—on making the world queerer than ever
In her feminist landmark The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir asserts that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (1949/1989: 267). One might think that Beauvoir’s claim, issued over 60 years ago, would be relatively uncontroversial—at least among educated adults performing something like intellectual work in the public sphere—today. If, that is, one has understood, as per our early lessons, that human reality must be made to mean, and that our species’ prematurity at birth necessitates that no little animal at the mercy of language is ever born already fully humanized, much less “essentially” gendered, then the question of whether or not one “agrees” with Beauvoir’s observation is pretty much a no-brainer. Or if one has grasped Lacan’s argument that “Woman does not exist” (1975/1998: 7)—that women exist but that “Woman” is a product of male fantasy, a symptom of what Roland Barthes calls “this disease of thinking in essences, which is at the bottom of every bourgeois mythology of man” (1957/1972: 75)—then one should be able to recognize that a newly born human female hasn’t quite yet “lived up” to the expectations of masculinist fantasy or gotten very far in “the process of assuming, taking on, identifying with the positionalities and meaning effects specified by a particular society’s gender system” (De Lauretis 1994: 302). One might well imagine the female infant’s “womanly” potential, but as our old pal Hegel puts it, “when we want to see an oak . . . we are not satisfied to be shown an acorn instead” (1807/1977: 7). Or one might point out that if “woman” is our standard English term for an adult human female, then to call a newborn human female “a woman,” to purport that anyone can be born as a fully grown adult, is preposterous, in the literal sense of that word.
And yet, “preposterous” is exactly the word that an adult female has recently used, in the pages of The New York Times Book Review, to describe Simone de Beauvoir’s signature claim. In her review of a new translation of The Second Sex, a woman named Francine du Plessix Gray calls Beauvoir’s “one is not born a woman” a “preposterous assertion” which—get ready—“will be denied by any mother who has seen her toddler son eagerly grab for a toy in the shape of a vehicle or a gun, while at the same time showing a total lack of interest in his sister’s cherished dolls” (2010: 7)—as if any and all mothers everywhere in all of human history had beheld nothing else but this particular scenario of playtime preferences; as if all fort-da games ever played, all eager grabbing or bored letting go of manufactured objects on the part of our littlest animals, were always attributable only to their innate and unmanufactured natures, not to those protocols of “nurture” or socialization from which no human playtime has ever been immune; or as if no “nurturing” mother had ever done her duty to the reality principles of patriarchy by actively discouraging a toddling son’s interest in any dolls other than “G. I. Joe” action figures or by vigilantly squelching a barely ambulant daughter’s desire, as expressed through the available playthings, to one day drive a car or shoot a gun or use a tool or write a book, her desire to be something other than a cherished doll, plaything, or trophy herself, to do something else with herself, with her life, if she chooses, than make and care for those little living dolls called babies.
And of course there’s a point—a certain logic and sagacious foresight—to this protective maternal discouragement. After all, there’s little point in letting little girls actively play with toy trucks in a society (such as Saudi Arabia) where big girls can’t legally drive anyway. There’s little point in letting little girls actively play with their own clitorises in cultures where even those excessive “little toys” are one fine day to be taken away from them, so that they might become marriageable young women, the toys and/or tools of men. There’s little point in letting a little girl even pretend to be literate or educated, to read or to write, in settings such as Pakistan or Afghanistan, where, reportedly, a little girl might get acid thrown in her face on her way to school as Taliban-style punishment for the “obscenity” of being a little girl on her way to school.1 Maybe there’s little point in allowing a little American girl to pretend to be interested in math and science—to play with a toy microscope or a real calculator—in a culture where male presidents of prestigious universities casually attribute the relative scarcity of women in the highest echelons of scientific research to “innate” differences in men’s and women’s cognitive abilities.2 Or, as Virginia Woolf suggests with her hypothetical account of “Shakespeare’s sister” in her feminist landmark A Room of One’s Own, there would be little point for “a woman in Shakespeare’s day” to have had Shakespeare’s gifts as a writer, his “natural” and “innate” talent or genius for writing, for “any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at” (1929/1989: 48, 49).
One fears that these elementary tutorials in what Toril Moi calls “sexual/textual politics” are lost on the likes of Francine du Plessix Gray, or on anyone who would mockingly call Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born a woman “preposterous” and then trundle out the playpen observations of “any” old ahistorical “mother” as airtight evidence supporting the charge. Gray, to be fair, also maintains that Beauvoir’s claim has been “disputed by certain feminist scholars, who would argue that many gender differences are innate rather than acquired” (2010: 7)—but she doesn’t bother telling us who these “certain” feminist scholars are, nor upon what empirical research they base their certainties, nor upon what theoretical premises they base their claims to being feminist. Of course, one is not born, but rather becomes, a feminist—or then again maybe one doesn’t.
But what does it mean for any individual subject to become not “a woman” or even a feminist activist but an actively feminist theoretical writer? What follows here, in answer to this question, is, in warped imitation of Cleanth Brooks, of all people, a sort of “My Credo” regarding what feminist theorizing “means to me.” First of all, though, given the gendered credentials of the “me” here in question, given that I was not born female and have thus far completely failed to become a woman, let’s stipulate that one need not be, become, or have ever been a woman to engage in feminist theorizing.3 Conversely, let’s observe the obvious point that just being female doesn’t pre-qualify anyone to be a feminist. Moreover, let’s emphasize the second word in the phrase feminist theorizing to indicate that not all theorizing is informed by political feminism any more than all feminism or feminist literary criticism is demonstrably “theoretically aware.”4
Of course, one is never born “theoretically aware,” either, but I believe that to become theoretically aware as a feminist, and to become responsibly feminist as a theorist, one must learn to negotiate with a few basic critical ground rules. Thus, as per my credo, and to further warp the words of Mr Cleanth Brooks, “here are some articles of faith I could subscribe to” (1952/2007: 798). To become a feminist theorist, one must learn:
(1): To become relentlessly anti-essentialist, except maybe when it’s “strategically” productive not to be.
