"The women of Bikini Kill let guitarist Billy Karren be in their feminist punk band, but only if he's willing to just "do some shit." Being a feminist dude is like that. We may ask you to "do some shit" for the band, but you don't get to be Kathleen Hannah."--@heatherurehere


Thursday, November 15, 2007

Theory Thursday: Lenses and Malleability

After posting about Armchair Feminism, it's probably not a fantastic idea to do a post that is theory-heavy, but here it is.

In the comments from a recent post, Eric notes some problems with the idea of understanding the world through a feminist lens:
See, I sometimes think the "lens" is the problem itself. I am cautious about adopting lenses that produce rigorous conceptual models; I would prefer to gain some insights into the world from various philosophies and political movements and literatures and ideas and worldviews and religions by keeping an open mind. Thus the eclectic part, I grab bits and piece from all over the place and rethink things. Now, of course, that's what works for me at this point in my life.
I admit a lot of this is also very intellectual/academic for me. I'd rather understand and be able to teach/explain/discuss/lecture rather than necessarily agree with/internalize a particular viewpoint. My problem with framing it as a "lens" is that it implies your applying them a priori to reading something or looking at something or watching something. I find this problematic because it then prevents you from developing other possible lens, of opening other possible world-views, or ways of looking at the world or experiencing the world gained from those works.

I agree that the conceptual tool of 'lenses' is problematic in some of the ways Eric points out--though I find it useful to quite a large degree, when people think I mean something apart from, and prior to, experience, problems can arise. The main weakness of the 'lenses' metaphor is that it can imply that a person can pick and choose lenses prior to experience, when in fact even the very choice of which lenses we choose from is given by our current world-view. But one strength of the 'lenses' metaphor is that it allows for, I think, one of the things that Eric also values: Malleability of a world-view. I can choose to look at something through the lens of feminism. And then I can look at it through lenses of race theory, and atheism, and class theory--and even where these conceptual frameworks don't intersect, I can gain more insight into the world as a whole.

On a related note, I'm all for malleability. In fact, that's central to my truck with traditional gender roles (which is one basis of my interest in feminism): I don't have a problem that there are roles. My problems begin to arise when the roles are seen as forever-and-ever-amen, writ in stone, and very not-malleable. (Not that I believe they are infinitely malleable, either, of course, which becomes important rather quickly.) And many varieties of feminism focus on anti-essientialist conceptions of gender roles (among other things), which is one of the things I like about feminism.

I think I get Eric's take on an eclectic world-view, using concepts he's chosen from various other world-views--and I tend to do that more than most as well.

I do think there is a danger of letting the malleability of one's thoughts provide an excuse to stay on the sidelines regarding the world. I start wondering if this happens to Eric as often as it happens to me, when he says this:
I'd rather understand and be able to teach/explain/discuss/lecture rather than necessarily agree with/internalize a particular viewpoint.

For me, one place that I come to feel ok with identifying as a feminist is as regards real violence done by what I see as a patriarchal dominance hierarchy; when I look at my mother's life, and the hurdles she had to overcome, the violence she faced by virtue of being a woman, it makes me want to get off the sidelines and take to the streets (so to speak) more, even if I may be subscribing, for however long, to a set of concepts that I may not agree with at some point in the future. When I see men suffering violence at the hands of other men over what amount to traditional conceptions of masculinity, when I see women going through something like what my mother has gone through, I want to do more than teach/explain/discuss/understand/lecture, and I think that's a good thing--and I think internalizing a viewpoint, if one recognizes that such a viewpoint is often just a starting-point, and that the viewpoint itself is malleable, isn't such a bad thing. In fact, It's doubtful to me that we can avoid internalizing viewpoints to some degree in order to better understand them. And I think using the conceptual tool of 'lenses'--as long as we do recognize the limits of conceptual tools in general--can be powerful.

6 comments:

Mollygrrl said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Mollygrrl said...

His comments are weird. I think that what is great about the 'Lens' metaphor is precisely that: they're impermanent. The image it reminds me most of is old-timey ophthalmology equipment where they'd flip physical lenses to make you see better. My point is: they're temporary but can have some permanence.


I find compartmentalizing other lenses useful, because when reading a single article I can look at only the gender, then only class, then only race issues and see what I may have missed on first glance. You can also utilize this method to think about all three and where they intersect and connect together and to look at hybrid identities and multiple indices of disempowerment.

That said, I also don't think of feminism as a lens. Gender is a lens for sure, but there are so many different flavors of feminism within feminism that you can't really call it a singular lens. Similar to arguments folks have made about the term transgender (one is not *a* transgender, but one could be a transgender lesbian), I think that one could use a feminist Marxist lens, or a Feminist Foucauldean lens, or a Feminist race theory lens...But just by itself, the descriptor, while it has meaning—that meaning is a bit to expansive to really pinpoint anything.

Jeff Pollet said...

I agree that the 'lenses' metaphor seems to imply flexibility, Molly.

Part of the point that Eric was making, however, still holds as a limitation of the metaphor: People treat the choosing of various lenses as if it happens somehow 'outside' of our world view, prior to experience. You may choose to look at the world through the lenses of, say, feminism, but you choose that lens (in part) because you're already looking through the lens of (for instance) gender.

