Hypatia

Hypatia 14.1 (1999) 120-125

Two Feminist Views on the Self, Identity and Collective Action

Margaret A. McLaren

The debate about the importance of identity, both individual and collective, is central to contemporary feminist theory. Two notable contributions to this debate are Allison Weir's Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity and MorwennaGriffiths's Feminisms and the Self: The Web of Identity. Both Weir and Griffiths are concerned with the relationship between individual and collective identities and with the implications of this relationship for a feminist politics. And each moves the debate about feminist theory and identity forward, albeit in different ways.

Weir's Sacrificial Logics moves deftly through the terrain of French feminism, postmodern feminism, psychoanalytic feminism, and object-relations theory. She argues that the theme of identity as negative—as repression, exclusion or domination—runs rampant in recent philosophy from Simone de Beauvoir to Jacques Derrida. She persuasively argues that this logic of identity as negative results in a paradox for many feminists when they try to subvert it. She calls this negative logic of identity sacrificial because it is founded on the sacrifice of and exclusion of difference. Hoping to correct the overemphasis on separation that is seen as the normative ideal for (male) identity, feminists posit a relational identity. However, by doing so, they implicitly accept the logic that separation equals domination. Weir concludes that a feminist model of self-identity must include difference, connection, and heterogeneity, and she urges feminists not to give up abstraction and thus the capacity for critique so easily.

Griffiths situates her Feminisms and the Self within the analytic philosophical tradition, although she draws upon continental philosophy as well, pointing out some overlap between these two approaches. She weaves a theory of [End Page 120] identity as a web, arguing that traditional philosophy often has a narrow masculinist bias that privileges certain conceptualizations of autonomy, selfhood, the emotions, rationality, and politics.

Feminisms and the Self is very accessible and should be of interest to a wide range of readers. Griffiths states that her imagined audience includes feminists, philosophers, social scientists, any combination of these, and academics as well as non-academics. Her concern for audience indicates the attention to process that characterizes so much of the best feminist work. This feminist bent continues throughout the book from her serious consideration of experience as a form of knowledge to her conclusion about the importance of collective action in social transformation. She uses accounts of experience—both her own and others—to demonstrate the ways that selves are constructed within, yet not determined by, social context and their membership in social groups such as race, class, gender, and sexuality. Appealing to lived experience, she argues, can correct the overemphasis on theory and abstraction that is found in mainstream Western philosophy.

The first part of Feminisms and the Self argues for an epistemological framework that begins from experience. Amidst the diversity of feminist epistemologies, Griffiths discerns three commonalities. First, feminist epistemologies are concerned with the subjective consciousness of the self. Second, feminist epistemologies are a response to the devaluation and oppression of women and girls, and thus, they have a moral and political stance. And finally, feminist epistemologies implicitly acknowledge the importance of theory. She adds to these three commonalties the "continuing spiralling" of feminist knowledge, that is, the recognition that "there is no possibility of the acquisition or creation of stable unchanging knowledge" (Griffiths 1996, 60). From these epistemological commonalities, Griffiths derives four methodological principles that make experience central to the acquisition of knowledge:

(M1) knowledge can only be gained using a method which allows for reflection on experience, (M2) using theory, (M3) in a number of different group/political perspectives, which will bring that experience into question; all of which (M4) indicates a never-ending process of returning to old knowledge using the new perceptions and then using the result to re-work the new perceptions. (1996, 68)

To demonstrate these methodological principles she draws upon what she calls critical autobiography, that is, autobiography that describes...