Feminist Ethics and Hegemonic Global Politics (Jabri)

Alternatives 29 (2004), 265-284

Feminist Ethicsand Hegemonic Global Politics

Vivienne Jabri*

The challenge for feminism in the present relates to how it re-sponds, ethically and politically, to a global context that is at oncegeared toward total control and fragmentation. In seeking to con-tribute to the revival of feminism as a distinctly political project,this article explores the potential of feminist contributions in rela-tion to ethics and politics. The aim is not to reenact, or even toreactivate, the well-worn arguments around universalism and theethic of care.1 It aims instead to reclaim the political in feministdiscourse, to identify its conditions of possibility, and to considerits location in relation to the hegemonic order that clearly definesthe present. Faced with totality, a totality that I argue is based on ahegemonic neoliberal order and a matrix of war, feminism's optionsappear to be twofold. On the one hand, there is clearly the optionof complicity, a form of co-optation into the discourses of the pow-erful. On the other, there is the option of dissention and contesta-tion. The feminism of co-optation is not intentionally supportive oftotality, but rather lacks a discourse based on a radical critique ofthe present. However, and far more significantly, there is anotherfeminist voice, located in a plethora of spaces and associations,essentially and necessarily transnational, that contests and throughcontestation enables the emergence of woman as speaking subject,possessing an ever-shifting agency that in itself is circumscribed bytime and space, culture and society, the local and the global. Thisis an engaged feminism, one that refuses co-optation, or uniformdefinitions of what it is to be a liberated self.

The first part of the article identifies the totalizing discourse ofthe present and its implications for feminism. The aim of this firstsection is to clearly identify the present and its constitution in intel-ligibility. This first section asks simply: What are the conditions of

*Centre for International Relations, Department of War Studies, King's College,University of London. E-mail: [email protected]

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the present and how is feminism and feminist discourse beingreconstituted as it is subject to the imperatives of power that definethe present social and pohtical order? The second and third sec-tions analyze and elaborate upon the options facing feminist ethicsand politics. These options are related to the ontological commit-ments within feminist discourses, relating in particular to how fem-inism responds to totality or hegemony. The aim throughout, Irepeat, is to reclaim the political in feminism.

On Totality

The present appears to represent a break from history, a temporallocation that somehow encompasses the uncertainties and vulnera-bilities associated with late-modern social and political life. Thereis a sense in which the transformation has taken place and in sodoing has firmly established itself in lived experience. The trans-formation is, however, incomplete, and it is this incompletenessthat disturbs, generating in its wake a sense of a world that is un-known and unknowable, a constitutive unease that locates the sub-ject in a temporal in-between, the in-between of past and present.Transformations must hence imply a present dissociated from thepast, where the former represents vulnerability and uncertainty,while the latter is the domain of consistency, of bounded selfhoodand community. The past, nostalgically recalled, is then imaginedas that location that must be retrieved even as the past so remem-bered is devoid of historical content, shorn of its complexities anduncertainties.

Awareness of transformation must hence raise questions relat-ing not simply to a break from a constructed past, but also of con-tinuities that render the past intelligible, or at least subject tounderstanding, so that the subjectivities of the present may in someway ask that which is question-worthy. The lived experiences of pastgenerations come to form the memory traces of the present, con-stitutive of life in the present. The enactment of naming the pre-sent in any particular way is not therefore an essentializing act, astriving for exactitude in conceptual formation. Rather, it is areflection of a distinct and particular articulation of the present,emergent from a particular and distinct reading of history, a par-ticular subjectivity.

There is much in the present condition that centers on a con-ception of the past that naturalizes and reifies. As Michel Fou-cault's analytic of power has shown,2 the establishment of a hege-monic discourse requires a uniform rendition of past and present.

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where, in a sense the past comes to serve the present, is broughtinto the service of the present. Pohtical discourses based on cate-gories such as homogeneous community, the right to sovereignty,family, the hteral reading of rehgious doctrine, appear to seeklegitimacy through renditions of the past where the subject is uni-form and content within the confines of family and community.History is rendered a technology, deployed in the practices of exclu-sion that identify exclusively those agencies that may possess legiti-macy in renditions of past and present. Such historical technologiesare not only aimed at the glorification of the past, but also at thereversal of particular social and political turning points of the past.Relations of power come to be formative of the historical processand the discursive practices that surround it. For Foucault, analysesof such relations must move beyond the dichotomy between struc-ture and event, for "the important thing is to avoid trying to do forthe event what was previously done with the concept of structure"since events differ in their "capacity to produce effects."^

A critical ontology of the present asks first and foremost theFoucaultian question—namely, "How in the present does poweroperate?" Now, in the present, the conditions of totality are vari-ously described in terms of empire, as in Hardt and Negri, theinformation age, as in Manuel Castells,'' and late-modern risk soci-ety, as in Giddens^ and Beck.6 These authors describe the transfor-mations of the present in terms of networks and flows, transnationalrelations, structured through the dynamics of information capital-ism, the consequences of which are often beyond the control oflocal communities and state authorities. The dialectics of late-mod-ern social life come to be defined in terms of globalized and ram-pant neoliberalism, on the one hand, and the reassertion of localityon the other. This relationship becomes crucial, in that it begins toinform us of the dynamics of exclusionary practices that differentlyimpact upon the lived experiences of the many as against the few, aswell as the constraints that originate in distant abstract systems butthat have implications in the everyday and the routine.

