'Woman' thus becomes an 'identity' solely constituted through the 'injury' of male sexual power

(Sex-Positive Femme Identity | B&L After Ships In The Night Queer Dance Party, SF)

Feminism and Ressentiment

According to Brown, politicized identity, including feminism, displays many of the 'attributes of…. ressentiment' (1995: 27): the tendency on the part of the powerless to reproach power with moral arguments rather than to seek out power for itself. The turn to Nietzsche accounts for Brown's use of terms like 'pain' and 'injury' to indicate the effects of marginalisation and subordination. Nietzsche postulates that the cause of ressentiment is 'suffering': this suffering causes the individual to look for a sight of blame for the hurt, as well as to revenge itself upon the 'hurter'. Brown describes the 'politics of ressentiment' as follows:

Developing a righteous critique of power from the perspective of the injured, it ['the politics of ressentiment'] delimits a specific site of blame for suffering by constituting sovereign subjects and events as responsible for the "injury" of social subordination. It fixes the identity of the injured and the injuring as social positions, and codifies as well the meanings of their actions against all possibilities of indeterminacy, ambiguity, and struggle for resignification or repositioning…the effort to "outlaw" social injury powerfully legitimizes law and the state as appropriate protectors against injury and casts injured individuals as needing such protection by such protectors (1995: 27).

Ressentiment's investment in powerlessness means that it prefers moral posturing over political argument:

His [Nietzsche's] thought is useful in understanding the source and consequences of a contemporary tendency to moralize in the place of political argument, and to understand the codification of injury and powerlessness… that this kind of moralizing politics entails (Brown 1995: 27).

Brown's opposition between 'morals' and 'politics' seems at first difficult to accept, especially for feminists. What are we to base our politics on, after all, if not some notion of what is right, what is just, what is good, for women — all moral notions? However, in encouraging politics rather than morality, Brown does not suggest that we get rid of, or can do without, the 'right', the 'just' and the 'good'. What she does say is that ideas of what is right, just, or good that are based on moral notions of what we think we are lead to a politics of ressentiment, of 'reproach, rancor, moralism and guilt' (1995: 26). She argues that we need to develop new spaces in which to decide politically, collectively, what is good, just and right, derived not from identity-based notions of 'who I am' but from a new ethics of 'what I want for us' (1995:75).

The tendency to turn towards the state for protection, rather than questioning state power to regulate and discipline, is one that Brown sees as especially problematic for feminism. She notes women have particular cause for greeting such politics with caution. Historically, the argument that women require protection by and from men has been critical in legitimating women's exclusion from some spheres of human endeavor and confinement within others. Operating simultaneously to link "femininity" to privileged races and classes… protection codes are also markers and vehicles of such divisions among women. Protection codes are thus key technologies in regulating privileged women as well as intensifying the vulnerability and degradation of those on the unprotected side of the constructed divide between light and dark, wives and prostitutes, good girls and bad ones (1995: 165).

The notion of 'injured identities' offers a provocative way to begin to examine how and why CATW feminists are positioning the 'trafficking victim' in their discourse. Brown's examination of the historical formation of late modern politicized identities places the problematic of 'logics of pain in the subject formation processes'(1995: 55) central. This has immediate resonance: CATW's campaign against trafficking in women constantly reiterates the literal, physical pain undergone by 'third world prostitute' bodies. If 'politicized identity's investment… in its own history of suffering' (Brown 1995: 55) is a constituent element of late modern subject formation, this may help explain why CATW and Barry rely so heavily on the 'suffering' of third world trafficking victims in their discourses of women's subjugation. It also raises questions about CATW's efforts to seek protection for trafficking victims through 'protective' legislation.

via walnet.org

Jasper Gregory