FEMINISM, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND IDENTITY POLITICS: AN INTERVIEW WITH JANE FLAX.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Grant, Megan
• Date: 01 January 1997

MJP: Where did you do your undergraduate study and your dissertation:?

Jane Flax: I did my undergraduate study at Berkeley, I graduated in 1969. Then I went to Yale and did my graduate work. I got my PhD in 1974 Both degrees were in political science.

MJP: Was your early research in mainstream political science?

Jane Flax: No, I always did political theory, that was my great love. When I lived at Berkeley I was very fortunate because there were wonderful political theorists who were there at the time. When I was at Yale, I also did political theory and philosophy. My interests have always tended more towards the philosophic and I actually wrote my dissertation on the relationship between politics and knowledge. And that was before I'd even read Foucault. I've had a pretty constant set of interests, I would say, since I was in graduate school.

MJP: Don't you wish you had have got in before Foucault; "I was before Foucault"?

Jane Flax: Foucault was way ahead of me, I'm afraid. The only book of his I had read at the time was The Archeology of Knowledge. It wasn't until later, probably until 1982 or 1983, that I really started reading him seriously. I was certainly interested in psychoanalysis early on because I did my dissertation on the critical theorists - Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse - so that I got into psychoanalysis because I wanted to try to understand what they were doing. You can't really do that unless you know a lot about psychoanalysis. So that was sort of my route into studying Freud.

MJP: The issues that you have written about appear to be very much a continuation of that ...

Jane Flax: Yes, it is really. I think even in undergraduate school I was very interested in philosophies of knowledge. When I was in graduate school I continued to be interested in philosophies of knowledge and I was always interested in relationships of power, too. When I was in graduate school the women's movement started up again and that was a very strong reason for pursuing that. So I got interested in gender, although I didn't really write about that in my dissertation.

After I got my dissertation I started writing about gender issues. So my interests in knowledge and subjectivity and power have been really long-standing issues. I just seem to explore them in a variety of ways, but they were certainly the three central issues that I worked with.

MJP: There is also a major concern in your work with the difficulty of finding perspectives for theory and practice. This is noticeable particularly in relation to feminism ...

Jane Flax: Yes, yes. This is one of the reasons that I have a lot of empathy for Foucault. I think that it's very easy to become a prisoner of a certain kind of theory, and then it actually blocks you from thinking. And you become so invested in the theory that the theory comes up like a blender where everything gets processed through, no matter what. I have a very restless mind in that way. What I usually do is try to get very much inside a theory and work with it in a very empathic way. But then I begin to see its intrinsic difficulty and I need some other way to think, and so I take up some other theory. I look at theories more as tools, as ways of helping me to formulate questions or think about issues, not as things in themselves that you want to be committed to.

MJP: How do you situate yourself in relation to the current conflict in feminist theory with the issue of "identity politics"? Do have a need to situate yourself within this debate?

Jane Flax: Yes. I've written a lot about this issue and I have a lot of trouble with identity politics for a number of reasons. One is, of course, I think identity is so complicated and multiply determined that I think that it's hard to figure out any kind of straightforward identity to begin with. I think that it's a great mistake to think that having some sort of solid identity gives you any kind of stable place to operate from. I think that it's really tied up in a paradoxical way in liberal philosophy; to think that you have to have some kind of homogenous identity to be able to make any kind of political demand. It seems to me that that's really a continuation of the Kantian idea, that in order to be a political person and make ethical demands ... that there has to be this kind of clear universal place that one speaks from and for.

I think that people who are involved in identity politics take on a lot of these assumptions without really thinking about them. Especially in the States - I guess in other places too it's highly problematic, because of issues of race, and intersections of race and gender, and sexuality and gender. It seems very difficult to operate from identity politics without being involved in processes of exclusion or getting oneself locked into one position that really pushes out other aspects of oneself. So I see these kinds of politics as open to `being highly self-defeating, and it makes it very difficult to see oneself in relationship to others. It doesn't lead to very good politics in terms of building alliances on particular issues, which seems to me to be important to the kind of politics that we can have now.

And identity politics leads to this process of conceptualising oneself as the victim which seems highly self-defeating. My approach has always been to sort of explode these kind of identities rather than really fixate on them. So my own politics are quite different from people who want to, for example, argue that there's a kind of women's position or standpoint that can constitute feminism

MJP: Are there any feminist theories that you currently feel have tried to overcome that? What are you currently excited by in relation to feminist theories?

Jane Flax: What I'm most excited by in feminist theory are really the writings of women who are trying to think through the intersections of race and gender. For example, Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, where she talks about the centrality of race and gender for constructing an idea of Americanness. I really like her work. There has just been an explosion of writing by women of colour in the States; like Patricia Williams or Kimberley Krinshaw. Most of what I've been reading in the last three or four years has to do with a whole group of people involved in "critical race theory" who are trying to think about race as a social construction; opposing ideas about race which have to do with geography or biology. That's the kind of work that's most exciting to me.

MJP: Is there a form of identity politics in "critical race theory"? Is there an essentialism of the racial position?

Jane Flax: That's what the critical race people are trying to work against. They're trying to work against black nationalism or Afrocentrism, or the idea of racial identity as being somehow the essence of one or being determinative in some simple way. They are trying to talk about both; how gender always plays to race, and that you can't talk about one without the other. They try to talk about a genealogy of race. So they look at how concepts of race change historically and what functions race serves in areas that don't really seem race related. For example, the normative ideas of citizenship and how they are both deeply raced and gendered. And so it's very different from a kind of identity politics ... they try to explode the normal categories altogether.

There's a brilliant book by Paul Gilroy called The Black Atlantic; he's an English black person. He argues that instead of thinking about the binary of Africa and Europe we need to have a whole different metaphor - which he calls the Black Atlantic - based on the idea of these ships going between Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, the United States. He says that we need to think in terms of metaphors of passages and intermingling as opposed to two opposite and contradictory identifies. It's really a wonderful book. He and others, write critiques of those who always seem to end up, sometimes even despite themselves, with a very essentialised view of race. He talks about how you might use that strategically for different purposes; but not as something that you take as being a stable "non-historically constructed" effort. So a lot of what I have been reading in the last few years, has to do with ways of thinking about race.

MJP: Are there now or could there ever be gender neutral methods of research?

Jane Flax: Well, I don't see how there could be gender neutral approaches to research as long as people are constituted through gender. As long as gender operates to construct such activity, there can't be gender neutral modes of research.

I think that one of the things that is so important about feminist theory is that it explores the ways in which gender plays through whole areas of life that we think of not being related to gender. One of those is certainly the ways that we construct philosophies of the mind or philosophies of knowledge. If you think, for example, of the model mind in research, it's this kind of disembodied mind. You can see that a concept like the disembodied mind is very heavily gender determined. One of the ways gender works is that you can project embodiment on to women so that they become the carriers of the body - You can then have this concept of a universal mind that's free from the effects of the body.

MJP: Are you saying that "the mind" is necessarily male?

Jane Flax: Well, it is of course presented as a universal mind, but in fact only men can have it. I mean, you can see this for example in Kant, who argues that women are too bound up in their bodies to be able to engage in abstract thinking. In "What is called Enlightenment?" he talks about how we live our early life in this kind of cow-like existence, which is the world of the family. Boys need tutors who gradually enable them to leave their family, and this cow-like existence, and go on to be rational subjects in the world. But that women - women are this kind of...