Hutchinson, et al.

411

of bureaucracy and the distrust of both elected officials and public ad-
ministrators alike, citizens shun their role as part of government and
retreat to their role as private citizen. As King and Stivers (1998) have
argued, citizens have consistently been sending the message that “gov-
ernment isn’t us.” This wave of public opinion is not unfounded. As
Kathy E. Ferguson notes, “bureaucracy tends to damage people in dif-
ferent ways at its different levels” (Ferguson, 1984, p. 88), but at all
these levels administrators and their clients develop a sense of aliena-
tion or separation from the projects that they are engaged in. Feminist
theory can illuminate the unique opportunity that public administrators
have to combat this alienation. In her Foucaultian-feminist critique of
bureaucracy, Ferguson writes,

Those who resist organizational oppression do so from within the

very structure that creates that oppression. Embedded within bu-
reaucratic discourse and institutions, resistance is carried out in bu-
reaucratic terms by people whose subjectivity has been shaped and
distorted by the requirements of technical society. (Ferguson, 1984,
pp. 116-117)

Though administrators are shaped by bureaucratic discourse and prac-

tices, they are not wholly determined by them. Administrators may
serve as “the second sex” in some capacities, but as insiders, they are in
a unique position to subvert the system that damages them and their
clients. They can create alternative discourses that tell the story of their
own experience and those of their clients, thus expanding our social
view of reality. This will enhance our view of what the possible con-
tents of this identity of “citizen” might be comprised of, and how the
content of this identity is not immutably fixed.

We learn from the feminist theory of Butler, Haraway, and several

others who deconstruct gendered categories, that identity is not unitary,
but multiple and fluid. We are not simply masculinized rational deci-
sion makers, nurturing caretakers, or bureaucratic pawns. Feminist the-
ory as applied to public administration can provide us with a new view
of the identity of the administrator and the citizen that is diverse and
speaks to a wider range of experience. Judith Butler explains that de-
spite the few benefits that a traditional Enlightenment conception of
the gendered subject provides, it also leads us to enforce a homogene-
ous, forced identity, not just within the confines of the subject, but also
in the community of subjects. She writes,

The fixity of gender identification, its presumed cultural invariance,

its status as an interior and hidden cause may well serve the goals
of the feminist project to establish a transhistorical commonality