Fluid-essentialism and
Weberian Sociology
Radical feminist theory is not a completely unified body of concepts
and assertions. I find it necessary and useful to make an analytical distinction
which will allow me to focus on the sub-form of radical feminist theory
to which my assertions apply and from which they derive. Radical feminists
differ in the degree to which they conceive of oppressive male tendencies
as intrinsically and inseparably part of the expression of maleness by males.
For male theorists, this is a critical theoretical point (although women
may be inclined to consider it tangential). For discussion purposes, I will
describe this distinction throughout this paper as if it were always a vividly
polarized opposition, cleanly categoriziing radical feminist theories according
to whether they
For the duration of this paper, I will use new terms (there are no old ones
since the distinction made here is not a traditional one): fluid-essentialism,
to describe the radical feminism that falls into category "a"
above, since it posits a fluid connection between maleness and "masculine"
political motivation or behaviors even as it asserts that "masculine"
values and their expression are the essential root cause of all social oppression
(e.g., Morgan 1982; French
1985; Johnson 1987); and rigid-essentialism
to describe radical feminism described in category "b", where
the connection between maleness and "man-ness" is asserted to
be self-evidently rigid (e.g., Solanas
1971; Daly 1978).
The important theoretical point, I think, is that rigid-essentialism posits
a category of people as enemies in a conflictual power-struggle,
in a way analogous to Marx's identification of the bourgeoisie as enemies
against whom a violent revolution is entirely ethical and perhaps necessary.
Or, as Mary Daly (1978) puts it,
This book is about the journey of women becoming, that is, radical feminism.
This will of course be called an "anti-male" book. Even the most
cautious and circumspect feminist writings are described in this wayThus,
women continue to be intimidated by the label anti-male. Some feel a need
to draw distinctions, for example: "I am anti-patriarchal but not anti-male."
The courage to be logical-the courage to name-would require that we admit
to ourselves that males and males only are the originators, planners, controllers,
and legitimators of patriarchy...
The use of the label is an indication of intellectual and moral limitationsEven
feministsare intimidated into Self-deception, becoming the only Self-described
oppressed who are unable to name their oppressor, referring instead to vague
"forces", "roles", "stereotypes", "constraints",
"attitudes", "influences". This list could go on. The
point is that no agent is named-only abstractions
This book is absolutely Anti-Androcrat, A-mazingly Anti-male, Furiously
and Finally female.
(pp. 1, 27-28)
I have, of course, drawn the very distinction that Daly objects to, and
it is precisely the development of a conflict theory that names "vague
forces" rather than human culprits which leads me to find radical feminism
of the fluid-essentialist variety to be highly interesting. (That I, a male,
do so and think so would probably not surprise Daly in the least.)
Not all radical feminists blame men for patriarchy, or attribute its existence
to the inherent nature of men:
Blame has no part in the agenda of the women's movement...Though men
regard and treat us as their deadliest enemy, men are not our enemy. Feminism,
as the biophilic philosophy and world view that it is, has no place for
the concept of "enemy"...
To assume that men and women have totally different, even opposing, natures,
thus fitting them for altogether different ways of being in the world, is
to accept patriarchy's most basic rationale: biology is destiny. Many people
do not like how men think and behave, but to lay this solely at the feet
of their gender is profoundly patriarchal; to see half the human race as
"other" is the imperative of that old, deadly mind.
(Johnson 1987, pp. 263, 282)
Furthermore, to be a radical feminist is not necessarily to assume or propose
a permanent antagonism between the sexes, either as an inevitable state
of affairs or as a revolutionary strategy:
Feminism is a human movement; the future of all of us-girls,
women, boys, and men-depends upon our all comprehending and realizing feminist
principles. Repudiation of the male world may be a principled and felicitous
position for the short term, but it is not enough for the long term.
(French, 1985, p. 448)
This is the theoretical position I am calling fluid-essentialism as it exists
within radical feminism. Fluid-essentialist radical feminists Morgan
(1982), French (1985), Johnson (1987) and Fisher
(1979) depart from conflict theorists who blame a category of oppressors
for maintaining a system of oppression. The effect of removing inevitable
struggle with the enemy from the conflict model of social theory is that
it questions the sources of hunger for power and the will to oppress, rather
than taking these tendencies for granted. All of the fluid-essentialist
theorists have identified the urge to have power over other people as an
aspect of patriarchy that is not "natural", i.e., inevitably a
factor in human interaction or as a principle of human social organization.
