What is it that we demand of sex, beyond its possible pleasures, that makes us so persistent? What is this patience or eagerness to constitute it as the secret, the omnipotent cause, the hidden meaning, the unremitting fear?
—Foucault, History of Sexuality vol. 1, pp. 79-80
I believe that Dora only wanted to play "secrets" with me, and to hint that she was on the point of allowing her secret to be torn from her by her physician.
—Freud, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Dora), p. 70
"The Beast in the Jungle" isn't, at least at first, very obviously a story about sex or sexuality. It is, though, about a secret.
That secret's meaning will remain elusive to John Marcher (the main character) until the end of the story, and to many of James's readers it has remained a source of interest well beyond that endpoint.
Henry James wrote "The Beast in the Jungle" in the first years of the 20th century: he recorded the very brief, early idea for the story in a notebook entry of 1901, and published the completed story in 1903. These are the years when he was also working on the three great novels of his "late" period, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904).
Henry James
During this period of his life James was dictating his fiction to a secretary rather than writing it out himself; a long career as a writer--he had begun publishing fiction in the 1860s--had given him an almost preternatural narrative fluency, and his late style is at once colloquial and elaborate. At its best, this late style is subtle in the way that human minds and relationships are necessarily subtle, capturing the play of consciousness through a world whose meanings it at once expects and creates. At its worst, it can just feel tiresomely oblique and longwinded. It can be hard to separate what's great in late James from what's not so great, and I'll be the first to admit that "Beast" and its contemporaries in his oeuvre can be hard going--but I've also found them to more than repay the effort of reading they demand. One of my favorite words in James's lexicon is "meeting," which he often uses to describe something like the spirit in which one person hears and responds to another: to "meet" a person in this sense isn't just to be present before her, but to rise (or fall) to an intellectual and emotional and ethical level answerable (responsible) to her own. (Cf. p. 332: "She met him, perhaps, less directly, but she met him unperturbed.") To read James well, you'll need to meet him in this way.
This is especially true in a story like "The Beast in the Jungle," which is at once deeply suspenseful and deeply boring: we're waiting (with May and Marcher) for something to happen, and it never happens, or happens only when we're looking at something else. If the sort of suspenseful narrative that this story's title usually suggests rewards our waiting with a dramatic event, James is interested rather in how that kind of waiting can be a form of blindness, in reading as in life. This sort of experience seems at once quite odd and particular to Marcher's almost paranoid fantasy about the 'beast,' but it's of course perfectly ordinary as well. We miss the experience that matters all the time, because our attentions and energies are aimed elsewhere, because it's hard to know where meaning resides.
It's perfectly intelligible though extraordinarily complex for a parent to say that he has "missed my child growing up," or, as in Ibsen's The Doll House, for a wife to say that she has never really known her husband of many years. How do such things happen? It will be hard to know if we understand all experience as made up of events that are available to perception independently of our desires and beliefs; that sort of a model will help us to understand how one might miss, say, a solar eclipse (I had the time wrong; I was in the wrong hemisphere) but not how one misses a declaration of love that was implied rather than avowed, or the muted pain in a friend's voice. James, then, is going to focus not so much on the event or thing to be missed, but rather on the beliefs and feelings that structure Marcher's (and May's) experience so as to make missing possible.
During the first five sections of the story, then, you may well begin to develop hunch about what the secret is, about what the "beast" will prove to be an image of. I'd like us to bracket that curiosity, though--the story's ending will satisfy it at least provisionally--to ask other questions about Marcher's secret. Foucault's admonitions about the sorts of question useful to ask about sexuality are useful here: he urges us, rather than becoming fixated on unveiling "the" secret, to ask about the structure and and the effects of that secret and our will to know it.
In "The Beast in the Jungle," then:
*What is the structure of Marcher's secret? (That is, who knows it, and in what ways is it knowable? For example, I might know that I was and born in Kenya, and keep that a secret from you: this would be a secret transparent to myself and opaque to you, but you might find out by searching for my birth certificate. Marcher's secret is of a different sort, and knowable in different ways. In some ways, it changes over the course of the story, in which what it means to "know" something (see e.g. pp. 327-332) is itself a matter of debate).
* What are the effects of Marcher's secret? What sorts of relationship does it make possible? How, in particular, does it affect Marcher's relationship to May? His relationship to his own experience? The relation of each of them to society at large?
*While the story never turns explicitly to the topic of sex or sexuality, it will occasionally discuss gender. What do Marcher and the narrator say about women generally, and about May in particular? (Her aunt, a very minor character but an important one for her influence on May, is also interesting in this context). Conversely, what is said or implied about being male?
*The story's title is a clue to one important strain of thematic language in the story, about the jungle and its opposite, the desert; watch for related language about lushness, on the one hand, and aridity and emptiness on the other.
*We might look at the story's opening, at the Weatherend estate, as a sort of model in miniature for the concerns of the story as a whole. May is a sort of informal tour guide there, a service she performs as a condition of her aunt's allowing her to stay there. She'll perform a kind of analogous service for Marcher, guiding him not through the estate but rather through his own memories and into his future experience. Look carefully, then, at how James describes the experience of the visitors to Weatherend, and at the particular things that May helps Marcher recover about his memory of her.
For a large part of my life, I have been stigmatized by a masculinity that marked me as ambiguous and illegible. Like many other tomboys, I was mistaken for a boy throughout my childhood, and like many other tomboy adolescents, I was forced into some semblance of femininity for my teenage years. When gender-ambiguous children are constantly challenged about their gender identity, the chain of misrecognitions can actually produce a new recognition: in other words, to be constantly mistaken for a boy, for many tomboys, can contribute to the production of a masculine identity. It was not until my midtwenties that I finally found a word for my particular gender configuration: butch. —Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinities (1998), p. 19
We've looked over the past couple of weeks at arguments that resist traditional categories of gender and sexuality: Wittig argues that "lesbians are not women," that the whole binary structure of gender (and sex) needs to be left behind. Judith Butler argues that gender identities are lived moment to moment, only as real as the series of acts and perceptions that approximate them.
Del Grace, "Jack's Back II" (1994)
While Halberstam praises and draws upon Butler's work, her strategy rather depends on making use of gender and sexual identities in particular and (relative to heteronormative assumptions) defamiliarizing ways. Instead of challenging the reality or the ontological ground of masculinity, she proceeds as if there is a way of being identifiable as "masculine," and studies how that identity manifests itself in bodies that aren't straight or male. This isn't, it seems fair to say, a return to essentialism (the idea that there's a masculine essence, a 'real' thing). Halberstam rather takes for granted (works on the basis of) Butler's claims about gender's unreality. Instead of showing in general that gender is unreal or constructed, she works through particular cases in which it's clearly so. In "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" (2002), she makes a succinct case for the critical value of studying non-male masculinities, a project she had undertaken at length in Female Masculinities (1998).
