Mestiza autonomy as relational autonomy: Ambivalence & the social character of free will

Journal of Political Philosophy

Volumn 15, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 1-21

  Barvosa Carter, Edwina ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33846588969     PISSN: 09638016     EISSN: 14679760     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9760.2007.00249.x     Document Type: Review

References (65)

1. See for example: Jennifer Nedelsky, "Reconceiving autonomy: sources, thoughts, and possibilities," Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 1 (1989), 7-36;
2. Trudy Grovier "Self-trust, autonomy, and self esteem," Hypatia, 8 (1993), 99-120;
3. Diana Tietjens Meyers, Self, Society, and Personal Choice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989);
4. Jean Grimshaw, "Autonomy and identity in feminist thinking," Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy, ed. M. Griffiths and M. Witford (London: Macmillian, 1988), pp. 90-108;
5. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 68-88.
6. Marilyn Friedman, "Autonomy, social disruption, and women," Relational Autonomy, ed. C. Mackenzie and N. Stoljar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 35-51 at p. 41.
7. For examples of this shift see: Gerald Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 36;
8. Kenneth Baynes, "Public reason and personal autonomy," ed. D. M. Rasmussen, The Handbook of Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 243-54;
9. Joel Feinberg, "Autonomy," The Inner Citadel: Essays on Individual Autonomy, ed. John Christman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 27-53;
10. S. I. Benn, "Individuality, autonomy, and community," Community as a Social Ideal, ed. E. Kamenka (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982), pp. 191-7;
11. and John Christman, "Autonomy and personal history," Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 21 (1993), 1-24.
12. For an overview of the convergence between feminist and mainstream accounts of autonomy see Friedman's "Autonomy, social disruption," and her "Autonomy and social relationships," Feminists Rethink the Self, ed. D. Meyers (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 40-61.
13. See Mackenzie and Stoljar, Relational Autonomy; and Diana Tietjens Meyers, Being Yourself: Essays on Identity, Action, and Social Life (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).
14. See for example, Sarah Hoagland and Marilyn Frye, "Feminist philosophy," Philosophy of Meaning, Knowledge and Value in the Twentieth Century, ed. J. V. Canfield (New York: Routledge, 1997) pp. 320-5;
15. Diana Meyers, "Intersectional Identity and the authentic self?" Relational Autonomy, ed. Mackenzie and Stoljar, pp. 151-80 at 155;
16. and Amy Mullin "Selves, diverse and divided: can feminists have diversity without multiplicity?" Hypatia, 10 (1995), 1-31 at pp. 25-6.
17. I assume throughout this essay that autonomy is an achievement that agents realize to varying degrees in different social contexts. Gary Watson put this point succinctly with his statement that, "[f]ree will involves the capacity to reflect critically upon one's values according to relevant criteria of practical thought and to change one's values and action in the process. . . . So viewed, free will is not something we simply have or lack, but is an achievement, that admits of degrees," "Introduction," Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 8. Because the "relevant criteria" of practical thought can vary widely, I also assume that systematic critical thought may incorporate a full range of socially given standards and components beyond instrumental rationality. These may include affect, intuition, aesthetic judgments and different systems of value from Native American spirituality, to feminist norms, to Kantian moral imperatives.
18. Harry Frankfurt, "Identification and wholeheartedness," Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions, ed. F. Schoeman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 27-45 at 38.
19. As some feminist philosophers have pointed out, however, Frankfurt does not theorize the role of socialization in his framework of autonomy, and thereby potentially perpetuates the gender bias common to earlier accounts of autonomy; see Freidman "Autonomy, social disruption," p. 39 and n. 29. While I acknowledge this point, as I read Frankfurt's framework, he does not rule out or deny the influence of social construction on the subject. Desires that just "happen to occur" as part of our internalized worldviews may come to be there in many ways, including by the constructivist routes that Frankfurt himself does not specify or explore.
