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Beyond Representations and Subjectivity: Gender Binaries and the Politics of Organizational Transformation David Knights and Deborah Kerfoot Department of Management Keele University ST5 5BG [email protected] Introduction. The editors of this Special Issue raise the question as to whether binary thinking is a fundamental obstacle to gender equity. For in binary thinking, our subject matter is divided dichotomously between two polarities - men/women, or masculinity/femininity. Following Derrida (1988) and Irigaray (1980), they suggest that binaries always involve a hierarchy and, in the case under discussion, men and masculine discourses occupy the dominant centre of rationality, displacing women and femininity to the emotional margins of 'reality'. In short, what Derrida describes as masculine logocentric or legislative reason reduces the 'feminine' to an absent or wholly subordinate 'other'. Their argument is that despite a recognition that there are a multiplicity of masculinities and femininities (Brittan, 1989), these continue to 'exist in a binary relation to each other' (Linstead and Brewis, 2002) rendering the feminine subordinate. Their concern is to import the arguments of social science and philosophy into the study of gender at work in order to 'dissolve these gender binaries to further explore the fluidity of gender identity' (ibid). Whilst we are sympathetic to these concerns to acknowledge and theorise the fluidity of gender identity, we wonder whether this objective of dissolution is possible within an epistemological frame of representation. What is likely is a mere deconstruction of the gender binaries. Our argument is that critique needs to go beyond representation in order to challenge the subjectivity that makes it possible. This requires us to occupy a space that stands between representations and their conditions of possibility. In our view, deconstructing the gender binary is simply to challenge the reification of the terms wherein male and female, masculine and feminine, or men and women are treated as absolute and unchanging. Dissolving the binary, by contrast, would presumably invite a collapsing of the terms so that they no longer sustain and reproduce the polarities between men and women, and between masculinity and femininity. Our paper is divided into three parts as follows. First, we explore what is implied by the attribution of gender identities. Here we focus on the most dominant gender discourse within work organizations - that of masculinity. We seek to challenge this dominance because we think it is repressive in its consequences for others including the productive capacity of organizations. By productive capacity we do not merely mean more output at a lower cost but also less damaging social relations of production. In a second section, we examine the discourse within feminism that has surrounded the work of Foucault. This revolves around whether, given his neglect of issues of gender, Foucault is to be seen as 1 an inspiration or a distraction for feminist politics. This debate is extensive and intense but we are less concerned with taking sides than with exploring how the various insights might be mobilised to examine discourses of masculinity for purposes of their disruption. In the third section, we argue that this disruption is unlikely to be advanced if we remain caught within the representations of gender reflected in many feminist debates with Foucault. Instead, our concern is to occupy a space that resides between those representations and the subjectivity that makes them possible. For only then can we challenge the binary subjectivities that reflect and reproduce discourses of masculinity. Our radical epistemology has the potential not only to disrupt masculinity but also might be the way that gender binaries can be dissolved rather than merely deconstructed. While this would undoubtedly improve the experience of work for men and women, perhaps removing some of the most repressive effects of masculine dominated workplaces, it might also stimulate a more creative and productive mode of organising. In a summary and conclusion we draw out some parallels between our analysis and Hekman’s (2001) strategy of developing a feminist alternative to the singular and unitary conception of truth, method, and morality. While supporting her destabilising of the hegemonic masculinity that reflects and reproduces mainstream conceptions of truth, method and morality, we suggest that our epistemological location between representations and the subjectivity that makes them possible provides a necessary complement. Section 1 - Men and Masculinity In recent years there has been a proliferation of interest in men and masculinity (e.g. Tolson, 1977; Cockburn, 1983; 1985; Brittan, 1989; Seidler, 1989; 199; Cohen, 1990; Hearn and Morgan, 1990; Rutherford, 1992; Cornwall and Lindisfarne, 1994; Connell, 1995). This interest has not gone on entirely uncontested (MacInnes, 1998) within the sociology of gender but could be said to have been fairly marginal with respect to the study of work organization and management (cf. Collinson and Hearn, 1996). Despite this, much of the earlier work in both organizational studies and in the feminist literature has, often unproblematically, tended to position men at the centre of their critiques (ibid.) of sexual inequality at work (Pollert, 1981; Cavendish, 1982; West, 1982; Cockburn, 1983; Wajcman, 1983; Westwood, 1984; Collinson et al., 1990). Similarly