Schaef (1981) notices that it is a
myth of the system that domination is desirable and that power is a zero-sum
linear commodity-in order for one to have more power, someone else must
have less. Marilyn French (1985) made
the notion of power and its desirability the central focal point of her
treatise, seeing in it the essence of patriarchy and targeting the concept
as most central of the abstract enemies with which feminism must content.
Like Schaef, and like Elizabeth Janeway
(1980), who makes many similar points, French reconceptualizes power
in interactionist terms:
Power is a process, a dynamic interaction. To have power really means
to have entry to a network of relationships in which one can influence,
persuade, threaten, or cajole others to do what one wants or needs them
to do. Although no other syntax is available to us, it is in fact false
to speak of "having power". One does not possess power: it is
granted to the dominator by hosts of other people and that grant is not
unretractable...
Coercion seems a simpler, less time-consuming method of creating order than
any other; yet it is just as time-consuming and tedious and far more expensive
than personal encounter, persuasion, listening, and participating in bringing
a group into harmony.
(p. 509)
At some point, my model of a clear distinction between fluid-essentialists
and rigid-essentialists falls apart, or at least becomes less clear. French's
assertion that power over other people is not intrinsically desirable and
therefore that the desire for it cannot explain patriarchy is not
shared by all people who deny that dominance per se is ingrained
into the male package by nature, or for that matter that submissiveness
and subserviency is somehow a part of female nature. Randall
Collins, who would hardly be described as a feminist, posited an explanation
of sexual inequality by concentrating on physical morphological differences
in physical strength at close intimate range between males and females and
concludes that, although there need be no inborn differences in terms of
personality and behavioral tendencies, there are certainly differences in
typical muscle mass and frame size, and that this alone explains patriarchy
from a microsocial focus upward (1972). There are also feminists who engage
in this sort of pseudo-biological explanation, seeing in women's reproductive
biology a handicap in a presumed struggle for control and supremacy which
left men in charge of things (Firestone
1970) or in the differences in genital morphology the key to women's
subordination due to the non-reciprocal power of the male to force sexual
congress (Brownmiller 1975; Dworkin 1987).
The limitation of my analytical distinction between fluid-essentialism and
rigid-essentialism lies here, in the complexities of bodily existence and
the implications of physical sexual dimorphism itself: I can be quite abstract
and choose to regard the body itself as part of the context in which
a person lives, or I can be rather down-to-earth and regard the body as
being self-evidently an aspect of the self. If, however, the female body
and the male body are different in such a way that the female experience
of any reality differs markedly and intrinsically from the male experience,
it doesn't matter which view I take--the socially gendered selves having
the experiences are rigidly connected to the context of physically sexed
bodies, or they are gendered/sexed people, irreducibly so, in their interaction.
And if the situation that men and women experience differently is an inevitable
power struggle because humans inevitably struggle for power, the rigid-essentialists
are right.
Therefore, in continuing to emphasize a meaningful distinction between fluid-essentialist
and rigid-essentialist feminists, I am drawn further into an exposition
of the fluid-essentialist view of the tendency to seek power as a socially
constructed human pattern rather than an inevitable and natural human characteristic.
Having suspended the normative concepts of power and of oppressors as successful
"culprits", radical feminist theorists who have denied rigid-essentialism
sometimes find it problematic to conceptualize men in terms of their relationship
to patriarchy:
If we cannot use the word "oppression" to describe men's plight,
how can we speak of it? That, of course, is the point: we cannot. Because
patriarchy does not recognize the ultimate destructiveness of tyranny to
tyrants, the fathers have no word-and therefore no concept-for the kind
of dehumanization, the severe characterological damage, done to men by their
use of violence of all kinds to dominate women and all "others".
Men who are becoming conscious must find their own language for their experience.
(Johnson 1987, p. 290)
By taking the model of conflict theory and removing intrinsic conflict
and power struggle from the picture while insisting on the current real-life
existence of their oppression, radical feminists found themselves looking
at the interactive processes that we identify as oppressive and considering
the exchanges and communications that we call power rather than merely studying
the effect that unequal power relationships have on interaction.
For one thing, there was the matter of how males become men. Although feminist
theory is for the most part composed of the testimony and insight of women
working from their own experiences as females, it had not totally escaped
the attention of feminist theorists that little boys were under more severe
social pressure to conform to the "male sex role", i.e., to become
masculinized and socialized into participation
in the patriarchal system, and that this pressure begins at a much earlier
age than corresponding pressure on females to internalize and accept the
strictures and obligations of femininity (see Hartley
1974; Hart and Richardson 1981).
