But there should be no misunderstanding: men and women are caught up in a network of millennial cultural determinations of a complexity that is practically unanalyzable: we can no more talk about ‘woman’ than about ‘man’ without getting caught up in an ideological theatre
The mark of an ideological mind is not that it is perspectival (all
minds are perspectival), but that it is enclosed within a
particular perspective for unacknowledged (to oneself as well as
to others) reasons of self-interest. In contrast, the unideological
mind is open to the claims of other perspectives. One may even
change one’s mind and adopt a perspective quite different from
th at previously held as a consequence of being susceptible to
experience, evidence, and logic, which would seem to “compel” a
change of perspective. Those who would assert the impossibility
of such a change of view, arguing instead that everyone is
locked into one’s own perspective, are engaged in a self-fulfilling
prophecy. It is the view of those who have made up their minds
to listen only to their own voices (Goodheart 185-186).
When a previously dominant group begins to speak the language of cultural unity or diversity, it is understandable if their subordinates detect in this rhetoric a way of perpetuating their privileges in displaced form. When men begin to speak of how much, after all, they and women share in common, feminists are properly on the alert.
Ideology has the precise function of hiding the real contradictions and of reconstituting on an imaginary level a relatively coherent discourse.
Little Bristling Soul 