The term “poststructuralist” appears often in the Research Hub entries. I thought it was time to indicate how I have come to self-identify as “poststructuralist”. To this end I am reproducing a talk I gave in 2006 entitled “Postmodern by default” (not published elsewhere). The talk traces developments in my thinking over time and draws links with particular books, chapters and articles to illustrate how I have come “here” from “there”. Interventions in the talk, providing more up-to-date reflections, appear in parentheses in upper-case letters.

… 

“When I was kindly asked to offer a retrospective on my work a thought immediately popped into my mind – I have found that I am increasingly content to describe myself as postmodern in orientation and I had no idea how I had arrived here [NOTE: AT THIS STAGE I AM USING THE TERM “POSTMODERN” WHEREAS NOW I WOULD SAY “POSTSTRUCTURAL”]. I wanted to think about how I became postmodern by default (without even trying).

When I reflected on the influences that might have contributed to the theoretical stance I currently adopt, I identified four:

1. my training as a historian
2. my engagement with feminist theory and feminist epistemology
3. my shift from the discipline of History to the discipline of Politics in 1984

AND

• LIFE!!!

I’m going to trace this intellectual journal through some of my major publications, mostly books.

…

1. LIBERATION DEFERRED? THE IDEAS OF THE ENGLISH-CANADIAN SUFFRAGISTS, 1877-1918. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 1983 (REPRINTED IN 1986 and 1989).

I grew up in Montreal, Canada. Received my PhD in History in 1976 from McGill University. The thesis finally emerged in published form as Liberation Deferred? in 1983 (reprinted 1986, 1989).

Note the question mark after Liberation Deferred?  I would like to pretend that this might have signaled the beginnings of a postmodern ambivalence and uncertainty. Actually, it was a very pragmatic response to publishers who said that, between 1976 (when I wrote the thesis) and 1983, when it was to be published, the debate had moved on and I needed to signal that I was aware of these developments. In response I added a question mark to the existing thesis title. The publishers were satisfied!

You may recall that I listed my background in History as one of the factors influencing my current theoretical stance. This connection has several reasons:

1. History in my view, with its focus on the particular, creates ambivalence about grand claims. Some would say it is “atheoretical”. Perhaps now we could say it is postmodern. 
2. My thesis/book is a history of ideas. Hence, from the outset I have been interested in what people thought and in what contexts. Foucault makes clear that his genealogical approach is not simply a “history of ideas” but a “history of thought”, a history of what made (particular kinds of) thought possible. Still, I think that training as an intellectual historian creates the kind of curiosity about how people think about things that is quite close to some of Foucault’s work.
3. I encountered E. H. Carr’s What is History? (1961) in my study of the philosophy of history. Skepticism about claims to truth (or ‘fact’) was born. 

• NATURE-NURTURE ARTICLE.

Bacchi, C. (1980). The nature-nurture debate in Australia, 1900-1914. Historical Studies, 199-212.

I arrived in Australia in 1976 and started teaching (tutoring) Australian History at the University of Newcastle in that year.

I became interested in turn-of-century Australian history, in particular some of the scientific debates that were going on about how to shape the new Australian “man”. Unsurprisingly, I had encountered some of these ideas among my middle-class English-Canadian suffragists [NOTE: THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT WAS MOST ACTIVE AT THE TURN OF THE 20^TH CENTURY AND MANY SUFFRAGISTS WERE URBAN REFORMERS AND INTELLECTUALS]. 

In this 1980 article I argue that beliefs about the respective roles of nature and nurture tended to reflect political agendas (with lots of overlaps and ambiguities, of course). That is, those who held out hope that the Australian environment could produce a new, healthier “type” tended to support environmentalism (nurture) while those skeptical about environmental claims invested their hope in the “new genetics” (nature).

In a sense I was arguing (without realizing it) that ideas did not necessarily line up with “truths”, at least not in any conventional sense.

INTERREGNUM # 1 (1984-1990): (def: a period of absence of some control, authority, etc.) 

1. I joined the Politics discipline/department.
2. I read Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality Vol. I.
3. My second marriage broke up.
4. I started researching, writing and teaching feminist theory. 

• SAME DIFFERENCE: FEMINISM AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE (Allen & Unwin, 1990; re-issued by Routledge 2024 as part of their Revival Series).

This book brought together my history background and my immersion in feminist epistemology.

I read Sandra Harding (1995) on “strong objectivity” and Donna Haraway (1988) on “situated knowledges”. Genevieve Lloyd (1993) helped me put the “man of reason” under the microscope.

I developed a healthy questioning of the intellectual traditions that had dominated my training.

I began (more and more) a trend I had started in the nature-nurture article, examining how people came to think and argue certain things and in certain ways.

My topic in the 1990 book (Same Difference) is how feminists, historically and currently, use the language of “sameness” and “difference” (from men) for a whole range of reasons including their intellectual location and the way in which context affected the feasibility of particular political stances. I developed this argument not knowing specifically where this kind of analysis located me theoretically. I wasn’t interested in those sorts of questions (though I can remember puzzling over how feminism and postmodernism could possibly be compatible). Where I stood in 1990, I was simply telling it like it was/is. 

