Gender politics

Author: Wang Fengzhen
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-03-01
Features: The modern Western sense of self-affirmation has been overturned by political and intellectual events. The fundamental concept of all forms of meta-narratives of the Enlightenment (reason, history, science, self, knowledge, power, gender, and inherent Western cultural superiority) has been increasingly eroded by corrosive attacks on its meaning—or even existence. Challenges to Western political-economic hegemony and political and cultural colonialism, the rise of Third World nationalist movements, women's movements worldwide, and anti-racial struggles have all disrupted the established order. The epistemological security of Western intellectuals has also been shattered by dissenting voices from within. The constitutive concepts of the Enlightenment's meta-narratives, such as their "fundamental contestability" (and "too human" contingency), have been exposed. This has led to a crisis of innocence, as these concepts were immediately transformed into mere human constructs—products of human creation, for which we are fully responsible for their impact and effects. Without a reliable foundation below and an ontological and transcendental guarantee above, human life would be very difficult. Despite retaining contradictory attitudes and partial complicity with the old regime, psychoanalysts, postmodernists, and feminists have all contributed to subverting the foundations of Western thought. Psychoanalysts have questioned rational autonomy, the equivalence of consciousness and thought, the unity and stability of the self. They emphasize the existence and partial autonomy of the desire-laden, fantasy-filled inner world, which exerts unconscious and uncontrollable influence on other aspects of human subjectivity, such as thought. The narratives written by postmodernists about the relationships between knowledge, power, history, and subjectivity are more complex and carry less hope. Feminist theorists argue that the idea of knowledge depends on the existence of specific social relations, including gender, which make it credible. Philosophical accounts of epistemology tend to be fundamentally about the experiences, problems, and repressive behaviors of the traditional white, Western, male self. Postmodernists believe that philosophy occupies a constitutive and legislative position within the ongoing Enlightenment meta-narrative of constructing Western culture. Therefore, deconstructing philosophy is both a political responsibility and (at least as philosophers) a prominent and destructive contribution to contemporary Western culture. Western philosophy remains under the curse of "existential metaphysics." Most Western philosophers regard the construction of a philosophical system as their duty, within which some truth can also be represented as thought. This truth is external or universal, or a subject or matter that exists "outside" and independently of the knower. The philosopher's desire is to "map," register, imitate, or reproduce truth. Truth is understood as corresponding to it. For postmodernists, this pursuit of truth masks the desire of the vast majority of Western philosophers: to permanently dominate the world by enclosing it in a fantasy but absolute system, in which they believe can reproduce or correspond to a unitary existence that transcends history, individuality, and change. To conceal his idealized desire, the philosopher must claim that his knowledge is not a product or result of specific historical and discursive practices. It can only be the self-expression of truth in our minds.