On Faux Feminism and Social Hierarchy
I just received word that one of my papers has been published (open access so check it out after you read today’s Digression), “Ernest Nagel and Felix Oppenheim Respond to Leo Strauss, and the Road Not Taken,” Chapter 12 in American Philosophy and the Intellectual Migration: Pragmatism, Logical Empiricism, Phenomenology, Critical Theory (edited by Sander Verhaegh, De Gruyter).
Very regular readers know that I am an admirer of Serene Khader (CUNY), a feminist philosopher and also an important philosopher of social science. In my view she is the most important theorist of (let’s call it) ‘constrained agency’ since (say) Elster, and unusually alert to how social science works in an ‘IR’ (International Relations) environment. I suspect that her (2018) book, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic (Oxford) will increase in importance and that many people will discover belatedly that it has anticipated many (let me say this politely) journal articles that recently made a splash.
Khader’s new work (2024), Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop, is directed at a wider public. While there are some echoes with her earlier works, it’s decidedly not a popularization of her earlier works, but a free-standing argument. See her own reflection on how she sees it as a contribution to movement building at CrookedTimber (here). It’s also much more centered on the American situation than her previous work.
This last claim is not to deny all continuity between it and her previous work. I pick out two themes. First, she is very aware of and attentive to the multi-faceted ways in and conditions under which feminism (and social sciences) itself can become a tool of oppression. That is she offers many instances of feminism, when it is aggressively imposed or exported, can sometimes be itelf a “purveyor” of “gender hierarchy.” (184) That is, she is a foundational thinker to those of us who care about the inductive risk of philosophy and theorizing emancipation.
Faux Feminism is organized around a distinction between ‘choice feminism’ (or ‘freedom/neoliberal feminism’ that is the ‘white feminism’ of her title), which is her target, and ‘intersectional feminism’ which she defends. The crucial insight of her intersectional feminism (or the ‘feminism of the many’ as she also likes to call it) — and this is the second continuity theme I highlight — is that culture and traditions are capable of being enabling conditions to emancipation. Let me quote a useful passage:
There is an alternative to understanding feminism as a movement to liberate individual women from social restrictions. It is an alternative that is alive and well in the politics of feminists who think about forms of oppression besides gender. We can understand feminism as a movement against hierarchy or inequality, against the structures that subordinate women as a group. (p. 52 emphasis added)
That is, on her view “part of Western culture” sees “oneself as free of culture” (p. 101) and understands progress or liberation as expanding one’s choice-set and an agency unencumbered by tradition. As an effect, many western feminists (and non-feminists) see the “transcendence of culture” as itself a goal, and “can’t tell the difference between trying to free other women from their cultures and spreading their own.” (p. 101) There are many lovely examples that draw out both themes.
As an aside, my own view is that the tendency to see progress in terms of the transcendence of culture is itself an instance of a kind of militant republicanism that is visible in the French and Quebecois understanding of Laïcité/secularism that one can trace back to Condorcet and that was intertwined with forms of civilizational imperialism (much of it non-republican, of course) throughout the nineteenth century and as Khader’s writings show not yet left behind. As I suggest below, I do not think of the desire to transcend culture as a distinctive, liberal vice.
Be that as it may, that tradition and inherited culture are, in principle, constitutive of emancipation and agency would put Khader’s feminism in interesting company. I am thinking not just of communitarian thinkers on the Left, but also all kinds of thinkers usually presented as either ‘conservative’ or more ‘aristocratic’ liberals inspired by Montesquieu or a sociological liberalism. Khader herself does not draw the connection and I view this as a missed opportunity.
I want to close with a line of criticism which is really an invitation to feminism today (that is not wholly unconnected to the missed opportunity). Before I try to begin to articulate it, I do want to say something about genre. Faux Feminism was published by Beacon Press, which is itself a rather interesting organization.* It is very evidently not a work directed at professional academics. So, I want to be clear that my criticism is not intended as academic gatekeeping. I also want to preface my criticism by allowing that it is completely fine to write a book exposing problems without offering a solution to them. While it may seem that I am saying this, that’s not my point in what follows.
Early in the book (in the introduction), Khader writes the following:
I call the idea that feminism aims to free individual women from social expectations “the freedom myth.” It’s a myth, not so much because social expectations never harm women, but because it often masks other sources of harm, including social structures that perpetuate inequality. Feminism does not just harm women and gender-expansive people by preventing us from doing things or telling us what to do; it harms us by pushing us into inferior positions in an unjust hierarchy. Buying into the freedom myth also pushes us toward feminist strategies that do nothing about—or even worsen—white supremacy and economic injustice. (p.8)
This idea of an unjust hierarchy (and variants like “unjust social hierarchy” (p.16)) recurs throughout the book. It’s rather important to her argument because rather than focusing on “restrictions,” hierarchy allows her to pick out a class of harms and oppression(s) that are “structural” in character. (p. 48) Some of the structures Khader identifies are capitalism and colonialism, amongst others. Sometimes the nature of the injustice is fairly intuitive (e.g., the “racial hierarchy” of beauty on p. 29ff or “class hierarchy” (p. 29)), but it is not always explained why a particular hierarchy is unjust or opressive.
