Gender,theFamilyandHistory

Gender,theFamilyandHistory

byJudithButler

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Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:1/1987,pages:125130,onwww.ceeol.com.

REVIEW

GENDER, THE FAMILY AND HISTORY

Judith Butler Linda Nicholsons Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family is a broad-ranging and provocative book which raises extremely significant questions regarding the historicity of both Marxist and Liberal theoretical vocabularies. In particular, Nicholsons work challenges the formulation of the public/private distinction in both Marxist and Liberal discourses from an explicitly feminist point of view, and also suggests a way in which feminist theory itself might make itself more plausible through an appropriation of a more explicitly historical methodology. Although the emergence of modern feminism within the last two centuries of United States history remains her major historical focus, Nicholsons book is not a conventional history of feminist theory. In some ways, her book traces or narrates key shifts in theoretical discourse that emerge within a critical re-evaluation of the public/private distinction; it is a narrative history of discourse, as it were, which locates the feminist theoretical contribution as both a consequence and significant revision of Lockean and Marxian efforts to distinguish and interrelate the family, the economy, and to delimit the proper domain of the political. Her argument or narrative concludes with a critical re-evaluation of the reifying tendencies of pre-feminist social theory and with a prescription to feminist theory to avoid the ahistoricity of some of its paternal forebearers. She also proposes that feminist theorists make constructive political use of those dimensions of Hegelian and Marxist social theory which interpret the discourse of social explanation as a manifestation and reflection of the very historical conditions which form its theoretical focus. In short, Nicholson offers a feminist hermeneutics, one whose critical potential consists in the exposure of ideologically reified patriarchal concepts and whose self-critical potential consists in the methodological mindfulness of the historicity of its own terms. Although the stated intention of the text is to examine the presuppositions and consequences of social theory in terms of its sometimes unacknowledged historicity, it remains ambiguous on some key historical problems. For instance, Nicholson refers her reader to the early modern period and sometimes to the age of industrialization or the age of the family, an historical period, she maintains, which gave rise to both classical Liberal social theory (mainly Locke) and Marxian social theory. Although the early modern category belongs to a periodization of European history, and Nicholson herself makes use of the category to explain the emergence of European social theory, it is also used to designate the general historical situation from which American
Review of Linda Nicholson, Gender and History: Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family. Columbia University Press, New York, 1986.

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feminist theory emerges. This last claim, however, is never historically substantiated, and the historical relevance of European social theory to the diversity of American feminist political theory and practice is never fully established. Indeed, one might well question whether the theoretical roots of 19th century liberal feminism ought to be located in Lockes Second Treatise on Civil Government, or whether the complex and diverse character of 19th century feminist theory might better be explained in terms of American populism, religious and economic movements, the enfranchisement of the Black population after the Civil War, changing work patterns accompanying the growth of cities, and other concrete social and political transformations. Nicholson in some ways sidesteps the problem of establishing an historical linkage between European social theory and American feminist theory by maintaining that her work is less interested in explanation than in constructing a plausible narrative. And the narrative she tells does not begin at a single historical point in time only to move unilinearly to an antecedent point. The advantage of a narrative with multiple points of beginning appears to be that it provides (a) for the implication of the narrator in the historical situation that is being narrated and (b) that it maintains the complexity of historical relations that are not reducible to a single cause. Nicholsons repeated points that various conceptual givens of liberal social analysis the ontology of selfinterested individuals, the separation of family from economy, the separation of economics from politics, the distinction between private and public life are reifications that conceal their historical formation and, hence, their historical contingency. Nicholsons efforts to employ a plurivocal narrative strategy, however, ought not to preclude a critical understanding of how these various narratives relate to one another and whether there is warrant for assuming that each thread of the narrative expresses some dimension of the self-same socio-historical reality. But for all the emphasis on historicity, the text somehow loses sight of history, and it is unclear what particular set of circumstances, events, practices and institutions the age of the family is meant to designate. In her chapter on Gender and Modernity: Reinterpreting the Family, the State, and the Economy, Nicholson makes clear that a radical historical reflection on the presuppositions of social theory, especially on its false and ideological distinctions, has been only partially exemplified by the 19th century Hegelian and Marxist tradition and by the twentieth century school of critical theory. Missing from these rich and often radical reflections on the presuppositions of Liberalism is an explicit account of gender, specifically of the relations between women and men (105). An historical reflection on the family, especially as it becomes associated with domestic work and naturalized relations of domination between the sexes, Nicholson thinks has potentially emancipatory consequences, and here again the exposure of reified social structures is promoted as the primary task of a feminist analysis. Her analysis of the emergence of the family as a privatized and naturalized social structure is especially rich, although it is not always clear whether Nicholson wants to equate gender with the family or with relations

