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Boundaries and Silences in a Post-Feminist Sociology

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 2000 by Penny Edgell Becker

Penny Edgell Becker [*]

GROWING UP POST-FEMINIST

My encounter with sociology in general and the sociology of religion in particular began in college. In the 1980s, in that part of the Princeton sociology department that I experienced directly, feminism was taken for granted in a way that 1 encountered as positive. The push for more adequate categories of analysis that capture the gendered nature of social life, including religious groups and experiences, was part of the discourse of lectures and small-group discussions. Functionalism, with its easy assumption that current social arrangements make a larger whole that is if not "right" at least inevitable, had been replaced by a conflict view of society, sensitive to power imbalances, multiple perspectives, and opposing interests (Collins 1975).

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And then I went to graduate school. The University of Chicago in the late 1980s and early 1990s was characterized by several inter-woven strands of post-feminism. (A few of my friends insisted it was still pre-feminist, having been skipped over by the revolution.) Post-feminism is also a way of taking feminism for granted. But instead of asking feminist questions as a matter of course, post-feminism incorporates some of the insights about social life and power arrangements of feminist discourse without making them an explicit focus of analysis and debate. My encounter with post-feminism was less uniformly positive.

One strand of post-feminism is the idea that feminism as a social movement, having pushed us towards a more egalitarian society (which is self-evidently a good thing, and for which we are all of course grateful), is now essentially over, and the radicalism associated with it has been appropriately replaced by approaches to gender that seek consensus and value men's experiences. (We've grown; Deepak Chopra meet Robert Bly.) In learning how to do fieldwork, my insistence that gender be brought centrally into the account as a social location which constructs more than one "insider's view" was met with a reply of, "Isn't that just good fieldwork? Taking into account multiple points of view?" along with the assurance that, "Men have gender, too." In quantitative analysis, the equivalent was including sex as a standard variable in statistical analyses.

Another kind of post-feminism involved a building on and extending of the insights of an earlier generation of second-wave feminists. I remember Martin Riesebrodt's (1993) analysis of patriarchy as a personalistic system of power that constructs male-to-male, adult-to-child, and private-to-public status relations as well as those between men and women. And at a gender and society workshop I was pushed, for the first time, to go beyond the assumptions of a white, liberal, middle-class feminism to think more critically about other relationships of power.

However, I also remember classmates hostile to critiques of religious institutions as fundamentally patriarchal, who insisted that by making that critique I was devaluing women's own lived experiences of religion as meaningful. We had a hard time talking. They were drawing upon a neo-liberal view of agency, similar to that found in the work of people like Gary Becker and compatible with Coleman's view of the social actor, [1] which made no room for agency as socially constructed in a way that is simultaneously enabling and constraining. By definition, women participate in religious institutions because they want to do so, because their needs are met; criticizing these choices seems at best patronizing and at worst undemocratic. While I do believe we are all in one sense agents, I do not share the view of agency upon which they were basing their either/or dichotomy [2] (agents in this neo-liberal tradition either striding through history unencumbered or else being unjustly oppressed by any form of constraint -- including the critiques of liberal feminist academics). In my "agency is more complicated than that" argument, they read a straightforward hegemony theory which was not there, thinking that I meant women suffered from some pernicious form of "false consciousness." We talked past each other, in part because I did not yet have the theoretical tools to make my case clearly.

In this kind of environment, post-feminism confronts the young feminist as something of a briar patch to be negotiated with care. How can one object to fieldwork practices that are more sensitive to point-of-view, to insiders and outsiders-within, without sounding churlish? Or object to including a variable for sex (plus interaction terms) in statistical models? These are not bad things to do, surely. They only frustrated me because I encountered them as boundaries; doing these things, it was implied, one could not reasonably be expected to go further or do more.

With a few exceptions, it was generally difficult to talk about how our theoretical apparatus might itself privilege a masculine -- or masculinist -- point of view, in an atmosphere where even James Coleman [3] could say to me, a first-year student, at a Friday post-colloquium reception, "I think all the interesting things have been written about gender, don't you? I mean, it's not really worth while spending time on gender as an entire category of analysis, there's nothing theoretically interesting there, don't you agree?" And it was hard to talk with other feminists who were only too ready to assume that anyone in the avowedly positivist sociology department must be tone-deaf to their concerns, if not downright hostile. My defense of some forms of positivism, along with my relatively feminine presentation of self (complete with jewelry and lipstick), did not allay their concerns.

Boundaries and Silences in a Post-Feminist Sociology

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 2000 by Penny Edgell Becker

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