Universalizing Experience

Last semester, I wrote my senior thesis for my Women’s and Gender Studies major. My topic related to the employment of web-based resources and organizing tools by the feminist and women’s rights movements; or, rather, feminists underutilization of these resources. The centerpiece of my thesis was an essay written by Donna Haraway called, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Haraway, the foremost scholar on cyber feminism, wrote her essay in response to what she perceived as the very real inadequacies of the second wave of feminism. The Second Wave was conceived by Betty Friedan and others with the experience of a certain type of woman in mind, identified in the opening lines of Friedan’s canon, The Feminine Mystique:

"Each suburban wife struggled with it [Friedan’s famed ‘problem with no name’] alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night--she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’" (Friedan).

The Second Wave, and the organization and action that accompanied it, foregrounded this middle class, suburban white woman’s reality, and attempted to combat the “women’s problem” with her in mind. They created a movement that universalized one type of woman’s experience, and then went about agitating for policy and societal changes that would make life better for ‘women.' Feminists have discovered, though, that identity constructions are social constructions that have been forced upon us by a society attempting to categorize, organize, and sometimes repress; our affinity should come from conscious coalition, not from constructed identity categories because, as Haraway argues, “social reality is lived social relations […] a world-changing fiction" (Haraway 149).

While reading Joan Scott's, “The Evidence of Experience,” I could not help but be reminded of Haraway’s “Manifesto.” Haraway struggled against a feminism that relied upon strict identity categories for recruitment/coalition-building and essentialized one type of woman’s experience. Similarly, in her piece, historian Joan Scott laments the historical focus on experience as a representation of fact because, "it is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience" (Scott 401). She problematizes historical narration that relies on experience as an indicator of truth. In their attempts to subvert mainstream representations of history, representations that typically ignore the experiences of non-white, non-male subjects, some contemporary historians have concerned themselves with exposing the stories of those who have been “hidden from history.” They presume that by making the stories and experiences of the ‘other’ visible, they can historicize their experiences. Scott asserts that the visibility approach depends on historical constructions that resulted in the initial exclusion of these voices; these historians fail to critically analyze the reasons these voices were ignored to begin with and why other experiences and other histories were deemed important, and thus represented in history. Furthermore, an experience-based approach to the study of history propagates an approach to historical understanding that universalizes experience by “tak[ing] as self-evident the identities of those whose experience is being documented and thus naturaliz[ing] their difference” (Scott 399).

Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's film, Persepolis, is the story of one girl’s experience during a dictatorship. The filmmakers seem to approach this story using narrative techniques of which Scott is critical: Satrapi shares her story of life during the Iranian Revolution and the subsequent dictatorship. Whether or not Satrapi intended to render a universalized depiction of gender imbalance and oppression in Iran, the movie has been criticized as portraying a very Westernized view of fundamentalism and oppression in Iran, a palatable illustration of womanhood in Iran that comports with Western understanding. In reality, Iranian women experience life in a diversity of ways, and extrapolating Satrapi’s story onto an entire population is misleading and perhaps dangerous. This movie is an apt example of the hazard of employing the visibility approach to representations of history in visual and communications mediums. Film is powerful; by making Marjane visible, by sharing her story, it is possible that her experience will become universalized and the differences and nuances of her story naturalized.

In the “making of the movie” videos that we watched following the film, Satrapi explains that she was attracted to animation for this film because it transformed her individual story about life in Iran after the Revolution into a story about life in a dictatorship. (Scott would be highly critical and skeptical of this position: inferring universal truth about dictatorships from Satrapi’s story is, Scott would argue, impossible and misrepresentative of reality.) She thought a movie in black and white would act to disassociate her characters from their nationalities, races, and ethnicities. Additionally, the graphic novel/animated movie composition allowed her to more effectively present a sequence of events that was not predicated on the racial or ethnic composition of the characters. She sought to present people and stories, not identity characterizations.