men and masculinity are the un- or under-theorised element in critiques of a patriarchal society (Walby, 1986; 1990) that perpetuate sexual discrimination and inequality. Whilst mainstream writing on management and organisation has frequently served to deny or denigrate the significance of gender as a concept in the pursuit of `better' management practice, feminist insights have often focused on women and their experience of, and location within, (patriarchal) organisational stuctures and their differential status in the paid labour market. One result of this neglect of men, and in particular, masculinity as a core problematic is that whilst men and masculinity are central to any analysis, they "remain taken for granted, hidden and unexamined" (Collinson and Hearn, 1994:3). As we shall see later, like any other aspect of subjectivity, masculinity is a necessary presupposition for producing representations but it remains 2 tacit and unspoken. The growing literature on masculinity and organisation serves as a corrective to this tendency, and reconfigures the debate in such as way as to render men and masculinity visible as objects of critical interrogation. At one and the same time, critical discussion of men and masculinity in managerial and organisational locales has enabled the often-problematic aspects of masculinity to be illuminated, not least at the level of subjects themselves. In parallel, a related literature on men more generally (see for example Kaufman, 1987; Brod, 1987; Kimmell, 1987; Brittan, 1989; Segal, 1990; Connell, 1995) has signaled current problems with respect to men and masculinity. Although spanning a wide range of positions in the debate, this literature has been concerned to discuss men's experiences of `holding on to’ or changing their sense of masculine identity. Predominant conceptions of masculinity have variously characterised the consequences of masculinity synonymous with power, aggression and control. Often the `experience of masculinity' is delineated in terms of a sense of loss, inner trauma, emotional turmoil when a continuous and unending striving for the control of objects, people and events falls short of an ultimate conquest of the external world. Accepting the term masculinity as problematic, in that there are clearly diverse masculinities across racial and ethnic difference (Mercer, 1988) within and between countries (Gilmore, 1990) and across time and location, subsequent work on men and masculinity sought to escape the confines of dualistic gender essentialism. Moreover, beyond the obvious plurality of masculinites, the differing experiences of masculinity within the lifespan of individuals forced reconsideration of whether masculinity as an allembracing descriptor for the behaviours of men was of any significant value. The work of Connell (1995, for example,) resonated with that begun by Brittan (1989) arguing that the failure to recognise masculine identities as plural could be found in the hitherto unacknowledged understanding that masculinity had been conceived as an internally undifferentiated category. Connell's contention was that the failure to recognise the complexities and differences amongst men had resulted in a skewed analysis of social relations and in the politics of the sexes wherein, as a consequence of this theoretical slippage, all men were pitted against all women. Whilst there are clearly multiple masculinities, culturally and historically, what remained at issue in the discussion and development of the literature on masculinity was the shared characteristics of these behaviours. Following the attempts of Carrigan, Connell and Lee (1987) to theorise men's (dominant) behaviour in terms of masculinity, the term `hegemonic masculinity' achieved prominence. What we would want to describe, as discourses of hegemonic masculinity are what characterise most business and indeed non-commercial organizations. While tacit and non-explicit in their own terms, discourses of masculinity nonetheless prevail to structure and sustain behaviour of certain sorts. It is ordinarily behaviour that is technically rational, performance oriented, highly instrumental, devoid of intimacy yet preoccupied with identity, and driven by rarely reflected upon corporate or bureaucratic goals that are presumed inviolable. These masculine discourses thereby have the effect of constituting both managers and employees as subjects that secure their sense of identity, meaning, and 3 reality through the rational, efficient and singularly uncritical pursuit of the goals and objectives handed down from above. Conditioned by this privileged and pervasive form of masculinity, the modern manager is ritually engaged in co-ordinating and controlling others in pursuit of the instrumental goals of production, productivity, and profit. Our concern to disrupt masculinity is premised on the belief that left unchecked, such subjectivities and discourses are repressive in their consequences for self and others. Repressive for self in rendering the subject driven for no particular reason other than that of a compulsive, cognitive and goal-centred design on a heroic mastery of all it purveys. Repressive for others in reducing them to no more than instrumental resources in the pursuit of this purposive rational design on the world. We suggest that there are three interrelated ways in which masculine discourses and subjectivities are repressive both for self and others. These can be seen as related to the issues of instrumentality, intimacy, and identity