Everyday Feminist Research Praxis : Doing Gender in the Netherlands [1 ed.] 9781443868327, 9781443860116

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Everyday Feminist Research Praxis

Everyday Feminist Research Praxis: Doing Gender in the Netherlands

Edited by

Domitilla Olivieri and Koen Leurs

Everyday Feminist Research Praxis: Doing Gender in the Netherlands, Edited by Domitilla Olivieri and Koen Leurs This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Domitilla Olivieri, Koen Leurs and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-6011-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6011-6

To Xavier, your laugh makes the world a better place. To M., L. and my nomadic community, for being a constant reminder of how much what we do really matters.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ...................................................................................... x Acknowledgements .................................................................................... xii Contributors .............................................................................................. xv Introduction ............................................................................................ xxiv Section I: Negotiating Space-Time Preface ......................................................................................................... 2 Louis van den Hengel Chapter One ................................................................................................. 5 Webs of Feminist Knowledge Online: Representations of the Women’s Movement in Digital Documents and Monuments Sanne Koevoets Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 23 What is European about Homonationalism? Thinking through the Italian Case Gianmaria Colpani and Adriano José Habed Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 40 Irigarayan Insights on the Problem of LGBT Inequality: How Re-Imagining Difference can Facilitate Respect for Others Louise Richardson-Self Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 56 Performing (Readings of) Moving Across as Decolonial Praxis Heather Hermant

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Section II: The Matter of Affect Preface ....................................................................................................... 72 Iris van der Tuin Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 74 Tracing the Roots of the Fashion Image: Fashion Models as Fashion Workers, Immaterial Production and Affective Transmission Eline van Uden Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 87 “I Didn’t Know That I Do Not Know”: Writing the Feminine in Anne Enright’s What Are You Like Mariëlle Smith Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 101 Intimate Encounters in Fuses and One Night Stand Sara Janssen Chapter Eight ............................................................................................116 When the Personal Meets the Theoretical: Reflections on my Conversations with Luce Irigaray Krizia Nardini Section III: Negotiating Private-Public Preface ..................................................................................................... 134 Liza Mügge Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 136 In the Service of Modernity: The Gendered Deployment of Premarital Sexuality in the Processes of Identification among the Iranian Dutch Rahil Roodsaz Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 151 Bargaining between Husbands and Societies: The Obstacles and Difficulties of Chinese Mothers Teaching their Children Mandarin in the Netherlands Shu-Yi Huang

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Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 168 A Narrative Analysis of the Experiences of Women on Antiretroviral Therapy in the Mopani District of the Limpopo Province: Comparing Private and Public Institutions in South Africa Tiny Petunia Mona Chapter Twelve ........................................................................................ 187 Public-Private Boundaries and Gendered Codes in Limiting Institutional Childbirth in Rural Bangladesh Runa Laila Section IV: Negotiating Technologies and Mediations Preface ..................................................................................................... 208 Kathrin Thiele Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 210 In the Intervals between ‘Now’ and ‘Then’, ‘Here’ and ‘There’: Transnational Spaces Performed and Reimagined in Digital Hybrid Documentary Domitilla Olivieri Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 230 Scholarship as Geek Feminism: Subverting Gender and Sexuality in Glee Fan Fiction Nicolle Lamerichs Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 247 “A Shock to Thought”: The Affects of an Online Encounter with Posthuman Imagery Simone van Hulst Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 262 Wired Fingers, Sticky Keyboards: Towards an Embodied Approach to Internet Pornography Goda Klumbytơ Epilogue Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 280 A Dialogue on the Dilemmas of Feminist Research Praxis Koen Leurs, Rosemarie Buikema, Willy Jansen and Lies Wesseling

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1.1..................................................................................................... 5 The Leeds University Library hides the Feminist Archive North at its margins—are digital feminist archives better at avoiding traditional hierarchies and exclusions? Figure 2.1................................................................................................... 23 Photograph of the slogan “Italy vs Europe: in Europe it’s different”, taken by the authors at the Gay Pride in Turin, Italy, in 2009. Figure 3.1................................................................................................... 40 “Sorry to show you this. It’s the face of Homophobia” (Wilfred de Bruijn, personal Facebook profile page, 8 April, 2013). Figure 4.1................................................................................................... 56 Vanessa Dion Fletcher embodies a language of indigenous sovereignty, as land writes itself on her copper shoes (Courtesy Dion Fletcher, Writing Landscape, video still). Figure 5.1................................................................................................... 74 Author made collage, images from personal collection. Figure 6.1................................................................................................... 87 Bracha L. Ettinger, Woman-Other-Thing, n. 12. 1990-1993. Oil and mixed techniques on paper mounted on canvas. 30x29,5 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 7.1................................................................................................. 101 Emilie Jouvet, ‘Red Fetish Bathroom,’ in One Night Stand, 2006. Figure 8.1..................................................................................................116 Paris May 2012, Courtesy of the Author. Figure 9.1................................................................................................. 136 Words, in Persian, used by one of the informants for the author’s research, Hamid. Word-cloud made by Rahil Roodsaz.

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Figure 10.1............................................................................................... 151 “He can’t even write his own name in Chinese,” said the obviously disappointed Betty about the heritage language loss of her son. These characters were written by Shu-Yi Huang in 2013. Figure 11.1 ............................................................................................... 168 “One pill a day will greatly improve adherence. Prior the introduction of the Fixed Dose Combination Therapy (FDC), people on antiretroviral therapy had to take 8 tablets or more a day.” A chart designed by Hoedspruit Training Trust (Hlokomela). Photo taken by Tiny Petunia Mona. Figure 12.1............................................................................................... 187 Demonstration of the position of women during childbirth. Photo taken by Runa Laila. Figure 13.1............................................................................................... 210 “This image is not available in your country.” Screenshot taken and manipulated by Domitilla Olivieri. Figure 14.1............................................................................................... 230 Kurt and Blaine by ZephyrianBoom. Figure 15.1............................................................................................... 247 ‘Posthumanism’ according to Google search, in Images. Figure 16.1............................................................................................... 262 “Insert Body Here”: a DYI collage by Goda Klumbytơ.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In the first place, the editors thank everyone who has contributed essays, introductions to the different sections and interview input to this volume. It has been a rewarding and privileged experience to bring together emerging and established scholars. We have greatly extended our knowledge and awareness from engaging with work from a variety of fields, frameworks and topics. The anthology emerged from discussions, input and support of a wide network of colleagues and friends. Our academic environments have made this trajectory possible: Utrecht University in the Netherlands, London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom, the international networks of the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG) (www.graduategenderstudies.nl), ITN Gender Graduates financed by the Marie Curie EU Sixth Framework Programme, the Utrecht University 2006 High Potential Research Program, the Marie Curie EU FP7 Intra-European Fellowship Programme, the GEMMA Erasmus Mundus Programme, the European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation (AtGender), and our Gender, Postcolonial, Anthropology, Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies networks in the Netherlands, Europe and beyond. We especially thank our departments, the Media and Culture Department, Graduate Gender Programme and Institute for Cultural Enquiry at Utrecht University and the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). In particular we would like to thank the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG), its board members Rosemarie Buikema, Willy Jansen and Lies Wesseling for championing the cause of everyday feminist research praxis and Trude Oorschot, Vibeke Otter and Christel Meijer who organized the 2011, 2012 and 2013 NOG conferences. Claudia Krops and Wilma Lieben were the local conference coordinators in Nijmegen and Maastricht respectively. Trude, thank you for reconnecting us with those participating in the previous conferences. We also would like to thank our editor at Cambridge Scholars Press, Carol Koulikourdi, for believing in the project and guiding us in the writing process.

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This book originated from a brainstorming session held in Utrecht on a warm afternoon on May 24, 2012 during one of the PhD “Reading/Writing seminar” of the Graduate Gender Programme (www.genderstudies.nl). Almost two years later, in the first weeks of spring 2014 the manuscript was finalized. In this whole process, the NOG conferences and the Dutch gender studies community were not only our starting point, but also our main academic networks. We are grateful for the support we received being members of the NOG as PhD candidates and afterwards, in our careers as researchers and lecturers. We participated in the three annual National Research Days in 2011, 2012 and 2013, and in hindsight we appreciate the value of having such a safe space to exchange, discuss and develop cutting edge work of junior researchers of Dutch universities in the field of Gender, Ethnicity, Sexuality and Diversity. Koen Leurs presented his paper “Community and voice: Dutch-Moroccan youth using online discussion boards” in 2011, and gave the introductory key-note lecture titled “Digital Passages. Moroccan-Dutch youth performing gender, diaspora and youth culture across digital spaces” in 2012 and acted as a respondent to several papers in 2013. Domitilla Olivieri delivered a paper on “Indexicality, Vision and the Artifice of Reality: for a feminist study of documentary film” in 2011; and in 2013 she partook to several panels as a respondent to younger scholars. This trajectory of our engagement in the NOG conferences is but an example of the kind of academic sharing of knowledge and experiences that characterizes this community and inspired this volume. Koen Leurs is grateful for his mentor Sandra Ponzanesi for her continuing guidance throughout the years as well as Myria Georgiou and Florian Töpfl for warmly welcoming him at his new intellectual home at the LSE. With much gratitude I wish to acknowledge informants in the Netherlands, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and London, UK who have generously let me in to their world during my recent fieldwork. At last, Stephanie and Xavier, thank you for your love, patience and support, without you in my midst – either virtually or physically – this book would not have been possible. Domitilla Olivieri would like to thank Massimo and Luciana and her other families and kindred spread all over the world for all the care, support and love they have shown; without you I would not have been able to develop and consistently practice my critical outlook onto the world. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to all my students who have shown me the importance of sharing knowledge, and who have taught me how to

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remain enthusiastic, humble and engaged in the potential of feminist research and praxis.

CONTRIBUTORS

Rosemarie Buikema Utrecht University, the Netherlands Rosemarie Buikema is professor of Art, Culture and Diversity at Utrecht University. She chairs the UU Graduate Gender programme and is the scientific director of the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG). Her current research concerns the role of the arts in processes of political transitions. Here she combines theories of transitional justice, the politics of aesthetics and theories of sexual difference in order to develop new and multi-layered scenarios for change and transnational justice. Gianmaria Colpani University of Verona, Italy / Utrecht University, the Netherlands Gianmaria Colpani is a PhD candidate in Philosophy and Gender Studies at the University of Verona, Italy, and Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He is research assistant of PEN (Postcolonial Europe Network). His research lies at the crossroad of the debates on homonationalism, the European construction and the Mediterranean space, trying to conceptualize a Mediterranean perspective on homonationalism in contemporary fortress Europe. With Adriano J. Habed, he has written another essay on European homonationalism from an Italian perspective that is going to be published in the book LGBT Activism and the Making of Europe: A Rainbow Europe? edited by David Paternotte and Phillip Ayoub (Palgrave, forthcoming). Adriano José Habed Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands Adriano José Habed obtained his Bachelor in Philosophy at the University of Turin, Italy, and his Master in Philosophy at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. His research concerns the intersections between sexuality and the nation-state but also the epistemic intersections between psychoanalysis and intersectionality. Together with Gianmaria Colpani, he has written another essay on European homonationalism from an Italian perspective that is going to be published in the book LGBT Activism and the Making of Europe: A Rainbow Europe? edited by David Paternotte and Phillip Ayoub (Palgrave, forthcoming). He has also written with Veronica

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Vasterling a monographic piece on the work of Judith Butler that is going to appear in the next edition of Filosofen Van Deze Tijd (Bert Bakker, forthcoming). Louis van den Hengel Maastricht University, the Netherlands Louis van den Hengel is Assistant Professor at the Department of Literature and Art and the Centre for Gender and Diversity at Maastricht University. He holds an MA in Classics and Mediterranean archaeology and a PhD in Gender Studies, and specialized in contemporary gender and diversity studies, with a focus on feminist theories of materiality, embodiment, and subjectivity. His publications include a book on Roman imperial sculpture and the embodiment of gender as well as various articles about contemporary art and cultural theory. His current research examines the relations between affect, materiality, and time in contemporary performance art, and presently centres on the work of the Serbian and New York-based artist Marina Abramoviü. In the spring of 2010, Louis van den Hengel was a Visiting Scholar at New York University. During this period he observed and participated in Abramoviü’s durational performance The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Heather Hermant Utrecht University, the Netherlands / York University, Toronto Heather Hermant is an artist and PhD candidate in Gender Studies, Utrecht University, The Netherlands (supervisors Gloria Wekker and Geertje Mak), supported by a Canadian SSHRC fellowship. She has taught in the Community Arts Practice program at York University, Toronto since 2006 and is an Associate Artist of urban ink productions, Vancouver. Her solo show ribcage: this wide passage premiered in 2010 and has been translated to French. Her one-to-one performance, Aujourdhuy / This Day, 1738, was presented by Rhubarb Festival, Toronto, in 2012; at the 8th European Feminist Research Conference, Budapest, 2012; and at the 8th Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics Encuentro, São Paulo, 2013. Recent writing has appeared in Canadian Theatre Review and Tusaaji: A Translation Review. Shu-Yi Huang Utrecht University, the Netherlands Shu-Yi Huang is a PhD candidate at Institute of Gender Studies, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She received a Taiwanese Government

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Scholarship for Studying Abroad in the field of gender studies. Her PhD research project is entitled “Being a mother in an alien land: Motherhood practice experienced of first-generation Chinese diasporic women in the Netherlands.” She is a columnist in http://www.frontier.org.tw, a Taiwanese feminist website. Her recent publications include: Chen, Yi-Chien & Huang, Shu-Yi (2010) “Tysiąc v. Poland㸦Case of Reproduction Freedom) European Court of Human Rights 2007/3/20” Judgments Translation Selection II: European Court of Human Rights, 408-440. Taipei: Judical Yuan (in Mandarin). Wekker, Gloria, translated by Huang, Shu-Yi (2013) “Innocent Unlimited: Some Reflections on Dutch Multicultural Society” Journal of Gender Equity (65). Simone van Hulst Independent researcher Simone van Hulst lives in Rotterdam. In 2009 she finished the Master Literary Studies at Leiden University, with a thesis on the phenomenon of ‘prefab-literature’ in the Netherlands. In august 2012 she completed the Research Master Gender & Ethnicity at Utrecht University with a thesis that was titled Towards an Ethics of the Unimaginable: Feminism, Literary Thinking, and the Question of Relating Differently. At the moment she is writing on popular scientific discourse, rhetoric and critical posthumanism. Besides, she has several freelance jobs in proofreading, editing, translating and writing and is involved in projects in which she collaborates with artists and curators. Also, she is looking into the possibilities of starting a PhD project on the unimaginable, science and critical posthumanism. Sara Janssen Utrecht University, the Netherlands Sara Janssen studied Cultural Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen where she obtained her MA in 2010. She wrote her master thesis on the embodiment of sexuality in the film One Night Stand. After that, Sara participated in the PhD Training Year at the Netherlands Research School for Genderstudies (NOG). Currently, she is starting up her PhD research there. Her primary interests are in visual culture, feminist theory, sexuality, and corporeality. Besides her academic activities, Sara is also involved with the organization of the annual DIEP festival about gender and sexuality “against the grain” in Utrecht, and with a sex-education project from a sex-positive feminist and queer standpoint. Sara lives in Nijmegen.

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Willy Jansen Radboud University, the Netherlands Willy Jansen is professor of Gender Studies and director of the Institute for Gender Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She has done anthropological research in Algeria, Jordan and Spain and published on issues of women, gender and sexuality in relation to education, material culture, religion and reproduction. In 2009 she was elected as member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Sanne Koevoets Utrecht University, the Netherlands Sanne Koevoets holds a PhD in Gender Studies from Utrecht University, where she analyzed the figure of the library in the western imaginary through the lens of feminist cultural and media studies. She teaches new media studies at Utrecht University. She co-edited the volume Teaching Gender with Libraries and Archives: The Power of Information (2013) and is an editor for the Dutch Journal of Gender Studies (Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies). Her research interests include symbolic expressions and monumental materializations of knowledge regimes, the tropes of the librarian and the library in popular culture, and the political dynamics of knowledge production, organization, and dissemination in network cultures. Goda Klumbytơ Utrecht University, the Netherlands Goda Klumbytơ has recently earned an MA in Media Studies at Utrecht University. She has presented in conferences “Thriving on the Edge of Cuts: Inspirations and Innovations in Gender Studies” (University of Leeds, 2011) and “NOG National Research Day” (University of Nijmegen, 2012), and tutored at the NOISE Gender Studies Summer School in 2012. Her co-authored chapter (with Katrine Smiet) “‘Bodies like our own?’ The Dynamics of Distance and Closeness in Online Fat Porn” is forthcoming in Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism collection (eds. Dr Caroline Walters and Dr Helen Hester). Her academic interests include pornography studies, feminist media and technology studies and critical theory. She is also an editor of Lithuanian online feminist magazine Dilgơlơ and a queer activist.

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Runa Laila Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands Runa Laila is a PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Runa completed her Bachelor and Master of Social Sciences in Sociology at Dhaka University, Bangladesh. She pursued Master of Arts in Development Studies with specialization in Women, Gender and Development at ISS. Runa Laila started her academic carrier as a lecturer in the department of Sociology at Rajshahi University in 1996. Later she moved to the department of Women and Gender Studies of Dhaka University as an assistant professor in 2004. Her research interests include reproductive health, livelihood systems, nonformal education, ethnicity, kinship and marriage systems, women’s empowerment and the implementation of CEDAW. Runa Laila presented several research papers in international conferences in Europe and the USA. Nicolle Lamerichs Maastricht University, the Netherlands Nicolle Lamerichs is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. Her dissertation Productive Fandom (2010-2013) discusses the playful and creative practices of media fans. Her work has been published in international peer reviewed journals, such as Participations and Transformative Works and Cultures. Moreover, she has contributed to edited collections, such as Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom (Busse & Stein, 2012). Koen Leurs London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom Koen Leurs is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the London School of Economics, UK and affiliated researcher at the Utrecht University Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICON) and Graduate Gender Studies. At the LSE he works on Urban Politics of London Youth Analysed Digitally (UPLOAD). He is the author of Digital Passages. How Diaspora, Gender and Youth Culture Intersect Online and co-editor of “Digital Crossings in Europe” a special issue of Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture. From 20112013 he was a post-doctoral researcher for the 7th European Framework Programme Mig@Net, Transnational Digital Networks, Migration & Gender project. From 2008-2012 he conducted his PhD in Gender Studies at Utrecht University, participating in Wired Up. Digital Media as Innovative Socialisation Practices for Migrant Youth. His research focuses on digital networks, youth culture, multiculturalism, migration and gender. See www.koenleurs.net.

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Tiny Petunia Mona University of Limpopo, South-Africa Tiny Petunia Mona is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Limpopo. She holds a BA Honours in (Sociology and Anthropology), and Master’s degrees in Sociology from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She holds a certificate in Gender Studies from Utrecht University, the Netherlands and a Post Graduate Diploma in HIV and AIDS management from Stellenbosch University. She has submitted her PhD thesis in Sociology at the University of Limpopo, South Africa. Tiny Petunia Mona has recently contributed to the Limpopo AIDS Spending Assessment Report for the South African Government, (NASA) 2011. She provides the Limpopo Broadcasting Network, a Community TV station with HIV and AIDS content on YouTube. She is an Editorial Board Member of the Journal of HIV and AIDS and Infectious Diseases and a Motivational Speaker. Liza Mügge University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Liza Mügge is an assistant professor in the political science department and associate director of the Amsterdam Research Center for Gender and Sexuality (ARC-GS) both at the University of Amsterdam. She is also coconvenor of the Standing Group Gender & Politics of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR). In 2012 she was visiting scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. She published a monograph (Beyond Dutch Borders, Amsterdam University Press 2010) and many articles on transnationalism. Recently she coordinated a section on intersectionality in European political science for Politics, Groups & Identities, 1(3) (with Sara de Jong) and edited a special issue for Women’s Studies International Forum on the politics of gender equality representations in Europe (forthcoming 2014). Krizia Nardini Utrecht University, the Netherlands / Open University of Catalonia, Spain Krizia Nardini is conducting her PhD research on profeminist men’s mobilizations in Italy and Spain. After her training in philosophy at Siena University, in 2011 Nardini received her Research Master in Gender Studies cum laude from Utrecht University and then started her PhD project Men’s Strategies for Change, while collaborating with the Graduate Gender Programme (UU) as teaching assistant. Her publications include a chapter in Proceedings from GEXcel Theme 9: Gendered Sexualed Transnationalisations, Deconstructing the Dominant: Transforming Men,

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“Centres” and Knowledge/Policy/Practice (Ed. Alp Biricik and Jeff Hearn, 2011) and ‘Men’s Antiviolence Activism’ (2013) in Dutch Journal of Gender Studies. Domitilla Olivieri Utrecht University, the Netherlands Domitilla Olivieri is a lecturer and researcher at Utrecht University, where she received her PhD with a doctoral research entitled Haunted by Reality. Towards a feminist study of documentary film: indexicality, vision and the artifice. Committed to bridging the distance between academic and nonacademic milieus, she collaborates with cultural institutes, activist groups and documentary filmmakers in the Netherlands and internationally. An example of this dialogue between scholars and practitioners is her article: “Shattered images and desiring matter. A dialogue between Hito Steyerl and Domitilla Olivieri.” In Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics, B. Papenburg and M. Zarzycka (eds.). IB Tauris, 2012. Her primary areas of interest are at the crossroads of documentary film studies, visual studies, feminist theory, cultural studies, semiotics, and cultural and visual anthropology. Louise Richardson-Self University of Sydney, Australia Louise Richardson-Self recently received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Sydney, where she is also a lecturer and tutor. Part of Louise’s PhD research was undertaken with the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies at Universiteit Utrecht. Her undergraduate and Honours research was undertaken at the University of Tasmania. Louise’s other publications include “Questioning the Goal of Same-Sex Marriage” in Australian Feminist Studies (2012) and “Coming Out and Fitting In: Same-Sex Marriage and the Politics of Difference” in M/C Journal (2012). She is currently editing a conference proceeding to be published in Australian Review of Public Affairs (forthcoming). Her research interests include contemporary feminist thought, LGBT/Queer Studies, intersectional analysis, French feminisms, practical ethics, moral philosophy, contemporary political philosophy, modern political philosophy, and legal philosophy. Rahil Roodsaz Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands Rahil Roodsaz is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Gender Studies of the Radboud University Nijmegen, where she is completing her dissertation

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on the cultural constructions of sexuality among the Iranian Dutch. In particular, she analyses the perceptions of the Iranian Dutch regarding sexuality in relation to processes of subjectivity. She has obtained a master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology from the same university and is currently working on several publications based on her PhD-project, centered on the topics of homosexuality and transgressive sexualities Mariëlle Smith Utrecht University, the Netherlands Mariëlle Smith is a PhD candidate at the Department of Media and Culture Studies, University of Utrecht (NL). She holds a bachelor degree in English and a research master’s degree in Gender and Ethnicity from the University of Utrecht. The title of her MA-thesis is Psychoanalysis Revisited: A Feminine Ethics in a Man’s World. A Conversation Between Bracha Ettinger and Anne Enright. Her current research focuses on contemporary women's literature and French feminist philosophy, with a focus on feminine/maternal aesthetics in Anne Enright's literary work. Her first publication, “Subjectivity as Encounter: Feminine Ethics in the Work of Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger and Anne Enright,” has recently been published by Hypatia: A journal of feminist philosophy. Kathrin Thiele Utrecht University, the Netherlands Kathrin Thiele is Assistant Professor for Gender Studies in the Graduate Gender Programme, Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, where she teaches courses in contemporary feminist theories and feminist technoscience studies. Her research expertise lies in critical theory, continental philosophy, feminist theories of difference, and posthuman(ist) studies, and her current research engages the future of sexual difference and a feminist cosmopolitics. Her published work explores a Deleuzian feminist legacy with focus on questions of ethics and politics, and her first monograph is entitled The Thought of Becoming. Gilles Deleuze’s Poetics of Life (Diaphanes, 2008). Her work also appears in academic journals such as Deleuze Studies, Parallax, Rhizomes, and Women: A Cultural Review. Iris van der Tuin Utrecht University, the Netherlands Iris van der Tuin is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Philosophy of Science in the Graduate Gender Programme of Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She edited Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture

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(Routledge, 2009) with Rosemarie Buikema, and wrote New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (Open Humanities Press, 2012) with Rick Dolphijn. Her work on feminist new materialism has appeared in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Australian Feminist Studies, European Journal of Women’s Studies, and Women’s Studies International Forum. Articles on philosophy of the humanities have appeared in History of the Human Sciences, Philosophy & Technology and Bergson and the Art of Immanence: Painting, Photography, Film (edited by John Mullarkey and Charlotte de Mille for Edinburgh University Press, 2013). See http://uu.academia.edu/IrisvanderTuin. Eline van Uden Independent researcher Eline van Uden completed her undergraduate studies Gender & Ethnicity at the University of Utrecht and a bachelor’s program Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She is currently located in the Netherlands. Eline’s research interests lie in Fashion Theory and Feminist New Materialism which she combines in her approach of fashion and the modeling industry. In her research, Van Uden draws on experiences in her career as a professional model and has written various critical articles on blogs and newspapers about the industry. In her undergraduate studies, Eline enjoyed teaching the basics of Gender Theory to BA students. Her wish is to embark upon an academic career in both research and teaching. Lies Wesseling Maastricht University, the Netherlands Elisabeth (Lies) Wesseling is an associate professor in the Department of Literature and Art. She is Director of the Centre for Gender and Diversity of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Her research is on the cultural construction of childhood in fiction and science. Her current projects focus on narrative models for forging kinship in global adoption.

