richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

88 Gramsci is Deadquestion of whether it is theoretically justifiable and politicallyeffective to seek the emancipation of some generalized entity called‘woman’ (Nicholson 1989; Benhabib 1995). I will discuss some ofthe details of these debates in Chapter 6. For now, I want only topoint out that postmodern feminism has arrived at a very interestingpoint in the critique of the quest for recognition by asking whetherit is possible to imagine a politics that seeks ‘neither to liberate afemale subject nor to secure certain fundamental rights for her’ (Elam1994: 77).A very similar path has been followed by the gay and lesbianliberation movements, which began as liberal quests for acceptanceand recognition guided by the metaphor of ‘coming out of the closet’.If only gay men and lesbian women could be treated the same asstraight men and women, the argument ran, then the inequalitiesassociated with sexual orientation would diminish or cease to exist.But the queer critique of relations between hetero- and homosexualityhas pointed out how these two discourses are mutually dependentupon one another. Just as hetero requires homo in order to knowwhat it is (not), homo demands hetero as its other. Thus Judith Butlerargues that ‘the affirmation of homosexuality is itself an extensionof a homophobic discourse’ (1993a: 308). Rather than claiming oursexuality, she argues, it might be more effective to disclaim it, torefuse to answer the question about what we do with our bodiesin order to achieve pleasure: ‘I come out only to produce a newand different closet’ (309). Butler notes, of course, that disclaimingnon-heterosexual identities may appear to be just what the forcesof neoconservatism would like to see. But disclaiming is not thesame as silence. By coming out into an open field, rather than intoa hierarchical structure of fixed identities, she suggests that it ispossible to undermine the coercive regulation of sexuality as such.This observation can easily be extended to other identities, whichonce again brings us up against the limits of the politics of demand/recognition/integration.TOWARDS A POLITICS OF THE ACTAs ‘pragmatic’ as it may be, and despite its successes during the heydayof the welfare state in a few countries, the politics of demand is bynecessity limited in scope: it can change the content of structuresof domination and exploitation, but it cannot change their form.As Laclau points out, without a hegemonic centre articulated with