Definition and Significance of Representation - Essay Example

Definition and Significance of Representation: Post-Feminism and Terrorism Representation is mainly important for discursive practices because of its capacity to provide meaning and delimit and explain their field. Two discourses, post-feminism and terrorism, provide a useful discussion of the process and importance of representation; hence this essay answers the question, what is representation and why does it matter, with reference to post-feminism and terrorism. Post-feminism is a concept which originally became widely known in the early 1980s to explain the array of various, at times contradictory, theories and discourses that emerged after the 1960s and 1970s, the period of second-wave feminism. Although second-wave feminism was focused on themes of legal equality like voting rights, several feminists stressed that it also has a tendency to view women as an oppressed, victimised, and identical group that had almost no agency. On the other hand, national security discourse, as a tradition of governance, represents terrorism. This is representation in terms of terrorism. As a representation, terrorism is explored within a particular discourse that guarantees that the state is made totally inclusive, evident, and appreciated. National security discourse comprises and represents the creation of an advantaged area where the state provides terrorism meaning. Post-Feminism Within the postfeminist perspective, women are viewed as belonging from different economic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. Moreover, postfeminists recognise female agency, instead of seeing women as submissive, unquestioning receivers of patriarchal traditions and systems. Several advocates of post-feminism have explored why several women accept the objectives of feminism yet do not regard themselves as feminists; others have studied criticism of feminism or investigated social practices such as creation and use of pornography from the point of view of post-feminism. A major component of post-feminist discourse is the exploration of how gender inequality remains existent in more restrained, complicated or mediated forms. Possibly one of the most debated arguments of post-feminism is the notion that feminism is now obsolete as numerous of the issues it campaigned for have been attained and that other concerns, like economic disparity, are of relevance. A global neoliberal treatise of post-feminism, as explained by Lazar (2005), is “once certain indicators (such as rights to educational access, labour force participation, property ownership, and abortion and fertility) are achieved by women, feminism is considered to have outlived its purpose and ceases to be of relevance”. Hence several contemporary feminists have discarded the concept of post-feminism, thinking that it does not precisely represent their objectives and instead adopt the concept of ‘third-wave feminism’ to identify their position. Post-feminism widely includes a group of beliefs, broadly communicated or distributed in common media forms, largely related to the ‘pastness’ of feminism. Essentially for many, post-feminism indicates a more complicated connection between feminism, politics, and culture than the more popular framing idea of ‘backlash’ permits. What seems unique about contemporary post-feminism is exactly the level to which a discerningly identified feminism has been quite openly ‘taken into account’, as emphasised by Angela McRobbie, though in order “to emphasise that it is no longer needed.” In numerous instances, post-feminism is an outcome of the belief that the efforts of second-wave feminism to represent women as a huge population eventually disregarded a large number of women. This belief marked a vital development in feminists’ knowledge of activism and patriarchy. In acknowledging the multiplicity of the nature, definition, and implication of being a ‘woman’, efforts were initiated to acknowledge women formerly excluded by the majority, mainly white, bourgeois feminism. This paved the way to the realisation that resistance to patriarchy should also be examined, and that in the end, there is no single general definition of feminism. Nevertheless, this assumption was broadened, and for certain people it meant that, since every woman views domination and patriarchy from her own biases or beliefs, no form of feminism can feasibly represent women. Instead of acknowledging the diverse experiences of women with domination as a necessity to re-evaluate the complexities of patriarchal control, several instead understood this as a necessity to turn down the concept of a ‘universal patriarchy’ completely. As stated by McRobbie regarding the flourishing of post-feminism: Back in the early 1990s and following Butler, I saw this sense of contestation on the part of young women, and what I would call their “distance from feminism” as one of potential, where a lively dialogue about how feminism might develop would commence… It seems now, over a decade later, that this space of “distance from feminism” and those utterances of forceful non-identity with feminism have consolidated into something closer to repudiation rather than ambivalence… This is the cultural space of post-feminism. Such development in theory and discourse, where the necessity to reassess patriarchy has been supplanted by the requirement reassess the significance or applicability of feminism, has been established by the media. Such denunciation of ‘universal patriarchy’ is established by means of two coinciding representations: (1) the old-fashioned 1960s’ feminism, and (2) elitist image of women’s liberation and empowerment. Feminism is largely shown in the media as a “movement devoid of currency and at the same time responsible for the sad plight of millions of unhappy and unsatisfied women who, thinking they could have it all, have clearly ‘gone too far’ and jeopardised their chances at achieving the