In Paris is Burning, we saw several of the men talk about drag as an aspiration to "pass," to look like a woman in spite of having an anatomically male body or, in some cases, to surgically alter a male body so as to become convincingly female. Yet we considered in discussing the film how these aspirations sometimes led to performances of femininity that read as exaggerated or excessive; the two people on the beach, for example, on of them a post-operative transexual with a still recognizably male voice, as her transgendered friend mockingly points out, end up laughing at the distance that still separates them from the 'real' thing. That laughter is hard to read, I think: it sounds rather joyous--"I'm free as the wind," one of them says--and yet it may be somewhat cathartic, registering a failure to attain the desired sort of naturalness. Insofar as drag or transgendered behavior is understood as aspiring to "pass," it seems doomed to mere approximation (as is, for that matter, even a female body's performance of femininity, on Butler's reading).
Jake (1991), photograph by Catherine Opie.
Halberstam reproduces several photographs
from this series in Female Masculinities.
Halberstam seems to have a quite different experience of gender identification in her sights, one whose goal isn't at all to pass, but to inhabit an identity that is recognizably neither male nor female. To be butch isn't to wish to pass for a man; it is rather to be a recognizably masculine woman. Not to fall neatly into either category isn't a failure--it's the point. When Halberstam discusses those bathroom doors that Lacan uses to show the power of signification in producing gender identity--the "women's" sign gets you to put your body through the door--what she focuses on isn't the transgendered person's wish to pass in the bathroom, but rather the fear of not passing: "the bathroom problem is much more than a glitch in the machinery of gender segregation and is better described in terms of the violent enforcement of our current gender system" (Female Masculinities, 25). One goal of her work, then, is not (as in Wittig) the eradication of gender categories, but their multiplication:
The "It's Pat" character produced laughs by consistently sidestepping gender fixity--Pat's partner had a neutral name, and everything Pat did or said was designed to be read either way. Of course, the enigma that Pat represented could have been solved very easily; Pat's coworkers could simply have asked Pat what gender s/he was or preferred. [My] project on female masculinity is designed to produce more than two answers to that question and even to argue for a concept of "gender preference" as opposed to compulsory gender binarism. (FM, 27)
"Pat," played on Saturday Night Live
in the '90s by Julia Sweeney
In "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," Halberstam looks back at a series of films released during the years when she was completing that 1998 book that feature gay characters who either facilitate or become involved in straight relationships. Halberstam calls these "heterosexual conversion narratives" (or "fantasies") -- "a fairly repulsive genre of films" (2640), she says by way of introduction. This characterization may be surprising, in that these films are not what would usually be called homophobic or anti-gay; as Halberstam points out, As Good As It Gets was even recognized at the Academy Awards by a Hollywood establishment that has been in many ways out in front of middle America in its acceptance of queers. I suspect the Academy would be surprised to hear that it nominated Jack Nicholson "for playing America's most endearing racist, homophobic, sexist white guy" (N 2641n1, my italics). Indeed, they almost surely intended to nominate him for a role that criticized those views, in that they're exactly what the character needs to unlearn before he can be an acceptable love object for the female lead (played by Helen Hunt).
Jo Calderone, aka Lady Gaga, at the
2011 Video Music Awards
Yet this might not be critical enough, or not criticism of the right kind, and Halberstam begins from the premise that "to keep pace with changes in the social and political recognition of queers, homophobic response has become ever more subtle and devious" (2638). This group of films needs to be criticized, in other words, precisely because they pass off a subtilized homophobia beneath a gay-friendly façade. What are Halberstam's grounds for this critique? In what way do these films reaffirm rather than critique white male masculinity? Why is As Good As It Gets not good enough?
The next step in Halberstam's argument is to suggest that female masculinity, excluded from these films, would pose a potent threat to their normalizing love plots (it "would be or could be cataclysmic"--2642). She works through this idea in the second section of her essay, largely on the basis of two psychoanalytic accounts of the relationship between anatomical sex and phallic power, by Paul Smith and Judith Butler. (Halberstam gives a good example here of the sort of exposition of other critics' work that you'll be attempting in your second papers). Again, what's the argument here--why is female masculinity potentially "cataclysmic" for heteronormative culture?
Catherine Opie, Bo
Finally, we might wish to ask whether Halberstam's use of identity categories, albeit for the purpose of unsettling them, escapes the cultural baggage that goes with those categories. What place is there here, for example, for female (or male) femininity?
(Halberstam writes occasionally, as Jack Halberstam, on politics and popular culture at bullybloggers).
When I spoke at the conference on homosexuality in 1989, I found myself telling my friends beforehand that I was off to Yale to be a lesbian, which of course didn't mean that I wasn't one before, but that somehow then, as I spoke in that context, I was one in some more thorough and totalizing way, at least for the time being. So I am one, and my qualifications are even fairly unambiguous. Since I was sixteen, being a lesbian is what I've been. So what's the anxiety, the discomfort? Well, it has something to do with that redoubling, the way I can say, I'm going to Yale to be a lesbian; a lesbian is what I've been being for so long. How is it that I can both "be" one, and yet endeavor to be one at the same time? When and where does my being a lesbian come into play, when and where does this playing a lesbian constitute something like what I am? To say that I "play" at being one is not to say that I am not one "really"; rather, how and where I play at being one is the way in which that "being" gets established, instituted, circulated, and confirmed. This not a performance from which I can take radical distance, for this is deep-seated play, psychically entrenched play, and this "I" does not play its lesbianism as a role. Rather, it is through the repeated play of this sexuality that the "I" is insistently reconstituted as a lesbian "I"... —Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," in Inside/Out, ed. Diana Fuss (1991)
In the passage above, Butler rehearses the theory of identity as performative, stated in impersonal (third-person) terms in Gender Trouble, with reference to herself. We see her own, experiential sense of how being a lesbian is differently important according to context (e.g., an academic talk on sexuality). When she says that since age sixteen, "being a lesbian is what I've been," we should hear the emphasis on the "-ing" in "being": she's been being a lesbian, bringing that aspect of herself into being through recurrent actions.
This idea that identity (being) is the product and not the ground of action (doing) finds perhaps its clearest expression in Nietzsche, who develops it in The Genealogy of Morals I.13 (you have this in your course reader):
A quantum of force is equivalent a quantum of drive, will, effect--more, it is nothing other than precisely this very driving, willing, effecting, and only owing to the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a "subject," can it appear otherwise. For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed--the deed is everything. (p. 45, trans. Kaufmann)
We might say in this spirit (awkwardly but memorably?) that there are no lesbians, only lesbianing (and no heterosexuals, just heterosexualing, etc).
Butler's generally critical attitude towards sexual identity categories, which she regards as confining and regulatory, sets her work apart from that of earlier theorists who claim "gay" or "lesbian" identities as sites of positive value and as bases for political rights. Thus Butler's work is associated with "queer studies," as opposed to "gay and lesbian studies." (We'll talk about this distinction more, and see more examples of it, over the coming weeks).
