APA Newsletters

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

Symposium: Intra-Feminist Criticism and the "Rules of Engagement"

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Openness, Vulnerability, and Feminist Engagement

Naomi Scheman
University of Minnesota

"To follow reason in the Socratic way requires a form of vulnerability and even passivity. It means dropping the pose that one is always adequate to any occasion, always on top, always hard. It means letting reputation and mastery wait on the outcome of impersonal logic and factual discovery; searching with humility for the truth that will refute what one holds most dear."1 Martha Nussbaum thus articulates (with all the sexual allusions obviously intended) the incompatibility between serious and searching intellectual honesty and a common "norm of manliness." While agreeing with her exposure of cocksure sophistry masquerading as reason, I want to suggest that she doesn't take the critique far enough. Logic and facts are, after all, the paradigms of the "hard": what justifies exempting them from the ideal of openness and vulnerability? How might we think of reason if we thought of it as soft and yielding all the way down?

The objections are immediate and legion, especially if the context of discussion is feminist. Openness and vulnerability are hardly new virtues to urge on women: they have typically been demanded by the norms of femininity that are the counterparts to the norms of manliness Nussbaum discusses, and as such they have set us up for exploitation and abuse. We hardly need to be urged to disarm ourselves further, to drop the hard-earned and far from fully won right to reject ideas that fail to make logical sense or to square with what we know to be the facts. Furthermore, how might anyone reason responsibly without some touchstone for soundness and validity? How else, if not by appeal to logic and the facts, can we distinguish between good and bad arguments, between what ought and ought not to persuade?

That these questions are epistemological is an obvious point that tends to get lost in the discussions about (to use a piece of shorthand) postmodern critiques of modern conceptions of reason. Postmodern critics argue against epistemological objectivity via the rejection of a metaphysics of Truth and Reality, while defenders of modernity like Nussbaum typically reply by defending a realist metaphysics as though doing so were epistemologically efficacious. The epistemological argument, however, ought to concern not the existence of mind-independent facts, objective truths, or metaphysically necessary laws of logic, but rather the epistemological role such things might play-and how they might play it. Are they, to use Wittgenstein's image (from another context) "part of the [epistemic] mechanism," or are they like "a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it"?2 Appeals to epistemological notions like self-evidence, obviousness, and conceivability fail to account for such a role in providing impersonal bedrock, since such appeals are either unnecessary (if those to whose arguments we leave ourselves open share our conceptions of what is self-evident, obvious, and so on) or question begging (if both they and we claim to have bedrock under our own, differently placed feet).

Epistemologically, whatever one's metaphysical commitments, we are-to use Neurath's image via Quine-forever at sea on a raft that floats not because of some privileged planks but because of the connections among the planks. Some of us may be certain that particular planks are irreplaceable, but if some of our raftmates see as rotten one of the planks we think of as most essential to our seaworthiness, what then can we appeal to? It's fine to insist that the truth of the matter is not reducible to the terms of the power struggle between us, but what do we do? The claim that logic and standards of argumentation transcend our practices gets its apparent support precisely from its being unchallenged in practice, or-what comes to the same thing-being challenged in ways and by groups that in practice "we" manage not to have to take seriously. How do we balance our openness to reasonable argument with our own conceptions of what, specifically, reasonableness is, when it's those conceptions that our raftmates are calling into question? And how, specifically, do we as feminists engage with other feminists when notions of rationality and reasonableness are at stake between us?

Here are two stories, real ones:

1. Some years ago a woman student on my campus went to the university police to report that she was being stalked. After speaking with her, the police concluded that the alleged stalking was not, in fact, happening, and they declined to pursue the matter further. The student then went to the sexual violence center and reported both the stalking and the dismissal of her complaint by the police. The student and staff advocates at the center believed her story and organized protests over the refusal of the police to take it, and her, seriously. I was asked, as a women's studies faculty member, to speak at a rally in her support. I was suspicious of the woman's story, for rather amorphous reasons that I do not now recall, but I agreed to speak at the rally, as an ally of the sexual violence program and as someone who taught about the importance of believing women who spoke out about violence and abuse.

I spoke, in fact, about my own incredulity, putting it down (in both senses) as due to my having been a "good girl," one whose views of the world accorded with, and hence got sympathetic uptake from, the adults nearest to me. (That they happened to be my socialist parents has allowed me to pass in the wider world as much more of a rebel than in my soul I am.) I spoke about my need, as a feminist, to learn not only to trust my own voice, but, paradoxically, to learn when not to trust it, when not to listen to my gut, when to cultivate the suspicion that I had an overly "civilized" gut, one trained to digest patriarchal pablum and to choke on the hard truths uttered by those who lacked my privileges.

