Choice
At first glance, the propsition dubbed "choice feminism" sounds like a great idea: when discussing privileged women who have the choice between working and staying at home, who besides Linda Hirshman wants to condemn those who choose to stay home? My mother stayed home with me, after all, and friends of mine, people I love and whose choices I respect, stay home with their children. And yet, if it's really equally okay to choose to stay home, why do so few men choose it?
To me (and to some extent, it seems, to Hirshman), the difficulty with the idea of choice feminism rests in the concept of choice. It seems clear that in a hypothetical world free of social pressures and conditioning where women were actually presented with a number of equally acceptable choices, there would be no need for the choice feminist approach because it would be absolutely fine for a man or woman to choose to stay at home, and it seems equally clear that we don't live in that world.
I like to think of myself as someone who is reasonably self-aware, and yet I can think of dozens of messages about gender that I've internalized. How many more must there be that I haven't even noticed yet, just sitting there in my subconscious, shaping my self-conception, my politics, and all of the dozens of decisions I make every day? To the extent that this is true, every decision that I make is partly coerced; that is, part of how I think about my choices is controlled by external forces, and no matter how much I struggle to examine my desires and perceptions, I don't know that it's likely that I'll ever succeed in removing all of that control.
So here is my question: given that we live in a world with social pressures and norms, with still-strong gender ideology and conditioning, what does it mean to choose? Can I choose to fill a traditional gender role in a way that isn't buying into some kind of discriminatory essentialism? Can I choose not to fill a traditional gender role freely, rather than as a reaction to ever-present expectations? Or better yet, to frame the question positively, how can each of us exercise the maximum freedom and individual agency in terms of our choices while living in a culture where not all choices are equal ones?
To me (and to some extent, it seems, to Hirshman), the difficulty with the idea of choice feminism rests in the concept of choice. It seems clear that in a hypothetical world free of social pressures and conditioning where women were actually presented with a number of equally acceptable choices, there would be no need for the choice feminist approach because it would be absolutely fine for a man or woman to choose to stay at home, and it seems equally clear that we don't live in that world.
I like to think of myself as someone who is reasonably self-aware, and yet I can think of dozens of messages about gender that I've internalized. How many more must there be that I haven't even noticed yet, just sitting there in my subconscious, shaping my self-conception, my politics, and all of the dozens of decisions I make every day? To the extent that this is true, every decision that I make is partly coerced; that is, part of how I think about my choices is controlled by external forces, and no matter how much I struggle to examine my desires and perceptions, I don't know that it's likely that I'll ever succeed in removing all of that control.
So here is my question: given that we live in a world with social pressures and norms, with still-strong gender ideology and conditioning, what does it mean to choose? Can I choose to fill a traditional gender role in a way that isn't buying into some kind of discriminatory essentialism? Can I choose not to fill a traditional gender role freely, rather than as a reaction to ever-present expectations? Or better yet, to frame the question positively, how can each of us exercise the maximum freedom and individual agency in terms of our choices while living in a culture where not all choices are equal ones?
posted by Sarah at 6:56 AM
3 comments