Anonymous said...

I don't think I was implying that the lens metaphor or specific ideologies come before experience. If that was unclear, then let me say it more explicitly: experiences always comes first before the lens or ideology is in place, and by this I mean a full-fledged ideology. To a certain degree other factors such us cultural values instilled by your family for example will affect how you interpret experiences before you ever develop a full ideological lens. I'll elaborate further below.

I think when one chooses (and I use that word loosely) their ideology/lens it is at the point when that person is trying to make sense of their experience/data. So there is something of choice; after all, why'd you choose this ideology instead of that one or why not some other?

Take two so-called Feminist issues like Domestic Violence and Rape for example and every ideology/belief system across the board is going to give you a method to interpret that data and find what ultimately underlies those things (Feminism, Marxism, Race Theory, Christianity, Fascism, Libertarianism, Sociology, Mythology, etc.). Oversimplifying to be sure (i.e. it would have to be a race related for Race Theory to meaningfully explain domestic violence or rape).

The problem is that once you have a lens/ideology and say, "feminism has the right answers to explain my experiences!" Well, you've now choosen, and that's where you start cutting yourself off from seeing other possibilities. Molly's example shows her choosing between the Leftist academic Holy Trinity of Race, Gender, and Race; I would hardly call that real malleability of world-view or a diverse world-view. It is ultimately switching between a more general Progressive world-view. These isn't malleable in that complete rethinking or shattering of world-views that I meant by the term when I used it.

Christina Hoff Sommers again captures beautifully some of my concerns on these points: "They think that they have healthy debate because they are in a department that has some intellectual disagreements between a Marxist-Leninist feminist versus a socialist versus a lesbian versus an eco-feminist, goddess worshipping whatever. They think that counts, that it is healthy debate."

Now I don't get me wrong I am adamant that sometimes it can be very useful to have a "gender" lens, or to put it another way sometimes it is sexism going on, sometimes it is misogyny, but sometimes it's also something else entirely and the people that adhere too strictly to those other lenses often can't make sense of something that fails to fit their world-views and what they expect or it descends into dogmatism and it incorporates and explains away anything it can't make sense of.

As Jeff suggests in a rather Foucaultian fashion (but perhaps existentialist fashion for him) you're never outside the world, you're always experiencing it from within, you can't step outside ever, there's never a point where you aren't building off something else you learned from within society, theirs no view you can utter that is entirely yours. I think this is what he means when he says there is always a world-view proceeding any development of lens.

I'll first start by saying I don't entirely agree with this extreme anti-essentialist "pretty much everything is socially constructed about us" view. It has significant problems, which I won't get into now. I'll secondly add I'm not entirely sure how much Jeff buys into or to what extent/degree might be better to say that view, so I could be overexaggerating how much he does and I am just interpreting from the info I have.

I think there was more I wanted to say, but I am tired and it's hitting 1:30 AM over here and I honestly can't remember right now.

Jeff Pollet said...

Eric--
Do you have a background in philosophy? I ask because you talk like a philosopher...

I am more of an existentialist, and I think that social construction theory holds a lot of promise, though it is often misunderstood (for instance, I think I'm a Realist many senses of the word, as some social constructionists aren't). But I don't think that you have to be a social constructionist of any sort to think that experience comes before conceptual frameworks. They go hand in hand, from the beginning of a brain until the end of one, as far as I can tell. I don't buy experience outside of conceptual frameworks (e.g. the 'clean slate'), though you may mean something different by 'ideology' than 'conceptual framework'. But I don't have to be a social constructionist to say this: I just have to believe that experience is always filtered through an experiencer.

The problem is that once you have a lens/ideology and say, "feminism has the right answers to explain my experiences!" Well, you've now choosen, and that's where you start cutting yourself off from seeing other possibilities. I don't disagree with this, which is why I resist saying "feminism has all of the right descriptions of all of my experiences...and the feminists I tend to agree with and take ideas from don't, either. You may be able to find feminists who do, but I don't tend to agree with them--or I may disagree with the interpretation of them as that way.

Yeah, this stuff gets complex pretty quickly for 1:30 in the morning, and we've opened up many cans of worms on this thread.

I want to say once again that I appreciate your comments, Eric. This is a helpful conversation, at least for me.

Anonymous said...

I got my BA in English with a minor in History actually. Now I am working towards two Masters degrees, one in English and the other in Library Science. I was going to go on for my Ph. D. in English, but I recently decided I had enough for now.

As an acquiatance of mine who is dual majoring undergrad in philosophy and English stated, "I think most English classes are really just philosophy classes in disguise."

I've taken philosophy classes before and I'm fairly well-versed with the basic ideas (and let me emphasize "basic") behind most of the major philosophers (I need to find time to read the Philosophical Canon, which probably won't happen until after Grad School). I think in general I just have strong cultural literacy.

I also have the tendency to spend a lot of time thinking about issues. I actually embarassingly enough can spend anywhere from two - three hours a day pacing back and forth having a debate with myself about an issue. I also occassionally get the oppurtunity to do it with actual people. So you might say I live a very philosophical life and am always scrutinizing everything.