Fortunes of Feminism (14 page)

When Mrs. Eckerd finally arrived, May said, “Why do social workers ask so many questions?”

Mrs. Eckerd said, “What kind of questions do you mean, May?”

Bernice . . . said, “Like ‘How did it feel?'”

There was an uproar over this . . . (137)

In general, then, Rains's black subjects devised a varied repertoire of strategies for resisting expert, therapeutic constructions of their life-stories and capacities for agency. They were keenly aware of the power subtext underlying their interactions with the social worker and of the normalization dimension of the therapeutic initiative. In effect, these young women parried efforts to inculcate in them white, middle-class norms of individuality and affectivity. They refused the case worker's inducements to rewrite themselves as psychologized selves, while availing themselves of the health services at the facility. Thus, they made use of those aspects of the agency's program that they considered appropriate to their self-interpreted needs and ignored or sidestepped the others.

Fourth, in addition to informal, ad hoc, strategic, and/or cultural forms of resistance, there are also more formally organized, explicitly political, organized kinds. Clients of social-welfare programs may join together
as clients
to challenge administrative interpretations of their needs. They may take hold of the passive, normalized, and individualized or familialized identities fashioned for them in expert discourses and transform them into a basis for collective political action. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward have documented an example of this kind of resistance in their account of the process by which AFDC recipients organized the welfare-rights movement of the 1960s.
³⁴
Notwithstanding the atomizing and depoliticizing dimensions of AFDC administration, these women were brought together in welfare waiting rooms. It was as a result of their participation as clients, then, that they came to articulate common grievances and to act together. Thus, the same welfare practices that gave rise to these grievances created the enabling conditions for collective organizing to combat them. As Piven put it, “The structure of the welfare state itself has helped to create new solidarities and generate the political issues that continue to cement and galvanize them.”
³⁵

5. CONCLUSION: NEEDS, RIGHTS, AND JUSTIFICATION

Let me conclude by flagging some issues that are central to this project but that I have not yet discussed here. In this essay, I have concentrated on social-theoretical issues at the expense of moral and epistemological issues. However, the latter are very important for a project, like mine, that aspires to be a
critical
social theory.

My analysis of needs-talk raises two very obvious and pressing philosophical issues. One is the question of whether and how it is possible to distinguish better from worse interpretations of people's needs. The other is the question of the relationship between needs claims and rights. Although I cannot offer full answers to these questions here, I would like to indicate something about how I would approach them. I want also to situate my views in relation to contemporary debates among feminist theorists.

Feminist scholars have demonstrated again and again that authoritative views purporting to be neutral and disinterested actually express the partial and interested perspectives of dominant social groups. In addition, many feminist theorists have made use of poststructuralist approaches that deny the possibility of distinguishing warranted claims from power plays. As a result, there is now a significant strand of relativist sentiment within feminist ranks. At the same time, many other feminists worry that relativism undermines the possibility of political commitment. How, after all, can one argue against the possibility of warranted claims while oneself making such claims like “sexism exists and is unjust”?
³⁶

This relativism problem surfaces here in the form of a question: Can we distinguish better from worse interpretations of people's needs? Or, since all need interpretations emanate from specific, interested locations in society, are all of them equally compromised?

I claim that we
can
distinguish better from worse interpretations of people's needs. To say that needs are culturally constructed and discursively interpreted is not to say that any need interpretation is as good as any other. On the contrary, it is to underline the importance of an account of interpretive justification. However, I do not think that justification can be understood in traditional objectivist terms as correspondence, as if it were a matter of finding the interpretation that matches the true nature of the need as it really is in itself, independent of any interpretation.
³⁷
Nor do I think that justification can be premised on a pre-established point of epistemic superiority, as if it were a matter of finding the one group in society with the privileged “standpoint.”
³⁸

Then what
should
an account of interpretive justification consist in? In my view, there are at least two distinct kinds of considerations such an account would have to encompass and to balance. First, there are procedural considerations concerning the social processes by which various competing need interpretations are generated. For example, how exclusive or inclusive are various rival needs discourses? How hierarchical or egalitarian are the relations among the interlocutors? In general, procedural considerations dictate that, all other things being equal, the best need interpretations are those reached by means of communicative processes that most closely approximate ideals of democracy, equality, and fairness.
³⁹

In addition, considerations of consequences are relevant in justifying need interpretations. This means comparing alternative distributive outcomes of rival interpretations. For example, would widespread acceptance of some given interpretation of a social need disadvantage some groups of people vis-à-vis others? Does the interpretation conform to rather than challenge societal patterns of dominance and subordination? Are the rival chains of in-order-to relations to which competing need interpretations belong more or less respectful, as opposed to transgressive, of ideological boundaries that delimit “separate spheres” and thereby rationalize inequality? In general, consequentialist considerations dictate that, all other things being equal, the best need interpretations are those that do not disadvantage some groups of people vis-à-vis others.

In sum, justifying some interpretations of social needs as better than others involves balancing procedural and consequentialist considerations. More simply, it involves balancing democracy and equality.