Social theorists of the present provide us with characterizationsof the dynamics of transformation emergent in late-modernity. Itis, however, important to point to the structures of domination thatpermeate these transformations, for it is relations of power thatultimately reveal the congealment of hegemonic institutionalizedpractices that determine the legitimate, the acceptable, and the re-mits of politics. Understanding domination, therefore, calls for theidentification of conditions that delimit how these conditions arenamed, just as it requires the unraveling of hegemonic practicesthat control entry into the space of the political.


The totality of the present may hence be named as the hege-mony of neohberal information capitalism. For the social theoristsmentioned above, the workings of this order are global in scope,touching communities across the signifying divides of culture andstate. The social patterns emergent from this order intersect thelocal and the global, render proximate distant events, and com-press time and space distantiations so that the "ontological securi-ties"^ traditionally associated with local environments and localrelationships are radically transformed. If we therefore enquirephenomenologically into the condition of the present we find thatthe experience of late-modernity and, as I will show below, of total-ity differs in accordance with the differential locations of the indi-vidual self, locations that are not just defined in terms of geopolit-ical space but societal locations where class, gender, and cultureintersect as sites that constitute the subjectivities of the present.

To understand totality is hence to understand at one and thesame time both social forces and their emergent subjectivities. It isto understand the mutually constitutive relationship between struc-tures of domination and articulations of self, for it is the case thatboth are co-present in the lived experience of the individual sub-ject and their agency. What then of totality and the subject posi-tions that totality produces? The neoliberal order that defines thecomplex governmentalities^ of the present is, in the present, sus-tained by a juridical discourse centered on war and the right ofintervention. As described by Hardt and Negri, neoliberal capital-ism of the late-modern form makes possible the integration offorms of power traditionally conceived as separate, an integrationthat results from the intersection of economic and political power,in a sense producing a single power, a "new inscription of author-ity"3 that has a capacity to view the world as its remit, to subject theworld to technologies of control through pacification, and to con-fer to itself the authority to act.

The totality described above is hence also a matrix of war.Thinking of totality in this way enables us to understand how theoperations of power in the present condition Umit politics, pro-duce particular subjectivities, and circumscribe agency. Politics inlate-modernity is about the government (surveillance, confinement,pacification) of groups and populations conducted at the trans-national/global level. This is a "biopolitics" that recognizes noboundary, that sees the entire global population within its remit ofcontrol. 10 Such government may, at times such as the present junc-ture, involve war, it may involve the manufacture of threat, and it mayinvolve the predominance of a discourse of fear and insecurity.^' Thedifference in late-modernity is that such practices of government

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(defined as is evident here in Foucault's understanding of govern-mentality) occur at local, national, and regional, as well as global, lev-els, involving a complexity of interactions between these levels. The"inside" and "outside" are no longer delimited by the boundaries ofthe sovereign state but are inscribed in terms of subjects identified as"other" through the social/juridical/political matrix of regulation.This system is not constituted by one state alone but transcends statesand international institutions, making use of military forces and net-works of intelligence, as well as domestic jurisdictions.'2

The political subject that emerges is one that is uniformlydefined, differentiated from its unacceptable other, molded as theperfect subject of global capital, content to put up with strugglesrelating to lifestyle and impervious to or ignorant of the impover-ishment of the other. Hegemonic order requires such compliantsubjectivity if it is to succeed. It further requires the dissolution ofthe political subject into an entity that is both participant in andobject of a focus-group orientation to technocratic governmental-ity. Through such practices, efficiency and certainty are ensured asthe bedrock of a form of a Third Way politics that seeks to recon-cile the late-modern welfare state to neoliberal imperatives.'^ Theexercise of power globally is hence centered on the capacity toorder conduct, a capacity that has its base in institutionalized ratio-nalizing practices ranging from the regulation of exchange rela-tions to policing across borders.

Totality is hence not a structure, nor is it a singular event.Rather, the concept is used to highlight the complexity of inter-connection between practices that govern conduct, that regulatelife itself, so that, to use Foucault's definition of governmentality,the "conduct of conduct" applies not just to the government ofothers but also to the "government of self."''' The "technologies ofdomination" that are the defining moment of the totality describedabove interact with "techniques of self," thereby raising questionsrelating to the interaction between the everyday and the extra-ordinary, the public and the private.'^ For Foucault, analysis ofrelations of power must "take into account the points where thetechniques of the self are integrated into structures of coercionand domination."'S As we will see below, this has profound conse-quences for feminist responses to the present.

Totality as a concept applied to the present assumes the globalas the remit of its operations and produces at one and the sametime the compliant, uniform subject of the neoliberal order andthe constituted "other" of this order. But how is this other identi-fied and what are the consequences of such identification? Theprevalent marker in the present context, a context defined above


as the intersection of late-modern capitalism interlaced with thematrix of war, is cultural. Culture is now the site through which dif-ference becomes most manifest. More importantly, as a marker, itis utilized as a technology of government, a technology of differ-entiation that subjects the cultural other to discriminatory prac-tices and modes of exclusion that inscribe the very corporeality ofthe other as threat. Such practices are not, however, uniformlyapplied to all who are culturally different. Cultural differentiationas a technology of control targets "foreignness." As Hardt and Negripoint out, following Etienne Balibar, "biological differences havebeen replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers as the key rep-resentation of racial hatred and fear.""

