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Editorial: The Personal Is Political?!
political and social setting. They feel personal, and their details are personal, but their broad texture and character, and especially the limits within which these evolve, are largely systemic. In this sense, the contribution of the New Left was to say that we suffer a "totality of oppressions," systemically based, entwined, and all needing to be eliminated via a "revolution" in existing institutions, and the creation of new liberating ones.
The "personal is political" therefore meant that our personal lives are in considerable part politically delimited and determined so that improving our personal experiences meant we must collectively address political relationships and structures.
Later, others took the phrase to mean that the choices we make personally have political implications. Big deal, you might say. Obviously the choice to be an activist or not or to support this or that political project has political implications even though it is personally undertaken. But this meaning of the phrase went further to say that all the choices we make, even the ones that seem totally apolitical and personal, have political implications. The choice to wear make-up or not, to watch TV or not, to eat this or that or not, to wear this or that item of clothing, to use a bank or not, and so on, is personal, but it is also political.
This is true enough, and has some explanatory power and informative value, but then something strange began to happen. In essence, the most telling and instructive meaning of the "personal is political" was slowly turned upside down to mean that the political, the social, the economic, and the cultural derive from our personal choices. The key thing for each individual to be concerned with in being political is, then, to be personal in the "correct" way. Dress right, eat right, talk right, look right, consume right, so that one is the best person, politically, that one can hope to be.
The "personal is political"— meaning that personal outcomes are largely a product of systemic relations and of structures beyond each individual that need to be addressed—came to mean, instead, that all political phenomena arise from the accumulated personal choices of individuals, so that what needed to be addressed to win better circumstances was primarily people’s personal choices.
This trend is partially embodied in many sides of contemporary thought and activism, not least, for example, in elements of what is called "third wave feminism," "identity politics," "food politics," "lifestyle politics," and so on. We urge a reconsideration.