As Diana Fuss explains, essentialism in general philosophical terms involves “belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the ‘whatness’ of a given entity,” while essentialism in the cognitive domain of sex and gender involves “the idea that men and women . . . are identified as such on the basis of transhistorical, eternal, immutable essences.” While theory in general is “anti-essentialist” in that it rejects “any attempts to naturalize human nature” (Fuss 1989: xi), feminist theory in particular is anti-essentialist in that it rejects any attempts to naturalize and thereby eternalize historical social inequalities and asymmetries of power in the lived experience of sex and gender. Feminist theory assumes that human sex and gender are never essential facts of nature but are only ever materialized in the socio-symbolic, in the social realm of signs, and signs, as you’ll recall from our lesson on structuralism, “do not have essences but are defined by a network of relations” (Culler 1975: 4). Hence, for feminist theory, neither “woman” nor “man” can ever be “essentially natural” identities; gender itself can never be anything other than “a socially imposed division of the sexes” (Rubin 1975/2007: 1675), “a social category imposed upon a sexed body” (Scott 1988: 32), and no “body that matters” can ever have or express a “gender identity” except by virtue of signification, symbolic practices. But as Gayle Rubin points out in her landmark feminist text “The Traffic in Women,” all significant “expressions” of gender constitutively involve suppressions, repressions, and oppressions that are anything but naturally ordained:
Far from being an expression of natural differences, exclusive gender identity is the suppression of natural similarities. It requires repression: in men, of whatever is the local version of “feminine” traits; in women, of the local definition of “masculine” traits. The division of the sexes has the effect of repressing some of the personality characteristics of virtually everyone, men and women. The same social system which oppresses women in its relations of exchange, oppresses everyone in its insistence upon a rigid division of personality. (1975/2007: 1675)
For Judith Butler, however, this insistence on rigid sexual division works itself out, or doesn’t, not through “expression” as normally understood but rather via performativeness or performativity. Indeed, for Butler, who in the 1990s became anti-essentialism’s most prominent feminist champion, “the distinction between expression and performativeness is crucial” (1990: 192). To understand this crucial distinction, however, we should first “distinguish ‘the performative’ in the linguistic sense from ‘performance’ as public exhibition.” We should then observe that “speech-act theorist J. L. Austin distinguishes performative utterances, which ‘perform the action they describe,’ from constantive utterances, which ‘describe a state of affairs and may be true or false’ ” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 222). In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Butler subversively applies the idea of the linguistic performative to articulations of identity, arguing that outright “expressions” of identity—such as “I am a straight white man”—can never be constative utterances, merely describing some already existing gendered, sexed, and raced “self,” but are rather utterly performative, actually bringing into (relatively fragile) social existence that which they purport to describe (in “my” case, straight white manliness). In Butler’s account, I never substantially am a straight white man; I only ever performatively repeat—and with no small amount of flop sweat—an approximation of a culturally produced ideal of straight white manliness, an ideal that is itself always only a copy for which there was never any “true original.” For Butler, “gender is performative,” by which she means
that no gender is “expressed” by actions, gestures, or speech, but that the performance of gender produces retroactively the illusion that there is an inner gender core. That is, the performance of gender retroactively produces the effect of some true or abiding feminine [or masculine] essence or disposition so that one cannot use an expressive model for thinking about gender . . . Gender is produced as a ritualized repetition of conventions, . . . [a] ritual [that] is socially compelled in part by the force of a compulsory heterosexuality.5 (1997: 144)
With, however, her analysis of “drag” or “female impersonation” as a deconstructive imitation of a purportedly “true gender” that is itself shown to be only ever imitation, Butler in ways collapses the distinction between the linguistic performative and “performativity” in the sense of public exhibition.
When a man is [publically] performing drag as a woman, the “imitation” that drag is said to be is taken as an “imitation” of femininity, but the “femininity” that he imitates is not [ordinarily] understood as being itself an imitation. Yet if one considers that gender is acquired, that it is assumed in relation to ideals which are never quite inhabited by anyone, then femininity is an ideal which everyone always and only “imitates.” Thus, drag imitates the imitative structure of gender, revealing gender itself to be an imitation. (1997: 145)
For Butler, in other words, when it comes to gender, it’s all drag all the time, not only “when a man is performing drag as a woman,” but whenever “a man is” or “a woman is”—period. Given the imitative structure of all gender, whenever a man is, whenever a man’s a man, that man is only ever “caught in the act” of male impersonation, performing drag as a man, so that “a man is” is not a constative utterance (any more than, say, crossing one’s legs in a specific manner while sitting is the “natural expression” of some “inner gender core”). Given gender’s imitative structure, there’s never any real difference between being a man or a woman and acting like a woman or a man, whether we men and/or women like it or not.
And in fact Butler’s performative theories are not to everyone’s liking. Some see her work as symptomatic of a baleful move within the academy from a specifically feminist focus on “women’s studies” to an overly general “gender studies” or to a not always discernibly feminist “queer theory” (both moves facilitating yet more discussion from, about, and between men, not infrequently to the exclusion of women). Others, such as Joan Copjec (1994), Slavoj Žižek (1999/2008), Tim Dean (2000), and yours truly (2008), disagree with Butler’s take on Lacan (or think that Butler, who frequently critiques Lacan, seems not to have actually read very much Lacan). Still others attack Butler for being too “theoretical” and hence insufficiently “political,” if not actually immoral, some even going so far as to assert that Judith Butler—brace yourself here—“collaborates with evil.” In her assault on Butler in the pages of The New Republic, Martha C. Nussbaum pillories the woman she calls “The Professor of Parody,” rips into this evil academic’s “hip quietism,” and rather noisily proclaims that “Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it”—with “this” and “it” here standing for the seemingly “cheerful” but actually cynically debilitating “Butlerian enterprise” of highfalutin theory. “Feminism,” says Nussbaum, “demands more and women deserve better” (1999: 45) than Butler’s “fancy words on paper” (1999: 37). Of course, Nussbaum is technically absolutely correct—hungry women are not fed, etc., by reading the theoretical works of Judith Butler. But then, one might wonder exactly how the hungry, battered, and raped women of the world are substantially assisted or protected by moralistic attacks on the evil Judith Butler published in the pages of The New Republic.
However, Nussbaum’s unfancy if not rather puritan “words on paper” allow us to consider more seriously the question of whether feminist anti-essentialism enables or disables political action or agency on the part or behalf of women. Feminism, after all, is necessarily, even essentially, a political project—it must be about change. And so, some wonder what in the world “anti-essentialism” ever really changes, what politically “emancipatory effects” really follow from buddying up with Butler at theoretical drag bars or lolling around with Denise Riley examining the moniker “Woman” and forever asking Am I that Name? (1993). How does all this essence-less inquiry really help get anything politically salutary accomplished for women as an “identitarian grouping” (Bahri 2004: 209) of oppressed human beings? If in our desire to avoid “essentializing,” we become reluctant to say what or even that “a woman” truly is, basing our reluctance on the deconstructive imperative to refuse “the authority or determining power of every ‘is’ ” (Lucy 2006: 11) that there is, then how can “we” claim that “she” is truly oppressed (hungry, held down, battered, raped) or ever really fight against her oppression?
