Feminist Theory in Pursuit of the Public: Women and the “Re-Privatization” of Labor

265 Pages·2010·4.924 MB·English

by  Robin Truth Goodman (auth.)

EDUCATION, POLITICS, AND PUBLIC LIFE
Series Editors:
Henry A. Giroux, McMaster University
Susan Searls Giroux, McMaster University
Within the last three decades, education as a political, moral, and ideolog-
ical practice has become central to rethinking not only the role of public
and higher education, but also the emergence of pedagogical sites outside
of the schools—which include but are not limited to the Internet, televi-
sion, film, magazines, and the media of print culture. Education as both a
form of schooling and public pedagogy reaches into every aspect of politi-
cal, economic, and social life. What is particularly important in this highly
interdisciplinary and politically nuanced view of education are a number of
issues that now connect learning to social change, the operations of dem-
ocratic public life, and the formation of critically engaged individual and
social agents. At the center of this series will be questions regarding what
young people, adults, academics, artists, and cultural workers need to know
to be able to live in an inclusive and just democracy and what it would mean
to develop institutional capacities to reintroduce politics and public commit-
ment into everyday life. Books in this series aim to play a vital role in rethink-
ing the entire project of the related themes of politics, democratic struggles,
and critical education within the global public sphere.
SERIES EDITORS:
HENRY A. GIROUX holds the Global TV Network Chair in English
and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. He is on the edi-
torial and advisory boards of numerous national and international schol-
arly journals. Professor Giroux was selected as a Kappa Delta Pi Laureate
in 1998 and was the recipient of a Getty Research Institute Visiting
Scholar Award in 1999. He was the recipient of the Hooker Distinguished
Professor Award for 2001. He received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters
from Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2005. His most recent
books include Take Back Higher Education (co-authored with Susan
Searls Giroux, 2006); America on the Edge (2006); Beyond the Spectacle of
Terrorism (2006), Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability
(2006), The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-
Academic Complex (2007), and Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics
Beyond the Age of Greed (2008).
SUSAN SEARLS GIROUX is Associate Professor of English and Cultural
Studies at McMaster University. Her most recent books include The Theory
Toolbox (co-authored with Jeff Nealon, 2004) and Take Back Higher
Education (co-authored with Henry A. Giroux, 2006). Professor Giroux
is also the Managing Editor of The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and
Cultural Studies.
Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times: Hope and Possibilities
Edited by Sheila L. Macrine
The Gift of Education: Public Education and Venture Philanthropy
Kenneth J. Saltman
Feminist Theory in Pursuit of the Public: Women and the “Re-Privatization”
of Labor
Robin Truth Goodman
Hollywood’s Exploited: Public Pedagogy, Corporate Movies, and Cultural
Crisis
Edited by Benjamin Frymer, Tony Kashani, Anthony J. Nocella, II, and
Richard Van Heertum; with a Foreword by Lawrence Grossberg
Education out of Bounds: Reimagining Cultural Studies for a Posthuman
Future
Tyson E. Lewis and Richard Kahn (forthcoming)
Academic Freedom in the Post-9/11 Era
Edited by Edward J. Carvalho and David B. Downing (forthcoming)
Educating Youth for a World beyond Violence
Svi Shapiro (forthcoming)
Rituals and Student Identity in Education: Ritual Critique for a New
Pedagogy
Richard A. Quantz (forthcoming)
America According to Colbert: Satire as Public Pedagogy post-9/11
Sophia A. McClennen (forthcoming)
Citizen Youth: Culture, Activism, and Agency in a Neoliberal Era
Jacqueline Joan Kennelly (forthcoming)
Feminist Theory in Pursuit of
the Public
Women and the “Re-Privatization”
of Labor
Robin Truth Goodman
FEMINIST THEORY IN PURSUIT OF THE PUBLIC
Copyright © Robin Truth Goodman, 2010.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-61640-0
All rights reserved.
First published in 2010 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-37996-5 ISBN 978-0-230-11295-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230112957
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goodman, Robin Truth, 1966–
Feminist theory in pursuit of the public : women and the
“ re-privatization” of labor / by Robin Truth Goodman.
p. cm.—(Education, politics, and public life)
ISBN 978–0–230–61640–0 (alk. paper)
1. Feminist theory. 2. Sex role. 3. Power (Social sciences) I. Title.
HQ1190.G66 2010
305.4201—dc22 2010003049
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: September 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 Feminism and the Retreat from the Public 15
2 The Habermasian Public Sphere: Women’s Work
within the Critique of Instrumental Reason 51
3 Beirut Fragments: The Crumbling Public Sphere,
Language Privatization, and the “Re-Privatization”
of Women’s Work 87
4 Adorno Faces Feminism: Interiority, or Modern Power
and the Liquidation of Private Life 125
5 Baghdad Burning: Cyborg Meets the Negative 159
Conclusion 193
Notes 199
Works Cited 241
Index 253
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Acknowledgments
T
his book owes its very life to Henry and Susan Giroux, who not
only continue to be intellectual inspirations, but who also have kept
faith in the project from its inception. I also am greatly indebted to
Kenneth J. Saltman, who went through every page of the manuscript
with a fine-toothed comb and subjected each idea to his muscu-
lar scrutiny. Ralph M. Berry provided untold support and rigorous
