Gender and Agency E-Book

Lois McNay

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 326

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This book reassesses theories of agency and gender identity against the backdrop of changing relations between men and women in contemporary societies. McNay argues that recent thought on the formation of the modern subject offers a one-sided or negative account of agency, which underplays the creative dimension present in the responses of individuals to changing social relations. An understanding of this creative element is central to a theory of autonomous agency, and also to an explanation of the ways in which women and men negotiate changes within gender relations.

In exploring the implications of this idea of agency for a theory of gender identity, McNay brings together the work of leading feminist theorists - such as Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser - with the work of key continental social theorists. In particular, she examines the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Paul Ricoeur and Cornelius Castoriadis, each of whom has explored different aspects of the idea of the creativity of action. McNay argues that their thought has interesting implications for feminist ideas of gender, but these have been relatively neglected partly because of the huge influence of the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan in this area. She argues that, despite its suggestive nature, feminist theory must move away from the ideas of Foucault and Lacan if a more substantive account of agency is to be introduced into ideas of gender identity.

This book will appeal to students and scholars in the areas of social theory, gender studies and feminist theory.

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for Maisie

Gender and Agency

Reconfiguring the Subject inFeminist and Social Theory

Lois McNay

Polity Press

Copyright © Lois McNay 2000

The right of Lois McNay to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2000 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McNay, Lois.

Gender and agency : reconfiguring the subject in feminist and social theory / Lois McNay.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7456-1348-9 (hc.: acid-free paper) — ISBN 0-7456-1349-7 (pbk.: acid-free paper) ISBN 978-0-7456-6787-4 (ebook)

1. Feminist theory. 2. Sex role. 3. Gender identity. 4. Man-woman relationships. I. Title.

HQ1190.M393 2000305.3—dc2199-056202

Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Berling

by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong

Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

1    Gender, Subjectification and Agency: Introductory Remarks

2    Body, Position, Power: Bourdieu and Butler on Agency

3    Gender and Narrative: Ricoeur on the Coherence of the Self

4    Psyche and Society: Castoriadis and the Creativity of Action

5    Gender and Change: Concluding Remarks

Notes

References

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the following for their comments on parts of the manuscript at various stages in its drafting: Gráinne de Búrca, Michael Freeden, Bridget Fowler, Desmond King, Morny Joy, Nicola Lacey, John Thompson and Robert Young. I have benefited enormously from the support and friendship of Gráinne de Búrca. Kinch Hoekstra’s patient discussion with me of various issues and his perceptive reading of sections of the manuscript were extremely helpful in clarifying my thoughts. Above all, I would like to thank Henrietta Moore, whose comments and insights were invaluable to the completion of this book.

I am indebted to the British Academy and Somerville College, Oxford, for their support in the form of research leave.

Parts of chapter 2 originally appeared in a revised form as ‘Gender, Habitus and the Field: Pierre Bourdieu and the Limits of Reflexivity’, Theory, Culture and Society, 16 (1): 95–117 and ‘Subject, Psyche and Agency: The Work of Judith Butler’, Theory, Culture and Society, 16 (2): 175–93.

A shorter version of chapter 3 appeared as ‘Gender and Narrative Identity’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 4 (3): 315–36.

1

GENDER, SUBJECTIFICATION AND AGENCY: INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

From negative to generative paradigm

In the last few years, a cluster of issues pertaining to the question of agency have become the renewed focus of thought in feminist and social theory. The concern with the concept of agency has been initiated, in part, by more general reflections on the changing nature of economic and social structures in late-capitalist societies. The many debates about modernity, postmodernity, reflexive modernization, globalization and detraditionalization address in various ways questions about the changing nature of action in a society which, it is claimed, is becoming increasingly complex, plural and uncertain.

