Tuija Pulkkinen

Identity and Intervention: Disciplinarity as Transdisciplinarity in Gender Studies

Within the past 40 years, feminist studies/women’s studies/gender studies/studies in gender and sexuality has effectively grown into a globally practised academic discipline while simultaneously resisting the notion of disciplinarity and strongly advocating multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. In this article, I argue that gaining identity through refusing an identity can be viewed as being a constitutive paradox of gender studies. Through exploring gender studies as a transdisciplinary intellectual discipline, which came into existence in very particular multidisciplinary historical conditions of the feminist movement, I suggest that transdisciplinarity within gender studies takes on a meaning which results in a radical problematization of the academic goal of ‘knowledge production’. Instead of such ‘knowledge production’, transdisciplinarity in gender studies promotes intervention which reaches beyond the concepts of accountability, innovation and corporate management. I argue that Jacques Derrida’s promotion of the Collège International de Philosophie in 1982 in its particular relationship to the tradition of philosophy provides a parallel example of such an attitude. Adding to Joan Scott’s and Clare Hemmings’s insights on gender studies in terms of critique and transformation, I argue that transdisciplinarity as practice of ‘intervention’ is crucial for the construction of gender studies disciplinary identity, based upon apparent non-identity.

Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Philosophy

Many recent interpretations of Hannah Arendts work, such as those of Bonnie Honig (1) and Dana Villa, (2) have placed it in proximity with claims about postmodern thought. Using the term the postmodern as it is often distinguished from the modern, I refer here to a nonfoundational orientation in thinking. More precisely, unlike the modern, the postmodern does not aspire to uncover the origin, the basic level, the true essence, or the pure core of the phenomena that it studies. While modern thought is motivated by the aim of exposing some authentic level of reality, the postmodem, on the contrary, adopts the view that there is no foundation to be unveiled. Instead of concentrating on the possibility of unveiling, a postmodern thinker in this sense pays attention at the constructed nature of the layers in phenomena and the decisive role that action and power plays in the construction. (3) Dana Villa situates Arendts work in general as postmetaphysical, while Bonnie Honig stresses the role of performativity in it. Performativity is strongly related to the postmodern in the above sense, particularly since the Derrida-Searle debate of 1977 about the relevance of John Austins speech-act theory, in which Searle accentuated the intention of the speaker and differentiated between real speech and mere imitation, whereas Derrida argued that in order to function the performative requires a cultural practice that consists of repetition and presupposes imitativeness. (4) The concept of performativity has in the consequent postmodern discussion gained meaning that surpasses the original Austinian speech-act theory and has begun to function as a sign for the crucial role that imitation and repetition plays within all productions of meaning and within the construction of identity in general. The best known example is Judith Butlers theorizing of identity of gender as performative: We have gender and understand what gender is because gender is imitable and produced through countless repetitions. (5) In both Villas and Honigs accounts, Arendt is presented as postmodern in this sense. She is seen as a nonfoundationalist thinker who effectively temporalizes and perspectivizes everything allegedly basic and self-identical. She is also seen as a thinker who conceives of all identities as doing rather than as being. This post modernizing interpretation is easily linked with the view of social construction of gender as well as sexual and ethnic identities. Indeed, many interpreters have found at least the potential for an account of the social construction of gender and ethnicity in Arendts work. (6) While not seeking to ignore the postmodern flavor of some of Arendts work, I see the need at this juncture to emphasize that Arendts work also contains plenty of clearly modern, and one could even say high modernist, aspects and themes. In this context, it is useful to remember that twentieth-century analytical philosophy was not the only tendency striving to purify, to achieve some basic ground from which to create something new from a pure beginning. Phenomenological-existential philosophy, in which Arendt was immersed, had similar aspirations. The postmodern attempt to think without searching for origin, without looking for authenticity, foundation, or beginning, understanding each identity not as something original, not as being but as doing, has set itself consciously against both of these modern traditions of philosophy. I will especially study the tension between the modern and the postmodern themes in Arendts work in relation to questions of identity. By identity I refer not only to so-called social identity, but even more so with the classical concept of identity as one and the same.,, (7) The question of the identity of gender or ethnic identity in Arendts work may be specified in this context in the following question: Does Arendt assume that there are, in some natural or original way, two genders that in themselves are self-identical? …

Feelings of Injustice: The Institutionalization of Gender Studies and the Pluralization of Feminism

“This is what a wrong [tort] would be: a damage [dommage] accompanied by the loss of the means to prove the damage. “ (Lyotard: The Differend, 5) “I would like to call a differend [différend] the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim.“ (Lyotard: The Differend, 9) “The limits of the discursive analysis of gender presuppose and preempt the possibilities of imaginable and realizable gender configurations within culture. This is not to say that any and all gendered possibilities are open, but that the boundaries of analysis suggest the limits of a discursively conditioned experience. These limits are always set within the terms of a hegemonic cultural discourse predicated on binary structures that appear as the language of universal rationality. Constraint is thus built into what that language constitutes as the imaginable domain of gender.” (Butler, Gender Trouble, 9)

Introduction: Reading Hegel

Werner Hamacher raises the question of whether it is possible to read Hegel without catching and keeping and thus murdering and burying him. It is a question that resonates through the history of the reception and interpretation of Hegel’s thought from his most immediate successors to the present.2 As many commentators have pointed out, Hegel’s work is open to being read in so many different ways that any given interpretation, however historically sensitive or philosophically sophisticated, can be accused of silencing (murdering, burying) other Hegels.3 The question of reading Hegel is at the heart of this book in a double sense. On the one hand, the book seeks to demonstrate how approaches to reading Hegel inspired by feminist and queer thought (of different kinds) generate vivifying rather than killing interpretations of Hegel’s work. On the other hand, the book is concerned with the value of reading Hegel from perspectives that take the philosophical significance of gender and sexuality seriously.4 The book will show that in the years since the publication of the last Anglophone edited collection of essays on Hegel and feminist thought, Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel, 5 the feminist interrogation of Hegel has moved beyond its initial predominant focus on the pros and cons of Hegel’s explicit treatment of women, sex, and gender in his texts. Contemporary feminist scholars are building on their philosophical insights into the meanings of sex, gender, and sexuality to illuminate Hegel’s philosophical method and central concepts, and drawing creatively on Hegel’s thought for feminist theory.

Debating Hegel’s Legacy for Contemporary Feminist Politics

This book has focused primarily on the philosophical implications, for both feminism and Hegelianism, of engagements between Hegel and feminist thought. Traditionally, however, a key concern of feminist engagements with Hegel has had to do with the political implications of using his work for feminist purposes. In this final chapter, we revisit this traditional concern, in a debate over Hegel and feminist politics. We decided to do this by inviting four feminist philosophers with a long-term, active, and diverse engagement in feminist politics to exchange views on the question of the relevance of Hegel’s work for contemporary feminist politics. In doing this we hope to highlight the very different ways in which philosophical and political concerns intersect within feminist thought on Hegel.