20. Frankfurt, "Identification and Wholeheartedness," p. 38.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid. While identification and wholeheartedness are necessary to autonomy for Frankfurt, he does not argue that they will necessarily eliminate core conflicts between competing desires (or that some conflicts may not be reconsidered at a later time). Those conflicts may persist, but when they erupt they are already resolved for the subject who has already decided on his position, identified with one side of a conflict and disidentified with the other, ibid., pp. 40 and 43. On this account, it is because no ambivalence remains toward his choice that the agent can be thought to be wholehearted.
23. Meyers, "Intersectional identity," p. 153; see also pp. 168-72. Meyers (pp. 154-6) also draws on the work of various other thinkers who have written on intersectionality, including María Lugones, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Kirstie McClure and Chantal Mouffe.
24. Ibid., p. 157.
25. Ibid., p. 155; see also pp. 166-7. Consequently Meyers considers, "ignorance of one's intersectional identity . . . is a major threat to nuanced social critique" and "leads to self-deception . . . corruption of principles . . . and to moral heteronomy" (p. 161).
26. Ibid., p. 170; emphasis in original.
27. Ibid., p. 157.
28. Meyers, "Personal autonomy," p. 126;
29. Self, Society, and Personal Choice, p. 76;
30. and "Intersectional identity," p. 173.
31. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: the New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). Anzaldúa's work can also be seen as part of a broad body of work by feminists of color that emphasizes the intersection of different identities and identity group-related forms of subordination within the self. Much of this work also draws a connection between those intersections and struggles for social justice.
32. For reference to this see Norma Alarcón, "The theoretical subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism," Making Face, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, ed. G. Anzaldúa (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990), pp. 356-69;
33. and María Lugones, "On the logic of pluralist feminism," Feminist Ethics, ed. C. Card (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press), pp. 35-44.
34. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, p. 63. The terms Anglo and Anglo-American are used in Anzaldúa's work and in Chicana/o Studies generally as inclusive terms that refer to mainstream Euroamerican culture as the majority culture in United States. I employ it here in that manner and use it interchangeably with the term Euroamerican.
35. The term mestiza is sometimes controversial due to its origins as a referent for "mixed-blood" biological heritage and essentialist understandings of race. While Anzaldúa does refer to "mixed- blood" frequently in Borderlands, I take her to be referring (as she later clarified) to a cultural mestizaje - a mixture of socially constructed identities formed through a confluence of lifeworlds and social relations. See for example, Borderlands, pp. 55-61, 74
36. and also Anzaldúa's clarification in Interviews/Entrevistas, ed. A. Keating (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 133, 238-41.
37. In addition, while I consider most people to have some greater or lesser diversity of social identities, I do not consider mestizaje to be a general state of being as does Jean-Luc Nancy, "Cut throat sun," An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, ed. A. Arteaga (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 113-23. Instead, like Norma Alarcón, Anzaldúa and María Lugones, I use the terms mestiza and mestizaje to refer to the quality of empirical selves in which they exhibit specific forms of cultural mixture mestizaje.
38. For Alarcón's response to Nancy, see "Conjugating subjects: The heteroglossia of essence and resistance," An Other Tongue, ed. Arteaga, pp. 26-7.
39. Ibid., p. 78.
40. María Lugones, "Playfulness, 'world-traveling', and loving perception," Hypatia, 2 (1987), 3-19;
41. see also "On Borderlands/La Frontera: An interpretive essay." Hypatia, 7 (1992), 31-7.
42. The 8th edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines to "syncretize" as "the attempt, esp. inconsistently, to unify or reconcile different schools of thought." This seems to me to be what Anzaldúa had in mind as the method by which the mestiza lives through her multiple identities.
43. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, p. 79.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., pp. 79-80, emphasis added.
46. María Lugones, "Purity, impurity, and separation," Signs, 19 (1994), 458-79 at p. 475.
47. Ibid., p. 477. bell hooks, among others, has made a similar argument regarding the creative potential of being at the margin of a social group, see "Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness," Yearning: Race Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston, M.A.: South End Press, 1990), pp. 145-53.
