Donna Haraway: Rise of the Cyborgs

Stop Number Three on our tour of voices lifted against patriarchy takes us even deeper into the depths of feminist literature and identity to consider the work of scholar Donna Haraway.  Where bell hooks views resistance to oppression as the building of coalitions between people with broad intersections of identity categories, Haraway resists the idea that categories and intersections have any validity at all - that there is no "being a female" as such.  From Haraway's perspective, the female experience (like all experiences) is constructed on the social, cultural, and scientific level and exists only in our imaginations as a platonic form, rather than an immutable fact.  And that's ok.

A Fusion of Dissimilar Elements

Haraway gained the most renown with the publication of her Cyborg Manifesto in the early eighties, which is an amazing metaphor expressing a very sophisticated idea.  With demagogic flourish, she forcefully makes the following point: there is no single feminism because there is no singular female experience.  There may not even be any aspects of female experience that apply to all people that self-identify as females.  However, Haraway does not see this as a problem for feminists: rather, it is an asset.  In the same way that cyborgs in science fiction transcend the limitations of both their organic and metallic components, feminists can transcend the limitations of their own limited perspectives by amalgamating the diverse body of perspectives that consider themselves feminist.  The goal is no longer assimilation, or even reconciliation; it isn't necessary to hash out a general understanding that creates internal consistency between different advocates against patriarchy.  

“The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity.” 

That is to say, working to construct the perfect feminism doesn't have to be a prerequisite to toppling patriarchy.  We can accept and move past the fractured nature of resistance (inevitably fractured because none of us can let go of the notion of divisive identity), and instead focus on our shared affinity - abhorrence of oppressive power structures.

Existential Horror

There are many wonderful authors of feminist literature in the world, but I chose Donna Haraway today because I think that her particular advocacy is emblematic in the differences in thinking that can arise when we suspend the demands for structural rationality that grow from the old order of knowing and organizing our knowledge.  At different points this month I've blogged about the ways that our understanding of the world (science, medicine, etc.) has not developed in a neutral, humanistic vacuum.  All of history is tainted by the arc of historical development that has concentrated power and influence in the hands of men, and has enabled these men to frame our social expectation for acceptable argument in ways that make it difficult to uproot the status quo.

Donna Haraway doesn't care about any of that.  Her argument disregards those logical demands (that all feminists should agree on what feminism is); she rejects them on face and calls them what they are - not inherently necessary elements of truth, but rather conditions imposed by the existing social order.  In that sense, Haraway's work is not only a beautifully evocative metaphor, but also a challenge to patriarchal power structures by the virtue of its very construction.

bell hooks: I'll meet you at the crossroads

Humble gift though it is, today I'd like to give my appreciation and draw hopefully simultaneously draw more attention to the scholarly work of one of the authors of the twentieth and twenty-first century who has been successful at making the conversation around feminism and patriarchy bigger.  Today we discuss bell hooks.

Standing at the center of the oppressive panopticon

For those of you who may be less conversant in feminist literature, bell hooks is a scholar that's been writing important texts since the seventies.  Before she was an academic, however, she was one daughter of a working class family in Kentucky that lived through the insult of segregated education and the trauma of integration.  Indeed, the confluence of multiple oppressive systems in her life primed hooks to significantly broaden the feminist conversation - bell understands intuitively the way that capitalism, racism and patriarchy function in a mutually supportive way to preserve the fundamental distribution of power in the status quo.  She made an argument for intersectionality - an understanding of identity that expands beyond the singular explanation to consider the dynamics interactions that shape people and movements.  

As a black feminist, bell experienced (perhaps still experiences) marginalization; she identified the toxic way that many conversations about gender equality entrench other forms of oppression, either by devaluing voices that come from outside of the center of the movement or deprioritizing issues that particularly affect members of the movement who have other overlapping identities.  For instance, one might argue that when Chris Rock attacked Jennifer Lawrence by comparing her struggle to the arguably more significant struggle of black female actors, he was raising an issue of intersectional feminism, challenging the idea that there is a singular collection of "women's issues" that impact all women equally (I critiqued the tenor of Rock's response as divisive to broader movements against oppression, but that doesn't mean it isn't a conversation worth having).  A strong alternative to oppressive power structures should be radically open to all voices.

Many people on the left aren't crazy about scholars like hooks that critique the state of activist movements; they perceive such scholarship as nitpicking or inflexible idealism that sacrifices the good in the name of the perfect.  I would argue that such attitudes are a replication of the same oppressive structures that movements try to combat.  I've criticized patriarchal institutions and world views for privileging certain forms of knowledge or certain modes of thoughts, and movements that don't value a diversity of voices and experiences are a micro-political reproduction of exactly the same thing.  bell hooks and her ideological successors are the post-modern vanguard intent on guaranteeing that as movements gradually collapse the old power structures, the new world that emerges will actually be better than the one it replaces.