INTRODUCTION KOEN LEURS AND DOMITILLA OLIVIERI

The political is a form of subjectivity that cannot be dissociated from the cultural or the aesthetic, simply because it involves the creation of sustainable alternatives and social horizons of hope. —Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects

The contributors of this anthology on Everyday Feminist Research Praxis are researchers who are working at or who have crossed the universities part of the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG). The NOG is a platform for gender research and teaching started in 1995. As such it offers training options specially designed for postgraduate and PhD students, from the Netherlands and abroad. The NOG is a top European programme and has a longstanding international reputation for its pioneering work in the field of literary, cultural, philosophical, anthropological and epistemological Gender Studies. This anthology, entitled Everyday Feminist Research Praxis. Doing Gender in The Netherlands, presents selected, previously unpublished work presented during the 2011, 2012 and 2013 NOG conferences. On the 18th of February 2011 the first conference of the NOG took place at Utrecht University. The call for papers announced: “To celebrate the recognition of the Netherlands Research School of Women’s Studies as the national platform for gender research… we would like to invite you for a National Research Day dedicated to the cutting edge work of junior researchers in the field of Gender, Ethnicity, Sexuality and Diversity.” After that, two more of these events took place respectively, at Radboud University in Nijmegen in 2012, and at Maastricht University in 2013; and one more is planned for 2014 at the University of Amsterdam. The exchanges of knowledge and expertises that started there, between young and senior scholars, made it possible for many of us participating in these conferences to not only share our research concerns and learn from others, but also to start or strengthen important national and transnational networks and personal and professional collaborations. In fact, although based and strongly rooted in the Netherlands, the NOG opens to the many

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international students and researchers traversing Dutch Gender Studies programmes and related departments. The themes of these conferences address various key interdisciplinary issues, from questions of spatiality and geopolitics, to the issue of generations, from feminist epistemologies to postcolonial approaches and transitional justice. More precisely: in 2011, the conference theme was Doing Gender in the Netherlands: Discovering the Global in the Local; on March 9, 2012 the conference theme was Doing Gender in the Netherlands: Transgenerational Perspectives; and on April 5, 2013 the NOG day was entitled Doing Gender in the Netherlands: Taking Turns in Feminist Theory, and the plenary state of the art lecture was delivered by NOG affiliated Erasmus Mundus scholar Associate Professor Vicki Kirby (University of New South Wales, Australia). On May 26, 2014, the conference is titled Doing Gender in the Netherlands: Feminism in Transition (Activism, Institutions and Canons). Within this variety, the constant key concern of these conferences was how using a lens informed by gender studies, in an interdisciplinary and intersectional framework, can shed light into past and present everyday cultural dynamics and power relations, and how this insight contributes to triggering social change and producing new knowledge and new practices in theory and in everyday lived experiences. Consequently, reflecting the broad scope of gender studies, the volume brings together both conceptual and empirical feminist research, grounded in film studies, feminist theory, media studies, cultural studies, digital media studies, literary studies, anthropology and sociology. The richness and variety of research done in the interdisciplinary field of Gender Studies and Feminist Theory in the last years in, from and across the Netherlands can hardly be summarised within one single direction or heading. Nonetheless, one of the main common threads that can be identified is certainly the concern with uncovering and discerning how gender plays a crucial role in the everyday relations of power, in the everyday experiences of men and women, in the everyday interconnections between gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class and other axes of difference. Alongside and together with this main aim is a methodological feminist perspective interested and engaged in the relation between theory and practice, ethnography and philosophy, visual culture and literature, between subjectivities and culture, society and identity, geopolitical contexts, representation and memory: a focus on doing, doing research and doing with research; the praxis and politics of affecting change. It shall be noted that, in this context, feminist/gender research is considered as a field of enquiry that explores the socio-cultural implications

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of the processes of knowledge production for the constructions of subjects and subjectivities, and that proposes political spaces of resistance to hegemonic discourses and promotes change (Braidotti 2011; Buikema et al. 2011; Lykke 2010). These are then approaches and matters that, both in academic and theoretical terms, as well as in practices and actions, focus on people as gendered, racialised and classed subjects. Charting the relations between power, discourse and subjectivity, reveals political dimensions of individuals and emergent collectivities. Finally then, the politics of feminist/gender research here considered are “a matter of bringing about changes in the very structures of subjectivity” and in “our collective modes of relation to the environment…to our cultural norms and values [and] to our bodies” (Braidotti 2011, 74-75). Accordingly, the central emphasis of this book is twofold: first, the everyday is approached as a concretely grounded site of cultural and socio-political power struggles. Expanding prior feminist critiques that exposed the subordination of women in everyday private spheres of domesticity, housework and sexuality, the anthology moves beyond the private/public dichotomy by showcasing the urgency of feminist research unraveling various micro-politics at work in quotidian life across time and space. Everyday experiences are acknowledged as situated sources of knowledge that emerge in relation to patriarchy and other intersecting differences and geo-historical privileges. Questions include: where and how to look for micro-politics in the everyday? What gendered, ethnic and/or racial space-time relations sediment in the everyday? How to unpack historical/transnational/national/diasporic quotidian power constellations? What affective consciousnesses shape everyday experiences? Second, all the contributors to this volume make explicit connections between the theories they explore and their everyday feminist research practices. The authors provide a reflexive account of their research, and put into words what drives them. The relation between theory and practice has been one of the ongoing and crucial concerns of feminist research for the last decades. The aim of this volume is not to reinforce the two domains as oppositional, but rather to explore their interconnections and entanglements. The underlying questions then are: how does the practice of doing research affect the theoretical frameworks therein chosen? What is the relation between their everyday, gendered, geopolitically situated experiences and the knowledge explored and produced by the researchers in this volume? Therefore, while addressing specific topics at the core of contemporary feminist debates in original and previously un-published articles, the authors pay attention to these relations and present a selfreflexive approach to the processes of research praxis.

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Everyday life beyond domesticity Intuitively, the ordinariness of the everyday is self-evident. However, the prosaic, quotidian, banal and mundane are elusive. Often times, the everyday is downplayed as uneventful, superfluous and fleeting. However, exposing taken-for-grantedness reveals that the everyday, although of fleeting character, has long-lasting and serious repercussions. Therefore, we vow in this anthology to take the everyday seriously as a valuable point of departure. Recently, scholars have begun charting everyday practices, across different fields including philosophy, history, geography, literary, visual, cultural and media studies (e.g. Highmore 2002; Rigg 2007; Bakardjieva 2005; Moran 2005; Silverstone 2005). We are therefore tempted to speak of a turn across the humanities and social sciences towards everyday life as an entry point to explore discipline-specific focus points. However, from various directions also comes the call for approaching quotidian life in an intersectional manner and especially from a gender studies angle: the everyday concerns “demand more attention from scholars working on race, class, gender and sexuality” (Centre for Modern Studies 2013). The foundations to come to grips with the everyday can be located in philosophy and cultural studies. According to G.W.F. Hegel “the familiar is not necessarily the known”; for Henri Lefebvre, everyday life is “in a sense residual, defined by ‘what is left over’ after all distinct, superior, specialized, structured activities have been singled out by analysis,” and he added: “Everyday life is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their difference and conflicts, it is their meeting place, their bond, their common ground” (1991, 97). In feminist research, prior work on everyday life predominantly focused on the gendered domain of the household and the confines of domesticity. Domesticity is dominantly considered as “a source of critique of the contemporary social world”: as a “housewife” one was “sentenced to everyday life” (Johnson & Lloyd 2005, 160). However, attention for the situation of housewives established one of the fundaments for the emergence of second wave feminism: “in order to achieve a proper subjecthood, we are suggesting then that the figure of the housewife made the feminist subject possible. She made it possible, in the first instance to think about all women as having something in common” (ibid. 152) Indeed, Betty Friedan broke the “happy housewife myth” by critiquing the idea of fulfilment being tied to the household. As such the second wave feminist project of consciousness raising to make women aware of sexist ideologies grew from acknowledging everyday life as an important site of

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struggle. However, these early projects and studies predominantly only made visible the experiences of a certain kind of woman: middle class, white and heterosexual. In the meantime, black feminists, among others, were addressing and fighting against other forms of oppression and other expressions of hegemonic power. Subsequently, the variously intersecting axes of difference among various groupings of people have received increasing scrutiny, especially addressing how people differently negotiate diverse and multiple times and spaces, both face-to-face as well as in mediated settings. We expand the focus on the gendered everyday beyond the confines of domesticity, which was the focus of many earlier studies but which has remained somewhat in the shadows in more recent feminist enquiries. With this anthology then, we aim at bringing the everyday into the field of feminist scrutiny as a critical lens and a conceptual tool that can shed light onto daily power dynamics. Pointing the attention to the everyday can function as a critical strategy to ‘making strange’ everyday common thinking, unsettling taken for grantedness, questioning quotidian habits otherwise made to seem natural by hegemonic discourse, and thus, eventually, opening towards a situated politics of difference. ‘Making strange,’ estrangement, is here understood as the act of defamiliarising the perception and understanding of the everyday, the habitual. In a rethinking of Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of ‘ostranenie’—beyond the level of formal and stylistic change in the domain of the arts, along the lines explored, for example by Annie van den Oever (2010)—this defamiliarization of the quotidian, has a potential for questioning the known and the ‘taken for granted,’ for unsettling hegemonic discourse, and for triggering change in the way of thinking, in the imaginary, and finally in the social reality. Thus, following Jondi Keane, researching and writing about everyday “relationships is a way of generating meaningful consequences” (2013, 4243). It is in this sense that “[e]veryday life might therefore seem to constitute a field of doubt,” Ben Highmore notes, “a field of experimentation, of possibility” (2002, 4). What we are addressing here is a move from the everyday only understood as prosaic and banal, to an attention to the potential and the performative character of intervening in norms sedimented in the everyday. However, the possibility of experimentation in the everyday should not be accepted as a blanket term for a micro-politics of resistance and agency, as power asymmetries may just as well be reinforced in everyday practices. For this reason, the other key focus, that of praxis, has to be brought into this conversation.

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Praxis: the everyday as problematic The relation between theory and praxis has been a central concern of feminist research since its outsets (for a genealogy of this relation see, for example, Hesse-Biber 2012). Following from the knowledge, reclaimed by feminist movements and activists over the last fifty years, that the personal and the political are deeply intertwined, many scholars have elaborated on how “[f]eminist epistemology and methodology directly affect feminist praxis” and vice versa (ibid., 15). This praxis refers not only to the various ways in which feminist research is conducted, but it always also refers to how these processes of knowledge production engage questions of difference, power, visibility, reflexivity, authority, and the potential for social change. In this anthology, feminist research praxis is understood as a reflective, critical dissociation from naturalized routines of daily life, which in turn enables the scrutiny of, for example, the arbitrariness of entrenched views and the revealing of contradictory and layered everyday trajectories; and thus opens new possibilities for new forms of recognition, representation and redistribution of power (Fraser 2003). In working on the nexus between praxis and the everyday, we are inspired by the seminal 1987 work of Dorothy E. Smith to approach the “everyday world as problematic”: We constitute the everyday world as our problematic. We do so by interesting ourselves in its opacity for we cannot understand how it is organized or comes about by remaining within it. The concept of problematic transfers this opacity to the level of discourse. It directs attention to a possible set of questions that have yet to be posed or of puzzles that are not yet formulated as such but are ‘latent’ in the actualities of our experienced worlds (1987, 110).

Problematizing the everyday demands researchers to pursue desires to critically expose what has become engrained and naturalized. Taken for grantedness and common sense should be treated with suspicion. Paul Ricoeur used the term “hermeneutics of suspicion” to unravel a red thread woven through the works of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond their notable differences, Ricoeur argued that these thinkers together shaped a new “school of suspicion.” That is to say, they shared a commitment to unmasking “the lies and illusions of consciousness,” by doing so they paved the way for critiques of the obvious, the self-evident and the everyday, charting hidden truths by drawing out mechanisms operating beneath the surfaces (Ricoeur 1970,

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356, see Felski 2012). This endeavour of denaturalising self-evident assumptions, which far from being natural or neutral are instead informed by gendered power relations and hegemonic discourse, is accompanied by the commitment of feminist scholars to making visible the invisible yet very material and quotidian dimensions of cultural, geo-political and social power inequalities. Religion scholar Corinna Guerrero summarizes the workings of this interpretative focus in the field of feminist research praxis: The underlying principle that links a feminist critique to every other critical lens since the rise of feminist discourse is the “hermeneutic of suspicion.” Essentially, a hermeneutic of suspicion identifies the disconnect between rhetoric and a lived reality. The lived lives of women are different than the pontifications espoused directly and indirectly by the traditionally patriarchal social, political, cultural, religious, and educational structures in which individuals participate (2012, np).

Therefore we would like to argue for a feminist research praxis that is fuelled by a “hermeneutic of suspicion.” When considering praxis as the suspicious unravelling of everyday life as problematic, both as an ‘action’ and as a ‘custom,’ we can pay attention to the complexities of what research praxis means. Praxis as action refers to the application or use of a certain knowledge or skills; in this sense we then address practice as distinguished from, but not oppositional to, theory. Importantly, as already mentioned, this anthology looks at the interconnections between theory and practice, and the feminist potentials therein. Praxis as convention, habit, or custom instead connects it again with the everyday as well as with the process of self-reflection upon one’s research, goals, motivations and methodologies. In this volume, by always implicitly or explicitly addressing these two understandings and modes of praxis as entangled, we are focusing on what feminist research does or can do, its effects on the social world–research as action–; as well as on the necessity of such approach to address and make visible what often remains unsaid, unpredictable and invisible: the mundane, the taken for granted, the habitual. Making visible the invisible also means revealing contradictory and layered trajectories and paying attention to the positionality of the researcher, his/her situatedness (see also Adrienne Rich’s politics of location in Rich 1986). Only through these situated and partial knowledges (Haraway 1988) it becomes possible to unearth complexities in grand narratives while still leaving room for ambiguity, dialogues and coalitions. The chapters demonstrate how differently situated “politics of location” of feminist researchers fuels

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feminist literacies. This literacy consists of the crucial ability to understand the multi-layeredness of the social, political, economic, material engineerings of in-and exclusion. Finally, we would like to address how the contributions of this volume also call for an attention to the “politics of citation”: who is published, read, quoted and canonised matters, and it has to do with the same intersectional structures of privilege, inclusion and exclusion. Feminist scholars have identified the important entanglements between the “politics of location.” In the praxis of feminist writing, we should rethink our “politics of citation” (Wekker 2009, 56). What are ways to confront the looming Routledge and Sage syndromes that reaffirm an established canon of well-known researchers, while rendering invisible works published outside the mainstream dissemination channels? We humbly provide a space to emerging scholars in the ‘publish and perish’ world. By having their voices heard, we hope to foster dialogue and exchange across upcoming and established actors in the field. In sum, the distinctive feminist gesture of this everyday praxis resides in both the choice of researching (and also teaching) subjects that remain overlooked in other fields, as well as the distinctive way these subjects are dealt with, the attention for the paradoxes and complexities of power relations. In the interview-based epilogue to this anthology, Rosemarie Buikema sums up everyday feminist research praxis as characterised by the incessant drive to articulate what remains unarticulated and to make visible what remains invisible. This act of “understanding our social world by deconstructing our common sense,” of unsettling and making visible is a crucial scholarly endeavour as well a political imperative.

Structure of the book This volume is organised in four sections along four conceptual knots. Strategically tapping into recent discussions in the field of interdisciplinary gender studies, the four thematic entry-points are space/time, affectivity, public/private and technological mediation. Each section consists of four chapters written by emerging scholars, with a commissioned introduction by an established expert in the field. The book concludes with an epilogue, which contains an interview with some of the founding members of the NOG. All chapters open up with an image that functions as the inspiration of the analysis and as a guide that stimulates the author’s self-reflection. This figure is not just an illustration, but a focal point to commence

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argumentation from a specific grounded, personal and situated example. The authors frame their argument by unpacking the chosen image–a photograph, a chart, a film still, a screen capture, or something else–which ranges from being a striking, moving, illustrating, motivating or frustrating example that assists in unpacking the everyday praxis of gender studies research. In the preface to section one, Louis van den Hengel introduces the thematics around the negotiation of space and time by describing how feminist research raises awareness for the shifting geopolitical coordinates of embodiment and spatio-temporal situatedness. Late-modernity has realigned intersectional axes of difference such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class and religion in multiple ways, empowering some and disenfranchising others. Van den Hengel sums up the following overarching question energises the section: “The fundamental question of how to think the future, and how to welcome it through the creation of an empowering present, is indeed what drives these researchers in their desire to activate new ways to inhabit the time and space of this world in and through the situated practice of feminist thought.” In chapter one, Sanne Koevoets takes feminist knowledge and library practices as an entry point into the debate on space and time. In particular, she explores promises of overcoming the limitations of the physical library with the seemingly infinite character of digital libraries. Her case study charts the digital library politics of the British Library’s online oral history repository Sisterhood and After and the online European feminist canon FRAmes on GENder in Europe (FRAGEN). Bringing library theory and cultural narratives on the library into dialogue, Koevoets argues that library practices are materially, institutionally and symbolically gendered as a labyrinthine interweaving of offline/online knowledge and power. In the second chapter, Gianmaria Colpani and Adriano José Habed resituate contemporary European geopolitical imaginations of sexual politics through their case study of homonationalism in Italy. Hegemonically, (desires for) gay rights are constructed as European rights that, Colpani and Habed argue borrowing the words of Gayatri Spivak, “one cannot not want.” Speaking from Italy—one of the EU founding states but a peripheral actor in EU liberal sexual politics—they attest that the negotiations between the European project and individual nations are most intense at the external and internal borders of Europe. In chapter three, Louise Richardson-Self mobilises the utopian (non)temporality and (non)spatiality of Luce Irigaray’s sexual difference theory as a way to conceive of an alternative future where LGBTs achieve solid social, political, cultural and legal standing. Richardson-Self argues

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same-sex relations can strategically affirm alterity beyond phallocentrism, while simultaneously resisting the violence of LGBT discrimination. Positing “difference as such” as a productive space in-between others allows phallocentric hierarchies of inequality to be confronted and subsequently enables championing respect for differential LGBT subjectivities. In chapter four, Heather Hermant presents an auto-ethnographic reflection on feminist decolonial arts-research praxis by discussing the notion of her authoring body across and in relation to the arts and the academy. The dynamics of this particular form of performativity of historiography across space is unpacked through reading the embodied experiences of artworks of four female urban artists: Camille Turner and Vanessa Dion Fletcher from Canada and Mariana Rocha and Oriana Duarte from Brazil. She exposes how the act of moving dialogically interpellates bodies in relation with lands and their embodied archives. In the preface to section two, Iris van der Tuin argues that in feminist research praxis, affect rhizomatically traverses theoretical, practical and political realms. Research not only spurs or inspires changes in unjust societies, feminist interventions also leave their imprint on the bodies and subjectivities of the researchers involved. This incessant multidirectional relationship provides a red thread running through chapters five, six, seven and eight. In chapter five, similar to Heather Hermant’s explicit autoethnographical approach in chapter four, Eline van Uden produces knowledge from her own standpoint. Case in point is the—distinct affective performativity of—embodiment of the author as a fashion model, a privileged biological and cultural location she is revaluing with the feminist affectivity research toolbox. Most successful when they are capable of operating their bodies following the visual scripts of the fashion genre in order to affectively spur consumption desires, consumers are not made aware of the individual everyday labour of fashion models. Aiming to intervene in dominant cultural presumptions surrounding fashion modeling, Van Uden invites us to take seriously the immaterial labour of models as fashion workers. In chapter six, Mariëlle S. Smith unpacks her affective alignments with the Irish female author Anne Enright and the French feminist theorist and artist Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger. Smith analyses the foreclosing and opening of the feminine among the twins Marie and Rose/Marie in Enright’s 2001 novel What Are You Like? Achieving subjectivity by becoming active agents over their own lives, they seek to live a complex matrixial, undeniable femininity which accommodates a phallic self-

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understanding. This recognition proves to be a common ground for Enright, Ettinger, and Smith. In chapter seven, Sara Janssen documents her trajectory of becoming a feminist scholar of contemporary pornography. She compares two feminist portrayals of sexual agency: Emilie Jouvet’s 2006 no budget, do-ityourself film One Night Stand with Carolee Schneemann’s typically second-wave feminist film Fuses (1964-1967). In the chapter, we witness how the author transforms from an inquisitive researcher searching for a way to meaningfully engage with erotic visuals into a reading machine that combines mind and body to become receptive to intimate affective encounters. Chapter eight, written by Krizia Nardini, recounts yet another transformative affective journey. Nardini reflects on a crucial feminist question: how does ones research project speaks to and drives oneself? She recognizes this question “keeps haunting the everyday of a feminist research project.” In particular, the chapter is used to come to terms with issues raised by Luce Irigaray in the theoretician’s’ home in Paris. Irigaray’s sexual difference framework is mobilised to reflect upon “Maschile Plurale,” a collective of heterosexual Italian men. During their meeting, Irigaray told Nardini that although “you stress the practice of ‘partire da se’ [starting from oneself] … you actually don’t act in this way” and therefore “you remain trapped in a traditional metaphysical abstraction.” After the author reassessed her feminist praxis, it turns out these comments actually allowed her to be moved and enriched above and beyond her doctoral dissertation project. In the preface to section three, Liza Mügge points at how the analysis of the relation between private and public spheres has a long tradition in feminist scholarship and activism, and at how, in contemporary feminist research, it became increasingly interconnected with post-colonial and post-migration dynamics. She also notes how practices of negotiations in the blurred zones of the public-private distinction are dealt with, in this volume, in both their local and transnational dimensions, whether the focus is on Western or non-Western societies. Importantly, the preface stresses how, in the chapters of this section, issues of migration, integration and citizenship become crucial concerns and inextricably connected with gender roles and norms. Chapter nine, by Rahil Roodsaz, addresses the ways in which notions of premarital sex and modernity, and processes of identity construction are tightly intertwined in the Iranian Dutch community. Focusing on the gendered connotations of the tension between tradition, religiosity and the need to integrate in Dutch society, Roodsaz offers an account of the

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rhetorical strategies used by her informants to negotiate a sense of self in relation to what is perceived as ‘modern sexuality.’ She concludes that female premarital sexuality becomes a site where the very notion of ‘modern identity’ is re-signified and where the binary opposition between a supposedly liberated sexuality and a restrictive one is criticised. In chapter ten, the focus remains on migrant communities in the Netherlands. Shu-Yi Huang, through in-depth interviews, studies practices of motherhood among the first generation of Chinese women in this country. In particular, the author analyses the experiences of mothers when they decide to teach Mandarin to their children, and the obstacles they face in the daily negotiations with their husbands and when confronted with the political discursive construction of Dutchness. Through Pierre Bourdieu’s theories, an intersectional approach and an attentive reading of the stories of her interviewees, Huang presents a complex picture of the struggles these mothers face, of their strategies of resistance, of the gendered dimension of educational practices, and of the role language plays in the construction of migrant identities. In chapter eleven, Tiny Petunia Mona investigates the challenges faced by private and public health institutions in South Africa to implement antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence among women with HIV and AIDS. This study, informed by theories on medicalization, self-determination and social capital, departs from in-depth fieldwork on two institutions and their patients, and proposes recommendations for the treatment adherence that take into account issues of literacy, gender social constructs, notions of the family, and the role of the community in HIV AIDS prevention. A sociological approach also drives chapter twelve, where Runa Laila explores the gendered norms that inform the decision of mothers for home delivery or institutional childbirth in rural Bangladesh. The health risks and the high mortality rate of women choosing home delivery are addressed in their relation to existing gender norms and taboos related to the body, purity and sexuality, and by looking at how those norms create a public-private divide. Additionally, the author outlines a number of guidelines to promote safer childbirth in professional health facilities, and to design local policies aimed at building the necessary conditions to challenge and change gender inequalities. In the preface to section four, Kathrin Thiele links the different studies on media and technologies collected in this volume with what Donna Haraway refers to as SF-mode. Outlining the relations between feminist technoscience studies, and feminist media and visual culture studies, Thiele points at how processes of mediations and medialization “affect and transform our most intimate experiences with-in life.”

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Chapter thirteen opens the last section of the volume; here Domitilla Olivieri explores the potential of digital experimental-documentary film to represent, recognise, construct and share the stories and the experiences of diaspora and migration. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s notions of the “inappropriate/d Other” and of the “interval,” and a focus on the materiality and the specific cinematic strategies of one of her film are the key concerns of this chapter. Through them the author investigates how the film’s aesthetic strategies are deeply interconnected with its political dimension: performing and making sense of the affective reality of transnational movements and connections. In chapter fourteen, Nicolle Lamerichs discusses the critical potential of fan fiction and geek feminism by closely analysing Glee fan fiction. Through the concept of intermediality, the author analyses three fan works and their relations to the original Glee. Lamerichs shows how these fan authors create innovative representations of gender and sexuality, and how this creates a vital platform where audiences interpret fiction and construct new images. Finally, the author advances geek feminism as a methodological stance, one that effectively connects the endeavours of researchers and informants, a scholar and her subjects. Also addressing the power of representations on the Internet, chapter fifteen engages with questions of affect, feminist philosophy and posthumanism. Simone van Hulst starts by selecting one image from a rather random online search through a commercial search engine; next she explores what motivated this (affective) choice and how the image, in dialogue with theory, turns out to be a compelling mediation that stimulates thought and causes affective responses. By articulating posthumanism not just a trend but as “a mode of thought,” the author discusses how an ‘everyday’ image can stir a feminist posthumanist mode of thinking that questions the very nature of the existence and superiority of the human species. In chapter sixteen, Goda Klumbytơ explores Internet pornography through a practice-oriented, embodied approach. Focussing on (her) bodily engagement with Internet porn the author argues that the practices of its consumption reveal not only that the body is the primary gateway to virtual reality, but also that questions of affectivity and sexual agency in pornography get re-defined to emerge as resonance between body-imagetechnology. Klumbytơ offers a framework to study Internet porn in a way that triggers critical revision of how we think about embodiment, technology and sexually explicit imagery. Additionally, she argues for a feminist research praxis that takes our own felt resonances critically, and advocates creativity to look for alternatives both in academic critique and

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in activist practice. In the epilogue, as a way to draw the themes addressed in the anthology together, a multivocal interview is presented with Willy Jansen, Rosemarie Buikema and Lies Wesseling, the three current board members of the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies. The dialogue brings together different situated perspectives, histories and future outlooks pertaining to everyday feminist research praxis. Advocating empirical work, Jansen emphasises the importance of feminist praxis resides in the capability to give voice to those who are seldom listened to, providing an inclusive intellectual home for a variety of students, professors, practitioners and activists as well as championing topics relevant for scientific scrutiny that remain overlooked in mainstream research. Buikema puts emphasis on the political and ethical character of feminist research praxis, as the possibilities to articulate and visualise that which remains unarticulated and invisible also may initiate new power asymmetries. Wesseling calls for renewed energies to raise consciousness and spread awareness of everyday processes of exclusion such as sexism, ageism, and racism arising for example from the use of discriminatory categories. The interviewees call into question recent neo-liberal incentives that risk changing universities in unreflective, uncritical and uncreative knowledge factories. In connection, Wesseling also questions the increasing precariousness of academic labour in the Netherlands as well as many parts of the world, as is the case with the growing numbers of researches and lecturers having to make do with temporary working contracts. Following Buikema, although gender studies has increasingly been institutionalised, the power of feminist research praxis remains in making clear that “the work is not done”; the declarations and ratifications of human right agreements have not yet countered global, regional and local hegemonies and knowledge is needed to work towards a more just global society. By advocating articulating the unarticulated, we aim to stimulate heart, courage and perseverance among our readers, much-needed for future feminist research praxis.