Now, the political aim of anti-essentialist feminism is of course to resist patriarchal oppression by refusing to fix meaning—specifically, by subverting the purportedly “biologically determined” meanings of the word “woman.” But (if I can begin to tap into some critically queer resources here) there’s also a sort of anti-metaphysical ethic of non-violence involved in proliferating the term “woman” in the same destabilizing way that queer theorists proffer “queer” as “an identity without an essence” (Halperin 1995: 62). Just as poststructuralists and postmodernists follow Nietzsche in questioning the value of “truth,” this queerly anti-identitarian ethic radically questions the value of “the self,” even if the “self” in question is the vaunted experiential self of collectively feminist identity politics, the sacrosanct “self” that, as the saying goes, supposedly “speaks truth to power.”6 For as Leo Bersani argues, “the sacrosanct value of selfhood accounts for human beings’ extraordinary willingness to kill in order to protect the seriousness of their statements.” The self, writes Bersani, is actually no more than “a practical convenience,” a way to get things done; but when “promoted to the status of an ethical ideal, it is a sanction for violence” (1990: 4), a way to get people killed. To avoid sanctioning violence, particularly violence against “the other,” one must learn to take oneself ironically. The ethically ironic trick that one must play or perform on oneself involves utilizing “the self” only as a “practical convenience”—not as an essential truth or locus of absolute authenticity but rather as a strategic fiction, and always without taking identity or identity-statements (or identity politics) seriously enough ever to kill or die for.
Even though the queer theorist Bersani and the Marxist feminist deconstructive postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak are far from addressing the same set of problems, perhaps Bersani’s ethically ironic stance toward “the self” can be productively related to what Spivak famously calls strategic essentialism in relation to “the group.” For the principle trick of strategic essentialism would be to remain theoretically anti-identitarian while mobilizing as much essentialist identity as is practically convenient to form a politically effective identitarian grouping. As Deepika Bahri explains, Spivak considers it possible for feminists
to avoid the pitfalls of biological determinism or formulaic fixity while continuing to use essentialism in a self-conscious and meditated fashion. Spivak describes the tactical and deliberate use of essentialist typology as “strategic essentialism”: “a strategic use of positivistic essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” (1996: 214). Although it is undesirable to accept any positivistic or deterministic notion of identity, Spivak nevertheless allows for its contingent use in a specific and well-defined context for the work being undertaken. (2004: 209)
Whether anti-essentialist or strategically essentialist, however, feminist theorists, as feminist theorists, all recognize that there is a great deal of political work still to be undertaken. Even if they grant the possibility of “performative interpretation, that is, of an interpretation that transforms the very thing that it interprets” (Derrida 1994: 51), feminist theorists still understand that revolutionary change in human sexual relations isn’t going to happen simply on Judith Butler’s or Jacques Derrida’s interpretive say-so. But as feminist theorists, most also take to heart Donna Haraway’s postmodernist point that even “the feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one” (1985/2008: 342, my emphasis). At the very minimum, and unlike Gray’s purportedly “feminist scholars,” feminist theorists acknowledge that human sex and gender are performative to the marrow—bodily matters, perhaps, but matters of cultural signification nonetheless, always in excess of “the bare choreographies of procreation” (Sedgwick 1990: 29) or the “bare bones” of chromosomal variance. Even, that is, if there turn out to be empirically provable “innate” differences between human males and females, we’ll still have to talk about what these differences mean and what, if anything, we want to do about them in relation to the question of what sort of world we want to live in. Yes, like non-human animals, human males and females are indeed made of flesh and blood and X and Y chromosomes and such, but, unlike non-human animals, “women” and “men” are made of signs, which neither have essences nor grow on trees nor fall from the sky. And the fact that the signs of gender have been to some extent denaturalized and demystified by feminist theory leads me to my credo’s next article faith; to wit, that to become feminist in one’s theorizing and theoretically aware in one’s feminism, one must learn:
(2) To become relentlessly anti-theological: no gods (or goddesses), no masters—no exceptions.
“Man,” says Marx, “makes religion” (1844/1978: 53), but, being a man, he forgot to add—“in order to maintain systemic male dominance.” For just as there’s no document of civilization that doesn’t also document barbarism, there is no documented “world religion” to date that hasn’t been invented by men in order to serve oppressively patriarchal purposes. This “radical” observation—which should be obvious to anyone who’s not a religious adherent (to the cause of male dominance)—isn’t nullified by the fact of no few women’s “willing participation” in their own “spiritual” oppression, much less by the fact that certain people consider themselves “feminist,” but nonetheless remain adhered to some patriarchal religious institution or another, no doubt in hopes of “reforming” it (i.e., inserting a few tokens of female authority into the overarching structure of male dominance but basically leaving that structure ideologically intact, i.e., with some phallic deity or another fixed at the fantasized center). I confess that my own powers of sympathy are strained by these remarkable (but not miraculous) powers of adherence, and that I quite frankly see no intellectually respectable way to reconcile feminist theory with any of the available andro-monotono-theisms. In other words—sorry, boys and girls, but if we want to grow up to become real-world feminist theorists, then we’ve got to get over “God,” even if we can’t get rid of grammar.
Well, I’m afraid that I’ve just alluded to Friedrich Nietzsche yet again, specifically to his dig at the “pitiable God of Christian monotono-theism” (1888b/2006: 491) and to his fear “that we are not getting rid of [this] God because we still believe in grammar” (1888a/2006: 464). My allusions aren’t at all inappropriate to a discussion of gender, however, for the immediately preceding sentence in Twilight of the Idols reads, “ ‘Reason’ in language: oh what a deceitful old woman!”—by which quip Nietzsche, according to his editors, is not simply being ageist and misogynist but rather “exploiting the fact that the grammatical gender of the word for reason in German (die Vernunft) is feminine” (Pearson and Large 2006: 464n21).
We’ll come back to this matter of gender and grammar anon. Here, let’s tarry with Nietzsche’s point about God and grammar, or “Reason in language.” Let’s observe that every grammatically correct and completely predicated sentence must include a subject and a verb, a subject which is the legible cause of the action that the sentence effectively describes. Nietzsche suggests, however, that this arbitrary grammatical rule is the unacknowledged legislator of the “reasonable” philosophical assumption that any effect must have a cause and for the “reasonable” theological assumption that any creation must have a creator. In sum, Nietzsche here ascribes sublime theological belief to mere grammatical prejudice. Of course, this ascription doesn’t mean that a prescriptive grammarian can’t be a howling atheist, any more than my claim that a feminist theorist must be “anti-theological” turns every militant atheist into a feminist. Nietzsche’s writing does, however, suggest that “getting rid of God” remains a problem of writing, and a problem of authority, for all animals at the mercy of language.
