The Rise, Fall, and Re-birth of “The Personal is Political" or: What can the Feminization of Truth do?

Orphée Senouf-Pilpoul
Issue 56 | Summer 2022
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This article seeks to challenge the prevailing doubts in feminist discourse about the political power and horizon of #MeToo, according to which the acceptance of stories of sexual harm to women as truthful claims is a product of the conditions of the present time, characterized as the era of post-truth, which implicitly erode the status of the truth. Against that skeptical position the article raises the argument that while it maintains the post-truth discourse, whose constitution depends on the ongoing exclusion of many women’s ways of describing reality, it misses the paradigmatic shift of “the personal is political” (PIP) as a feminine praxis and theory, embodied by #MeToo. To discern the ways the current realization of PIP enables the politicization of the description of reality, the article traces the conditions of the possibility of PIP and the changes that occurred in it since it appeared in 1969. This process will serve as a basis for the main argument, that the “feminization of truth,” as a political and analytical practice, is what turns #MeToo into a turning point that constitutes the political as non-personal. The political potential of #MeToo is inherent therefore in severing the epistemological subordination as a publicly performed political act, and in anticipating women’s collective experience of their personal experience, which are conceptualized and discussed in the article through the phrase “the nonpersonal is political.”

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