Verbatim Mac

Discourse Good

Our interpretation of theory is most productive and adaptable to individual experience—totality is exclusionary

Dolan 89 (Jill, Dean of Princeton University and PhD in performance studies with research interests in women’s and feminist studies, LGBTQ studies and American studies, “In Defense of the Discourse: Materialist Feminism, Postmodernism, Poststructuralism…And Theory” TDR, Vol. 33, No. 3, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1145987.pdf)//meb

A Personal Defense of Theory in Discourse Because poststructuralist theory questions the authenticity of experience as truth, many feminist theorists have been attacked as jargon-wielding elitists who have no political project and who trivialize years of political action organized around radical feminist epistemology. This is not the intent, as I know it, of theory. Poststructuralism simply questions the liberal humanist notion that men or women are free individuals capable of mastering the universe, and points out the way in which ideology is masked as common-sensical truth (see Weedon I987). Poststructuralist performance criticism looks at the power structures underlying representa- tion, and the means by which subjectivity is shaped and withheld through discourse. These are intensely political projects. But rather than arguing the implications of such a poststructuralist per- spective, some feminist academicians and activists attack the project of theory. Black feminist critic Barbara Christian, for instance, in her article "The Race for Theory," reasserts the accusation that theory silences (I988). She believes that theory became popular when marginalized minor- ity writers were successfully clamoring to be heard in academia. Christian criticizes theorists for ignoring black women writers in their drive to immerse themselves in the verbal gymnastics of famous white men. She implicitly charges that because feminist poststructuralism ac- quiesces to the death of the author, it's complicit with a reactionary silenc- ing of women authors. Christian is not the only woman to voice these concerns, and from a certain perspective, the point she raises is valid. In theatre, much of the recent dissension over theory comes from a similar unwillingness to unsettle playwrighting as one of women's primary activi- ties. If we agree that the author is dead, how can we continue talking about women playwrights? Feminist poststructuralist theories, however, don't intend to kill off women authors a priori, but to simply enlarge the consid- eration of texts to take into account the meanings that are constructed in performance as well as on the page.2 Christian angles her argument through a racial perspective, insisting that her race theorizes from the basis of its experience as a minority. Other women attack theory by insisting that their experiences of oppression keep them from using its language. How can I, as a feminist theorist, respond to these concerns? How can I negotiate the differences between Christian and myself? Christian says she works in literary criticism to save her own life. I work in theory to save mine. Theory allows me to articulate my differ- ences from a feminism I first learned as monolithic. Theory enables me to see that there is no tenable position for me in the totalizing strategies of radical feminism, and that I can align myself profitably elsewhere. Through theory, I can articulate the roots of my own identity in the conflicting discourses of lesbianism and Judaism, and know that there is no comfortable place for me within any single discourse. Theory enables me to describe the differences within me and around me without forcing me to rank my allegiances or my oppressions. As feminist critic Gayle Austin would say, theory enables the divided subject to fall into the cracks of difference and to theorize productively from there, knowing that truth is changeable, permeable, and finally, irrelevant (1988).

Alt Fails

Their feminist materialist analysis fails because it views patriarchy and capitalism as one machine of oppression—economic oppression of women intensifies with lessened male dominance

Tinsman 2k (Heidi, Department of History at the University of California in Irvine, “Reviving Feminist Materialism: Gender and Neoliberalism in Pinochet’s Chile” Signs, Vol. 26, No. 1, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3175383.pdf)//meb

