On Being in Time with Feminism

As soon as we learn words we find ourselves outside them. . . . There is a long inchoate period during which the struggle between the language of experience and the language of theory becomes a kind of agony.

—Sheila Rowbotham, Dreams and Dilemmas

An Introduction, and Then Some

Sheila Rowbotham's contemplation about the complexities of feminism as a psychic pedagogy interests me for a number of reasons, not the least of which is her emphasis on language as both the means and the impediment to self-conscious understanding. ¹ For academics in particular, or perhaps I should simply say for me, the postulation that one's learning always entails "a kind of agony" is profoundly unsettling, even as the clarity of Rowbotham's expression provides comfort in my own struggles and failures to learn. It is not easy, after all, to confront repeatedly the failure of the words we use to know or those we know to use—and I mean this not merely in terms of knowing in the abstract, but in terms of knowing something precise, indeed enabling, about the encounter between the personal and the analytic or, in Rowbotham's terms, the experiential and the theoretical. What she captures is the affective dimension of the pedagogical failure we encounter in the move from experience to theory. I take this failure as central not only to living in time—by which I mean, perhaps clumsily, psychic aging—but also to the dynamic of transformation that being in time with feminism as contemporary political intellectual life entails.

Recent conversations in academic feminism have traversed some of these issues, most often by establishing a war of political utility between experience and theory and thereby refusing the difficult matter of rendering legible the inchoate period in which political attachments are born and analytically transformed. ² In the stockpile of cliché and reductionism that often consolidates inquiry into camps, theory, our theoretically consumed students now take as a truism, gives us antiessentialist and complex understandings of the subject, which enable us to know in advance the political meanings of the intertwined and divergent performances of race, sexuality, gender, and sometimes (though unfortunately rarely) class. Experience, our identity-bound students retort, offers precision about the realities of women's complicated lives and so demonstrates that feminism's political power arises from consciousness born in the materiality of the everyday. Methodologically, this opposition produces strange effects, requiring the critical theorist to make noises about how to account for experience without herself trucking in the raw, problematic, perhaps even unintelligible ways that life happens to us, that we end up spending time trying to catch up with it, to incorporate it, to know adequately what it has done. The experientialist mode is no less mastering, but it takes the bottom-up approach, making consciousness into the primary source of consequential meaning and offering self-explanation as the entire domain of the explicable. We sustain the opposition between these epistemological modes, it seems to me, by refusing to engage both theory and experience as pedagogical forms or, to extrapolate from Rowbotham, as languages that struggle and repeatedly (and, importantly) fail to be adequate on their own.

I begin with Rowbotham in order to establish two sets of concerns about the problem of feminism in time. First, I take her quotation as providing a meditation on the difficulty of being in time with feminism, by which I mean the difficulty of sustaining a relationship to a political and intellectual project that is itself historically transforming and transformative, and whose transformations are neither produced by nor wholly disengaged from the historical and psychic temporalities of the subjects who act in feminism's name. In expressing the dilemma of being in time with feminism in this way, I am purposely making a distinction between feminism and the agents who claim to produce it in order to approach feminism in time as something more than tracking either our own...