Teaching Subjectivity. Travelling Selves for Feminist ... - MailChimp

LEAVING HOME? THE ‘WORLDS’ OF KNOWLEDGE,
LOVE AND POWER
Eva Skærbæk (Østfold University College)
In the 1970s, feminists in the United States and in many Western countries
argued that ’the personal is the political’. The point being that relations of
power within families should be a matter of public concern, because these
relationships form a crucial part of how power is socially created, distributed,
maintained and changed. To neglect or forget the interdependency of the
personal and the political, as has been the case since the 1970s, leaves a gap
between life practices and theories, between us and them, a gap that tends to
reproduce the old subject/object dichotomy. To amend this, the Norwegian
social anthropologist Marianne Gullestad suggests extending political theory
to include the analyses of everyday life practises as a source of central values and
as a metaphorical-experiential grounding for political meaning making and
identity construction. It does not suffice to look to everyday life practises or
to political and public documents. The essential point is to trace connections
between arenas and domains that are normally conceived as separate in popular
understandings as well as in scholarly work; a task that necessitates bringing
together very different sorts of empirical material. 1
With her book Lily’s History of Denmark (2007), Pia Fris Laneth, a
Danish political scientist, has demonstrated one way of doing it. By following
her own family of four generations of working-class women, Laneth tells
her-story covering 150 years of Danish history. To read this, her story linking
private stories with the situation in civil society when striving with the same
theme, made a great impression on me. Perhaps this was due to the fact that
both of us became the first academics in our family, although the author is ten
years younger than me and from another class. Laneth not only succeeded in
reviving the link between the personal and the political, she has also found a
language with which to bridge these areas.
Both Gullestad and Laneth underline the important argument of Donna
Haraway that the only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular.
2 Feminists start, as Lorraine Code says, from a realisation that epistemolo-
1
Marianne Gullestad, Plausibel Prejudices (Oslo: Scandinavian University press, 2006), 120 - 125.
2
Donna Haraway, “The Persistence of Vision. An Excerpt of Situated Knowledges,” in Writings on the Body (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1997)
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