respectively. Instrumentality Masculine discourses privilege instrumental rationalities that reflect and reinforce an effective attainment of ends through an efficient application of means. These rationalities are a condition and consequence of masculine preoccupations with success that sees no limits to control, competition, and conquest (Kerfoot and Knights, 1996). Lyotard (1984) described the preoccupation with instrumental reason or what he calls ‘performativity’ as that which is directed toward 'efficiency' and a concern with outcomes irrespective of the means to their achievement. In this sense, instrumentality is amoral having no concern with the ethical means to or outcomes of its achievement. It thereby represses the moral content of organizational life even though this can be self-defeating since, as Durkheim (1956) made clear at the turn of the century, there is an essential non-contractual or moral framework in all contracts. The labour contract is no different here and the instrumental repression of the moral framework can serve to undermine the inter-dependence and cooperation of organizational life. Intimacy A second repressive consequence of dominant masculine discourses is the structuring of relations in ways that feign intimacy while actually denying 'its' expression. In pursuit of its goals, the rationale of instrumental behaviour sustains a tunnel vision that displaces any sense of intimacy. It is a wholly disembodied way of relating to self and Other. Of course, subjects caught up in a masculine instrumental rationality follow the norms and niceties of polite interpersonal relations since this is seen to oil the wheels of communication as a necessary condition of securing outcomes that extend beyond the individual. Masculinity constitutes a mode of relating devoid of intimacy other than in ways that facilitate an expression of self, bound up in purposive rational instrumentality and a heroic mastery of 'reality'. In the workplace and especially within management, intimacy is denied legitimacy; it is understood to reside only in those 'private' places beyond the world of work. This is absurd and repressive both for self and other since intimacy cannot be segregated to its own private ghetto, as it is a part of what it is to be human. But this attempt to ghettoise intimacy could be seen to be a function of its 4 mystery and hence its location in a space always beyond representation and mastery, where it perpetually escapes our grasp. Within masculine discourses, if something cannot be a target for mastery then it must be possessed and if it cannot be possessed then it must be banished to the margins where it is contained if not controlled1. As we argue later, this boundary where only that which can be represented counts as knowledge can be challenged. Intimacy otherwise constitutes a threat to the precarious sense of a masculine self, intent on instrumental control, competition, and conquest. Identity Masculine discourses would seem not only to invoke a preoccupation with control, conquest, and competitive success but also, and as a necessary accompaniment to these instrumental pursuits, self-mastery. This involves a compulsive preoccupation with identity for how else can self-mastery be recognised except through the mirror of narcissus confirming to us the sense that we have of ourselves? But narcissus is not simply the image in the water or its modern equivalent - the mirror2; it is mediated through our relations with others. Confirmation of self and identity is social and yet masculine instrumentality has already chased out the intimacy through which such confirmations from other might be plausible let alone sustained. The preoccupation with identity must then become as instrumental, compulsive, and self-defeating as the demands for control, conquest, and competitive success that it reflects and reproduces. By virtue of the difficulty if not ultimate impossibility of controlling how the ‘other’ perceives the self, identity always remain beyond reach. Section 2 – Foucault and Feminism This section begins by providing a somewhat truncated summary of the debate between feminist supporters and detractors of Foucault. This is done not because we wish to take sides for we remain ambivalent about the virtues and vices of theorising gender. We also want to avoid treating one or other of the opposing representations as a vehicle for the solidification and security of self or the shoring up of our own identities. Instead of placing a closure around one particular set of arguments, we hope to draw on the insights from both to set the scene for our analysis of an alternative epistemological space that is beyond representation in Section 3. From these critics and supporters, we pay particular attention to those that are either ambivalent or contribute to a discourse on masculinity. In particular, we want to claim that ambivalence has a radical intent since it facilitates a questioning that reaches behind rather than becomes locked into particular representations. Despite not taking sides on the specific issue of the critique or acceptance of Foucault's refusal to theorise gender, our analysis is informed by a Foucauldian injunction to think the unthought or, in our terms, to go beyond representation and subjectivity. At the same time, we draw on the critics in insisting that an analysis of gender is crucial to understanding contemporary organization(s) but, while retaining an ambivalence or scepticism with regard to all representations including gender, our