✍🏾In Her Words: The Problem with Marilyn Frye’s Caged Bird Analogy
Guest Contribution by Jocelyn Crawley
The Peachy Perspective occasionally features guest posts from Southern radical feminists whose voices sharpen our collective fight for women’s liberation. This In Her Words entry brings you more from Jocelyn Crawley, a radical feminist in Atlanta, Georgia. Her latest contribution challenges Marilyn Frye’s “Oppression,” showing how even well-intentioned feminist analysis can echo patriarchal logic—reducing women to birds in a gilded cage.
One of the most important and effective things a woman can do once she has ideologically and materially aligned herself with the theoretical framework and practical implications of radical feminism is to fine-tune her thought process regarding issues pertaining to women so that her personal identity and/or political activism are more consonant with her understanding of gender-based oppression and how one should respond to it. This reality recently became profoundly prevalent in my psyche when, following a presentation I gave regarding a piece that I wrote about Brock Turner’s rape of Chanel Miller, several women expressed issues with my appropriation of Foucaultian concepts in my elucidation of how mainstream societies discuss sexual assault in ways that perpetuate rape culture (in terms of its erasure of the victim and bolstering of the rapist). The objection to my use of Foucault’s work was rooted in collective understanding that, as a pedophile, his world view and behavior are not miscible with radical feminism and the primacy it places on the liberation of women and girls from the tyranny of men and boys. In recognizing this reality, I have decided to remove his name and concepts from the dissertation I will be developing regarding discourses that transpire within rape cultures and how they impacted women such as Chanel Miller.
These types of internal ideological and perspectival discords, or productive struggles, should continue. Although I assume they transpire amongst most of us with respect to a plethora of issues, they are particularly important when it comes to topics pertaining to radical feminism because the oppression of women and other living entities in the planet is the most pressing matter to address in our world. With this thought in mind, I think it is important to note that, although meaningful, Marilyn Frye’s “Oppression” is problematic in at least one way. Specifically, in providing the analogy of a caged bird to represent the reality of how multifarious systems intersect and interact to perpetuate the subjugation and suppression of female people, Frye conflates women with animals. In essence, women are the birds she references as caged. This reality is problematic because it operates, however unintentionally, in ideological alignment with the male supremacist practice of reducing women to animals for the purpose of legitimating abuses against them. If, within the male supremacist view of the world, women are reduced to the realm of animals within the anthropocentric understanding that men are superior to animals, language which associates or conflates women with animals is problematic. (It is equally problematic for men to create a binary-based hierarchy in which male people are conceptualized as superior to animals, but that is a discourse for another day.) This is why, for many years and in many ways, radical feminists and feminists have objected or at least critiqued the process of women being associated with animals (such as kittens, bunnies, foxes, cows, etc.). The paradoxical and problematic aspect of Frye’s caged bird analogy is that, in the process of critiquing the patriarchal process of men controlling women such that they experience little to no autonomy and agency, she utilizes the patriarchy’s trope of conflating female people with animals. The divergence from the patriarchal process involves the reality that Frye does not conflate female people with animals for the purpose of suggesting that they are inferior objects, as is the case with patriarchal modes of zoomorphism such as the (presumably appreciative and admiring) statement “She eats like a bird.” This enunciation promotes the sexist idea that female behavior can and should be dainty or somehow small, with the aligning of women to smallness emphasizing the sexist practice of asserting that women shouldn’t take up too much visual, cognitive, and/or material space given that men are inherently more deserving of the attention that transpires in terms of having access to capacious use of space and being seen favorably within those spaces.
When Frye uses the analogy of the caged bird, it is clearly to develop a framework that is ideologically divergent from patriarchy. Specifically, in analyzing how the patriarchy confines women, she writes:
Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.
Here, Frye explains women’s oppression by noting that, as with the wires that surround a bird in a cage, the suppression of female agency is not singular. Rather, there are a plethora of intersecting factors that result in women’s spatial, psychic, and somatic confinement. (Although this quote does not reference specific factors, we know that realities such as barriers in education, politics, heterosexual relationships, and ideological frameworks which reinforce sexist ideals regarding women’s intellectual capacities are some of the individual factors which, working in consonance with one another, contribute to female confinement.) Although Frye’s analysis is accurate and reflects an acute awareness regarding what oppression is and how patriarchy uses it to suppress women, the use of the bird analogy subtly–or saliently, depending on the feminist’s subjective interpretation of reality–reinforces the sexist idea that women are somehow like or akin to animals.
As women-centered women continue exploring how patriarchy operates for the purpose of dismantling its psychic and somatic effects, consideration must be given to the role that we as feminists may play in perpetuating some of the stereotypes that have a deleterious impact on our sense of self and agency in the world. Doing so will enable us to more effectively understand our condition as women and subsequently decide what we want to do about it.
Why is it still gender based oppression?