No coincidence, then, that the word “anti-theological” hails, as we’ve read, from Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author.” As you’ll recall, Barthes calls writing “an anti-theological activity” that basically bumps off “God and all his hypostases” by refusing “to fix meaning” (1968/1977: 147). But it isn’t just any old writing that “deicidally” refuses fixity. It certainly isn’t “male writing” that refuses phallic divinity by refusing to demonize feminine sexuality. It is, rather, “a new insurgent writing”—a “writing the body” or écriture feminine—that inscribes this explicitly feminist refusal to fix meaning. In her feminist landmark “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Hélène Cixous writes:
I mean it when I speak of male writing. I maintain unequivocally that there is such a thing as marked writing; that, until now . . . writing has been run by a libidinal and cultural—hence political, typically masculine—economy; that this is a locus where the repression of women has been perpetuated, over and over, more or less consciously, and in a manner that’s frightening since it’s often hidden or adorned with the mystifying charms of fiction; that this locus has grossly exaggerated all the signs of sexual opposition . . . , where woman has never her turn to speak—this being all the more serious and unpardonable in that writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures. (1975/2007: 1646)
Writing of sexually opposed ways of writing, Cixous celebrates the writing called écriture feminine as “the very possibility of change,” and she describes its opposite, “male writing,” as repressive and mystifying fiction that works against change, that tries to keep all its meanings fixed, all its canards in a row. But here, we might pause to ask—isn’t all this “writing the body” stuff borderline “essentialist”? Isn’t Cixous buying into biological determinism, writing as if any writing from any female body is inherently revolutionary while any male script remains innately phallogocentric? On the one hand, Cixous is clearly and intentionally writing about “writing, from and toward women” (1975/2007: 1647)—she is writing (from and toward) the female body, the masturbating, menstruating, maybe child-bearing (or maybe not—your choice, says Cixous), the literally and figuratively lactating body of “woman.” “There is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk,” writes Cixous, “She writes in white ink” (1975/2007: 1647). “By writing her self, woman will return to the body . . . Write your self. Your body must be heard” (1975/2001: 1646), etc. On the other hand, Cixous doesn’t count all writing by any female as automatically écriture feminine by a long shot. Nor does she think that all male bodies are biologically determined to just keep pumping out the custard of phallogocentrically “male writing.” In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” she notes “inscriptions of femininity” in the work of “Colette, Marguerite Duras . . . and Jean Genet” (1975/2007: 1646n4), while elsewhere she writes extensively on feminine inscription in her Exile of James Joyce (1968/1980). Despite, then, certain menstrual and milky appearances, there’s ultimately nothing biologically essentialist about Cixous’ écriture feminine (in other words, she gets metaphor—she understands that the word “milk” isn’t really milk, that the word “real” isn’t the real, etc.). I would also suggest that there’s nothing theologically essentialist about écriture feminine either, for Cixous’ Medusa, though obviously a conscientiously un-demonized figure of mythic resistance, isn’t exactly “a goddess.”
And neither is Donna Haraway’s socialist-feminist sci-fi cyborg.7 For at the end of her landmark “Manifesto for Cyborgs,” having pretty much pulled the plug on certain naturalizing, techno-phobic, and residually religious forms of feminist discourse, Haraway flat-out claims that she “would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” (1985/2008: 349). And to my atheist ear, Haraway also begins the essay on an anti-theological note, calling her manifesto “an effort to build an ironic myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism” and then following with this irreligious (and ungrammatical) fragment—“Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification” (1985/2008: 324). She goes on to call her essay
an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction . . . an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a post-modernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. (1985/2008: 325)
Haraway’s non-salvational cyborg is a “cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” And yet, it pleases Haraway to confuse the boundary between social reality and fiction, even science fiction, for “Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction” (1985/2008: 324). What links Haraway’s poly-sci-fi cyborg to Cixous’ laughing Medusa to Barthes’ anti-theological “scriptor,” and perhaps even to Nietzsche’s overflowing Dionysus, is this happy blasphemy against identity, this ironic belief in human reality as world-changing fiction, in writing as “the very possibility of change” in and of a world that must be made to mean. And yet, as much pleasure as we might take in the confusion of boundaries, we must, as Haraway observes, also take responsibility for their construction. Thus, as every good boy and girl must tirelessly point out, not everybody in the world—particularly the “Third World”—has the luxury of reading fiction or writing the body or proliferating sexy theory. And this point leads to my penultimate article of faith, which is that to become feminist in one’s theorizing, one must:
(3) Become relentlessly “anti-universalizing” in one’s radically critical endeavors, except when to do so effectively disables one’s radically critical endeavors.
With apologies to Cixous, we do have to observe that a good bit of the “ink” spilt in the name of feminist theory has been pretty “milky” (that is, Anglo-Eurocentrically “white”) and that anti-essentialist, antiidentitarian feminism has taken its share of hits from certain critical race and postcolonialist quarters. In “Postmodern Blackness,” for example, bell hooks describes (without exactly endorsing) the way she says
black folks respond to the critique of essentialism, especially when it denies the validity of identity politics[,] by saying, “Yeah, it’s easy to give up identity, when you got one.” Should we not be suspicious of postmodern critiques of the “subject” when they surface at a historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time [?] (1989/2007: 2012)
And Gayatri Spivak famously and effectively hangs Cixous and (particularly) Julia Kristeva out to dry in “French Feminism in an International Frame” (1981).
But perhaps the most relentless postcolonialist critique of Anglo-Eurocentric feminist theory is Chandra Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” which steadily argues against “a universalist theory of women’s oppression,” rightly insists “on the heterogeneity of the lives of ‘Third-World’ women,” and passionately “pleads for an interrelational analysis that does not limit the definition of the female subject to gender and does not bypass the social, class, and ethnic coordinates of those analyzed” (Bahri 2004: 213). Mohanty writes that her project involves “deconstructing and dismantling” what she calls “hegemonic ‘Western’ feminisms” while “building and constructing” what she calls “autonomous, geographically, historically, and culturally grounded feminist concerns and strategies” (1991/2008: 381). Of course, at the time of its writing, Mohanty’s essay represented a sorely needed intervention into the overly universalizing, overly generalizing, blinkeredly ethnocentric, and even discernibly racist tendencies of middle-class white Western feminisms.8 And Mohanty helpfully specifies that even in her non-Western woman’s eyes, “Western feminist discourse and political practice is neither singular nor homogeneous in its goals, interests, or analyses” and that her reference “to ‘Western feminism’ is by no means intended to imply that it is a monolith” (1991/2008: 381–2).