much valorised American Dream”. By means of indirect discursive changes in embodying the experiences and lives of women, post-feminism representations turn the responsibility for gender inequality from social, political, and economic institutions to feminists’ denunciation of such institutions, arguing that although several of the consequent social changes have benefitted women, insisting to keep or accept them endangers the struggle. Hence, post-feminism, as explained by Oullette (2002), is accepted “as a flexible subject position for a new era in which the women’s movement is presumed successful, but feminism is ‘other’ and even threatening to contemporary femininity.” As attested by the post-feminist description: In the beginning our newly awakened anger and astonishment at the realities of our own oppression caused us to take positions that were extreme. We went too far; either becoming ‘like men’ in our quest for acceptance or finding ourselves doing double duty at home and at work… But as the popular historians would have it now, we have emerged from the dark, angry nights of early women’s liberation into the bright dawn of a Postfeminist era The context of post-feminism unfolds to take in not only—as the concept describes—a semantic and conceptual connection with feminism but also links with other political, theoretical, cultural, and social domains—like neoliberal perspective, popular media, and consumer culture—that could be at odds with feminism. Therefore, post-feminism is not the wrongful outcome of— or even a replacement for—feminism; its beginnings are much more diverse and even inconsistent, dealing with the ironies of the late 20th- and early 21st-century context wherein feminist issues have moved into the dominant discourse and are communicated in politically conflicting manners. Some scholars tried to situate post-feminism in context so as to limit a post-feminist setting comprised of a range of links and relationships in political, academic, cultural, and social domains. In such settings, post-feminism obtains varied and at times conflicting meanings, such as the fact that it is frequently presumed that post-feminism as an explanatory mainstream perspective is theoretically lower than and more traditional than conceptual forms related to a postmodern critique of identity politics. As claimed by Genz, “this distinction signals an unwillingness to engage with postfeminist plurality and is viable only as a disclaimer to ensure that post-feminism remains easily categorised and contained in well-defined boxes.” The idea that post-feminism cannot be delineated in this manner and explained with a definite sense of conclusiveness and validity reflects its ‘intercontextuality’ and ‘interdiscursivity’, which unavoidably adopt the pattern of boundary-crossing. A helpful definition has been provided by Patricia Mann by describing post-feminism as a ‘frontier discourse’ that “bring[s] us to the edge of what we know, and encourages us to go beyond”: “Postfeminism is a cultural frontier resulting from the breakdown of previous social organising structures that continue to exist only in various states of disarray.” As argued by Mann, adopting a post-feminist stance is a perilous, uncertain act that tries to cover the evolving nature of our political, cultural, and social lives within the perspective of the broader mechanism of women’s empowerment. Post-feminism is eventually viewed as a ‘fertile site of risk’ that goes beyond the boundaries of feminist spectators and recognises a “bricolage of competing and conflicting forms of agency and ‘multiple subject positions”. Although post-feminism became represented as a discursive process and cultural occurrence in the latter part of the 20th century, it is fascinating to say that its earliest mention occurred much earlier, at the advent of the century, when the suffrage movement won the right to vote for women. As described in 1987 by Nancy Cott: Already in 1919 a group of female literary radicals in Greenwich Village… had founded a new journal on the thinking, ‘we’re interested in people now—not in men and women.’ They declared that moral, social, economic, and political standards should not have anything to do with sex’, promised to be ‘pro-woman without being anti-man’, and called their stance ‘postfeminist’. Such early reference to post-feminism was rooted in the perceived accomplishments of the ‘first wave’ of feminism that concluded with the suffrage movement for women, by which the ‘post’ is interpreted in transformative ways as an evolution of feminist arguments. Finally, such representations are vital to the appeal of post-feminism. It is simpler to argue that feminism has become antiquated and is not applicable anymore by limitedly concentrating on women who, by prevailing norms, have in fact flourished in a patriarchal culture. Such implies that the fact that these women are not reflective of the broader society, and did not, in any way, liberated themselves from the gender-based limitations that still control society in general is insignificant; it is the ‘presence’ or ‘image’ of equality that is essential. Vavrus (2000) called this the ‘feminist fallacy’—the belief that the image of women in media contents—as well as politically powerful women—transforms into “cultural visibility and institutional empowerment.” It is by means of these thoroughly chosen representations of the universal equality of women that the ‘feminist fallacy’ is counteracted and women not anymore situated in the fringes of society is associated with women not anymore being excluded or marginalised. Ultimately, it would seem that postfeminist representations have made the establishment of dominant gender ideals that much simpler for a group of women who are, according to Ouellette (2002), “often quite supportive of feminist principles having to do with educational and professional equality but are unwilling to give up the pleasures, expectations, and promised