One of the most pronounced effects of these macrostructural tendencies towards detraditionalization is the transformation of the social status of women in the last forty years and the restructuring of gender relations that it has arguably initiated. The effects of these processes of gender restructuring upon the lives of men and women are ambiguous in that they do not straightforwardly reinforce old forms of gender inequality; nor, however, can their detraditionalizing impact be regarded as wholly emancipatory. New forms of autonomy and constraint can be seen to be emerging which can no longer be understood through dichotomies of male domination and female subordination. Instead, inequalities are emerging along generational, class and racial lines where structural divisions amongst women are as significant as divisions between men and women. Feminist theory has registered the ambiguous effects of these social changes through a rethinking of the concepts of gender identity and agency. In so far as these concepts, inherited from first-wave feminism, are premised upon notions of patriarchal domination, they do not explain sufficiently the types of behaviour and action exhibited by men and women in their negotiation of complex social relations. In short, underlying the move away from what are regarded as relatively ahistorical theories of patriarchy and female subordination is an attempt to reconceptualize agency which, in feminist theory, is often formulated as explanations of how gender identity is a durable but not immutable phenomenon.

The conceptualization of gender identity as durable but not immutable has prompted a rethinking of agency in terms of the inherent instability of gender norms and the consequent possibilities for resistance, subversion and the emancipatory remodelling of identity (e.g. Butler 1990, 1993a; Pellegrini 1997; Sedgewick 1994). This book is a contribution to that project of thinking through aspects of the dialectic of stasis and change within gender identity and its implications for a theory of agency. My central claim, however, is that recent theoretical work on identity offers only a partial account of agency because it remains within an essentially negative understanding of subject formation. If, following Michel Foucault, the process of subjectification is understood as a dialectic of freedom and constraint – ‘the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a more autonomous way, through practices of liberation, of liberty’ – then it is the negative moment of subjection that has been accorded theoretical privilege in much work on identity construction (Foucault 1988: 50). The predominance of a primarily negative paradigm of identity formation – of subjectification as subjection – comes from the poststructural emphasis on the subject as discursive effect and is a theme common to both Foucauldian constructionism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The idea of the subject formed through an originary act of constraint has been particularly powerful for feminist theory because it offers a way of analysing the deeply entrenched aspects of gendered behaviour while eschewing reference to a presocial sexual difference. I do not dispute the power of this negative paradigm of subjectification for an examination of the seemingly compulsory nature of the sex-gender system. I question, however, the extent to which it is generalized in much recent theoretical work on identity to become an exhaustive explanation of all aspects of subjectivity and agency. The idea that the individual emerges from constraint does not offer a broad enough understanding of the dynamics of subjectification and, as a consequence, offers an etiolated understanding of agency.

Although it is formulated in diverse ways, the main contention of the negative paradigm is that coherent subjectivity is discursively or symbolically constructed. This idea of discursive construction becomes a form of determinism because of the frequent assumption, albeit implicit, of the essential passivity of the subject. This uni-directional and repressive dynamic is reinforced by the exclusionary logic that is used to invest the subject with levels of self-awareness and autonomy. Following a relational theory of meaning, the assertion of the subject’s identity is explained through a logic of the disavowal of difference; the subject maintains a sense of self principally through a denial of the alterity of the other. While this might be a foundational moment in the formation of coherent subjectivity, it does not provide on its own a comprehensive explanation of all possible ways in which the subject may relate to the other or deal with difference. When this exclusionary logic is extended to explain all aspects of subject formation, it results in an attenuated account of agency which leaves unexplored how individuals are endowed with the capabilities for independent reflection and action such that their response, when confronted with difference and paradox, may involve accommodation or adaptation as much as denial. In other words, it leaves unexplained the capabilities of individuals to respond to difference in a less defensive and even, at times, a more creative fashion. Arguably, it is such qualities that are partially characteristic of the responses of women and men to processes of gender restructuring in late-capitalist societies.

This is not to say that the negative paradigm of subjectification does not offer a theory of agency, but it tends to think of action mainly through the residual categories of resistance to or dislocation of dominant norms. In part, the predominance of the cluster of ideas of dislocation, resistance, hybridity and resignification in work on identity construction stems from the rejection of unfeasible Marxist notions of revolutionary praxis that dominated radical theories of change and agency during the early 1970s (e.g. Foucault 1980: 78–108). Such ideas denote strategies of subversion which have a more tangential relation to dominant forms than directly oppositional and fully self-conscious models of revolutionary change. Yet the terms resistance and dislocation have, in some respects, become truisms in that they are used to describe any situation where individual practices do not conform to dominant norms. This is a tendency evident, for example, in some types of cultural studies which impute to certain everyday practices a kind of inherently subversive status (McNay 1996). Yet, if it is accepted that individual practices never reflect overarching norms in a straightforward fashion, then this widely deployed notion of resistance loses analytical purchase. This is not to deny the efficacy of all forms of resistance, but it is to suggest that a more precise and varied account of agency is required to explain the differing motivations and ways in which individuals and groups struggle over, appropriate and transform cultural meanings and resources. This, in turn, indicates the necessity of contextualizing agency within power relations in order to understand how acts deemed as resistant may transcend their immediate sphere in order to transform collective behaviour and norms.

This attempt to sketch out other aspects of subjectification and agency which have been underelaborated in the negative paradigm involves trying to integrate the idea of a determining constraint within a more generative theoretical framework. The symbolic determinism of the negative paradigm is partially overcome, for example, through a more dialogical understanding of the temporal aspects of subject formation. The emphasis in the negative paradigm on subjection tends to highlight the retentive dimension of the sedimented effects of power upon the body. This underplays the protensive or future-oriented dimension of praxis as the living through of embodied potentialities, and as the anticipatory aspects inherent within subject formation. Unravelling some of these dialogical relations replaces the stasis of determinist models with a generative logic which yields a more persuasive account of the emergence of agency. The main implication of this generative logic for a theory of agency, which is taken up in this book, is that it yields an understanding of a creative or imaginative substrate to action. It is crucial to conceptualize these creative or productive aspects immanent to agency in order to explain how, when faced with complexity and difference, individuals may respond in unanticipated and innovative ways which may hinder, reinforce or catalyse social change. With regard to issues of gender, a more rounded conception of agency is crucial to explaining both how women have acted autonomously in the past despite constricting social sanctions and also how they may act now in the context of processes of gender restructuring. I also argue that attendant on the conceptualization of a creative dimension to agency are renewed understandings of ideas of autonomy and reflexivity, understood as the critical awareness that arises from a self-conscious relation with the other. These concepts have proved problematic for feminist theorists, in particular, because of their association with a form of masculinist abstraction that privileges a disembedded and disembodied subject. I argue, however, that the converse insistence, made by many feminists, on the ineluctably situated nature of the subject hinders the conceptualization of agency in so far as it necessarily involves a partial transcendence of its material conditions of emergence.

The account of a creative substrate to agency that arises from a generative account of subjectification also results in a slightly altered perspective on certain problems upon which much work on identity has become fixated. Some of these problems appear particularly intractable because of an unhelpful polarization that is an effect of the debate over essentialism which preoccupied feminist and other work on identity during the late 1970s and early 1980s. I do not make the grandiose claim that these very difficult issues are overcome through a reformulated account of subject formation, but rather that they may be reconfigured. The term reconfiguration suggests that by slightly rearranging the relations existing between elements within a given theoretical constellation, insight might be generated into ways of moving beyond certain overplayed dualisms and exegetical clichés. I focus, in particular, on the insights that a generative account of subjectification and agency offers into three clusters of issues that have predominated in much thought on the construction of the subject: the relation between the material and symbolic dimensions of subjectification; the issue of the identity or coherence of the self; and, finally, the relation between the psyche and the social. To enable a more detailed discussion of these issues, I will discuss the negative paradigm of subjectification, as it is formulated in the thought of Foucault and Lacan, and its relation to feminist thought on subjectivity and agency.

The subject in Foucault and Lacan

Much feminist work on gender identity is dominated by the thought of Foucault and Lacan, which exemplifies some of the major features of the negative paradigm of subjectification. Although feminists have considered in detail the shortcomings of their thought, particularly with regard to integrating an account of agency into an understanding of the formation of gender identity, there have, on the whole, been few attempts to locate alternative theoretical sources beyond these two paradigms.

