The Oppositional Imagination (RLE Feminist Theory) by Joan Cocks

Author:Joan Cocks [Cocks, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Reference, General
ISBN: 9780415635202
Google: GOQb9WRpVeQC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-10-11T04:43:55+00:00

7

Impositions and Evasions

1.

These, I want to argue, were the errors – derivative of privileged ideas in the dominant order and yet also uniquely its own – that radical feminism made as it struggled towards a critical understanding of sex and gender. First, it took the ugly word of phallocentric culture for the truth of the world. It accepted the key conceptual distinctions of Masculine/feminine, and the point of them, that helped make up the established language: the distinctions between “man” and “woman,” “activity” and “passivity,” “dominance” and “submission,” and their underworld cognates, “sadism” and “masochism.” It trusted the images of male/female relations it found in films, magazines, and novels. It interpreted as strict reflections of heterosexual reality the everyday remarks men made about that reality at work, on the street, in the lecture hall, and in social conversations. Second, radical feminism held to the reverse conceit of its enemy. It declared power to be allied with vice (except for that harmless and therefore admirable hybrid it called “selfempowerment”) and powerlessness to be allied with virtue. To have power was in itself a vice, and to have none a virtue. To be oppressed, while not a virtue, was a sign of one’s virtuousness. To be oppressed by others was to bear no responsibility for one’s failings. To oppress others was to bear responsibility for their failings as well as one’s own, because it automatically was to have authored all the vicious things those others thought and did, and to have acted in full knowledge of all the vicious things one did to them. Third, radical feminism was convinced that at the core of every social situation and of phallocentric culture as a whole was a clear understanding of it, a straightforward intention to bring it about, and an undivided will to carry that intention through. In the case of the established sex/gender system, moreover, it believed in the essential sameness of all situations – the sameness of their meanings, their consequences, and their animating geniuses.

All of these convictions and conceits, which at their heart had to do with the nature of power, were significant far less as instances of radical feminism’s having, intellectually speaking, gone wrong than as symptoms of more general difficulties in feminist discourse. If radical feminism was pitched into the center of the storm of that discourse, it was only because it spoke its mind sharply and without vacillation.

Let us begin with the first, and, I think, most tantalizing conviction of the three. What is the error in presuming that shared concepts, images, artifacts, and the idioms of ordinary speech are the distillation of sex/gender relations as those relations are actually and normally lived out? Certainly it would not be hideously far from the truth to say that there can be little more to any established social relations than this – little more, that is, except the body in its pure, uninterpreted state. (But here at least the body seems to underwrite culture’s main thrust: that masculinity is the cunning bird of domination and femininity is its vulnerable prey.

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