To put it another way, a feminism that seeks only to make women equal in standing to men will inevitably fail, because not all men are equal to each other.  Racism and capitalism elevate the rights and protections that some men receive, and a meaningful challenge to that inequality cannot neglect other systemic oppressions to focus only on one.  It's a failing strategy and it fractures the coalition of humanity whose common interest is positive global transformation.

The Art of Misdirection

Some of you may recall that Jennifer Lawrence drew some attention earlier this year for an essay she wrote describing the pay gap that exists between her and her male colleagues in film.  In a recently published interview in the New Yorker, Chris Rock belatedly responded to Lawrence's sentiment by musing, "You hear [her] complaining about being paid less because she's a woman -- If she was black, she'd really have something to complain about."  The comment was contextually relevant because Rock was discussing black TV actor Leslie Jones, but it also exemplifies an essential element in the continued survival of unequal power structures: the rhetoric and politics that turns one oppressed group against another.

Hierarchies Cut Both Ways

The politics of both the left and the right are plagued in different ways by this cannibalism of the oppressed.  In Republican rhetoric, the gaze is constantly directed downward towards the groups that fall below oneself in the echelon of hierarchies.  Fear of anger from the less privileged unites people behind policies of oppression.  Comparisons between oneself and those same lesser others pacifies any discontent that one might experience with the entrenched inequalities that emerge from such a fascistic worldview.  Trump and his supporters personify this particular perversion in modern America.  Less educated, economically disadvantaged whites unite in their fear of racialized others (first Latinos, then Muslims) who are constructed as plausible threats to the relative prosperity those white folks currently enjoy.  Trump's male supporters can be safely reaffirmed in their presumption of male dominance when their candidate belittles Hillary and accuses her of playing the woman card.

Rock's comments exemplify the problem on the left, where instead people's focus is turned to those higher on the hierarchy pyramid.  He suggests that Lawrence doesn't really have a legitimate complaint because she doesn't possess the most oppressed intersection of identities.  In one stroke, he's turned someone who should be an ally in the fight against the hegemony of the white male into an apparent adversary.

Divide and Conquer

A year and a half ago I was talking to one of the smartest people I know as we blazed through the tunnel of buildings that surround the prettiest stretch of Atlanta's downtown connector about some of these same issues.  I was expressing my continued amazement at the fact that so many people were so susceptible to narratives of racial or sexual superiority.  He suggested to me that such narratives were inextricably entwined with classism and hierarchy.  His argument was essentially that a person who isn't being given an objectively fair deal will have an easier time accepting it if he has a frame of reference that makes it look like a good deal.  A white male employee who has to work too many hours for less compensation and fewer benefits might still feel content with his life if he has a sense of sovereignty over his family unit at home, or an inherent notion of worth and importance relative to another racial group.

The divisive effect of such tacit identity politics is two-fold; not only does it help us accept the raw bargain we all get from the elites in whose hands economic and political power is concentrated, it also gives us some sense of complicity in that inequality, and therefore fear of repercussions.  A white man that feels guilty for his white privilege is inherently divided from others.  His interested become realigned with those of the oppressor group.  Forming alliances to push back against oppression becomes increasingly difficult.  The process is replicated with each division, with every line of divisive identity we draw amongst ourselves.  Just like the Tutsis who were empowered by the Belgians to rule over the Hutu majority, just like the various Syrian resistance groups that have fragmented and turned on each other, the only victor when we turn on each other is the status quo power structure.

Unwitting Tools

Please don't believe that I'm accusing Chris Rock of intentionally trying to undermine challenges to social change.  I'm 100% confident that it wasn't his intention, in fact.  But his words demonstrate a natural fact that grows out of the desperation of skewed capitalistic competition: it's totally normal to resent those who have things you haven't got.  That whole "grass is greener" idiom grows out of deeply rooted human psychology, and that fact is being exploited by the ruling groups of the Western World to militate against greater social and economic equality.  Maybe there's no explicit design by any particular group or person to divide us against each other; it doesn't matter.  Whenever we participate in this kind of friendly fire, we're taking steps backward, carrying everyone farther away from a better world.  So Chris Rock, would it really be so hard to acknowledge that the world would be a better place if both Leslie Jones and Jennifer Lawrence were being paid what they should be paid?  Any man that tells the slave to stop complaining is a servant of the master.