For Balibar, the "foreigner" is subject to identifications thatcome from others.'^ Such identifications are discursive and institu-tional and they may traverse the local, national, and transnationalarenas.'9 The "foreigner" must not, however, be seen as the gener-alized other, moving into the shadows of the global political econ-omy. The cosmopolitan elites created and sustained by informationand capital flows are differently located in relation to systems ofidentification reinforced by an international class system. In thissense, structures of signification intersect those of domination, andin doing so they have different phenomenological effects. Bordersmean different things to different people. The "space of fiows,"20the repatterning of social relations in the "information age," pro-duces different subjectivities differentially located in relation toglobal systems of control.

What then are the implications for feminist ethics and politics?As I state in my introduction, the choices for feminism appear tobe twofold. There is on the one hand a form of feminism that maybe seen as a constitutive element of late-modern totality. The sub-ject of this form of feminism is identified above as the full partici-pant in the global neoliberal order. The central problematic forthis feminist program relates to difference, and specifically culturaldifference, and how this impedes, on the one hand, understandingbetween Western feminists and the rest and, on the other, the fullemancipation of women subject to its historical effects. The solu-tions, as we will see below, center on the formulation of a substan-tial liberal conception of justice.

There is, however, another form of feminism emergent fromthe present condition. This is the feminism of politics, contesta-tion, and liberation. It finds itself in transnational networks andlocations, engaged in defining new forms of political presence andcommunity. The central problematic for this project is the neo-liberal global order as generative of the poverty and inequalities

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affecting women's lives across states and cultures. This article willseek to define this latter project as a distinctly political feminism.As I argue below, a distinctly political feminist discourse must en-gage in an analytic of the conditions of the present and the hege-monic practices generative of practices of exclusion. The predomi-nant tendency within feminist ethical discourse has been to locatethe conditions of exclusion in locality and particularity. In my view,feminist ethics, if it is to contest being identified with global struc-tures of domination, must engage first and foremost with those verystructures. Before I define these two feminist positions, I must out-line why I think the distinction is significant in the present context.

There is a sense in which late-modern transformations requirea retheorization of the "political." To retheorize the political alsoimplies a problematization of subjectivity, of what it means for theself "to be in the world," how the self interacts with others, andhow these complex relationships relate to the political problems ofour time. From feminism to poststructuralism, the view has beenthat the everyday practices and experiential locations of the subjectare intimately related to, and yet, at same time, challenging of, tra-ditional notions of what constitutes politics. The subject thatemerges from these writings is at some distance removed from uni-tary conceptions of the Cartesian self and, indeed, from the sover-eign self that lies at the heart of how we have conventionallydefined the political.

In stating that the subject of politics has a multiplicity of loca-tions and that such locations are not confined to the public sphereof interaction and discourse, a serious challenge is posed to fun-damental conceptions of how we view politics, from collective willto the meaning of democracy, to political mobilization, and so on.Such questioning of the fundamentals means a root-and-branchdislocation of thought on categories that constitute politics, thestate, citizenship, responsibility, and rights. These categories arethe mainstay of political thought and have been constitutive ofwhat we think of as the modern state. In addition, these funda-mental categories have not only been constitutive of the identity ofWestern political systems but have played a defining role in dis-courses of legitimation that underpin and propel these systems atthe expense of others.

It is, therefore, evident that those who enter the fray and callfor a problematization of the sovereign subject that lies at the heartof these categories inevitably problematize the foundational statusof the latter and their formative role in the mechanics of Westerngovernance. Doing so, however, raises crucial theoretical chal-lenges to those who problematize, specifically those of us who


retain an interest in social transformation and some notion ofemancipation; those of us troubled by the increasing valorizationof global capital at the expense of the welfare state, democraticgovernance, and the role of the state in answering the claims of cit-izens. In seeking to take these theoretical challenges seriously, theaim is to move away from one serious consequence that canemerge from the problematization of subjectivity; namely, the "pri-vatization of politics."

A Feminism of Totality

There are a number of points of departure for the analysis of thisform of feminism; here, however, I will concentrate on a debatearound Martha Nussbaum's liberal feminism—a feminism that isdistinctly modern in orientation, directed at "humanity" at large,internationalist, and cosmopolitan.21 This is a feminism that at firstsight all feminists will recognize since its main treatise is centeredon the equality of women within a wider context of global justice.

This form of feminism has a time-honored pedigree: It identi-fies itself with modernity and the Enlightenment. The political sub-ject for this form of feminism is the individual autonomous self,unencumbered by history and tradition and capable of deliberativereasoning based on freedom and equality. As argued elsewhere, thecritique of relations that subjugate women, that confine themwithin oppressive, unequal, and exploitative relations, is here com-bined with the political aim of emancipation from such relations.22The call for equality is hence based on a universalist conception ofagency, one that sees agency as situated in the rationality of theself. The formative moment of this distinctly modernist vision isthat women across the signifying divides of culture and societyshare a common agenda, irrespective of the particularities thatdefine the lived experience of women and their differential loca-tions in relation to structures of signification and domination.