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References Braidotti, Rosi. 2011. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (second edition). New York: Columbia University Press. Bakardjieva, Maria. 2005. Internet Society: The Internet in Everyday Life. London: Sage Publications. Buikema, Rosemarie, Gabriele Griffin, and Nina Lykke, eds. 2011. Theories and Methodologies in Postgraduate Feminist Research: Researching Differently. New York: Routledge. Centre for Modern Studies. 2013. Call for Papers Ordinary/Quotidian. An International Two-Day Conference. York University. 31 October 2013 http://www.york.ac.uk/modernstudies/conferences/oeq/ (accessed December 5, 2013). Guerrero, Corinna. 2012. Practice what you preach. Feminism and Religion Blog. http://feminismandreligion.com/2012/02/12/practicewhat-you-preach-by-corinna-guerrero/ (accessed November 26, 2013). Felski, Rita. 2012. “Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion.” M/C Journal 15(1). Fraser, Nancy. 2003. “Social justice in the age of identity politics: Redistribution, recognition and participation.” In Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, edited by Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth. London: Verso. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599. Hesse-Biber, Sharlene Nagy. 2012. Handbook of Feminist Research. Theory and Praxis. London: Sage Publications. Highmore, Ben 2002. The Everyday Life Reader. New York and London: Routledge. Johnson, Lesley and Justine Lloyd. 2005. Sentenced to Everyday Life: Feminism and the Housewife. New York: Berg. Keane, Jondi. 2013. “Æffect: Initiating Heuristic Life.” In Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, eds. Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts, 41-61. London: I.B. Tauris. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. Critique of Everyday Life: Volume 1. Translated by John Moore. London: Verso. Lykke, Nina. 2010. Feminist studies: a guide to intersectional theory, methodology and writing. New York: Routledge. Moran, Joe. 2005. Reading the Everyday. New York and London: Routledge.

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Rich, Adrienne. 1986. Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 19791985. New York: W.W. Norton. Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rigg, Jonathan. 2007. An Everyday Geography of the Global South. New York and London: Routledge. Silverstone, Roger. ed. (2005). Media, Technology and Everyday Life in Europe: From Information to Communication. Hants: Ashgate. Smith, Dorothy E. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Oever van den, Annie. ed. 2010. Ostrannenie. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Wekker, Gloria. 2009. “The Arena of Disciplines. Gloria Anzaldúa and Interdisciplinarity.” In Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture, edited by Rosemarie Buikema and Iris van der Tuin. London and New York: Routledge.

SECTION I: NEGOTIATING SPACE-TIME

PREFACE LOUIS VAN DEN HENGEL

Thinking about time is like turning the globe round and round, recognizing that all journeys exist simultaneously, that to be in one place is not to deny the existence of another, even though that other place cannot be felt or seen, our usual criteria for belief. —Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

This section brings together feminist research that aims to unravel the gendered, sexualized, and racialized knots of space-time relations that traverse and compose everyday experiences of difference and inequality, and at the same time seeks to create the conditions for a more sustainable future. The contributions that follow are written from an acute awareness of what Adrienne Rich (1986) has called the “politics of location,” a feminist method and strategic practice that thinks through the materiality and temporality of the body as a distinct political site in order to make us accountable for the coordinates that we inhabit within the geopolitical spaces of the contemporary world. The purpose is to create a politically informed map of the present, as well as the past and future: a politics of location enacts a “cartographic gesture” (Braidotti 2002, 2) that traces our embodied and embedded perspectives across multiple socio-cultural, economic, and symbolic positions within ever-shifting webs of power, knowledge, and resistance. The time-space of late modernity is marked by an intense realignment of configurations of gender, race, sexuality, nation, class, and ethnicity in relation to contemporary forces of terrorism and counterterrorism, emerging neo-nationalisms and populisms, the politics of immigration, and the globalizing processes of advanced capitalism. Claims for gender equality and sexual liberation have moved from the margins to the mainstream of the Western political imagination, both because and in spite of intensified gender-based violence and homophobia in Europe and beyond. The language of women’s rights and LGBT emancipation structure many of the contemporary debates around questions of cultural belonging and citizenship, and sexual politics are increasingly utilized in the context of anti-immigration movements and Islamophobic political

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discourses. In this context, claims for sexual democracy and freedom have become racialized in troubling ways, as a profoundly white idea of sexual modernity is defined over and against the traditions, bodies, and spatial locations of minority communities. Against this background, feminist research—in tandem with postcolonial scholarship and queer criticism—remains a critical vector of conceptual and political change, not only because it calls attention to the historical, economic, and socio-cultural links between the transnational present and an enduring colonial and imperialist past, but also because feminism can envision a different spatial and temporal politics of location: one that acts against the tide of a neo-conservative present, even if it is inevitably moved by it. The chapters that follow indeed seek to enact such moments and movements of transformation. Sanne Koevoets, navigating the webs of feminist knowledge that connect technologies of cultural memory and experience to the politics of digital libraries, calls for a renewed awareness of the power of online knowledge spaces to structure our inevitably partial perspective on the living history of women’s movements. Gianmaria Colpani and Adriano José Habed seek to reposition the debates on homonationalism on a European scale by thinking through the case of Italy as a peripheral location on the map of sexual politics and geopolitical imaginaries. Louise Richardson-Self activates the utopian (non-)temporality of Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference to acknowledge samesex relations as a locus for the affirmation of sexual alterity, as well as to resist the social and symbolic violence of LGBT discrimination. Finally, Heather Hermant mobilizes the physicality of the artist/researcher through a performance of counter-memory that traces colonial and neo-colonial timescapes, and propels them into new becomings by the creation of an imaginative feminist archive where body, earth, and language meet in coshaping motion. As these contributions show, the everyday praxis of feminist research holds the power to open breaches in the line of time as it is presently lived or actualized, by drawing new connections across material histories through the inner and outer worlds of imagination, experience, politics, and writing. If these momentary disjunctures allow us to engender progressive political practices and creative modes of thought, it is in part because they unfold a different kind of spatiotemporality: an untimely movement that takes us into “futures yet unthought” (Grosz 1999). The fundamental question of how to think the future, and how to welcome it through the creation of an empowering present, is indeed what drives these researchers in their desire to activate new ways to inhabit the time and space of this world in and through situated practices of feminist thought.

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References Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1999. “Thinking the New: Of Futures Yet Unthought.” In Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, edited by Elizabeth Grosz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Rich, Adrienne. 1986. Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 19791985. New York: W.W. Norton.

CHAPTER ONE WEBS OF FEMINIST KNOWLEDGE ONLINE: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT IN DIGITAL DOCUMENTS AND MONUMENTS SANNE KOEVOETS

Figure 1.1 The Leeds University Library hides the Feminist Archive North at its margins—are digital feminist archives better at avoiding traditional hierarchies and exclusions?

Introduction Libraries are commonly considered to be both generative spaces of knowledge and memory, and as spaces of social and cultural domination and control. While libraries on the one hand preserve and give access to (particular aspects of) the past, they simultaneously materialize regimes of

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power and knowledge in the present. A case in point is the Leeds University Library above. Its architecture suggests the ubiquity of knowledge: just take out a book and partake in the truth. When entering the reading room, you would not expect that somewhere up three staircases, past the special collections section, behind a thick door the Feminist Archive North holds records of almost a century of women’s movement activities. While included into the library in the strictest sense of the word, it is not symbolically part of it. Libraries, paradoxically, hide as much as they reveal, exclude as much as they preserve, and their indexes serve as roadmaps that not only open up certain routes of inquiry, but also inevitably close off others. The library itself is essentially far more labyrinthine, and feminist research not only involves using the indexes to find information about women, but also discovering or mapping out alternative routes through the labyrinth of knowledge. Indeed, sometimes, feminist research is less about the objects of research (not all feminist research investigates women, and not all research on women is feminist), and more about how it formulates, invents and performs connections between objects and subjects of knowledge. Throughout my research in libraries, I have thus come to consider them not only “storehouses” of (universal) Knowledge, but interesting objects of research in themselves. That is how I became a researcher of libraries. At first my aim was to uncover the symbolic role of libraries in narrative culture (Koevoets 2013). Over time, my focus has shifted increasingly towards particular libraries and library practices, and the cultural, political and technological forces that shape these practices (and vice versa). Libraries—in various and specific ways—are profoundly gendered spaces on the material, institutional and symbolic levels, and research into libraries at all these levels reveals much about how gender “works” in and through knowledge spaces and knowledge practices (Koevoets and De Jong 2013). In this chapter I will show that women’s libraries are continuously engaged with developing innovative ways to preserve and disseminate the history of women and women’s movements, and that this is a knowledge practice that involves tendencies towards either revealing or hiding the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. As such—just like feminist knowledge production—feminist library practices are never finished. Both traditional and innovative (feminist) library practices are profoundly entangled with the politics of definition and preservation. The gender studies community would therefore do well to appreciate and support, but also scrutinize and engage critically with both traditional and feminist library practices.

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The uses and limitations of Theory for negotiating library politics Critical engagement with library practice is not served by reducing the discussion to the Library with a capital L, or by the seduction of a uniform Library Theory. Something similar happened to the archive in the late ‘90s, when cultural theory went through what is now known as the Archival Turn. As Ann-Laura Stoler has argued: “in cultural theory, ‘the archive’ has a capital ‘A,’ is figurative, and leads elsewhere. Rather, it may serve as a metaphor for any corpus of selective forgettings and collections— and, as importantly, for the seductions and longings that such quests for and accumulations of the primary, originary and untouched entail” (Stoler 2002, 94). This turn in cultural theory was set in motion by two of the most influential poststructuralist thinkers in Europe: Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Derrida’s seminal text Archive Fever – A Freudian Impression (1995) has been highly influential for thinking through the paradoxicality of the archival drive—“le mal d’archive” or “archive fever”—which in its desire to possess the archive (to preserve it for oneself and for the edification of the self) destroys it (Derrida 1995, 14). Particularly insightful is Derrida’s insistence that archives produce, rather than record the event, and that they are thoroughly technological. In Archive Fever he traces how psychoanalysis—which dominated how the human subject was not only conceptualized, but also experienced in the West for a long time—was shaped to a large extent by Freud’s on-going correspondence with his peers and colleagues, and wonders how different things would have been had they communicated through electronic technologies. Now that archives and library collections are increasingly being digitalized, this question has become one of the central topics of debate among those studying (in) such memory institutions (De Jong en Wieringa 2013). However, Derrida’s concept of the “Archive” has been critiqued for being too theoretical and too metaphorical. From a Derridean perspective, any collection of statements or artifacts can be described and investigated in terms of the Archive. Historian Carolyn Steedman points out that such a metaphorical understanding of the Archive obscures the practices of the historian. In Something She Called a Fever – Michelet, Derrida, and Dust (2001) she argues that Michelet’s “heavy and often stupefying” headaches that befell him after breathing in “lungfuls of dust” while in the archive are more illustrative of what she calls “Archive Fever Proper” than Derrida’s tractate on psychoanalysis: “we're talking epidemiology here, not metaphor: meningitis due to or as a complication of anthrax” (2001, 1172).

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Anyone who has experienced the debilitating pain of carpal tunnel syndrome brought about by spending too much time navigating the Internet can attest that the digital “Universal Library” (more on that later) presents it very own occupational hazards that are not reducible to metaphors of “flurry” or “fever.” Similar problems arise when engaging with Michel Foucault’s concept of the archive, which is arguably even more abstract (Manoff 2004, 18). In The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault describes the archive as “the law of what can be said” and “the system that establishes statements as events and things” (1972, 129). As archives, through the Foucaultian lens, have become thought of as nothing more (and nothing less) than the system of naming and ordering itself, ambivalence towards this thought is understandable. For example, Eric Kluitenberg and David Garcia (2011) reflected on this problem in relation to the Tactical Media movement that engaged critical and creative media practices in order to formulate a critique on global capitalism. These practices, they suggest, “by [their] nature resisted or outright refused to be named” (2011, n.p.). Any attempt to record or preserve the traces of this movement will inescapably tie them up in the politics of the archive, which threatens to “[freeze] its iridescent Àuidity into established modes of discourse […] Every statement that falls outside these rules would then be discarded as illegitimate” (Kluitenberg 2011, 24). Kluitenberg suggests that in order to preserve such fluid practices and movements, we need a format that resists “the forms of institutional closure associated with archival institutions” and instead is founded on “an active discursive principle emphasizing the contingency of historical development” (Kluitenberg 2011, 25). Theories of the Archive as metaphor or abstraction may have successfully inspired such reflections, but they do not offer suggestions as to how we may produce and engage with cultural memory differently or in a way that is more in tune with the fluid and ephemeral aspects of social movements, including the women’s movement. Some of the most provocative work to have engaged with the politics of the archive does not take the Archive as a metaphor or as an abstract concept, but rather considers the way in which specific archives simultaneously produce cultural identity, political subjectivity and citizenship, and the means for both political control and resistance. While the Archival Turn has succeeded in elevating the archive from merely a place that stores traces of the past into a meaningful object of study in itself, it has done so less through the co-optation of the archive for the sake

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of poststructuralist theorizing, and more so by making visible particular archival practices (see for instance Eichhorn 2013). Of course, libraries are distinct in some ways from archives, mostly in the way that they are considered not so much storehouses for the unfiltered stuff of the past, but rather as monumental storehouses for the exemplary aesthetic and intellectual texts of a culture. However, many of the insights from and dangers of theories of the Archive apply to libraries as well. Libraries are indeed complicit with political power, at the very least insofar as they are tasked with selecting and preserving—and thus defining—what and who belongs to culture proper. As David Greetham has argued: “while the prerogatives bestowed by culture may often have been taken seriously by the standards of the time, attempts to either predict the archival needs of the future or to find universalist systems of classification are inherently doomed by the force of local prejudice” (Greetham 1999, 19). But feminist theorists such as Nancy Hartsock, Sandra Harding, and Donna Haraway have suggested that “local prejudice”—that is, one’s standpoint (Hartsock 1983) or the “partial perspective” that arises from one’s “situatedness” (Haraway 1988)—can be particularly powerful locations of (feminist) knowledge production. Indeed, the feminist paradigm of “strong objectivity” (Harding 2005) as residing in a reflection on the socio-historical conditions that have produced particular perspectives takes as its starting point that the repressed know better how systems of oppression work than those whose perspectives are produced by those systems as being neutral and universal. Clearly, patriarchal prejudices that have materially and symbolically erased women’s lives and work from traditional library collections, or relegated them to separate headings in the indexes and corners of the library buildings should be considered as “local prejudices” that have been particularly forceful in excluding the experiences of the repressed. Simultaneously, women’s libraries and archives have developed out of their own prejudices innovative ways of preserving and representing knowledge. Prejudice as such thus does not in itself render libraries and archives useless. To the contrary: by locating and engaging with the presence of such prejudices in all knowledge spaces, an interesting point of entrance is created for feminist critique. Attempts to reflect on and correct the force of patriarchal prejudice on the institutionalization of cultural memory in libraries should not fall into the trap of simply extending Derrida’s dictum that “there is no political power without control of the archive” (Derrida 1995, 4 note 1) to the Library with a capital L. Instead, feminist engagement with libraries (plural) should consider their cultural, historical and technological

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contexts en entanglements. Such an engagement with digital women’s libraries shows, as I will argue below, that while new technologies are often feared to mark the demise of libraries (Baker 2001; Van Slyck 2001), they may in fact offer new possibilities for producing the cultural record in alternative, political and innovative feminist ways. However, they can only do so if the intersecting practices of selection, organization and (re)presentation are understood as emerging in conjunction with particular cultural prefigurations of the Library as a place of knowledge. I will proceed to make my case through a series of examples from culture and practice. Firstly, I will engage images of the imaginary library: the Aedificium in Eco’s The Name of the Rose as the embodiment of the uncanny maze which’ order obscures an underlying primordial chaos, and the digital Universal Library (or the “web of Babel”) as a figure of technological chaos—information overload—that fails to engage the mechanisms of digital control. I will connect these cultural prefigurations to two recent examples of feminist digital library projects that attempt to engage the dual potential of memory and digitalization. Firstly, the British Library’s online oral history repository Sisterhood and After attempts to preserve and make available oral accounts of the women’s liberation movement in Britain. Secondly, the FRAGEN project shows the result of a collaborative effort to construct a European feminist canon to promote comparative research. Both projects have had to negotiate social, political, economic and technological limitations, as well as the entanglements of the webs of feminist knowledge with the politics of archives and libraries.

The library as a labyrinth: Navigating webs of feminist knowledge in Sisterhood and After The narrative prefiguration of the library as an uncanny maze that is kept under strict control and yet fails to be fully controlled is wittily pastiched in Umberto Eco’s highly acclaimed novel The Name of the Rose (1980, English translation 1983). The plot centers on a fictional medieval library at a Benedictine monastery in northern Italy. The Benedictine monk William of Baskerville and his young novice Adso of Melk are called to the monastery to investigate a series of mysterious deaths. It soon becomes clear that the Aedificium—the library that towers over the abbey, known as “the greatest library in the world” —must hold the solution to the mysteries. Thwarting their attempts at solving the crimes is the fact that the Aedificium is meticulously closed off from the outside world. Only the elderly librarian, the blind Jorge of Burgos, and his assistant have access to the books and—more importantly—the index of the library. An elderly

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monk warns William and Adso against entering the library of their own accord: “The library is a great labyrinth, sign of the labyrinth of the world. You enter and you do not know whether you will come out” (Eco 1983, 158). Of course William and Adso do not let such warnings deter them, and soon find themselves utterly and desperately lost in the library. The library labyrinth in Eco’ Rose is a perfect representation of Eco’s work on language. As Rochelle Sibley notes: “the physical structure of the library is only one aspect of its labyrinthine nature.” She explains that: the first mention of the library emphasizes the intellectual knowledge that the librarians are required to learn in order to navigate it successfully, suggesting that the physical labyrinth is a concrete manifestation of the immaterial labyrinth of knowledge contained within the books that the library houses (Sibley 2004, 34).

This type of labyrinth Eco calls a “rhizome” or “network.” The rhizome, rather than a two-dimensional map of intersecting paths which ultimately lead to a solution (the revelation of the secret), consists of multiple and intersecting connections between multiple points, in which every point is connected to every other point. This network is “an unlimited territory [which] has neither a center nor an outside” (Eco 1986, 81). The library in The Name of the Rose thus metaphorizes a confounding paradox of the library: while the Aedificium appears strictly ordered, its order merely serves to hide the primordial chaos underneath. To navigate the library the user must submit to the knowledge regime that structures the library space, and thus becomes a co-producer of an order that is essentially arbitrary. As Hope A. Olson (2001) has argued, the labyrinthine interweaving of power and knowledge within particular epistemes is present at the very level of library catalogues. Olson suggests that library indexes “appear unbiased and universally applicable—but they actually hide their exclusions under the guise of neutrality” (Olson 2001, 640). Such indexing systems, as Suzan Searing (1992) has shown, were “designed as the hierarchical and universal profiles of human knowledge” (Searing 1992, 7) and are not well adapted to accommodate the fundamental interdisciplinarity of studies on gender, let alone intersectionality. The problem for users seeking information outside the mainstream, such as information on women’s or feminist issues, “will meet with frustration in finding nothing, or they will find something but miss important relevant materials” (Olson 2001, 639). Although Olson’s argument is aimed mainly at librarians themselves, feminist library users would also do well to develop an awareness of “biases of gender,

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sexuality, race, age, ability, ethnicity, language, and religion as limits to the expression of diversity in naming information for retrieval” (Olson 2001, 639). Furthermore, as Fabienne Baider and Anna Zobnina (2013) point out, classification systems do not, in fact, represent the binary divisions and hierarchical distinctions on which they rely, but rather “[constitute] the basis for the very conception of binary difference (sex and gender for instance): it creates the concepts it is supposed to represent” (Baider & Zobnina 2013, 100). The Dewey Decimal System (DDC) and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are two such dominant library indexing systems. As Olson shows through her work on mapping A Women’s Thesaurus to the DDC through an innovative interface design: “[t]echnologies can be used to make systems permeable, but the contents of information systems are still governed by standards such as LCSH and DDC that also need to be made permeable” (Olson 2001, 661). A Women’s Thesaurus was published in 1987 under the subtitle: “An Index of Language to Describe and Locate Information by and about Women.” It formed one of the first attempts to design a system that would allow users to search existing catalogs from a feminist perspective (see Capek 1987). As the indexing systems she investigates still pertain to book collections—and are thus always intertwined in the curious paradox posited by philosopher-librarian Leibniz, that the form of the book suggests a linear organization, while the knowledge represented by the library system did not come about in a linear fashion—the question arises whether digital libraries may be better able to represent and render navigable webs of feminist knowledge as being fundamentally unstable, fluid and intertwined. The British Library, itself one of the most iconic examples of a monument of knowledge and cultural memory, recently presented the project Sisterhood and After: An Oral History on the Women’s Liberation Movement, aimed at collecting, preserving and making available a “living archive” of oral history accounts of the women’s movement in Britain. A small portion of the archive can be listened to/viewed online (The British Library 2013). The archive itself is located at the British Library’s Sound and Moving Image collection, and consists of 60 audio interviews and verbatim transcripts, which can be searched online, but can only be played at the British Library. It also includes 10 documentary films, parts of which can be viewed online (including commentary). While the website only showcases a few selected fragments from a small selection of the interviews, it functions as a digital monument of the women’s movement, and its architecture and organizational structure serve as an interesting example of how the way knowledge of and about women is represented

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constructs women’s issues and produces women’s movements in particular ways. First of all, the website Sisterhood and After is located in the Learning section of the British Library website, under the subheading “History.” As the interviews aim to chart a particular moment in the British women’s liberation movement—the ‘70s and ‘80s of the twentieth century—this location seems logical. However, this categorization of the online archive obscures two aspects of the women’s liberation movement: firstly, that it is much older, and secondly, that it is ongoing. The website allows users to “browse themes” (more on those later), read short biographies of feminists that were interviewed, view an interactive timeline, access teacher’s notes on the different themes for use in classroom settings, and read an “About” section that offers some background information about the project. While the website seems logically organized and easy to navigate, a closer look reveals that it seems so because its organization reproduces a dominant view of feminism that is based on the interests of white, heterosexual women. This becomes apparent when one takes a critical look at how the interview fragments are organized along particular themes. The first theme is “Family and Children,” which is subdivided into the headings “Marriage and Civil Partnership,” “Families and Parenting” and “Division of Labor.” Here, two things stand out. First of all, this theme is presented as the first, top-left theme, reproducing the idea that women’s issues are first and foremost issues pertaining to relationships, parenting, and domestic work—issues that are engaged with in the interview fragments as being not merely “personal” but also thoroughly political, but that at are symbolically associated with the private sphere. Secondly, the interview fragments available under this heading predominantly deal with the experiences of white, heterosexual women—even though the description of the theme includes references to non-heterosexual relationships. The categorization of themes also promotes a traditional view of women’s embodiment. The second theme is “Body, Minds and Spirits,” and is subdivided as “Health and reproduction,” “Body experience” and “The politics of therapy.” Here what stands out is the fact that the subthemes seem to reproduce the idea that women’s embodied experience is first of all tied to reproduction. This assumption is further strengthened by the fact that under the “Health and Reproduction” section, no less than three of the seven fragments deal with contraception, childbirth, and abortion. The selection of these and other fragments do give a glimpse into the intersectionality of gendered embodiment: the fragment on contraception deals with the controlling of poor women’s bodies, whereas another fragment mentions body/mind dualism and asks whether feminism

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prompted the interviewee to think about her asthma differently. Overlaps between themes within subheadings are also plentiful, such as between one of the fragments dealing with rape and sexual fantasy (in the Health section under “Body, Mind and Spirits” category) and the fragments under the “Sexual pleasure, sexual rights” subheading in the “Sex, Love and Friendship” section. Such investigations make clear that underneath the seemingly rigid subdivision of topics lies a far more complex web of intersecting and conflicting perspectives. The topics discussed in the short fragments are by and large organized along topics that were central to the women’s liberation movement in Britain in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and as such the website’s organization is perhaps too uncritically representative. To turn these topics into an overall categorization of the movement results in reproducing the inherent biases within the movement, that had already garnered much criticism at the time. New important strands and strategies of feminist thought and action, such intersectional and queer theory and the Black Women’s and Queer movements, have since emerged from these critiques. Traces of these critiques can be discovered in the interview fragments themselves. For instance, under the “Education” section under the “Women’s Studies and Women’s History” subsection, Gail Lewis mentions her lingering resentment of the fact that Black women “got called out as voices and living examples of activism, [not] called out as voices of and living examples of scholarship and theoretical development” (Lewis 2013). While the Black Women’s Movement appears in multiple fragments on the site, its critiques of the colonial and exclusionary aspects of the feminist movement at the time are fragmented across different categories and thus buried at the bottom of the topical hierarchization. Similarly, lesbian identity and transgender issues appear across several categories, but do not appear as coherent and locatable counter-narratives. It is not in the “living archive” as an ongoing project itself, but on the website of Sisterhood and After that the politics of the archive manifests itself in full force: while the voices of difference and dissent are present, the structure of the index seems to fix feminist topics along a traditional rationale that marginalizes those voices and relegates them to the bylines of the (hi)story of feminism. To truly access and scrutinize the complex webs of knowledge and power that have come out of and have shaped the women’s movement in Britain, a thorough research into the oral histories in the archive would be necessary. The immense value of the project is, of course, that it capacitates such research at a truly remarkable scale. However, the way it is presented on the website seems to have prioritized navigability over promoting a reflection on issues of representation, bias,

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and the power to decide what feminism should be about. While the merit of the website lies in its capacity to present feminist ideas in a relatable and accessible manner, its very structure and organization of topics on the site hides the on-going struggle of feminism to come to terms with its own biases.

