Power in Knowledge as Feminists’ Core Resistance in Transforming Structural Gender Inequalities
This essay is submitted as a final exam assignment on gender and politics class.
In addition to the material and concrete manifestations of gender inequality, feminists also emphasize the contestation of power in knowledge. Why is knowledge important in feminist resistance? How is knowledge used in transforming structural inequalities in gender relations?
This writing will use a poststructuralist approach to feminism in explaining how knowledge, and the contestation of power in its discourse, becomes important in the feminist resistance and how it is then used to transform structural inequality in gender relations. Poststructuralist feminism can be explained as a mode of knowledge production that uses poststructural theories of language in which subjectivity, social processes, and social institutions are used to understand existing power relations and to identify spaces and strategies for development (Weedon, 1987, in Gavey, 1989). When it comes to comprehending knowledge, poststructuralists reject the possibility of absolute truth and objectivity. Through feminists observation, the current dominant conceptions of what deemed as reality and truth tend to be constructed through male experiences, which reflect and perpetuate male power and interests–resulting in a world that is structurally, inherently, patriarchal. In this approach, experience is understood as ‘having no inherent essential meaning, and in so far as it is meaningful experience is constituted in language,’ in the sense that it does exist and is important, but that the ways in which we understand and express said experiences are never independent of language (Weedon, 1987, quoted in Gavey, 1989). Emphasizing the role of language in creating discourse and eventually producing knowledge deemed as reality and truth became fundamental when it comes to the deconstruction phase in attempting reversal of the hierarchical relationship between men and women (Derrida, quoted in Culler, 1982). For poststructuralist feminists, the goals of scholarship and developing knowledge would include understandings or theories that are historically, socially, and culturally specific, and that are explicitly related to changing oppressive gender relations. Rather than “discovering” reality, “revealing” truth, or “uncovering” the facts, feminist poststructuralism would, instead, be concerned with disrupting and displacing dominant (oppressive) knowledge (Gavey, 1989).
Foucault’s conception of power knowledge relation could also help comprehend the contestation of power within knowledge as a manifestation of gender inequality. Foucault understands that essentially, every society has a ‘regime of truth’, a general politics of truth, which can be interpreted as a discourse that is accepted and used as a basis for functioning as truth. A mechanism that allows one to distinguish between right and wrong based on the discourse. This regime of truth is produced through scientific discourse, is perpetuated by institutions, and is continuously enforced and redefined through the education system, the role of the media, and the turmoil of economic and political ideologies. Thus, the contestation of which knowledge is agreed upon as a regime of truth is not a search for absolute truth, but a contestation over the rules that separate right from wrong, and there is a certain power effect attached to what is believed to be true–a contestation of truth and role in political and economic settings (in Rabinow, 2009).
In a nutshell, knowledge became a fundamental part in feminist resistance because in it relies power itself. How a gender and their attributes is defined and given meaning to create a regime of truth that then defines what they are, their characteristics, their abilities and limitations, positions in social standing, how they should be treated, and all that there is to them–the ultimate power itself. All these are embodied in discourses made of words and languages that translate into actions. Discourse which is understood as a set of beliefs about the existence of our reality becomes crucial when it is interpreted as something that is not only produced in institutions, but is also constitutive of the continuity of these institutions. It is from the discourse that power relations can be formed in institutions which are manifested in the oppression of those who have power over their subordinates. Political visibility which is needed in order to address women struggles in realities based on women experiences needs a language that is able to represent women against the backdrop of the pervasive cultural condition in which women’s lives were either misrepresented or not represented at all (Butler, 1990).
The terms women, the construction of gender and sex, as well as the meaning of the relationship between femininity and masculinity, to their meaning in language are themes that continue to ignite and become the natural fuel for questioning meaning through post-structuralist feminist discourse. For example, in the discussion of how identification of gender and what does femininity means. Does it means the absence of masculinity as stated by Beauvoir, or if what is actually meant as gender only qualifies femininity because masculinity is actually normality itself, how then is the relation in the binary depiction of the conception of sex and gender as Wittig elaborates? (in Butler, 1990). In the notion that the working field is essentially the realm of men and that women belong in the house, is it then just to treat the capacity of working, labor, and productivity coming from men as deemed more valuable and thus the labor attributed to women are valued less? As we see embodied in the state of gender pay gap and the dismissal of housework as work?