The modernizing imperative of this perspective is also globalin orientation. It sees its remit not just in local or even nationalterms but in relation to the whole of humanity. While differencesin the experience of women across societies are recognized, theaspirational project is centered on an agenda that assumes univer-sal applicability. This liberal project is, as stated above, cosmopoli-tan in its political orientation since it is based firstly on the right ofjudgment of the lived experiences of women located elsewhere;secondly, on the view that intervention may take place whereoppressive social and cultural practices are apparent; and thirdly

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on a political mobilization process that is global in scope andwhose targets are not only governments and international institu-tions but women themselves.

Clearly, this feminist discourse has come under a great deal ofscrutiny that will not be repeated here. What is of interest in thepresent context is the question of whether this particular feministdiscourse is complicitous with the neoliberal totality describedabove, a totality based on technologies that produce particular sub-jectivities, the uniform subject of neoliberal order and the culturalother. Nussbaum's project is declaredly "universalist" and "essen-tialist." It sees a core of the human self, the human being, sharingwith other human beings basic needs (capabilities) that are "com-mon to all," experienced across cultures and locations. Nussbaum'sargument is that "we should in fact begin with a conception of thehuman being and human functioning in thinking about women'sequality in developing countries."23

Nussbaum rejects the charge of metaphysical realism, stressingthat her capabilities list (largely drawn from Amartya Sen's work)derives from "a wide variety of self-interpretations of human beings inmany times and places."24 The list is, furthermore, a "normative con-ception," for it is an ethical inquiry that is distinctly evaluative, pro-viding a "ground floor or minimal conception of the good, "25 that isregulative rather than determining of choices relating to ways of life.There is here a descriptive account of what Nussbaum sees as a fullyhuman life wherein a list of capabilities are realized—including, forexample, the ability to live a normal length of life and the ability topossess good health, education, and so on. She sees the precise defi-nition of such capabilities as emerging within "specific and histori-cally rich cultural realization, which can profoundly shape not onlythe conceptions used by the citizens in these areas but also theirexperiences themselves. Nevertheless, we do have in these areas ofour common humanity sufficient overlap to sustain a general con-versation, focusing on our common problems and prospects. "26

There is, furthermore, a stress on "plural" as well as "local"specification, so that while public policy is geared toward a generalconception of the good, local specificity stresses the concrete socialsituation of the agents and their capacity to determine local real-ization of capabilities through participatory dialogue. Herein liesNussbaum's response to the criticism that she does not account forlocal differentiation: Her Aristotelian view of the human life situ-ated within the specifies of political society provides the backdropto her claim that while her philosophical project is a blueprint forpublic policy, its realization is in the hands of locally situatedagents on the receiving end.


Let us then analyze Nussbaum's response to the charge thather form of liberalism within which she locates a humanist femi-nism is not responsive to difference and the context-bound lives ofwomen. She makes the claim that liberalism is "required to takeaccount of the texture of experience, including its differences ofpower. "27 This means a recognition ofthe "equal worth of humanity"and inquiry into "the impediments to equal respect for humanity."^^Nussbaum identifes this inquiry as follows:

My attempt to defend universal cross-cultural norms had to beundergirded by fieldwork that attempted to understand the var-ied contexts in which women are striving for decent lives. I fo-cused on a single nation, India, because I have some hope that inthat way I can adequately contextualise the issues of which Ispeak, taking not only history but also region, religion, and occu-pation into account. . . . And precisely because I think context isso important, I urge that the vague norms I recommend in the"capabilities approach" be worked out at a more concrete level byeach nation, in a democratic dialogue, taking history and differ-ences of gender, ethnicity, religion, and region into account. . . .Both in its methodology then, and in its normative recommenda-tions, the book takes context extremely seriously.^9

Let us unravel the assumpdons contained in Nussbaum's state-ment. These are both epistemological and ontological. The subjectof "capabilities" that Nussbaum identifies is one who, even whencontextualized in culture, somehow emerges as a universal being,for cultural context is merely superimposed upon a core being,which is the liberal rational self. Culture is hence what others liveunder. It is these others whom Nussbaum sees her project as liber-ating. Then there is the representation of "India" and its regions;these are reduced to variables that might be utilized as tests for theapplicability of Nussbaum's theory.

There is, in addition, the proposition that different nationsundertake a "democratic dialogue" to discuss Nussbaum's norms,to test their applicability in their own contexts. There is here theassumption that nations somehow do not possess their own under-standings of elements that constitute justice. However, by far themost revealing aspect of Nussbaum's approach to context is itstotal neglect ofthe global context. As I have outlined above, this isa context that is defined by social forces that enable the few andconstrain the many. It is a context that directly emerges from theuniversalizing liberalism that Nussbaum advocates as the solutionto global justice. As Quillen points out in a powerful critique ofNussbaum's thesis, "Nussbaum brackets the political question:how? Through what institutions, social practices, and methods of

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redistribution can we work to allocate resources so as to amelioratematerial deprivation worldwide?"-^"