The Digital Universal Library and the myth of chaos – negotiating digital library politics in the FRAGEN database A second important narrative prefiguration of the library can be found in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Library of Babel (1941, English translation 1962). The story figures a vast library that consists of hexagonal spaces along the walls of which stand an unimaginable number of books: [T]he Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything. (Borges 1962, 75).

Borges’ Library has captured readers’ imaginations for decennia with its promise of a Universal Library that can hold all of human knowledge (without any exclusions) on the one hand, and the realization that such a collection would be useless without an index on the other hand. Considering that even if the Library of Babel would hold only one 410 page book and every possible misprint of that book with one, two, three mistakes would occupy a larger space than the universe itself (Bloch 2008), the thought of having all that knowledge preserved in one space, with only an infinitesimal chance of encountering even one meaningful text, turns hope into horror. The promise of digital technologies to capacitate the storage of vast amounts of text electronically has, in the last century, reawakened the Alexandrian dream of a universal library. Already in 1945—a mere four years after Borges conjured up the philosophical problems posed by the idea of totality—Vannevar Bush considered the possibilities to devise a system (which he called the Memex) that could store massive amounts of data and make them available in a structure that resembles the World Wide Web (Vandendorpe 2009, 75). But David Langford’s pastiche The Net of Babel by J*rg* L**S B*rg*s (1995) suggests that such a digital Universal Library presents a similar conundrum. While net-librarians are no longer doomed to dwell in a seemingly endless labyrinth, and can engage the totality of everything that can be written from behind a screen: “chaos

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reigns throughout the whole vast informational sea; the tiny islands of meaning we have found are scattered like primes in the ocean of numbers, according to no visible plan” (Langford 1995, 5). The digital Universal Library appears thus as the opposite of Eco’s Aedificium: rather than being characterized by an excess of order to hide the lurking chaos underneath, the digital Universal Library suffers from too little order, allowing chaos to reign free. In Jon Thiem’s digital utopia, on the other hand, the modern crisis of knowledge has been resolved by sophisticated search tools, “Universal Abstracts,” and electronic reading programs that render all the knowledge in the Universal Library immediately accessible and intelligible” (Thiem 1999, 258). Here, the immediacy of the search tool reigns in the destructive effects of chaos. The reality of the digital library, however, is both more complex and more mundane. While the fantasy of a (digital) Universal Library may be philosophically or metaphysically compelling, the politics of selection and access—and thus of ordering techniques—are ever present on the Web. Sophisticated search tools, such as Google’s personalization algorithms, increasingly define and dominate how information is presented to users. In The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is hiding from you (2011) Eli Pariser argues that the recent trend towards search personalization has the effect of “feeding back” the searcher’s own previous preferences to them. Additionally, José van Dijck (2010) argues that Google Scholar uses popularity ratings as a way to rank scholarly articles online, and as such its ranking algorithm has become a co-producer of scientific authority. William Turkel even calls Google’s ranking algorithm “the most pervasive source of bias in the history of research” (Turkel 2008, n.p.). In face of these considerations, it seems about time to abandon the lofty dream of the Universal Library altogether. Neither the reality nor the aim of any real library has been aimed at universality since Alexandria, as Christopher Rowe has argued: “no matter how expansive in space and aspiration, every library is by definition selective in its collection of texts” (Rowe 2013, n.p.). Rowe’s insight seems particularly pertinent to feminist libraries; as such collections will tend towards specificity rather than totalizing inclusivity. But even such specific collections will have to engage the mundane reality of the electronic marketplace. As Marlene Manoff has pointed out: “[t]he consolidation of the publishing industry as well as the limited number of vendors selling database packages [has led to the situation that] libraries may only lease access to information rather than purchase it outright, they cannot preserve, archive, or guarantee future access” (Manoff 2001, 378). Under such conditions, how can webs of feminist knowledge be

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represented online? The FRAmes on GENder in Europe project (FRAGEN) aimed to take an innovative approach towards constructing an online, accessible database of core texts from the second feminist wave from all 27 EU countries as well as Croatia and Turkey. The project was from its get-go forced to face the Babylonian confusion of Europe’s multilinguism, while negotiating budgetary limitations and strict copyright laws (de Jong et. al. 2013, 77). The result of the project is a database of core texts and a website that gives access to the database from all over the world. What stands out when accessing the website is that compared to Sisterhood and After it appears sparse in term of design and multimedia content. The information on the homepage states the aim of the project is to “facilitate comparative research into the history of feminist thinking in 27 EU countries plus Croatia and Turkey” and there is a mention of the project’s affiliation with the EU funded research project “Quality in Gender + Equality Politics” (QUING). It further states that the goals of the FRAGEN database is to: “create a database of the original texts on gender+equality frames that have emerged from feminist movements in Europe” and to “organize and facilitate open access for researchers to this database” (Fragen 2013). The “About” section of the website reflects on the selection criteria. First of all a selection was made of key figures within the 29 states, secondly insight is given into the criteria by which these key figures were asked to select texts for a “longlist,” then on how “longlists” were pared down into “shortlists” of ten texts per country. The “About” section also gives insight into the construction of the “analytic descriptions” of texts. This description is of particular importance, as the sections on “copyright” and “digitization” describe. A “Creative Commons by non commercial-no derivative works” license was acquired, which allows FRAGEN-users to download and share the texts with others “for research purposes only, and as long as they link back to the FRAGEN database.” This also means that it is not permitted to change the texts in any way—the FRAGEN project was limited to upload and make available the texts only in the original language in which they were written. Here the power of digital copyright laws is made visible as a defining factor in how digital libraries can take shape. The third section of the website allows access to specific countries and the texts that were selected and the fourth section allows a database search based on a keyword query, a list of countries, a list of all keywords, and the list of titles (in English). Clicking on a specific title brings up a page important information about the text, including the title (in the original

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language); author(s) name(s); a list of keywords; a link to the survey; and a short summary in English. While the majority of texts are not in English, the list of keywords, summary, and most importantly the survey give a lot of information about the text and the topics it deals with. The survey was filled out by local experts and gives insight in (among other things) the topics of the text according to Beijing’s critical areas of concern, the way gender is conceptualized in the text and how it is seen (or not) to intersect with other axes of difference. For a thorough description of the contents of the survey and its role in the selection and organization of the database, see De Jong, Meulmeester & Vriend (2013). The combination of transparency given with regards to the selection of texts as a collective, international effort and the way in which different local views and conceptualizations were used to provide access to the database via multiple routes of entry (for instance by country, author, topic, etc.) lends the database—which is for all extents an purposes a “finished” collection rather than a “living archive” that can grow and expand—a certain fluidity that the Sisterhood and After website lacks. This fluidity can be found in the way in which different queries can pull up different lists of European texts, and as such produce different representations of thematic “webs” or “constellations” within European feminist thought. The last section of the website, “Research,” invites researchers from all countries represented in the database to reflect and comment on the shortlisted texts in a comparative way. As of yet, only one article is up (Kazinci 2013), but its inclusion on the website does strengthen the project’s claim to wanting to capacitate critical, comparative research. It also allows for the inclusion of shifting interpretations and new ways of framing to enter the database. This is another way in which the FRAGEN database and website are set up actively eschews claims to objectivity. Instead, the FRAGEN database clearly and explicitly invites reflection on questions of (feminist) canon formation, the categorization of feminisms, and feminist methodology (De Jong et. al. 2013, 80-82). Furthermore, FRAGEN engages in innovative ways with the privatization and control of the digital archive through copyright laws, and has developed alternative ways to make European feminist texts available across Europe within the strict budgetary limitations that libraries and archives are facing. The FRAGEN database shows that in order to make feminist knowledge accessible online, not only the politics of selection, but also the politics of the index must be addressed. Rather than imagining the Internet as an (utopian) anarchical, or a (dystopian) chaotic sphere, online feminist libraries have to thoughtfully engage the specific dynamics of privatization

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and technological control online when they develop innovative ways to preserve and disseminate traces of the women’s movement.

Digital feminist libraries as monuments: Representing webs of feminist knowledge online These two examples of digital feminist libraries together show the significant challenges of representing webs of feminist knowledge online. The Sisterhood and After website makes innovative use of multimedia. However, the way the materials are organized reproduces biases in the movement, and fixes them within its very structure. FRAGEN on the other hand, explicitly addresses such inherent dilemmas by providing a great amount of transparency with regards to the processes of selection and organization and thus inviting fundamental reflection on how such processes are nowadays situated within specific configurations of culture, politics, and technology. But should these two spaces be considered “libraries” at all? If so, then certainly for different reasons. Sisterhood and After serves a clear monumental purpose: it makes the women’s movement visible online. Its use of feminist iconography and its presentation of video material invites a sense of engagement with the movement. FRAGEN, on the other hand, is engaged in the other purpose of traditional libraries: the selection and dissemination of exemplary texts. The website appears far less monumental in scope: its design is sparse and functional, but its internal structure allows for the representation of webs of feminist knowledge in terms of different constellations of ideas, topics, frames, and aims. Feminist researchers should take seriously the implications and fundamental assumptions that are built into the very structure of knowledge spaces, including online knowledge spaces. The way we can access and navigate webs of feminist knowledge—including their entanglements with cultural, political, and technological forces—through collections and indexes of feminist texts forms an integral part of our situatedness as researchers. As Donna Haraway (1988) has argued, rather than imagining knowledge to spring from a “conquering gaze from nowhere” (Haraway 1988, 581), feminist knowledge practitioners should acknowledge and reflect on the partiality of their perspective. The spaces where and practices through which we search for knowledge, through which we produce or which produce for us maps and overviews of webs of (feminist) knowledge, are important factors in the production of such partial perspectives. That is why library practices do not only include the

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librarian’s and archivist’s practices of selection, preservation, and organization, but also the practices through which researchers engage with the materials in libraries and archives, as well as with libraries and archives themselves.

References Baider, Fabienne and Anna Zobnina. 2013. “(Re)searching gender in a library.” In Teaching Gender with Libraries and Archives: The Power of Information, edited by Sara de Jong and Sanne Koevoets, 99-111. Budapest: Central European University Press. Baker, Nicholson. 2001. Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. New York: Vintage Books/Random House. Bloch, William G. 2008. The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel.” (1962) 1999. Translated by James E. Irby. In Magic and Madness in the Library, edited by Eric Graber, 75-84. Delhi NY: Birch Book Press. De Jong, Sara and Saskia Wieringa. 2013. “The library as knowledge broker.” In Teaching Gender with Libraries and Archives: The Power of Information, edited by Sara de Jong and Sanne Koevoets, 13-30. Budapest: Central European University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. De Jong, Sara, Gé Meulmeester and Tilly Vriend. 2013. “Core feminist texts in Europe online: Teaching gender with the FRAGEN database.” In Teaching Gender with Libraries and Archives: The Power of Information, edited by Sara de Jong and Sanne Koevoets, 76-86. Budapest: Central European University Press. Eco, Umberto. 1984. The Name of the Rose. Orlando: Harcourt Press. —. 1986. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Eichhorn, Kate. 2013. The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order. Philadephia: Temple University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books. FRAGEN. 2013. “Welcome to FRAmes on GENder.” http://www.fragen.nu/atria/fragen/ (accessed October 30, 2013). Garcia, David and Eric Kluitenberg. 2011. “Tracing the Ephemeral: Tactical Media and the Lure of the Archive.” Tactical Media Files

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Blog, June 30. http://blog.tacticalmediafiles.net/?p=175 (accessed October 30, 2013). Greetham, David. 1999. “Who’s in, who’s out: The cultural Poetics of archival exclusion.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32(1):1-28. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14(3): 575-599. Harding, Sandra. 2005. “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is ‘Strong Objectivity?’.” In Feminist Theory: A Philosophical Anthology, edited by Ann E. Cudd and Robin O. Andreasen, 218-36. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Hartsock, Nancy. 1983. “The Feminist Standpoint.” In Discovering Reality, edited by Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka, 283-310. London: D. Riedel Publishing Company. Kazinci, Piri. 2013. “Reports on Turkish feminist texts selected for the European Union FRAGEN project.” Amsterdam: Atria. http://www.atria-kennisinstituut.nl/iiav-staging/mmbase/attachments/ 2057629/fragendef.pdf (accessed October 30, 2013) Kluitenberg, Eric. 2011. Legacies of Tactical Media, The Tactics of Occupation: From Tompkins Square to Tahrir. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Koevoets, Sanne and Sara de Jong. 2013. “Introduction.” In Teaching Gender with Libraries and Archives: The Power of Information, edited by Sara de Jong and Sanne Koevoets, 1-12. Budapest: Central European University Press. Koevoets, Sanne. 2013. Into the Labyrinth of Knowledge and Power: The library as a gendered space in the western imaginary. PhD diss., Utrecht University, the Netherlands. http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/dissertations/2013-0617200601/UUindex.html (accessed October 30, 2013). —. 2013. “Beyond the Bun Lady: Towards New Feminist Figurations of Librarianship.” In Teaching Gender with Libraries and Archives: The Power of Information, edited by Sara de Jong and Sanne Koevoets, 142-163. Budapest: Central European University Press. Langford, David. 1995. The Net of Babel by J*rge L**s B*rg*s. Cambs: Interzone. Lewis, Gail. 2013. “Black Feminist Texts.” British Library Learning. http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/sisterhood/view.html#id=143433 &id2=143140 (accessed October 30, 2013). Manoff, Marlene. 2001. “The Symbolic Meaning of Libraries in a Digital Age.” Libraries and the Academy 1(4):371-81.

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—. 2004. “Theories of the Archive from across the Disciplines.” Libraries and the Academy 4(1):9-25. Olson, Hope A. 2001. “The Power to Name: Representation in Library Catalogs.” Signs 26(3):639-668. Pariser, Eli. 2011. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You. London: Penguin. Rowe, Chistopher. 2013. “The New Library of Babel? Borges, Digitization and the Myth of the Universal Library.” First Monday 18.2: n.p. http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3237/ 3416 (accessed November 1, 2013). Searing, Suzan E. 1992. “How Libraries Cope with Interdisciplinarity: The Case of Women’s Studies.” Issues in Integrative Studies 10:7-25. Sibley, Rochelle. 2004. “Aspects of the Labyrinth in The Name of the Rose: Chaos and Order in the Abbey Library.” In Illuminating Eco: on the Boundaries of Interpretation, edited by Charlotte Ross and Rochelle Sibley. Aldershot, Burlington: Ashgate Publishing. Steedman, Carolyn. 2001. “Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust.” American Historical Review 106(4):1159-80. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance.” Archival Science 2:87-109. The British Library. 2013. “Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the Women’s Liberation Movement.” http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/sisterhood/index.html (accessed October 30, 2013). Thiem, Jon. 1999. “Myths of the Universal Library: From Alexandria to the Postmodern Age.” In Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory, edited by Marie L. Ryan, 256-66. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Turkel, William. 2008. “The Search Comes First,” Digital History Hacks (2005–2008). http://digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html (accessed October 30, 2013). Van Dijck, José. 2010. “Search engines and the production of academic knowledge.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 13(6):574-92. Van Slyck, Abigail A. 2001. “The Librarian and the Library: Why Place Matters.” Libraries & the Cultural Record 36(4):518-23. Vandendorpe, Christian. 2009. De papyrus a l’hypertexte: Essai sur les Mutations du Texte et de la Lecture. Montreal: Boréal.

CHAPTER TWO WHAT IS EUROPEAN ABOUT HOMONATIONALISM? THINKING THROUGH THE ITALIAN CASE GIANMARIA COLPANI AND ADRIANO JOSÉ HABED

Figure 2.1 Photograph of the slogan “Italy vs Europe: in Europe it’s different”, taken by the authors at the Gay Pride in Turin, Italy, in 2009.

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Chapter Two The question must remain open, and in a particularly ‘central’ way at the border points. — Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe?

Introduction Let us set the stage for this discussion on Europe and homonationalism by means of a personal anecdote. Shortly after we moved from Italy to the Netherlands we were interviewed for an Italian radio program entirely devoted to the experiences of Italians living abroad. While many of the stories collected by the program accounted for the economic reasons pushing Italian youth to leave their country nowadays, the journalist wanted us, a young gay couple, to place particular emphasis on issues of sexual citizenship and gay rights. Hailed as such and asked to illustrate to the Italian audience what it means to be gay (and especially a couple) in the Netherlands, we pointed out some differences distinguishing the Dutch context from the Italian one. These differences certainly included, in our view, some rights and material privileges we may be entitled to if we decided to marry or to contract any other kind of partnership available to both straight and gay couples in the Netherlands (contrary to Italy). Yet, another crucial difference consists in the mobilization of these very gay civil rights in Dutch nationalist and racist politics—a turn that has been termed “homonationalism” by feminist and queer theorists as well as activists (Puar 2007; Haritaworn et al. 2008; Mepschen et al. 2010). By highlighting the collusion between gay rights and Dutch nationalism, we hoped we could unsettle the sharply teleological terms in which the distinction between Italy and the Netherlands had been framing the interview from the start. However, our answer remained unheard. The journalist at the other end of the line bypassed rather quickly our ‘derailment’ from what she considered to be the main issues at stake and moved on to the next question (which, for the record, concerned the question of whether we may or may not consider adopting a baby, in her words “as a natural step forward in our family life”). We suggest that our interviewer’s incapacity to debunk her idea of the Netherlands must be read as having more to do with Europe than with the Netherlands itself. A conflation often takes place, from a peripheral location such as Italy, between the idea of Europe and certain European countries. Europe as a promise of sexual freedom and recognition materializes in those places where such a promise can be fulfilled. This way, Europe becomes the horizon of progressivism— something that, borrowing from Gayatri Spivak (1999, 110), “one cannot

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not want”, or so it seems. Looking back at that encounter, we may say that we presumed we held a position enabling us to undo certain Italian familiar narratives concerning Europe and its promises of happiness. But we failed. And not only because our interviewer ignored the twist we tried to give to the conversation, somehow displaying an incapacity (or refusal, for that matter) to ‘hear’ our answer, but also because our very position spoke loudly against our intents. Why did we move to the Netherlands in the first place? Is not there in fact something exceptional about the Netherlands and, more broadly, about the idea of Europe that makes it legitimately (though dangerously) a powerful object of desire, especially from the European peripheries? We begin this chapter by addressing this very conflation of the idea of Europe with few specific European locations. We do so by reviewing in the first section a particularly thorough analysis of Dutch homonationalism (Mepschen et al. 2010), which tends to uncritically establish a metonymic relation between the Dutch context and Europe as a whole. This is exemplary of certain literature on homonationalism ‘in’ Europe that focuses on few European countries (most frequently the Netherlands, France, Germany, and the UK) and identifies them with the signifier ‘Europe’ (Butler 2008; Fassin 2010). Such a gesture mirrors progressive social actors from the peripheries of Europe who tend to project, as our interviewer did, the European promise of sexual freedom on few European locations. Italian gay activists who mobilize the slogan “In Europe it’s Different” (see figure 2.1) contribute in fact to recast Europeanness on those (North-Western) countries where gay rights do exist, while erasing Southern and Eastern peripheries from the European map of liberal sexual politics. In this chapter our goal is to ‘materialise’ the trope of Europe circulating both in the debates on homonationalism and in the progressive discourses on sexual rights at the borders of the continent. Challenging both discourses, we insist on the need to look at Europe as a proper geopolitical scale of its own. We do so by thinking through the Italian case, that is from a peripheral position on the European map of liberal sexual politics. We begin here for reasons that remain predominantly accidental or, as Spivak (1988, 281) once put it, because “in the absence of advanced disciplinary training, that accident of birth […] has provided [us] with a sense of the historical canvas, a hold on some of the pertinent languages that are useful tools for a bricoleur”. So in the second section we critically focus on the dialogue between the Italian and the European jurisprudences on the matter of gay marriage

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in order to show how ‘Europe’ emerges both as an agent and a powerful trope. Finally, in the last section, we try to suggest that the idea of Europe as the exceptional bearer of gay civil rights emerging from the negotiations between centers and peripheries entails particular kinds of exclusions. Hence, such an analysis of the intersections between geopolitics and sexuality at the borders of Europe can shed light on the very Europeanness of homonationalism. Although we are critical towards and even warn against those desires for Europe that insistently circulate at the borders of the continent, doing away with Europe is not our primary concern. Instead, a deconstruction of Europe and its hegemonic configurations or, to push our argument a bit further and borrowing from Spivak once again, a practice of deconstruction as a radical critique of what one cannot not want, is what we hope to offer here. The stakes are high but, as Balibar (2004, 10) has put it in the context of a slightly different discussion and echoing the paradoxical tone of Spivak’s deconstructivist call, “Europe impossible: Europe possible”.

Where is Europe? Dutch critics Paul Mepschen, Jan Duyvendak and Evelien Tonkens (2010) offer a detailed account of the access gained by homosexual (predominantly male) subjects to current configurations of Dutch nationalism. This encounter was first embodied by openly gay Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, who inaugurated in the Netherlands the by now quasi-commonsensical entanglement between fierce defense of gay liberal secularism and Islamophobic paranoia. Mepschen et al. regard Fortuyn’s appearance on the Dutch scene and, more broadly, the surfacing of Dutch homonationalism as the outcome of a peculiar assemblage of national narratives and political turns. Certainly central to this assemblage is the quick turn to secularity experienced by Dutch society in the late 20th century as “part of a broader historical process of ‘de-pillarization’—the crumbling of the hierarchically organized religious and socialist subcultures (‘pillars’) composed of their own media, schools, organizations, social and cultural institutions and political parties” (Mepschen et al. 2010, 966). Fortuyn, as well as others who later capitalized on his political legacy (most notably Geert Wilders and Ayaan Hirsi Ali), fostered and mobilized in Dutch public debates a fortunate encounter between the ghost of the Dutch ‘pillarized’ past, a proud defense of sexual freedom as emblematic of modern secularization, and Islamophobia. As Fortuyn claimed, referencing the alleged threat of ‘Islamization’ that would throw Dutch society back into a dark past prior

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to ‘de-pillarization’ and secularism, “I refuse to start all over again with the emancipation of women and gays” (Fortuyn in Mepschen et al. 2010, 968). For Mepschen et al. we must add to this scenario the assimilationist practices characterizing gay politics in the Netherlands almost from the start and cultivated by the state itself. As they recall, in the 1980s the Dutch state “gave gay men a significant role in managing the HIV/AIDS crisis affecting their community” (Mepschen et al. 2010, 971), without fostering the profiling of gay populations as viral vehicles of death. It is precisely this profiling that propelled elsewhere in Europe and the US, but not in the Netherlands, a radicalization of gay politics. Therefore, the very “depoliticized character of Dutch gay identity” and more specifically the long lasting framing of gay male subjects as lives worth state protection, can contribute to explain the exceptional availability of gayness to Dutch “neo-nationalist and normative citizenship discourses” (ibid., 971). Mepschen et al. locate this entanglement of local histories within what they regard as broader European tendencies, namely spreading Islamophobia, the culturalisation and sexualisation of citizenship (that is, the definition of a particular cultural attitude towards sexuality as a necessary requirement for political belonging) and homonationalism. However, while their primary aim is to highlight the singularities of the Netherlands within such a European landscape, their portrayal of Europe is excessively modeled on the Dutch context in the first place. In other words, Dutchness is inscribed as singular and general at once, Dutch homonationalism being presented as a sophisticated assemblage of local vectors yet able to stand, metonymically, for Europe as a whole. As the three authors remark: We focus on Dutch controversies around Islam and gay politics as they provide quintessential examples of the sexualization of European debates on the vicissitudes of cultural and religious diversity. In no other country have discourses of gay rights and sexual freedom played such a prominent role (Mepschen et al. 2010, 963. Emphasis added).

We shall wonder what kind of work is done by this attribution of exemplarity to Dutch homonationalist formations considering that, as the authors observe, “in no other country have discourses of gay rights and sexual freedom played such a prominent role” (ibid, 963). A double erasure seems to be taking place here. On the one hand, many European countries (particularly those located on the Southern and Eastern borders of the continent) disappear from view. In those countries—where broad sectors of the social and political spectrum continue to oppose any

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recognition of gay rights—sexuality, race, and nationality engender slightly different assemblages than the ones the Netherlands alone can stand for as an exemplary and explanatory model. On the other hand, Europe itself is swept away through the inscription of the Netherlands as a “quintessential example of the sexualisation of European debates” (ibid., 963). While the authors refer to recent debates taking place in different national contexts on the European soil, ‘Europe’ is no longer merely such a name for a disaggregated bunch of national singularities. Contemporary Europe has a history, recent as it is, that makes it by now something more than a background against which national histories unfold. Europe has its own ‘consistency’, so to say, which involves a conglomerate of European institutions as well as the social and political processes at play in the contemporary reshaping of the continent (the EU integration and enlargement processes in the first place). In fact, the metonymic relation that Mepschen et al. unwittingly establish between the Netherlands and Europe is not surprising. It even parallels certain imaginaries about Europe at work in the Southern and Eastern peripheries of the continent, where Europeanness itself is often perceived to reside in few North-Western European countries. “In Europe it’s different” (see figure 2.1), read the main slogan of an Italian Gay Pride demonstration in 2009, effectively stripping Italy away from Europe and redesigning the boundaries of the continent according to a map of liberal sexual politics. If it is true that ‘in Europe it’s different’, then Italy emerges in some important sense as not-yet fully European. The appeals to Europeanness articulated by both this slogan and the three Dutch critics of homonationalism circumscribe Europe to its geopolitical centers and at the same time neglect the consistency of Europe as a geopolitical scale of its own. In response to these different yet similarly elusive inscriptions of Europeanness we shall insistently ask: where is Europe? With this question in mind, we want to suggest how to think homonationalism and Europeanness in ways that do not neglect the European scale while, at the same time, focusing on those European peripheries that all too often fail to enter these debates—in this case Italy. Hence, we pose the following questions: how to think homonationalism as a European phenomenon? Or better, what is the Europeanness of European homonationalism? And how does an Italian perspective— peripheral insofar as marked by the absence of gay civil rights— contribute to this task? In order to answer these questions, we propose in the next section a critical reading of some recent negotiations between Italian and European legal Courts on the matter of gay marriage. As we will see, it is especially through such negotiations that ‘Europe’ emerges

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as a powerful trope and as the exceptional bearer of sexual freedom and recognition (however fictional this trope may be).