rewards of participating in the beauty culture promoted by [the media]”. Terrorism Terrorism is given meaning in a mechanism that justifies or validates power relations and establishes statist goals— defence of protected peoples, economies, and borders. Such statist goals are established in emphasising the frightening feature of terrorism as a direct attack against the state’s power. In establishing statist goals, power is exercised as a process that comprises, validates, creates, and re-creates a set of processes and knowledge to guarantee that specific methods of reactions to terrorism are predetermined and applied. As terrorism is transformed in order to comply with the ‘reality’ of the discourse, it shifts towards concepts of neutrality in the state’s effort to make neutral that which is not. At this point, the notion of ‘imaginative enactments’ by Michael Shapiro demonstrates how the meanings created are “not simply acts of pure, disembodied consciousness; they are historically developed practices that reside in the very style in which statements are made, of the grammatical, rhetorical, and narrative structures”. In view of the construction of security, within the political realm, terrorism is involved as a totally perceived risk created by the state. Due to the completely perceived risks to security, the question to answer is how ‘securityism’ can legitimise and establish its power over and supervision of collective imagination and memory. The danger of terrorism is raised in the mind of the public and dealt with as a conclusive risk to the security of the nation. National security discourse is employed to deal with terrorism both as a notion and an action as it examines and constructs the manner within which terrorism is established, objectified, and used as a target of security. The state uses its authority through the control and handling of reality as vital components of its validity. National security discourse constructs the social and political existence of the state with regard to ‘us’ and ‘them’, or ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion—a categorisation of right and wrong, of good and evil. Within this mechanism, terrorism is rooted in a theocratic interpretation that demonstrates the processes of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion. As explained by Connolly (1989): The invention of terrorism to characterise non-state violence by those closed out of the system of states runs roughly parallel to the Christian definitions of polytheism, idolatry and sacrifice in the sixteenth century, for both justify ruthlessness against the other by concealing points of similarity between the other and itself, and both deploy this ruthlessness (or its rhetoric) to ward off signs that the system has begun to comprise its own preconditions of stability. Polytheism becomes a monstrous evil because Christianity insists upon the true universality of monotheism in a world in which it is not universal in actuality. Terrorism becomes a monstrous evil—an evil more monstrous than state-centred violence—because it threatens to expose self-subverting characteristics in the global system unless it itself is defined to be the monstrous source of this subversion. An examination of the clash between the ‘us’ and ‘them’ results in a dialogue about the five elements of terrorism by explaining how the terrorist (actor) and terrorism (act) contribute to the framing of national security discourse; the state sees terrorism as a wrongful, criminal act that endangers national security. Terrorism is transformed into reality as the meaning underlying it is “attenuated perforce by our power to represent it for our purposes.” The terrorist turns out to be the major component as they exercise violence in terrorism to identify “the possible measure of justified existence and necessary malice”. The presence of numerous definitions to identify terrorism by the state suggests the difficulty of the problems in determining the actor and the act of terrorism and emphasises the state’s measured attempts to regulate definitions of terrorism by omitting specific features and exchanges for the benefit of others. Differences in definitions stress the reality that terrorism is a much debated occurrence. The saying “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” reflects the difficulty or intricacy of terrorism when understood within historical and socio-political settings. The state has problems in the use of definitions due to the fact that terrorism is “possessed of a dual specificity: on the one hand, it necessarily associates ideology with practice, and its self-image with the bearing of arms; on the other, it is perpetrated by groups which are always relatively external to the movement of which it is an inverted image”. Such twofold particularity of terrorism—the connection to ideology and its realisation by outside organisations—pushes the state to maintain the flexibility and malleability of the definitions of terrorism. Terrorism’s ideology and exteriority provide it with unpredictability and unpredictability for the state which permits manifold definitions to form a space that shifts based on the flexibility of terrorism. Such flexibility of meaning and act strengthens the capacity of the state to react and regulate various occurrences as it incorporates them into the terrorism theme. Within the Foucauldian perspective, it is through the presence of differences in definitions that terrorism by no means creates an ultimate understandable appearance for the people to understand. Definitional differences overpower the complex groups that turn to aggression for political causes. The manifold appearances as symbolic indicators become unreadable to the people, supplanted by the discourse of terror. National security discourse uses a structure of methods and interpretation to form a definition and associated a meaning with terrorism that puts it into a security framework. It is