(n.b. - I'm indebted here to Paul Fry's excellent discussion of "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" in Theory of Literature (Yale, 2012); you can see him lecturing on Butler here).
"Gender" and "Sex" (outwittig Wittig)
While the English word "gender" is quite old, dating to the 14th century, the sense in which we use it, where it distinguishes culture from biology, is very recent. The O.E.D. describes this sense as follows:
3b.Psychol. and Sociol. (orig. U.S.). The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones; the collective attributes or traits associated with a particular sex, or determined as a result of one's sex.
The first use in this sense is from 1945, in the American Journal of Psychology 58: 228: "In the grade-school years, too, gender (which is the socialized obverse of sex) is a fixed line of demarkation, the qualifying terms being ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine.’" The first non-specialized use given is from 1968, in Life magazine. The gender/sex distinction was elaborated by psychologists studying what we now describe as transgendered people; they needed a way to distinguish biological from psychological sex. During the '60s and '70s, feminist theorists appropriated the sex/gender distinction for their own purposes (see the first chapter of Toril Moi, What is a Woman?, for a fuller account of this history).
"Garbo 'got in drag' whenever she
took some heavy glamour part,
whenever she melted in or out of
a man's arms, whenever she simply
let that heavenly-flexed neck...
bear the weight of her thrown-back
head." Butler's epigraph, N2542
Butler follows Monique Wittig in questioning whether it's useful to think of any biological ground that pre-exists culturally inflected conceptual categories; commenting on Wittig in Gender Trouble, she writes that "there is no distinction between sex and gender; the category of "sex" is itself a gendered category, fully politically invested, naturalized but not natural" (153). Yet Butler also critiques Wittig for trying to establish "lesbian" as a category transcending sex and gender: "Wittig calls for a position beyond sex that returns her theory to a problematic humanism based in a problematic metaphysics of presence" (169). Butler worries, in other words, that Wittig's concept of "lesbian" is no less reified than "woman" itself. The Norton's selection from Butler's Gender Trouble picks up just after her critique of Wittig. The first part of "Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions" (2542-7) concerns the body as culturally "inscribed" or "constructed" or "constituted." Some of her language in this section is quite abstract, but she also brings these abstractions down to earth at a few points. For example: "this is the mode by which Others become shit" (2546). What does she mean by this? What sort of cultural constitution of the body enables this devaluation (or "abjection") of the other, and how does Butler contest this?
"the imitation that mocks the notion
of an original is characteristic of
pastiche rather than parody" (N2550).
In the second half of the Norton selection, "From Interiority to Gender Performance," Butler begins to think through the Nietzschean idea of "doing" as producing "being" in the context of male drag performance. Against feminists who see male drag (including gay male drag) as rooted in misogyny, Butler argues here for its "subversive" potential with regard to normative gender roles. What justifies her description of drag as subversive? What reasoning underlies this claim? It will help to have a clear sense of this portion of Butler's argument before viewing Paris is Burning, so that you can begin to test out her claims about drag on the basis of what we see in the film.
Paris is Burning Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary, filmed in the late '80s, focuses primarily on two groups or "houses" of gay men in Harlem who compete in drag balls. The two houses, House Ninja and House Xtravaganza, are divided largely along ethnic lines (black and Hispanic, respectively). Drag in particular and female identity in general play different roles for different individuals in the film: some men go in drag only for the balls, others cross-dress in their everyday lives, and some are transsexuals who have modified their bodies surgically, or wish to. Yet "drag" also includes the performance of straight masculine identities (e.g. "executive," "soldier"), and many of the performers understand the identities that they perform as bound up with race and class as well; to look like an "executive," for example, means to look both white and wealthy. The drag balls, then, are about the glamour of identities from which the performers, non-white gay men, feel cut off in ordinary life, and for the most part, the winner at a ball in the performance of one of these identities is judged by how close he comes to passing for the "real" thing; the primary intent--and intentions in these performances are surely complex, multiple--in the "executive" category, for example, isn't to mock executives, but to emulate the appearance of one. This means that the application of Butler's idea that drag is "parody" to this film isn't perfectly straightforward: if drag is about parody, what does ball culture parody? The film will cut between footage of the balls and interviews with the participants, and sometimes to footage of wealthier and whiter parts of Manhattan; we should think critically about how the documentary constructs the relationship between the balls and the "outside" world. Since many of the drag performances involve the imitation of media and film images, Livingston's own camera should be seen as more than just a passive recorder of events here. If the drag balls are in part about a longing for visibility and fame (and the wealth that goes with them), does the performance (or the longing) end when the ball participants talk on camera to Livingston herself? Like Butler--who will point this out in "Gender is Burning"--Livingston is a white, Jewish, Yale-educated lesbian, and Paris is Burning launched her own career as a filmmaker, winning a major award at the Sundance festival (among others). Some critics of the film thus wondered if it was in part repeating rather than critiquing the inequalities of race, class, and sexuality that have structured the lives of its subjects. The drag performances themselves have been criticized as fundamentally misogynist; Butler will address some of these views in Friday's reading, but I think it's useful to have them in mind as possibilities before going into the film. For some of the ball participants, Willi Ninja in particular, ball culture really did lead to wealth and fame: Ninja was already becoming a sought-after dancer and choreographer when filming for Paris is Burning ended. In the same year as its release (1990), Madonna released her hit single "Vogue," which draws directly on a dance style invented at the balls--in New York, she had met members of House Xtravaganza. Many of the Hollywood icons that Madonna names in the song, and whose images David Fincher will recreate in the video, are also gay male icons: Bette Davis, Greta Garbo (see the photo and quote above), and Marlene Dietrich, among others. After you see Paris is Burning, the lyrics may sound a bit less like pop and a bit more like nascent critical theory: Look around everywhere you turn is heartache It's everywhere that you go You try everything you can to escape The pain of life that you know
When all else fails and you long to be Something better than you are today I know a place where you can get away It's called a dance floor, and here's what it's for...
It makes no difference if you're black or white If you're a boy or a girl If the music's pumping it will give you new life You're a superstar, yes, that's what you are, you know it.
"Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion" That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. —Butler, Gender Trouble (N 2548) Strike a pose, there's nothing to it. —Madonna I'd like to be a spoiled, rich white girl--they don't really have to struggle for anything. —Venus Xtravaganza
Willi Ninja
I can never say how a woman feels... Women get treated bad. —Pepper Lebeija Take a family--it's the mother that's the hardest worker, it's the mother who gets the most respect. —Willi Ninja I'm trying to bring their [NYC women's] femininity back... it's nice to know, because it's attractive to men. —Willi Ninja, on coaching women in runway walking technique
Butler's essay on Paris is Burning was published in her Bodies That Matter (1993). She writes the essay after an initial wave of responses to the film, and so is able to engage with critics of the film (chiefly bell hooks) as well as the film itself. (Indeed, the essay seems to engage in more detail with other critics than it does with the film).
