The text below is from a guest blog I wrote for the journal Feminist Theory, to launch my article 'Whose Personal is More Political? Experience in Contemporary Feminist Politics', forthcoming in volume 17(3). At present the full text of the article is available from the journal free and can be accessed here. If for any reason you are unable to download this version, the open access version can be downloaded here.
Whose personal is more political? This question has been bothering me for a while. Feminism has been a politics of the personal since its inception, from the testimonial activism of black women in the US civil rights movement to the ‘personal is political’ slogan which underpinned Women’s Liberation, to contemporary intersectional feminist blogs and social media actions such as #sayhername, which exposes police brutality against women of colour. But what happens to this testimonial politics in a neoliberal context which commodifies experience and emotion? This concern underpins my paper. I build on work by Scott and Alcott on the epistemology and politics of experience, and by Ahmed, Pedwell and others on how emotions and affect enter the political.
In my own feminist activism, I am uneasy about what I see as competitive deployments of experience in the service of political agendas. I have been particularly struck by how ‘survivorship’ often acts as the trump card in adversarial debates. The politicisation of women’s victimisation has a long history, and others have documented the role of rape allegations in racialised oppression from slavery to contemporary criminal justice, and the use of indigenous and Othered women as a rhetorical justification for colonial and neo-colonial projects. Feminisms have been caught up in, and sometimes actively complicit with, these dynamics: together with neoliberal trends towards the commodification of the personal, this may frame the ways in which experience has also become capital within the feminist movement.
The question ‘whose personal is more political?’ invites fresh engagement with perennial issues of epistemic and political privilege. I argue that privileged feminists, speaking for others and/or for themselves, use experience to generate emotion and defeat critics who are often from more marginalised social positions. The sex industry ‘survivor’ is used to silence those still working in the industry, who argue for labour rights in order to protect them from violence and abuse. Cisgender women’s experiences of rape and assault are used to conceal the victimisation of trans women and assign them with ‘male violence’ through transphobic rhetoric. Selective empathies operate in which experience is only respected if it has political use value. ‘Speaking for others’ becomes even more problematic when it is wielded against another Other with whom one disagrees, who also happens to be speaking for themselves.
I am not, however, arguing for a renunciation of the politics of experience: instead, I argue that we need to situate experiences structurally, and critically appraise the uses to which they are put. When personal stories become capital in political debates, they must be understood in relation to dynamics of privilege and marginality: in other words, we need to ask whose personal is more political, and why.
Ali Phipps 