NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research

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Feminism, Embodied Experience and Recognition:

An Interview with Lois McNay

Marita Husso & Helena Hirvonen

To cite this article: Marita Husso & Helena Hirvonen (2009) Feminism, Embodied Experience
and Recognition: An Interview with Lois McNay, NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender
Research, 17:1, 48-55, DOI: 10.1080/08038740802694463

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Published online: 25 Feb 2009.

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NORANordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research,
Vol. 17, No. 1, 4855, March 2009

INTERVIEW

Feminism, Embodied Experience and

Recognition: An Interview with Lois
McNay

MARITA HUSSO & HELENA HIRVONEN

Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyvaskyla, Finland

Lois McNay is Professor of the Theory of Politics at Oxford University, United

Kingdom. In addition to many articles and book chapters her work includes
Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self (1992), Foucault: A Critical
Introduction (1994), Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and
Social Theory (2000), and Against Recognition (2007). We met Professor McNay at
the conference Power: Forms, Dynamics and Consequences in Tampere, Finland, on
September 2224, 2008. Professor McNay gave her plenary talk by the title
Feminism and Post-identity Politics: The Problem of Agency.

Marita Husso & Helena Hirvonen: You are a Professor of the Theory of Politics at
Oxford University. How did you end up being a social and feminist theorist?

Lois McNay: It is probably easiest to answer this question in a semi-

autobiographical way. My family background instilled in me loosely leftist
sympathies but, until I left home to go to university, these were largely inchoate,
intuitive responses. Sussex University was really the most formative period for me in
terms of the crystallization of my ideas. I studied English Literature there and, in the
early 1980s, it was a very intellectually exciting place to be. It was the time when the
influence of post-structural theory was making itself felt largely in the humanities
departments of British and American universities, and debates over the status of
texts and theory in the study of literature were lively, often polemical and,
sometimes, very heated. I remember attending faculty seminars which were so highly
charged intellectually and emotionally that participants were sometimes reduced to
shouting matches and even, on occasions, tears. At the time, I understood very little

Correspondence Address: Marita Husso, Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, FI-40014
University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. Email: mhusso@yfi.jyu.fi
0803-8740 Print/1502-394X Online/09/01004855 # 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/08038740802694463
 An Interview with Lois McNay 49

of what was being debated but, in retrospect, it was incredibly energizing, if not a
little bewildering, as a young undergraduate to witness these politically and
intellectually fraught debates.
When I was at Sussex, the English Department was very theoretical and had a
high concentration of young lecturers many of whom went on to be major figures in
the post-structural firmament. As an undergraduate and as a post-graduate (I did a
one-year MA there in critical theory before starting a PhD at Cambridgea much
duller place!) I was taught by Geoff Bennington, Homi Bhabha, Jonathan
Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, Peter Stallybrass, Jacqueline Rose, and Gillian Rose.
This theoretical hot-house gave me a fantastic and rigorous grounding in the thought
of Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan as well as a more classical tradition of Marx,
Nietzsche, Adorno, Benjamin, and Gramsci. Indeed, at that time, and probably still
to some extent now, I was more sympathetic to the aims and methods of this latter
Marxian tradition than to the post-structural one.
As well as this intellectual baptism of fire, Sussex University had a strong tradition
of left-wing politics, dating back to the civil unrest of the 1960s, and there was still a
great deal of student activism in which I became involved. The early 1980s was also a
time when the hegemony of neo-liberal ideas (via the figure of Margaret Thatcher) was
beginning to emerge and of course this gave the left many fronts on which to protest,
not least the miners strike which was a defining moment for the New Right agenda in
Britain. Although I was involved mainly in Labour Party politics (for about a decade),
I was also drawn to the Communist Party and its intellectual attempts, largely through
the journal Marxism Today, to redefine a soft left materialism via figures such as
Gramsci. This was the point at which my intellectual and political interests most
closely converged. I feel that even in my writing now I am still working through, in
many ways, the rich intellectual and political legacy of this time.

