Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Certain trends in feminist theory have made it increasingly difficult to respond to questions about the interests of gender in politically adequate ways. Despite assertions to the contrary, the dominance of post-structuralist paradigms in contemporary feminist theory has constrained feminists' ability to develop robust theories of politics, stalemated feminist efforts to intervene responsibly in the face of current political challenges, and stymied critical feminist engagement in contemporary debates, both inside the academy and in the wider world in which the academy exists. In this essay, we defend the necessity to continue to engage in generalization and theory-building, and reject the claim that every analytical category is necessarily essentialist. We call for a reconceptualization of politics, which links systemic analysis of institutions to critical attention to narrative practices. In other words, we invite further theoretical and empirical work elaborating, in detail, the particular structures and dynamics creating and sustaining any network of power/discourse within which processes of linguistic resignification and political representation always occur. We argue that reconnecting linguistic accounts of discursive power to systemic accounts of institutional power can produce rich political analyses of the concrete conditions and capacities both to sustain and change a given gender system and should include analysis of the spatial (institutional structures and places) and temporal (historical), as well as discursive (ideological, linguistic) conditions and capacities through which individuals and groups enact deeds (actions) that both reproduce and subvert a social order.