As you may have guessed, the story the woman told turned out not to be true; she was not being stalked. The police were, "factually," right not to believe her. The hard part of my story is to figure out what its moral is: should I have trusted my gut, listened to the inner voice that told me not to believe her? I don't think so. For all I know, the police fully realized that even if she was not being stalked, something was seriously wrong; they may well have treated her kindly, and urged her to get counseling. But she could have heard such urging only as patronizing, as dismissive of the complaint that she needed to have taken seriously in the terms in which she was able to frame it. It was the "factually" misplaced trust of the sexual violence center advocates that created a context within which her sense of the threat of male predation could be acknowledged as valid without needing to be tied to a specific man, committing specific acts of stalking. I have learned from theorists such as Diana Meyers, Sue Campbell, and Danielle Bouchard to think about the ways in which perceptions of abuse can be too inchoate, given the available resources of intelligibility, to be expressible except through assimilation, consciously or unconsciously, within culturally comprehensible narratives-leading to stories that turn out not to be true, but which can reveal the truths they encode to those who extend to the tellers what in literal terms might well be "mistaken" trust.

The moral I took from the story is this: My own ability to weigh evidence, to judge the likelihood that someone is telling me the literal, factual truth, is in certain, systematic ways faulty. But, rather than succumbing to uncritical credulity, what I need to do is to establish trusting relationships with others whose epistemic capabilities and liabilities are different from mine, and to build with them contexts within which we can cultivate trust and extend that trust to others, contexts within which difficult truths can emerge and become articulated. Such contexts help to extend the terms of intelligibility beyond what the privileged want to hear and want others to be straightforwardly able to say. Discursive resources-the ability to make sense, to report the facts in ways that make logical sense-are as unequally distributed as are other sorts of cultural capital, and determining what passes the tests of "impersonal logic and factual discovery" is, in practice, not a matter best left to each individual reasoner.3

2. I was invited to give a talk to a conference designed to bring together gender theorists with clinicians who treated children diagnosed with "gender dysphoria."4 I agreed without having any idea of what I could talk about. In particular, I was stuck at trying to understand what male-to-female transsexuals could mean by saying that they had an inner sense of being women. Like Hume in search of the Cartesian ego, I rolled my eyeballs inward in search of such an inner sense, reasoning that I too must have such a thing, some mark of gender identity unconnected to the two things mtf transsexuals clearly did not share with me: a body unambiguously female since birth and the unwavering ascription of femaleness by those around me. And like Hume I came up empty-handed. I wanted to understand the claim to be women, wanted not merely to pay lip service to transsexual identity claims but to find them intelligible-but I couldn't.

The breakthrough came from my realizing (with the help of Leslie Feinberg and local activist/theorists who participated in a serendipitously earlier conference at the University of Minnesota on relationships between feminist and transgender communities) that I had been doing what not only my feminist politics but my Wittgensteinian proclivities should have warned me against: I was taking myself as unproblematically normal, not in need of explanation, transparently intelligible-and finding the other, by contrast, mysteriously opaque, incomprehensible. It was by shifting my attention to an identity of my own-secular Jew-that makes no sense within the currently prevailing norms of intelligibility that I was able to return to my puzzlement about mtf transsexuals with the Wittgensteinian lesson that I was finding one phenomenon (their gender identity) intractably puzzling precisely because I was not finding another phenomenon (my own gender identity) puzzling enough. The lesson is, of course, the one that most white, heterosexual, middle-class, able-bodied and otherwise privileged feminist theorists had, and have, to learn and relearn-not to take ourselves as the unproblematic center of feminist discourse, the paradigm examples of womanhood, the ones with respect to whom others are variously different, and in relation to whom others need to be understood.

What I learned, and continued to learn through multiple drafts of the essay that the talk became-helped by Jacob Hale's astute criticism and supportive anger-was the need to balance my own critical faculties, my intellectual autonomy, against the recognition of the systematic epistemic liabilities of privilege-in this case the privilege of being normatively, intelligibly gendered.5 For someone who still identifies as a "seventies feminist," it hardly comes naturally either to see being gendered female as a form of privilege, or to question the centrality to political consciousness of finding one's own voice and trusting one's own feelings. But such re-examinations are crucial to grappling with how some of us are privileged at the expense of others whose allies we claim and conscientiously want to be. In particular, when we encounter disagreements over the facts, or over the logical implications of the facts, there is nothing we can appeal to that will do any real work over and above how we and our interlocutors understand those things. Not to leave ourselves open and vulnerable to alternative understandings when our own come in part from locations of discursive privilege is to close ourselves to the possibility of learning from others whose social locations on the borders of intelligibility equip them precisely for dismantling the structures we may deplore but cannot ourselves see beyond-since they are, for those of us who are intelligible in their terms, the "limits of our language."