• AN ARTICLE I PUBLISHED IN 1992:

Bacchi, C. (1992). Affirmative Action—is it un-American? International Journal of Moral and Social Studies, 7(1): 19-31.

I mentioned my move to the Politics department/discipline as the third key influence shaping my current (2006) theoretical position. This occurred for two reasons. Until this point in time, I had no labels to attach to the kinds of thinking I was doing. The shift to Politics began the long, slow process of making these languages available to me.

The second reason is that I arrived in Politics with no particular commitment to its precepts or concepts. I think this disregard (easier when one comes to a discipline later in one’s intellectual development) is healthy. It allowed me to put the concepts/precepts associated with the study of “politics” under scrutiny, to ask where they came from, instead of accepting them as “truth”.

So, in this article (entitled “Affirmative Action: Is it un-American?”) I examined the historical genesis and trajectory of the concept of “political culture”, and how it featured in debates about affirmative action. I still didn’t really think about what I was doing in terms of theory. I didn’t see the article as an example of Foucauldian genealogical analysis (which it was). One thing I did realize was that I was developing greater and greater skepticism about the nature of the academic enterprise. The realization that ideas were promulgated and defended for a range of reasons, few of which had any connection to a desire for “truth”, became central to my thinking.

• THE POLITICS OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: “WOMEN”, EQUALITY AND CATEGORY POLITICS (Sage, 1996)

This realization bore fruit in my first major explicitly theoretical work, The Politics of Affirmative Action. In that book I declared myself committed to a view that concepts have no fixed meaning, that language is a tool deployed in accomplishing a range of tasks. I applied this theory to the experience of affirmative action in the six countries that were supposed to be leading the way in developing effective affirmative action policies for women (the United States, Canada, Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway). I discovered the range of mechanisms by which progressive change was kept in check. Overall, these mechanisms reflected the importance of meaning making in politics – the power to make meaning. 

• WOMEN, POLICY AND POLITICS: THE CONSTRUCTION OF POLICY PROBLEMS (Sage, 1999).

These ideas culminated in my 1999 book, which argues that, in order to understand how policy operates, we need to understand how policy “problems” are represented.

In Women, Policy and Politics I develop an approach to policy, called ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’. I have described the approach, based on five questions (with a number of sub-questions), as a lay person’s guide to deconstruction. [NOTE: IN WOMEN, POLICY AND POLITICS (1999) AND IN THESE 2006 COMMENTS I AM STILL REFERRING TO FIVE QUESTIONS IN WPR. BY 2009 AND THE PUBLICATION OF ANALYSING POLICY (PEARSON EDUCATION) THE WPR APPROACH HAD SIX QUESTIONS. BY 2016 IN POSTSTRUCTURAL POLICY ANALYSIS: A GUIDE TO PRACTICE (PALGRAVE MACMILLAN) SELF-PROBLEMATIZATION, WHICH HAD ALWAYS APPEARED IN CHARTS LISTING THE QUESTIONS, NOW APPEARED AS STEP 7. THIS CHANGE WAS MADE NECESSARY DUE TO THE FACT THAT RESEARCHERS HAD TENDED TO IGNORE THIS IMPORTANT PART OF THE ANALYSIS.]

The WPR approach is very popular in the Scandinavian countries and in Canada, and in Australia it is used effectively in interpretive approaches to health policy [NOTE: AT THIS TIME I WAS USING “INTERPRETIVE” IN A BROAD SENSE; I LATER DREW DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND INTERPRETIVISM – SEE Bacchi, C. (2015). The Turn to Problematization: Political implications of contrasting interpretive and poststructural adaptations. Open Journal of Political Science, 5: 1-12.]

In Women, Policy and Politics (1999) I used the language of discourse and believed I knew (fully) what it meant [NOTE: I WENT ON TO EXPLORE VARIED UNDERSTANDINGS OF DISCOURSE IN Bacchi, C. (2005). Discourse, Discourse Everywhere: Subject “Agency” in Feminist Discourse Methodology’. NORA: Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies, 13(3): 198-209. Reproduced in C. Hughes (Ed.) (2012). Researching Gender. Sage Fundamentals of Applied Research Series.]

I started to ask questions about subjectivity and read more postructuralist feminist theory, especially by those trained in psychology (Potter and Wetherell 1987; Davies 1994; Blackman et al. 2008).

The “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” approach offers a way to analyse representations, but it retains a place for talking about lived experience and even exploitation. [NOTE: IN SUBSEQUENT PUBLICATIONS I CHALLENGE WHAT APPEARS HERE AS A CONTRAST BETWEEN “REPRESENTATIONS” AND “THE REAL”. SEE ANALYSING POLICY, 2009, P. 35 WHERE I SAY: 

A problem representation therefore is the way in which a particular policy “problem” is constituted in the real. 