If patriarchy were the tool of males expressing themselves to an unrestrained
and self-satisfied conclusion at the expense of female self-determination,
why the massive effort to force young males to adopt the very behavior that
should come natural in the absence of counterbalance and constraint?
Another important factor was the growing awareness on the part of feminist
women, who were so often baited by being accused of wanting to be men, that
in fact they did not envy men their positions as oppressors and did not
see those positions as desirable (Schaef
1981; French 1985). As the above
quote from French alludes, establishing power over other people is time-consuming
and requires as much energy expenditure as other modes of attaining cooperation
from others, which tends to negate the notion that oppressing others is
in one's short-term interest. Then, if the overall experience of being in
a position of hegemony and domination holds no ongoing attraction once established,
the notion that power over others is intrinsically desirable becomes yet
harder to defend. Finally, as the workings of patriarchal power hierarchies
were increasingly blamed within feminism for the purposeless destruction
of the natural environment, the bureaucratic nonresponsiveness to individual
and systemic needs, and the adversarial posturing evidenced by the ongoing
threat of nuclear confrontation (e.g., see Fisher
1979; Morgan 1982; French
1985; Ruth 1980), the notion that
this type of power structure in any meaningful (functionalist) way serves
the interests of society in the transcendental very-long-range sense seems
indefensible as well.
In this growing light of critical fluid-essentialist consideration, the
existence and original genesis of patriarchy began to be seen as due to
some kind of all-encompassing constraint on individuals' interaction in
a way that controls us but only through our retractable cooperation. Patriarchy
oppresses, but not to the advantage of anyone, and actually to the detriment
of all life on this planet, and although it oppresses us individually insofar
as we are in it (men as well as women; despite Johnson's comment above,
the word "oppression" is sometimes used to refer to men's experience
of patriarchy, e.g., Ruth 1980), the
immediate source of that oppression is not external, for collectively speaking,
it is in us as well. In other words, social structures might be better understood
as shared conceptual structures located only in our collective individual
heads, despite their reality and the reality of how they oppress us.
These perspectives on power and oppression represent a challenge to orthodox
sociological theory, a challenge which is probably best explained to feminists
by taking a moment to look at the theoretical contribution of sociology's
other major conflict theorist, Max
Weber, and the effect that he had on the overall sociological perspective.
A meaningful overview of Weberian concepts is more than I want to attempt
at the moment, and would be largely tangential to the things I'm talking
about, but the major lasting legacy he left the discipline is more important,
for it sheds some light on the reception that sociology has given radical
feminism.
Weber developed a theory of ongoing conflictual power struggles occurring
in several different domains of authority. In some ways, this concern with
power and the dynamics of inequality mirrored the theories of Marx, which
is why Weber is often placed alongside of Marx as a conflict theorist. Yet,
in another important way, Weber stands as sociology's favorite critic of
Marx and his monocausal theory of oppression, in which oppression revolves
around one axis and one axis alone: material possession and control of the
means of production. By illustrating the different ways in which individuals
can have different sources of social power over other people, and theorizing
about the inability of a single pat explanation to set these forms of power
in a precise hierarchy so as to establish which persons in a social setting
would necessarily possess the most power, Weber set in motion two trends
within sociological thinking: that meaningful social phenomena, rather than
having single explanations, might better be explained by a simultaneous
consideration of multiple variables; and that, since power and access to
power seems to occur across the axes of many different structured social
distinctions, the universal constant relevant to understanding oppression
is not class or any other explanatory categorical distinction setting people
apart from each other but rather the omnipresence of power struggle itself.
Certainly, Weber said many other things that individual sociologists might
find more memorable, but he is particularly representative of and associated
with these ideas.
The assertion that power itself is a fundamental human social organizing
force has taken on the authority of an axiom within sociological theory,
in contrast to which the social construction of virtually every other shared
human tendency, experience, etc., is posited. Thus, power and the intrinsic
struggle for it forms the inner framework, and all other human behaviors
wrap around that framework in largely arbitrary, reshapable, culturally
and historically contingent ways for sociology to explain through causal
analysis of chosen variables. Radical feminism is therefore contra-Weberian,
operating from a different axiomatic beginning in which emotional responses
to a situation (if not necessarily the intellectual interpretation thereof)
are posited as innate, and power, or the desire for it, joins the rest of
the malleable clay that remains to be explained by events and circumstance.
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