focus is on disrupting the domination of masculine presuppositions and discourses. Our concern to disrupt the discursive dominance of masculinity is because we believe it to have repressive consequences both for its perpetrators (usually but not 5 exclusively successful men) and its victims (often but not exclusively women). In seeking to bring about this disruption, we find Foucault’s (1973) early yet comparatively undeveloped discourse on epistemology is of particular value. Before turning to this alternative epistemological framework for studying gender, we discuss the debate between pro- and anti-Foucauldian feminists. i) Critics One of the main objections of feminists to Foucault is his refusal to theorise gender identity. They believe that it undermines the political project of feminism to emancipate women from male domination. His anti-humanism precludes the possibility of 'woman' as the very project for feminist emancipation (Benhabib, 1992). It denies space for an active subject as the agent and recipient of feminist demands for emancipation (see also Hartsock, 1990) and undermine the reason for, and the content of, a feminist politics. Moi (1985) argues that Foucault ignores any sense of women's oppression and hence a politics of their liberation. Bartky (1988) also sees Foucault's neglect of the gender differentiated affects on the 'docility' of bodies resulting in his ignorance of how women are turned into 'compliant' or submissive accessories for men. Others have suggested that the failure of Foucault to focus on gender as opposed to sexuality have left him less reflective about dominant masculine discourses than might otherwise have been the case. Indeed, Braidotti (1991: 95) argues that by ignoring the sex specific struggles of women, Foucault reinforces a 'masculine model of social relations'. Hartsock (1996) follows a well-trodden path of assuming that because Foucault perceives power to be everywhere, there is no point in resistance since it only serves to displace one power with another. She also objects to the absence of any normative foundation within Foucault since this removes the ground of a feminist politics to resist oppression. This is also the basis of Frazer's (1996) highly sophisticated critique of Foucault where she argues that we perhaps cannot dispense with humanism as a normative base if we are to have any way of resisting the discipline over our bodies and souls that Foucault (1977) describes. Also without some normative base, how can the totalizing panoptic of a society disciplined by its own commitment to autonomy be opposed? Only if the ideal of autonomy can be reinterpreted to have historically been the support for women's subordination, Fraser (ibid. 36) argues, should feminists seek to follow Foucault in rejecting humanism. This not entirely unsympathetic critique of Foucault is endorsed by McNay (1994) who is more ambivalent than these other writers about the relevance of Foucault's discourse to the feminist project. She argues that treating the subject in terms of a passive or 'docile' body (ibid. 47) is the most problematic aspect of his work for feminism. This reaffirms Bartky’s (1988) view that female passivity has been exploited by men who treat women as little more than accessories to their masculine projects. While sympathetic to his later work on ethics and aesthetics where Foucault seems to overcome much of the passivity limit, she nonetheless argues that Foucault's failure to develop a phenomenological theory of subjectivity (Knights, 1990: 321) leaves the 'social mediation of the self undeveloped and unexplained' (ibid. 175). 6 The majority of these critiques appear to rest on a rejection of Foucault’s anti-humanist denial of a normative and/or agential base from which feminists might struggle for women’s emancipation. As we shall see when reviewing the supporters of Foucault, they see the cost of following this kind of politics is to reproduce the gender binary that is the very ground of a masculine, heterosexual hegemony. For the supporters of Foucault, it is these gender binaries as a product of male dominated (hetero) sexual discourses that need to be resisted. The two more ambivalent critiques, we feel, can be developed in ways that might help disrupt rather than reproduce the gender binaries that we wish to deconstruct. We turn first briefly to examine the feminist supporters of Foucault. ii) Supporters Feminist supporters of Foucault have responded in a variety of ways to his work. Few are entirely uncritical but are prepared to accept what they see as certain flaws given the overall value of his perspective. A case in point is Jana Sawacki (1991) who forgives Foucault his androcentricism on the basis that his analysis reflects the values of feminism in disrupting 'realities' that are normally taken for granted. She believes that Foucault provides a devastating critique of sexual liberation in the 1960s. . This so-called sexual liberation simply rendered us more then ever determined by its discursively constructed biological and humanistic conception of sex. Despite his neglect of gender, Foucault's theorising of sexuality as a key arena of political struggle is clearly relevant to a feminist politics (Sawicki, 1991:49). In focusing on sexuality as a discourse that constitutes all human subjects as targets of its enveloping power, Foucault also avoids the binary oppositions that surround an analysis of gender. These binary oppositions have traditionally been inescapably hierarchical - elevating, for