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{"id":16892,"date":"2014-12-15T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-12-15T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1717"},"modified":"2014-12-15T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-12-15T00:00:00","slug":"impure-feminism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2014\/12\/impure-feminism\/","title":{"rendered":"Impure Feminism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

Irene Gedalof argues in\u00a0Against Purity<\/a> 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 \u201cWoman\u201d or \u201cFeminine.\u201d On the contrary, women\u2019s identities are complex and \u201cimpure,\u201d irreducible to the single feature of sex or gender.<\/p>\n

As Gedalof says, \u201cFeminism needs to move beyond\u00a0analytical approaches to social identity that view \u2018women\u2019 only as a\u00a0category of gender or sexual difference. If \u2018women\u2019 is a category, it is a\u00a0complex one, that refers to questions of specific community identities\u00a0like race, nation, ethnicity and class, as well as to gender or sexual difference. This is both because women\u2019s identities are constituted as \u00a0much by race, nation and other categories of identity as they are by sex\u00a0or gender, and because, both symbolically and strategically, the \u2018active\u00a0management\u2019 of Woman\/women seems, in turn, to play a key role in determining the \u2018truths\u2019 around which these identities are constructed.\u00a0Here, the impurity we need to draw on is the way \u2018Woman\u2019 and\u00a0\u2018women\u2019 seem to bleed across the boundaries of these apparently coherent categories of gender, race and nation. The purity we need to\u00a0contest is the attempt to fix \u2018Woman\u2019 and \u2018women\u2019 as the unchanging\u00a0ground upon which these apparently discrete categories stand. Additionally we need to underpin this kind of analysis of social\u00a0identities with alternative theoretical models of the self that take these\u00a0complex, impure spaces as a valid and valorised position from which to\u00a0derive a sense of self, and from which to act and to speak\u201d (195).<\/p>\n

On the one hand, there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, surprising as it may seem, \u201cimpurity\u201d may actually be a useful category for moving feminism an inch or two closer to reality.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"