This wespeak is an attempt to correct an article in the Tuesday, Nov. 16 Argus on “Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom,” a lecture given by Northwestern University Professor of Political Science Linda Zerilli in the Center for the Humanities (and the subsequent, incorrect correction of that article). It is my hope that by amending the summary this article provided of the talk, on campus political dialogue will be furthered. This was a very difficult lecture to follow, as the quotes in the Argus article make evident. It is only after going to the Tuesday morning discussion seminar and speaking with some of my professors who happened to be at the lecture that I feel I understand most of Professor Zerilli’s argument.
The article described the lecture as claiming that feminism was over in the wake of identity politics. This is the direct opposite of what I understood her position to be. Rather than agreeing with those that declare feminism dead after the critique of identity politics (such as Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble”), Zerilli (largely through arguments first posited by Hannah Arendt) asked her audience to think of what the political realm actually entails.
Her basic position is that what we think of as the “political” is actually better described as “social.” These include such things as women’s suffrage, abortion laws, and wage differences. If this is all social, then what is the political? Zerilli claims that the political realm, for a democratic political structure, is not defined by the issues being debated within it but the very fact that there is a realm for debate in which issues become related to one another. She also claims that in the turn from private to public, issues leave the realm of their advocate’s control. This distinction is important for a variety of practical and theoretical reasons.
It means that it is freedom, and not expediency (or practicality) which should be most valued. The hallmark of a democratic political system is the freedom of those it affects to participate in the political dialogue and not the ability of such a system to solve social problems. If the latter were most valued, then democracy as a political system makes no sense; various other forms of government get the job done much faster.
The valuation of freedom has important consequences for democratic political dialogue. It is no longer as important “what” the speaker is socially (a woman, of a certain race and class and sexuality). It is instead important “who” the speaker is; the who is not a subject or an agent, it is a voice engaged in dialogue in a public, political world. Zerilli essentially reframes what the political is so that feminism can move past identity and the critique of identity politics. Identity is not the issue in the political world, action and speech are.
What this argument means is that political acts are not an expression of a subject’s selfhood, they are in a political, not a social world. Thus, what many see as the problem of identity politics, that when one speaks for a group, one necessarily excludes members of the group one speaks for, is not a bad thing. Debate, originating from difference between and within groups and individuals, is the point of democratic politics. The exclusion of members of “the people” that “we” speak for is part of political speech in democracy. But so is inclusion and debate.
I asked Zerilli during the group discussion what safeguards existed in her concept of the political that would prevent (for example) a homophobic person from speaking for the queer community. “None,” she said. Political speech is risky; you could make a mistake when you engage in it. That cannot stop you from engaging. To want safeguards, such as the one the concept of “experience” in identity politics seems to (but does not) offer, is to fail to understand the nature of political speech. Surely, this does not mean that those who define themselves as speaking from and identifying with a group do not have an important place in the political world. It does mean that a “white, straight, man,” has the freedom to speak for and to the queer community. It means that members of the “radical queer” community have the freedom to speak to him. It means that the “conservative queer” community can pipe in too. It also means that when we do choose to speak to one another politically our social identities are not what are doing the speaking.
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