example, men over women, masculinity over femininity, heterosexual over homosexual, mind over body, rationality over emotion, and so on (Irigaray, 1980; Derrida, 1988). Consequently disrupting them may be seen as a necessary part of any feminist political struggle. De Lauretis, (1987) finds Foucault’s analysis interesting because it can be used to challenge the category gender and the dualistic modes of thinking that sustain its associated binaries. Foucault’s neglect of the category gender could be seen largely as a resistance to a heterosexual hegemony. To pose the question of gender in terms of sexual difference (i.e. women from men or male from female) is to remain "within the frame of a conceptual opposition that is always 'already inscribed'" within "dominant cultural discourses and their underlying 'master narratives'" (de Lauretis, 1987:1). It is therefore to reproduce that self-same binary and make it impossible to examine differences either among women or among men. While Foucault makes no attempt to interrogate masculine subjectivity, De Lauretis (1987) has argued that sexuality in Foucault is gendered in that it is seen already predominantly as a male attribute. This argument is elaborated by McCallum (1996:83) who points out that 'gender is very much contained by, and constructed through, the deployment of sex/uality and thus is inscribed in Foucault's analysis. Whether or not it is 7 embodied in the male or the female, sexuality is on the masculine side of a binary gender matrix (McCallum, 1996). Foucault's refusal to genderise power-knowledge relations is because this is precisely the binary that the discourse of sexuality has constructed. The demise of hegemonic (hetero)sexuality demands that the binary be denied. Following Lloyd (1984), McWhorter (1999:140) believes that Foucault’s rejection of the Cartesian dualism between mind and body is to be endorsed because it perpetuates sexist beliefs and behaviour. By privileging intellectual and cognitive representations, masculine discourses reproduce a disembodied thinking that 'blinds us to the power of normalisation, which does not operate on a body that is' a static property of the self and thereby, prevents us from engaging in 'deliberate self-transformative practices' (ibid. 210). This is because when disembodied in our orientations to life, we fail to notice what is being done both to our bodies and to our souls since all that we recognise is that which is accessible to the cognition or intellect. Self-transformation is unlikely in the absence of an integration of mind and body. Judith Butler (1990) was strongly influenced by Foucault in her opposition to essentialist pre-social notions of identity and any politics in which a singular unitary identity was invoked as the basis for female emancipation. However, through invoking a notion of a libidinal 'multiplicity of pleasures' that seemingly presupposes the sexuality that power imposes upon it (ibid. 95-101), Foucault does not help her to advance this emancipatory critique. For Butler, this simply contradicts his other arguments that nothing about human life is pre-discursive. Foucault’s concern to refuse the sexuality that has been imposed upon us leads him into an essentialist cul de sac of treating pleasures as prediscursive. Susan Hekman (1992) supported Foucault largely because she saw his work as undermining the dominance of the Enlightenment discourse on rationality where women are constituted as the irrational 'other'. Although this is to neglect his ambivalence toward the Enlightenment (Foucault, 1984), Hekman values his tendency to valorise the subjugated knowledge of feminists as socially and self-transformative. Barbara Townley (1994:166) focuses much more closely on the ethical possibilities in Foucault arguing that the 'strength of Foucauldian politics' is its commitment to questioning how we are to 'conduct ourselves in our relations with others'. This is to take us more closely to the later Foucault, where the concern was with how we can transform ourselves into ethical and aesthetic subjects. We believe that an important condition of this transformation is to remain in an epistemological and methodological space beyond representation. Section 3 - An alternative space for dissolving gender binaries This debate between critics and supporters of Foucault is illuminating in a number of ways but we are less concerned to take sides than to recognise how our analysis can draw insights from both without necessarily agreeing with either in their entirety. In recognising that gender binaries invariably result in a privileging of men over women, we follow those feminists who endorse Foucault's view that discourses of heterosexuality keep in place the differences3 that sustain the dominance of masculinity. However, the critic’s concerns are also important because we do not think it possible to dispense with theorising masculine, and thereby gender discourses, if we are to seek to disrupt them. 8 However, we do not wish merely to add to or reinforce the representations that are made while remaining oblivious of the conditions that make them possible. The question is to what extent we can find a space where we might take on the insights from both sides of this debate on gender without reverting to a solidification of self through becoming attached to one set of representations against the other? This will need to be a space beyond representation. In other words, we seek to occupy a critical space beyond representation where our accounts