Kneading Margarine: Social Comparison and Feminist Testimony

Keywords Sexual difference • Feminism • Truth • Drive • Eros "Social comparison" need not be thought of as a merely occasional activity, conducted by a sovereign subject, as psychological investigations have tended to approach it.Need not, and should not-because accessing "social comparison" in this fashion commits one, surreptitiously, to a particular and a contested idea of the subject and her activities.1 It is, rather, in terms of something more structural in human experience-which is named by Leon Festinger in his 1954 essay, "A Theory of Social Comparison Processes," as a "truth drive"-that "comparison" imposes itself on philosophers as demanding investigation.Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex gave us, nearly a hundred years ago, a vocabulary for pointing to the way that women as "other," compared-or differentiated-from the get-go, find themselves in society as subjects who are not quite 5 1988, 294: "On ne naît pas femme: on le devient."6 This division between "theory" and "practice" being precisely what is unsettled by taking the thesis that comparison is "horizontal" or goes "all the way down" in earnest.7 Festinger, "A Theory of Social Comparison Processes," 1954, 135-136."Gregariousness" or the sheer collection of numbers of individuals as it is conceived of here should be distinguished carefully from the political collectivities philosophers have been striving to conceive of at least since Plato's Republic.