Maitra and Richards: Reconfiguring Feminist Agency through Rhetorical Performance

In “The Questions of Identity and Agency,” Keya Maitra acknowledges that while her primary aim in this text is to identify implications of a mindful approach to feminism without borders, she hopes that the type of feminist self-consciousness for which she is advocating may be useful for other kinds of feminism as well (362). Thus, it seems useful to test that hope by thinking of Richards’ account of historical and contemporary Iron Ladies in terms of the agency and feminist self-consciousness that may exist as part of this particular rhetorical performance.

The notion that “an iron lady can move herself in and out of complicity with these hegemonic structures” (Richards 5) suggests that the iron lady is a potential site of agency for women leaders. While Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign would fairly certainly fall within the scope of the “mainstream Western feminist discourses” (Maitra 361) with which Mohanty takes issue, Richards’ multiple examples of iron ladies across the world (and in particular, their connectedness and constant comparison to each other) suggests that the iron lady is a subject position through which women leaders can “develop a perspective of self that not only acknowledges its own constitutive dependence on its given intersectionalities, but that is also aware of its own grounding in such” (Maitra 361).

While it seems fairly clear from Richards’ article that the iron lady can be a means of gaining agency and access to the male-dominated political arena, it is less clear whether inhabiting the iron lady moniker necessarily constitutes an act of mindfulness. Richards points to examples of women who very purposefully sought out that trope, but others who utilized it after the nickname had been given (and still others for whom the nickname has only been attributed posthumously). For the women who consciously sought out the iron lady name or embraced it once it was given, there appear to be some connections between this creation of the iron lady self and Maitra’s description of mindfulness. If both the “essential entity of self and the materialist notion of self as nothing but the body are denied” in the mindful approach (Maitra 363), then the cyborg, and the Iron Lady in particular, seem to fulfill, at least in part, both requirements. Even as Richards points out that the cyborg can be homogenizing, she maintains that the cyborg self is fragmented, consisting of partial identities, and resists unification. In addition, Richards’ examples describe ways that Iron Ladies like Queen Elizabeth and Benazir Bhutto transcended their female bodies to present a self that was more than the body. For Elizabeth, this was done through language, by replacing parts of her biologically female body with those of a king in order to become hybrid. For Bhutto, this meant using technology to subvert her own biology by manipulating her childbirth so as not to “encourage any stereotypes that pregnancy interferes with performance” (qtd. in Richards 11).

Maitra claims that “self-consciousness is the location for a woman’s self-reflective, self-altering opportunities” (368); taken this way, the iron lady as enacted by leaders like Clinton may be a source of self-consciousness. As Richards points out, Clinton’s campaign sought out the iron lady name, and Clinton’s actions in response to the claims that she wasn’t iron lady enough could be read as self-altering in the sense that she was engaged in what Richards refers to as a “politics of becoming” (17). With her identity always partial and in flux, Clinton “allowed [her] gendered performances to fluctuate for each temporal situation, in order to confront and attempt to take control of the given rhetorical situation (ibid).

Ultimately, though, I don’t know if the feminist self-consciousness theory entirely holds up in Richards’ examples because, as she rightly points out, some of the iron ladies she identifies are complicit in maintaining patriarchal order and the masculine political status quo. Thus, it becomes unclear whether the iron lady trope can be a source for feminist self-consciousness and an opportunity for agency, or whether (at least as deployed by Clinton et al.) it is merely part of the machine. For me, the most pertinent question remains whether self-consciousness can be attained when one is caught in the double bind Richards describes. Given that Clinton’s attempts to enact her cyborg identity were read as “mere political maneuvering and not the natural fluctuating identity that we all experience,” the potential for true feminist agency and self-consciousness seems less than robust. Does the iron lady trope “result in an empowered sense of agency [and] open up an expanded range of choices,” (Maitra 362), or do female leaders remain limited to two choices: inhabit the iron lady trope (and cease to be a “pleasant” woman) or resist the Iron Lady trope (and be seen as unfit to lead)?