Lacan’s thought has had an enormous impact upon feminist psychoanalytical accounts of the formation of gender, principally because his interpretation of Freud through structural linguistics permits an account of the institution of sexual identity that is not biologically reductionist. These aspects of Lacan’s work are extensively discussed in feminist literature and, therefore, will only be briefly set out here (e.g. Gallop 1982; Grosz 1990; Ragland-Sullivan 1986). For Lacan, the stable subject is an illusion which obscures the ceaseless disruption of identity by the workings of the unconscious. The imaginary aspect to the formation of the stable subject or ‘I’ can be discerned in a ‘primordial form’ in Lacan’s account of infant self-identification during the ‘mirror stage’ where lack is connected to the anatomical underdevelopment of the infant which is concealed by the illusion of a premature corporeal unity given in the reflection. The dilemmas of the mirror stage prefigure the dynamic of the subsequent formation of the subject within language or the ‘field of the Other’ (Lacan 1977c: 203). The formation of the subject within language is crucially linked to the ambiguous status of the sign itself. Signifiers in themselves have no absolute meaning for meaning is only the effect of a negative relation between signifiers (Rose 1982: 32–3). The subject can only emerge as such within language. At the same time, however, the unstable nature of language means that, at the moment of its appearance, the subject is ‘petrified’ or reduced to being no more than a signifier. The subject is constituted within the other of language, but language cannot confer on the subject any absolute guarantee of its meaning. This play of presence-absence which characterizes the emergence of the ‘I’ within language is what Lacan calls the ‘fading’ of the subject (aphanisis): ‘aphanisis is to be situated in a more radical way at the level at which the subject manifests himself in this movement of disappearance that I have described as lethal… I have called this movement the fading of the subject’ (Lacan 1977c: 207–8). The disappearance of the subject is connected to the movement of the unconscious which eludes capture within language and which is located beneath the networks and chains of the signifier in an ‘indeterminate place’ (1977c: 208). Thus, despite the persistence of the subject’s belief in the wholeness of its identity, the subject is in fact constituted upon a fundamental lack or division. In terms of the instauration of gender identity, this lack ensures that there is no inevitability or stability to the process whereby women and men assume feminine and masculine identities. The stabilization of identity is constantly thwarted by the destabilizing effects of the unconscious upon the symbolic order of phallocentric meaning.

The difficulty with Lacan’s linguistic account of subjectification, it is widely argued, is that the ahistorical and formal nature of the paradigm forecloses a satisfactory account of agency. This is most evident in the description of the phallocentric construction of feminine identity, which is construed in such univocally negative terms – woman as double lack – that it is difficult to see how it connects to the concrete practices and achievements of women as social agents. The uni-directional account of subject formation as the introjection of the repressive law of the symbolic results in a monolithic account of the phallocentric order which remains essentially unaltered by social and historical variations. Although the destabilizing force of the category of the unconscious points to ways in which the internalization of the law of the symbolic can be resisted, a more substantive account of agency beyond the individualist terms of a libidinal politics is foreclosed. The socio-historical specificity of agency and of particular struggles is denied by being reduced to an effect of an ahistorical and self-identical principle of non-adequation between psyche and society. Indeed, agency is imputed to the pre-reflexive realm of the unconscious, rather than being conceived of as the property of determinate historical praxis. A further difficulty for feminist theory is that the priority that is accorded to the phallus in determining meaning within the symbolic realm means that agency is usually only considered in relation to sexual difference.

Running counter to Lacan’s thought, the work of Michel Foucault on the body and power has been one of the most influential sources for the development of constructionist accounts of subject formation. The impact of his work upon feminist theories of gender identity and agency is so well known that it need not be gone into here (Diamond and Quinby 1988; McNay 1992; Ramazonglu 1993). It is a widely rehearsed criticism that Foucault’s earlier work on discipline lacks a concept of subjectivity and, therefore, also precludes a theory of agency by reducing individuals to docile bodies. The major part of his oeuvre, from Psychiatry and Mental Illness to the first volume of The History of Sexuality, exemplifies the negative paradigm of subjectification in that it is devoted to exploring the different ways in which the identity of dominant groups has been maintained through the exclusion and derogation of marginal groups and liminal experiences.