As matters stand: a dialogue between the European and the Italian Courts On March 2012 the Court of Cassation (the highest instance in Italy’s juridical system) delivered its judgement on the case of an Italian gay couple that married in the Netherlands and was subsequently refused the transcription of marriage by municipal officers in Italy. What is of interest for our discussion is not the decision taken by the Court of Cassation, which, quite expectedly, confirmed the impossibility for the applicants to register their marriage in Italy. It is rather the way Italian justices mobilize Europe while articulating their decision. Despite the negative outcome of the ruling, jurists agree to define it “of enormous significance” (Franco 2012, 173). Its significance consists in the fact that for the first time in Italy a Court recognizes both the validity and the existence of same-sex marriage. Indeed, in the Court’s own words, the impossibility of registering same-sex marriages in Italy “is not due to their non-existence or invalidity, but to their inaptness at producing [...] juridical effects in the Italian legal order” (4184/2012, 76). This means that the Court of Cassation opens the way for the signifier ‘marriage’ to be extended beyond heterosexuality. While developing this argument, justices make extensive reference to ‘Europe’ (i.e., to the Schalk and Kopf v Austria case by the European Court of Human Rights, to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, and to the European Convention on Human Rights). As we shall see, the decision of the Italian judges is the outcome not so much of a national Court as of a dialogue between the Italian and the European jurisprudences. The ruling in question can be divided into two parts. In the first part (4184/2012, 10-34), the Court of Cassation develops its argument against the registration of same-sex marriage. This argument is built upon “a consolidated and thousand-year notion of marriage [that] postulates sex difference between the partners” (4184/2012, 29-30). Because of such a definition of marriage, this first part of the ruling can be deemed conservative. To be sure, the Court of Cassation borrows the notion of marriage as a “consolidated and thousand-year” tradition from another Italian Court, namely the Constitutional Court. The latter was called to rule on a similar case two years earlier, in 2010, and it also rejected the request by the applicants. Given that the Constitutional Court, by providing the most authoritative reading of the Constitution, is highly

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considered in the Italian juridical system, it is no surprise that the Court of Cassation makes continuous reference to this previous ruling. Already in the exchange between these two Italian Courts, Europe plays a pivotal role. Indeed, the ruling of the Constitutional Court referenced by the Court of Cassation makes extensive use of European legislation. More specifically, it calls into question Article 12 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) and Article 9 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (CFREU). Men and women of marriageable age have the right to marry and to found a family according to the national laws governing the exercise of this right (Article 12 ECHR). The right to marry and the right to found a family shall be guaranteed in accordance with the national laws governing the exercise of these rights (Article 9 CFREU).

Both articles establish that the right to marry is ultimately regulated by national laws. The fact that European charters make national legislations responsible for the definition of marriage allows the Constitutional Court to go back to Article 29 of the Italian Constitution. The Republic acknowledges the right to family as a natural society founded on marriage. Marriage is based on the juridical and moral equality between the partners, within the limits established by law and as a guarantee for the unity of the family (Article 29 of the Italian Constitution).

This article, even without prescribing the heterosexuality of marriage, is interpreted by justices as being originally meant, “to establish that the partners must be of a different sex” (4184/2012, 32). Hence, the Constitutional Court in 2010 shuts down the possibility for same-sex couples to get married. Consequently, the Court of Cassation two years later cannot but accept and reassert this decision. Even though the Constitutional Court’s plea to Europe is justified (both Article 12 ECHR and Article 9 CFREU do make national legislations ultimately responsible for the definition of marriage), it is worth pointing out that Europe is mobilized here only to the extent that it acknowledges its own limits and leaves to single member states the autonomy to define marriage. To put it differently, Europe is posited at the very moment it erases itself by reasserting national sovereignty: the Italian Constitutional judges mobilize Europe in the very moment Europe disappears. In this sense, jurist Andrea Pugiotto (2010) is right when he contends that the

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Constitutional Court “only appeal[s] to the transnational dimension in order to reinforce the opinion it already holds, [regardless of] the genderneutral formulation included in article 9 CFREU [...] and the recent pronouncements of the European Court” (19). This means that in 2010 this Court strategically deploys Europe along conservative lines, overlooking on purpose the progressive promise that Europe may entail as for gay rights. This promise is instead extensively developed in the second part of the 2012 ruling by the Court of Cassation (4184/2012, 34-76), which, after having reasserted the negative stance of the Constitutional Court, gives a curious twist in favour of the recognition of same-sex marriage. In this second part, the Court of Cassation distances itself from the Constitutional Court and turns to Europe. More specifically, it looks at the decision taken by the European Court of Human Rights in 2010 on the case Schalk and Kopf v Austria. This case is analogous to the Italian one: an Austrian homosexual couple married abroad whose marriage was refused registration by municipal officers in their home country appealed to the European Court. The latter, however, rejected their request according to the principle that marriage be ultimately regulated by national laws (Article 12 ECHR and Article 9 CFREU). This rejection notwithstanding, European judges developed an argument that opens the way for the Italian Court of Cassation to conclude in favour of both the existence and the validity of same-sex marriages. For this reason, it is important to see how Italian justices make use of Schalk and Kopf in order to formulate a more progressive position. According to the Court of Cassation (4184/2012), the ruling Schalk and Kopf is “profoundly innovative” (31) because it “contains important novelties about the interpretation of both Article 12 and Article 14 ECHR” (54). Article 12 (printed above) regulates the right to marriage, while Article 14 guarantees equal enjoyment of rights: The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Convention shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth, or other status (Article 14, ECHR).

By reading Articles 12 and 14 together, the European Court recognizes, in the Court of Cassation’s view, that in principle “the right to marry [...] includes the right for same-sex couples to marry” (64). Which means, Schalk and Kopf has deprived marriage of heterosexuality as its necessary condition. And yet the European Court is bound to conclude that it cannot enforce any decision because, “as matters stand, the question whether or

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not to allow same-sex marriage is left to regulation by the national law” (Schalk and Kopf v Austria, 14). According to this reading, the European Court opens up the possibility for marriage to be detached from heterosexuality. Yet, also the contrary holds true. The European Court does reject the request of the Austrian applicants by ultimately delegating the definition of marriage to national legislations. The way in which the Court of Cassation mobilizes Europe, thus, is no less strategic than the way in which the Constitutional Court mobilized it two years earlier in order to oppose the registration of a gay marriage in Italy. The difference between the two Italian rulings lies first and more obviously in their aim (progressive and conservative respectively), and secondly in the fact that the Constitutional Court erases Europe at the very moment of positing it while the Court of Cassation overloads Europe with power. According to the latter, it is only by looking at the European legislation that the national law can be superseded. Not by chance do jurists express either their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the 2012 decision of the Court of Cassation by taking Europe as their standard of measurement. Justice Marco Gattuso (2012), in favour of extending gay rights in Italy, commented after the publication of the ruling: “who is against the new notion of [...] marriage should now ask for a turnabout of the European Court”. Here the European Court emerges as the guarantor of the correspondence between homosexuality and the signifier ‘marriage’. Along this line, progressive jurist Stefano Rodotà (2012) interprets “the ruling by the Court of Cassation [as] a gift from Europe”. On the other hand, jurists like Ilenia Massa Pinto and Laura Lorello—who believe that the heterosexual “nature and form of marriage [is] one of the most authentic expressions of the identity of our country” (Lorello 2012, 4)—criticize Europe for intervening on an issue, marriage, that “is not in its sphere of competence” (Massa Pinto 2012, 8). Through these negotiations of power and meaning, Europe becomes a metaphor for progressivism and even a fortress for gay rights. Conversely, the national scale becomes a figure for conservatism, or the shield against the extension of marriage to same-sex couples. These configurations emerging at the borders of Europe are strategic, if not deliberately fictional. Europe is not progressive per se and delegates in fact to national legislations the sovereign power of deciding on same-sex marriage. Yet Europe is also progressive and functions, in the ruling of the Court of Cassation, as a powerful device to counter a conservative and heterosexist view on marriage. ‘Europe’ emerges as an ambiguous signifier open to contingent, contextual and politically loaded materializations. This analysis of the negotiations between European and Italian Courts

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exposes some of the contradictory ways in which Europe materializes at the borders of the continent hand-in-hand with concerns regarding sexual politics. None of the commentators of the rulings—neither those conservatives who strongly reaffirmed the national sovereign power of determining the meaning of marriage, nor the progressives who put it into question—must be considered the ultimate guardians of the ‘truth’ of Europe. Europe rather materializes differently at the crossroads of divergent political interests. In the wake of this reading, let us turn to the materialization of Europe that constitutes the main concern of the present essay, namely the European dimension of homonationalism. How does the Italian scenario outlined so far speak to the debates on Europe and homonationalism? While in Italy (as well as in many other peripheral locations in Europe) a critical analysis of contemporary homonationalist formations can be hardly inflected in a strictly national scale—in fact, as we have seen, when issues of national identification enter these debates, it is heterosexuality and not homosexuality which is posited by conservatives as the shared ground defining the Italian national community—such a location offers instead a particularly interesting standpoint from which we can look at the Europeanness of homonationalism. In other words, to the extent that the national space is defined in terms of heterosexuality (none of the Courts eventually manages to overcome the heterosexism of the Italian legislation and, as matters stand, same-sex marriage is still forbidden in Italy), we witness a resignification of Europe as the land of liberal sexual politics. Such a resignification is not innocent though, especially today. Which boundaries and borders are drawn around the idea of Europe and the very European space by those appeals to Europe as the guarantor of sexual freedom articulated at the peripheries of the continent? This is a question we shall try to answer if we are to define the lineaments of what we may call homonationalism on a European scale.

European homonationalism Professor of Law Marilisa D’Amico (2010), who participates in the generalized enthusiasm for the potentially progressive force of Europe on the matter of gay civil rights, commented during a radio interview on the Schalk and Kopf ruling, few days after its release by the European Court of Human Rights: It is clear how much the European Court is becoming more and more pivotal in the homogenizing of the fundamental rights in the various European countries. But this also has its limitations. To leave this task only

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D’Amico is thinking of Eastern Europe and the Balkans when she mentions those accession countries that may constitute a threat to a sexually progressive Europe. Here, the peripheral identification of ‘Europe’ with ‘gay rights’ installs a logic that demands the protection of Europe from backward intruders that may threaten rights and freedoms not-yet achieved but ‘to come’. No matter how fictional the mobilization of Europe is, to the extent that European institutions are the only ones able to rescue Italy from its conservative ‘backwardness’, they are seen as being always on the edge of losing their emancipatory force. This way, Europe is configured as a fortress constantly under siege. Curiously enough, accession countries threaten not what Italy already has, but what Italy may gain by becoming more and more European. The paranoid character of this warning is all the more relevant if we consider in the first place that the composition of the European Court of Human Rights includes already and since a long time judges from nonEU countries. Thus, the EU enlargement process (towards South and East) would by no means alter substantially the composition of the Court. Second, let us highlight that the much-vaunted Schalk and Kopf ruling ends with a concurring opinion by Swiss justice Giorgio Malinverni who partially disagrees with the majority opinion of the Court. Indeed, in his view “Article 12 [ECHR] cannot be construed in any other way than as being applicable solely to persons of different sexes” (Schalk and Kopf v Austria, 29). Such a conservative stance against same-sex marriage being voiced by a Swiss justice, one may wonder whether professor D’Amico would consider Switzerland to be one of those countries that threaten gender and equality achievements in Europe. Haunted by a paranoid anticipatory temporality, D’Amico’s reference to European accession countries as a threat to what the European Court of Human Rights and Europe more broadly will have done for Italy (in the future anterior tense) displays and reaffirms a geopolitical imaginary that we the citizens, but especially the not-yet citizens of Europe know far too well. In The Paradoxes of Europe’s Borders (2006), political scientist Thomas Diez individuates, among the paradoxes characterizing the making of the European scale, what he terms “the normative power paradox”. The normative power of which Europe tends to invest itself

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proves paradoxical in many respects, but one clear instance of the paradox has to be found precisely at the core of the EU enlargement process elusively referenced by D’Amico. Diez observes: the Copenhagen Criteria, agreed to set explicit standards for new EU members, specified an identity of the EU that had previously not existed as such. Indeed, as the then candidates used to point out, some existing member states would have found it hard to demonstrate their readiness for membership, for instance, in relation to the guarantee of minority rights, which were later added to the set of political criteria specified in Copenhagen. The result was an EU that had not only enlarged but also specified its own values in the process (Diez 2006, 244-245).

Thus, the enlargement process (hand-in-hand with the integration process and the profiling of the Schengen Area aimed at erasing the borders within Europe) sets the stage for the reinforcement of the borders surrounding ‘fortress Europe’ and, importantly, for a retroactive reinscription (performative, if you wish) of Europeanness itself. Not only do so-called accession countries get caught in the midst of such rearrangements—posited as not-yet fully European, hence marking a space of teleological transition along shades of Europeanness. Italy, peripheral itself within the European map of liberal sexual politics yet one of EU’s funding member states, stands obliquely between the two poles and easily casts the burden of peripherality on the most available neighbors in order to secure, in a future anterior mood, what Italy through Europe will have become. Italy’s peripherality is both marked (vis-à-vis Europe and particularly the European Court’s ruling Schalk and Kopf) and concealed (vis-à-vis a generalized threat coming from East). In the process, the European landscape shatters into multiple overlapping spaces and its population gets assembled as a patchwork body; a body composed of ‘proper’ members and rather ‘monstrous’ appendixes, whose degree of Europeanness can be measured through the thermometer of liberal sexual politics. Interestingly enough, and so we move toward a conclusion, D’Amico suggests a solution to the dangers she thinks are posed by the EU enlargement process to liberal sexual politics in Europe: “[t]o leave the task [of homogenizing the fundamental rights in the various European countries] only to judges can be extremely risky. Instead, it would be better to focus on a wider European political space” (D’Amico 2010). What she invokes here is the forging of a properly European people. Thus, she takes part in the choir of voices, especially on the Left, resented at the current abdication to the project of a political Europe (which must

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involve the implementation of democratic participation, the practicing of a European public sphere, post-national forms of citizenship, economic justice, and civil rights, to name but a few) in favour of a merely bureaucratic and economic union (see, among others: Braidotti 2001; Benhabib 2002; Balibar 2004). We share that resentment. Yet, it is noteworthy that precisely when D’Amico appeals to such a European people (or, to be precise, through that very appeal) her speech gestures toward the crafting of a European internally hierarchized population. In fact, her appeal to a European public sphere and a European people depends on her fear of the threat constituted by certain Europeans. We need a European people, she pontificates, because otherwise Eastern, notyet fully European judges will jeopardize the possibility of holding on to European principles of equality and sexual freedom and, importantly, will prevent not-yet fully European Italians from folding triumphantly into Europeanness. The European Court’s ruling Schalk and Kopf gives rise to a set of responses that redraw the contours of Europe and powerfully assemble its population. While jurists concerned with the defence of a consolidated thousand-year tradition such as heterosexual marriage fear the intrusion of the European Court into the Italian legislation, more progressive jurists look at Europe as the horizon within which the homosexual subject from the periphery of the continent may eventually fold into family life. However, not only is the very shape of Europe and of its peripheries redesigned by progressive commentators such as D’Amico, but in a similar fashion Europeanness itself multiplies and translates into population targeting: a targeting that operates at the crossroads of geoand sexual politics. Europe becomes subject to these somehow performative reinscriptions through its own rather contradictory moves, namely by pressing against national sovereignties without ever overriding their primacy. In fact, the affective investment into Europe at play in Italy and other peripheries of the continent seems to be directly proportional to the extent to which Europe names ‘gay marriage’ while erasing, at the same time, the performative force of this naming. In other words, Europe emerges as the forefront of sexual rights from center-periphery negotiations such as the ones around the Schalk and Kopf ruling. Yet at the same time, and importantly, Europe does not hold the power of pushing that performance to its extreme: as matters stand, recognition of sexual rights is left to national sovereignty. It is in the midst of these ambiguous clashes of sovereignties that we can track the surfacing of Europeanness as a normative device producing others from Europe as well as others within

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Europe. As Helma Lutz (1997, 107) has put it, “[a]s long as the sovereignty of the nation states of Europe, positioned vis-à-vis Europe as symbolic and politico-economic unions, is a source of ambiguity and contradictions, ‘European-ness’ will stay a symbolic identity, in danger of symbolizing whiteness, Christianity, enlightenment and modernity.” Liberal sexual politics and its contemporary homonationalist formations must be added to the list. Étienne Balibar (2004, 2) is right when he poses the question: “Is there then a ‘European people,’ even an emergent one? Nothing is less certain. […] But the question must remain open, and in a particularly ‘central’ way at the border points.” Yet at the borders of Europe, where the negotiations between the European scale and the national scale are more intense, the racialized assembling of a European population takes place as well through some of the mechanisms exposed so far. Sexual politics is by no means tangential to such processes, and certain mappings of European liberal sexual politics, that contribute to the targeting and manufacturing of this European population, must not be too hastily embraced as Europe’s gift to its ‘people’.

References Balibar, Étienne. 2004. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Benhabib, Seyla. 2002. The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2001. “Gender, Identity and Multiculturalism in Europe.” 1st Ursula Hirschmann Annual Lecture on Gender and Europe. European University Institute, Florence, May 8, 2001. Butler, Judith. 2008. “Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time.” The British Journal of Sociology 59(1):1-23. D’Amico, Marilisa. 2010. Radio Interview: “Matrimoni gay: Marilisa D’Amico commenta la sentenza della Corte Europea dei Diritti dell’Uomo.” Radio Radicale, July 16, 2010. http://www.radioradicale.it/scheda/307881/matrimoni-gay-marilisadamico-commenta-la-sentenza-della-corte-europea-dei-diritti-delluomo (accessed March 17, 2013). Fassin, Éric. 2010. “National Identities and Transnational Intimacies: Sexual Democracy and the Politics of Immigration in Europe.” Public Culture 22(3):507-29. Franco, Luigi. 2012. Autonomia della Famiglia e Identità Personale. Naples: ESI.

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Corte di Cassazione, Sezione Prima Civile. 2012. Judgement 4184/2012, March 15. Corte Costituzionale. 2010. Judgement 138/2010, April 21. Diez, Thomas. 2006. “The Paradoxes of Europe's Borders.” Comparative European Politics 4:235-52. European Court of Human Rights, First Section. 2010. Case of Schalk and Kopf v Austria, June 24. Gattuso, Marco. 2012. “Dopo la sentenza di Cassazione sulle relazioni affettive fra omosessuali.” Persona e Danno. http://www.personaedanno.it/orientamento-sessuale/dopo-la-sentenzadi-cassazione-sulle-relazioni-affettive-fra-omosessuali-marco-gattuso (accessed March 17, 2013). Haritaworn, Jin, Tamsila Tauqir, and Esra Erdem. 2008. “Gay Imperialism: Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the ‘War on Terror’.” In Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality, edited by Adi Kuntsman and Esperanza Miyake. York: Raw Nerve Books. Lorello, Laura. 2012. “La Cassazione si confronta con la questione del matrimonio omosessuale.” Associazione Italiana dei Costituzionalisti 2:2012. http://www.associazionedeicostituzionalisti.it/sites/default/files/rivista/ articoli/allegati/Lorello.pdf (accessed March 17, 2013). Lutz, Helma. 1997. “The Limits of European-ness: Immigrant Women in Fortress Europe.” Feminist Review 57(1):93-111. Massa Pinto, Ilenia. 2012. “«Fiat matrimonio!» L'unione omosessuale all'incrocio del dialogo tra Corte Costituzionale, Corte Europea dei Diritti dell'Uomo e Corte di Cassazione: può una sentenza della Corte di Cassazione attribuire a (un inciso di) una sentenza della Corte Europea il potere di scardinare «una consolidata ed ultramillenaria tradizione» (superando anche il giudicato costituzionale)?” Associazione Italiana dei Costituzionalisti 2:2012. http://www.associazionedeicostituzionalisti.it/sites/default/files/rivista/ articoli/allegati/Massa%20Pinto_0.pdf (accessed March 17, 2013). Mepschen, Paul, Jan Duyvendak, and Evelien H. Tonkens. 2010. “Sexual Politics, Orientalism and Multicultural Citizenship in the Netherlands.” Sociology 44(5):962-79. Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Pugiotto, Andrea. 2010. “Una lettura non reticente della sent. 138/2010: il monopolio eterosessuale del matrimonio.” Forum di Quaderni Costituzionali. http://www.forumcostituzionale.it/site/images/stories/pdf/documenti_f

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orum/paper/0226_pugiotto.pdf (accessed March 17, 2013). Spivak, Gayatri C. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press. —. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Rodotà, Stefano. 2012. “La Nuova Stagione dei Diritti.” Micromega online. http://temi.repubblica.it/micromega-online/la-nuova-stagione-deidiritti/ (accessed March 17, 2013).

CHAPTER THREE IRIGARAYAN INSIGHTS ON THE PROBLEM OF LGBT INEQUALITY: HOW RE-IMAGINING DIFFERENCE CAN FACILITATE RESPECT FOR OTHERS LOUISE RICHARDSON-SELF

Figure 3.1 “Sorry to show you this. It's the face of Homophobia” (Wilfred de Bruijn, personal Facebook profile page, 8 April, 2013).

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Introduction The photograph printed above shows the bloodied and beaten face of Wilfred de Bruijn, who was assaulted near his apartment in the Paris working class 19th district. De Bruijn claims the violent attack was motivated by a homosexual public display of affection—walking through the street arm in arm with his partner. Such a blatant instance of homophobia is shocking. Despite growing legal equality for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender men and women (LGBT)—France is the fourteenth country to legalise same-sex marriage—such attacks remain common. Recognition of same-sex marriage has been on the rise since the Netherlands first opened up the institution in 2001. Since then, fifteen countries have followed suit: Belgium (2003), Spain and Canada (2005), South Africa (2006), Norway and Sweden (2009), Portugal, Iceland and Argentina (2010), Denmark (2012), Uruguay, New Zealand, France, England, and Wales (2013). Same-sex marriage is also legal in parts of the United States and Australia. For the purpose of this chapter, I specifically choose to focus only on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people. Notably, this excludes intersex people. While considering intersex people’s position would undoubtedly add an additional layer of complexity to issues of sociopolitical inequalities of ‘Others,’ it is a task I am unable to undertake in this article. Instead, I follow Kate Sheill’s definition of ‘lesbian’ and extrapolate this to define ‘gay.’ Sheill takes the category ‘lesbian’ to include “at the very least, individuals who identify as women and, at any time in their lives, desire or nurture emotional and sexual intimacies with other women-identified persons” (2009, 55-6). This definition includes any self-identified women who, regardless of prior relationships, enter into intimate relationships with other self-identified women. Thus it follows that I define gay men as those who self-identify as men and, at any time in their lives, desire or nurture emotional and sexual intimacies with other male-identified persons. Both definitions are inclusive of bisexual and transgender men and women. Same-sex marriage remains a controversial praxis. The Daily Mail reports that the first three months of 2013 have seen homophobic attacks triple in France when compared to the same period of 2012. The Daily Mail also claims that debates on whether same-sex couples should have parenting rights are largely responsible for the surge in verbal and physical displays of homophobia (Williams 2013). While oppositions to marriage reform have been reported within all countries that have opened the institution to same-sex couples, the French opposition has been overwhelmingly

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negative. The severity of the French opposition was personally surprising, since recognition of same-sex marriage is increasingly characterised as ‘inevitable.’ However, the French response to the introduction of same-sex marriage and the correlative increase in homophobia gives us pause to explore a number of urgent questions about the same-sex marriage movement and its effects. Why are same-sex marriage and related practices (still so) controversial? Many people claim to be concerned about the possible repercussions of opening up this institution. I want to investigate this rather typical response. A recent example of one such reductio ad absurdum comes from former Tory Chairman Lord Tebbit. Tebbit claims the introduction of same-sex marriage to Great Britain will open up the “possibility of a lesbian Queen giving birth to a future monarch by artificial insemination,” and that “the legislation could also allow him to [personally] marry his son to escape inheritance tax” (Watt 2013). However, conservatives who postulate absurd slippery slope arguments are not the only ones exercising caution about the possible repercussions of same-sex marriage. There are other, more legitimate, potential repercussions that must be considered. Problematically, arguments for same-sex marriage predominantly position LGBTs as the same as (normative) heterosexuals. The sameness/difference dilemma in issues of inequality initially emerged in dialogues between feminist thinkers. Many have rejected sameness arguments, since they fail to question the standards which certain excluded Others seek to equal. As a point of clarification: in this chapter, my use of the terminology ‘Other’ and ‘Subject’ reflects those defined according to phallocentric logic, whereas the ‘other’ and the ‘subject’ are those imagined through Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of sexuate difference. Irigaray is a prominent figure whom opposes sameness arguments (Chanter 1998, 268-9). She challenges: “[t]he demand to be equal presupposes a point of comparison. To whom or what do women want to be equalized? To men? To a salary? To a public office? To what standard? Why not to themselves?” (2007, 4). The problem, Tina Chanter explains, is that, “[b]y focussing on the fact that women can measure up to men, feminists concede inadvertently that men’s traditional roles are more valuable than women’s” (1998, 268). Likewise, in the case of LGBT inequalities, by focussing on the fact that LGBTs can measure up to normative heterosexuals, activists concede that heteronormative institutions and practices are more valuable than alternative practices sought by queers and non-normative heterosexuals. Indeed, popular legal arguments in favour of same-sex marriage and related familial entitlements frequently hold that but-for the sex of the

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couple, same-sex relationships are the same as different-sex relationships (Rosenblum 1994, 85-6). This ‘fact’ is used to justify the claim for equal entitlements, concluding that LGBT exclusion from marriage is unjust. However, this conclusion is problematic because discrimination, so understood, “is based on an inherently comparative evaluation [...] which implicitly assumes the validity of the standards of an already-established [social norm or institution]” (Cornell 1992, 283). Because the social norms and institutions which LGBTs claim to match are implicitly heteropatriarchal, advocates of difference-based equality have claimed, as a countermeasure, that excluded Others should not have to match such standards. Importantly, same-sex sexual attraction is a real difference (in terms of personal desire, at least). Yet, it is also a difference that has been illegitimately interpreted as ‘abnormal’ and ‘perverse’ in the face of ‘normal’ heterosexuality. Difference-feminists claim that such rigid designations of ‘appropriate’ behaviour unfairly curtail the possibility of a sexuality lived differently. Therefore, assimilative arguments ought to be avoided (Cornell 1992, 290). Excluded Others ought instead to be treated with dignity, where ‘dignity’ is understood to involve several factors: it means to have symbolic presence and visibility, as well as endignifying representations, and the ability to (re)produce queer identities and lifestyle choices (Richardson 1998, 87). This chapter advances a position toward LGBT equality from the perspective of difference-feminism. My motivation for avoiding strategies of assimilation (regardless of how politically expedient they may be) stems from a belief that revolution in dominant collective imaginings is the only way to exit hierarchical structures of inequality, stigma, and shame. I propose that Irigaray’s insights on how to encounter difference can be useful to this end. I have chosen to mobilise Irigaray’s philosophy in this debate since a core feature of her scholarship is the reimagining of subjectivity as (at least) two. This conception of a two-subject culture replaces the individual Subject of phallocentric logic. Phallocentrism reflects the habit of “referring to subjectivity, as to all other key attributes of the thinking subject, in terms of masculinity or abstract virility,” in a singular and unified conceptual order (Braidotti 1998, 299). My project facilitates a reimagining of the encounter with difference itself. Such a shift will ultimately allow Others, including LGBTs, to exit phallocentric modes of recognition and representation, and to be conceived of with the respect they deserve.

