Dr Shona Hunter: Feminist Psychosocial Imaginings: Politics, possibility and desire

Date: 17 February 2010, 16:00h
Location: Beech Grove House

Gender Studies Seminar Series

Title: Feminist Psychosocial Imaginings: Politics, possibility and desire, Dr Shona Hunter, RCUK Fellow in the Machinery of Governance, Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds

In line with authors such as Chantal Mouffe (Mouffe, 2000; 2005) this paper begins by positing ‘impossible governance’ as the paradox at the heart of contemporary liberal democratic ethico-politics (Rose, 1999); the illusion that inequality can be eradicated by the state. It situates the current UK New Labour governments’ social investment aspirations, with its twin aims to improve social and psychological wellbeing and to achieve economic opportunity and security, as an example of this core paradox. In particular it outlines how developments in mainstreaming equalities policies in health, education and social care constitute attempts at ‘emotion governance’. But the paper critiques the mismatch between policy aspiration and effect. The central problematic in this ‘emotion governance’ New Labour style, is that it continues to develop equalities policy instruments which assume a direct and uncomplicated relationship between identity and action. Thus, in practice it ignores what I call the relational dimension which connects, but also complicates the relations between identity and action.

In contrast a feminist psychosocial way of thinking draws on anti-rationalist critique from across feminism, psychology and cultural studies to understand the everyday conflicts, inconsistencies, ambivalences and contradictions of governance as these are lived through, reproduced by and resignifying broader social relations. It relies on multidimensional theorising which prioritises the intersections of bodies, emotions, identities, cultures and institutions. It moves beyond feminist work around multiple intersecting relations of power to theorise intersections between the psychological and the social but also those between the natural, material and symbolic. The first question for this paper is how does a feminist psychosocial way of thinking enable us to intervene/understand/think through resolve this paradox?

The paper argues that these interdisciplinary engagements with anti-rationalist theory raise a number of important ontological and epistemological questions for social policy analysis which mean revising ‘what’ we understand by governance and politics. Governance is not an abstract activity removed from the everyday social relations of gender, ‘race’/ethnicity, generation, ability, sexuality occurring in particular bounded locations. It is continually enacted, re-enacted through the intersection of a range of social relations, constituted across multiple interconnected sites. This opens up new avenues for policy analysis around the ‘who’ and the ‘how’ of governance. These questions are around the ‘nature’ of policy makers, of policy learning and of policy change. ‘Who’ or ‘what’ are the key policy actors? ‘What’ do they draw on when enacting policy? ‘What’ motivates them to do their impossible task? And what ‘intervenes’ between intent, action and outcome? So in posing these initial questions the paper also poses a second more awkward set of questions around what sort of politics this feminist psychosocial imaginings imply.