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Perspectives Against Interests: Sketch of a Feminist Political
Theory of “Women”
Laurel Weldon, Purdue University
doi:10.1017/S1743923X11000171
Do women share interests? Seeking interests that women share is
theoretically problematic and politically undesirable for feminists. Efforts
to redefine interests as subjective, contingent and/or context sensitive are
unsatisfying for those who want to link women’s representation to the
fact of their oppression, exploitation, and discrimination. Fortunately, we
need not posit shared interests to make strong claims about the
importance of women’s representation. Nor do we need such a concept
to explain why women work together across significant institutional
barriers and social differences. Overlapping, entwined sets of global and
local social structures define “women” as a social collectivity. Women in
diverse organizational, social, and national contexts organize to alter this
complex configuration, forging relations of solidarity and shared
identities in the process. But this is not reducible to shared interests.
Moreover, focusing on things that women have in common deemphasizes
issues that mainly confront marginalized groups of women
and/or that are group or context specific but critical to achieving gender
justice. Fortunately, feminist theorists have identified bases for political
representation and mobilization that offer more useful accounts of social
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group politics (e.g., Mansbridge 1995; Mohanty 2003; Young 1997, 2000;).
The idea of social perspective is one such concept.
Problems with the Idea of Women’s Interests
Feminist theorists no longer emphasize women’s shared identities or
interests for several reasons. To begin with, ignoring differing sexualities
among women implicitly privileges heterosexist, binary notions of
gender, erasing alternative sexual experiences (Butler 1990; Epstein and
Straub 1995). The claim to universality also obscures the experiences of
women of color (Collins 1990; hooks 2000), and reproduces a colonial
stance towards Third World women (Mohanty 2003; Narayan 1997).
The problem is not that women never share any interests. Rather, the
search for, and emphasis on, universal concerns privileges heterosexual,
middle-class, and otherwise advantaged groups of women. The problem
is both political and analytical: As Burns puts it, “We will get the story
wrong if we focus on the things all women or all men share” (2007,
104). Indeed, most feminist theorists shy away from claims of common
interests and identities, focusing instead on gender as an analytic
category, process, or social structure.
Defining interests (unitary or diverse) as wholly objectively given is also
problematic. Often, such interests seem to diverge from women’s expressed
interests. Democratic theorists have generally been uncomfortable with
suggesting that people are ignorant of what is best for them (Vickers
2006).1 On the other hand, merely accepting expressed preferences as
interests raises problems of its own: Women’s expressed interests vary
across groups and over time (O’Brien 2004). The information people
receive may be systematically distorted or manipulated, and they may be
socialized to accept ideas that go against their interests. This may be
mitigated when oppressed groups self-organize (Lukes 2005; Morris and
Braine 2001; Vickers 2006). But even self-organized groups of women
express varying preferences over time and across groups, and some
women’s groups oppose feminist policies.
Women’s preferences, mobilization in social movements, and political
solidarity are importantly influenced by ideas and identities, not just
interests (Mansbridge 1995; McBride and Mazur 2010). Feminists seek
to oppose oppression in its many and varied forms, not just to advance
women’s interests (hooks 1990; Mohanty 2003). Feminists want “justice
1. See also Diamond and Hartsock (1981) and Sapiro (1981) on objective and subjective interests.
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for women and everyone” rather than “more goodies for me.” The concept
of “women” must capture the important role of ideational, normative
phenomena and link it to the social structures that organize power in its
diverse forms. We need an account of the social category “women” that
can account for both the impressive political solidarity of women and
the deep conflicts of interest among women. The concept of women’s
interests cannot do these things.
So Why Are We Still Talking about Women’s Interests?
Even for those who recognize the problematic nature of the idea of
women’s interests, the concern persists that if women do not share
interests, then we cannot speak of representing women, evaluate their
representation, or treat “women” as a significant political grouping. As
Vickers (2006) puts it: “Where women do not articulate a common voice
. . . democracies cannot be deepened by the feminist project” (p. 9), and
“Being able to assert what are ‘women’s’ best interests in a particular
context enables contestation when men are making laws and allocations
or formulating policies based on their images of what is good for ‘the
universal woman’ (p. 17). But we do not need to claim that women
share interests to show that particular policies or practices disadvantage
or favor particular groups.