through such incorporation that terrorism becomes meaningful for the nation’s security. Security is devoid of meaning in itself, according to Krause and Williams; for meaning to exist, “security presupposes something to be secured”. Hence, security is constructed as a defence for the presence of the state. The state continuously constructs and re-constructs reads and rereads the structures and objects of terrorism so as to create meaning and generate a necessity for the continuous application of a new discourse to face and fight terrorism. The state is constantly involved in the practice of handling problems to guarantee its continued existence. Terrorism is hence objectified within the state’s construction. The giving of meanings preserves relations of powers by regulating the referential aspect. Discourses fulfil its “ideological role by explicitly referring to one thing and implicitly referring to another, by entangling these multiple referents in a way which serves to sustain domination”. The mainstream discourse on terrorism is one that views the state as the dominant authority, as it delineates the domain by which one can tackle terrorism. Terrorism is represented as a danger to the state, a danger to its people, a danger to the economic bases of global resources, and a danger to the identity of the state as a justifiable and ‘moral’ body. The expression of a moral danger enables security to implant itself into the mentality of the people where terrorism is portrayed as a looming, worldwide threat. Such threat, expressed as a danger against ‘us’, is rooted in who ‘we’ are and what ‘we’ represent as a political body. Moral power enables the mainstream discourses of security to be voluntarily or willingly embraced by the people of the state. The War on Terror, which is likened to the post-Civil War setting to lynchings, demonstrates an interconnection of sexual, gender, and racial fears represented in Christian position. The reality that the terrorists are eager to sacrifice their lives for the sake of religious conviction by itself throws a considerably disappointing attack to white Christian disembodiment. As divulged by the reports of Iraqis of being coerced to give up their religion while held captive at Abu Ghraib, the claim of Christian hegemony works as a demoralising inquiring method. Religious terror is obviously active at this point. As argued by Hazel Carby, the documented lynchings of African Americans and those of the tortured Iraqis at Abu Ghraib show similarities in terms of historical context. The occurrence at Abu Ghraib appears to characterise a primeval resurrection of racial lynching during the post-Civil War period. Such frightening likelihood compels one to reclaim both groups of photographs from the national memory and to place them on a spectacle with the goal of determining the institutional processes which result in brutalising and demoralising aggression. Working alongside religious intimidation is the conversion of white racial identity—the concept of being ‘white’ cannot be ignored anymore as a universal classification or advantaged position. As demonstrated by Howard Winant: The dissolution of the transparent racial identity of the formerly dominant group, that is to say, the advancing racialization of whites in Europe and the United States, must also be recognised as proceeding from the increasingly globalised dimensions of race. As previous assumptions erode, White identity loses its transparency, the easy elision with ‘racelessness’ that accompanies racial domination. Whiteness becomes a matter of anxiety and concern. Although the process of ‘racialising’ whites across the globe undermines dominant identity, the progress of homosexuality and femininity in the public domain additionally endanger masculinity. Such risk to tradition is quite observable in the military. As assumed by Holly Allen from congressional meetings over the recent decades, the intense disagreement about the disclosure of women, gays, and lesbians has exposed the fact that political and military officers are worried about the “compromise [of] American national values, particularly the nation’s commitment to heterosexuality and traditional gender roles;” they contest or oppose as well the possible philosophical transition “from being a testing ground for transcendent national citizenship into just another ‘government-sponsored jobs program,’ since neither women nor homosexuals possess the traits to become exemplary soldiers,” including the risk to the male friendly, nonsexual relationship needed for the military “to function as the embodiment of U.S. national community”. The typical male-controlled venture sees the intrusion of women and homosexuals as endangering its symbolic representation, for the “embodiment of U.S. national community” paradoxically requires the reduction of any individual with a body. Conclusions Representation, as exemplified by post-feminism and terrorism, is an instrument within which power, knowledge, and language overlap or interconnect as component of the discursive processes that validate the state. Principles introduced by Shapiro, Derrida, Foucault, and Saussure provide a basis for the arguments of post-feminism and terrorism. Representation operates within and by means of language to form and organise the framework within which meanings and concepts are used, created, and established. Representations of post-feminism and terrorism are constructions with unique features comprising institutions and processes that generate knowledge assertions that the dominant entity or power relations believe is valuable. Post-feminism and terrorism discourses fulfil a role—it actualises objects by recognising them, delineating their domain, and explaining them. Works Cited Carby, Hazel. A Strange and Bitter Crop: The Spectacle of Torture. Open Democracy. Web, 11 October 2004. Web. 19 Aug. 2014. < https://www.opendemocracy.net/media-abu_ghraib/article_2149.jsp>. Read More