Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

“Empowerment has, however, sometimes, been taken to mean the promotionof equality of opportunity and participation. Similarly, empowerment hasbeen used in other contexts to imply the development of individualism andthe skills required for self-assertion and advancement rather than any analysisof the roots of powerlessness and the structures of systemic oppression. 31In effect, the articulation of women and men as opposites in the consciousnessraisingworking groups implies a binary between women and men, which alsois upheld and strengthened through this mere articulation. The notion of womenas innocent victims of patriarchal structures also homogenizes women andtreats them as infallible. But the mere aim of consciousness- raising, to reachliberation from oppression or captivity, takes its departure in the idea of thesubject as “Origin, Essence and Cause”, like Althusser formulates it 32 . As such,the autonomous, self-conscious subject at the core of the ideals of theEnlightenment was the privilege of men for many years and they also werethe subjects of know ledge. Subsequently, although, feminist work made womenthe subject of know ledge, they only scantily questioned the “inherited view ofconsciousness”. 33Curiously, the idea of consciousness-raising was initially also used bymemory workers. As described by the memory work collective, they start offfrom the idea of making the process of socialization conscious, because “thismakes clear the process whereby we have absorbed existing social scientifictheories, ideologies and everyday opinions”. 34 Nevertheless, having done this,they start to question the usefulness of consciousness-raising and decide to distancethemselves from the idea of consciousness. Through the explicit urge tofind a “less predetermined way of seeing” they describe how they try to combineboth the knowledge from everyday life and scholarly, theoretical knowledge,aiming to a “displacement of the problem”. 35 Thus, even though they departfrom in the idea of consciousness, they do not find any solution to the problemin raising the individual’s consciousness. Instead, they turn to the Foucauldianidea of discourses, to investigations into the colonizing effects from “theories,explanations, value judgements” and in explorations of “colonized forms”of perception 36 in order to investigate how individuals work themselves into31Heald, 47.32Althusser quoted in Alarcón , 290, Alarcón,, 295.33Ibid, 289.34Haug, 54.35Ibid, 54.36Ibid, 55.88