The moral of both these stories is that I (we) need to recognize and acknowledge the unjust distribution of discursive resources, of the ability to make straightforward sense, to use a common language to describe, in literal, factual terms, one's life, perceptions, experiences. Not (of course) that the privileged are always models of lucidity, but by and large the language is available to them, to use or abuse, to reveal or conceal what they are thinking, feeling, and doing. When they need neologisms, their access to the media helps to ensure that their inventions will catch on; and when others fail to understand them, they can usually be confident that it is those others who will bear the brunt of the failure. When, on the other hand, the privileged fail to understand their subordinates, that failure is held not against those who do not understand but against those who are not understood: "I don't understand" has as one of its common meanings, depending on how the relations of privilege are lined up, "You're not making sense." "Sense" is, by definition, what the discursively privileged make and what others make in their terms; to be incomprehensible on those terms is to be incomprehensible tout court-at least within the precincts of academic and other mainstream discourse.

Consider, for example, the use of rhetorical questions, those that presuppose a taken-for-granted ground of agreement between the author and her, presumptively "reasonable," interlocutors. In discussing Judith Butler's use of drag as liberatory practice and trope, Nussbaum writes, "But what is going on here? The woman dressed mannishly is hardly a new figure. Indeed, even when she was relatively new, in the nineteenth century, she was in another way quite old, for she simply replicated in the lesbian world the existing stereotypes and hierarchies of male-female society. What, we may well ask, is parodic subversion in this area, and what a kind of middle-class acceptance? Isn't hierarchy in drag still hierarchy?"6 Well, yes and no: diverse transgender practices call into question the meanings of the signs of gender and the encodings of hierarchies, not, as Nussbaum would have it, solely (or, I suspect, primarily) out of excessively privileged apolitical narcissism, but out of attempts to deal with the pain of one's own unintelligibility.

Nussbaum's invocations of the "hungry, illiterate, disenfranchised, beaten, raped" women whom she takes to be the appropriate objects of feminist concern serve to create a monolithic body of reproachful others. Thus, she urges us to work on "building laws and institutions, without much concern for how a woman displays her own body and its gendered nature"; we should be "working for others who are suffering."7 One need not underplay the urgency of privileged feminists' attention to women who are economically and politically oppressed to be uneasy with the way in which such women are ritualistically invoked. And one thing those who are working on building alliances across lines of privilege are constantly relearning is just how hard it is to listen to, hear, and interpret the voices of women who are geographically, culturally, economically distant: not even physical hunger speaks unequivocally. And one thing that is needed is precisely an openness to the possibility that one simply does not understand, an openness that Nussbaum seems confident she does not need to cultivate in the case of those whose sexed and gendered bodies are unintelligible in the terms she presumes us all to share.

A similar problem arises for me in relation to a more personal and long-standing disagreement I have had with Nussbaum: In her New York Review of Books review of Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt's anthology A Mind of One's Own she gave an account of feminist arguments that the essays she discussed were concerned to counter, arguments that call into question prevalent Western philosophical accounts of reason and rationality.8 Ignoring the essays in the volume (including mine) that laid out a range of such arguments, Nussbaum gave an account of what she took these arguments to be, an account in which many of us presumably representative of the position she was discussing failed to recognize our own ideas. Her references were minimal and hardly representative, but one received particular attention: an essay of Ruth Ginzberg's in the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy in which she relates her experiences teaching logic to students many of whom (disproportionately, she notes, women of all races and men of color) reported that modus ponens did not reflect how they themselves reasoned.9 For Nussbaum Ginzberg's commitment to taking these students seriously meant that she doubted the validity-in general or "for them"-of modus ponens, that she took their claims not to "think that way" to be literally true and that her task as a teacher, and by extension as a feminist philosopher, was to recognize the legitimacy of other forms of argument that did not rely on modus ponens.

This reading of Ginzberg's paper is uncharitable, but it follows from the assumption, implicit in the quote from Nussbaum with which I began this essay, that what's involved (all that's involved) in opening oneself to another's argument is admitting the cogency of facts and of inferences from them that might run counter to one's own cherished beliefs. On such a conception, Ginzberg's willingness to take her students seriously when they claimed not to use modus ponens does indeed look irrational: how could she possibly have evaluated such a claim according to the rules of "impersonal logic"? The only possible conclusion, on Nussbaum's terms, was that Ginzberg had abdicated rationality altogether and descended onto the perilous terrain on which might made right and truth was nothing other than an expression of power-terrain on which, far from being empowered, her students would be eaten alive, with no recourse to logic or the facts. But Ginzberg nowhere says or implies that in taking her students seriously she was taking them to be speaking the literal truth about the relationship of modus ponens to their own thinking. Rather, she describes her efforts to understand what they were-imperfectly, inchoately-telling her about their estrangement from institutionalized norms and the oppressiveness of the ways in which those norms had been enforced in their lives.

