USSF one

In the run up to the US Social Forum, I’ve been reading some bell hooks to help ground how I prepare for the event (mentally at least). I’ve been thinking about how participation in political movements occurs and sometimes fails. I think there needs to be a new way of describing political participation to initiate a third ‘wave’ of feminist activism. The metaphor for blame and agency became a stumbling point for a critique of patriarchy and people’s participation in it. Notions of legalistic blame that locates harms solely in the mind of an autonomous individual, and describes complicity solely in terms of guilt and innocence determines the reception many people (men in particular?) have for a critique of patriarchal thinking. The assumption that a criticism of someone’s action meant an accusation of conscious malice creates the idea that feminists irrationally hate men and blame men for their problems. The stumbling block comes at the association between action and people, hinging on the model of agency that locates the genesis for actions solely in the mind of an actor.

This problem also works in the other direction, in determining people’s willingness to participate in politics. Many people identify with feminist ideals or even identify as feminists but don’t act like feminists, sometimes in active contradiction with the label. The role and status of ideas and malice seems to play a role in this: ideas (as a concept, a notion) are divorced from action, and that good intentions forgive bad actions. These are undergirded by the notion that ‘freedom’ means the ability, as an individual, to have maximum leeway in making the available choices presented to you (on the individual scale). I think two things are necessary: one, a new way of describing participation and support for feminism, that goes beyond mental disposition. The most effective democratic exercises in America are aesthetic and commercial – American Idol anyone? Participation isn’t dead, but the foundations for motivating it have changed. The second is a conception of freedom that exists in multiple. Freedom requires an interest in the needs and choices of other people. We are mutually interconnected, by means of communication and common space, and freedom for ourselves and others requires attending to those connections. Choice for one cannot be the standard against which progress is judged, because that choice, within a mutual environment, impacts the needs and desires of others. Ultimately, there are limits to freedom, circumscribed by our participation in social spaces with others: someone may always intervene upon us. Freedom involves dealing with those limits: finding and negotiating them.

Duncan