challenges. I wish also to thank Daniel Vitkus for his conversations
in a course on Middle Eastern literature that we co-taught in 2008
and that led to many of the ideas in two of these chapters. I wish to
thank Deborah Hall and the English department at Valdosta State
University for providing a forum where many of these ideas first were
aired, and John Marx for his valuable comments that helped with
chapter 3. Barry J. Faulk, Elizabeth Spiller, and Scott Kopel were
my muses who kept me supplied with food for thought. I also owe
deep gratitude to Florida State University, both the English depart-
ment and the Office of Research, for giving me the support and the
time necessary to complete this project. And lastly, to my family and
Mona, for everything.
Introduction
F
eminist Theory in Pursuit of the Public argues that feminism needs
to devise a theory of the public. Remarking on feminist theory’s tradi-
tional adherence to an industrial division of labor—where women are
closer to the private sphere, socialization and reproductive processes
than other categories of action and identity—I start out by question-
ing why and how contemporary representations of femininity in lit-
erature, theory, and popular rhetoric make it seem incompatible with
the public sphere. I argue that on an ideological plane, the incom-
patibility of femininity and a politics of the public sphere is creating
economic zones of regulative nonintervention, beyond state control,
by symbolically relegating them as provinces of women’s work. The
tools developed by feminist theory can unravel such representations
to show how women’s work can be realigned within a theory of the
public.
What’s known as the “Second Wave” of feminist theory developed
predominantly as a theory of private life, assessing private life as the
predominant form of women’s inequality and oppression. As Juliet
Mitchell, for one, put forward, “[F]eminist theory has isolated the
family as the place in which the inferiorized psychology of femininity
is produced and the social and economic exploitation of women (as
wives and mothers without legal or economic independence) is legiti-
mated” (xviii). This focus left a huge gap in feminist theory’s political
thinking on the public. It also tended to project an ideal of women’s
emancipation from the home as what would count as women’s equal-
ity or women’s freedom, not foreseeing that the private would take
another form. Instead of disappearing as some women rejected the
relegation of their work to the work of reproduction, or as technologi-
cal advances eased up the demands of domestic work tied to reproduc-
tion, sites of the private multiplied. Presently, the private has become
a substitution for the public and the state, no longer just a barrier
to the state and public life defined through domestic women’s work.
I am calling “re-privatization” the current corporate and financial
practice of avoiding the regulatory state by directly capitalizing on a
type of labor that resembles women’s work of the industrial era in its
2 Feminist Theory
legal status, tasks, and definitional traits. Such labor is often called
“enterprise” or “entrepreneur” and is configured in business lingo as
“empowering” because it allows for “freedom” outside of liberal codes,
controls, conventions, associations, taxes (often), and the protective
status of the traditional “worker: That is, “freedom” in market terms.
Currently, women’s work is being “re-privatized” within rising forms
of corporate exploitation, dispossession, and debt financing. That is,
neoliberalism’s transfer of public functions to private controls is partly
happening through such a “re-privatization” of women’s work. As
Randy Martin has warned, “Perhaps the most mundane effect of the
war on terror is to make clear how much we have to fear from the
advance of the private itself” (61).
Rather than a rejection of the private/public divide, what need to
be worked out are the different intertwining ways that the private
sphere is called into being; that is, whether as (1) the disappearing
private sphere of the industrial division of labor; (2) the persistent
private sphere of neoliberal modes of exploitation and ownership,
from outsourcing to microfinance, that bank on the appropriation
and commodification of traits and work regimes traditionally recog-
nized as “feminine”; (3) the understanding of the human individual
as having an inner core of the self that precedes entry into the social,
like a soul, a personality, desire, sex, suffering, sentiment, or freedom,
particularly manifest in formulations of human rights and civil rights;
and (4) the place of critique, consciousness, autonomy, and reflection.
This last category of the private is needed to challenge market philos-
ophies and the privatization of everything through preserving ideals
of social and political improvement and public participation that are
not necessarily just an extension of private power. All of these differ-
ent modes of the private are being mixed together and confused in
discourse, political rhetoric, and popular culture. The confusion leads
to the values inherent through one such system of the private ends up
emergent in another without any acknowledgment that the registers
have been switched.
In literary studies of the 1980s, new feminist writing by scholars
like Nancy Armstrong and Mary Poovey argued that in the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively, women’s work in the
private domestic sphere was “crucial to the consolidation of bour-
geois power” (10).1 In other words, women’s activities in the domestic
sphere aligned seamlessly into the dominant culture as the process of
socialization produced its subjective adherents. The domestic sphere,
Poovey continues, was depoliticized through its abstraction “both
rhetorically and, to a certain extent materially—from the so-called