BY 2012 I CHANGED THE LANGUAGE TO REFER TO THINGS ‘as the real’ RATHER THAN ‘in the real’. See Bacchi, C. (2012). Strategic interventions and ontological politics: Research as political practice. In A. Bletsas and C. Beasley (Eds.), Engaging with Carol Bacchi: Strategic Interventions and Exchanges. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, pp. 141-56.

ALSO NOTE THAT THE ACRONYM ‘WPR’ DID NOT EMERGE UNTIL 2009 IN ANALYSING POLICY.]

I continue to worry less about whether, or not, my ideas are theoretically consistent than in my conviction that they are useful.

There is a simple logic here. If our categories of analysis (including our theories) are human constructs (see The Politics of Affirmative Action, 1996), it is just possible that they may not capture everything that needs capturing. 

From the beginning I have developed ideas and then found labels when they suited. I intend to continue in this tradition and, if the labels don’t fit, it doesn’t worry me. 

INTERREGUM #2 [1992 and beyond]:

I mentioned LIFE as the fourth influence on my current postmodern disposition.

1992: I gave birth to my son, Stephen. I had expected life to go on as usual and enrolled him in a childcare centre at 3 months old. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, the belief that feminism had delivered on the promise to make the work/care nexus navigable exerted a powerful influence. But then Stephen became very ill. He developed a feeding disorder that meant I had to take all my long-service leave (6 months) to care for him, one on one. During my next long-service leave (in 2000) I wrote up our story as a memoir (see next item).

• FEAR OF FOOD: A DIARY OF MOTHERING (Spinifex Press 2003).

On many occasions, including when I was trying to convince Susan Hawthorne from Spinifex Press to publish my book, I referred to Fear of Food as my “postmodern moment”. This comment was usually accompanied by a sly smile, almost apologetic.

By calling it my “postmodern moment” I meant that here was the story of one mother and her child and just maybe this story would resonate with the life of some other mother and her child. However, there was another reason for writing the book – I believed that the messages it contained about the inflexibility of our workplace structures would, through this book, reach a wider audience than my conventional academic writing. I continued and continue to believe that it is possible to talk about “one woman’s story” and institutional inflexibility. 

So, how postmodern am I? And does it matter?

Since Fear of Food I have been asked whether anything in the experience of that piece of writing has carried over to what I do now. I replied that, “No. I’m back to writing dense, theoretical prose that only the few will be able to penetrate”. But that’s not quite the case. I have decided to write an undergraduate text in public policy based upon the “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” approach. It will be called: Problems and Policy: Australia in the World. Deadline – December 2008. [NOTE: IN THE EVENT THE TEXTBOOK WAS CALLED – ANALYSING POLICY: WHAT’S THE PROBLEM REPRESENTED TO BE? published by Pearson Education 2009. I’M MUCH HAPPIER WITH THIS TITLE.]

Importantly, to write this new book I’m having to re-read key writings I have used before. I’m re-reading Foucault and understanding more. I’m understanding that the ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ approach is richer in its understanding and more flexible in its uses than I ever imagined. Some of these insights have been due to examples of its application by talented postgraduates such as Zoe Gill, Angelique Bletsas and Zoe Gordon, and talented undergraduates such as Anne Wilson.

[NOTE; FOR MORE UP-TO-DATE ELABORATIONS OF THE WPR APPROACH AND ITS APPLICATIONS, SEE POSTSTRUCTURAL POLICY ANALYSIS: A GUIDE TO PRACTICE (with Susan Goodwin; Palgrave Macmillan 2016) AND Bacchi, C. (2017). Drug Problematizations and Politics: Deploying a poststructural analytic strategy, Contemporary Drug Problems, 1-12. DOI: 10.1177/009/450917748760.]

Thank you for the opportunity to share this intellectual retrospective with you. I have enjoyed and continue to enjoy the journey. Should you be tempted to follow the same path, some things you could try include: switch disciplines, re-read key texts, keep your mind open, don’t worry if you don’t get something first time around, don’t worry about labels, and have a baby!

I was thinking about this talk the other day as I was listening to Radio National (ABC) – an interview with Mavis Staples of the Staples Singers (‘Respect yourself’). She reflected on what she says when people ask her if she sings ‘gospel’ or ‘blues’ or ‘country’. She answered: “I don’t like categories. I just like to sing”. 

Now, if a theorist says something like this, they are bound to be called “postmodern”. So, why fight it? I decided. Here I stand – postmodern by default.”

… I do hope that this reminiscence proves useful in some way to some readers. Feedback is always welcome. 

All the best

Carol

REFERENCES

Blackman, L., Cromby, J., Hook, D., Papadopoulos, D. and Walkerdine, V. 2008. Creating Subjectivities. Subjectivity 22: 1-27.

Davies, B. 1994. Poststructuralist Theory and Classroom Practice, Deakin University, Geelong.

Harding, S. 1995. “Strong objectivity”: A Response to the New Objectivity Question. Synthese, 104(3): 331-349. 

Haraway, D. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, Feminist Studies, 14(3): 575-599.

Lloyd, G. 1993. The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy. NY: Routledge.Potter, J. and Wetherell, M. 1987. Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. London: Sage