Undeniable
“The irony is that many feminist theorists want to attend to the particular, to the specific situations and cases. But they also think they need to build a general theory of identity, gender, or femininity (or language, or power, or affects, or matter) to get there. Usually the purpose is to establish a complex understanding of identity, one that aims to subsume all possible kinds of identities under itself...
I am questioning the underlying picture of theory that generates...the idea that feminist theory needs a high-level, all-inclusive theory of identity before it can get going. As if feminist theory was to settle the question of (female) identity once and for all, in general in the abstract. As if the right theory could guarantee the right politics, the right feminist understanding of the specific case...As if our understanding of identity doesn’t emerge from and rely on careful attention to the particular case. As if identity is always a problem, always the problem, that must be settled before feminists can say or do anything. Why do we think that feminist politics requires a theory of identity in the first place? What notion of politics makes us think that identity, rather than action (what we are, rather than what we do) is always the key feminist problem? In short: what is the question to which identity is the answer?
I am in favor of investigating identity when it becomes a problem for us, when we experience a confusion, when our categories seem to fail in the encounter with concrete and specific identities or situations”
A feminist inspired by ordinary language philosophy would be unlikely to set out to theorize “intersectionality” or “identity” as such. Instead, she wold focus on a specific problem that troubles and confuses her, maybe my looking at some examples. The work of theory would be an effort to reach clarity - to find a clear view - of that problem...it requires the particular case.
We can’t solve political disagreements by focusing exclusively on definitions.”
- Toril Moi, “Thinking Through Examples: What Ordinary Language Philosophy Can Do for Feminist Theory”