The lack of a substantive category of subjectivity is corrected in Foucault’s final work where he sets out the idea of ‘technologies of the self understood as the practices and techniques through which individuals actively fashion their own identities. This active process of self-formation suggests how the seemingly inexorable processes of corporeal inculcation, or ‘technologies of domination’, may be resisted through the self-conscious stylization of identity like a work of art. Individuals are regarded as relatively autonomous in so far as the process of identity formation involves neither passive submission to external constraints nor willed adoption of dominant norms (McNay 1992). However, Foucault’s idea of the self does not really offer a satisfactory account of agency. Although the idea of practices of the self or an ‘aesthetics of existence’ gestures towards the autonomous and even creative element inherent to action, it is asserted rather than elaborated in detail. For example, the status of the self-fashioning subject who appears to precede an ethics of the self remains unexplained. The failure to distinguish more precisely between practices of the self that are imposed on individuals through cultural sanctions and those that are more freely adopted also means that the idea of agency ultimately has voluntarist connotations. The lack of detail in Foucault’s consideration of how the dialectic of freedom and constraint is realized in the process of subject formation results, ultimately, in his thought vacillating between the moments of determinism and voluntarism. The insights in the work on discipline are not fully integrated with the later work on the self and so Foucault can only offer the overdeterminist view of the subject subsumed by the operations of power upon the body or the solipsistic outlook of an aesthetics of existence.

While Foucault’s work does not foreclose an account of agency in so stark a manner as the Lacanian reification of the phallocentric order, it is seriously limited by its conceptual underdevelopment. Despite the lack of a detailed account of agency, much feminist and other constructionist theory of identity tends to remain within a Foucauldian paradigm. This is evident, for example, in the work of Susan Hekman (1995), who criticizes the work of thinkers such as Teresa De Lauretis (1987) and Paul Smith (1988) for deploying ‘dialectical’ notions of subjectification which fail to break from a dualist model where a Cartesian concept of agency is grafted mechanistically onto a pre-given subject. Against this dichotomous concept of the constituting–constituted subject, Hekman argues that Foucault’s idea of the construction of the self as a ‘work of art’ exemplifies an alternative, monological and active sense of agency. However, given the elliptical nature and voluntarist implications of Foucault’s account of self-formation, it is hard to see how it breaks substantively from other dualist conceptions. In order, therefore, to understand the creative elements of action that are so suggestive in Foucault’s idea of an aesthetics of existence, it would seem necessary, if not to move beyond the negative paradigm, at least to enlarge it with a more generative account of subject formation and agency.

Agency in feminism

On the most general level, a revised understanding of agency has long been the explicit or implicit concern of feminist research devoted to the uncovering of the marginalized experiences of women. These experiences attest to the capacity for autonomous action in the face of often overwhelming cultural sanctions and structural inequalities. This unifying impulse notwithstanding, the concept of agency has been theorized in ways which mirror bifurcations in feminist thought. Echoing conceptual problems in mainstream social theory, feminist thought could be said to be divided between the relatively unmediated notions of agency and practice characteristic of microsociological and relational theories, on the one hand, and the discursively determinist accounts of poststructural feminist theory, on the other.

