Impure Feminism

Impure Feminism December 15, 2014

Irene Gedalof argues in Against Purity that feminists have been too much in the grip of a binary logic that actually undermines feminism. What she has in mind is the notion that women can be defined in terms of a pure category of “Woman” or “Feminine.” On the contrary, women’s identities are complex and “impure,” irreducible to the single feature of sex or gender.

As Gedalof says, “Feminism needs to move beyond analytical approaches to social identity that view ‘women’ only as a category of gender or sexual difference. If ‘women’ is a category, it is a complex one, that refers to questions of specific community identities like race, nation, ethnicity and class, as well as to gender or sexual difference. This is both because women’s identities are constituted as  much by race, nation and other categories of identity as they are by sex or gender, and because, both symbolically and strategically, the ‘active management’ of Woman/women seems, in turn, to play a key role in determining the ‘truths’ around which these identities are constructed. Here, the impurity we need to draw on is the way ‘Woman’ and ‘women’ seem to bleed across the boundaries of these apparently coherent categories of gender, race and nation. The purity we need to contest is the attempt to fix ‘Woman’ and ‘women’ as the unchanging ground upon which these apparently discrete categories stand. Additionally we need to underpin this kind of analysis of social identities with alternative theoretical models of the self that take these complex, impure spaces as a valid and valorised position from which to derive a sense of self, and from which to act and to speak” (195).

On the one hand, there’s something a little pathetic about the constant fear of conceptual domination. How does one get anything done when they are constantly combatting the interpellating oppressions of other people. It seems that one needs some sort of transcendent identity-determination just to keep calm.

On the other hand, surprising as it may seem, “impurity” may actually be a useful category for moving feminism an inch or two closer to reality.


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