Consciousness-raising’s self-transformation methods seeded postmodern identity politics

Evidence

Morgan also discusses her experience of consciousness-raising (c-r), the primary tool and political structure of the women’s liberation movement, and home of ”the personal is political.” She credits c-r, along with working on this anthology, with the feminist transformation of her life and political ideas. C-r is another prime instance of how early second-wave feminism was on the cusp between dominant modernity and emergent postmodernity and was instrumental in the shift. Its goal was to radicalize women and bring about feminist revolution, but its methods emphasized what came to be considered individual ”lifestyle choices.” These questions of how one lives one’s life were then questions of how individual women could transform their consciousnesses and thereby change the oppressed conditions not just of their own lives but ultimately of all women’s lives. But the emphasis on changing one’s own life clearly led to the postmodernity of the construction or performance of subjectivity as in itself inherently political. Again, this is not a process of depoliticization but a transformation of the meaning of the political. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 866

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Micropolitics and identity-group organizing are themselves postmodern phenomena; Therapy co-opted consciousness-raising by converting it from collective to private practice — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1949

Broader Connections

• Micropolitics and identity-group organizing are themselves postmodern phenomena #expands (0.75)
• Therapy co-opted consciousness-raising by converting it from collective to private practice #complicates (0.70) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1949