In Search for a more Differentiated Account of Agency

Husso & Hirvonen: You published Gender and Agency in 2000. In that book, you
reinterpret the work of Bourdieu, Foucault, Castoriadis, Ricoeur, and some other
theorists in such a way that a new version of feminist theory emerges. The aim is
obviously to avoid both structuralist determinism and voluntaristic conceptions, and
to establish that corporeality and situatedness are central to the nature of human
agency. Would it be possible to condense the message of the book into a few
sentences?
McNay: That is quite difficult! I suppose, on the most general level, the motivation
behind the book was the feeling that although it has generated many important
insights, much high feminist theory on gender (indeed, on identity in general) has
become stranded in a form of theoretical abstraction that weakens its political
moorings. For example, Wendy Browns analysis in States of Injury (1995) of the
masochistic dynamics that operate in identity politics is very powerful and in many
respects brave, but her emphatic Nietzschean rejection of identity politics is, in my
view, overstated and has uncomfortable political implications. This is compounded,
I think, by her normative counterposition which often seems to consist in rather
vague exhortations that feminism should abandon the limiting concern with identity
50 M. Husso & H. Hirvonen

to adopt a wider and slightly mysterious (it seems to me) world orientation. These
abstract arguments, grounded on a misleading construal of identity politics, are
echoed in other terms in the burgeoning field of feminist thought influenced by
Hannah Arendt, e.g. Linda Zerilli (Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, 2005) and
Mary Dietz (Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt, Politics, 2002). These thinkers
take up Arendts idea of action as inaugural creation to argue that feminism should
free itself from its constraining preoccupation with issues of identity and agency
the politics of the I amin order to explore more radical forms of intervention in
the worldthe politics of the I will.
A difficulty with such exhortations is that they are symptomatic of another
troublesome tendency in high theory, which is to persistently construe radical politics
in terms of empty abstractions of non-identity, inchoate desire, and indeterminacy.
Judith Butlers work, as brilliant as it is, is prone to this elevation of indeterminacy as
the self-evident locus of the radical. As well as becoming a bit of an exegetical cliche
in leftist thought, this fetishization of non-identity side-steps fundamental issues
about political action many of which are related to some kind of account of
embodied experience. In Gender and Agency I tried to show how it was possible to
develop a critical phenomenology of this experiential substrate without falling back,
on the one hand, into some kind of essentialism, or without relinquishing, on the
other, important post-structural insights into the intrinsic connections between
language, bodies, and power.
Husso & Hirvonen: You have been critical of Freudo-Lacanian understandings of
subjectivity production and have, instead, turned to Bourdieus relational sociology.
Could you elaborate further, how your understanding of subjectivity differs from
these theories, and what the benefits of a Bourdieuan approach on feminist theory
might be?
McNay: My main difficulty with most types of psychoanalytic theory is that, no
matter how sophisticated their accounts of the inherence of psyche and society, they
inevitably reify the latter. In other words, some degree of psychic determinism is
inevitable, and this dehistoricizes the social realm. This reification is most evident in
post-Lacanian accounts of subject formation where the source of agency,
particularly radical agency, is found in the unconscious. This deprives agency of
social-historical specificity and, in particular, of any intentional logic reducing it, to
some degree or another, to an expression of an endlessly self-repeating dynamic, a
kind of eternal recurrence. Now of course when we are considering certain types of
phenomena, most especially the fanatical and genocidal nationalisms that are a
feature of so much of the politics of the twentieth and twenty-first century, it is
not possible to get very far analytically without deploying some psychoanalytic
terms such as sado-masochism, hatred and desire of the other, fantasy, and so
forth, as Adornos analysis of the authoritarian personality and the rise of Nazism
long ago established. Yet there are many other types of action and social change
often less dramatic and more mundanethat are not really adequately explained
through a psychoanalytic register or logic of desire, requiring instead a
sociocentric account involving terms such as situation, intention, interpretation,
or effects.
 An Interview with Lois McNay 51