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between women and men. The term gender in Nicholsons analysis denotes a set of relations, the social structure of the family, and the general relation between the private/domestic and the public. But this kind of broad historical and institutional approach to gender suffers from generalization, and the concrete and varied experiences of gender across class and color lines is almost entirely overlooked. Moreover, within modernity gender may well be properly understood as a function of the family, itself an historically emergent social structure, but to make this claim concrete, it would seem that some more subtle and specific theory of gender acquisition is required. Although Nicholson makes use of Gayle Rubins The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex, she does not acknowledge the feminist reappropriation of psychoanalysis that Rubin suggests. Rubins question, how it is that a female being is transformed into the social phenomenon of woman, requires an analysis that not only demarcates the relevant historical institutions, like the family, that condition gender, but also elucidates the mechanisms of their concrete application, i.e. the ways in which those institutions leave their marks on bodies, the way they constitute gendered identities. Nicholsons review of Nancy Chodorows theory of motherhood establishes her own position on the relation between the psychological and the social. She very clearly refutes Chodorows efforts to explain social structures exclusively in terms of their psychological origins. Nicholson argues that one cannot seek recourse to a psychological origin which is not already socially constituted, especially if the psychoanalytic theory that Chodorow accepts in revised form takes the family for granted as a primary and ahistorical social given. In Nicholsons words: . . . our concept of mothering refers not only to the fact of biological mothers being responsible for the care of their young but also to the case where this relationship is interpreted as significant, and where the quality of the relationship is seen as constitutive of the character of the young. The problem that Nicholson identifies in psychological theories such as Chodorows is that they very often promote reified conceptions of what constitutes childhood, the mother-child relation and, indeed, the family. But if this is the main reason to be skeptical of psychological theories, and psychoanalytic ones in particular, then perhaps Nicholson would not object to a psychoanalytic effort to explain the process of gender acquisition which explicitly affirms the historicity of family relations . If that is so, I would suggest that the incorporation of such a theory into her present work would contribute a needed concreteness and specificity to her analysis of the relation between gender and modernity. Nicholsons text is at its best in its critical or negative function; it reminds us of the limits of social theory when its constitutive categories are treated as part of a natural ontology, immutable and de-historicized. In this anti-reifying mode, the text exposes some of the historical ground of modern feminism, although that concept remains forbiddingly large. And it reveals this ground through a subtle reading of Locke and Marx which shows the contrivance of a public/private distinction, the related and false distinction between the economy and reproductive work, and the peculiarly modern conception of the

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nuclear family as the primary social unit. Although Nicholson uses a Marxist view of reification to dispute some Liberal assumptions regarding the charcterization of the economy and the family as pre-political, she also turns this critical method against Marxism itself which, she maintains, inadequately described the relation of the family, sexuality and gender to political life. She even warns feminists against engaging in reifications of patriarchy as the first and fundamental cause of womens oppression, but the question necessarily arises whether Nicholson has a notion of a true or undistorted description of historical experience. She makes clear that objective (10) explanation is not of interest to her, and that a plurivocal narrative (my description of her method) better expresses the hermeneutical problem of narrating the constitutive history of ones own political point of view; she seerns nevertheless to subscribe to a notion of a truer social ontology than the ones she discerns in classical Liberal and Marxist texts. Nicholsons method of critique is to reveal a set of accepted theoretical distinctions as historically constructed and, to that extent, contingent; but she also assumes a set of interrelations that constitute a social ontology which preexist these constructions: . . . the separation of the family and the economy, like the separation of the family and the state, needs to be comprehended as occurring within history. Since what we now perceive as separate spheres have common origins and interrelated histories, we should expect to find important connections between them (122). Generally considered, there are true and false descriptions of social reality, true being those which acknowledge the interconnectedness of these spheres, and false being those which reify the distinctions, treating spheres of life only analytically separable as if they were ontologically distinct. Nicholson makes a number of very fine historical and anthropological points to support her claim that these various distinctions are not only contrived, but peculiarly modern, and that they serve the purpose of concealing the interrelatedness of these social institutions through a fragmenting and false conception of social reality. She cites Karl Polanyi, who argues that the market only becomes conceived as an autonomous system under the conditions of capitalism, and also cites a number of scholars on the ancient Greek oikos who argue forcefully that the distinctions between the family, the household, and the economy were not comprehensible within that historical context. In effect, it appears that the modern period, which is taken to be synonymous with the rise of capitalism and industrialization, is in some sense responsible for creating the theoretical distinctions that are pervasively taken for ontological truths, but the sense in which they are responsible is not wholly clarified. What is the theory of periodization to which Nicholson subscribes and what precisely is her claim about the modernity of theoretical distinctions and separations which come to structure the way in which social and historical reality appears? It seems right to assert that these various distinctions are peculiarly modern constructs, and there is no doubt that Nicholsons radical historical reflection on the presuppositions of Liberal social theory is necessary and sound. And yet, the relation between these theoretical distinctions and the historical ground that they both reflect and