are not primarily an occasion for producing an orderly and predictable world in which to secure our sense of self. This is a resistant discourse that seeks to avoid reflecting and reproducing our relationship to the Other (Levinas, 1986) as an instrumental resource for the solidification of self (Clough, 1992). The space we suggest may be found epistemologically residing in between strong or positive representations of reality and the conditions that make them possible. In relation to feminist and gender discourses, this is illustrated in Diag. 1 below. A dominant though by no means exclusive representation in feminist discourse is gender and its objectification of the behaviour and identities of men and women. Through a transformation of this objectification, a feminist critical knowledge seeks to exercise and/or influence power to determine the 'truth' in norms of gender/sexual equality. Because of other powerful representations within liberal democracy, the equality norm is often reduced to a pale image of its own possibility in demands for equal opportunity4. The only concept in the diagram that we have purposely neglected until the last is that of subjectivity. This is because subjectivity is also what knowledge producers tend to neglect or rather take for granted. None of the representations and their objectification of particular events or activities are possible in the absence of implicit or explicit conceptions and/or presumptions of subjectivity. In other words, subjectivity is a necessary condition for any representation to be made possible. The conception of subjectivity that reflects and reproduces gender representations is the binary that divides men from women as discrete subjects or masculinity from femininity as distinct discursively produced behaviours. While crucial, assumptions about subjectivity are often taken for granted rather than examined as a condition that make representations possible. Discourse Representation Objectification (knowledge) of Power/ Subjectivity Feminism Gender the behaviour and identities of men and women Conditions that make possible particular representations and their truth effects ‘Truth effects’ in norms of Equality or equal opportunity Diag. 1. A space beyond representation This space may be seen as providing the conditions of possibility for a certain kind of critical work - one that seeks to get behind the representations and to challenge the subjectivity that makes them possible. A binary conception of subjectivity is what makes 9 possible representations of gender but then the representations reproduce precisely that binary almost as a self-fulfilling prophecy5. Subscribing to the representations of gender leaves the gender binary divide in tact, making a disruption of masculinity difficult. Remaining in the space between those representations and the subjectivity of binary oppositions that make them possible, on the other hand, leaves us free to refuse or disrupt the subjectivity of masculinity that is one of their significant discursive outcomes. It could be argued that while advocating that gender researchers remain within the space lying between representations and the subjectivity that makes them possible, we have already produced a representation of representational knowledge. So the condition that makes it possible to occupy the space between representations and the subjectivity that makes them possible is another representation, ad infinitum. This, of course, is a reductio absurdum where we can never escape the status quo. However, our representation of representational knowledge retains some element of ambivalence since it refuses to put closure on the subjectivity that is the condition that makes it possible. Instead, it encourages representational theorists to reflect on the subjectivity they ordinarily take for granted. This way perhaps they will begin to feel more ethically comfortable also in the space that lies between representations and their conditions of possibility. But this might then lead to the demise of representational knowledge altogether and then there would be no space between representations and subjectivity to occupy except those of a historical past. In this sense, an ethical space for gender studies is either parasitically dependent on the continued reproduction of a/non-ethical research or anticipates its own demise. The latter seems somewhat utopian, but it need not be dismissed as absurd since it simply means that by such time, academic research could have exported an ‘openness’ to the population. This might find its expression in ethical responsibility to others rather than a continued and compulsive reproduction of security for the self. Discussion and Conclusion While there is not space here to articulate fully our alternative epistemology and its methodological and ethical implications, it can be seen to have some parallels with that proposed by Susan Hekman (1999). Her concern is also to find an epistemological space for feminist analysis that is neither utopian nor essentialist. Demands for equality between the sexes have remained utopian ever since Simone de Beauvoir (1972) argued for sexual equality despite subscribing to an epistemology where woman is always and necessarily the opposite passive and subordinate complement to the active and autonomous male subject (Hekman, 1999: 6). In this epistemological asymmetry, subjectivity is male and woman must always be its Other. De Beauvoir argues that there are only two solutions to this dilemma for women – either to abandon