Shuffling the Deck: The "Woman Card" and Material-Discursive Complexities of "Identities"

• In Event: Surviving and Countering Patriarchal Whitelash: Public Education and Resistance Research by "Nasty Women"

Abstract

Hillary Clinton, post-2016 Presidential election, named misogyny as a major contributing factor to her devastating loss, even as her fellow Democratic, Bernie Sanders, still was declaring “It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman, vote for me.’” But, as the Editors of The New Yorker (October 31, 2016) had noted in their stirring endorsement, Hillary “has been the target of twenty-five years [plus] of hatred, misogyny . . .” (p. 35).
In considering varied iterations of misogyny and “the woman card” as both played by and dealt to Hillary, I focus on interpretations offered by literary as well as academic feminists (Atwood, 2017; Bordo, 2017a; Butler, 2017; Mead, 2017) to further examine, on one hand, contingently situated needs and desires for forms of “identity politics” that enable the fight for and attainment of human rights. Most certainly, identity-based political movements continue to be impelled by deleterious effects suffered by any deemed “different,” for neither normative nor literal violences have disappeared from the streets or our schools. Such a politics thus connects, for example, to the 2018 AERA conference theme that emphasizes our roles as educators and education researchers in “the fight for public justice.”
On the other hand, the very concepts of misogyny and the “woman card” imply what many critique as essentialized assumptions about any identity category, including biology-related and binary-only versions of “woman” and “man,” for example. Assumptions of unitary “identities” seem increasingly inadequate in light of current and proliferating complexities of subjectivities, including those who refuse binary-only assumptions about gender and race, for example.
Holding in mind Butler’s (1992) contention that any named identity “designates an undesignatable field of differences, one that cannot be totalized or summarized by a descriptive identity category, [and thus] the very term becomes a site of permanent openness and resignifiability” (1992, p. 160), I also consider post-foundationally oriented research (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; MacClure, 2013; St. Pierre, 2013; St. Pierre, Jackson & Mazzei, 2016). Such work attends to poststructural theories as both challenged and expanded by perspectives (differently) offered by new materialist, post-human and affect theories that dispute reified, singular and autonomous versions of “identities” of living and non-living entities, thus potentially opening possibilities for vitally inclusive versions of “social justice” in education and its broad research arenas.
Such theories indeed question how life can be understood without privileging the sovereign category of “human,” for example, while simultaneously opposing aggressive unravellings of gains toward humane equities. I argue that education researchers might explore circulations of intensities in these unravelings wherein “identities” become embodied engagements with materialities of research data (Taguchi, 2013) as part of the fight against the appearance of new planes of discrimination and their destructive consequences. By specifically considering Hillary’s defeat in relation to complicatings of unitary implications of misogyny and “the woman card,” I thus also shuffle that deck of cards and all that it represents by refusing its assumptions that deal out “meanings,” and instead envision it as proliferating material-discursive co-constitutive complexities.

Author

• Janet L. Miller, Teachers College, Columbia University