The Imaginary and a Political Quest for Freedom

It is not unusual for feminist theorists to turn to the imagination, or the substantive of a more recent vintage, the imaginary, to offer both a critique of masculinist institutions and a creative alternative for how women might represent themselves. This is not simply a late-twentieth-century phenomenon occurring in the wake of the work of Jacques Lacan, who gave the adjective “imaginary” [imaginaire] a new critical purchase when he used it as a substantive. ¹ In the eighteenth century there was also an imagination at work in the Romantic movement of Western Europe that emerged as a revolt against a particular form of rationalism, turning instead to the creative or active imagination for a model of self-making that was primarily artistic in nature. ² As Joan Scott demonstrates, the feminist Olympe de Gouges found resources in that context to present her own active imagination when arguing for women's citizenship in revolutionary France. Scott writes: “De Gouges's insistence on the imaginative basis for her own thought and action was meant to establish her autonomy, her ability to produce an authentic self (not a copy of anything else)—to be what she claimed to be—and so her eligibility for the franchise” (34). In this endeavor, de Gouges revealed the ambiguities and contradictions in the workings of imagination and reason. Moreover, claiming for herself and women the right of self-representation in a republic in which she was more object than subject was an undertaking shot through with paradoxes. ³ As it did for de Gouges, the imagination again has a prominent and ambiguous place in feminist political theory; but times have changed and so has the imagination.

The category of the imaginary has proliferated in social criticism and feminist theory. Consider the modifiers of the substantive “imaginary” that circulate in contemporary discourse: social imaginary, political imaginary, postmodern imaginary, imperialist imaginary, decolonialist imaginary, democratic imaginary, masculine imaginary, feminine imaginary, racist imaginary, feminist imaginary. ⁴ I could go on. Indeed, trying to construct a genealogy of the contemporary use of the imaginary is complex. The imaginary resonates in psychoanalysis, phenomenology, philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and politics. ⁵ After a long spate as the adjective of imagination, a traditionally understood realm of illusion, misrecognition, and fancy, the imaginary emerges as not simply opposed to reason, but the “ground” of reason itself; ⁶ not simply a tool of cognition, but central to how we know and feel ourselves as part of a community or nation; ⁷ not simply a part of the mind, but fundamental to understanding the interconnectedness of mind and sexed bodies. ⁸

Feminist formulations of the imaginary inevitably, and importantly, address the power of images to shape one's sense of bodily identity and, acting as modifiers, signal that the body or a sense of self is not reducible to ideology. For Moira Gatens, “imaginary bodies” are a way to formulate how symbolic representations of women shape our affective feelings of ourselves, others, and social policy in terms of women. For Drucilla Cornell, the “imaginary domain” is a heuristic device for making justice claims and guiding legal reform in a way that acknowledges the importance of images to one's sense of self (the sexual imago). Hence, for instance, Cornell utilizes the imaginary domain as a way to argue against the harm images of sexual violence can do to one's sense of self. ⁹ These examples are useful in positing the intimacy between social imaginaries, affect, and self, on one hand, and the way justice claims can counter harmful representations of women and sexuality, on the other. However, my task is not to critique or explore this work in depth. Rather, I wonder whether feminist thought ought not to take into account another version of the imaginary.

In this essay I explore one particular articulation of the imaginary in relation to emancipatory politics by...