Within sociology, the exploration of female agency has been conducted mainly at the level of interpretative microsociology, particularly feminist ethnomethodology. A problem with this work on the submerged practices of women and other marginal groups is that it can too easily slip into a celebration of these experiences as somehow primary or authentic. This is evident, for example, in the work of feminist standpoint theorists, such as Dorothy Smith (1987), who accord an epistemological privilege to women’s dual perspective on social reality. It is also evident in certain types of women’s history which, as Joan Scott has shown, rely heavily on an appeal to experience as an originary point of explanation (Scott 1991: 786–7). The rapid transformation in women’s social status in late-capitalist society combined with the black feminist critique of feminism and the poststructural problematization of identity have all triggered the recognition that these celebratory accounts of agency which rely on a dualism of male dominance and female subordination do not capture adequately the complexities of agency in an era of transformation in gender relations. As Patricia Mann puts it, ‘it is necessary to expand the vocabulary of political actions in order to make sense of individual agency in moments of discursive uncertainty and political change’ (Mann 1994: 17).

Within feminist theory, one of the main alternative paradigms to poststructural ideas on the construction of gender are the various relational accounts of subjectification offered in object relations theory and Habermasian feminism. Although this stream of thought is not the main focus of this book, some of the limitations of their tacitly naturalized accounts of agency should briefly be considered. Against the poststructural emphasis on the discursive construction of subjectivity, relational accounts tend to emphasize the constitutive role of the intersubjective dynamic in the establishment of gender identity. In the object relations approach of Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan, the intersubjective dynamic is paradigmatically expressed in the mother–child dyad which, as has been “widely pointed out, has the effect of naturalizing the process through which gender identity is assumed (Held 1987; Soper 1990). The idea of agency that can be extrapolated from such an account of subjectification is curtailed by the reliance upon an inevitable sexual difference. Moreover, within that limited paradigm, it is only the role of the mother that is theorized. Such tacitly maternal accounts of agency are insufficient to explain changes within patterns of gendered behaviour which are, to a large extent, catalysed by tensions arising from the expansion of women’s role beyond that of mothering.

An alternative strand within relational theories of gender is the work of Habermasian feminists such as Selya Benhabib (1992) and Jodi Dean (1996) on the communicative dimensions to subject formation. This work attempts to overcome the naturalizing tendencies of object relations theory by socializing the relational dyamic. Nonetheless, the concept of agency that emerges is limited because its understanding of intersubjective relations is underpinned by an implicitly domesticated concept of difference. Habermas’s distinction between system and lifeworld forecloses an understanding of the structural aspects to gender reproduction by confining gender identity to the normatively oriented rationality of the lifeworld (Fraser 1989). This foreclosure of an examination of structural elements in the reproduction of gender norms means that subjectification occurs through intersubjectivity understood primarily as immediate interpersonal relations (the concrete other). This model fails to take on board fully the implications of a notion of extended intersubjective relations for gender identity, that is, relations that are mediated through impersonal symbolic and material structures. The mediation of gender forms through such structural mechanisms renders the levels of reflexivity presumed in the intersubjective dynamic more problematic than is often recognized in the Habermasian model. The linguistic monism of this model tends to gloss over the blockages, both psychic and social, that may hinder transparency of the self both to itself and others (e.g. Coole 1996; Whitebook 1995). This can be seen as symptomatic of an increasing stress on the management of the self in late modernity which, as Ian Craib argues in The Importance of Disappointment, leads to the rise of anodyne notions of subjectivity based on respect and equality which suppress the irrational and often negative contents of identity such as jealousy, possessiveness, devotion, sacrifice, rage and brutality (Craib 1994: 178). This results in a sanitized view of gender subjectivity and agency which, in so far as it elevates the mothering role, is not that dissimilar to feminist object relations theory. In sum, although relational accounts of subjectification offer notions of agency beyond the negative paradigm, they are undercut either by being framed in the naturalized terms of the maternal function or, as a result of the requirement of reflexive and reciprocal communicative structures, by being predicated on untenable levels of self-transparency.

Counterposed to such relational theories are the ideas of the discursive construction of the subject offered in post-Foucauldian theory. Within feminist thought, the proliferation of recent work on the theme of embodiment represents, in part, an attempt to elaborate in more detail Foucault’s original insight into how processes of bodily inscription can result in the formation of the autonomous subject. Feminist theorists, in particular, have focused on this question of embodiment because it is crucial for analysing how the effects of dominant, sexualized notions of ‘Woman’ upon the dispositions and practices of women may be oppressive but are not completely determining. In other words, despite the imperatives of the sex-gender system (‘compulsory heterosexuality’), women (and men) do not remain prisoners of their sex as some feminist thought seems to imply (e.g. Bartky 1988). Feminists have argued that the category of embodiment replaces dichotomous formulations of the relation between mind and body with monistic and more dialogical conceptions. The emphasis on praxeological or lived aspects to corporeal being suggests a more fluid relation between body and subjectivity than is available in dualist concepts. This monistic approach expresses a revised understanding of gender identity as not simply imposed through patriarchal structures, but as a set of norms that are lived and transformed in the embodied practices of men and women. The instability of gender norms arises from the inherent historicity of social practices. There is a shift, therefore, from understanding the sex–gender system as an atemporal structure towards an alternative concept of a series of interconnected regimes whose relations are historically variable and dynamic. This idea of gender as a historical matrix, rather than a static structure, is regarded as offering a more substantive account of agency.

Despite the insights generated by this work on embodied identity, theoretical difficulties arise which reflect certain limitations of remaining within a negative paradigm of subjectification. It is these limitations with regard to introducing a theory of agency into gender discourse which will now be considered to enable comparison with the approach suggested by a generative account of subject formation and agency.

The material and the symbolic

With regard to the relation between the material and symbolic, one of the limitations of recent feminist work on embodiment is that it remains largely within a symbolic, or more narrowly a linguistic, conception of the construction of corporeal identity. Following the linguistic turn initiated by poststructural thought, difference is understood principally as instability within meaning systems and not, in more sociological terms, as the differentiated power relations constitutive of the social realm. The primacy accorded to linguistic accounts of subject formation results in what Stuart Hall has called a ‘reduction upwards’ in which the only issue considered is positionality in relation to sexual difference in language (Hall 1997: 33). An effect of the primacy accorded to symbolic accounts of subjectification is that material dynamics in the process of identity formation are not considered. For example, the issue of the social reproduction of gender inequalities is often reduced to the narrower question of the symbolic construction of sexual identity. Constructionist thought frequently alludes to material dimensions of power, but an understanding of the way in which the symbolic dimensions of subjectification are refracted through these structures is often not developed sufficiently. Whilst all social practices are to some degree linguistically mediated, they are not necessarily linguistic in nature; patterns of employment discrimination or economic exclusion are deeply sedimented, complex and reproduced in ways that the linguistic model does not adequately capture.

The importance of understanding the intertwinement of both material and symbolic practices in the construction of the gendered subject is not new. It was a major concern of first-wave feminist work, which tried to capture these complex interrelations through ideas of patriarchy (e.g. the debate over dual systems theory or the domestic labour debate) or the sex–gender system (Hartmann 1981; Mitchell 1974; Rubin 1975). For various well-rehearsed reasons, this work has been criticized for being too rigid and essentializing in its analysis of gender subordination (Connell 1987: 41–66). Yet, as overstated as this early work may have been, it attempted to connect the psychosexual dimensions of gender identity to a range of social and economic imperatives in a way that contemporary feminism has neglected because of its bifurcation into materialist and symbolic forms of analysis. From a materialist perspective, Nancy Fraser (1997) has argued that certain Foucauldian-influenced work on the construction of identity has led to an overemphasis within feminist thought on a symbolic or cultural politics of recognition that disregards underlying issues of economic disadvantage. For Fraser, it is crucial to recognize that gender is simultaneously constructed along symbolic and material dimensions in order to undo the false antithesis between a politics of recognition and one of redistribution. Other materialist feminists have criticized the emphasis on marginal sexualities within feminist work on embodiment because it results in an under-theorization of heterosexuality (Hull 1997). The concentration within feminist work on sexuality upon the emergence of non-heterosexual or ‘excentric’ sexualities means that the norm of heterosexuality is deemed, explicitly or implicitly, to be relatively unproblematic. In fact, arguably, processes of gender restructuring are far more complex than the distinction between the normal and the excluded allows. In reaction to this focusing on ‘excentric’ sexualities, there has emerged a ‘theorizing heterosexuality’ stream within materialist feminism which focuses on the economic and institutional dimensions of gender inequality, rather than issues connected to the psychosexual formation of the subject (Richardson 1996; VanEvery 1995). This sociological work claims that there is little evidence to suggest that, despite the increased opportunities for women in education and the labour market, the gender division of labour within the household is altering significantly (Franks 1999). The persistence of discriminatory practices at work, continued pay disparities between men and women and phenomena such as the ‘feminization of poverty’ reinforce the view that if change is occurring it is extremely gradual. In this view, the restructuring of gender relations does not involve a steady increase in women’s autonomy, but involves a shift to new forms of inequality, exemplified in Walby’s idea of the move from private to public patriarchy (Walby 1990).