the status of Other and the negativity and lack that it entails or to assert the same kind of autonomy for the Other and thus become a subject like a man. De Beauvoir’s preference is for the first strategy and she sought therefore to eliminate the gender differences both social and biological. Career women throughout recent decades have tended to follow this strategy thus demonstrating that masculinity is not the exclusive preserve of men. However, in the absence of also 10 abandoning the One/Other epistemological framework, Hekman argues this strategy is impossible. This is because the hierarchy is a logically necessary element of the gender binary. Consequently, in the history of feminism, a greater emphasis has been placed on the alternative strategy of seeking to valorise women’s unique lived experience to elevate woman to a level coincident with that of men. This ends up relying on essentialist arguments that elevate women’s lived experience as the source of a superior form of knowledge. The claim is that women should displace men in the hierarchy of One/Other relationships because they rather than men have access to this superior knowledge. While the first strategy sought to eradicate the differences between men and women, the second strategy did the opposite in emphasising the differences and displacing men by women in the hierarchy. Hekman (1999:92) challenges both these strategies on the basis that they remain locked into an enlightenment epistemology that sustains a belief that there is one single standard of truth from which deviations are inferior. The first sees women becoming an equal member whereas the second seeks a rebellion in which women displace men as the guardians of the truth. Both, however, leave unchallenged the unitary standard of truth that sustains an instrumental, disembodied and identity seeking masculine self. Hekman (ibid.) subscribes to a third strategy that denies a single unitary truth and promotes an epistemology where multiple sources of truth prevail. Differences are not seen as illegitimate deviations from the one true standard but simply a part of the rich texture of human life and experience. This epistemology draws on a Wittgensteinian or Nietzschean philosophical tradition where a Background of ‘domain assumptions’ (Gouldner, 1970) is perceived to render any statement intelligible or meaningful to members of a society. This Background which may be identified as ‘language games’ (Wittgenstein), ‘prejudices’ (Nietzsche) or ‘epistemes’ (Foucault) is synonymous with a hegemonic masculinity that must be challenged if an alternative feminist strategy is to be advanced (ibid. 121). While Hekman has her own way of challenging the Background that sustains masculine power, here we have suggested an alternative yet complementary strategy. This has been to remain in the epistemological space that lies between representations and the conditions that make them possible. These conditions can be seen to reflect precisely the Background to which Hekman refers. Hekman’s third strategy involves seeking to destabilise the hegemonic masculine Background assumptions of everyday discourse not by claiming a superior feminine truth but simply by showing how there are multiple paths to truth. So, for example, she draws on the work of Haraway (1989) who has studied primatology to demonstrate that stories of culture, nature, gender and race change in relation to cultural changes in society. Her argument is that the hegemonic masculine story of reality can be destabilised by telling a feminist story and this ought to transform cultural thinking about women (ibid. 144). What, however, is limited in Hekman’s analysis is the presumption that the Background assumptions sustaining a hegemonic masculinity are only repressive for women and not also for (at least some) men. This is where the literature on masculinity can make a contribution in destabilising not only the Background assumptions of hegemonic 11 masculinity but also some of those relating to feminism. Although men may often be privileged in material and symbolic status vis-à-vis women, they are also imprisoned by the demands of masculine discourses to be independent, tough and manly, ‘breadwinners’, protective and responsible. We are completely sympathetic to Hekman’s strategy of destabilising the conception of unitary truth handed down from the Enlightenment by showing how there are multiple paths to the truth. We also support a challenging of the boundaries of the language games or epistemes that sustain a masculine hegemony where there is only one (epistemo)logical route to truth and where, to the exclusion of other moral values (e.g. care, love, responsibility), justice rule supreme. This can reveal the Background as not the ground of all truth but merely the ungrounded ground of the truth prevailing in our society and at this time (ibid. 138) but it is a truth that elevates instrumental control. As she argues, feminists rendering unfamiliar what is taken for granted (e.g. gender conventions, sexual behaviour, justice) can shift incrementally the boundaries of the Background assumptions that reflect and reinforce a hegemonic masculinity. Our concern is that while acknowledging multiple paths to the truth and morality, Hekman does not discuss how her methodology will avoid the representational form that, following Foucault, she admits (re)produces the world that it studies (ibid. 134). Our proposal is that we remain in the space between representations and the conditions that make them