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  • Two Feminisms
  • Noëlle McAfee

In this paper I unpack a suspicion that much feminist thought about politics flows out of a misconception about the nature of the problems that women face, ultimately about the nature of politics and the public sphere. I suspect that the more conventional feminist approaches have a rather flat or narrow conception of politics: as primarily a one-way transmission of power, flowing from those who oppress to those oppressed. In this view, little if anything is done to conceptualize or problematize the media through which this supposed transmission passes; the media disappear from view and all that is left are actors with either sinister or innocent intentions. Just recall Catherine MacKinnon's claim that on day one men oppressed women and then on day two they set up the stereotypes of femininity and so forth that would uphold and conceal this oppression. In this view, the public sphere is flatly reduced to a unidirectional flow of power. In contrast, in this paper I want to draw out another feminism that sees the ways in which actors or subjects are situated in a matrix of signs and symbols, of meaning-making (semiosis), of perspectival interpretation and perception. To do so I use the resources in various semiotic and pragmatist traditions, which have a much richer view of politics and the public sphere as discursive and semiotic processes and arenas. My initial suppositions coincide with those of John Dewey, that the public finds itself communicatively. From there I have turned to semiotics, developing my own synthesis of Peirce's view and Kristeva's, to see how the public sphere is a discursive space in which subjectivity, identity, and meaning are created, dispersed, and interpreted. In this second picture of the public world, feminist thought has a task different from the first one: instead of simply "fighting power," feminist practice calls for rethinking how meanings and identities are created in discursive and communicative processes and matrices. In this second view, political thought moves from an agonistic toward a more deliberative view of the political public sphere. In short, the model of fighting oppression gives way to thinking about discursively and deliberatively reconstituting the public sphere.

When feminists identify the problem as that of an oppression that can be peeled away, as the effect of an other that can be excommunicated, what we get [End Page 140] is a politics of exclusion. This might take the form of separatism, as championed by radical feminists such as Mary Daly. Or it might take the shape of agonistic politics—a politics of struggle—with adherents ranging from Chantal Mouffe to Bonnie Honig and, some argue, Hannah Arendt (though she can be read otherwise as well). By agonistic I mean the view that politics is a struggle over resources, a struggle over who gets what, where, and when, a competitive, aggregative process driven by self-interest. Feminist theorists and practitioners have long taken this view of politics, engaging in the agon in order to garner a more just and equitable distribution of power and resources for women.

One Feminism

Many of the current generation of political theorists grew up in a world in which freedom or resources for one group came at the expense of the liberty and goods of another, and many of these theorists, feminists included, have been, on the whole—even as gains are being made—on the side still struggling. An agonistic lens shows the continuity between first-wave feminists who fought for equal rights and second-wave feminists who have been fighting for sexual and cultural freedom. Tying them together is the notion that patriarchy, the fathers in power, have found it in their own interests to deny women basic rights and resources. Feminist political struggle, in this view, is a battle to increase women's portion of the political pie. If one looks, one can see this common orientation across the spectrum of feminist approaches: liberal feminists seek more rights; cultural feminists seek greater validation of historically female practices and institutions; socialist feminists seek more access to economic power; and radical feminists want to attack the root of the problem, to undermine patriarchy's project...

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