Barbara L. Marshall - Engendering Modernity: Feminism, Social Theory and Social Change

ENGENDERING MODERNITY

Feminism, Social Theory and Social Change

Barbara L. Marshall

Polity Press

Copyright Barbara L. Marshall 1994

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

First published in 1994 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers

Reprinted 2005, 2007

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Contents

For my mother, Maeve Marshall

Acknowledgements

This book has taken shape over a long period of time, during which many teachers, colleagues and students assisted me in developing my analysis. In particular I wish to thank Graham Lowe, Harvey Krahn, Derek Sayer, Susan Jackel, Marg Hobbs, Joan Sangster, Sedef Arat-Ko, Susan Lang, Robyn Diner, David Brown and Marie Carlson for stimulating many of the ideas developed here. My greatest intellectual debt is to Ray Morrow, who as both teacher and friend has always pushed me to think things through and, while we have not always agreed on the answers, has suggested many of the questions that I have tackled.

I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support in the form of a doctoral fellowship, as well as to Trent University for a Research Fellowship and a grant from the Sub-committee on Research in the Arts.

Friends and family deserve much of the credit for seeing this book through to fruition. Special thanks to Frances Adams, for always being there, and to Judy Pinto, for keeping my life organized. Love and thanks go especially to my husband, Yiannis Kiparissis, who has borne more than his fair share of both domestic labour and the frustrations of writers block. Our daughter Lucy, born during the preparation of the manuscript, has made it all worthwhile.

Finally, the people at Polity Press have been a delight to work with, from start to finish.

Permission to use previously published material was generously granted as follows:

Some of the material in was published in my Critical Theory and Feminist Theory, Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 25 (2), 1988, and is used here by permission of that journal.

An earlier version of was previously published as Reproducing the Gendered Subject, in Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 11 (1991), and is used here by permission of JAI Press.

Introduction

This is a book about theory, written at a time when the very practice of theory has become increasingly suspect. I write as a feminist, and as a sociologist, who has been caught up in the debates about the status and purpose of theory, and who has had to confront some of the resulting questions about theory in both my teaching and my research. The practice of theory has been deeply affected by the debates about modernity versus postmodernity, and the attendant questions of the possibility of social theory which can foster human autonomy and emancipation. The assertions by certain theorists, such as Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard and Rorty, that such theoretical aspirations are tied irredeemably to the now pass modern pistme, suggest that theory as an emancipatory project is indeed at an end. My basic premise is that these assertions are far from neutral. I see them as emanating from the same position of false universalism as that of the theoretical tradition they criticize. In other words, they express, as Christine Di Stephano puts it, the claims and needs of a constituency (white, privileged men of the industrialized West) that has already had an Enlightenment for itself and that is now ready and willing to subject that legacy to critical scrutiny (1990: 75). Just as feminist historians and social theorists begin to reconstruct the ambivalent relationship of women to modernity, and to breathe new life into its emancipatory project, this very project is deemed bankrupt. I want to argue that, flawed as it is, the modern project still contains considerable potential to ground an emancipatory practice, and that some recent feminist theory is paradigmatic of how such a project might be reconstructed or engendered.

I first used the term engender, in the manner in which I use it here, several years ago as I was working on a conference paper on women and the welfare state. I was struggling for a term which recognized the crucial role gender played in the initial construction of the welfare state, and which captured the active way in which gender is continually embedded in the operation of, and our experience of, welfare states today. I chose the term engendering both for its dictionary meaning of engender to enable or bring about and for etymological reasons. The prefix en- is commonly used to make a transitive verb out of a noun, as in endear or encircle. Thus it is in this dual sense that I want to speak of engendering modernity. I want to draw attention to the restructuring of gender relations as a fundamental characteristic of modernity, and to nurture a feminist vision of the emancipatory potential of social theory as a modern project.

To do this requires some major rethinking of the basic analytical categories of social theory, categories such as the individual, society, class, citizenship. The experience of women has always been peripheral to the construction of these categories, and as this experience is reclaimed and inserted into the heart of social theory, the inadequacy of these categories, as traditionally conceived, becomes painfully apparent. Singled out for particular critique is the relationship between the individual and society as this has been understood in both classical and contemporary theories of modernity. The sociological individual, while ostensibly the universal subject of modernity, obscures a deeply gendered analysis of social life. Such a conception of the individual is premised upon a set of dualistic categories, such as public versus private, economy versus family, universal versus particular, which are constructed on the experience of Western, white, heterosexual males, and which have been overly abstracted and reified in social theory. As we begin to deconstruct these dualisms to better account for wider experiences of social life, the potential for theorizing the individualsociety relationship in new ways arises. New questions around the subject and political agency, and the emergence of distinctively modern contexts for identity formation rise to the top of the theoretical agenda. The central aim of this book, then, is to undertake the dual tasks of providing a revised account of modernity one which includes the experience of women and of considering what sort of a theoretical framework might be built on this revised account.