In
his recent essay in Radical Philosophy, mark Neocleous argues that the
ideal of “resilience” has replaced the ideal of “security,” both as a structure
of individual subjectivity and a principle of social/national policy.[i]
Briefly, he defines resilience as “the capacity of a system to return to a
previous state, to recover from a shock, or to bounce back after a crisis or
trauma.” Resilience is an ethical and
political ideal, a sort of transformation of Nietzsche’s “what doesn’t kill me
makes me stronger” into a universalizable maxim (yep, a categorical
imperative): “you ought to be stronger.” Strength, here, is figured as flexibility
rather than rigidity; instead of preventing bad things from happening, you are
optimally prepared to meet any and all challenges. Resilience is the ability to
recover from disaster, to turn, as Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel would say, a
crisis into an opportunity. So, as an ethical imperative, resilience might look
something like this: you will always be threatened with death, and you ought to
overcome the threat in a way that does not deplete your resources, but in fact
grows them—you ought to become stronger.
“Resilience,”
he argues, “connects the emotional management of personal problems with the
wider security agenda and the logic of accumulation during a period of crisis.”
To illustrate this connection, Neocleous uses the example of a “young
woman…dominated by an overpowering and angry bully of a man” thinks resilience
is the “solution to her problem.” Neocleous’s choice of example tells us
something about the gender politics of resilience. While anyone can be the
victim of domestic abuse, patriarchy makes domestic abuse a problem that
disproportionately affects women (indeed, gender norms contributed to her
economic situation—it is conventional that women follow their male partners’
careers, and she “moved in with him to land a job in his town”). As feminists
have long argued, these “private” struggles are thoroughly enmeshed with
broader, “public” systems of privilege, like patriarchy. Neoclaus assumes as
much, and uses this one woman’s experience as a microcosm of the macrocosmic
phenomenon he analyzes in the essay: “the only thing a sad, lonely, and
oppressed young woman thinks might help her turns out to be the very same thing
being taught by the world’s largest military power,” and this commonality
“takes us from mundane tips about how to live well to the world of national security,
emergency planning and capital accumulation.”
Why
is it that the clearest hinge between subjectivity and the social manifests in
a woman’s gendered experience as a woman? Why is women’s emotional
management of their feminized problems as
women the ideal example of the logic and practice of resilience?
Changes
in properly feminine subjectivity (which means, privileged feminine ideals)
reflect not only this shift from security-thinking to resilience-thinking, but
also from classical white supremacist patriarchy to multi-racial white
supremacist patriarchy.
Resilience and overcoming
Traditionally,
ideal (by which I mean: white, bourgeois, able-bodied, cisgendered) femininity
required the performance of fragility. As Iris Marion Young puts it in her
famous “Throwing Like a Girl” essay, normative femininity trains women to:
approach
a physical engagement with things with timidity, uncertainty, and hesitancy.
Typically, we lack an entire trust in our bodies to carry us to our aims. There
is, I suggest, a double hesitation here. On the one hand, we often lack
confidence that we have the capacity to do what must be done… The other side of this tentativeness
is, I suggest, a fear of getting hurt, which is greater in women than in men.
Our attention is often divided between the aim to be realized in motion and the
body that must accomplish it, while at the same time saving itself from harm. We often experience our bodies as a fragile
encumbrance, rather than the medium for the enactment of our aims. We feel
as though we must have our attention directed upon our bodies to make sure they
are doing what we wish them to do, rather than paying attention to what we want
to do through our bodies. (TLGOE 34).
As Young argues,
traditionally feminine body comportment is tied to traditionally feminine
structures of subjectivity: women are fragile, and thus both (a) incapable of realizing
intentions in action, and (b) in need of support and therapeutic
control/discipline (to “make sure they”—both women and feminine bodies—“are
doing what we wish them to do”). Feminine subjectivity and corporeality needs
therapeutic monitoring and control to keep its fragility in check.
Neoliberalism replaces fragility
with a new ideal. As Neocleous puts it, “rather than speak of fragility and its
(negative) connotations, we should be speaking of resilience and its (positive)
connotations.” In post-feminist society, feminine identity and corporeality
shouldn’t be a drag, because we’ve solved patriarchy, right? Nowadays, ideally
feminine subjects are asked to overcome precisely this traditional logic of
femininity: they must overcome the fragility we tell them they’ve learned to
embody and to believe. Ideally feminine subjects ought exibit a different
relationship to their bodies than the one Young outlines in her essay. As
Autumn Whitefield-Madrano puts it, ideally feminine subjectivity involves “problematizing
something essentially human—cognizance of our own bodies—and framing it as
something that we must overcome… We’ve turned our relationship with our bodies
into a therapeutic narrative.” The therapy here is not disciplinary control,
but entrepreneurial overcoming—i.e., resilience. Ideally feminine subjects must
turn their gendered damage into human capital (whose surplus value is exploitable
by them, but ultimately by “us,” by hegemony). Whitefield-Madrano evocatively
and provocatively shows how feminine body comportment, especially one’s relationship
to one’s “body image," takes the form of a therapeutic narrative of
resilience.
