Adrienne Rich, "Notes Towards a Politics of Location"

Liz Bondi: "Locating Identity Politics"

Adrienne Rich
1. gives up discussing “the common oppression of women.”
 Position herself—starting with her address to The Solar System.
 Defining the causes of radical feminism pp.638
 Should start with the body; with the material.
 Instead of believing in abstraction, one should ask “when, where, and under
what conditions has the statement been true?” 639
2. redefines her body as white, female, Jewish. P. 640
3. associate the tendency to abstraction to the cold war mentality p. 642

Elspeth Probyn’s criticism: Rich still put emphasis on “the centrality of the local” and
her white Jewish female body.  Can the subaltern speak?  articulation of the
place and event in the idea of “locale”; on the level of location, consider how some
experiences can be denied or erased.

Liz Bondi: "Locating Identity Politics"

Deals with the tension between humanism (agency) and anti-humanism (structure)
1. Marx and Freud – both counter-hegemonic and anti-humanist,
2. Problems: Freud: 1) slippage from analysis to prescription, 2)emphasis on the
unconscious; Marx – 1) humanist in Communist Manifesto, but he focuses just on
the proletariat; 2) does not deal with the private
 Conclusion p. 90
3. Feminism and Identity Politics:
 Consciousness raising and its problems
 Hyphenation and its problems
 The threat of Poststructuralism vs. experience;
 Identity politics re-defined
4. Place and essence