May 25, 2013

Feminist theory and the blue sweater

  
In the movie "The Devil Wears Prada", which is otherwise a pretty uninspiring non-exposé of the underbelly of the fashion magazine industry, there is one scene of transcendent importance that has stuck with me through the years, and that I am often reminded of when people tell me that some subject of philosophical, political, scientific or sociological inquiry is "academic", "ivory tower", "has no relevance to people's lives" and so on.

I think of it as "the blue sweater speech":


In context of course, the scene give us a glimpse (not enough of a glimpse, and it;s a shame the film didn't explore that subject further) into how what we think of as our personal choices are really determined by executives, advertisers, buyers, magazine editors and so on. The relationship between fashion designers - the creative people who actually conceive the patterns and shapes of the clothes that we by necessity must choose among - is mediated by an enormous chain of other, often extraneous relationships that mean that at the point of purchase (or even closer to home, at the point of dressing), we can't really be said to make an informed choice between neutral options.

This is true everywhere in the consumer society; in food, in literature, in leisure activities and holiday destinations, in the jobs we go for and the degrees we choose etc. it's not really the amorphous concept of "society" that shapes the limits of our choice, it's groups of specific individuals whose job it is to do that, in various forms. On a side note, the vagueness of "society" and "culture" is a deliberate neoliberal ruse, and no wonder that it was set up for Thatcher to attack - of course there is no such independent, sentient agent called society. Making it sound ridiculous made it easier to nudge the choices people - individuals - to disengage from it and stop believing in it.

So much for Miranda Priestly and her unintentional critique of capitalism; but how is the blue sweater relevant to feminism? Well, the blue sweater is "lived experience".

I've been seeing that term about much more lately, almost always juxtaposed with, and opposed to, the idea of "theory". Feminism, the critique goes, is too detached, too academic, too theoretical. what it needs to be relevant to women's lives is an injection of lived experience. And example would be a woman who says "I have a basic belief that my (any) theories aren't as compelling as lived experiences."[1] the implication is that "theories", lower case T

it is now seen as an insult, as an affront to intersectionality, for example, to talk of queer theory. Transgender, the riposte invariably goes, is not a theory. It is real, and by claiming that it's "only a theory" you are insulting and erasing transwomen's experience. The saying goes: "your analysis doesn't trump our existence." This attitude often crops up in other controversies within feminism, such as the fight for sex workers' rights, in which the lived experience of individual sex workers is often advanced as a rebuttal to policy suggestions or research findings: theory is impersonal, obtuse, out of touch, and at its worst a deliberate bad-faith attempt to avoid taking the lived experience of women into account when it doesn't agree with the desired outcome.

Clearly, that is sometimes the case - "don't confuse me with facts" is a mental attitude that a lot of people wedded to their ideologies adopt rather than rethink their actions (see: Osborne, George). but that is not in and of itself a condemnation of theory, and more importantly it is in no wise a reason to suppose that there isn't a long, varied "supply chain" of sorts, mediating between what we think of as our independent agency and the theorizing of some feminist philosopher somewhere.

I remember sitting on a bench on the island of Santorini once, having a discussion with my best friend about the Spice Girls (yes I am that old!). Her position was that Girl Power was a real force that could be harnessed for women's liberation; mine was that it's a shallow flash in the pan. The conversation stuck in my mind because it was the first time that I heard this argument advanced: that what philosopher and feminists do in their ivory towers is so disconnected from the lives of ordinary women as to be entirely separate from and useless to them.

At the time I instinctively felt that this can't be right, and tried to rebut it with a fairly hand-wavy conception of a "trickle up" effect from academia to the privileged realms of Real Life(tm). I don't know that I did a very good job, because I didn't really know how things like Parliamentary Committees, policy think tanks, UN research reports, charity lobbying campaigns, popular science/politics/psychology/self help book commissions and so on interact with the world of academia and mediate between it and the seemingly independent everyday world of jobs, traffic jams and childcare dilemmas. Possibly even more importantly, I didn't know how very porous that connective tissue between "theory" and "lived experience" is - how directly, in some cases, academic conceptions are imported into the conditions that govern seemingly trivial parts of our lives (if you don't believe me, Google "jamology").

What Miranda Priestly is saying, in her inimitably blood-chilling style[2], isn't just that the Anne Hathaway character is being stupid and naive to think "this stuff" doesn't have anything to do with her; she is also hinting at the fact that without "this stuff", she'd simply have nothing to wear. If it were not for the temper tantrums and drug habits (sorry) over highly strung creatives in the Fashion World, we might not have all those "choices" we like to defend from encroachment, in the first place. We might all still be wearing petticoats.

Now, we might also not - we might discover a hidden wealth of creativity and variety within each of us. That is a somewhat Utopian view, but I don't discount it entirely. Certainly, to come back to feminism, the conception of an ideal post-gender society includes the complete freedom from external influences on individuals' socio-sexual identities. I mist say though, history is against us: one of the things we definitely had less of, before the age of universities (and fashion designers), is variety. People more or less all wore the same thing, even though they had full control of the production process, from flax to handkerchief; and they quite often more or less thought the same, too.

