Self-Reflexivity in the Formulation of Autonomy: An Appeal from Feminist Cultural Studies

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Notes

A note on the meaning of self-reflexivity: In its general sense it means reflecting on the self; in literary criticism, it can also mean calling attention to one's own artifice. This shade of meaning can be useful here in the sense that we must become aware of the fact that our practice (decision making, culture, and profession) is made up of particular constituent principles, affects, and other influences; it was not spontaneously generated, but has specific sources we can identify and become conscious of.

The critical approaches of my field, feminist literary and cultural studies, share much in common with other humanistic fields of critical analysis, such as history of science, science studies, critical race studies, and queer theory. For a thoughtful review of feminist methodologies as they have evolved in recent decades, including a focus on scholarly reflexivity, see Fonow and Cook (2005).

3. This process is not just unidirectional, but looping. For example, identifications can then influence future decisions, and subsequent experiences may refine decision patterns and identifications. In addition, this process is not confined to early developmental stages, but is ongoing throughout the lifespan. See Conner and Armitage (1998, 1444–1446) for a more extensive discussion of self-identity.

This genre, “neuro-self-help,” is populated by popular authors such as Daniel G. Amen, Eric R. Braverman, and the like.

In this system, not only do the notions of free will and compulsion depend on one another for oppositional definition, but they work in a dialectical relationship in which the purer the will that is postulated, the more powerful and pervasive the compulsion that corrodes it, and so forth. Sedgwick notes, “The late writing of Nietzsche is an excellent example of this contradiction: all that there is to learn from, and to recognize in, Nietzsche's rendering of human psychology qua an exquisite phenomenology of addiction—all tied to the bizarrely moralized imperative for the invention of a Will whose value and potency seem to become more absolute as every grounding possibility for its coming into existence breathtakingly recedes and recedes” (Sedgwick 1991, 586).

As Rose observes, “in the history of power relations in liberal and democratic regimes, the government of others has always been linked to a certain way in which ‘free’ individuals are enjoined to govern themselves as subjects simultaneously of liberty and of responsibility—prudence, sobriety, steadfastness, adjustment, self-fulfillment, and the like” (Rose 1996, 12).

In no way do I mean to occlude or diminish here the gravity of other uses of rhetorical recourse to “hardwiring” or other sorts of biological determinism, which can in other contexts be invoked to support all sorts of prejudices, especially racism, homophobia, and sexism. This important observation has been widely noted; here I am confining myself to exploring, alternatively, the ways in which determinism could be invoked upon oneself for liberating purposes.