Nussbaum reduces the political to a form of rationality, and inso doing she fails to recognize the political contestations thatinhere in the categories forming the core of her thesis. The onto-logical commitments she makes dislocate the self from history, forthe latter is conceived as being ontologically separable and exter-nal in relation to the self. Culture, in other words, becomes animpediment to Nussbaum's conception of the liberated self. Whatis beyond doubt is that Nussbaum, good intentions aside, seekscommonality as the promise of a better future, a future based uponcross-cultural norms that ensure the dignity of the universal humanself. Cultural context is represented as a set of local practices thatare somehow external not just to the self, but to the global institu-tional practices and social forces, in all their materiality, forces thatdifferentially enable and constrain. As Swasti Mitter points out,"The erudite, yet consciously ahistorical, non-empirical philosoph-ical text of Nussbaum leaves readers uncertain about both the fea-sibility and the desirability of the capability list."3'

The practical implication of Nussbaum's approach to a human-ist-oriented approach to feminist ethics is the production of sub-jects whose emancipation is defined in terms of their full partici-pation in the global liberal order. Apart from the banality of thecertainties expressed, there is here a form of "epistemic violence"that astounds.32 In representing her discourse as a baseline for aninternational feminism, Nussbaum reiterates a late-modern formof colonial mentality that leaves the subject of its discourse shornof history and complexity. This subject is hence denied a presence,denied an agency that emerges or is manifest in its own right andnot as a reflection of its enablement through colonial presence.This form of international feminism is ultimately a form of disci-plining biopolitics, where the distribution of female bodies is ulti-mately what can constitute their freedom, as consumers within theglobal marketplace, where, to use Spivak, "to be" is "to be gainfullyemployed."33 The ultimate force of a hegemonic discourse is whenits self-legitimization is based on an assertion that it is the onlystory available, a narrative constructed as the outcome of dialoguewith its subjects, even as the latter remain somehow absent, empty,and hence open to occupation.

A Political Feminism

Feminism's contributions to international thought are preciselycentered on its disruption of the givens. Dualisms of the domestic

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versus the international, the private as opposed to the public, theuniversal versus the particular, are all challenged by feminism'sconcern with gender as a social construct and its impact on thelived experience of women and men. However, along with othercritical approaches to the subject, feminism has in a sense to reflecton alternative forms of political expression and political commu-nity that transcend exclusionist practices and the institutions fromwhich such practices emerge. The problem for feminist thoughtis that it cannot rely on a single category, named "woman," pre-defined and transcendent. If gender is accepted to be a social con-struct, tben its construction is implicated in the identification ofindividuals in different social settings. The various modes of iden-tification are, however, manifested differently across time andspace, and it is this difference that distinguishes and determinesthe lived experiences of women in contingent social matrices. Prac-tices and modes of signification that construct gender are in them-selves interlaced with complex systems of meaning that define andconstitute particular societies.

This is the challenge that has for long faced feminist discourseas a normative project. This is the challenge of both cultural dif-ference and the materiality of social and political life. If feminismis conceived as a distinctly political project, then it has to developat one and the same time both a radical critique of the presentorder and a conception of political community and agency.

The challenge of difference, and specifically cultural differ-ence, brings into sharp focus the universalizing assumptions ofmodernist thought and their exclusionist implications. Just as colo-nial discourse sought to discredit national liberation movements bybigbligbting women's oppression, so, too, liberal feminist thoughthas, in recent times, sought to pitch the terms of debate againstcultural expressions deemed as oppressive to women. Woman be-comes the empty signifier through which modernist discoursesseek universal application and inscriptions of what it is to be awoman. Nowhere is this contest of signification more clearly appar-ent than in discourses surrounding the veil in Islamic communitiesin the West. The veiled woman is, in one sense, the oppressedwoman, hidden from view, a location of shame, confined in dark-ness even when she emerges into the public sphere. The veiledwoman in the West is, however, also a site of cultural and politicalexpression, expressive of a very public manifestation of differenceand nonconformity. The veiled woman in this latter frame comesto constitute a distinct voice, and one, moreover, that comes tooccupy the frontline against violence and discriminatory practicesaimed at minority communities.

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The paradox for feminism is to recognize the oppressive fea-tures of traditional practices contained in different cultures, whileacknowledging that such practices may be utilized in the assertionof agency. They, in other words, find different expression and artic-ulation in different subjectivities. Where such expression faces anexistential threat, the potential of its obliteration, then its assertionconstitutes a moment of resistance against an imposed hegemonicorder that is both institutional and symbolic in its domination. Thechallenge for political feminism is how it places itself in relation tostructures of domination and local assertions of cultural differ-ence, assertions that often find their open expression in the situa-tion of women and their bodies. Woman is hence empty signifierfor feminism, just as she is in society at large.

Within a matrix of totality, culture becomes a technology ofcontrol. It can also become a technology of self. To use Foucaultianterms, culture in late-modernity is a constitutive element of gov-ernmentality. It is used to designate otherness, to underpin prac-tices of exclusion at local, national and transnational levels. Whenused in this way, the different subjectivities of the individual selfcome to be "packaged" witbin an undifferentiated conception ofparticular cultures. As Uma Narayan points out, "This view under-stands cultures on the model of neatly wrapped packages, sealedoff from each other, possessing sharply defined edges or contours.. . . I believe that these packages are more badly wrapped and theircontents more jumbled than is often assumed and that there is avariety of agendas that determine who and what are assignedplaces inside and outside a particular cultural package."34 There is,at the same time, a reification of cultural difference, so that thetotality of the picture is lost from view. This totality, as stated above,centers on the domination of global capital and its sustenancethrough a matrix of war.