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constitute is not fully explained in Nicholsons text. At some points it appears that distinctions and constructs are causally occasioned by some prior historical ground, and that they serve as epiphenomenal theoretical reflections of actual, historical divisions of labour and a general compartmentalization of the social world. At other points, however, these distinctions appear to generate social phenomena such that the theoretical distinctions of Liberal social theory are constitutive principles of social life itself. In the former case, classical Liberalism expresses a prior and distinct process of capitalism which, through the division of labour and the reification of social spheres, is primarily responsible for the fragmentation of social and political life. This materialism appears to be in tension, however, with the hermeneutical idealism of the latter position. In the latter case, classical Liberalism is a theory rife with false descriptions of social reality which is itself responsible for the false structuring of the social world. Here the theory of Liberalism is less epiphenomenal that causative. This dual function of theory is not necessarily problematic, but the precise relation between the causative and expressive functions of theory need to be more clearly spelled out, especially if we are to understand how Nicholson hopes to reconcile the Marxian method of ideology-critique with a hermeneutical approach to social theory. The problem arises when we try to explain the relation of theory to that historical ground which is outside; while the Marxist theory of reification suggests that there is a truer social world which is systematically concealed by Liberal political vocabulary, the hermeneutic position suggests that the theoretical description of social reality is itself constitutive of that reality, and that recourse to a pre-discursive outside or before is never unmediated by theory itself. Can there be a hermeneutical Marxism? This is the question that Nicholsons text implicitly raises, although the full answer is not given within the confines of this work. The tension between hermeneutics and Marxism becomes especially acute when we ask, what makes a Liberal description of social reality false? If the description is false because it falsely ontologizes certain distinctions and separations, then does it follow that a true description would be one that reveals the interrelatedness of those social spheres that Liberalism maintains are separate? And is it the case that historically these spheres were and are interrelated, or is this perhaps a presumption of the ontological interrelatedness of social spheres that is transhistorical in some sense? If Nicholson wants to argue that capitalism is itself a systematic totality which tacitly organizes and unifies the social spheres that Liberalism considers ontologically discrete, then she might well make this point, but she doesnt. And yet there appears an operative presupposition in her own work which suggests that the truth is the whole, an Hegelian conceit of a social totality that raises yet another set of problems. Indeed, it is unclear whether the insistence that truth is a function of interrelatedness does not rest upon a romantic theory of social totality that not only does not exist, but perhaps never did. And though Nicholson explicitly renounces totalizing theory, she may not have fully resisted that particularly Hegelian-Marxist mode of reification that instates a totalizing interrelatedness at a theoretical level where none may be said truly to exist. I certainly do not meant to call into question the very rich and convincing

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historical and anthropological arguments that Nicholson provides in support of her claims that the individual, the family, the economy, and the distinction between public and private are both historically constructed and historically specific and that they emerge in the historical transition which signals the breakdown of kinship relations and the rise of capitalism. My question emerges only after those arguments are accepted: given that these distinctions are relative to the modern period, and given also that we can agree on some common meaning for this rather large construct of historical periodization, what precisely is the obfuscating reifying moment of these distinctions? If it is the case, as Nicholson herself seems to suggest, that these distinctions in some sense constitute the social reality they intend to describe, then does it not appear to follow that fragmentation has perhaps become the truth of social reality? And if our own historical position as reflecting agents is conditioned by this fragmented reality, then what recourse do we have to a social reality which might be said to precede or potentially follow this state of contemporary divisions? What keeps the historical reflection on reifications from reinstating reification at a more subtle level of theorizing, i.e. within the self-avowed act of historical reflection itself? The question is in some ways the conventional problem of hermeneutics: how does the agent of historical reflection avoid implication in the very historical structures that she intends to reveal? Does the act of exposing these structures in their historicity remain mired in the selfsame structures and, if so, in what does its emancipatory potential consist? Nicholson affirms that without any reflection on our practice and on the history which preceded it, we are led unthinkingly to replicate it (207). And yet what is to guarantee that thinking historically is the same as thinking critically? Only in the social context in which all descriptive falsity is attributable to the reification of historical distinctions as immutable ontological distinctions, does historical reflection per se appear equivalent to critical thinking. That historical reflection is qualified as a mode of conceptualizing which replaces contrived distinctions with systematic interrelations suggests that an ahistorical construct operates as the implicit normative guideline for historical thinking itself. If the tacit ideal of this theoretical program is a social ontology of interrelatedness, then this theory might well be subject to the very charge of reification that Nicholson directs against her theoretical opponents.