The work of Slavoj Zizek perfectly exemplifies the strengths and weaknesses of
psychoanalytic thought in this regard in so far as its analytical brilliance is
inseparable from a certain formulaic theoretical matrix. For instance, his account of
relations between men and women in terms of a paradigm of courtly love may very
well explain the psychic impossibility of heterosexual relations, but it has little to say
about the uneven restructuring of gender relations and practices that has been
happening since the 1960s onwards. It is this indifference to the significance of social
practice and historical variation or the persistent interpretation of practice as a
symptom of underlying psychic structures that I find difficult about psychoanalysis,
particularly Lacanian theory.
Like other constructionists such as Foucault, Bourdieu would reject such psychic
determinism arguing instead for a more sociocentric understanding of the way in
which subjects are constituted through the incorporation of social power relations.
Two reasons why, in my view, the idea of habitus is more productive than the
Foucauldian idea of practices of the self is that, first, it offers a more differentiated
account of agency as having both pre-reflexive and conscious dimensions. It thus
retains the multilayered account of subjectivity offered in psychoanalysis without the
attendant reification. And second, against the sexualized model of subject formation,
it brings class firmly into view. The idea of habitus provides a compelling account of
the way in which class inequalities are internalized as powerful subjective
dispositions, for example in emotions such as shame and envy exemplified brilliantly
in Carolyn Steedmans Landscape for a Good Woman (1986). Class lies at the heart of
contemporary processes of gender restructuring, and if feminism is to understand
these changes it needs to incorporate more fully an account of class into what are at
the moment still over-sexualized accounts of subject formation.

On Embodied Agency and Lived Practices

Husso & Hirvonen: How would you put the relationship between emotions, gender,
and agency?
McNay: There is no straightforward answer to this, and I certainly have not yet
worked out, and quite probably never will, my particular position on this. However,
I suppose I see my work as situated in a gap in the existing literature on emotions,
gender, and agency. On the one hand, there are liberal accounts of agency which are
either excessively rationalist or abstract (Rawls) or, if they do include an account of
the role played by emotions in action, such as Charles Taylors work for instance,
they are strangely domesticated and decoupled from an account of power. On the
other hand, much influential feminist theory tends to produce a more powerful
account of the emotional dimensions of agency but these are more often than not
construed in the quasi-psychoanalytic register of desires. This stems, in my view,
from the over-sexualized accounts of subjectivity and agency that dominate in
feminist theory. Although sexuality is a central dimension in the constitution of
feminine subjects, gender is a much wider socio-cultural construction which is, as
is often repeated, inseparable from structures of class and racial inequality.
Although the hybrid nature of identity is of course always acknowledged in
feminist thought, I feel that this insight is never really fully incorporated into the
52 M. Husso & H. Hirvonen

heart of some influential feminist theories of subject formation which still privilege
one dimension of gender, sexuality, over all others. Thus, although women engage
with the world in multiple ways, in much feminist theory, this agency is construed in
over-sexualized terms and according to a logic of desire. My recent work on agency
and recognition tries, very tentatively, to occupy the space between these delimited
liberal theories of emotion, on the one hand, and the idea of emotions as unruly
desires, on the other. I try to situate agency in an alternative sociocentric account of
emotions as engendered through a complex configuration of pre-reflexive embodied
tendencies, intentional relations with the world, and social structures. It is very much
a work in progress, though, because I find it very challenging to think this cluster of
issues through in a cogent way.
Husso & Hirvonen: In your view, how important is the idea of experience to
theorizing agency?
McNay: I think that some kind of phenomenological perspective on lived embodied
practice is very important in understanding agency and, in particular, its political
effects. Whether the particular term experience has to be central to this
phenomenology is a different, more contentious matter. As everyone knows, the
difficulty with the idea of experience is that it is so closely bound up with second-
wave feminist debates about essentialism and some of the problematic claims made
about women by, inter alia, standpoint theorists. It may be desirable therefore to by-
pass the term altogether and to use some kind of phenomenologically analogous idea
such as embodied practice in context. In Against Recognition, I am a bit inconsistent,
sometimes using the latter term and sometimes referring to experience or the
experiential. Although the term experience is problematic, it is quite hard to avoid
making any reference to it. What is unavoidable, however, is the theoretical necessity
of adopting some kind of experientially oriented, or interpretative perspective in
understanding agency. It is not possible to understand the effects of oppression and
how it constrains or motivates action without first enquiring into its lived
dimensions, that is, how individuals understand themselves and their position in
the world.
There is nothing original about this claim, it simply repeats Webers basic insight
into the interpretation of action through verstehen. Nor does it mean, as Weber also
stresses, that an account of agency finishes at this pointthat would be to fall into
an intentionalist fetishization of experience. Despite the fact that these claims are
very familiar to anyone interested in sociological method, feminist theories on
agency still seem to find it difficult to avoid bifurcating into subjectivist or objectivist
explanations. Thus, on the one hand, although, in response to criticisms of
essentialism, theorists such as Nancy Hartstock and Dorothy Smith have extensively
revised their standpoint theories rendering them far more sophisticated and attentive
to the differentiating effects of power upon subjects, they nonetheless still cannot
entirely avoid attributing a privileged epistemological insight to a certain experiential
perspective. On the other hand, post-Foucauldian feminist accounts of agency as a
discursive construct avoid this subjectivism but fall into the countervailing problem
of excessive abstraction which can be politically paralysing. Important lived
dimensions of experience are overlooked, and this impoverishes these accounts of
 An Interview with Lois McNay 53