Institutions and the discourses within the larger society itself, becomes the pinnacle goal of what poststructuralist feminists meant by constantly reshaping and questioning what considered as ‘truths’ and tackling the structural gender inequalities. Beyond mainstreaming marginalized discourse, knowledge constructed by continuously asking, redefining, and challenging structures into accommodating more and more of what it means to be women became the backbone of any hope of structural change. Structural gender-transformative changes do not happen overnight as it is beyond a specific set of activities implemented at a certain time, rather it is a cumulative result of actions and processes. It requires collective actions in creating changes at multiple levels–within individual selves, within households, within societies, and for it to be eventually institutionalized. These actions should also be long-term, sustainable, and high in endurance as the process of disrupting the unfair normatives will be met with backlash and resistance from the comfortably benefitted by the gender-oppressive system. It is a slow and complex process that needs to be nurtured carefully over time (Skakun et. al, 2021).
An attempt to elaborate how discourses are grown from dissemination of knowledge constructed from feminists and women experience in general is used in transforming structural change in gender relations will be made through an analysis regarding the discourse of rape, sexual violences, and how institutions such as media and (ironically) law enforcements critically lacks of gender and victim’s perspective, a close and familiar narrative for us here following the rising conversations regarding the emergency state of sexual violence in Indonesia. The notion that sex drive is a primal, natural attribute to this creature called men, combined with the power relation that advantages them through a patriarchal set of norms has then demean women merely as sexual satisfactory object. From there, stems out myriad of heartbreaking women experience, blamed for being victims of sexual violence as rape culture is normalized, tucked away in a corner as a marginalized discourse as women’s experience lost the contestation of knowledge. For years on end, women are told they have to do a lot of things just to not get sexually harassed or assaulted by being a woman–told to cover up, to not wear attention-drawing accessories and makeup, to not walk alone or go out at night, to carry protective weapons or take a self defense class, to not take public transport, et cetera–because if a woman happens to get harassed or assaulted, it is their fault for not behaving accordingly and failing to protect themselves instead of that it is the perpretator’s fault for harassing, assaulting, raping, and/or committing other acts of violences.
Holding perpetrators accountable for sexual violence became an unnecessarily complex struggle as the words and experiences of women are considered second class to men. Media coverage perpetuates victim blaming culture by using soften vocabularies for the acts done on victims instead of the actual word of ‘rape’, insinuates characters of victims as ‘naughty’ or ‘seductive’ to deem them as failing to behave accordingly, put social settings on headlines that implies the violence happens in place for no goods, even selling detailed, bombastified, chronology for clickbaiting purposes. Similar notion also appears when it comes to victims seeking justice through law enforcement institutions. Victims are questioned on things such as the clothes they wore, the reason they did not escape or express blatant rejection when assaulted, examined for things that may provoke or upset the perpetrators for such an act to happen to them–all aside from them being a woman and the perpetrators’ intent and action of wrongdoings. Questions and elaboration such as why only women are told that their safety is their own accountability and that men are discounted of said accountability because they are helpless against temptation, dissemination of knowledge regarding the concept of consent (and the power relations that produced forced consent), and other acts to voice out rejection towards the normativity of rape culture became the frontline of feminists resistance towards sexual violence as an embodiment of structural inequalities in gender relations. These discourses on women’s knowledge and experiences will need to happen and transform not only within the realm of individual or communal, but should be embraced, internalized, and integrated into institutions such as governments, media, education bodies, and law enforcements, in order to challenge the current knowledge production and construction of truths that perpetuate the imbalance of power within the gender relations.
REFERENCES
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble. Routledge.
Gavey, N. (1989). Feminist poststructuralism and discourse analysis: Contributions to feminist
psychology. Psychology of women quarterly, 13(4), 459–475.
Rabinow, P. (2009). Foucault’s untimely struggle: Toward a form of spirituality. Theory, Culture
& Society, 26(6), 25–44.
Skakun, Z., Smyth, I., & Minne, V. (2021). Transforming gender inequalities: Practical guidance
for achieving gender transformation in resilient development.
