An Introduction to Feminism

The word ‘ideology’ is one of those words that gets used in a disconcerting number of ways. For example, it may be used to refer simply to a system of beliefs (‘my ideology…’), or it may be used more pejoratively, to indicate an outlook – usually a political one – which is judged to be dogmatic, inflexible, exaggerated, or in some other way misguided (‘your ideology…’).

The sense of the term that is most relevant here is neither of the above, but one which I associate with Marx. Marx also used the term ‘ideology’ in more than one way, so we will need to zoom in further. ‘Ideology’ in Marx's work can refer to a particular view of history (historical ‘idealism’, which he dubs ‘the German ideology’), and it can also refer in general to the sphere of reality that is composed of ideas (the ‘ideal’ as opposed to ‘material’ component of social reality). But there is a further sense of ‘ideology’ which may be detected in Marx, and which has been extremely important for later theorists. This is the sense of ‘ideology’ which is bound up with another term Marx uses: ‘false consciousness’ (falsches Bewusstsein). To class something as ‘ideology’, in this sense, or as ‘ideological false consciousness’, is to identify it as an instance of a particular kind of illusion. I'll say something first about how we should understand the idea of ‘false consciousness’, before moving onto the ‘ideological’ bit.

‘False consciousness’ just means – here, as well as for Marx – ‘error’ or ‘illusion’, in the broadest sense: consciousness which is, in whatever way, false or inappropriate. This might be a matter of having a false belief about the world – e.g. the belief that it is Tuesday when really it is Wednesday. But the ‘falsity’ might also take other forms. In cases of so-called ‘body dysmorphia’, a person perceives her body (it is disproportionately often the body of a ‘her’) as other than it is ‘objectively’, and other than it is seen by others. To fix on a very common instance: a woman sees her body as bigger and heavier than it really is.