In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Poststructural Feminist Pedagogy in a Post-Katrina World
  • Gloria Pierce (bio)

Conceptual Foundations

The healing professions—psychotherapy and counseling—have been criticized for being insufficiently concerned with the larger social environment and the ways in which social structures contribute to the problems and disturbances for which clients seek help. Notable among these critics is James Hillman, a Jungian therapist. In his iconoclastic book, We’ve Had A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse (1992), Hillman calls upon his profession to transform the world by transforming the nature and practice of therapy. In his view, therapy should help clients see their problems less as what has victimized them in their past than what is victimizing them in their current situations—things such as inequality, corporate power, social injustice, etc. “Then, the consulting room becomes a cell of revolution. . . . By revolution, I mean turning over. Not development or unfolding, but turning over the system that has made you go to analysis to begin with” (38–39).

This major work anticipates Theodore Roszak’s critique of both the therapeutic community and the environmental movement with the 1995 publication of Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. The central tenet of this book is that mental and emotional disorders are largely symptoms of humans’ disconnection from the natural world and that healing the planet and healing ourselves are part of the same enterprise. Ecopsychologists maintain that abusive relationships between human beings are not unrelated to humans beings’ abuse of the earth. Ecofeminism adds further dimensions to ecopsychology by linking the exploitation of women and other oppressed or devalued groups of people to the devastation of the natural world (the entire biosphere). Because ecofeminism understands dysfunction and distress as emanating from an androcratic/patriarchal system that maintains itself through domination and control (Eisler), it advocates social action to change skewed, asymmetrical power relations and thereby transform systems of domination.

The project of feminism, in general, but especially poststructural feminism, is fundamentally aligned with the perspectives of ecofeminism, ecopsychology, and Hillman’s vision of therapy as necessarily engaged with the outside world. Arising [End Page 36] from a postmodern worldview, poststructural feminist discourse grew out of the postmodern agenda that seeks to deconstruct, debunk, and dismantle the positivist belief in scientific objectivity and the commonly accepted assumptions of a masculinist culture. As Sue Middleton puts it, poststructuralism is “a disbelief, skepticism, or suspension of belief in universal truth or in the possibility of a totalizing master narrative” (58). This debunking, therefore, opens the way for alternative ways of seeing the world and all its facets, and it calls for questioning all preconceived notions of gender, race, social-political-economic systems, cultural values, institutions, and so forth.

Two ideas central to poststructuralism have been especially influential in the evolution of feminist thought. First, poststructuralism problematizes “truth,” seeing reality and knowledge as socially constructed, rather than externally existing and discoverable through objective scientific rules and methods. Instead, poststructuralists argue, people merely agree upon what reality is; dominant discourses only appear to be natural; certain groups of people are perceived to be superior to others. Furthermore, because privileged groups’ control counts as knowledge and truth, dominant discourses support and perpetuate existing power relations. The poststructuralist agenda challenges these dominant discourses (“the master narrative”), recognizing that there are many alternative discourses and multiple truths and meanings.

Second, poststructuralism rejects essentialism: there is no essential self or core identity that persists across time; instead, identity is relative, existing in a constantly shifting context, consisting of one’s positionalities at a given time in a given situation. The self exists always and only in relationship, always connected and in flux. Janis S. Bohan goes further, asserting that “the self is in the [social] exchange. In fact, the exchange is the self” (80): it exists in the space between and among people. Thus, poststructuralism moves beyond simply critiquing the structures of society to an analysis that connects the social-economic-cultural arrangements of patriarchy, capitalism, or white supremacy to the intersections of individual aspects of identity such as race, gender, class, age, ability, religion, etc. And most important, all such differences are deconstructed in relation to power.

Poststructural Feminism...

pdf

Share