Some scholars have tried to reconstitute the idea of women’s common
interests as a sort of contextual, politically pragmatic claim, based on
empirical analysis: We could speak of women’s common (but not
universal) interests where such interests could be demonstrated (Vickers
2006). In order to avoid attributing interests to women based on expert
opinion, we should look to women’s own expression of these interests in
contexts where they self-organize. This approach leaves many troubling
questions unanswered, however: What do we make of women who fail to
identify with each other at one point in time, who nevertheless forge
strong bonds of solidarity and agree on a political agenda at a later time,
as happened in the global women’s movement? Does this common
interest suddenly emerge? Nor does this approach solve the political
problem: Women need to speak with a common voice, not only where
we have common interests, but especially in those instances when we
have conflicting interests, when the interests of marginalized groups of
women are most likely to be overlooked.
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Women’s Perspective as a Basis for Political Solidarity and Analysis of
Representation
Analytically, a better way of linking women’s social position to women’s
movements, and to evaluate women’s substantive political
representation, is to focus on women’s perspective (Young 1997, 2000).
While women have divergent experiences, identities, and interests, they
are designated as a social collective, or series, by social institutions, by
social practice, by what Sartre calls practico-inert structures. Constituting
this sort of social collective, or series, does not require shared
experience; it means that some external object, practice, or process links
the members of the collectivity. This link may constitute a trivial aspect
of their consciousness or subjectivity, but it is a social fact. Bus riders,
for example, are objectively linked by virtue of waiting for the same bus,
and this makes them a sort of social collective, a series (Young 1997).
This does not mean that the riders have the same experiences or
interests, but they are part of the operation of a larger system, which
designates and defines a category to which they belong. Their
subjectively reported experience helps us to understand the actual
operation of the bus route.
In order to understand broader processes of social organization, we need
to map the connections across groups, as well as understand the many
different ways that members of a series subjectively experience belonging
to the group. Greater diversity in the individual and group subjectivities
that are mapped provides more information about how a social structure
operates. Any particular organized group of women will always be partial
in relation to the series. But every woman has some information about
the operation of social structures in her personal experience. This
element of personal experience may not be salient; it may be in the
background. When women organize as women, however, their
membership in the broader series is foregrounded, made visible.
Deliberation among women is a particularly powerful tool for generating
knowledge of social structure. Such groups of women have more
information about the broader series than do individuals, and more
diverse groups offer more insight.
Where members of such a series freely organize to seek to change the
reality they face, then, they generate social knowledge. The issues they
discuss reflect the social landscape they see. This set of issues comprises
the perspective of the series (Young 2000). Substantive representation of
women is accomplished when these issues are accorded weight in
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democratic deliberations or policymaking processes. Perspective is a plural
concept: A group perspective is comprised of the perspectives of subgroups.
We can tell which groups of women are substantively represented by
examining whether their priorities are given weight and attention.
This account, then, sees women as a special kind of social collective
called a series. Each series is associated with a social perspective. This
idea of perspective allows us to recognize, for example, that we are all
connected as women by the way gendered norms about responsibility for
children combine with international economic processes that create
significant inequalities, and even relations of exploitation, among
women. This connection can ground a shared commitment to address
these inequalities, but it does not suggest a common interest. Indeed,
developing a shared program to address such issues requires women to
overcome serious conflicts of interest. Neither the connection nor the
conflicts are determinative of political action; but organizing and
developing better ideas can produce a solidarity that builds on this
connection (Mohanty 2003).
The idea of women as a series with a social perspective explains why
there is the potential for global organizing without positing common
interests among women. Although there is the potential to create
political solidarity among women by virtue of their membership in the
series, there is not necessarily a shared interest or identity. This explains
why in the initial phases of women’s global organizing, women activists
were unable to come together around a common agenda, as they were
divided by region, religion, sexuality, race, and other political categories
(Weldon 2006). In spite of these divisions, women were able to generate
solidarity by identifying a set of priorities they shared. It is important to
recognize that this was not a process through which common interests
were revealed. It was a process of building solidarity by recognizing
diversity among women and developing new ideas (e.g., a broadened
concept of violence against women) that better captured the experiences
of the world’s women. And the women in these movements who pushed
for reproductive freedom, for equality in family law, or to end violence
against women did so not necessarily because it was in their own
interest but, rather, because it reflected their shared commitment to
gender justice.
Laurel Weldon is Professor of Political Science, Purdue University, West
Lafayette, IN: weldons@purdue.edu
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