agency, often resulting in overstated dualisms of normality and abjection, inclusion

and exclusion, domination and resistance.
Husso & Hirvonen: The title of your new book is Against Recognition (2008). In this
book, you express dissatisfaction in both Axel Honneths work in the theory of
recognition and Nancy Frasers feminist reinterpretation of it. What is the problem
with this line of critical theorizing and how does your recognition paradigm differ
from theirs?
McNay: Actually that is not quite an accurate portrayal of my argument. I do indeed
find Axel Honneths account of recognition very problematic. His universalization of
the idea of recognition to explain not only the central dynamic of all contemporary
political struggles but also the developmental trajectory of capitalism in general (i.e.
capitalist democracies are characterized by an ever increasing recognition of
excluded and marginal groups) is sociologically simplistic and nave. Furthermore,
his reliance on an ontology of recognition derived from object relations thinkers
such as Winnicott and Benjamin is both questionable and psychologically
reductive, ultimately emptying much historical specificity from his account of social
and political conflict. Given his commitment to sociological analysis,
these dehistoricizing tendencies are very undermining for the plausibility of his
argument.
Nancy Fraser offers a stringent and compelling critique of Honneths psychologist
theory of recognition which I wholeheartedly agree with. It is not so much what she
says, therefore, that I have difficulty with but rather what is left out of her analysis.
My claim is that her materialist reinterpretation of misrecognition as objectively
verifiable status subordination, rather than as psychological injury, is ultimately
weakened by its lack of phenomenological content. Her desire to overcome the
subjectivist shortcomings of Honneths model means that she lets go of any
interpretative perspective which might help her focus on the social suffering that
forms the, often hidden, experiential substrate of institutional status subordination.
This results in several gaps in the analytical purchase of her recognition-
redistribution model, not least that it is in danger of becoming an abstract dualism
that operates regardless of the specific strategies and practices of embodied political
agents. I do not think, though, that this is a fatal flaw in her theory; indeed, I believe
that the critical phenomenology of agency offered in the idea of habitus is
compatible with Frasers larger intellectual project. In fact, given the affinities
between their theoretical orientations, I am quite surprised that, in her work
generally, Fraser does not draw more heavily on aspects of Bourdieus relational
phenomenology. Incidentally, it is interesting to note that, in his subsequent work on
organized self-realization, Honneth appears to implicitly reject his previous work
on recognition, espousing instead a much bleaker and politically nihilistic vision of
modernity that is much closer to Foucault than to his mentor Habermas.

On the Prospects of Feminism in the Era of Neo-liberal Capitalism

Husso & Hirvonen: You are both a social theorist and a feminist theorist. Is it always
easy to combine these roles, and is there something general social theorists could
54 M. Husso & H. Hirvonen