I don’t mean this point in a nitpicky way. That is, it is pretty clear from context when Khader, and the sources she draws on, thinks a hierarchy is oppressive (viz. “It makes perfect sense that women of color would put the concept of hierarchy back in the center of the feminist toolkit. After all, we bear the brunt of a form of oppression that is undoubtedly hierarchical: racism.” (p. 31))
In addition, by focusing on hierarchy, Khader can spot instances where a focus on freedom is, in effect, a zero-sum game of musical chairs. Some of the best material relentlessly focuses on versions of this analysis. She puts a version of the point like this at the end of the second chapter: “Once we see that fighting oppression means fighting for women as a group, and once we see that privileged women moving up in the social hierarchy often happens at the expense of other women, it becomes clear that this battle isn’t going to be fought one “boss” at a time.” (p. 76) Keep that in mind.
So, it is no surprise that Khader understands herself as articulating, “A feminism focused on fighting hierarchy… [a fight] for equality, understood as the dismantling of hierarchy, has long been central to intersectional feminist politics.” (p. 142) Passages like these suggest that for Khader ‘social hierarchy’ (a phrase repeatedly used) is itself a problem. And one may well think this also by what she says about equality and the generally favorable remarks about socialism — and the quality of sex in East Germany! — sprinkled through her argument (pp. 45-46).
But throughout the book there is also an unsteady shifting back and forth between attacking unjust hierarchy and hierarchy as such. Writing in TeenVogue, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò almost implies that a certain kind of semantic vagueness (even about being feminist or not) doesn’t matter as long as it contributes to successful, political agency:
Khader’s alternative “feminism for the many,” defined by what it does rather than what it says, means winning concrete political victories for the many working-class women of color and immigrant women who make up the majority of daycare workers, house cleaners, home health aids, and additional essential care work the world can’t do without. These workers fought successfully in New York City to access paid sick and safe leave; in Washington, DC, to overturn exclusions of domestic workers from basic labor protections; and in Philadelphia to establish a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. The teams of people fighting these fights might not all describe themselves with the same combination of political labels — not even Khader's feminism for the many — and that’s fine. What matters is what they did.
I agree that in movement building some such nuances may not matter. But even public facing feminism always has a dual character of practical and theoretical construction. So, I am not so sure. In Faux Feminism’s conclusion, Khader shifts back to a focus on unjust hierarchy:
I have spent much of this book dragging the idea of individual women dreaming big. But feminism for the many is also a call for feminism to go big. We need to work for a world without unjust hierarchy, and doing that has to mean fighting for women as a group, especially the most vulnerable among us. The ideal of opposition to gender-based oppression, and the other oppressions that intersect with it, makes clear what feminism needs to fight against….To put unjust hierarchy at the center of our thinking is at once to see what is wrong with many unfreedoms foisted on women… and to see that sometimes what we need is something other than freedom. Sometimes we need care and support. (pp. 194-195, emphasis in original)
And, the problem is that if there is such a thing as an ‘unjust hierarchy,’ this invites the question to what degree there is a permissible hierarchy, and of its nature. It does make a difference if one wants to remove unjust social hierarchy or be a (social) hierarchy abolitionist. To be sure, and this is one reason why my criticism is not academic, I don’t mean to be inviting her to offer us a theory of justice or various principles of permissible hierarchy.
And yet, if one cares about the zero-sum phenomena that Khader repeatedly focuses on, one may well wish to explore the structures that allow for win-win or non-zero-sum outcomes. I doubt the actual history of socialism is especially rich in examples that show how to do this. Despite the purported high quality East German sex-lives, the worker’s paradise saw many workers uprisings against a firmly entrenched managerial and political hierarchy. In fact, without wishing to be polemical, in my opinion socialists have a rich distrust if not contempt for liberalism’s tendency to focus on win-win political solutions.
In fact, I suspect that if the program is to dismantle “the structures that produce inequality” (193) this is not a winning formula. For, it’s not only those that benefit right now and those that falsely or not expect to benefit from the status quo that may wish to demur or work against the program, but even those that are sympathetic to the aim may well wonder if the devil one knows isn’t better than the new one and that the transition costs may be high. In fact, as Khader’s previous work has taught such implied risk-averse calculations are not just rational, but quite common to those that live under any social hierarchy.
* I quote from Wikipedia: