The Problem of Exclusion in Feminist Theory and Politics: A Metaphysical Investigation into Constructing a Category of ‘Woman’

Abstract

The precondition of any feminist politics – a usable category of ‘woman’ – has proved to be difficult to construct, even proposed to be impossible, given the ‘problem of exclusion’. This is the inevitable exclusion of at least some women, as their lives or experiences do not fit into the necessary and sufficient condition(s) that denotes group membership. In this paper, I propose that the problem of exclusion arises not because of inappropriate category membership criteria, but because of the presumption that categories can only be organised by identity relations or shared properties among their members. This criterion of sameness as well as the characterisation of this exclusion as essentialism attests to a metaphysics that is not conducive to resistance and liberatory projects. Following a strain of hybrid thinking in feminist and post-colonial theory, I outline an alternative pluralist logic that confronts oppressive binaries that impede theory work in gender, sexuality, and race theory, and limit political action and resistance. The problem of exclusion is neither irresolvable nor is it essentialism. Instead it is a denial of subjectivity due to pseudodualistic self/Other dichotomies that can be resisted by adopting a new categorial logic. While this paper focuses on the specific problem of formulating a category of ‘woman’, it has implications for other areas of gender, critical race, and postcolonial theory. Rather than working toward an inclusive category founded on sameness, theorists need to develop independent and positive categories grounded in difference. Our current categorial logic does not permit such a project, and therefore a new metaphysics must be adopted.

Keywords:

• Exclusion
• difference
• essentialism
• woman
• subjectivity
• other(ness)

Acknowledgements

This manuscript originated as a term paper for a graduate seminar in Metaphysics and Epistemology taught by Professor Marilyn Frye at Michigan State University. The themes discussed in this course on Categories greatly influenced my thinking and I would like to thank Professor Frye for her dedicated teaching, insight, and interest in my work. I would also like to acknowledge my audience at the 2003 meeting of the Canadian Women's Studies Association for helpful questions and comments on a later draft of this work.

Notes

¹ While cognisant that ‘essentialism’ has been used in a variety of ways in feminist theory, I choose to be ambiguous about what I mean by ‘anti-essentialist’ at this point to bring attention to how the term is often used unreflectively in feminist thought to denote numerous theoretical and political problems. See Marilyn Frye (2000) for discussion on how the term has been used and misused in feminist thought and Schor (1994a) for some exasperated feminist responses to ‘the policing of feminism by the shock troops of antiessentialism’ (p. vii).

² Simone de Beauvoir argued in The Second Sex that the intellectual and behavioural differences between men and women were historically and socially constructed gender and not sex. While (bodily) sex was seen to exist and be biologically fixed, she argued that there was no inherent or essential basis for gender differences, and that they could therefore be changed. Theoretically, women and men could be the same in all the relevant intellectual activities and social roles.

³ While most feminists saw their error as stemming from a failed social constructionist project, some feminists took issue with social constructionism as a method. Diane Fuss (1989), for example, argued that social constructionism was a misguided reaction to essentialism, as it ‘reessentialised’ women by displacing the ‘natural’ with the social.

⁴ In many ways my argument will parallel the debates over equality and difference in contemporary feminist thought. However, these debates concern the relation of women and men, while my focus is on the relation of women to each other. Accounts of sexual difference have been criticised for not saying enough about difference among women and are therefore often accused of being essentialist.

⁵ Other figurations aimed at displacing oppressive binaries include Donna Haraway's (2000) cyborg, Homi Bhabha's (1994) hybrid subject, and Gilles Deleuze's (1985) nomad. Haraway's (2000) cyborg metaphor serves to problematise traditional notions of the self (and the many binaries complacent in its traditional formulations), while Bhabha's (1994) postcolonial subject is always split because of its ambivalent relationship to the dominant culture. The hybrid subject is similar to mestiza, although Bhabha only focuses on ethnicity and fails to take the axes of gender, sexuality, and class into account. In ‘Nomad Thought’, Deleuze (1985) argues that any philosophical discourse that has its origins in institutions is part of a cultural drive towards immobility and fixity. He offers nomadism as a means to mobilise or unfix cultural dynamism.