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Structure My argument is divided into three sections. First, I give an overview of Irigaray’s philosophy of sexuate difference, specifically focussing on her insistence that difference as such, must be recognised as truly irreducible. This will require paying particular attention to the cultivation of the ‘space between.’ ‘Betweenness’ is an increasingly common theme in multiple bodies of scholarship. A focus on the space between usually arises when discourses emerge that are neither inside nor outside histories of domination. This could be patriarchal domination, but can also refer to imperial domination and others (Dirlik 1994). The space between is conceived of as the ‘location’ where a re-imagining and retraining in ethics and civility can occur. By maintaining a space between one another, the subject is able to recognise that an other is irreducibly different to oneself, and is able to respect that their own subjectivity does not constitute the whole. Such an exploration of the possibilities produced by respecting the space between is vital, indicating the relevance of Irigarayan insights for matters of LGBT equality. However, there are also some challenges in employing Irigarayan insights. Her work is difficult to situate; the insights she shares appear simultaneously early and late when considered in relation to present sociopolitical injustices. In some sense, her work cannot account for and does not give credit to the gains that have already been won by excluded Others. And yet, her work also points toward the revolutions that still need to occur in our shared dominant imaginaries if the respect I envision is ever to be achieved. This indicates that, while important valuable insights can be gained from Irigarayan philosophy, there also remains a need to stay within the present. Therefore, I secondly consider the temporal (non)location of Irigaray’s work, and explore more fully the difficulties and advantages of such a space/time. Finally, I will discuss the importance of the utopian aspects of Irigarayan philosophy. I hold that it is only by ‘imagining the impossible’ that goals and values can transfer from utopian, to feasible, to matter of fact (Stoetzler & Yuval-Davis 2002, 327). This does not mean that one final utopian ideal should be formulated, but that we can imagine and reimagine desirable impossibilities into possibilities. Thus, while Irigarayan philosophy is utopian and employs the language of reform, it should not be mistaken for one literal program for reform. The imaginings produced here can encourage and influence change, without requiring us to settle on a fixed notion of the best possible future. Ultimately, utopianism is useful insofar as it is able to affect dominant shared social

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imaginaries. These shifts tend toward the respect for others in their difference, moving away from assimilative recognition of the Other. My overall claim is that advocates for same-sex marriage can and should move away from the ‘sameness’ arguments that have heretofore been employed to justify LGBT access to rights. It is of the upmost importance to work within the realms of the social and the symbolic in order to influence a shift toward respect for LGBTs’ dignity. Ultimately, I conclude that a philosophy of sexuate difference is utterly relevant in ending instances of LGBT discrimination. The purpose of this philosophy is to cultivate new ethical and civil relations between all people, thereby avoiding hierarchical barriers of inclusion/exclusion. It is Irigaray’s utopianism, her theoretical focus on the ‘space between,’ and her insights on how to encounter difference as difference, that can better ensure a just socio-political and legal standing for LGBTs.

Irigaray’s Philosophy of Sexuate Difference Throughout Irigaray’s work a key concern has been to promote sexuate difference as the cornerstone for social justice and ethical relations between people. She claims that Western philosophical, psychoanalytical, legal, and social discourses have predominantly been structured according to phallocentric logic. This logic positions people according to how approximately they match a singular standard of comparison, where that standard is always marked by the hetero-masculine. The Subject of these discourses is therefore highly partial, even though he appears to be the neutral marker of humanity. As such, people who differ from this standard become Othered. Importantly, there is a connection between Others’ statuses in Western thought and their statuses in Western society, given that the two domains share the same dominant imaginary. This link blurs the difference between the metaphorical and the social reality (Whitford 1991, 102). In other words, divergence from the standards of the Subject reflexively affects how Others are treated, as well as how they are imagined and perceived. Irigaray’s proposal for combatting inequalities does not rely on a celebration of multiplicity, though. Rather, such inequalities can only be overcome if humanity comes to be imagined as (at least) two. We should pause to investigate this claim. Since the fundamental model of the human Subject has remained unchanged, Others have had to match up to certain implicit principles of social organisation and personal identity in order to gain recognition (Irigaray 2000a, 121-3). For example, consider how women have often

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had to prove their suitability as mothers with recourse to heteronormative standards so as to retain custody of their children: In the unreported case of Gemmell […] the mother’s custody of her daughter was challenged on the basis of her activism within the Women’s Liberation Movement and an accusation of lesbianism. Although the court found that she had never had a lesbian relationship, the mother continued to be treated as a lesbian mother because Justice Treyvaud was concerned that her feminist involvement could lead to her engaging in a lesbian relationship in the future (Jennings 2012, 512).

If a woman was too non-normative, even if she was not, in fact, a lesbian, she was at risk of losing custody of her children. Problematically, becoming like, or the same, as the heteronormative standard of acceptability does not dismantle the hierarchical relationships between the Subject and his Others. Furthermore, a simple ‘celebration of multiplicity’ will not challenge the one individual who stands as the referential Subject. The ‘one’ and the ‘many’ are flip-sides of the same coin (Martin 2003, 4). Irigaray therefore argues: “[i]f we are to get away from the omnipotent model of the one and the many, we have to move on to […] a two which is not two times one itself, not even a bigger or a smaller one, but which would be made up of two which are really different” (2000a, 129). Given these insights, it seems that ‘equality’ can only be brought about through recognition of and respect for the (potential for) differences existing between people. Others must be allowed an unappropriated space in which to cultivate their (and our) identities. Irigaray begins her project of respecting irreducible difference with the recognition of what she refers to as the most basic human reality: sexuate difference (Irigaray 1994, ix). That is, Irigaray argues for re-imagining the two of sexuate difference as irreducibly other, since this radically undermines the singular and biased logic of phallocentrism. Sexuate difference can be deemed a necessary focal point for this project, because Western societies are historically and culturally situated societies that divide and organise themselves in terms of heteronormatively understood sexuate difference (Gatens 1996, 11). Indeed, it is the very prevalence of phallocentric perceptions of ‘real’ manhood and womanhood, as well as the assumed normative connections between sex, gender, and sexual orientation in present Western societies that warrant such a starting point. An example of Irigaray’s attempt to undermine phallocentric logic of female/feminine identities is the re-figuration of woman’s two lips. This is a crucial re-imagining of women’s sexuality—both heterosexual and homosexual. The very emphasis on the lips suggests a morphological

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figuration of the woman as ‘full’ and ‘lacking nothing,’ directly in contrast to Freud’s morphological description of woman as castrated (Gatens 1991, 115). This is vital, as Freudian psychoanalysis has overwhelmingly influenced shared perceptions of ‘normal’ male and female roles. For Freud, the very sexual function consists entirely in the fact of heterosexual reproduction of humanity (Irigaray 1985b, 41). Yet, an emphasis on reproduction as the function of sex simply serves to define reproductive heterosexual behaviour as necessary, natural, proper, and thus, normative, while dismissing other forms of sexual actions as improper, abnormal, and even pathological. The Freudian discourse is, in Irigaray’s words, “imperious, normative, [and] moralizing” with regard to proper sexual functioning and development (1985a, 31). Irigaray criticises Freud, then, for failing to consider “the special nature of desire between women” (1985a, 101). Promoting the figuration of woman’s two lips as full and lacking nothing is an example of how to unlink the notion of sexuate difference from normative heterosexuality, as well as to rethink and re-symbolize sexuate difference. Since Irigaray’s goal is to re-encounter difference as radically other, her philosophy is able to undermine the hetero-sexist perception of Woman as Man’s Other and/or his complement. It should be noted, though, that Irigaray is ultimately stressing the respectful recognition of difference as such, via the medium of the two of sexuate difference. Thus, sexuate difference is only the most important difference to focus on “if it is the difference that might better facilitate all other differences in our culture” (Deutscher 2002, 171). The model of thinking two therefore acts as a purposeful and strategic approach to relieving matters of unjustified social and political exclusion. It aims to ultimately rethink difference and tend toward the production of just civil relations of respect for otherness more generally. Indeed, Irigaray perceives ‘thinking two’ as the path which will eventually lead to respectful recognition of all other forms of difference, and says: “[r]ecognizing the other–man or woman–is different from me, and accepting that his/her right to exist and to human dignity is equivalent to mine, leads to the recognition of other forms of diversity” (2000a, 12). The point is that difference itself needs to be re-imagined and re-encountered theoretically prior to identity recognition. If this is achieved then Others need not prove their sameness simply to gain respect and recognition. Irigaray holds that perception of the other and of the potential for otherness is crucial for sexed subjects’ coming into their own specific civil identity and for promoting relationships of respect between-others as different. She says, “[w]e are still lacking a culture of between-sexes, of

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between-races, of between-traditions, etc…” (2002, 139). Irigaray’s spacebetween therefore involves a specific notion of difference. It is not to be different-from an other: Irigaray believes the perception of being differentfrom will likely give rise to further conflict; to be ‘different-from’ implies a resistance to the Other, it implies a disjunct, or a barrier of inclusion/exclusion. Instead, Irigaray says, people have a right and a duty to recognise others and ourselves as differing-between. “Thus, not: ‘I’m different from you,’ but: ‘we differ amongst ourselves,’ which implies a continual give-and-take in the establishing of boundaries and relationships, without the one having greater authority over the other” (Irigaray 2000a, 14). Differing amongst ourselves does not prevent the recognition of shared needs, for example, but it also does not reduce the recognition of identity to simply belonging ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ a presumed standard of normalcy. The point is that it lessens the implicit expectation of conformity when encountering an Other. Federica Giardini argues that Irigaray’s ‘in between,’ as the space where (the potential for) difference lies, should hold our theoretical focus (2003, 18-9). Rebecca Hill has also paid special attention to the figuration of the space between (or interval) in Irigaray’s work, and acknowledges the interval as a generative threshold for a non-hierarchical ethics in relations of alterity (2012, 1-7). This space between can encompass a reimagining of what it means to be civil/a citizen. Proper reimagining would require the cultivation of certain values, specifically “values of communication, not only in the sense of transmission of information but as communication-between,” where ‘communication-between’ means among subjects fundamentally diverse between themselves (Irigaray 2000a, 9). Thus, the space between also houses the potential for ethical communications between differing subjects. This communication requires an ability to recognise that others have needs which may not be applicable to one’s own. Thus, what ‘thinking two’ who ‘differ-between’ themselves is supposed to provide, is a new way to perceive and imagine humanity. A new reference point is created, allowing people to have their difference(s) positively recognised. It is humanity built from (at least) two who are truly autonomous, different, and irreducible to each other. This is in lieu of understanding humanity as consisting of duplicate ‘ones’ (Irigaray 1996, 64). However, this project is not without difficulty, which I shall explore in the following section.

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Temporal (Non)Location of Irigaray’s Philosophy Clearly Irigaray’s work is aiming to enact a shift in how we each encounter difference at the symbolic level; this is evident from her stress that we must re-imagine humanity as two. Furthermore, given the blurring between the symbolic and the social, it is implied that her work can enact shifts at the social level. However, one question is to what extent is this really likely? Undoubtedly, part of the difficulty in assessing whether Irigarayan philosophy can result in positive practical transformations stems from the disjunct between the temporal dimensions of Irigaray’s work and the political present. Irigaray’s work is difficult to situate, as Giardini notes, since Irigarayan philosophy appears to be both early and late with regard to the urgencies of the political present. Talking specifically about Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman and the feminist movements of the 1970s, Giardini claims that Speculum seemed to have no immediacy (2003, 16). At the time of its release, Speculum presented women as lacking an avenue to reconcile the problems they faced, given their position within the patriarchal symbolic order. This made Speculum out to look irrelevant, or ‘late,’ since it did not reflect or account for the many gains being won by and for women (even if only piecemeal) at that time. A similar critique is possible regarding the temporal location of Irigaray’s texts regarding present movements for social justice. Irigaray’s texts continue to largely overlook the movement of Others toward full social inclusion, and instead overwhelmingly stress the two of sexuate difference. An exception is Irigaray’s Between East and West (2002) which focuses on cultural as well as sexuate difference. This has amounted to frequent charges of heterosexism. However, many contemporary scholars argue that Irigaray’s philosophy can escape this charge. For example, Alison Stone claims that a self-critical sexuate culture can “undermine, not support, the heteronormative family” (2006, 222 – original emphasis). This is an important insight, since Irigaray envisions the family as the site where learning how to engage in ethical and civil relations between subjects would begin (Irigaray 2002, 105-19). Hill also acknowledges the problem of heterosexism, yet she argues that Irigaray’s space-between (or interval) contains the possibility of becomings other than those of sexuate difference (2012, 150). Another notable attempt at the defence against heterosexism can be found in Christine Holmlund (1991), who stresses the importance that the figure of the lesbian has held in Irigaray’s early work. Finally, Ofelia Schutte (1997) argues that Irigaray’s project should be properly understood as

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invested in dismantling the heteronormative assumptions which underscore constructions of sexuate difference, and not only invested in changing the relationship between men and women. Schutte’s interpretation is particularly warranted, given Irigaray’s re-reading of Freudian psychoanalysis. Having said this, it is important to recognise that Irigaray’s texts themselves are not speaking about the political present for LGBT Others. The interpreters of Irigaray’s philosophy are attempting to make those texts speak to the political present, and these attempts may be more or less convincing. To return to Giardini’s assessment of Speculum, Irigaray’s insights on women’s position in this patriarchal symbolic order also rightly indicate that women need to create for themselves a different symbolic economy. This task has not yet been fully realised. As such, Speculum can simultaneously be considered as an ‘early’ text. Irigaray’s work points toward the revolutions that still need to occur in our shared dominant imaginaries both in the present and in the future if the respect I envision is ever to be achieved. Indeed, Irigaray’s philosophy points out why certain ‘practical gains’ do not affect the roots of discriminatory practices: it is because they are won according the phallocentric logic. Consider the following example demonstrating this insight: there is no guarantee that countries which have shown great legal tolerance of Others will also exhibit great social tolerance of Others. The image of Wilfred de Bruijn (figure 3.1) is clear evidence of this claim. An increase in legal tolerance of LGBTs in France has simultaneously resulted in increasing displays of homophobia. Another example to consider is the continued existence of ‘gay panic laws’ in parts of Australia. A ‘gay panic’ defence partially excuses someone accused of murder or assault from responsibility for the crime, as they were provoked into the attack by (the threat of) same-sex sexual advances. Despite overall Australian progress of legal LGBT recognition, the state of Queensland notably failed to overturn its gay panic laws in 2012 (Ozturk 2012). Thus, Irigaray’s philosophical insights demonstrate that, without first learning how to (re-) encounter difference as such, Others will continue to be conceived of as inferior to the Subject. It is for this reason that Irigaray’s analysis of the construction and perception of difference as such in Western culture remains both an early and invaluable insight: it illuminates the reasons why Others have had such difficulty in eradicating discrimination.

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Utopia In the last section I noted that Irigaray’s work appears ‘late’ as it frequently neglects to engage with present socio-political situations. This does not always hold true, though. In Je, Tu, Nous (1993; 2007) Irigaray sets out a number of sexed rights which, if employed, could promote the recognition of women and men as radically other. Such an articulation of sexed rights, however, seems utopian in a negative sense. Margaret Whitford acknowledges that ‘utopia’ has gained some pejorative connotations throughout the twentieth century, being either linked with totalitarian fantasies, or else seen to promote implausible or unrealisable visions of a perfect future (1991, 15). Whitford then goes on to say, “[w]hen she [Irigaray] attempts to hazard some more positive indication about where to go next […] then she enters the domain of the controversial—and this is how it should be” (1991, 17). In other words, it would be dangerous for Irigaray to be mistaken as a guru able to dictate the precise needs and wants of future people, since this would hinder the possibility for political reflection and refiguration. Similarly, Nicola Lacey has criticised Irigaray’s work, particularly for her use of reformist language in promoting a utopian theoretical framework. Problematically, Irigaray may be perceived as simply shifting the emphasis from one universal onto two. This is especially troublesome if, thanks to Irigaray’s appropriation of the language of institutional reform, her work is misconstrued as a reformist project, rather than a utopian strategy as it stands (2002, 132). If Irigaray is read as promoting a reformist project, she may obscure the full range of the violence that the law does to subjects, given her overwhelming focus on sexuate difference. This is always a risk when a philosophical theory is utopian. Thus, Lacey ultimately argues against Irigaray’s utopian rhetorical strategy of thinking two, finding Irigaray’s play on sexual stereotypes to be problematic already at the level of rhetoric, and potentially disastrous if she is taken to be offering a program of reform (2002, 132). She concludes that in attempting to eradicate socio-political and legal injustices, a more pragmatic approach should be preferred. While one can accept that if Irigaray’s work is read as a literal program for reform it is largely problematic, this does not mean that her utopian strategy is unable to affect positive shifts at the symbolic and social levels if it is recognised as strategic. Lacey defines ‘utopian rhetorical strategy’ as that which “sets out to tap the resources of the imagination: to read and speak against the cultural grain, and hence to make possible the impossible task of thinking beyond the present towards a different future” (2002,

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132—emphasis mine). Irigaray herself admits the utopian aspect of her work when she states, “I defend the impossible” (1996, 9). Thus, while one can agree with Lacey that it could be dangerous to read Irigaray’s work as a literal program for reform, we need not dismiss the potential value of employing her utopian rhetorical strategy. Utopian strategies are necessary if one wants to alter the symbolic realm. Without some kind of conception of what a better society might look like, how might one begin to imagine and reimagine the impossible into the plausible, and into the possible? Moira Gatens shares a similar sentiment specifically regarding rights discourses, stating: I would be reluctant to underplay the aspirational aspects of rights discourses, even while acknowledging that such aspirations are all too often disappointed. Reserving some space on the political platform for the inspirational, indeed the imaginary, dimension of rights seems important. Political theory need not confine itself to descriptions of political ontology (conceived in terms of what ‘is’) but may also entertain what could or should be (2004, 281).

It is via this very process of imagining, reimagining, and generating controversy that meanings are able to shift over time. Indeed, each moment of change creates a new situation, which then requires the imagination of a new and different response (Whitford 1991, 14). Competitions between imaginaries, which arise in this context thanks to Irigaray’s radical reconceptualisation of difference, generate contradictions and conflicts. These very conflicts and contradictions between shared imaginings can act as the motors of socio-political change (Gatens 2004, 287). Irigaray’s philosophy should therefore not be abandoned, or deemed less favourable than a pragmatic approach dealing only with political ontology. While it is important to stay within the everyday praxis of the present, which is difficult given the temporal (non-) location of Irigaray’s work, it is also important to think beyond it. This thinking beyond, shifting conceptions within our shared dominant imaginaries, is what Irigarayan philosophy can offer to contemporary matters of socio-political inequality.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that Irigaray’s philosophy of sexuate difference can provide crucial insights to instances of LGBT discrimination (among other varieties). While Irigaray’s primary focus is the two of sexuate difference, I have shown that this strategy is instrumental, as well as important of its own accord. For the purposes of

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this article, what matters is to recognise Irigaray’s emphasis on reconceiving difference as such. Combining this insight with a focus on the space-between others is what can allow for the reconceptualisation of phallocentric hierarchies of inequality, and hence the possibility of respect for LGBT subjectivities. The purpose of her philosophy, as I understand it, is to cultivate new ethical and civil relations between all people, avoiding hierarchical barriers of inclusion/exclusion. While Irigaray’s works can be criticised insofar as they tend not to speak to the specificities of struggles central to a particular time and place, this factor can also be characterised as the reason her work has maintained its ongoing relevance. Furthermore, when Irigaray’s texts do seem to prescribe fixed actions to be taken in the present, recognition of the utopian rhetorical strategy at play in her work allows multiple conceptions of the future to remain open. Irigaray attempts to make possible the task of thinking beyond the present towards an alternative future, and the desirability of such an approach is not lessened even though such aspirations are all too often disappointed. It is important to think beyond political ontology to what our socio-political relationships could be. Thus, I conclude that Irigaray’s utopianism, her theoretical focus on the ‘space between,’ and her insights on how to encounter difference as difference, can better ensure a just socio-political and legal standing for LGBTs and other excluded Others. Especially when faced with images like those of Wilfred de Bruijn, above, it is apparent that shifts in the symbolic realm are as urgent as legal rights for LGBTs.

References Braidotti, Rosi. 1998. “Sexual Difference Theory.” In A Companion to Feminist Philosophy, edited by Alison M. Jaggar and Iris Marion Young. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Chanter, Tina. 1998. “Postmodern Subjectivity.” In A Companion to Feminist Philosophy, edited by Alison M. Jaggar and Iris Marion Young. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Cornell, Drucilla. 1992. “Gender, Sex, & Equivalent Rights.” In Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by Judith Butler and Joan Scott. London; New York: Routledge. Deutscher, Penelope. 2002. A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Dirlik, Arif. 1994. “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism.” Critical Inquiry 20(2):328-56.

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Gatens, Moira. 1991. Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality. Cambridge: Polity Press. —. 1996. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. London; New York: Routledge. —. 2004. “Can Human Rights Accommodate Women’s Rights? Towards an Embodied Account of Social Norms, Social Meaning, and Cultural Change,” Contemporary Political Theory 3(3):275-299. Giardini, Frederica. 2003. “Speculum of Being Two: Politics and Theory After All These Years.” Theory, Culture & Society 20(3):13-26. Hill, Rebecca. 2012. The Interval: Relation and Becoming in Irigaray, Aristotle, and Bergson. New York: Fordham University Press. Holmlund, Christine. 1991. “The Lesbian, The Mother, The Heterosexual Lover: Irigaray’s Recodings of Difference.” Feminist Studies 17(2): 283-308. Irigaray, Luce. 1985a. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. —. 1985b. This Sex which is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. —. 1994. Thinking the Difference: for a Peaceful Revolution. Translated by Karin Montin. London: The Athlone Press. —. I Love To You. Translated by Alison Martin. London; New York: Routledge. —. 2000a. Democracy Begins Between Two. Translated by Kirsteen Anderson. London; New York: Routledge. —. 2000b. To be Two. Translated by Monique M. Rhodes and Marco F. Cocito-Monoc. London: The Athlone Press. —. 2002. Between East and West. Translated by Stephen Pluháþek. New York: Columbia University Press. —. Je, Tu, Nous. 2007. Translated by Alison Martin. London; New York: Routledge. Jennings, Rebecca. 2012. “Lesbian Mothers and Child Custody: Australian Debates in the 1970s.” Gender and History 24(2):502-517. Lacey, Nicola. 2002. “Violence, Ethics and Law: Feminist Reflections on a Familiar Dilemma.” In Visible Women: Essays on Feminist Legal Theory and Political Philosophy, edited by Susan James and Stephanie Palmer, 117-35. Oxford: Hart Publishing. Martin, Alison. 2003. “Introduction: Luce Irigaray and the Culture of Difference.” Theory, Culture & Society 20(3):1-12 Ozturk, Serkan. 2012. “Gay panic’ to stay in Queensland, rules LNP.” Gay News Network, July 19.

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http://gaynewsnetwork.com.au/news/national/7870-gay-panic-to-stayin-queensland.html (accessed February 22, 2013). Richardson, Diane. 1998. “Sexuality and Citizenship.” Sociology 32(1): 83-100. Rosenblum, Darren. 1994. “Queer Intersectionality and the Failure of Recent Lesbian and Gay ‘Victories’.” Law & Sexuality 4:83-122. Schutte, Ofelia. 1997. “A Critique of Normative Heterosexuality: Identity, Embodiment, and Sexual Difference in Beauvoir and Irigaray.” Hypatia 12(1):40-62. Sheill, Kate. 2009. “Losing Out in the Intersections: Lesbians, Human Rights, Law and Activism.” Contemporary Politics 15(1):55-71. Stoetzler, Marcel and Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2002. “Standpoint theory, Situated Knowledge and the Situated Imagination.” Feminist Theory 3:315-33. Stone, Alison. 2006. Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watt, Nicholas. 2013. “Gay Marriage Bill May Lead to ‘Lesbian Queen and Artificially Inseminated Heir’.” The Guardian, May 21. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/may/21/tebbit-gay-marriagelesbian-queen (accessed May 28, 2013). Williams, Amanda. 2013. “‘This is the True Face of Homophobia’: Gay Man Viciously Beaten in Paris Posts Picture of his Injuries to Facebook in Protest Move that has Now Gone Viral.” The Daily Mail, May 27. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2307288/Paris-gayattack-victim-Wilfred-Bruijns-Facebook-injuries-picture-goesviral.html#ixzz2UZH3Bjz1 (accessed May 28, 2013).

CHAPTER FOUR PERFORMING (READINGS OF) MOVING ACROSS AS DECOLONIAL PRAXIS HEATHER HERMANT

Figure 4.1 Vanessa Dion Fletcher embodies a language of indigenous sovereignty, as land writes itself on her copper shoes (Courtesy Dion Fletcher, Writing Landscape, video still).