The balls confront Butler with an example of drag that isn't clearly efficaciously "subversive": the performance style of the balls, appropriated from mass culture, is easily enough reappropriated by it. The performers remain vulnerable to a world where being "read" can cost blood and not just trophies.
Octavia St. Laurent
Butler had not, of course, ever claimed that drag would automatically prove subversive: "Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony" (N 2551). While she leaves this as an open question in Gender Trouble, she begins to work through it more concretely in "Gender is Burning." What does Butler most value in the ball culture filmed by Livingston? How does she explain subversion when she revisits her theory in this later essay?
One complexity that she deals with concerns what Foucault has called "the tactical polyvalence of discourses." Foucault's idea is that no discourse is intrinsically at the service of any particular interest group. What Butler confronts in "Gender is Burning" is the fact that if discourse is "polyvalent," it's nevertheless not quite a tool, not really analogous to, say, a wrench or a gun that fits all hands alike.
If one comes into discursive life through being called or hailed in injurious terms, how might one occupy the interpellation by which one is already occupied to direct the possibilities of resignification against the aims of violation? (123)
If you find out the name for what you are is, say, "faggot," you'll be able to mock and transvalue the derogatory intent of the word, even use it as a term of endearment (as the men in the film sometimes do). Does this change anything though, really? How do you understand what Butler means here by "occupying" an interpellation, and "direct[ing] the possibilities of resignification against the aims of violation"? How does she distinguish the drag balls from the drag in mainstream movies like Tootsie (see 126)?
Venus Xtravaganza
Beyond parsing Butler's essay, there's a lot to say about the film itself, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on one or both or on the relation between the two in your comments. The relation of drag to femininity in the film seems particularly complex (see the epigraphs to this section, above), and a bit underexplored in Butler's account: the way the drag queens talk about being a woman is by turns sympathetic and disconcerting. Everything Venus admires about herself is bound up with her approximation of a certain feminine ideal, for example, and yet she also rationalizes turning tricks as a prostitute on the analogy of heterosexual marriage: if a wife wants a washer and dryer, she's going to have to give her husband what he wants, so "it's all the same in the long run."
The cast of Dynasty, the '80s primetime soap
opera that becomes a 'category' at the balls.
Like Woolf and Cixous, both Rich and Wittig are first and foremost creative writers -- Rich a poet, Wittig a French-language novelist -- who are also feminist activists and theorists. Unlike Cixous and Woolf, though, Rich and Wittig don't write theory in a way that seems stylistically continuous with fiction or poetry. This isn't to say that they don't write movingly or take advantage of particular figurative and rhetorical devices in their prose--see Rich's rather stunning description of "the queasy strobe light" of compulsory heterosexuality that "flickers across and distorts our lives," for example (1607) -- yet it does seem fair to say that their writing violates fewer of the conventional norms for discursive prose: we'll find no imaginary Manx cats, no enthusiastic evocations of masturbation, no "pwetty eyes" (1958). Since we've discussed the value of these literary strategies for theory while looking at Woolf and Cixous, one overall question for us on Friday would be about the relative and tactical pros and cons of abandoning such stylistic experiments.
Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence"
Like Johnson, both Rich and Wittig give us, in their extensive footnotes, a sense of how wide-ranging and various the projects of feminist and queer scholarship had become by the early '80s: the graduates of Newnham and Girton had by this time more than taken up the suggestions for future research made by Woolf in Room.
Adrienne Rich
Unlike Johnson, though -- remember that her essay was written later, in 1998 -- both Wittig and especially Rich write at a moment when the women's movement and, a fortiori, the gay rights movement felt the gains made since The Feminine Mystique (1963) to be far from secure. The late '70s had seen Anita Bryant gain a national audience for her "Save Our Children" campaign, which sought to save children not from hunger or poor schools but from gays with civil rights. ("If homosexuals are allowed civil rights, then so would [sic] prostitutes, or thieves, or anyone else" -- see the video below; skip to a minute or so in for the original footage of Bryant). The Equal Rights Amendment (see Lorde 119) was dead in the water by 1981, after what had seemed like its nearly inevitable ratification in the previous decade. Ronald Reagan had won the 1980 presidential election on a "family values" platform that most feminists and gays felt to be inimical to their causes.
Rich's essay has the ambitious goal of contextualizing female heterosexuality within an array of social, political, and economic practices, ranging from sex trafficking to advertising to pornography to workplace harassment and unequal pay. Foucault argues that "power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere" (93). Rich's essay at once tries to enumerate a set of under-observed sources of male and heterosexual, and (thereby) to make possible a strategy within the feminist movement to resist and transform these sources. This strategy of naming unspoken things is, of course, also Friedan's; Rich borrows a formulation of it--I think, though the footnote placement is odd--from Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery:
Until we name the practice, give conceptual definition and form to it, illustrate its life over time and in space, those who are its most obvious victims will also not be able to name it or define their experience. (quoted N 1600)
We should think, then, about the usefulness (and limitations) of some of Rich's chosen terms. Two of her major innovations in this regard are "lesbian existence" and "lesbian continuum." Rich prefers "lesbian existence" to "lesbianism," she says, because the latter "a clinical and limiting ring" (1603). What advantages does she see in the term "lesbian existence"? Do these seem convincing to you?
"Lesbian continuum," Rich writes, is meant to suggest "a range...of woman-identified experience," including "forms of primary intensity" that don't arise from sexual acts between women (1603-4). Rich's tactic here, we might say, is to loosen the conceptual tie between "lesbian" and any particular kind of sexual aim or object. Again, what are the gains of this strategy? (We should be sure to get clear about the meaning of "woman-identified" and "male-identified" in this context as well--we rather hurried past these important terms while discussing Lorde).
Considering more broadly the place of sexuality in Rich's essay, we might compare her description of the "erotic in female terms" to Cixous's. Here's Rich:
...as we delineate a lesbian continuum, we begin to discover the erotic in female terms: as that which is unconfined to any single part of the body or solely to the body itself; as an energy not only diffuse but, as Audre Lorde has described it, omnipresent in "the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic," and in the sharing of work; as the empowering joy which "makes us less willing to accet powerlessness..." (1604)
And here's a similar moment from "The Laugh of the Medusa":
I have been amazed more than once by a description a woman gave me of a world all her own which she had been secretly haunting since early childhood. A world of searching, the elaboration of knowledge on the basis of a systematic experimentation with the bodily functions, a passionate and precise interrogation of her ertogeneity. This practice, extraordinarily rich and inventive, in particular as concerns masturbation, is prolonged or accompanied by a production of forms, a veritable aesthetic activity, each stage of rapture inscribing a resonant vision, a composition, something beautiful. (1943)
These moments are similar in that both Rich and Cixous object, as they elsewhere in their essays, to a typically male imagining of sexuality as fetishistically localized in the genitals; they see female eroticism as more diffuse, more "polymorphous" (to use Freud's term, though with a different value). What are the important differences between these passages, though, in terms of emphasis and style? What different conclusions do Rich and Cixous draw from fundamentally similar ideas about a distinctively feminine sexuality?