What, then, of the relationship between needs and rights? This, too, is a controversial issue in contemporary theory. Critical legal theorists have argued that rights claims work against radical social transformation by enshrining tenets of bourgeois individualism.
⁴⁰
Meanwhile, some feminist moral theorists suggest that an orientation toward responsibilities is preferable to an orientation toward rights.
⁴¹
Together, these views might lead some to want to think of needs-talk as an alternative to rights-talk. On the other hand, many feminists worry that left-wing critiques of rights play into the hands of our political opponents. After all, conservatives traditionally prefer to distribute aid as matter of need
instead
of right precisely in order to avoid assumptions of entitlement that could carry egalitarian implications. For these reasons, some feminist activists and legal scholars have sought to develop and defend alternative understandings of rights.
⁴²
Their approach might imply that suitably reconstructed rights claims and needs claims could be mutually compatible, even inter-translatable.
⁴³

Very briefly, I align myself with those who favor translating justified needs claims into social rights. Like many radical critics of existing social-welfare programs, I am committed to opposing the forms of paternalism that arise when needs claims are divorced from rights claims. And unlike some communitarian, socialist, and feminist critics, I do not believe that rights-talk is inherently individualistic, bourgeois-liberal, and androcentric; it only becomes so where societies establish the
wrong
rights, as, for example, when the (putative) right to private property is permitted to trump
other
rights, including social rights.

Moreover, to treat justified needs claims as the bases for new social rights is to begin to overcome obstacles to the effective exercise of some existing rights. It is true, as Marxists and others have claimed, that classical liberal rights to free expression, assembly, and the like are “merely formal.” But this says more about the social context in which they are currently embedded than about their “intrinsic” character, for, in a context devoid of poverty, inequality, and oppression, formal liberal rights could be broadened and transformed into substantive rights, say, to collective self-determination.

Finally, I should stress that this work is motivated by the conviction that, for the time being, needs-talk is with us for better or worse. For the foreseeable future, political agents, including feminists, will have to operate on a terrain where needs-talk is the discursive coin of the realm. But, as I have tried to show, this idiom is neither inherently emancipatory nor inherently repressive. Rather, it is multivalent and contested. The larger aim of my project is to help clarify the prospects for democratic and egalitarian social change by sorting out the emancipatory from the repressive possibilities of needs-talk.

^*
I am grateful for helpful comments from Sandra Bartky, Linda Gordon, Paul Mattick, Jr., Frank Michelman, Martha Minow, Linda Nicholson, and Iris Young. The Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College provided generous research support and a utopian working situation.

1
Foucault,
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Vintage, 1979, 26.

2
Decommodification of housing could mean socialized ownership or, alternatively, occupant ownership combined with a non-market mechanism for determining values during transfers (e.g., price controls).

3
An example of the kind of theory I have in mind is David Braybrooke,
Meeting Needs
, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Braybrooke claims that a thin concept of need “can make a substantial contribution to settling upon policies without having to descend into the melee” (68). Thus, he does not take up any of the issues I am about to enumerate.

4
The expression “mode of subjectification” is inspired by Foucault, although his term is “mode of subjection” and his usage differs somewhat from mine. Cf. Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Paul Rabinow, ed.,
The Foucault Reader
, New York: Pantheon, 1984, 340–73. For another account of this idea of the socio-cultural means of interpretation and communication, see Nancy Fraser, “Toward a Discourse Ethic of Solidarity,”
Praxis International
5:4, January 1986, 425–9.

5
The expression “internally dialogized” comes from Mikhail Bakhtin. I consider his notion of a “dialogic heteroglossia” (or a cross-referential, multivoiced field of significations) more apt for characterizing the MIC in late-capitalist, welfare-state societies than the more monolithic Lacanian idea of the symbolic. In this respect, however, I part company with Bakhtin's own view that these conceptions found their most robust expression in the “carnivalesque” culture of late-medieval Europe and that the subsequent history of Western societies brought a flattening out of language and a restriction of dialogic heteroglossia to the specialized, esoteric domain of “the literary.” This seems wrong to me, given that the dialogic, polemical character of speech is related to the availability in a culture of a plurality of competing discourses and of subject positions from which to articulate them. Thus, conceptually, one would expect what, I take it, is in fact the case: that speech in complex, differentiated societies would be especially suitable for analysis in terms of these Bakhtinian categories. For the Bakhtinian conceptions of heteroglossia and internal dialogization, see Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in
The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays
, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981, 259–422. For an argument for the superiority of the Bakhtinian conception of discourse to the Lacanian for theorizing matters of feminist concern, see Chapter 5 of this volume, “Against Symbolicism.”

6
On anti-abortion discourse, see Kristin Luker,
Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood
, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

7
If the previous point was Bakhtinian, this one could be considered Bourdieusian. There is probably no contemporary social theorist who has worked more fruitfully than Bourdieu at understanding cultural contestation in relation to societal inequality. See his
Outline of a Theory of Practice
, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, and
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Pure Taste
, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. For an account of Bourdieu's enduring relevance, see Nancy Fraser, “Bourdieu: Une réflexion pour l'ère postindustrielle,”
Le monde
, January 24, 2012. Accessible at lemonde.fr.

8
Here the model aims to marry Bakhtin with Bourdieu.

9
I owe this formulation to Paul Mattick, Jr. For a thoughtful discussion of the advantages of this sort of approach, see his “On
Feminism as Critique
” (unpublished manuscript).

10
Included among the senses I shall not discuss are (1) the pejorative colloquial sense according to which a decision is political when personal jockeying for power overrides germane substantive considerations; and (2) the radical political-theoretical sense according to which all interactions traversed by relations of power and inequality are political.