So how does a political feminism respond to the challengesthat totality presents? How does it provide a radical critique of thepresent and at the same time contribute to a retbinking of thepolitical and its own definition as a distinctly political project? Onevery dominant response has been to concentrate on the implica-tions of cultural difference for the development of a sisterhood atlarge—one that has global reacb, that is self-consciously universal-izing in its assumptions, that sees the potential for consensus acrossthe problematics of culture, developed through a dialogue of sorts.As I have argued above, the implications of such a course of actionare ultimately to reduce feminism to a form of global policing, con-cerned primarily with what is now referred to as "gender main-streaming," a disciplining discourse built into an ever-burgeoning

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bureaucratic industry at tbe international level that sees its remit aswatchdog for the good of women worldwide. This is feminism astechnology of control, constitutive of emergent global governmen-talities that ultimately dissolve community as well as individualagency.

In opposition to this disciplining form of feminism, poststruc-turalists have highlighted the view that when feminism assumes asingular category, woman, it precludes considerations of differenceand the multiform subjectivities that constitute the individual self.In recognizing uncertainty and fragmentation as constitutive ele-ments of subjectivity; in recognizing the multiple narratives of theself as a complex being emergent from the regulatory practices ofsocial life, feminism has to recognize that woman is always, as JuliaKristeva points out, a subject in process, an incomplete being.^s Itis this incompleteness of the individual self that moves the dis-course away from transcendental being and toward the view thatwhile the subject is constituted in contingency, the subject is also alocation of creativity, of an excess that enables dissent from regu-lation and conformity. Sucb a conception of subjectivity suggeststhat woman is not simply a situated being (as Seyla Benhabibwould argue) ;3S that woman is not simply a constituted self (as con-stitutive theorists would argue); but woman is a subject in forma-tion, in process, always emergent from the social matrices that sur-round her and constitute her being, but at the same having thecapacity for transfiguration of the self, a capacity to transcend thegiven order of things.

It is this "critical ontology of the self'̂ ^ that confers politicalagency to woman, while rendering woman herself as a site of con-testation and hence politics. Feminism in international relationshas sought to highlight gender as constitutive of the epistemologi-cal and ontological underpinnings of the discipline. Borrowingfrom wider feminist thought, it has contributed to questioningdualisms that form tbe basis of the discipline's theories and method-ologies, dualisms that demarcate the domestic from the inter-national, the private from the public. What emerges from this workis a conception of the different locations within which struggle andcontestation take place in the face of a globalizing social and polit-ical order, locations that are local, transnational, and global, emer-gent from a complex set of interactions and associations.^^ And, asSylvester stresses, feminists' "sense of difference 'out there' isaffected by movement in their own subjectivities and shifts andmobilities in the uncapturable 'other.'"39

In the conception of politics as contestation that I am definingas political feminism, the subject of politics is always in process.

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never fully formed as a gendered or a cultured being. Both genderand culture become sites upon wbich and through which a plural-ity of subjectivities emerge, a plurality of self-understandingsrelated in a highly complex manner to the emergence of politicalagency. Just as woman can be the empty signifier in which particu-larities seek hegemonic inscription, so, too, any discourse that seeksuniversal status is merely one among many particularities engagedin contesting the empty signifier that constitutes the universal. AsLaclau states: "The appeal to the universal is unavoidable once, onthe one hand, no agent can claim to speak directly for the 'totality'while, on the other, reference to the latter remains an essentialcomponent of the hegemonico-discursive operation. The universalis an empty place, a void which can be filled only by the particular,but which, through its very emptiness, produces a series of crucialeffects in the structuration/destructuration of social relations. It isin this sense that it is both an impossible and necessary object."'*"Rather than speaking of universal struggles, our attention can thenbe drawn to local struggles, local manifestations of agency, and thehistorical processes that refigure the local as the global.

To contest the hegemonic operations constituting the presentis hence to be aware of totality in developing a radical critique ofthe present. Reference to totality assumes the co-presence of pastand present, of distance and proximity, so that contestation of thehegemonic practices of the present assume the complexities andcontingencies of struggle, the differential impact of the materialand symbolic manifestations of the present upon the lived experi-ence of differentially located individual selves and communities. Afeminism of dissent, a political feminism, confronts at one and thesame time both the power relations that define the present neo-liberal global order and the forces of reaction that reify the localand the particular. For these two forces, those of globalizing mod-ernization, on the one hand, and those of reaction, on the other,are mutually constituting, the consequences of which are manifestdaily in the lived experiences of individuals located in differentsocial settings.