Sexual violence: Finally, Rich brings into the foreground the issue of sexual violence between men and women, in the forms of forced prostitution, sexual abuse, rape, and harassment.
While we haven't focused on these issues as of yet, it's worth recalling here that the place of sadism and masochism in sexual behavior were already problems for Freud in The Three Essays: sadism and masochism are "the most common and the most significant of all the perversions" (23), and they "occupy a special position among the perversions, since the contrast between activity and passivity which lies behind them is among the universal characteristics of sexual life" (25). What's striking here is that, rather as Freud saw homosexuality as a special kind of preference but also a latent potential within every person ("original bisexuality"), here he seems unable to decide whether sadism and masochism are special kinds of sexuality or tendencies inherent to all sexuality whatsoever.
Drawing on the scholarship of Catherine MacKinnon, Rich calls into question the distinctions between (heterosexual) sex and violence underlying contemporary studies of rape (see 1598-99). Whereas Freud observes the pervasiveness of an aggressive component to sexual behavior, which he sees as more often (though not exclusively) characteristic of men than of women, Rich is interested in the concrete effects of male sexuality as a form of socially sanctioned aggression. Against those who would see rape as violence and intercourse as sexuality, Rich argues (following MacKinnon) that perhaps all intercourse is rape, that it's difficult to tell the difference between them.
Compulsion, Desire, Violence, Consent: This brings us to what is perhaps the central raised by Rich's argument: what does she mean by saying that heterosexuality is "compulsory," that women live "in the absence of choice" (1609) in the matter? Clearly, Rich can't mean that no women can choose to have sex with other women, or that no women are able to love other women. It does sound here, though, as if she's saying that no woman can choose to be heterosexual. Is that indeed her argument?
Here's a thought experiment that might help us sort out her claim: You crave almond butter. You go to the grocery store to find no almond butter, but only a shelf full of Skippy peanut butter -- creamy, not chunky. It costs $50 per jar. You ask the store manager if there's any almond butter, or even some other kind of peanut butter--with a bit less sugar, perhaps. No luck. You can, though, buy a bag of unshelled almonds for $1000, and grind them into almond butter yourself. Your choice. Or is it? What, in other words, are the conditions of possibility for choice, or for consent? Monique Wittig, "One is Not Born a Woman"
Though deeply critical of the naturalization of gender roles in the text of Marx and in Marxist practice, Wittig's "One is Not Born a Woman" makes an argument about women patterned on Marx's argument about the proletariat (or working-class): Just as the proletariat must become conscious of itself as a class in order to bring about a classless society, so must women become conscious of themselves as a (non-natural, socially constructed) class in order to bring about a sexless society--a society without "men" or "women":
What does "feminist" mean? Feminist is formed with the word "femme," "woman," and means: someone who fights for women as a class and for the disappearance of this class. (1909)
Yet Wittig notes that many feminists don't understand feminism in this way in practice: "For many others it means someone who fights for woman and her defense--for the myth, then, and its reenforcement" (1909). We've seen Barbara Johnson articulate a version of the impasse that Wittig struggles with here:
...deconstruction introduces a fissure between "woman" as a concept that can never be a proper name for all women and "feminism" as a movement that must -- but cannot -- consider "woman" as an epistemological ground for action. (Johnson, 7)
Feminism requires some concept of "woman," but is also dedicated to changing the entrenched and stereotyped versions of that concept. Wittig goes a step further in seeking not a change but an end to the concept. In doing so, she asserts that "the capacity to give birth (biology)" should not be seen to define women, because this "naturalize[s] history" (1907), mistakes the made for the given. This places her at odds with varieties of feminism that seek to define woman or femininity affirmatively, or to use female specificity as a psychological or political resource:
The refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual always meant to refuse to become a man or a woman, consciously or not. For a lesbian this goes further than the refusal of the role "woman." It is the refusal of the economic, ideological, and political power of a man. This, we lesbians, and nonlesbians as well, knew before the beginning of the lesbian and feminist movement. However, as Andrea Dworkin emphasizes, many lesbians recently "have increasingly tried to transform the very ideology that has enslaved us into a dynamic, religious, psychologically compelling celebration of female biological potential. Thus, some avenues of the feminist and lesbian movement lead us back to the myth of woman which was created by men especially for us, and with it we sink back into a natural group. (1909-10)
We might wonder, here, how Wittig and Cixous would respond to each other, given that Cixous sometimes does indeed celebrate a specifically feminine sexuality:
Bring the other to life. Women know how to live detachment; giving birth is neither losing nor increasing. It's adding to life an other. Am I dreaming? Am I mis-recognizing? You, the defenders of "theory," the sacrosanct yes-men of Concept, enthroners of the phallus (but not of the penis): Once more you'll say that all this smacks of "idealism," or what's worse, you'll splutter that I'm a "mystic." (Cixous, 1957)
Is Wittig one of the "yes-men of the Concept"? Is Cixous a mystic? How might we understand the (apparent?) conflict between their feminisms?
For Wittig, the category that escapes the historical legacy of sexism and heterosexism embedded in the categories of "man" and "woman" is "lesbian":
Lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically. (1912)
I don't want to overplay the differences and conflicts among the theories of Cixous, Rich, and Wittig: surely they have a great deal of common ground, and would agree about many practical matters of social and political reform. Yet in this last quote, Wittig, whose arguments are in some ways so resonant with those of Rich, would seem to be at odds with her: if for Rich a lesbian is the quintessentially woman-identified woman, it seems that for Wittig, "lesbian" is politically valuable as a category precisely for not being identified with woman, as she says emphatically at the end of "The Straight Mind": "Lesbians are not women" (32). Before deciding which of these positions you agree with, you should think about the potential uses and values of each.
As for Rich, the place of sexuality in Wittig's theory is again a point of interest: she defines lesbians by opposition to social and political forms of oppression, and not primarily in terms of sexual desire.
Another point of contact with our earlier readings comes in Wittig's claim that "equality in difference" is an illogical principle (and note that she seems to echo here the "separate but equal" language of Brown vs. The Board of Education). Obviously, this places her in emphatic disagreement with writers like Lorde and Cixous who see difference as a value in itself; see too Johnson's discussion (borrowing from Joan Scott) of the conflicts between and equality (Johnson, 5).
"The Straight Mind"
Monique Wittig
In this essay, Wittig looks back at the linguistic turn in the human sciences, which happened earliest and most emphatically in France, following Saussure, and slowly spread abroad in the second half of the 20th century. Wittig's title for this essay echoes the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss's The Savage Mind (La Pensée sauvage) (see her page 27).