To open oneself to such voices is to place oneself on a raft on the open sea, with no assurance that any of the planks is unsinkable and nothing to appeal to beyond the cooperative efforts of one's raftmates, many of whom one has no good reason to trust. Given the choice, one might reasonably opt for the security of "impersonal logic and factual discovery"-but the choice is an illusion, and it is one of the epistemic liabilities of privilege to fall for it. However committed one might be to practice-independent conceptions of logic and facticity, such metaphysical commitments simply do not translate into epistemology. Epistemology is unavoidably about what we do, how we do it, and how we judge the doing of it. We cannot, therefore, avoid attending to just who "we" are and how we decide when we, or our interlocutors, have yielded enough, when what "turns our spade" is a shared foundation and when it is part of a structure built on the backs of others. Epistemology cannot, that is, claim for itself some ground metaphysically guaranteed to be politically uncontestable.

There is a further problem that is evaded by the call to lay oneself open to all challenges, a problem summed up by the t-shirt slogan, "So many arguments, so little time." Since the subject of epistemology is actual human practice, we need to have something to say about how we choose-and, normatively, how we ought to choose-among the myriad challenges to our beliefs. Epistemic promiscuity-opening ourselves to every passing argument-guarantees that we give no argument the time it needs to actually have its way with us. All of us pick and choose, as we must, which challenges to our own beliefs we will seriously entertain. Feminist argumentative ethics come into play in calling on us to examine how we make these choices: in what venues, for example, do we try out our ideas; to whom do we make them intelligible; whose critiques do we especially try to understand and respond to; whom do we read; where do we look for ways of thinking that might shake us up? And, crucially, whose trust do we cultivate so as to make genuine critical exchange possible? As Nancy Potter has argued, the burden of establishing trustworthiness falls disproportionately on the more privileged:10 whom do we trust enough to listen to, and to whom do we want to be trustworthy enough to be listened to?

In her eloquent argument for the importance of gay studies to a liberal education, Nussbaum writes that "far from requiring the abandonment of logic and standards of rigor, as some conservatives charge, this [Socratic] critical posture of the mind rests precisely upon logic and a respect for standards of argumentation-a point that some anti-traditionalists on the left have not always sufficiently grasped."11 Though there are no doubt theorists who have affirmatively rejected (or self-defeatingly claimed to have affirmatively rejected) logic and standards of argumentation, those of us whose arguments Nussbaum rejects without really addressing are urging precisely the openness and receptivity she urges-with specific others, attentive to differences in power and privilege, in connection with the building of trust as the ground for respectful alliances. The extent to which reason is vulnerable to practice, held in place by what we do, how we do it, and whom we do it with, may seem (it is) terrifying. But serious critical engagement- intra-feminist or otherwise-starts with an acknowledgement of that vulnerability rather than an attempt to evade it through an ultimately impotent display of just the sort of cocksure bravado Nussbaum rightly deplores.

Notes

1. Martha C. Nussbaum, "The Softness of Reason: A Classical Case for Gay Studies," The New Republic 207 3/4 (July 13/20, 1992): 26-35.

2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953): § 271.

3. For a discussion of the circumstances under which one ought to distrust one's own doxastic impulses, see Karen Jones, "The Politics of Credibility," in A Mind of One's Own, 2nd ed., ed. Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, forthcoming).

4. The conference, "Sissies and Tomboys," February 1995, was at the CUNY Graduate Center, sponsored by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. My subsequent essay, "Queering the Center by Centering the Queer: Reflections on Transsexuals and Secular Jews," appeared first in Feminists Rethink the Self, ed. Diana Tietjens Meyers (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997, pp. 124-62) and was reprinted in the volume from the conference, Sissies and Tomboys, ed. Matt Rottnick (New York University Press, 1999).

5. For a summary of what I learned, see Jacob Hale, "Suggested Rules for Non-Transsexuals Writing about Transsexuals, Transsexuality, Transsexualism, or Trans ," at http://sandystone.com/hale.rules.html.

6. Martha C. Nussbaum, "The Professor of Parody-The Hip Defeatism of Judith Butler," review of Judith Butler, Excitable Speech, The Psychic Life of Power, Bodies that Matter, and Gender Trouble, The New Republic 220/8 (February 22, 1999):37-45.

7. Ibid.

8. Martha C. Nussbaum, "Feminism and Philosophy," review of Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt, eds., A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, The New York Review of Books 41/17 (October 20, 1994): 59-63.

9. Ruth Ginzberg, "Feminism, Rationality and Logic," American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 88:2 (March 1989): 34-39.

10. See Nancy Potter, "Giving Uptake," Social Theory and Practice 26: 3 (Fall 2000), and "The Severed Head and Existential Dread: The Classroom as Epistemic Community and Student Survivors of Incest," Hypatia 10/2 (1995): 69-92.

11. Nussbaum, "The Softness of Reason."

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APA Newsletters

Spring 2001 Volume 00, Number 2

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2