possible. This facilitates a different way of destabilising the boundaries of the Background assumptions that sustain a hegemonic masculinity. It first of all indicates how the advance of singular and unitary truths through representational knowledge is not only grounded in the Background of what everyone knows but also in particular constructions of subjectivity. These constructions of subjectivity (e.g. rational economic man in economics) are the very conditions that make it possible to produce representational knowledge but they are, in effect, self-fulfilling. This is because once knowledge is drawn upon in the exercise of power, it has the effect of creating the conditions whereby we constitute ourselves in terms of the subjectivity that it presumes and seeks to sustain. Given the legitimacy that economic knowledge and government practice provides for the market system, what sense would there be for individuals not to constitute themselves as economically rational or rational choice subjects? 6 In short, the subjectivity representational knowledge presumes is reproduced and therefore selffulfilling through the exercise of power. Of course, not all scientists are effective in mobilising resources and enrolling key actants in the sociology of translation (Callon, 1986) or securing sufficiently robust networks to transform their representations into knowledge. Also there is no exact correlation between knowledge and its interpretation by those exercising power. Furthermore, subjects do not necessarily passively subjugate themselves to the demands that are made of them so that often there can be leakage in terms of the subjectivity that would ordinarily be self-fulfilling in power/knowledge relations. But the one way that is more likely to result in a refusal of the subjectivity that power/knowledge would have us become is to remain in the space between representations and the subjectivity that makes them possible. This is a subversive place that would challenge the boundaries of possible knowledge and, in particular, threaten the 12 masculine subjectivity that, through the Background, language games or the episteme, is presupposed by representation. It might do so in a way not dissimilar to Hekman’s alternative understanding of difference, method, and truth but may be less likely to result in a one-sided feminist understanding of the repressive effects of representation as falling exclusively on women. References Bartky, S. L. (1988) 'Foucault, femininity and the modernization of patriarchal power', in I. Diamond and L. Quimby (editors) Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, Boston: Northeastern University Press. 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J (1986) Patriarchy at Work, Cambridge: Polity Press. Walby, S (1990) Theorising Patriarchy, Oxford: Blackwell. West, J (1982) Work, Women and the Labour Market, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Westwood, S (1984) All Day Every Day: Factory, Family, Women’s Lives, London Pluto Press. Wittgenstein, L (1965) ‘Lecture on Ethics’, The Philosophical Review74, No. 1 pp. 3-12 in Cahoone L (editor) From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, Oxford: Blackwell. Notes 1 A parallel argument can be made whereby ethics, just like intimacy, is treated as a marginal and mysterious phenomenon perhaps because it also can only be contained, not controlled. ‘Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural’ … ‘What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense’ (Wittgenstein, 1965 quoted in Cahoone, 2003). We can draw here on Roberts (2001) use of Lacan (1949) where he argues that the mirror stage of the development of self (i.e. when we first recognise ourself in the mirror) brings about a misrecognition (mėconnaissance) or perhaps conflation of self with its specular image and that this is what leads to a preoccupation with having that image confirmd by ‘other’. A defence and elaboration of this self (Roberts 2001:118) becomes then a strategy for success in which the ‘other’ is invariably a means to an end. These strategies rely on an elevation or privileging of sight (visibility) over corporeal sensibility (Levinas, 1991 quoted in Roberts, 2001:112) and in this sense could be depicted as a condition and consequence of a masculine discourse that elevates what can be seen over other bodily senses. 16 Or should we say ‘differance’ (Derrida) in the sense that the difference between the genders is also one in which there is both deference of women to men and a continuous deferral of confronting the relationship for fear of undermining the power on which it rests. While not to be shunned, equal opportunity achievements provide 'meritocratic' means of legitimizing rather than undermining social (including gender) inequality. An analogy can be drawn with economics discourse where the conditions of subjectivity that lie behind representations of labour or consumption are the utility maximising or economically rational actor. Suppliers (e.g. employers and retailers) then apply the representations of economists such that to behave in ways other than economic rationality would be self-defeating. Consequently economic rational choice behaviour is selffulfilling. Public policy in the form of competition policy in the UK continually seeks to transform individuals into economically rational subjects on the basis that they contribute to the efficiency of companies by forcing them to be more competitive in their search for the (rational) consumers’ consumption. 17