But what seems problematic about Mohanty’s project—at least to this conspicuously pale male feminist theorist (and please remember that it’s “my credo” you’re reading here, and that my credo needn’t necessarily be yours)—is the way the project potentially “dismantles” not simply the “hegemonic Western-ness” but the feminism of purportedly “hegemonic ‘Western’ feminism,” the way its insistence on always historically contextualizing and culturally grounding feminist strategies could work to bring those very strategies crashing to the ground. If, on the one hand, Western feminist theory has been, as Mohanty rightly charges, often quite guilty of what Slavoj Žižek calls “over-rapid universalization,” which “produces a quasi-universal Image whose function is to make us blind to its historical, socio-symbolic determination,” then, on the other hand, Mohanty herself might be indulging in what Žižek calls “over-rapid historicization,” which “makes us blind to the real kernel which returns as the same through diverse historicizations/symbolizations” (Žižek 1989: 50). And if the “real kernel which returns as the same” here is, simply put, the systematic oppression of women by men, then a searing critique of “a universalist theory of women’s oppression”—of the oppression, that is, of women everywhere by men everywhere—can end up effectively sparing men, acquitting us (and the socio-symbolic systems we construct and maintain in our own image) of the very charge of oppression, thus inadvertently endorsing patriarchal discourses and oppressive political practices. I’m not suggesting here that Mohanty intends to endorse male dominance (in fact I’m quite sure that she doesn’t), but rather that her over-rapid historicizations in the essay called “Under Western Eyes” might effectively blind her readers to what my self-admittedly Western eyes nonetheless take to be the “real kernel.”
For example, Mohanty writes that we must avoid universally casting “women as victims of male violence” and that “male violence” itself “must be theorized and interpreted within specific societies, in order both to understand it better and to effectively organize to change it” (1991/2008: 386–7); to more effectively organize toward change, says Mohanty, we must “theorize male violence within specific societal frameworks, rather than assume it as a universal fact” (1991/2008: 402). Now, on the one hand, as a subject supposed to be male, and hence supposedly supposed by feminism to be violent, I suppose I should be grateful for the presumption of innocence that Mohanty, in the interests of sociohistorical specificity, here provides me and my likes, and I suppose I should take full advantage of the opportunity she affords me to claim myself as a non-violent exception to the rule. I can also appreciate that her intended motive here is to rescue “Third World women” from their prescribed roles as victims of universal male violence, so as to afford these women greater political agency. On the other hand, this feminist man has to ask—are there any societies anywhere in which patriarchy, or systemic male dominance, isn’t still pretty much the de facto if not the de jure lay of the land, in which female agency isn’t still at least something of a threat to the idea of male authority, and in which authoritarian male violence against women isn’t always a strong possibility, an assumed prerogative of “male identity,” if not a universal then at least a fairly pervasive fact? And if there aren’t any such societies, wouldn’t that absence suggest that “male violence against women” is a big honking part of what Žižek calls the “real kernel,” a legitimately “trans-societal” concern for “strategically universalizing” feminist analysis?9 Mohanty apparently thinks not, for in her analysis, it is not systemic male dominance, but rather universalizing “Western feminist discourse” that “ultimately robs” Third-World women “of their historical and political agency” (1991/2008: 398). Mohanty’s analysis can thus be read as effectively protecting (non-Western) patriarchy while handing “hegemonic Western feminism” an enormous amount of power over Third World women.10
As for the “contextualization” upon which Mohanty unwaveringly insists—she writes that “while Indian women of different religions, castes, and classes might forge a political unity on the basis of organizing against police brutality toward women . . . an analysis of police brutality must be contextual.” But one wonders exactly which explanatory contextual details a feminist analyst really needs to know to “better understand” and better oppose such “complex realities” (1991/2008: 396) as state-sanctioned male brutality against women. There can be little doubt that Mohanty both opposes and wants to render more “understandable” statist/misogynist/masculinist violence in India and elsewhere, and yet, there are times when the definitional line separating “the understandable” from “the justifiable” can seem precariously thin—or again, there are times when an overly contextualized analysis of “complex realities” might blind us to the “real kernel.”
One (male) feminist analyst of masculinity (and organizer against male violence) has written that “under patriarchy, the cultural norm of male identity consists in power, prestige, and prerogative as over and against the gender class women. That’s what masculinity is. It isn’t something else” (Stoltenberg 1974/2004: 41). And yet, Mohanty often writes as if patriarchal masculinity (at least in “the Third World”) really were “something else.” She rather astoundingly argues against the “universalizing” feminist theory in which “patriarchy is always necessarily male dominance” and in which “religious, legal, economic, and familial systems are implicitly assumed to be constructed by men” (1991/2008: 397). But again, this anti-theological male feminist wants to know—who or what else does Mohanty think “constructed” these “systems”? God? Does she think they grew on trees or fell from the sky? If Mohanty demonstrably doesn’t want (us) to consider “male violence against women” as a universal problem, a “real kernel which returns as the same through diverse historicizations” (Žižek 1989: 50), or if she really doesn’t (want us to) see how “patriarchy” really has and still does equal systemic “male dominance” everywhere and always (even if not all men get to be dominant, even if not all men are treated equally in or by this system), then her project, for all its vaunted and welcomed anti-universalist value, arguably falls short of the basic minimum requirements of radical feminist critique (which, in order to be radical, should, in my view, neither over-urgently universalize nor over-hastily historicize). Moreover, if Mohanty really doesn’t think patriarchal “religious, legal, economic, and familial systems” are constructed by men (to serve the purposes of systemic male dominance), then her discourse falls somewhat short of what Said in Orientalism calls “Vico’s great observation that men make their own history, [and] that what they can know is what they have made” (1978: 4–5). Finally, particularly invested, as she seems to me, in denying that religious systems are “constructed by men” (she lets the adjective “religious” appear first on her list of systems), Mohanty seems to disregard even Marx’s most basic historical materialist observations that “Man makes religion” and that the “criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism” (1844/1978: 53, my emphases). One suspects, in other words, that unlike Donna Haraway’s radically ironic cyborg myth, Mohanty’s sincere crusade against hegemonic Western feminist universalism may on some fundamental level be more “faithful” to religion, and hence to patriarchy, than to “feminism, socialism, or materialism” (Haraway 1985/2008: 324).
But look, I’m not an idiot—I am quite fully aware of the fact that Gayatri Spivak has “famously described British intervention in the Sati [or wife-burning] practice in India as ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ ” (Bahri 2004: 200; Spivak 1988: 297). And so I also understand quite well that my intervention into Mohanty’s scorchingly critical practices in “Under Western Eyes” opens me to charges of just being a white man attempting to save white women (and white theory) from a brown woman, if not of being nothing more at the end of the day than a violently identitarian masculinist posing as a feminist, a man all too willing, if not to kill, then at least to kick discursive ass in order to protect the seriousness of his own ethnocentrically and anti-religiously biased statements—statements, like “real feminism sees no use-value in religion,” to paraphrase what I’ve asserted above, that may themselves have no real use-value for feminists, and which may indicate that my most fundamental political commitment is to Nietzschean atheism (or to my own cleverness) rather than to feminism, postcolonial critique, anti-capitalist struggles, or even, for that matter, social justice. All I might say in response to these quite serious charges is that if I truly believe that social justice entails my attempting to read and write theory as a feminist, and that if I discern what I take to be a non-feminist or potentially anti-feminist undercurrent in anyone’s otherwise sympathetic critique of feminist theory, then I feel duty-bound to point it out—a feminist man’s gotta do what a feminist man’s gotta do to expose over-hasty historicization and to try to keep all our eyes peeled for the “real kernel.” Or I might stress once again that this is after all only my credo—you’ll have to get your own, and, just as Mohanty’s critique hasn’t become a particularly valuable part of mine, mine might very well not become a credible part of yours.