Wittig sees structuralism, including Lévi-Strauss and Lacan, as faulty first of all because it (like Saussurean linguistics, which studies languages as fixed and not changing structures) it is ahistorical. This criticism is, to a point, typical of the varied schools of thought sometimes categorized as "poststructural," of which Derrida and Foucault are usually taken to be exemplary. Indeed, Derrida articulates his post-structural theory precisely through a critique of the ahistoricity of Lévi-Strauss in "Structure, Sign and Play in the Human Sciences" (in Derrida's Writing and Difference).
Where Derrida sees not enough difference in structuralism, a failure to take account of temporal difference, Wittig again wishes to do away with difference altogether. Her motivations for this theoretical move lie in the history of oppression that conceptual differences (especially binaries) have undergirded--you'll think back on Dora, no doubt, as you read her critique of psychoanalysis (23ff.).
Wittig's ideas about language as having "material" consequences might recall Foucault's discussion of discourse and power: do you see substantial overlap between these two thinkers? Are there important differences between them that you would point to?
There's a moment at the end of Wittig's essay that seems as important as it is easy to overlook:
...let us say that we break off the heterosexual contract. So, this is what lesbians say everywhere in this country and in some others, if not with theories at least through their social practice, whose repercussions upon straight culture and society are still unenvisionable. (32)
The interesting suggestion here is that social practices speak, even if not yet articulately. We might think back here to Woolf's decision, in Room, to tell stories (about a walk on campus, a luncheon, a dinner) before articulating theories, or to Cixous's description of women's speech as expressive not just of ideas but of drives. We often think of theory as avant-garde, as articulating ideas that practice will need to catch up with, yet Wittig reverses that common conception. Since she doesn't provide examples of these practices, can you imagine what she might have in mind?
We'll continue to think about the relation of practice and theory later this semester -- next week, to begin with, as we turn to the work of Judith Butler.
She was an American woman engaged in work of a propagandist nature, which consisted principally in speaking and writing. All her life a certain degree of anxiety, sometimes very severe, was experienced after every public performance, such as speaking to an audience. In spite of her unquestionable success and ability, both intellectual and practical, and her capacity for managing an audience and dealing with discussions, etc., she would be excited and apprehensive all night after, with misgivings whether she had done anything inappropriate, and obsessed by a need for reassurance. This need for reassurance led her compulsively on any such occasion to seek some attention or complimentary notice from a man or men at the close of the proceedings in which she had taken part or been the principal figure; and it soon became evident that the men chosen for the purpose were always unmistakeable father-figures, although often not persons whose judgement on her performance would in reality carry much weight. — Joan Riviere, "Womanliness as a Masquerade" (1929)
Cixous, c. 1969, signing copies of her first novel, Dedans (Inside)
Every woman has known the torment of getting up to speak. Her heart racing, at times entirely lost for words, ground and language slipping away--that's how daring a feat, how great a transgression it is for a woman to speak--even just to open her mouth--in public. ... Listen to woman speak at a public gathering (if she hasn't painfully lost her wind). She doesn't "speak," she throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her voice, and it's with her body that she vitally supports the "logic" of her speech. Her flesh speaks true. She lays herself bare. —Cixous, N 1947 You, Dora, you the indomitable, the poetic body, you are the true "mistress" of the Signifier. —Cixous, N 1953
..who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body...
—Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 48
1. Speaking as a woman A Room of One's Own was first delivered by Woolf as a lecture about women's writing. Cixous's "The Laugh of the Medusa" is in many ways an essay about women's speech, their voices.
Perhaps even more than Lacan, Cixous's friend Jacques Derrida had made the difference between writing and speech a central topic for theoretical reflection of all kinds in France in the late '60s and early '70s. In a section of Dissemination (1972) called "Plato's Pharmacy," which you can find excerpted in the Norton anthology, Derrida undertakes a philologically grounded critique of the discussion of writing and speech in Plato's Phaedrus. (The following summary is rough at best...) In the Phaedrus, Socrates claims that writing is inferior to speech for a variety of reasons: it's merely a crutch to support our fallible memories; it lets an author make an argument without being present to support it, and so is in some ways intrinsically devious; it's more material than speech, which more immediately expresses one's thought. Writing, then, is just a supplement or support to spoken language; speech expresses the "Logos," truth grounded in reason. Plato's argument is grounded in an alignment of binary terms:
speech writing
philosophy rhetoric
truth falsehood
presence absence
mind matter
Derrida will attempt to show that these binaries are in fact unstable, and that the values they encode are therefore reversible.
In thinking about the relation of writing to speech in her 1975 essay, then, Cixous intervenes in an ongoing philosophical conversation, and makes gender and sexuality more prominent parts of that conversation. Her emphasis on speech might let us ask how Woolf's theorizing would have proceeded differently had she shared this emphasis: if a woman needs £500 a year and a room of her own to write well, what does she need to speak well in public?
2. Writing (and theorizing) as a woman
Cixous's essay, compared to the texts we read last Friday, is challenging in that it seeks to perform the "feminine writing" that it also describes. What's more, Cixous asserts that a full theoretical account of feminine writing is impossible: "
It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded--which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. (1949)
This passage raises questions about Cixous's view of writing and her view of theory.
1) Theory: Rather than seeing this as a simply evasive moment in Cixous's argument, or even as an argument against theory as such, we might take it first of all as an argument against a particular practice of theory, one in which the moves that count as properly theoretical are the ones she resists here: defining, enclosing, coding. If we take Cixous's text as advocating a different (which isn't to say, opposed) set of theoretical moves, what would they be?
2) Feminine writing: Even if we can't (or shouldn't) define feminine writing, we can at least describe some of its characteristics and effects on the basis of Cixous's performance of it. What can we say about feminine writing, as this text exemplifies it? It will help, I think, to keep Woolf's account of writing "as women write" (Room, 74ff) in mind as we read as a point of comparison. What aspects of her own theorization of women's writing might Woolf recognize in Cixous's essay? What are the important differences between these two texts?
3. Cixous and psychoanalysis
Anon. (Flemish), Medusa's Head, c. 1600. The painting
was believed until to the late 19th c. to be the work
of Leonardo da Vinci.
Cixous, much more readily than Woolf or Friedan, embraces some of the terms of psychoanalysis (libido, the unconscious, repression, drives) even as she rejects many of its premises (most centrally, the conception of women as "castrated"). We discussed last week how Friedan's account of women's identity (or "internal image") as something necessary for emotional as well as intellectual and social wholeness derives from a psychoanalytic view of the self, especially from the "ego-psychology" school of psychoanalysis. Yet the presence of psychoanalysis in The Feminine Mystique seems minor compared to its prominence in "The Laugh of the Medusa," in which the central image's effect depends on our awareness that Cixous is radically reversing Freud's interpretation of it. For Freud,
to decapitate=to castrate. The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something. Numerous analyses have made us familiar with the occasion for this: it occurs when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals, probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of the mother. (Freud, "Medusa's Head" [written 1922, published 1940], in Writings on Art and Literature, ed. Neil Hertz, p. 264)
Uma Thurman as Medusa, in Percy Jackson and the Olympians: the Lightning Thief (2010).
