The personal is political inverted into the political is personal as feminism went postmodern

Evidence

This passage is meant to exemplify what it means to say that ”the personal is political.” At the time, resisting what was seen as conventional, ”oppressed” femininity was political. It was a rebellion against the markings of an oppressed gender identity that enforced the subordination of women. But what appears in this passage incipiently is the postmodern world in which ”a woman’s politics” are indistinguishable from decisions about makeup, body hair, childbearing and breastfeeding, saving or ending a marriage. This passage exemplifies dramatically just how the revolutionary modern ”the personal is political” became the subversive postmodern ”the political is personal.” In this passage, the two are as yet indistinguishable. Shortly thereafter, they became profoundly sundered. The familiar narrative of a depoliticizing fall from radical to cultural feminism by means of substitution of the personal for the political does not allow us to understand this shift of the postmodern from emergent to dominant formation, nor does it allow us to understand the key role of second-wave feminism in this shift. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 865

Categorization

• XREF: Directly pays off the earlier book claim that second-wave feminism’s slogan inverted into a privatized politics by decade’s end — here DeKoven gives the mechanism. — connects to: Radical feminism’s internal contradiction prefigured the modern-postmodern feminist split. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 852; The personal is political leveled political and bodily experiences into a single category — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 863; Second-wave feminism’s slogan inverted into a privatized politics by decade’s end — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 644 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• The shift to subjectivity-based politics relocated rather than abandoned the political #expands (0.90) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 996
• Feminist strategy reverses public-private hierarchy as a political move #expands (0.88) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 281
• Postmodern discourse makes all cultural positions secretly political, except the overtly political #complicates (0.82)
• Postmodernist rejection of systems shrinks resistance to the personal and micro #complicates (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 375
• Micropolitics and identity-group organizing are themselves postmodern phenomena #corroborates (0.78)