learn from feminist theorists, or vice versa feminist theorists from general social
theory?
McNay: For me personally, I do not find it difficult to combine these roles and,
indeed, at a meta-level, I find it helpful to understand the type of work I am doing as
compatible with the notion of critique developed in the critical theory tradition,
perhaps most fully set out today in the work of Thomas McCarthy. The immediate
circles in which I move, however, sometimes present obstacles to intellectual
exchange and interdisciplinary understanding. Although my main interests are the
intersections between social and feminist theory, I am a member of a politics
department and indeed I do have an interest in normative political theory. In
Oxford, the dominant tendency in political thinking is Rawlsian contract theory, and
this proceeds on a very different understanding to mine of the status of normative
thought and, in particular, its relation to the sociological analysis of power
inequalities. What this means in practical terms is that if I ever give a paper in
Oxford, I often find it frustrating because I am quite frequently greeted by a basic
lack of familiarity with the underlying terms of my intellectual project, something
which tends not to happen when I give papers elsewhere. It is not that it is not
instructive and worthwhile to sometimes go back to first principles, but it can also be
a bit tiresome because it prevents more detailed discussion. On the general relation
between feminist and social theory, I would just say that, in my view, sociologically
minded feminist theorists tend to be well versed in social theory and incorporate its
insights into their work, but this engagement is often not reciprocated. On the whole,
mainstream social theory still tends to either disregard issues and theories of gender
or treat them in a tokenistic, add-on fashion. This intellectual asymmetry can be
seen as symptomatic of larger institutional power dynamics.
Husso & Hirvonen: We would like to hear your interpretation of the state of feminist
theorizing today. What are the most important achievements? What are the most
obvious dead ends to be avoided, and in what direction should the theory now be
developed?
McNay: I am not sure that I have a sufficient overall grasp of feminist theory to be
able to comment on this. One tentative observation is that it seems to me that
feminist theory is not as institutionally a unified body of work as it has been in the
past and that this, to an extent, is one of its major achievements. It is no longer seen
as something that only pertains to those interested in womens studies. Rather,
feminist insights have, to some degree, been absorbed into mainstream academic
disciplines, offering particular perspectives upon a wide array of topics and methods
rather than being seen as some kind of unified world view or delimited intellectual
position (which of course it never has been). Most obviously it is no longer closely
linked to a visible political movement in the way that it was in the 1970s and,
although this is not something to celebrate, it has maybe indirectly permitted its
intellectual diversification and heterogeneity within the academy. In terms of more
recent directions, it seems that issues of gender and sexuality which have dominated
the feminist intellectual agenda for the last thirty or so years are occupying a less
central place.
 An Interview with Lois McNay 55

Many influential feminist thinkers like Judith Butler, Seyla Benhabib, Nancy
Fraser, and Wendy Brown who began by theorizing about gender and sexuality have
moved into more general debates about democratic ethos, the nature of deliberation,
cross-cultural understanding, and so on. I do not think there are dead ends in
feminist theorizing, but I think there are new challenges arising from the
consolidation of neo-liberal capitalism that need to be incorporated at all different
levels into feminist and other types of social critique. One of the most important of
these is the status of identity politics in a world order that, to some degree,
deliberately incites multiple sites of recognition as a form of social control. On the
one hand, we should not, as some thinkers claim, move towards a post-identity
politics because issues of the marginalization and exclusion of minorities still remain
central political problems of our time. Yet, on the other hand, feminist theory needs
to think carefully about its investment in a certain idea of resistant identity politics in
an era when flexible structures of commodification are capable of depoliticizing the
most radical of practices.
Husso & Hirvonen: What are you personally working on now, and what do you plan
to do next?
McNay: I do not have any large project in mind at the moment although the issues of
identity and post-identity politics are ideas that I keep coming back to but that might
not amount to anything much. I keep circling around the idea of agency which has
formed such a central theme in my previous two books, and I feel that I need to
continue to develop much more fully what I mean by a relational phenomenology. I
am trying to do these two things in a piece that I am writing at the moment on what
it is that feminists actually mean when they talk about agency and how quite often
this involves the conflation of two related but distinct senses of agencythe
everyday and the political. The running together of the two results in nave accounts
of the politics of resistance.
In general, though, I tend to work up to some unifying idea through writing
smaller, more focused pieces, the thematic connections between them often only
emerging at the last moment. I have also just finished an article on Foucaults
recently published lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics for a special issue of a journal
to mark the 25th anniversary of his death next year. I was quite reluctant to take this
on because, having written two books on Foucault some time ago, I felt I had
nothing new or interesting to say about him. Indeed, for this reason, I have
deliberately avoided any sustained consideration of his work in my subsequent
writing even when perhaps his arguments would have been useful and relevant for
developing my ideas. So I approached these lectures on biopolitics with some
reluctance and much hesitancy. But the lectures are brilliant and inspiring, and they
made me reconsider my assessment of his oeuvre as a whole. An idea that comes from
my reading of his lectures and which I might follow up is what form can effective
political resistance take when individual autonomy is no longer a limit to political
domination but a central strategy of social control.
The interview was conducted by D.Soc.Sc. Marita Husso (mhusso@yfi.jyu.fi) and
M.Soc.Sc. Helena Hirvonen (helena.hirvonen@yfi.jyu.fi), Department of Social
Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyvaskyla, Finland.