When Manuel Castells defines the emergence of "defensivereactions" in the "information age" that is late-modern society, hes ummarizes the challenge that I see facing feminist politics in thepresent. For Castells, religious fundamentalism, cultural national-ism, and territorial communes are reactions against

fundamental threats, perceived in all societies, by the majority ofhumankind. . . . Reaction against globalization, which dissolvesthe autonomy of institutions, organizations, and communication


systems where people live. Reaction against networking and flex-ibility, which blur the boundaries of membership and involve-ment, individualize social relationships of production, and in-duce the structural instability of work, space, and time. Andreaction against the crisis of the patriarchal family, at the roots ofthe transformation of mechanisms of security-building, socializa-tion, sexuality, and, therefore, of personality systems.41

Furthermore, as "the new processes of domination to which peoplereact are embedded in information flows, the building of auton-omy has to rely on reverse information flows."'•2

While Castells stresses information flows in his analytic of late-modern power, I would further add militarist domination, wherestructures of domination come to be sustained through the ever-present threat of violence against entire societies. Any discourse ofdissent must in a sense negotiate its way between the intersticesof these forces and their manifestations in local circumstances.

Chantal Mouffe defines the problem eloquently: "In order toenvisage the making of a new hegemony the traditional under-standing of left and right needs to be redefined; but whatever thecontent we give to those categories, one thing is sure: there comesa time when one needs to decide on which side to stand in theiragonistic confrontation. "'*3 The choices confronting feminism arethose that confront other political projects, namely how we regardthe dominance of global capital and the role of the state and howwe respond to the present militarist order. To reify gender is toassume that these processes have a uniform impact on the livedexperience of women across the globe.*'' This would blatantly con-stitute a conservative form of feminism that sees its remit as theentire globe, its populations and their countries. This is a feminismthat produces blueprints for public policy and that pronounces onthe justifiability or otherwise of wars conducted at distance againsttarget populations deemed other. This is a feminism that has nospace for the other, except when the other agrees to engage in aprocess of understanding.

There is another form of feminism—one that is as opposed tothe above form as to any other reactionary discourse. This is a fem-inism that recognizes the harm perpetrated against the many by thefew. This is a feminism that recognizes the contingencies of resis-tance against oppressive practices, one that is ever aware of themutually constitutive relationship between structures of dominationand the forces of reaction that more often than not target the livesand bodies of women. This is a feminism that opposes war, for it rec-ognizes that war in late-modernity is to all intents and purposes total

Vivienne Jabri 281

war, aimed at the lives and bodies of entire communities. There isno commensurability between the conservative feminism describedin the previous paragraph and the feminism of dissent describedhere. What emerges from a feminism of dissent is therefore a com-bination of two mutually constitutive critical ontologies.

The first relates to a critical ontology of the present.^s Thiscalls for a radical critique of the present, the material and socialforces that define totality and the subjectivities it produces.**' Thesecond is a critical ontology of self, relating the lived experiencesof the self in relation to the continuities of social and political life,while recognizing the excess of subjectivity, the capacity of the selfto emerge beyond uniformity and conformity. In terms of a recon-ception of political community, it means taking both materialityand subjectivity seriously.

Finally, the question that is often asked: "How does this trans-late to politics?" It is a question that lies at the heart of feministethics and its discourses in late-modern social and political life.There is, in any political moment, an element of investment thatexceeds the act, the moment itself. In agreement with Laclau,*? Isee this moment as an ethical moment that exceeds the particular-ities that render it a possibility. It is precisely this excess that ren-ders the ethical moment political, for to be so it must exceed itsown temporal and spatial limitations, while being emergent, solelypossible, as a product precisely of the sedimentations of lived expe-rience, of continuity and history. This is where local strugglesexceed their locality, and in their excess, touch upon, instantiateconnection, with others similarly engaged in all their difference.This moment of connection is a moment of radical investment forit is at this moment that political engagement takes place.

Political feminism in this sense requires that its discourseengages with an analytic of power in the present and how struc-tures of domination are manifest phenomenologically in livedexperience.48 Political feminism requires recognition of that whichit excludes. To borrow from Chantal Mouffe, writing of a demo-cratic politics of the Left,'*9 political feminism must know its ownlimits for it to possess its own distinct identity, engaged in politicalmobilization against what Bourdieu and Wacquant call "the natu-ralisation of the schemata of neoliberal thought."50

A political feminism, in addition, defines its limits in terms ofopposition to the matrix of war that perpetuates totality. This is amatrix, as I state above, that is sustained by a hegemonic global mil-itary order, that renders the world open to violent intervention, andincorporates xenophobic practices that target entire communitiesin the name of state security and humanity, respectively. Limits are


not, however, forever, inscribed in uniformity. The subject of polit-ical feminism is always, to borrow from Julia Kristeva, in processand on trial. It is in all these aspects, that political feminism maybegin to know itself as a program of radical investment.

Notes

1. See contributions by Kimberly Hutchings and Vivienne Jabri inVivienne Jabri and Eleanor O'Gorman, eds., Women, Culture, and Inter-national Relations (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1999).

2. Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power," in Power/Knowledge, ed. ColinCordon (London: Prentice-Hall, 1980), p. 114.

3. Ibid.4. Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture

(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996).5. Anthony Ciddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, U.K.:

Polity, 1990).6. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage,

1992).7. Anthony Ciddens, Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the

Late Modern Age (Cambridge, LF.K.: Polity, 1991).8. Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," in Michel Foucault, Power:

The Essential Works, vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion (London: Allen Lane,2001).

