Feminism, power and powerlessness

Feminist theory and gendered power: background

Power is a tricky concept, in that it tends to get muddled in abstractions. S has pointed out to me how common it is among feminist thinkers to employ a totalitarian concept of power in descriptions of "partriarchy", so that all human relations are described as power relations and so that patriarchal power seem to be inevitable, omnipresent and without alternative. A system of power inscribed in language ("male", "female"). We cannot escape language (according to this post-structuralist picture), but we can, at best, try to get around the Law by means of an act of parody or a process of re-thinking. Employed in this way, the concept of power appears both cynical and strangely forceless. It seems to loose its specificity; the way we talk about "power" to describe a particular type of situation from a particular point of view.

I have to admit I have no idea whatsoever what "re-thinking" is supposed to mean. I don't understand in what way feminist writers have placed their hopes in "re-thinking". (Braidotti is one writer who takes a liking to this concept.) Perhaps I have to read more in order to understand it.

Even so, this picture of inescapable power has important connections with many experiences of gendered power. I've been trying to think of examples from my own life of having encountered situations that allow descriptions in terms of impersonal, gendered power. A few years ago, I worked at a research institute. I was assigned a project in which I was to conduct interviews with people working in the maritime industry. I knew next to nothing about most of the technical things that were brought up by the interviewees. There was talk about a lot of computer programs the function of which I had no clue about. Most of the time I felt that I asked questions that, to them, were either strange or obviously stupid. The guys I talked to had been working in the same place for many years. I absolutely detested these situations, because they transformed me into, not only a person unfamiliar with the maritime industry, but also a woman. A Woman who is expected to express "her" lack of knowledge in a joking, pleasant, apologetic manner, so that "she" can move on to ask yet another silly question about social relations at the workplace.

Shopping clothes. No matter which department I settle for, I get ugly looks. "What the hell are you doing here?" After two minutes of desperate wandering, I am on the verge of an outburst of obscenities. Catch-22. (There are exceptions; once, a dead-pan clerk offered me valuable advice of how to buy myself a nice suit. He didn't smirk, and I was thankful for that. Then I got mad for being "thankful".)

In situations like these I feel awkwardly helpless. No matter what I do, I will be seen as a female (or male, in some cases) creature and my actions will be understood in the light of what people think it means to be that creature.

I have no wish to impersonate a particular sex or gender. I want to be a cyborg.

Generality and power

To some extent, there is a level of impersonality at play in gendered power. When a bureaucrat has overstepped the boundaries of her job, we talk about an excess of arbitrary power. Gendered power seems to be an altogether different form of "power" It is not necessarily the type of power a person excercises in order to reach some specific goal. Gendered power seems to contain an element of generality or, more to the point, an appeal to generality. Even if there is some story of self-gratification lurking behind oppression in terms of gender, the forms this oppression takes seem intelligible independently of the personal agenda of the oppressive parties.

The point is perhaps that it is usually unclear who is the oppressive party. Gendered power is often personified (i.e. we blame somebody, a specific person, for excersicing it), but it also has to be understood in other, more general, ways and it is here that it gets strangely complicated.

It's easier to start reflecting on power from the point of view of powerlessness. When a person experiences a state of powerlessness she does not necessarily desire to be granted more power. Sometimes I simply wish that the entire situation would change; that the perspective of power (gender) would cease to be relevant. In the interview situation referred to above, I did not hope that the situation would improve by power being allocated to a different person (i.e. me). I just wanted to do my job, without being seen as an embodiment of the Female Researcher.

The powerlessness related to oppression in terms of gender can hardly be understood solely on the basis of evil oppressors. But if that is so, in relation to what am I feeling powerless? T brought up the following, good example. He recalled that he was once involved in a team-work excercise at school. His teacher exclaimed, after noticing the group-formations: "Oh, so you ended up with the girls!" T hadn't even thought about his team-mates as girls until she mentioned it. The perspective of gender was introduced to him from the outside. But of course he knew what the teacher meant, the perspective she introduced to him was already familiar. Here, for example, it makes sense to say that he felt helpless in relation to a perspective but this doesn't, I suppose, remove the feeling of helplessness from the concrete situations and the persons who introduce a perspective.

The generality I have in mind does, of course, not eradicate personal responsibility. "Why did you do it?" The force of the "you" is not alleviated or toned down if the centrality of an impersonal intelligibiilty is emphasized. If we want to say something about something as being an instance of gendered power, we have to see it from the point of view of the intelligibility - however evil - of gendered talk and concepts.

Butler's often used notion of "being hailed" illuminates something of what it means that one is viewed as a gendered being. One turns into something, a Woman, a Man, a Queer, by being addressed as something. (This point is quite specific, it cannot be applied to anything. I haven't said anything about "identity", nor do I want to.) Gendered power often takes the form of a transferred gaze, one looks at oneself with the eyes of the oppressive system. In the interview situation I've been talking about, I really came to experience myself as a silly, female researcher who asks shallow questions about things I know nothing about. I was infuriated to be seen as a woman, but it was difficult to escape the perspective I was confronted with - the reactions of another person. But the difficulty seems to have nothing to do with a metaphysical contraint, of language or something else. The difficulty is a moral difficuly.

I don't know how to go on from here, I can't think clearly about it.

Jelinek's Lust

I am reading Elfriede Jelinek at the moment. Lust, a novel published in 1989, is a relentless disclosure of a state of power and powerlessness that turns us into walking clichés, the mere skeletons of human beings. In her book, power and powerlessness are impersonal aspects of the world - the world of capitalism, a world in which everything is a commodity, be it nature, sex, food or something else. All relations are described as impersonal, characterized by greed and domination. In the characters of the book, power and powerlessness are intertwined. The oppressor is the oppressed from a different point of view. The book contains no story in the traditional sense of the word and it also lacks dialogue. Descriptions of persons are kept bluntly minimal.

Lust is a rambling account of the (pseudo-)relation between The Direktor, a factory owner, and his wife. There are also paralell stories, but these are simply different takes on the same nexus of power. The Direktor's attitudes towards his workers and his attitude towards his wife are portrayed in very similar ways.

Jelinek wages her war with dry puns, word-play and repetition. One of the positive aspects about the style of the book is that it, by reducing people to "types", does not lend itself to psychologistic readings. By psychologistic readings I am thinking about the explanatory schemes of "personal characteristics". The reader is introduced to a perspective from which it is not possible to see actions as expressive of persons. Everything is ambiguous, everything is crude. "Lust", the title of the book, is probably to be understood ironically. In the world of brutal capitalism, there can be no lust, no joy, and no love.

This said, I do have some problems with the way Jelinek imagines a world in which everything is reduced to power and violence. It's as if she does not allow for any alternatives, and this makes it difficult to know how to read the book. (The difference between political books and books who simply present the dystopia of the modern world.) But I appreciate that she acknowledges how gendered power is related to other forms of power and that we must start with very fundamental questions about what kind of world we live in if we are to get clearer about this.