But rather than attempting to support my charges against Mohanty with further evidence that I could draw from “Under Western Eyes,” or further refute what I imagine would be her charges against me, I will veer away from the problem of feminism’s ethnocentrism (which I think white Western feminist theory, after Spivak, Mohanty, bell hooks, and others, has basically bent over backward to politically correct) and turn instead to that of feminism’s heteronormativity.11 And this turn leads me to the end of my credo and to my last remaining article of faith—to wit, that in order to live up to its most radically and globally transformative promises, in order to keep writing (as) the very possibility of change, feminist theory must
(4) Do its part to help “make the world queerer than ever.”
In her other feminist landmark “Thinking Sex,” Gayle Rubin compares the analytical limitations of feminism to those of Marxism and concludes that “Feminism is no more capable than Marxism of being the ultimate and complete account of all social inequality.” She writes that “Marxism is probably the most supple and powerful conceptual system extant for analyzing social inequality” but that “attempts to make Marxism the sole explanatory system for all social inequalities have been dismal exercises.” While Marxism best confronts class antagonisms, Rubin writes, “Feminist conceptual tools were developed to detect and analyze gender-based hierarchies,” and “to the extent that these [hierarchies] overlap with erotic stratifications, feminist theory has some explanatory power.”12
But as the issues become less those of gender and more those of sexuality, feminist analysis becomes irrelevant and often misleading. Feminist thought simply lacks angles of vision which can encompass the social organization of sexuality. The criteria of relevance in feminist thought do not allow it to see or assess critical power relations in the area of sexuality. In the long run, feminism’s critique of gender hierarchy must be incorporated into a radical theory of sex, and the critique of sexual oppression should enrich feminism. But an autonomous theory and politics specific to sexuality must be developed. (1984/2008: 314)
And in fact such a theory has been developed by various cultural and political analysts who see their work as not (only) Marxist and not (only) feminist but (also) queer.13 What is now commonly known as queer theory develops as a “critique of sexual oppression” qua social normativity—queer theory develops by distilling the lessons of Marxism, feminism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and gay/lesbian studies while at the same time distinguishing itself from those movements by exposing their investments in heteronormativity and/or identity politics. Queer theory advocates a “thorough resistance to regimes of the normal” and attempts to “make the world queerer than ever” (Warner xxvi, xxvii) through such anti-identitarian resistance. Thus, on the one hand, queer theory
is interested in any and all acts, images, and ideas that “trouble,” violate, cross, mix, or otherwise confound established boundaries between male and female, normal and abnormal, self and other. In a limited sense, the goal is to create more space for and recognition of the various actions performed daily in a social landscape blinded and hostile to variety. But the broader goal is a general troubling, and an attempted unfixing, of the links between acts, categories, representations, desires, and identities. (Leitch 2001: 2487)
On the other hand, queer theory
views with postmodern skepticism the minoritizing conception of sexuality that undergirds gay liberation and women’s liberation (and hence academically institutionalized gay studies and women’s studies too) . . . Feminism and gay liberation based their claims for political participation and radical equality . . . on the foundation of identity . . . By contrast, queer theory and politics begin from a critique of identity and of identity politics, inspired primarily by Foucault’s analysis of the disciplinary purposes that sexual identities so easily serve. (Dean 2000: 223)
Thus, taking on what Berlant and Warner call the hard “labor of ambiguating categories of identity” (1995: 345), queer theorists offer up the fighting words “queer” and “queerness” as differing from not only “straight” and “straightness” but from gay, lesbian, etc., insofar as these terms function as clear markers of sexual identity. For “queer” is “less an identity than a critique of identity. . .a site of permanent becoming” (Jagose 1996: 131). “Queerness” involves “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning where the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (Sedgwick 1993: 8). For “queer,” writes David Halperin, “is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence” (1995: 62). “Queerness,” writes Lee Edelman, “can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one.” Queerness is “what chafes against ‘normalization,’ ” what “deliberately sever[s] us from ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of knowing ourselves” (2004: 17, 6, 5).
Queerness is thus “obviously threatening and infallibly dreaded by everything within us that desires a kingdom,” a fixed and knowable identity. I hope that you will recognize not only that but why I just swapped the word “queerness” for Derrida’s dreaded différance. And, I hope that you will understand both that and why différance, like queer, is one of those troubling words that troubles “is” itself, that, once again, “begins . . . from a refusal of the authority or determining power of every ‘is’ ” (Lucy 2006: 12) that there is. In this authoritarian and identitarian sense, “is” is its own kingdom. But “there is no kingdom of différance” (Derrida 1967/1982: 21–2); there is no kingdom of the queer.14
Heteronormativity, however, is a big “fucking” kingdom, a vast kingdom in which all real “fucking” is retroactively ruled over by its idealized product or result—“King Baby,” the ideological figure of “the Child” through which heteronormativity perpetuates its reign by attempting to ensure that “the future” is always “kid stuff.” Now, the first chapter of Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive is called “The Future is Kid Stuff.” There, speaking for queers, queerness, and queer sexuality—and speaking quite provocatively in favor of associating all three with the death drive—Edelman writes:
On every side, our enjoyment of liberty is eclipsed by the lengthening shadow of a Child whose freedom to develop undisturbed by encounters . . . with an “otherness” of which its parents, its church, or the state do not approve, uncompromised by any possible access to what is painted as alien desire, terroristically holds us all in check and determines that political discourse conform to the logic of a narrative wherein history unfolds as the future envisioned for a Child who must never grow up . . . That Child, immured in an innocence seen as continuously under siege, condenses a fantasy of vulnerability to the queerness of queer sexualities . . . The Child, that is, marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism. And so, as the radical right maintains, the battle against queers is a life-and-death struggle for the future of a Child whose ruin is pursued by feminists [and] queers. (2004: 21–2)
But Edelman goes on to argue that it isn’t just the “radical right” that enforces this “compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism”; it isn’t just the “moral majority” that insists on sacrificing everybody’s libidinal and aesthetic liberty to the future good of the permanent Child (an idealized figure of “imaginary unity” that, as Edelman points out, has little enough to do with actual children); the radical left and even some in the gay/lesbian community also get in on the act, bowing heads to singer “Whitney Houston’s rendition of the secular hymn, ‘I believe that children are our future,’ a hymn we might as well simply declare our national anthem and be done with it” (2004: 143). For Edelman, moreover, the identity politicians of the gay/lesbian community are never more indentured to the “pro-procreative ideology” (2004: 12) of reproductive futurism than when they deny the religious right’s hysterical slanders against those who engage in non-procreative or queer sex, when they dispute the idea that queers really do embody “a drive toward death that entails the destruction of the Child” (2004: 21).
