Page 247 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

THE MEANING OF NEW TIMES 235

resources on which we all now depend. The notion that ‘the market’ can
resolve such questions is patently—in the light of present experience—
absurd and untenable.
This recognition of the expanded cultural and subjective ground on
which any socialism of the twenty-first century must stand, relates, in a
significant way, to feminism, or better still, what we might call
‘the feminization of the social’. We should distinguish this from the
simplistic version of ‘the future is female’, espoused by some tendencies
within the women’s movement, but recently subject to Lynne Segal’s
persuasive critique. It arises from the remarkable—and irreversible—
transformation in the position of women in modern life as a consequence
not only of shifts in conceptions of work and exploitation, the gendered
recomposition of the workforce and the greater control over fertility and
reproduction, but also the rebirth of modern feminism itself.
Feminism and the social movements around sexual politics have thus had
an unsettling effect on everything once thought of as ‘settled’ in the
theoretical universe of the left. And nowhere more dramatically than in
their power to decentre the characteristic conversations of the left by
bringing on to the political agenda the question of sexuality. This is more
than simply the question of the left being ‘nice’ to women or lesbians or
gay men or beginning to address their forms of oppression and exclusion.
It has to do with the revolution in thinking which follows in the wake of the
recognition that all social practices and forms of domination—including
the politics of the left—are always inscribed in and to some extent secured
by sexual identity and positioning. If we don’t attend to how gendered
identities are formed and transformed and how they are deployed
politically, we simply do not have a language of sufficient explanatory power
at our command with which to understand the institutionalization of
power in our society and the secret sources of our resistances to change.
After another of those meetings of the left where the question of sexuality
has cut through like an electric current which nobody knows how to plug
into, one is tempted to say especially the resistances to change on the left.
Thatcherism was certainly fully aware of this implication of gender and
identity in politics. It has powerfully organized itself around particular
forms of patriarchy and cultural or national identity. Its defence of
‘Englishness’, of that way of ‘being British’ or of the English feeling ‘Great
again’, is a key to some of the unexpected sources of Thatcherisms
popularity. Cultural racism has been one of its most powerful, enduring,
effective—and least remarked—sources of strength. For that very reason,
‘Englishness’, as a privileged and restrictive cultural identity, is becoming a
site of contestation for those many marginalized ethnic and racial groups in
the society who feel excluded by it and who hold to a different form of
racial and ethnic identification and insist on cultural diversity as a goal of
society in New Times.