9. Michael Hardt and Antouio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-vard University Press, 2000), p. 9.

10. Michel Foucault, "The Birth of Biopolitics," in Michel Foucault,Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press,1997), pp. 73-79. For an investigation of the relationship between neo-liberal biopolitics and war, see Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, "ClobalLiberal Covernance: Biopolitics, Security, and War," Millennium 30, no. 1(2001): 41-66.

11. On practices of government relating to insecurity, see Didier Bigo,"Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Covernmentality ofUnease," Alternatives 27, no. 1 (2002): 63-92, andjef Huysmans, "DefiningSocial Constructivism in Security Studies: The Normative Dilemma of Writ-ing Security," Alternatives 27, no. 1 (2002): 41-62.

12. Civen the predominance of U.S. military power, as well as U.S.-ledmilitary interventions, it is tempting to argue that the role of the UnitedStates is core to the present hegemonic order. It is, however, important topoint out that the totality described here relates to practices that exceedthe role of one particular state or one particular agency, even as that stateor agency may historically possess an overwhelming role in the productionof global structures of domination.

13. The main advocate of Third Way politics is Anthony Giddens. Seehis The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity,1998).

14. Michel Foucault, note 8. For investigations into the implications ofneoliberal governentality in contemporary politics, see Mitchell Dean,Governentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999), and

Vivienne Jabri 283

Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose, eds., Foucaull and Polit-ical Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism, and Rationalities of Government (Lon-don: UCL Press, 1996).

15. For a discussion of neoliberal govermentality and its theoreticaland historical implications, see Thomas Lemke, "'The Birth of Biopolitics':Michel Foucault's Lecture at the College de France on Neo-liberal Gov-ernmentality," Economy and Society 30, no. 2 (2001): 204.

16. Quoted ibid.17. Hardt and Negri, note 9, p. 191.18. Etienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene (London: Verso, 2002).19. See Patricia Owens, "Xenophilia, Gender, and Sentimental Hu-

manitarianism" in this issue oi Alternatives.20. Manuel Gastells seeks to distinguish between the "space of flows,"

which applies to networks of interaction, and the "space of places," whichrefers to "historically rooted spatial organisation." See Manuel Castells,The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2000), p. 409.

21. Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1999).

22. Vivienne Jabri, in Jabri and O'Gorman, note 1.23. Martha Nussbaum, "Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings,"

in Martha Nussbaum and John Glover, eds.. Women, Culture, and Development:A Study of Human Capabilities (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 62.

24. Ibid., p. 73.25. Ibid., p. 80.26. Ibid., p. 93.27. Martha Nussbaum, "Comments on Quillen's 'Feminist Theory, Jus-

tice, and the Lure of the Human,'" Signs 27, no. 1 (2001): 125.28. Ibid.29. Ibid.30. Carol Quillen, "Feminist Theory, Justice, and the Lure of the

Human," Signs27, no. 1 (2001): 98.31. Swasti Mitter, "Universalism's Struggle," Radical Philosophy 108

(July/August 2001): 42.32. Epistemic violence is a term used by Spivak in her discussion of the

consequences of imperialist practices. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ACritique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Cam-bridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 277.

33. Ibid., p. 290.34. Uma Narayan, "Undoing the 'Package Picture' of Cultures," Signs

25, no. 4 (2000): 1084.35. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1991). See also Vivienne Jabri, "Restyling the Subject of Responsi-bility in International Relations," Millennium 21, no. 3 (1998): 591-611.

36. See Seyla Behabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Post-modernism in Contemporary Ethics (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 1992).

37. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vols, 2, 3 (London: Penguin,1987, 1990).

38. Christine Sylvester, Feminist International Relations: An UnfinishedJourney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

39. Ibid., pp. 244-245.40. Ernesto Laclau, "Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality

in the Constitution of Political Logics," in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau,


and Slavqj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogueson the Left (London: Verso, 2000), p. 58.

41. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell,1997), pp. 65-66.

42. Ibid., p. 66.43. Chantal Moiiffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000),

p. 15.44. See Suzanne Bergeron, "Political Economy Discourses of Globali-

sation and Feminist Politics," Signs 26, no. 4 (2001) for an excellent dis-cussion of tbe differential impact of globalization and its implications forfeminist politics.

45. Michel Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" in Paul Rabinow, ed..The Foucault Reader {hondon: Penguin, 1984).

46. There are a number of highly significant works that may be drawnupon in this context, especially from feminist readings of internationalpolitical economy. Chandra Mohanty, for example, stresses historical mate-rialism to explore the material realities that impact upon and constrainthe lives of women and the inequalities experienced globally. See herexcellent article, "'Under Western Eyes' Revisited: Feminist Solidaritythrough Anticapitalist Struggles," Signs 28, no. 2 (2002): 499-535.

47. Laclau, note 40.48. Mohanty, note 46, draws upon the work of Angela Davis and Gina

Dent to point to the gender, race, and class basis of exploitation andoppression from the political economy of U.S. prisons to the policing ofwomen's bodies in globalized production. See Angela Davis and GinaDent, "Prison as a Border: A Conversation on Gender, Globalisation, andPunishment," Signs2(>, no. 4 (2001): 1235-1241.

49. Mouffe, note 43.50. Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, "NewLiberalSpeak: Notes on

the New Planetary Vulgate," Radical Philosophy 105 (2001): 4.

Documents

Feminist Ethics and Hegemonic Global Politics (Jabri)