Key to the therapeutic narrative are four things: 1) a
once-whole, once-healthy self that was damaged by 2) a negative incident or
pattern that incites a protective formula, which 3) leads to suffering—but
luckily we have 4) self-awareness, the key to returning to one’s natural state of pure
psychological health through a full understanding of one’s “damage.” Enter the inordinate focus on
women’s bodies and its adherence to the therapeutic narrative: the
once-innocent girl, the incident of damage, the bodily self-loathing, and, by
the time the tale is told, self-acceptance.
Feminine subjects
still ought to feel their bodies as encumbrances, but this encumbrance is the
very medium for transcendence—it does not prevent you from doing, but provides
you the very materials with which you can do something. You have to be damaged
and/or have damage in order to have something to overcome. Post-feminism recognizes that women are
damaged by sexism; they just have to turn this damage into human capital. Sexism, then, is not a bug but a feature.
Without misogynist feminine body ideals, what would women have to overcome?
Because it’s not the sexism that needs collective overcoming, but individual
women that need to be “resilient” in the face of unavoidable, persistent sexism.
This is not about overcoming patriarchy, but about extracting even more surplus
value from it by allowing individual women to capitalize on the damage it does
to them.
Though Neocleous rightly identifies resilience as a general phenomenon, I think it is especially suited to "different" subjects--feminine, queer, non-white, disabled, etc.--the very subjects whose conditional, incomplete inclusion in multi-racial white supremacist patriarchy or homonationalism or whatever you want to call neoliberal hegemony distinguishes "us" from the more "primitive" Others (like "Muslims," "rednecks," etc.).
“Look, I Overcame!”
I
call this feminine resilience the “Look, I Overcame!” narrative for a number of
reasons. (1) it resonates with Frantz Fanon’s account of mid-20th
century colonial racism in Black Skin White Masks. His famous “Fact of
Blackness” chapter centers on his racial interpellation by the phrase “Look, a
Negro!” To be “a Negro” is to be objectified by the white supremacist gaze—it
fixes him as an object, rather than an ambiguous transcendence. The LIO
narrative differs from Fanon’s account in the same way it differs from Young’s:
the gaze does not objectify, but activate. (2) As in Fanon’s “Look, a Negro!”
narrative, the “Look, I Overcame!” is a technology of power that requires
visibility: it is not just enough that one overcome—there is also an imperative
to overcome in a visible or otherwise legible and consumable manner. Both the
looking and the overcoming are necessary.
Overcoming must be visible because
in the same way that individual feminine subjects use their resilience as proof
of their own ideal feminine and ethical subjectivity, hegemony uses the
resilience of its best women as proof of the
ideally ethical and just character of its own social/political practices. Feminine resilience is profitable for women at
the micro-level because it is ultimately profitable for multi-racial white
supremacist patriarchy on a number of fronts. For example, the “resilience” of
“our” women is often contrasted with the supposed “fragility” of Third-World
women of color. Or, the resilience of some African-American women (their
bootstraps-style class ascendance) is contrasted to the continued fragility of
other African-American women (and thus used to reinforce class distinctions
among blacks.) If the classic
virgin/whore dichotomy used proper and improper femininity to mark differences
between white and non-white women, the resilience/LIO narrative re-cuts the
virgin/whore dichotomy to function in multi-racial white supremacy. As
Neocleous argues,
Good subjects will ‘survive and thrive in any
situation’, they will ‘achieve balance’ across the several insecure and
part-time jobs they have, ‘overcome life’s hurdles’ such as facing retirement
without a pension to speak of, and just ‘bounce back’ from whatever life
throws, whether it be cuts to benefits, wage freezes or global economic
meltdown…
“Good girls” are resilient,
whereas “bad girls,” insufficiently feminine subjects, continue to be fragile
and in need of rescue and/or protection. If women of color are resilient
enough, they are included within multi-racial white supremacist privilege; if
they are insufficiently resilient, they are further marginialized as women of
color. (Think, for example, of the way formerly negative stereotypes about
African American women are being revalued—their independence, toughness,
fierceness, when combined with appropriate class/gender/sexual privilege, is
not a negative, masculinizing thing, but a distinctive and valued feature of
their black femininity. So, you have artists like Ne-Yo (Ms. Independent) and
Webbie’s “I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T” positively valuing black women’s resilience in
a very explicit way.) In multi-racial white supremacy, resilience cuts the
color line.
One last, somewhat tangential remark. Resilience is such
an ethical ideal, such incontrovertible evidence of a subject’s “goodness,”
that we are shocked, I say, shocked, when a bona-fide overcomer behaves
in morally unpraiseworthy ways. The public response to the Oscar Pistorious
murder charges shows just how much credence we give resilience as an index of
moral character. Up until early 2013, Pistorious was the quintessential example
of resilience & overcoming. He is a double-amputee who competes with
able-bodied runners in the “un-special” Olympics. He “overcame” his disability
to beat many, many able-bodied runners and compete in an elite event (even if
he didn’t win it, he was still among the world’s running elite). So, when he is
charged with murdering his girlfriend in a pretty violent, non-self-defense and
non-accidental way, we are shocked that he behaved in a non-morally-ideal way.
We are shocked that his overcoming/resilience is not in fact evidence of
his morally praiseworthy character.
thanks for share..
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