In short, materialist feminists have a more cautious view of the potential for a transformation of gender relations than certain work within symbolic feminism. From a materialist perspective, a linguistic understanding of subject formation reduces gender to the issue of sexuality, leads to an overestimation of the instability of symbolic structures and to an exaggeration of the emancipatory effects of alternative libidinal practices. The economic, political and social dimensions of gender inequality are all subsumed under what Gayatri Spivak has called the ‘fetish of identity’ (Spivak 1993). There is much force to these criticisms, but the weakness of materialist feminism is that the emphasis placed on economic, political and social structures of exclusion can result in a determinist analysis which lacks an understanding of how these structural forces are worked through at the level of subject formation and agency. For example, in an attempt to map the complex shifts within gender relations, Sylvia Walby (1990) disaggregrates the concept of patriarchy into seven regimes which, although characterized by their respective internal logics, are closely interrelated. Yet, what her analysis lacks is any mediatory category, such as agency, through which it is possible to understand how these structural relations operate at the level of daily life. Thus Walby finishes with a systemic account of gender hierarchy which disregards the impact of these macrostructural shifts upon the individual who moves between and negotiates different sets of power relations.

The relationship between symbolic and material practices can begin to be understood more adequately with the shift from a determinist to a generative account of subjectification and agency. When the formation of subjectivity is understood not in one-sided terms as an exogenously imposed effect but as result of a lived relation between embodied potentiality and material relations, then an active concept of agency emerges. Understanding agency partly as the capacity to manage actively the often discontinuous, overlapping or conflicting relations of power provides a point from which to examine the connection between the symbolic and material relations that are constitutive of a differentiated social order. This idea of difference, not just as indeterminacy within systems of meaning, but as social complexity, is often alluded to in constructionist work but is undercut by its symbolic determinism which pre-empts a substantive category of agency through which the idea of differentiation can be developed.

Personal identity

The second cluster of issues with which this book is concerned relate to the theme of personal identity or the coherence of the self. Poststructural theory has criticized the idea of the identity of the self by deconstructing its unity and revealing it to be an illusory effect emerging from the uneasy suturing of incommensurable discursive positions. A difficulty that emerges from this emphasis on the dispersed nature of identity is that subjectivity becomes a free-floating and atemporal entity which lacks historical depth or durée. An unqualified constructivism or nominalism emerges where subjectivity is regarded as being relatively amenable to processes of reconstruction. The problem of nominalism is compounded by the relational account of meaning that underpins the negative paradigm of subjectification which is often generalized to mean that, if identities have no positive content, then they may be rebuilt in a potentially endless variety of other modes (Bauman 1995; Kellner 1992). Such formal accounts lack a sense of the historical and social embeddedness of subject formations and the ways in which some types of identity are more durable than others. This lack of depth to the contingent subject of poststructural thought fails to recognize that the site occupied by the historical subject is characterized by the conjuncture of heterogeneous temporal dimensions or a ‘contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous’ (Kosselleck 1985: xiii). In short, ideas of temporal differentiation and lag throw into question the extent to which subjective formations are open to processes of refashioning.

Feminist work on embodiment has attempted to overcome the nominalist tendencies of an unqualified constructivism