Jackson, Stevi, Professor

By Stine Adrian on 28 Aug | 0 comments

Stevi Jackson is Professor and Director of Centre for Women's Studies at University of York, UK.

GEXCEL PROJECT
Materialist Feminism, the Pragmatist Self and Global Late Modernity

For some time I have been arguing that a materialist feminist approach to gender, sexuality and heterosexuality has to take account not only of structural inequalities, but also everyday practices, meaning and self/subjectivity. In this paper I will focus on the self, developing the argument that the pragmatist thought of G. H. Mead might provide a way forward.
This tradition has had little influence among feminists, despite the historical association between pragmatism and first wave feminism in the USA. Here I argue that Mead’s conception of the self as process and his emphasis on its sociality, temporality and reflexivity might be fruitful for feminist analysis.

Reflexive self-hood is associated in recent theory with late-modern, individualised projects of the self (e.g. Giddens). This over-emphasis on individualisation has been contested by a number of feminists, particularly in relation to its alleged impact on intimate relationships (e.g. Jamieson, Smart). A return to Mead’s insistence on the sociality of the self offers us critical purchase on these debates and potential insights into constructions of gendered and sexual self-hood in late modernity, linking the self to social practice and the actualities of everyday life.

In focusing attention on the social conditions of and for reflexivity it might also help in critiquing the universalising ethnocentrism of theories of late modernity. Western societies no longer have a monopoly on modernity – the different modernities that have emerged in East Asia, for example, call into question western assumptions about the “essential” characteristics of the modern self. Drawing on scholarship from and about East Asia I will suggest that locating the reflexive self in social context enables us to consider constructions of self beyond western society and western conceptions of modernity, while also subjecting western assumptions to critical scrutiny.