In considering the incorporation of women into new capitalist export economies, scholars and activists alike need a feminist materialist analysis that is more historical and more attentive to the complexities of how gen- der interfaces with different modes of production and organizations of political power. It is not that the analysis needs to be more inclusive and conclude that (in the case of Chile, e.g.) authoritarianism and neoliberal capitalism can be "both good and bad for women." Rather, what is needed is a different way of framing the issues. Above all, scholars and activists need a feminist materialism that considers how gender hierarchies may be, but are not necessarily, ameliorated at the same time that other forms of oppression deepen. This is not a new idea, but it has been strikingly absent from much of the discussion about women and late twentieth-century cap- italist expansion. What is needed is a resurrection and revision of the early marxist feminist insistence that capitalism and patriarchy are two different beasts that, although connected, have distinct logics and lives.'7 Part of this kind of analysis entails (the yet again not so new idea of) disrupting assumptions that patriarchy and capitalist exploitation are mechanically related, that their intensities necessarily rise and fall together. A feminist materialist analysis needs to recognize and explain the possibility that eco- nomic exploitation (and political repression) of women may intensify at the same time male dominance erodes. Feminist materialism also needs to be firmly situated within more recent theoretical debates that examine patriarchy and capitalism as profoundly heterogeneous and contradictory, rather than as coherent systems. The specific ways men exert authority over women, as well as the ways women consent to or contest that authority, consist of a multiplicity of arrangements, concessions, and contractual pacts that are constantly nego- tiated and that are not necessarily immediately linked to one another.18 While some forms of male dominance may erode, such as working wom- en's dependence on husbands and exclusion from political activism, other forms may not, such as working women's sexual vulnerability to male su- pervisors. Likewise, capitalism and authoritarianism are complex dynamics that workers experience in a variety of physical and emotional spaces and that elicit an array of contradictory demands, needs, desires, and identifi- cations. As has been demonstrated by the many labor scholars inspired by E. P. Thompson's model of social history and more recent discussions of Gramsci's notion of hegemony, whether and in what ways workers contest or consent to the different aspects of capitalism and authoritarianism de- pends on the dialectical interplay of past experience, present constraint, memory, and aspiration.19

Policy Perm

Perm solves and utilizing the state is key—their author agrees

Ebert 96 (Teresa, Professor of Humanities at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Albany who specializes in Critical and Cultural Theory, Feminist Critique, Marxist Theory and Globalization Theory, “Towards A Red Feminism” https://www.solidarity-us.org/node/2309)//meb

But we do not live in a communist or even a socialist order. Instead, in the current world historical situation, no particular social force can contest transnational capitalism with anything like capitalism's resources--except the state. As Masao Miyoshi writes in his essay, "A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State," "the state did, and still does, perform certain functions, for which there is as of now no substitute." (744) The fact that the state is, for the most part, as Miyoshi also notes, "thoroughly appropriated by transnational corporations" (744) does not change its importance in the class struggle. It is only through gaining control of the state that the workers will acquire the resources and apparatuses of power to enable them to control the means of production. The nation-state in late capitalism continues to be a necessary site in the international struggle to end the exploitation of people's labor and wrest the ownership of the means of production away from a transnational bourgeoisie. It is, thus, necessary to engage the state as a resistance against transnational capitalism. As Lenin reminds us in The State and Revolution, Marx and Engels provide "a highly interesting definition of the state, which is also one of the `forgotten words' of Marxism: `the state, i.e. the proletariat organized as the ruling class.'" (23) Contemporary feminism, under the influence of postmodernism, has developed a number of theories and practices that are represented as progressive. As I have indicated, however, they are far from being so. In its localism, this kind of feminism cuts off the relation of a coherent theory as an explanatory critique to guide its practices and prevent them from becoming ad hoc reactions; in its ecological anti-progressivism, such feminism becomes an ally of capitalism. Feminism's anti-growth logic is ultimately an attempt to keep the third world a permanent market of products for the first world. Feminism's conception of transnational anti-Statist resistance is identical--in its effects--with conservative attempts to remove the last existing obstacle from the path of capitalism. Its moralistic celebration of limits and its ethics of give-and-take lead to establishing philanthropy as international policy. Finally, a feminist valorization of consumption as the new political power of transnational citizens destroys the solidarity of women on the basis of their production practices and class connections. What we need is not a new "global-girdling" (post) consumptionist feminism, but a Red Feminism. Instead of alliances based on individual desire(ing), we need an international collectivity committed to emancipating women and all oppressed people from need and the exploitation of their labor