Overview Looking at the copper intaglio plates strapped around Vanessa Dion Fletcher’s feet as she moves along a rocky beach, I wonder what her intervention sounds like, smooth rhythmic press into wet sand, then the stones etching in jabs and scratches onto metal, uneven drag against

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copper, thunk, flex and crack as her weight presses in. The land that speaks—literally writes itself—through her feet receiving, balancing, moving. Her body co-authoring her indigeneity with the land. In this chapter, I consider the work of four urban-based female artists, Camille Turner and Vanessa Dion Fletcher from Canada and Mariana Rocha and Oriana Duarte from Brazil, who use their bodies in motion— across space, across eras—in ways that perform historiographies in compelling ways. I draw on my Canadian context, and my experience at the 8th Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics Encuentro in São Paulo, Brazil in January 2013. The thread running through the work to be discussed is the body moving across as a memory practice that challenges the present. I use my own performance practice and the praxical concerns I grapple with to read these works. My aims are to demonstrate performance as research; to situate scholarly dialogues emergent from gathering these artists; to point to queer feminist decolonial possibilities thereof; and to suggest research implications. This chapter can be considered as a documentation of the process of figuring out how to do contemporary queer feminist decolonial scholarly-arts praxis, one in which myself, my body where it is and goes in relation must be foregrounded as I cross genres into and through the academy.

Multicrossing I research an under-known eighteenth century “multicrosser.” Sift through documents. Walk a city’s grid. Return to archival handwriting. Walk between sheets of fabric on stage, suspended between testimony writ large and a projection of waves crashing where Europe meets that ocean that would carry empire, her, him, them between shores. I sit opposite you, cast as my interrogator, undressing. I walk São Paulo barefoot, between cathedral and synagogue, my visibility forced by the camera, bouts of choreography, changing from female to male on the street. I return home from a Toronto theatre after performing in French a show I wrote in English, and attempt to write a paper. How to find language for the relationship between performing an archive and theorizing a life that erupts into visibility in a colonial record circa 1738? What is an archive? Is my body an archive? How to “tell history” in the colonial present as a decolonizing practice?

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The multicrosser in question is Esther Brandeau / Jacques La Fargue, purported first Jewish person to come to Canada, purported Jewish female passing as Christian male, outed on both counts, held under house arrest, deported for refusal to convert. And disappears. This after five years working as a male Christian around France. This was a life constricted by and made possible by movement and colonial geographies. I understand my practice of performing (with) them as “becoming archive,” intimately linked with autobiography (Hermant, 2013). I have called this practice “historical non-fiction embodied as autobiography,” “ceremonial archival performance” and “a midrash on the archive” (midrash is the Jewish tradition of reflection on Biblical text, Hermant 2013, 40). In 2010, this historical figure and the process of (performing) reading(s of) them became the subjects of my doctoral dissertation.

Strands of methodology I am an artist and academic. My intuiting body moving through space across eras is the most important of my tools. Performance practice as methodology lends itself to radically local, emergent responses, neither prescriptive nor repeatable. I am interested in how research-creation might challenge what is expected as/of research. I want my work to do something about the colonial present. I envision an academic context that is interdisciplinary, intermethodological and multigenre. My hopes drive an approach of “bricolage” (Kincheloe et al. 2011, 168), of the “scavenger” (Halberstam 2013, 13). A key way to situate the discussion herein within the academic landscape is within what has variously been called research-creation, performative practice, practice-led research and creative arts practice. Research-creation is the making of art as/for research, say Chapman and Sawchuk, distinct from but sharing characteristics with qualitative and quantitative research. It poses a challenge to “the argumentative form(s) that have typified much academic scholarship” (2012, 6). Bolt writes that in creative arts practice “theory emerges from a reflexive practice at the same time that practice is informed by theory” (2007, 29). Haseman argues that rather than accept subsuming under the qualitative research umbrella, practice-led research is its own paradigm: “[It] expresses the research and in its expression becomes the research itself” (2007, 148150). There remains the expectation that a research question precede research, even though as Fleishman argues in the case of performance as research, performance does not know what it is searching for before it begins the search (2012, 30). Fleishman argues against opposing

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traditional modes of research vs. practice-based research though, and instead for “compossibility,” what bringing multiple modes into proximity can offer, not the least the paradoxes and anomalies revealed (2012, 30). The practices I consider also intersect with autoethnography (HolmanJones et al, 2013) and autoethnographic performance in particular because of the centrality of the artists’ bodies, body as site of research and research tool. Autoethnographic performance draws on “a highly situated (and contested) perspective that gazes inward (auto) and outward (ethno) simultaneously in order to performatively enact complex intersectionalities of identity, place, and power” (Shoemaker 2013, 524). A definition of performance seems in order. I consider central the following: the body is in motion; the body transmits, translates and intervenes in story; and the body in action engages the question of witness. Performance is relational and moving. I draw on Conquergood’s “performance as kinesis” (Shoemaker 2011, 525); Spry’s understanding of the body in performance as “a site from which the story is generated by turning the internally somatic into the externally semantic” (Pelias 2013, 388); and performance studies’ broader concern with performer-audience relationships. Since I am concerned with historiography, a vital theorization of remembering is performance studies scholar Diana Taylor’s elaboration of “the archive” (written documents, photographs, wampum belts) and “the repertoire” (performance as embodiment of knowledge and transmission of histories and ideas) (Taylor 2003, 19-20). I also draw on Carolyn Dinshaw’s account of longing as starting point for a queer historiography, where “touching the past” is a means of constituting community (1999, 154). I am informed by decolonial feminism as articulated by Maria Lugones (2010) and by the indigenous scholarship and critiques of settler colonialism of Jodi A. Byrd (2012) and others (Morgenson 2011; Driskill et al 2011). As such I attempt to shift the place of meeting as one of indigenous presence across disparate geographies, of “cacophonous” hierarchical and lateral encounter and the “enjambment” of diverse histories colliding unresolvedly, to borrow Byrd’s terms. In investigating how performers’ works respond in the face of each other, I aim for dialogical intersectionality, and gesture toward expanding intersectionality to the arena of genre and its entwinement with hierarchies of knowledge and power. I cannot perform all my ambitions here, but offer a trace of intention in process.

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A contextualized writing I am a PhD candidate in Gender Studies in Utrecht, writing in Toronto in the midst of the most significant social movement in Canada that I have yet seen. Idle No More (INM), led by Indigenous women, erupted in November 2012 in response to a bill proposed by the conservative government. Indigenous people view this bill, which drastically reduces the number of waterways protected by environmental legislation, as violation of their Treaty rights, evidence of Canada’s failure to meet First Nations in nation-to-nation relationships, and an open door to resource extraction on indigenous lands. It is not the only reason for INM’s eruption, but served as a lightning rod spotlighting settler colonial dynamics. Artists have been vital to INM as has “movement across,” from round dances in shopping malls to The Journey of Nishiyuu (Nishiyuu means people in the indigenous Cree language), in which Cree youth walked from northern Quebec to the Canadian capital over several winter months, enacting a traditional imperative to perform indigenous sovereignty by moving through traditional territory (Seesaquasis 2013). Other walks and over-water movements continue. In January 2013, Kayapo Chief Raoni Metuktire in Brazil endorsed INM in the midst of struggle over the Belo Monte Dam (Raoni 2013). In May, INM affiliates protested Shell Oil at its annual general meeting in The Hague (Flegg 2013). In July, the 4th annual indigenous-led Tar Sands Healing Walk took place in the heart of petroleum extraction in Alberta in the midst of new oil spills. In August, 500 paddlers arrived to New York to renew the two-row wampum treaty made between the Dutch and the Haudenosaunee 400 years ago. As a settler artist-scholar drawing together artists from Canada and Brazil in an anthology of Dutch feminist praxis, I begin with INM to point to the entanglement of nations in the intercontinental, transhemispheric constellations of contemporary colonialism and resistances thereof, as we artists perform ‘history’ on seemingly disparate sites.

Tactile geographies Toronto artist Vanessa Dion Fletcher’s Writing Landscape project, an image of which opens this chapter, predates the eruption of INM. Of Potawatomi and Lenape ancestry, (whose traditional territories transcend the international border between Canada and the U.S.), Dion Fletcher’s practice ranges from curation to performance to video to visual arts. She writes:

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Writing Landscape is a series of images that were created between my body and the land. The finished product consists of three parts. The first is a series of copper plates that were marked up when I wore them on my feet and walked over the land. The second is a series of prints that were produced from the copper plates. The third is video documentation of my performance of walking. Together, these images constitute an exploration of the relationship between my identity as an indigenous woman and different places on Turtle Island [Indigenous name for the Americas, HH]. This work begins in my mouth with my voice and moves down to my feet and the earth (Dion Fletcher 2012, 81).

The artist collaboratively produces an archive together with the landscape, performing memory as dialogically embodied: it is a conversation between her body and the land. Central to Writing Landscape is the relationship between movement over the land, indigenous identity and language. Dion-Fletcher began the project in response to being monolingually English-speaking and not knowing her ancestral languages. Her doing—land-body-language-archive as memory, her feet ‘seeing’ as the land authors—is evidence of another kind of literacy. Her walking not only contests the supremacy of English and the world views and histories embedded within it, but expands ‘language’ to non-verbalized forms, while complicating the subject-object relationship often assumed between land and body (2012, 82). She also constructs layers of witness, with visual forms inviting us to witness her witnessing the land and her dialogical entwining with it. Across layers of distance we see their collaborative output. Like the Nishiyuu, Dion Fletcher performs indigenous memory and sovereignty through movement over land, through the land writing onto and through her. In so doing she speaks and writes her indigeneity and, I am compelled to read, the land does the same. Her work is indeed an act of reclamation and recovery, autonomy and sovereignty. But even as the work speaks of the violences of colonisation, it compels a move well beyond reading through the trope of repair, of movement toward wholeness from brokenness along a linear progression. The work suggests walking as theorization of embodied memory that exceeds autoethnography, which exceeds the time and logic of the fracture that compels it. Writing Landscape un-names land as thing, perhaps even land as having autonomous agency, because body and landscape are entwined in doing. If, as she writes, the project starts in her mouth with her voice and moves down to her feet and the earth, she occupies and queers this English language in which I am writing, its words, its logics, bends it from its power to unmake, to enact removal.

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Sonic geographies On a cold March day, artist Camille Turner leads my PhD supervisor Dr. Gloria Wekker and me through a snowy memorial park nestled among condos. Dr. Wekker is in Toronto for events I have helped coordinate entitled “The Contemporary Urgencies of Audre Lorde’s Legacy.” We walk headphones isolating us each in our own experiences of a performance playing out in our ears and through our bodies, guided by historical figures re-imagined sonically into the present and accompanying us like whisperers. This is Hush Harbour, an immersive sonic walk that animates Black histories through a transtemporal Afro-futurist imaginary. We are beckoned to stand on a stone. The elder’s voice weaves time: This is the story of Samuel, a man with a mystical past who was born to an enslaved woman. His mother was determined that he would be free so she placed him in a boat on a river. Years later he arrived fully grown on the shore of the town of York [former name of Toronto, HH] where he witnessed the arrival of African astronauts (Turner 2012a).

A soundscape brings to life Peggy, a slave who cannot be freed because of a grandfathering of abolition even as Blacks from south of the border gain their freedom by arriving to Canada. It should be noted that Canadians are more likely to know about the Underground Railroad that enabled slaves to gain freedom by crossing into Canada, than they are to know that slavery ever existed in Canada. We meet Sam, one such free Black man. Turner is best known for Miss Canadiana, in which she takes on the persona of a national beauty queen (Turner 2011). Writes Turner, “Black skin and dreadlocks isn’t what is expected as the embodiment of the Canadian Nation” (Turner 2012b, 53). Turner’s work contests the active absenting of over four centuries of Black presence in Canada and aims to “evoke a Black cartography, in which Black histories and Black bodies, hidden within geographies of domination, are visible and mapped to the land” (2012b, 54). Turner tells us that “hush harbours” were places of clandestine meeting where enslaved people would gather at night in the woods, the sound of gathering dampened by suspended quilts. In Hush Harbour Turner weaves into a War of 1812 soldiers’ grave site Black historical figures, those who come to us through archival records of the city’s slave-owners, and those Turner imagines into presence from the “Coloured Corps and Indians” note at the end of a list of named white soldiers on the park’s memorial plaque.

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By having us listen while moving through space, Turner makes a counterclaim on the land, populating it with erased history through our bodies as actively moving witnesses. We remap the memorial landscape, contesting its assumed whiteness. Adaptation of the museum audio tour to an Afro-futurist historic sonic walk as genre is significant; it suggests an Afro-lineage to “science fiction” by anchoring the telling in a cosmology in which ancestors are ever-present, foresee the future and serve as contemporary guides. It foregrounds “old” spiritual practices as “futuristic.” The nearby pin-like CN Tower becomes a broadcasting point for the Black Ordinance, who “give the Afronauts access to ancient knowledge.” Even as we might interpret the Afronauts as voices from the past, one will say to Samuel, “You are our ancestor.” The work challenges notions of linear time and progress, and contests hegemonic neocolonial ways in which racialised people are perpetually located in the past yet erased from both the historical record, and invisibilised in the present. When at the end of nineteen minutes we meet again atop the stone, the elder-narrator-guide anoints us. We cannot un-know what we have just learned, she tells us. Turner calls on us to bear witness, our in-bodiedness bringing us in close to enact an intervention, an embedding. I cannot be on the outside of the story, and that is precisely the point.

Mapped violence Mariana Rocha is also concerned with absence and disappearance. From Belo Horizonte, Rocha walks Google maps that she constructs by linking addresses associated with obituaries published in newspapers. Rocha worked on the prosecutor’s bench defending the victims of violence before abandoning law to focus on her arts practice, in which she researches the ruin of the body, compelled by the impossibility of witnessing one’s own disappearance. She takes as her starting point Martin Heidegger's philosophical writings on being towards death. (Rocha 2013a). Her work begins with a performance of repetition: laboriously walking urban geography, unnoticed. Rocha walks the contours of the maps she creates, which sometimes physically exhausts her. This ritual becomes witnessable only in the visual art pieces she subsequently creates out of the shapes of the maps she walks, artifacts from her walking labour. Rocha’s maps uncannily take on the shape of bones and body parts. Coming upon a butcher’s shop, she takes the butcher’s discarded bones and studies their decay, how to boil and preserve them, then casts these in bronze in forms uncannily similar to the map-drawings. She carves the maps into tree stumps and displays the bronzed bones atop. Later she

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discovers bitumen, a breathable substance that allows the bones to continue their decay, seeping through bronze-like exterior in exhibition spaces, underscoring the paradox that the body is dead but the bones are still, in essence, alive. Bitumen is also the petroleum product extracted from Alberta’s tar sands in Canada, location of the annual two-day Tar Sands Healing Walk led by First Nations and Métis people whose environment and health are affected. Vulnerability in the face of potential violence seems undeniable as I comb over the artifacts of Rocha’s performative labour. I tell her her practice feels like ritual purging. I ask if it is partly a response to Brazil’s military dictatorship. She responds: You are totally right about the need to orchestrate and control in the face of vulnerability, all of it on the terrain of a female body. ... It is like sacrifice is always present, but causes no pain. ... The ruin of my body and the death of the victims [for] whom I was a lawyer filled my mind with images and questions ... I grew up listening to the stories about missing people and how some of my mother's female friends were tortured. Some people just vanished ... During the dictatorship, my parents went to live in the US, otherwise I guess my mother would have died too. She was very active against the government. ... I had this teacher in art school that kept telling me that a lot of my performances were totally political (related to the dictatorship) and sometimes I did not see it (pers. comm.).

Only later would she clearly see the connection to the disappeared, when she realized the barrels she uses in her work were and still are used to disappear people in Brazil. What gives Rocha’s work such unsettling power is the execution of beautiful, sensual, topographical, bodily forms incongruent with the unspeakable of which they can speak, and that the process from which they are derived allows Rocha to write her autonomy. I see Rocha’s work as historical-contemporary testimony, dependent upon and made possible by the performing female body that moves across space, stitching and dragging times. Without necessarily intending to, I think this work stands as evidence of lateral and intergenerational trauma and resistance, of past injustice feeding into the multiple forms of contemporary violence. My question returns: Is my body an archive? Yes. I refine the question. How does my body archive a time before me?

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Embodied questions Oriana Duarte’s doctoral thesis, Plus Ultra: The body at the limit of communication (Duarte’s translation), is multigenre, practice-led scholarship that defies expectations of what doctoral research and a thesis outcome should look like (Duarte 2012). She looks to sport as an artistic practice and an embodied practice of philosophy. Where Dion Fletcher, Turner and Rocha walk, for her doctorate Duarte rows in order to engageembody Foucault’s ideas and those of Cristine Greiner and Helena Katz, (Foucault 2001, 1997). Of interest to Duarte are knowing the self, caring for the self and engaging with others, and the close relationship Foucault demonstrates in his study of Greek and Roman ascetic practices between athlete and philosopher (Duarte 2012, 169). Greiner and Katz theorize what they call “corpomedia” [bodymedia], how the body itself communicates (for an overview in English, see Rosa 2011). An established Brazilian artist, Duarte trained for months then rowed rivers through five Brazilian cities, a treacherous endeavour on river as well as in the almost exclusively male clubs she had to integrate herself into to seek rowing partners and coaches. Years of process as research yield a performance practice of rowing as methodology and outcome; exhibitions of video installations from footage gathered from cameras rigged to her boat; a thesis comprised of three notebooks that include drawings, journal excerpts, still images, poetic and scholarly writing and literature review. Duarte’s dissertation crosses genres, disciplines, eras, spaces, borders. In her stated intention of investigating trajectories of movement between art and life as a means to understand self and an ethics of being, she demonstrates that “research-creation may act as an innovative form of cultural analysis that troubles the book, the written essay, or the thesis, as the only valid means to express ideas, concepts and results of experiments” (Chapman and Sawchuk 2012, 8). Much of the knowledge she produces resides in its best form, in the act of rowing itself, in the process of the research. That she chooses rowing has particular resonance from a feminist perspective in Brazil, and for someone sourcing Foucault. She maps rowing’s colonial genealogy as a British import to Brazil that enacts the disciplinary practices Foucault wrote of (1975). The boat as a promising heterotopia, after Foucault, carries conflicted meaning, particularly when Duarte tells the story of responses to an indigenous rower she sees at a race who is exceptionally fast, with a technique derived from paddling on Amazonian rivers, not in rowing clubs (2012, 206). Heterotopias are real sites that are at the same time "counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted

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utopia in which the real sites [...] are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” They are places of possibility and difference, which unlike utopias can be pinpointed to actual, real location. The boat, for Foucault is “the heterotopia par excellence,” “a place without place,” “closed in on itself yet open to the infinity of the sea” (1984). Those who resist the indigenous rower say he is not skilled to do team work. (Read: He isn’t disciplined by/in the club system.) He later wins a medal for Brazil in a world competition. Duarte questions her impulse to zero in on this story, but leaves her questions unresolved. Byrd might call us to consider that Foucault’s theorizing and Duarte’s coming to know depend on the indigenous body as a transit of ideas (2012). Duarte tracks such distances between people revealed through her process, even as she experiences a profound rapprochement with landscape through her body’s extension into becoming boat, becoming oar, becoming water. She does not see the passing landscape directly since she moves with her back to it, but she experiences it proprioceptively. She invents language to translate the experience. Corpobarco (“bodyboat”). Doing “body-landscape-boat” (2012, 50). Later she sees the landscapes (again) by witnessing the video witnessing her immersion. She meticulously documents a Brazil as only she can know it. When she finishes the project, she investigates a lump that emerged on her back while rowing. She documents the surgery. When she writes ambiguously of “the incommensurability that lies dormant in the Brazilian body” (2012, 353, my translation) I cannot help but wonder at that lump as a complex trace of lost borders between storied materialities, of the impact of her feminist immersion in masculinist disciplinary regimes, of battling colonial legacies embedded in and ever active on the land she witnesses from the water, all surfacing up through body.

Returning to a question I walk barefoot from church to synagogue past the mid-point between the two, where I am staying in São Paulo, a queer person descended from the lineages of both architectures. The majority of colonizers of Brazil were Jewish-descended, targets of Iberian Inquisition, says Suely Rolnik (2013). Embodying my research subject, purported Jewish female who passed as male Christian, I walk a counter-assimilationist direction. What of the historical trajectory of Jews into whiteness? Of my concurrent movement from female to male? My body barefoot does not know the Brazilian landscape nor language(s) with which to read my experience t/here, nor see what is erased. An open-ended experiment. Research.

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On stage in Montreal, in Toronto, a spinning Canadian winter landscape in video projection threatens to disappear her/his/our/their body into snowy whiteness as the land speeds up. I/we/they remain visible, in the labour of walking. I walk the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, intending to move against the pilgrimage grain, with the flow of exile. So much walking, I become nothing other than the moment of movement. Battling embodied histories concentrate into contact of the soles of my feet. Ici. Neste lugar. Hemen zaude. Aqui. Here (The word “here” in French, Portuguese, Euskara/Basque and Spanish, Hermant 2013b). Fullbodied meditation achieved, like Duarte, at the limits of my capacity, my perception of time changes, 1738 becomes recent. I cannot continue. I walk a French town, intuitive aid to reading records I sift in the local archive where she/he/they are never directly present. I walk a cemetery in search of a feeling found at the Amsterdam archives months before. I move between ‘male’ and ‘female’ in a tiny room with one witness at a time, audience cast as interrogator, my gestural movement in shadow incompatible with the realist script we speak. I lose track of the directionality or even fact of passing (Hermant 2013c). I translate an archival interrogation record into gesture, syllable by syllable writing its violence, my body its author (Hermant 2013b). I pull my body along a diagonal as water in video behind me locates the ship underfoot, conflicted heterotopia. I move on stage pursued by my shadow multiple, the singular story never alone (ibid). Does any of this movement—exile, deportation, translation—expose the assimilationist pull of the queer settler into collusion with settler colonialism? Which simultaneous multiple passings in the story I perform/research are visible, are palpable and to which audiences? The act of moving over or in relation to land is compelling historiography because at play, I think, is a dialogical interpellation, body and land entwined archives activated and animated by movement. The body in motion is theorizing, experiment, research, its outcome. Easy distinctions between land, body and the time of ‘history’ lose their smooth logic. Maria Lugones, when writing of the coloniality of gender, points to the possibilities of the locus of fracture and like Audre Lorde did, the possibilities of coalitional power because of difference. She sees in “tense multiplicity” a way out of the either/or logic of accomplishment of coloniality or freezing of memory, its ossification in the past (Lugones 2010, 754). This points to movement and the relational. My choice to tell the barely knowable life of the historical almost-settled multicrosser in “multigenre”—multiple genres in conversation—is a strategy for decolonial telling that tells while also fracturing the dominant idea that there is one

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cohesive story. The conversation between genres is the research, and it is to be in movement, in relation, troubled. To place this movement as telling within the context of other stories of moving over land as telling is to thicken the possibilities of tense multiplicity. A decolonial settler’s telling contends with settler colonialism and so looks to land, neither as metaphor nor as abstraction, but rife, storied, always already peopled. There is to be no resolution. Il n’y aura pas de certitude. J’interroge ma propre voix. Il n’y aura pas de resolution. Le retour impossible. Il ne nous reste que de. It is not possible to return. Only to (Hermant 2013c). An ethical position might be one of embodying irresolution as a decolonial practice. If to resolve is to be in “joyous cacophonous multiplicity” on a shared globe that denies the reality of indigenous presence, of African enslavement, of coloniality past and present (Byrd 2012, 18). If to resolve is to deflect rather than acknowledge, to bury the colonial intention of removal, replacement, a disappearing act (Morgensen 2011, 22). Something about all of this is a search for what it is to be, to become, to (make) unsettle(d).

Acknowledgements I thank all artists considered for engaging with me for this chapter. I thank Melina Young for suggesting “bend” in my discussion of the queering of language in Writing Landscape.

References Bolt, Barbara. 2007. “The Magic Is In Handling.” In Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, edited by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, 27-34. London: IB Tauris. Byrd, Jodi A. 2012. Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. St. Paul: U of Minnesota P. Chapman, Owen and Kim Sawchuk. 2012. “Research-Creation: Intervention, analysis and ‘family resemblances’.” Canadian Journal of Communication. 37:5-26. Dion Fletcher, Vanessa. 2012. “Writing Landscape.” West Coast Line. 46(2):80-87. Duarte de Araujo, Oriana Maria. 2012. “Plus Ultra: o corpo no limite da comunicação.” PhD diss., Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo. Driskill, Qwo-Li, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott Lauria Morgensen, eds. 2011. Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature. Tuscon: U Arizona P.

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Flegg, Erin. 2012. “Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Among Groups to Challenge Royal Dutch Shell at AGM,” Desmog Canada, May 22, 2013. http://www.desmog.ca/2013/05/21/athabasca-chipewyan-first-nationamong-groups-challenge-royal-dutch-shell-agm (accessed November 1, 2013). Fleishman, Mark. 2012. “The Difference of Performance as Research.” Theatre Research International. 37(1):28-37. Foucault, Michel. 2001. Fearless Speech. Edited by Joseph Pearson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). —. 1997. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press. —. 1984 [1967]. “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias [Des Éspaces Autres. Hétérotopies].” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité. 5:46-49. —. 1975. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House. Halberstam, Judith. 2013 (1998). Female Masculinity. Durham and London: Duke UP. Haseman, Brad. “Rupturing and Recognition: Identifying the Performative Research Paradigm.” In Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, edited by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, 147-57. London: IB Tauris. Hermant, Heather. 2013a. “Performing archives of passing, moving bodies across language,” Tusaaji: A Translation Review 2 (2): 26-41. http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/tusaaji/article/viewFile/37813/3 4273 (accessed June 17, 2014). —. 2013b. “Becoming Archive: ribcage: this wide passage.” Canadian Theatre Review 153:39-43. —. 2013c. ribcage: this wide passage / thorax: une cage en éclats, translated by Nadine Desrochers. Unpublished script-score. —. 2013d. Aujourdhuy / This Day, 1738. One-to-one performance. Rhubarb Festival, Toronto, February 2012; 8th European Feminist Research Conference, Budapest, May 2012. Holman-Jones, Stacy, Tony E. Adams and Carolyn Ellis, eds. 2013. Handbook of Autoethnography. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Kincheloe, Joe L., Peter McLaren and Shirley R. Steinberg. “Critical Pedagogy, and Qualitative Research: Moving to the Bricolage.” In The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 163-78. Thousand Oaks, London: Sage. Lugones, Maria. 2010. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25 (4): 742-759.