Now, Edelman isn’t saying that queers qua queers literally desire to sexually murder real children, as per extremist right-wing fantasy. Nor is he saying that queer politics shouldn’t fight against homophobic conservative slander and dogma. But what he is saying is perhaps no less startling and abrasive.
Without ceasing to refute the lies that pervade . . . right-wing diatribes, do we also have the courage to acknowledge, and even to embrace, their correlative truths? Are we willing to be sufficiently oppositional to the structural logic of opposition—oppositional, that is, to the logic by which politics reproduces our social reality—to accept that figural burden of queerness . . . of the force that shatters the fantasy of Imaginary unity, the force that insists on the void [that is] always already lodged within, though barred from, symbolization: the gap or wound of the Real that inhabits the Symbolic’s very core? Not that we are, or ever could be, outside the Symbolic ourselves: but we can, nonetheless, make the choice to accede to our cultural production as figures—within the dominant logic of narrative, within Symbolic reality—for the dismantling of such a logic and thus for the death drive it harbors within. (2004: 22)
What’s at stake in Edelman’s provocative argument is the oppositional relation between “the queerness of queer sexuality” and the “meaning” of sociality itself. He argues that our current symbolic reality is a “collective fantasy that invests the social order with meaning by way of reproductive futurism” and “bestows the imprimatur of meaning-production [only] on heterogenital relations” (2004: 28. 13). Reproductive futurism depends upon a “meaningful” libidinal investment in the ideological figure of “the Child” and on vigilantly protecting that figure from all queer figurations. It isn’t just “the Child” but “meaning” itself that must be protected from the queer, who/which embodies the destruction of heteronormative “meaning.” But “the queer” isn’t simply “the homosexual,” the gay man or lesbian woman, but rather anyone whose gender or sexuality “can’t be made to signify monolithically” (Sedgwick 1993: 8), anyone for whom “the distinctly sexual nature of human sexuality has to do precisely with its excess over or potential difference from the bare choreographies of procreation” (Sedgwick 1990: 29). Reproductive futurism is a “pro-procreative ideology” that attempts to reduce not only “the meaning” of human sexuality, but the meaning of “meaning” itself to those bare choreographies. This ideology maintains, as the narrator of P. D. James’s The Children of Men puts it, that “sex totally divorced from procreation” is “meaninglessly acrobatic” (in Edelman 2004: 13); this ideology tells us—quite stupidly—that to engage in such “sterile” shenanigans is to behave like an animal.15 Reproductive futurism tells us:
“If there is a baby, there is a future, there is redemption.” If, however, there is no baby and, in consequence, no future, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organization, collective reality, and inevitably, life itself. (Edelman 2004: 12–13)
Edelman argues that queerness demands something other than simply denying responsibility for the destruction of “meaning,” something other than the attempt to earn “a place at the table” of heteronormative “social organization” and become full-fledged members of a “collective reality” determined and driven by reproductive futurism. There might be a place-setting waiting for any good homosexual who buys into heteronormative “meaning-production,” but the “structural mandate” of reproductive futurism is always that s/he “who refuses the Child be refused . . . be projectively reviled” (2004: 45), punitively abjected. Edelman thus wants queers to resist the regimes of the normal by accepting “the figural burden of queerness,” by accepting responsibility for the destruction of “meaning” and the abject “undoing of social organization,” by happily embodying that symbolic reality’s inner void and its death drive to the hilt. If “the sacralization of the Child . . . necessitates the sacrifice of the queer” (2004: 28), then for Edelman, a real insistence on queerness by queers—as per the in-your-face AIDS-activist slogan “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it”—necessitates nothing short of a massive cluster “fuck you” to the Child, which obscene discursive gesture Edelman is more than happy to provide (and with which we will rather rudely and abruptly end this lesson). After reviewing some standard antigay-rights sentiments issued by religious representatives of church and state sanctioned sociality, Edelman writes that
Queers must respond to the violent force of such constant provocations not only by insisting on our equal right to the social order’s prerogatives [i.e., the benefits of matrimony], not only by avowing our capacity to promote that order’s coherence and integrity [by serving in the military], but also by saying explicitly what [Cardinal Bernard] Law and the Pope [John Paul II] and the whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand hear anyway in each and every expression or manifestation of queer sexuality: fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck [“the sun will come up tomorrow”] Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws with both capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop. (2004: 29)
Coming to Terms
Critical Keywords encountered in Lesson Ten:
Gender, performativity, performative/constative utterances, compulsory heterosexuality, identity politics, strategic essentialism, écriture feminine, cyborg, heteronormativity, erotic stratifications, queer, queer theory, reproductive futurism
Notes
1 “Acid,” reports Declan Walsh, “is the preferred weapon of vindictive men against women accused of disloyalty or disobedience. Common in several Asian countries, acid attacks in Pakistan grew sharply in number in 2011, to 150 from 65 in 2010, although some advocacy workers said the increase stemmed largely from better reporting” (The New York Times 10 April 2012: A1). Although acid may be the “preferred weapon” of such men against women and girls, bullets can also produce the desired effect, for as Walsh more recently reports from Karachi, Pakistan, “At the age of 11, Malala Yousafzai took on the Taliban by giving voice to her dreams. As turbaned fighters swept through her town in northwestern Pakistan in 2009, the tiny schoolgirl spoke out about her passion for education—she wanted to become a doctor—and became a symbol of defiance against Taliban subjugation. On Tuesday [9 October 2012], masked Taliban gunmen answered Ms Yousafzai’s courage with bullets, singling out the 14-year old on a bus filled with terrified schoolchildren, then shooting her in the head and neck . . . Doctors said that Ms Yousafzai was in critical condition at a hospital near Peshawar, with a bullet possibly lodged close to her brain. A Taliban spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, confirmed by phone that Ms Yousafzai had been the target, calling her crusade for education rights an ‘obscenity’. ‘She has become a symbol of Western culture in the area; she was openly propagating it,’ Mr Ehsan said, adding that if she survived, the militants would certainly try to kill her again. ‘Let this be a lesson.’ ” (The New York Times 10 October 2012: A1).