48. Social identities are those identities associated with one's group memberships or social roles, such as professional, ethnic or national identities. Personal identities, in contrast, are identifications that are unique to us as part of the relationships that we have to particular individuals, e.g. "daughter to Alexander" or "sister to Eileen." This distinction is commonly drawn in various areas of social psychology and particularly emphasized in social identity theory; see, John C. Turner, "Some current issues in research on social identity and self-categorization theories," Social Identity, ed. Naomi Ellemers, Russell Spears and Bertjan Doosje (New York: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 6-34.
49. I borrow the term identity schema from experimental psychologist Hazel Markus who has used it to refer to socially constructed social group identities such as gender identity. She defines an identity schema as a "structure of knowledge or systematic framework that participates in ongoing interpretive activity during information processing," or in what philosophers generally refer to as thought or cognitive reason. See Hazel Markus, et al., "Self-schemas and gender," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42 (1982), 38-50.
50. For the distinction between social and personal identities see note 27 above. The case of Patricia analyzed below indicates how social and personal identities can become intertwined.
51. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, p. 78.
52. I derive this point from Fredrik Barth's account of ethnic group formation produced through ongoing processes of claiming social boundaries and membership in social contexts. See Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1969), pp. 9-38, especially at p. 14.
53. For an extension of this approach to other types of social groups, see Anthony Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (London: Ellis Horwood/Tavistock, 1985).
54. Of course, female gender roles within Chicana/o culture are more diverse in practice than they are stereotypically drawn. While patriarchal norms have long structured Chicana gender role as home-centered, in practice poverty has often required Chicanas to engage in paid labor outside of the home as part of their care giving responsibilities. The double workday among Chicanas thus further displaced opportunities for formal education throughout the twentieth century. While these patriarchal and economic pressures still remain, Chicana gender roles have been transforming for decades to include higher education, skilled or professional labor outside the home, sexual independence and political participation. See Vicki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
55. As might be expected, during such social transformation the acceptance and practice of new norms remains uneven, see Aída Hurtado, Voicing Chicana Feminisms: Young Women Speak Out on Sexuality and Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2003).
56. Anzaldúa discusses the importance of such borrowings in Borderlands, pp. 77-87.
57. Ruiz, especially chs 2, 5-6.
58. In an essay on integrity in which she analyzes Maria Lugones's work on resistance to ethnocentrism and heterosexism, Cheshire Calhoun makes a related point. She states "[a]nyone who regards herself as an equal in autonomous judgment to others cannot be indifferent to what others think. When one's own and others' judgments come into serious conflict, ambivalence may be a way of acknowledging that equality," "Standing for something," Journal of Philosophy, 92 (1995), 235-60 at p. 241.
59. See María Lugones, "Hispaneando y lesbiando: On Sarah Hoagland's Lesbian Ethics," Hypatia, 5 (1990), 139-46.
60. Others have also suggested that the rank order of endorsements should be more flexible in structural procedural accounts of autonomy. Marilyn Friedman argued that there should be an ongoing assessment in which everyday thoughts and actions and endorsements are considered in reference to each other on an ongoing basis; "Autonomy and the split-level self," Southern Journal of Philosophy, 24 (1986), 19-35.
61. Diana Meyers makes a related suggestion that different endorsement should be considered as equally important rather than in a rank order; see "Intersectional identity," pp. 170-2.
62. This point is also drawn from the work of Fredrik Barth and Anthony Cohen on the social construction of social groups and group membership; see note 31 above.
63. Diana Meyers has made a related claim observing that those who experience multiple forms of social oppression are in some ways better positioned than those who are multiply privileged to exercise autonomy; see "Intersectional identity," p. 152.
64. While I propose mestiza autonomy as a procedural, content neutral account of autonomy, it might be compatible with weak substantive accounts of autonomy in which self-esteem is an enabling factor in autonomous thought and action such as that presented by Paul Benson, "Free agency and self-worth," Journal of Philosophy, 91 (1994), 650-68. It is difficult to imagine that Patricia could have persisted in her educational endorsements against so many obstacles without a significant degree of self-worth and self-trust, assets that she may have drawn from her relationships with own parents and/or her husband.
65. Friedman, "Autonomy and social relationships," p. 56.