For Cixous, the sight of the Medusa (thus of of female sexuality) is neither terrifying nor suggestive of a lack or wound:
You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing. (1951)
Her assertion that the Medusa is "beautiful" is perhaps an expected reversal of value; the claim the she's "laughing" is a bit more surprising, and it's the idea that Cixous chooses to emphasize with her title. Why is this so important? What does laughter mean for Cixous in this essay? (Look first of all at other references to laughter in her text -- these will help to fill in the concept for you).
More broadly, we might ask about the connection between sexuality and politics in this text. It seems fair to say that sexual desire is more integral to Cixous's account of feminism than it was to Woolf's or Friedan's. (It's important for the both of them, of course, but doesn't permeate their texts to the same extent). What risks does Cixous run in asserting, for example, that "more so than men who are coaxed toward social success, toward sublimation, women are body" (1953)? Why might she think it worth taking the risk of such a claim?
You'll sense (and the Norton's helpful footnotes will confirm this) that Cixous's point of reference for pyschoanalytic thinking is more often Lacan than Freud. Her essay is centrally concerned with language, and so Lacan's articulation of linguistics and psychoanalysis is particularly important for her. What particular aspects of his theory of language does she challenge? Which aspects does she draw on?
Like Lacan (and for that matter Woolf), Cixous wishes to retain a concept of sexual "difference" for her theory while jettisoning some of the baggage that comes with it: she'll thus distinguish between "sexual opposition" and "sexual difference" (1946). What's the difference? (Lorde's and Johnson's accounts of difference may be helpful here).
Just as she distinguishes between two understandings of sexual difference, Cixous wishes to distinguish two theories of bisexuality: what are they, and why does the difference matter? (See 1950). To what extent does Cixous's "other bisexuality" (1950) resemble Woolf's theory of the writer's "androgynous" mind?
Caravaggio, Medusa, 1597
In your comments, feel free to respond to any of the questions I've raised above or to point out aspects of Cixous's text that I haven't dealt with. Comparisons of Cixous to other writers (Woolf, Lacan, Friedan), grounded if possible in particular quotations, are especially welcome.
At right, an ad for Folgers coffee from circa 1963, when Friedan's book was published. It will give men equal opportunity to be Playboy bunnies. —a federal administrator in 1964, referring to Title VII, prohibiting sexual discrimination in hiring, of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Quoted by Friedan, 518 Take a hypothetical husband and wife who are both lawyers. But the husband is working 50 or 60 hours a week, going all out, making 200 grand a year. The woman takes time off, raises kids, is not go go go. Now they’re 50 years old. The husband is making 200 grand a year, the woman is making 40 grand a year. It wasn’t discrimination. There was a different sense of urgency in each person. — WI State Senator Glenn Grothman, in Feb. 2012, on the rationale for repealing equal-pay-for-equal-work legislation Free at last — again
One of the strange and ordinary things about the modern women's movement is that it keeps beginning.
This is strange insofar as we tend to extrapolate history backwards as a narrative of continuous progress leading up to the present. It's ordinary in that history so seldom, of course, moves in straight lines, and in that history is made up of many intersecting histories. The Emancipation Proclamation (1864) and the 14th Amendment (1868) were followed by the farce of Reconstruction and the tragedy of Jim Crow, opening the way for a "new" Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and '60s. The 19th century gay (his own term was "Uranian," after the "heavenly love" we've seen described in the Symposium) activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs might raise a disappointed (in so many ways) eyebrow at histories that date the gay liberation movement to Stonewall (1969). The original audiences of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879) might have been surprised that the play would feel contemporary when broadcast on American television in 1960. And both Wollstonecraft (Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792) and Olympe de Gouges, who drafted a "Declaration of the Rights of Woman" (1791) to complement the French Revolution's "Declaration of the Rights of Man" (1789), might be surprised to hear accounts of a women's movement that began in the 1960s, and which is often dated to Friedan's Feminine Mystique (1963).
Between Wollstonecraft and Friedan, we could locate other moments of origination or rebirth. In the U.S., the Seneca Falls Convention (1848) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Declaration of Sentiments mark one starting point. The suffrage movement in the U.K. became organized in the 1860s and '70s, where (somewhat unusually at this time) it was aided by a prominent male intellectual, John Stuart Mill, who presented to Parliament a petition (originated by women) for extension of the right to vote for members of Parliament in 1866; Mill published On the Subjection of Women in 1869. Emmeline and Richard Pankhurst and their daughters were major figures in the British suffrage movement to 1928 and beyond. The right to vote won by women in the wake of WWI was both a sudden victory and the result of over a century of struggle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Friedan's sense of a new beginning around 1960 should strike as both uncanny and expected, then. Her claim that she has discovered an unspoken truth about women's experience has been praised as rhetorically brilliant and critiqued as somewhat disingenuous about important recent precedents. (The intellectual historian and literary scholar Louis Menand gives a brief and helpful account of The Feminine Mystique's context and reception in a recent New Yorker article, "Books as Bombs.") To a certain extent, critiques of Friedan's acknowledgment of precedents are beside the point--more than any comparable predecessor, The Feminine Mystique was felt to mark a new beginning.
Friedan in 1970
(New York Times photo)
Friedan was a part-time magazine journalist and mother of three when she began work on the book in the '50s. After graduating with highest honors from Smith College in 1942, she went on to pursue graduate work in psychology at Berkeley with Erik Erikson, an internationally prominent psychoanalyst, but broke off her studies under pressure from a boyfriend. Returning to the East Coast, she married a theater-director-turned-ad-executive (Mad Men and Betty Draper may come to mind as you do Friday's reading). The Feminine Mystique turned her into a national and international influence on the women's movement, and Friedan followed up on her success as a writer by assuming a more actively political role, helping to found the National Organization for Women (i.e., N.O.W.) in 1966 and serving as its first president.
I'll be curious to hear on Friday about the extent to which The Feminine Mystique seems relevant (or, conversely, dated). In many ways, it does seem like a book from a different world, though not a distant one (your and even my parents and grandparents grew up in it).
Yet we have to approach the book, too, as one that did strike its first readers as revelatory, and we should consider the rhetorical techniques that helped to make it so compelling. Foucault has given us some useful tools for this: how does Friedan constitute secrets and incite to discourse in this introductory chapter, for example? How does the book relate to the discourse of sexuality that Foucault describes?
Friedan and Freud
The fifth chapter of The Feminine Mystique is called "The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud," and lays out a thorough indictment of Freud's sometimes blinkered assumptions about women.