However that future might turn out though, that hypothetical world in which everybody can simply be free to have their own individual theory of identity is still to come; in this world, we're all the products of the same sausage factory, and that sausage factory is built on blueprints that have a lot of theory in them. To imagine that any one individual's lived experience is entirely above or beyond engagement with theory is like thinking that you really did "choose" that blue sweater. And, when we identify beneficial changes that have filtered into women's lives through decades of feminist work, to fail to acknowledge the important contribution of theory to that would be short-sighted and ungrateful.


[1] I'm sorry for the lack of proper attribution; I did think about and decided that depersonalizing the discussion is probably the better choice here.

[2] I'm not advocating being that nasty to anyone (ever!), but isn't it kind of marvelous how Meryl Streep manages to portray absolute power without an ounce, a breath of male patterns of aggression? Masterful! And a bit of a template for would-be non-violent dictators. Er. Don't quote me on that.
  

8 comments:

  1. "And a bit of a template for would-be non-violent dictators."

    I aver that there is no non-violent way to be a dictator.

    The rest of the article was great. I think that had the plot of the movie gone further in exploring what "choice" is really about, it would have detracted from the sellability of the movie and perhaps kept it from becoming a success. Popular media doesn't become popular by encouraging the masses to think too much. Oh, it'll throw in a tidbit here and there, just to get our attention, but then our attention will be diverted onto something else.

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  2. Two comments:

    My old lecturer loves this quotation from Keynes which ties in nicely with your post:

    "The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."

    Secondly something theory should do is take account of as many facts as possible and as new facts come to light they should be incorporated. As humans we have a limit to the complexity we can handle so nuance can be tricky but we should be aiming to take into account as much as possible. I think the challenge here is less about the academic development of theory and more in the communication of theory to a wider audience.

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  3. I enjoyed the clip, but also think that it works in both directions- thinking here of that vexed ol' trans* thing, where in the past there has been an attitude to it in some quarters that 'there is no such thing as gender, therefore transsexuality is a delusional condition' that has led me at times to think that I was being explained to myself, and badly explained at that, by someone who doesn't really know what they're talking about...it's good that there is at least some engagement going on now. I'm all for the lived experience thing, personally, as too much theorising gives me a headache. Still, needs must...(inserts smiley here)

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    1. I completely agree that theorizing without any recourse to relevant facts is nonsense -and pernicious nonsense, at that. and of course when theorizing about gender, the experience of people is a
      set of relevant facts that must be taken into account.

      what i'm minded to reject tipping, it's the idea that lived experience it's not connected to antecedent theories. so in the example of the trans* experience, I'm not at all sure that people should be claiming to have arrived at their lived experience entirely independently, and not owe anything of their identity to post-structuralism, queer theory and so on.

      sorry if this doesn't entirely make sense, I'm on my phone and typingthisout it's taking a lot of my brain power!

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    2. I completely agree that theorizing without any recourse to relevant facts is nonsense -and pernicious nonsense, at that. and of course when theorizing about gender, the experience of people is a
      set of relevant facts that must be taken into account.

      what i'm minded to reject tipping, it's the idea that lived experience it's not connected to antecedent theories. so in the example of the trans* experience, I'm not at all sure that people should be claiming to have arrived at their lived experience entirely independently, and not owe anything of their identity to post-structuralism, queer theory and so on.

      sorry if this doesn't entirely make sense, I'm on my phone and typingthisout it's taking a lot of my brain power!

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  4. yes, agreed; and theories are ways of modelling experience to explain it, aren't they? And we're trying to build a model that is a true one- "the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth"...

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  5. (whoops) but.... there's the part of our identity that is socially and culturally formed, and there is also that bit of us (I believe) that is innate. Which makes things difficult sometimes; a lot of tosh is spoken about how we're 'hard-wired' to behave in certain ways; while I think there is at least something behind that notion, it is expedient to minimise it in order to get things done; so much of gender is oppressive.

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  6. I enjoyed this piece.

    With regards to "theory vs personal experience", I believe we tend to treat them as "one vs the other", when as we all know, theory is always based on personal experience.

    In the case of trans* experience, people tend to argue that those who claim "there's no such thing as gender" cannot know what they're talking about because they are not trans*.
    But those who claim "there's no such a thing as gender" do have personal experience of gender... it's just that their personal experience indicates that gender is irrelevant.

    The discussion we need to have is a different one. It's not "theory vs personal experience" but "whose personal experience counts the most?".

    It's the same when it comes to discussions on prostitution. Sex workers differ from the opinions of women who have exited prostitution. Both of their opinions are based on lived experience... but the conclusions they arrive at are different.
    So what do we do then?

    I don't think there are any easy answers...

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