2 I refer to comments made in 2005 by Lawrence Summers, then president of that great “symbol of Western culture” called Harvard University. And yes, following Walter Benjamin’s “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (1950/1968: 256), I am “wildly” suggesting a line of continuity between the Taliban’s barbaric assaults against women and girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Summers’ more civilized, but still discouraging words in Cambridge, Massachusetts, taking both the actions and the words as documents of patriarchy as a global structure in dominance, as indications, to quote Virginia Woolf quoting Lady Stephen, of “how few people really wish women to be educated” (1929/1989: 20n1) even now. And, just to be clear, I am not citing the Taliban’s actions as some “hegemonic Western feminist” rationalization for the United States’ continuing military occupation of Afghanistan or its military drone operations in Pakistan—though, to be quite honest, I’ll admit that, while I would likely be saddened by the sheer stupid waste of it all, I wouldn’t exactly be overcome with grief or guilt if I were to read that some sort of American ordnance had taken out Mr Ehsanullah Ehsan.
3 For discussions of the problem of men and/in feminism, see Thomas (2002) and (2007).
4 In Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, Moi claims that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, authors of The Madwoman in the Attic, are “theoretically aware” (1985: 61)—and then sets about demonstrating that they pretty much aren’t.
5 Compulsory heterosexuality is a term used by Adrienne Rich (1980) “to suggest that heterosexuality, though commonly understood as a natural and personal ‘preference,’ is actually shaped and imposed upon women by society” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 53).
6 The phrase identity politics is used in contemporary critical debates to capture “the sense of identity offered by one’s membership in groups that have suffered oppression on the basis of gender, race, class, or sexual preference” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 148).
7 “A contraction of ‘cybernetic organism’, a cyborg is any self-organizing system which combines organic and mechanical parts . . . The word was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in their 1960 Astronautics article “Cyborgs and Space’ . . . However, critical theory did not explore the implications of the cyborg until the American socialist-feminist Donna Haraway wrote her seminal ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985). Haraway reinscribed the cyborg as a political and theoretical idea which could disrupt conventional binary oppositions, such as human/animal and organism/machine. Because the cyborg is a hybrid or mixture, it suggests an alternative to unifying, homogeneous concepts, such as ‘Woman’ ” (Malpas and Wake 2006: 166).
8 Mohanty discusses the time of the essay’s writing, some of the feminist responses to it, and her current thinking about it, in “ ‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited” (2003).
9 Cf. the “strategically universalizing” gesture in note 2 above, where I focus on a specifically “real kernel which returns as the same in diverse historicizations” by suggesting lines of continuity running back and forth between Afghanistan’s vicious Taliban, Harvard’s more genteel Lawrence Summers, and all those who really didn’t want women to be educated back in the days of Virginia Woolf’s Lady Stephen.
10 It might be worth noting that, as represented in Mohanty’s essay, this purportedly quite powerful “hegemonic Western feminist” bloc—powerful enough to “rob” all Third World women of all political agency—amounts to a small number of not particularly well-known academics writing for an obscure feminist publishing house called Zed Press. On the one hand, in pointing this out, I’m certainly not suggesting that feminists can’t possibly write in a way that’s complicit with the ideological project of Orientalism, or that “mere” representations don’t have real effects on real people’s lived experience; on the other hand, there may be limits to the power and reach of “hegemonic” representation, and while Western feminists may represent Third World women in a way that seems to “rob” them of political agency, women in the Third World probably have whatever political agency they have or don’t have, regardless of what a handful of Western feminists may be writing about them.
11 Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner write that “by heteronormativity we mean the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality not only coherent—that is, organized as a sexuality—but privileged. Its coherence is always provisional, and its privilege can take several (sometimes contradictory) forms; unmarked, as the basic idiom of the personal and the social; or marked as a natural state; or projected as an ideal or moral accomplishment. It consists less of norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine than of a sense of rightness produced in contradictory manifestations—often unconscious, immanent to practice or institutions. Contexts that have little visible relation to sex practice, such as life narrative and generational identity, can be heteronormative in this sense, while in other contexts forms of sex between men and women might not be heteronormative. Heteronormativity is thus a concept distinct from heterosexuality” (1998/2007: 1722).
12 We can best consider what Rubin means by erotic stratifications by considering the diagram she provides in “Thinking Sex,” which charts the way heteronormativity separates “Good” sex from “Bad.” The “best” sex is “normal, natural, healthy, holy, heterosexual, married, monogamous, and reproductive” while the “worst” is “abnormal, unnatural, sick, sinful, ‘way out,’ ”—anything involving “transvestites, transsexuals, fetishists, sadomasochists,” and/or the exchange of money. The point of Rubin’s diagram is that “most people mistake their sexual preferences for a universal system that will or should work for everyone. This notion of a single ideal sexuality characterizes most systems of thought about sex . . . including feminism and socialism” (1984/2008: 294).
13 The word queer has appeared a number of times already in this book, but I’ve strategically deferred a specific gloss until now. Carla Freccero writes that the term queer, “as taken up by political movements and by the academy, has undergone myriad transformations and has been the object of heated definitional as well as political debates . . . It is a term that [has] something to do with a critique of literary critical and historical presumptions of sexual and gender (hetero) normativity, in cultural contexts and in textual subjectivities. It also has something to do with the sexual identities and positionalities, as well as the subjectivities, that have come to be called lesbian, gay, and transgender, but also perverse and narcissistic—that is, queer. At times, queer continues to exploit its productive indeterminancy as a word used to designate that which is odd, strange, aslant; in this respect, . . . all textuality, when subjected to close reading, can be said to be queer” (2006: 5). For somewhat “historicizing” accounts of the emergence of the term “queer” in the academy, see Thomas (2000) and (2009).
14 “Queer, in its deconstructive sense, designates a kind of Derridean différance, occupying an interstitial space between binary oppositions . . . This use of queer finds its energy from the way the term works to undo the binary between straight and gay, operating uncannily between but also elsewhere. Queer—precisely by marking out the space and time of différance—can thus show how the two, gay and straight, are inter-implicated and how they differ from themselves from within . . . Meanwhile, queer can also be a grammatical perversion, a misplaced pronoun, the wrong proper name; it is what is strange, odd, funny, not quite right, improper. Queer is what is and is not there, what disaggregates the coherence of the norm from the very beginning” (Freccero 2006: 18–19).
15 The situation is, of course, just the opposite, for animals as a lot are pretty much incapable of divorcing sexual activity from reproductive imperatives, while our divorce from nature is what’s anthropogenetic, constitutively humanizing, for us. Ironically, then, the queerest sex is the most productively human/humanizing, and reproductive futurism, which attempts to naturalize sex, to rob sexual activity of its specifically human meanings, is actively dehumanizing in its hostility to the queer.