The chapter is both influential for and representative the view of Freud in the '60s and early '70s feminist movements in the U.S. and the U.K. Psychoanalysis was more integral and internal to French feminisms of this period. Toril Moi's concise, lucid and still useful 1985 overview of French and and English-language feminist literary theories gives a useful account of these differences:
Whereas the American femnists of the 1960s had started by vigorously denouncing Freud, the French tok it for granted that psychoanalysis could provide an emancipatory theory of the personal and a path to the exploration of the unconscious, both of vital importance to the analysis of the oppression of women in patriarchal society. (Sexual / Textual Politics 96; cf. 27-9)
Moi dates the end of this trend to Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974). Yet even Friedan's rejection of Freud comes to a significant extent from within the discourse of psychoanalysis: Friedan, remember, is no casual reader of Freud, but an accomplished student of modern psychology; she had nearly become a psychologist herself. Erik Erikson, her mentor during her graduate work at Berkeley, was one of the most important developers of the "ego-psychology" branch of modern psychoanalysis, and one Friedan articulates one version of the argument of The Feminine Mystique as a critical development of Erikson's thought. She quotes the following passage from Erikson's Young Man Luther, A Study of Psychoanalysis and History (1958)
I have called the major crisis of adolescence the identity crisis; it
occurs in that period of the life cycle when each youth must forge for himself
some central perspective and direction, some working unity, out of the
effective remnants of his childhood and the hopes of his anticipated
adulthoood; he must detect some meaningful resemblance between what he has come
to see in himself and what his sharpened awareness tells him others judge and
expect him to be…. In some people, in some classes, at some periods in history,
the crisis will be minimal; in other people, classes and periods, the crisis
will be clearly marked off as a critical period, a kind of “second birth,” apt
to be aggravated either by widespread neuritocisms or by pervasive ideological
unrest. (Erikson 15ff., as quoted in Friedan, 134)
The problem, Friedan says, is that this identity crisis has been thought of as a male crisis, when in fact it seems to be equally and perhaps more acute for the women of her generation. And so she expresses one major claim of her book as what we might see as a revision of the Freudian repressive hypothesis:
It is my thesis that the core of the problem for women today is not
sexual but a problem of identity—a stunting or evasion of growth that is
perpetuated by the feminine mystique. It is my thesis that as the Victorian
culture did not permit women to accept or gratify their basic sexual needs, our
culture does not permit women to acept or gratify their basic need to grow and
fulfill their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely
defined by their sexual role. (Friedan, 133)
A pithier expression of this idea is that "the American woman no longer has a private image to tell her who she is, or can be, or wants to be" (126, my emphasis). This "private image" is opposed, of course, to the public image (or ego ideal) of the happy housewife supplied by '50s and '60s consumer culture. (Anyone feeling nostalgic for Lacan -- you know you do! -- might consider this latter quotation from Friedan in light of his critique of the image, of the "specular I" as opposed to the "social I" (N1167), in "The Mirror Stage"; how might Lacan respond to the individualist emphasis that becomes pronounced in at least some parts of her text?)
Friedan's feminism seems at once, then, both radically indebted and radically divergent from psychoanalysis, and can thus be a resource for you as you continue your work on Dora over the next few days.
Friedan quotes from the climactic speech of Ibsen's Nora, the heroine of The Doll's House, in her chapter on the history of the feminist movement: "'I can no longer content myself with what most people say or with what is found in books. I must think over things for myself and get to understand them...'" (141, my emphasis). Nora's words here don't have anything very immediately to do with sex as such, but everything to do with desire, and we might say (I'm suggesting) that psychoanalysis is useful to Friedan as a theory of desire, where desire need not be understood as primarily sexual. Her argument's power resides not just in its claim for equality as a reasonable or just ideal, but in her account of how the lack of a "private image" is leaving her contemporaries discontent, unfulfilled, desiring ways of being and flourishing unavailable to them. (I'll say a bit more about this in class tomorrow).
Making Waves The Feminine Mystique is perhaps the inaugural text of what you may have heard called "Second Wave" feminism, distinct from "First Wave" feminism, which had been focused on suffrage, in its broadening of the movement's concerns to social, cultural and psychological concerns not thus far considered political. ("The personal is political," while not altogether a new idea, was interpreted with new intensity during the '60s).
Audre Lorde
Our other texts for Friday, by Audre Lorde and Barbara Johnson, are thoughtful snapshots by two brilliant writers of the feminist movement's transformation as it expanded beyond the centers of concern in Friedan's work (from "Second" to "Third Wave"). The Feminine Mystique quite explicitly focuses on middle-class, married heterosexual women; implicitly, they're white. The women's movement after the '60s increasingly sought to account intellectually for differences internal to it -- differences of race, class, nation, sexuality -- rather than to assume a homogeneous "woman" at odds with an equally homogenous patriarchy. While neither Lorde nor Johnson refer specifically to Friedan, they both give voice to the difficulty and the intellectual ambition of these new developments within feminism.
Lorde is certainly better known as a poet than as a "theorist," but the collection from which our readings are drawn (Sister Outsider) is an important prose record of "Third Wave" feminism. The essays we're reading are very much addressed to an academic audience, to feminist scholars as a professional group. They record Lorde's experience of marginalization or exclusion, and the theoretical arguments arising from that experience.
Barbara Johnson
Barbara Johnson is, in my unauthoritative and enthusiastic view, one of the best few literary scholars of her generation, perhaps the best deconstructive literary critic to have written in English. Johnson studied with Paul de Man, the major figure in American deconstruction (though he was born in Belgium), at Yale, and spent most of her career teaching at Harvard. The "Introduction" to her 1998 The Feminist Difference is a forthright attempt to gauge the value of deconstructive and psychoanalytic interpretive modes for engaging with tensions--differences--within contemporary feminism. This is certainly the most academically oriented of our three essays, but it also helps to link the implicit debate between Friedan's and Lorde's outlooks back to the interpretive traditions we've studied so far in our course. Our syllabus isn't brimming with Johnson's work only because she elaborates her theoretical views by way of the close reading of particular literary texts, and it seemed to me like it would be unsatisfying to assign her criticism without also taking the time to read the primary texts she discusses. If you happen to be familiar with Melville's Billy Budd, I'd highly recommend her essay on it ("Melville's Fist") reprinted in our Norton anthology.
"Difference" is a key theoretical term for both Lorde and Johnson, and we might discuss how much common ground there is between their uses of it. Lorde writes with an eye primarily to feminism as a movement, while Johnson, for whom these practical concerns are by no means secondary, writes in a philosophical tradition running back through de Man and Derrida (and more distantly through Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Hegel) in which "difference" is a metaphysical as well as a social category. Do the different emphases of these two texts help to complete each other's projects, or do you see here rather a troubling gap (or difference) between theory and practice? Though neither writer mentions Woolf, I'd be curious to hear about any continuities you see between Room and Friday's readings, too.Room casts a long shadow over later feminist thought, and we'll be referring back to it frequently this semester.
Taken together, Lorde's and Johnson's essay gesture towards a path that we easily could have spent several more weeks following in this course: studying the relations of race and feminist theory in the lat 20th century. If that intersection is interesting to you, the Norton anthology provides some excellent starting points: see the essays by bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, Barbara Christian, and Barbara Smith.
