The politics of understanding

Amy Cowan

London School of Film, Media and Design

Supervisors:

Professor Helen Hester

London School of Film, Media and Design

Dr Matilde Nardelli

London School of Film, Media, and Design

This poster will aim to demonstrate the split within left wing feminism that results in two incompatible political strategies aiming at the same goal. In demonstrating this, two of my research questions will be answered: the first concerning the application of theory to practice under poststructuralism and the second concerning the application of identity politics for intersectionality. This will be done through analysing the differing views of political language and understanding.

I will start by summarising the debate between Judith Butler and Martha Nussbaum on the importance of clarity within feminist politics. This will lead to a discussion on the link between intelligibility and understanding, arguing that we should move away from discussing political language in terms of clarity, but instead, intelligibility. I will then frame the debate in terms of intelligibility and analyse either side. As an egalitarian movement, feminism ought to be intelligible in order to preserve accessibility for those who need it the most; in doing so, this preserves intersectionality. On the other hand, intelligible political language is understandable precisely because it operates in line with the status quo. Therefore, in order to meaningfully criticise power structures, which remains central to the feminist struggle, intelligible language ought to be avoided in favour of an avant-garde political strategy e.g. gender performativity. This leads to a normative slippage rather than more radical change possible under marxist movements.

I will conclude that it is impossible to form political movements which rely on unintelligible language even if, philosophically speaking, we should be concerned that intelligibility serves a hegemonic function. In practice, this provides the theory necessary to support the development of a new political strategy which remains intelligible whilst being critical of language as a foundation of political movements. Subsequent chapters of my thesis will develop this new political strategy.