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Morgenson, Scott Lauria. 2011. Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization. Minneapolis, London: U Minnesota P. Pelias, Ronald J. 2013. “Writing Autoethnography: The Personal, Poetic and Performative as Compositional Strategies.” In Handbook of Autoethnography, edited by Stacy Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis, 384-405. Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press. Raoni Metuktire, Chief. 2013. “Letter of support to the Idle No More movement and my indigenous brothers in Canada.” Planète Amazone Raoni. http://raoni.com/news-604.php (accessed November 1, 2013). Rocha, Mariana. 2013a. Artist Presentation, 8th Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics Encuentro, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, January 17. Rolnik, Suely. 2013. “Group Theatre in São Paulo and the Commodification of Culture.” Keynote lecture, 8th Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, Sesc Vila Mariana, São Paulo, January 12. Rosa, Cristina. 2011. “O Corpo em Crise: Novas Pistas e o Curto-Circuito das Representações by Christine Greiner [Book Review].” e-misférica 8(1). Accessed November 1, 2013. http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-81/rosa Seesaquasis, Paul. “Nishiyuu Walkers: In Restlessness, There Is Power.” The Tyee. April 6, 2013. http://m.thetyee.ca/Life/2013/04/06/NishiyuuWalkers/#.UWA5HdflXD x (accessed November 1, 2013). Shoemaker, Deanna B. 2013. “Autoethnographic Journeys: Performing Possibilities/Utopias/Futures.” In Handbook of Autoethnography, edited by Stacy Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis, 517537. Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham and London: Duke UP. Turner, Camille. 2012a. Hush Harbour (19:00) Sonic walk. http://www.outerregion.ca (accessed November 1, 2013). —. 2012b. “Miss Canadiana Confronts the Mythologies of Nationhood and the im/possibility of African diasporic memory in Toronto.” Caribbean Intransit Arts Journal 1(2):52-60. http://caribbeanintransit.com/issue-2-location-and-caribbeanness/ (accessed November 1, 2013). —. 2011. Miss Canadiana's Heritage Walking Tours: The hidden Black history of the Grange. (Outerregion Productions, 15:00) Digital video. http://camilleturner.com/?project=miss-canadiana (accessed November 1, 2013).

SECTION II: THE MATTER OF AFFECT

PREFACE IRIS VAN DER TUIN

‘Affect’ features as a transversal concept in the four chapters, which will follow. First, affect’s transversality connects the neo-disciplinary locations from which the chapters have been written. Second, the concept moves rhizomatically across the theoretical, the practical, and the political realms. And, lastly, affect studies appear to have an empowering effect on young researchers. We may wish to start talking about æffect, borrowing not only from conceptualizations of Marielle Sophia Smith and Krizia Nardini in this section, but also from Jondi Keane, creative arts researcher from Australia. In his contribution to Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts, edited by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, Keane argues that “[a] new materialism can no longer make assertions about matter, but must become part of the material world by realizing that observing relationships is a way of generating meaningful consequences” (Keane 2013: 42-3). This, he calls ‘æffect.’ Affected by and affecting the seemingly ephemeral world of fashion, or the world of filmic ‘representation,’ or the so-called cognitive world of theory, the feminist scholars here gathered together make a change through research, and in the process they change themselves, too. Eline van Uden’s chapter makes clear how the research process is itself affective and how acknowledging this affectivity adds to the research. Starting from a photograph of a seemingly everyday fashion model, which is being revealed to be the author herself at the age of eighteen, Van Uden demonstrates how a research project on fashion is prone to end up in gendered generalizations about female bodies and labor as a public (not domestic or reproductive) affair. A project of fashion, however, enables the researcher to come close to fashion’s required embodiment and the fashion model’s curious situation of being both included in and excluded from the categories of material and immaterial labor. These two consequences result in Van Uden revaluing the active biology of her own body. This body plays a creative role in the signifying process of the fashion system.

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Marielle Smith’s chapter demonstrates how a scholar can fall in love with an Irish woman writer (in her case Anne Enright) and a French feminist theorist and artist (Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger), and how this imagined, or rather intuited, relationship generates insight in the two oeuvres at once. In the course of Smith’s analysis of Enright’s 2001 novel What Are You Like? the entanglement of Ettinger’s matrixial borderspace and the story of the twins Maria and Rose/Marie is one of empowerment, again. Both girls become active agents, and take the lead of their own life, affirming neither the Oedipal plot nor second-wave feminist preOedipality but rather the matrixial, undeniably feminine line that connects also Enright, Ettinger, and Smith. In a similar vein, Krizia Nardini’s real-life encounter with Luce Irigaray, one of the main inspirations of her PhD research, is yet another journey of transformation. It is as if the matrixial stratum makes itself felt, when Nardini narrates how Irigaray’s commentary had been “knocking at the door every now and then, without really becoming transformative.” A commentary that seems at first to be wholly dismissive turns out to have spawned thoughts and feelings beyond the confines of the two covers of a scholarly dissertation. Sara Janssen’s chapter on the films One Night Stand (Emilie Jouvet, 2006) and Fuses (Carolee Schneemann, 1964-7) discusses the feeling of film from the point of view of the affected viewer, whilst not underestimating the fact that the transformed celluloid must have had an effect on Schneemann and the sexual stories of her protagonist-interviewees must have moved Jouvet. Elegantly guiding her readers through the feminist theoretical and political engagements with amateur, feminist, and queer pornography, Janssen lays out the trajectory of the contemporary feminist porn scholar: we see her transform from the inquisitive mind in front of the screen and behind a desk (in)to a sensing body-mind apparatus that also comprises the filmic signifying material.

References Keane, Jondi. 2013. “Æffect: Initiating Heuristic Life.” In Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts, edited by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt. London: I.B. Tauris.

CHAPTER FIVE TRACING THE ROOTS OF THE FASHION IMAGE: FASHION MODELS AS FASHION WORKERS, IMMATERIAL PRODUCTION AND AFFECTIVE TRANSMISSION ELINE VAN UDEN

Figure 4.1 Author made collage, images from personal collection.

Introduction We tend to forget that commercial imageries we see around us are produced by large industries. I therefore turn to production to understand more about practices and structures in which images are embedded:

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in an image-overloaded era, certain visual conventions have become selfevident, unquestioned and easily consumed. To be able to look at them more consciously, we need to think about the visual traditions as well as the social practices and power relations in which they are embedded (Buikema & Zarzycka 2001, 119).

We might have to admit to not always noticing the model’s presence when we are passing by a shop window or while flipping through a magazine. Being a model entails offering the service of lending one’s appearance as a way to represent a brand, or to simply present the looks of the new season in the catalogue magazine of a local clothing-store. Indeed, models by being the human face in fashion photography attach meaning to a brand. Fashion models, as fashion workers, have their own story to tell about the meaning of the images we see around us in shopping malls, magazines and television. In essence, the function of the model is to arouse and stimulate consumer desire and ultimately make people buy the advertised product. However, in this chapter I show that although we as consumers might not always be aware of their presence it does not mean we are not physically affected by them. It is a model’s job to stimulate and transmit affective energies on unconscious levels. We have to take their labour seriously in approaching the image.

Aim and approach In this article, my aim is to analyze the role and position of fashion models in the production of fashion images. The argument is informed by experiences in my own career as a fashion model. These experiences have urged me to call for an adjustment of ruling presumptions about fashion models. By stating that fashion models are ‘fashion workers,’ I take fashion modeling seriously and consider it a profession. I know from experience that the physical and mental demands of the work are intense: Thus my wish is to frame fashion modeling by means of a worthy definition the workers contributing to this industry deserve. The choice for the approach taken in this article is informed by this goal I am convinced that the labour situation of fashion models is of particular interest for feminists because it is a type of labour that, similar to sex-work and care-work, is associated with the female body and as somehow being close to ‘nature.’ But unlike sex-work and care-work, fashion modeling occupies a high cultural status and, contrary to domestic labour or care-work, is economically rewarded and valued as such. Fashion models, as fashion workers, participate in what I will call the ‘immaterial’ production of images. Although their labour is very much

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grounded in the body, their goal is to stimulate affective transmission and the production of an immaterial consumption desire. In my approach, I refer specifically to the affective turn in the social sciences and the humanities and make a case to continue to discuss the role of affect as a possible track in further engagements with the topic. A focus on affect helps to enhance our understanding of the bodily labour aspects playing a role in the production and perception of visual images. A theory of affect developed with an eye on fashion modeling enables us to increase the awareness about in particular the corporeal roots of the fashion image. There is a need to “envision a new mode of dress, which engenders a sense of the body, not as a visual image, but as an active corporeal presence” (Negrin 2013, 142). I realize the opposition between immaterial production of the image and the corporeal roots of labour must seem confusing at first glance. Nonetheless, I will take this supposed contradiction as the ground for a fruitful feminist intervention to enrich our understanding of modelling as a form of immaterial labour.

Collage After having introduced the aim and approach of this article, I now want to turn my attention to figure 5.1 printed above and describe how it represents and informs my motivation to write a paper about fashion modeling. Drawn on my professional background, the collage conceptualizes my experiences as a worker in the modeling industry. As you might see already, the image is a collection of different images gathered in the format of a ‘collage.’ The reason why I have included a collection of images and not a single photograph is because, at least in my view; that a collection of visual events is able to communicate a differentiated image about fashion modeling. A collage, or an assemblage of visual events is in a Deleuzian manner of speaking: “productive of difference… It is the ground and primary expression of all qualitative difference” (Markus & Saka 2006, 103). The collage consists of materials I selected, ordered and photographed myself during my own modeling career. For this reason, kindly allow me to explain the choices I have made while arranging this collection. My intention was to present an image in which the aspect of production is foregrounded. In other words, I wanted to include an image that would be able to represent a fashion model’s working life and thereby offer exclusive insights in the production of images. Therefore I have included three image formats that are used in the modeling industry designed to promote a model’s career. The first format

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of the image I want to discuss here, can be found in the middle left side of the picture. Looking more closely you will find four, relatively small, images in white frames. In business jargon these are called polaroid ‘snapshots’ depicting the model’s looks and body in her everyday appearance. These particular snap-shots were taken during my very first visit of a modelling agency at the age of seventeen. Three of them are ‘head-shots’ taken from the front, profiling my face, the fourth is a ‘total’-shot of my body. I consider these snap shots important because in these pictures a young girl on the edge of becoming a fashion model is portrayed. Looking at these images now, with the knowledge of an experienced model, I would say there is evident ‘model-potential’ in these images. The girl in the images is young, slender and still lacking the knowledge about how to perform as a model. She clearly does not know how to pose in front of the camera, nor is she aware of the possible facial expressions and mimics. It is just a girl standing there, whose body is not yet showing the marks of ingrained posing practices that are common in the modeling industry. Compared to these ‘polaroid’ snap-shots, the professional pictures in the middle and the right of the collage look more refined and sophisticated: I have become more experienced and seem to have acquainted the skills necessary for fashion modeling. In the center of the collage is my most prestigious image and the absolute highlight of my career: the image was printed on the cover of Vogue magazine. The publication in the September 2006 issue of the Italian Vogue included my appearance on the cover, as well as a series of images inside. A famous photographer in Milan shot the images and therefore the publication was a promising asset and a prestigious event in my career. However, I soon realized a model’s career is never fixed but dependent on unforeseeable combinations of events. Soon after this publication, I decided to head back to the university while continuing working as a model part-time. Nonetheless, I have experienced the euphoria of being booked for a prestigious job or glancing over images of oneself in a shiny fashion magazine that makes the physically and mentally demanding work worthwhile. The high demands in the industry are most clearly represented by the last format of images. Whereas the images on the left side of the collection are mainly polaroid-pictures and early professional photo material, I have also included two set-cards there; which is another word for a businesscard the model brings with her to the set or a casting. These cards depict my body measurements and a small selection of portfolio images. The measurements noted on these set-cards are seen as the objective basis for potential transactions between agent and client. After all, it is mandatory for models to fit in the clothing the client provides and if a client

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complains about noticing a difference between the sizes in real-life and the set-card, the reliability of an agency is under pressure. This means that model’s bodies are under constant intense surveillance by modelling agencies. The choice for a making a collage consisting of material from my modeling career is to draw the attention to my experiences in the modeling industry. This industry is oftentimes a ‘bizarre’ working place, and I can attest to this. However, my work as a model has inspired me to think differently and this experience has ultimately pushed me in the direction of feminism. In fact, my writing about fashion modeling is a form of feminist praxis or ‘doing feminist theory,’ which is the central theme of this book. In other words, I want to situate my intervention in the knowledge and insights drawn from my experiences in the modeling industry. This selection of images, all taken from my personal archive and put together in a different form and order, refers to a different, immanent mode of knowledge production; an approach that emerges from experience and the will to account for this knowledge. Therefore, my aim for the remainder of this chapter, is to improve our understanding about the world behind the image and more specifically, the ‘work’ involved in the production. I hope my reflective take on this collage provides an introduction to the intricacies of the main discussion.

Immaterial production The fashion image industry produces new images at a rapid pace according to trends and seasonal changes. The image industry is immaterial because it produces largely intangible, cultural products and not material goods with an inherent financial value. Therefore I have chosen to conceptualize the fashion image industry in terms of ‘immaterial production’: a terminology developed by the writers of the post-Marxist Operaismo movement (Hardt & Negri 2001; Hardt 1999; Lazzarato 1996; Virno 1996). This post-Marxist school originating in Italy is known for its political and critical theories of globalization and has become a major player in academic discussions about labour and production. The movement’s main protagonist is philosopher and critical thinker Antoni Negri, who, with co-author Michael Hardt, published Empire (2001) and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2005). Hardt and Negri describe large transformations and shifts in the organization of labour in global society. Their main argument is that informatization “marks a new mode of becoming human” (Hardt & Negri 2001, 289). Traditional industrial modes of production (such as the

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factory) are transformed by computer and communication technologies and inform the passage to what they define as an ‘informational economy.’ In this new economy, structures of labour are affected by the passage that has changed “the quality and nature of labour” (Hardt & Negri 2001, 289). Within this context of shifts in a global ‘informational’ economy, Hardt and Negri note different sectors have changed in particular. They qualify the sector of productive communication as a domain in the informational global economy, which produces services: “The production of services results in no material and durable good, we define the labour involved in this production as immaterial labour- that is labour that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication” (Hardt & Negri 2001, 290). In a late-capitalist, postindustrial era, changes in flows of capital are redirected to the production of services and other forms of immaterial goods. Important to keep in mind are the innovative aspects of the Operaismo vision of immaterial production because it makes us aware that immaterial goods such as knowledge, information and cultural objects are ‘produced.’ However, we should also be more attentive to power relations inherent to immaterial labour and goods. Nick Dyer-Witheford (2001) for example delivers a critical response to the use of the terminology in Hardt & Negri’s Empire because it suggests a reference to a privileged form of labour that is not accounted for by the writers. In Dyer-Witheford’s perspective, the term immateriality remains suggestive: The new circuits of capital, it could be argued, look a lot less ‘immaterial’ and ‘intellectual’ to the female and Southern workers who do so much of the gruelling physical toil demanded by a capitalist “general intellect” whose metropolitan headquarters remain preponderantly male and Northern (Dyer-Witheford 2001, 71).

Also from a feminist point of view, the problem is that Operaismotheory tends to formulate a political critique for a society without sufficiently accounting for gender relations, contextual specificities and local differences (Clough 2007; Weeks 2007; Fortunati 2007). What these feminist critiques of Operaismo-theory have in common is that despite wishing to overcome the binaries that have long haunted Western thought, the writers nonetheless have fallen in the trap of universalist accounts of society. Similar to Dyer-Witheford, who also mentions the missing aspect of gender in Hardt and Negri’s terminology of immateriality (2001, 73); the feminist scholar Angela McRobbie accuses Hardt and Negri of not accounting for the feminization of the labour force (McRobbie 2010, 62). Gender is by them not at all taken as an object of critique. She argues that

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with the rise of media culture, capitalist processes such as consumption and spending have become gendered and feminized (McRobbie 2010, 66). McRobbie mentions that Hardt and Negri displayed a celebrative attitude towards communication- and media technologies and in this logic regard women as mere figurations of the post-industrial informational economy as they came to embody processes of mobility and transition (McRobbie 2010, 68). However, in McRobbie’s view, media culture is not enforcing the mobility of women but instead fixes them in the confined role of consumer. In my view, McRobbie highlights an important aspect of contemporary media culture by showing that also in immaterial industries, the position of women as objects remains fixed and unchanged. Her argument stimulated me to think about the position of fashion models in the immaterial production of fashion that is similarly organized to enhance a precarious labour position. I will come back to this argument later. Another point of objection is that Operaismo theory fails to account for other, related academic trends: Operaismo theory acknowledges the role of gender in changed notions of labour and the extensive feminist research on labour, they have not enhanced a discussion about the body and corporeality or how these notions could enrich their notions of immaterial labour. In fact, the relation between matter and immateriality is not sufficiently discussed. At this point, a feminist Marxist critique of immaterial labour would allow us to perceive this distinctive flaw in Operaismo notions of immaterial labour and production and show that the focus on immateriality is deceptive. After all, materiality in feminist materialisms was first and foremost taken up as an economical notion, following the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The historical materialist work of the feminist Marxists raises questions about the novelty of the theoretical Operaismo framework. Both Kathi Weeks (2007) and Leopoldina Fortunati (2007)—who have mingled themselves in the immaterial labour debate— arguing that already in the 1970’s, feminist Marxists brought the material and bodily labour performed by women under the attention of Marxist theories. Therefore, Marxist feminism can be viewed as being an early form of materialist feminism (Hennesey 1993). In masculinist Marxism, material labour is a reference to industrial, productive labour. Feminist Marxists have hotly debated domestic labour in relation to Marxist theories of exploitation, arguing that the domain of the home was a locus of capitalist control where material production was still dominant: “when work was typically still equated with waged production and material goods” (Weeks 2007, 235). Feminist Marxists scrutinized differences between material labour and were focused on their political goal to overcome the binary opposition

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between work that ‘economically matters’ and unwaged reproductive labour. The feminist Marxists partly succeeded: the women’s movement of the 1970s opened up the labour market for women. However, I think that feminist Marxist critiques have not been devaluated by recent societal and economic movements and changes. Their critique is still relevant for our times. What is important for the present discussion is that from a feminist Marxist perspective, we are able to argue that the ‘new’ global economy has not changed the gendered model of labour. Gender, sexuality and race remain structural mechanisms in the labour market as McRobbie (2010) argued. Fortunati further proceeds on this Marxist feminist critique in the current post-Marxist discussion of immaterial labour. Her critique of the Operaismo treatment of labour lays bare that theories of immaterial labour have overlooked the sphere of unwaged, reproductive labour that has been traditionally and still is performed by women outside of the labour market: But this debate, which developed in relation to aspects of the immaterial and the sphere of the individual, I argue, completely ignored the material labour of the domestic sphere (cleaning the house, cooking, shopping, washing and ironing clothes) and above all, ignored the labour done in order to produce individuals (sex, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and care), as well as the other fundamental parts of the immaterial sphere (affect, care, love education, socialization, communication, information, entertainment, organization, planning, coordination, logistics) (Fortunati 2007, 140).

According to Fortunati Operaismo-theories tend to celebrate new technologies and the way these affect the population without fully accounting for the different inequalities that even in this post-industrial global society remain existent. In Fortunati’s view the post-Marxist writers also have not fully accounted for the material labour in the immaterial sphere either because in their work they have chosen to rather concentrate on shifts in the global labour market or focused on how immaterial production and labour has entered this domain instead of how material labour is being performed in the immaterial sphere of labour. In my view, Fortunati points to an important flaw in Operaismo-theories of immaterial labour. With an almost exclusive focus on material industrial labour, Operaismo ignored the immaterial, domestic sphere of labour as the place where reproductive labour was being performed by women. Marx did not account for the material labour performed by women in the home because, after all, women did not produce material ‘things’ or ‘goods.’ Fortunati quotes Marx who has called these manifestations of reproductive labour in

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the immaterial domain so “insignificant, if we compare them to the whole of production, that they can be completely ignored” (2007, 139). Fortunati employs the same feminist Marxist critique to her critique of the Operaismo notion of immaterial production. The main critique of feminists to Marx was, Fortunati explains, based on his concept of ‘labour value’ by which he means to describe economic valorization of labour power in a direct, causal relation to production “labour that is not separable from the act of production” (Fortunati 2007, 140). Operaismotheories seem to seek the solution for immaterial labour valorization in Marx’s concept of surplus value exceeding his concept of labour value: “a general productivity of the social body - dispersed through technologies and human bodies, connected in new, shifting assemblages” (Terranova 2006, 29). However, it is a question if the position of other, oftentimes less mobile bodies in immaterial spheres of production is attended in both Marxist concepts of ‘labour value’ and ‘surplus value.’ In fact, both concepts lack to perceive the body at all. Fashion modeling is an ultimate example to illustrate this position in the debate.

Bodily labour, corporeality and affective transmission In this section I make a plea to understand fashion modeling not in terms of immaterial labour, as a theory of labour value intends doing, but to see acts of labour separate from production, thus as material labour. Modeling is for the most part a waged form of labour. Fashion workers are engaged in the immaterial production of “fashion.” However, in fashion modeling there is clearly the case of a ‘mismatch’ in labour value because there is no direct relation between the act of production and labour: fashion modeling is material labour, even though it is performed in the immaterial spheres of cultural production. Their participation in the production of fashion is practiced on corporeal and bodily levels. Thus, I want to claim here that models through material ‘bodily’ labour are engaged in immaterial production of the fashion image industry. So why do I want to define fashion modeling as material and not as immaterial? This is because of the fundamental role of the body in modeling: similar to athletes, actors, sexworkers and domestic labourers, models have learned to employ the potentiality of their bodies as commodities in transforming postures into affective looks spurring emotions. Fashion modeling is a job in which an understanding of once own embodied potential is central: “because, above all, it demands creativity with both body and mind” (Mears 2011, 118). These corporeal aspects not necessarily refer to physical aspects of productive labour. Therefore, to see fashion modeling as bodily material

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labour and not as immaterial, we are able to understand more about the corporeal and material elements of labour. But what exactly are these corporeal traits of fashion modeling? To answer this question, I propose the turn to a theory of affect. I think that a grounded use of affect can make us more aware about the corporeal roots of labour and the affective capacities of the image. Although the problem with the use of the umbrella term ‘affect’ is often the vagueness of the vocabulary as well as proliferating academic discourses that are using the term differently (Hemmings 2005). In particular, I am building my argument on a biological explanation of affect in visual images, as described by Teresa Brennan in terms of affective transmission: “[v]isual images, like auditory traces, also have a direct physical impact; their reception involves the activation of neurological networks, stimulated by spectrum vibrations at various frequencies” (Brennan 2004, 10). Although Brennan writes about the reception of images, she also writes that images constitute transmissions between individuals and surrounding contexts such as the context of production. This transmission of affect between bodies is what she calls “a process that is social in origin but biological and physical in effect. By the transmission of affect, I mean simply that the emotions or affects of one person, and the energies these affects entail, can enter into another” (Brennan 2004, 3). By stating that fashion modeling is a form of corporeal and material labour, I point to the potential differences of labour. Labour is not only a practice of producing concrete goods or the immaterial production of information. Fashion modeling exemplifies how labour is potentially perceived as corporeal and how a theory of affect a combined view on the body, technology and culture is possible (Wissinger 2007b, 232). The feminist sociologist Elisabeth Wissinger who has written about the social role of affect in fashion modeling that certainly seems to refer to Brennan’s social/biological concept of affect. Wissinger describes the labour of fashion model in terms of the interplay between “shifts in energy” and the ultimate goal of modeling work in terms of affective stimulation and production: Models are often admonished to produce energy in this way. Their work is more physically expressive than verbal; successful models can be exquisite communicators without saying a word. What I found most intriguing about their work is that in order to succeed, most models have to develop a kind of sixth sense about the kind of energy they have to work with; in so doing, they become attuned to shifts in energy occurring below the surface of awareness (Wissinger 2007, 259).

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Wissinger’s use of the term affect fits in the corpus of theory of the ‘affective turn’ in the social-sciences and the humanities which elaborates on the co-functioning of the human body, technology and culture (Clough 2007). Wissinger’s description of fashion modeling in terms of affect fits Patricia Clough’s definition of affect as the bodily capacity “to act, to engage, and to affect a substrate of potential bodily responses, often autonomic responses, in excess of consciousness” (Clough 2007, 2); as well as Susanna Paasonen’s conceptualizations about the constructive functions of affect that “results from encounters between bodies, connects them and gives rise to diverse sensations and forms of knowledge” (Paasonen 2011, 69). The concept of affect resolves some of the difficulties when focusing on the relation and forces between in this case at least four entities: the body, labour, production and the visual image. Thinking affect as a capacity of the living body, helps us to understand how modeling as a labour practice co-emerges in relation with the visual image: affect emerges at the very bodily roots of material labour and therefore participates in the immaterial production of the image. Through the concept of affect we are able to explain that the fashion image no longer matters exclusively as an image but “as an active corporeal presence” (Negrin 2013, 142). Furthermore, a focus on the corporeal aspects of labour helps to associate labour and production less strictly than a Marxist view of labour value. Perceiving fashion models as fashion workers increases our understanding about the material production of images and visual culture. Perhaps in the near future, we would notice the presence of fashion models in the images we see around us and acknowledge the affective transmission between the image and the body.

Conclusion I want to conclude this article by repeating my statement that fashion models as fashion workers are engaged in the ‘immaterial production’ of the image. As I have illustrated in the description of the image 4.1, the modeling industry is a concrete industry that is organized to produce fashion models as fashion workers and facilitate the material and corporeal roots of image production. This was basically the first aim of this article, namely to enable a located perspective of the fashion model on the power relations, social practices and visual conventions in fashion images. Secondly, fashion models as fashion workers participate in the immaterial production of images. In this regard, I stated that fashion

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models offer another perspective on immaterial production. While discussing the terminology, I made a plea to re-value the feminist Marxist critique of labour value to explore how fashion modeling creates an productive tension—or what I have called ‘a mismatch’—between the Marx’ supposed causality between production and act of labour. Their situation supports a feminist critique of the immaterial production debate showing how most masculinist theories of labour insufficiently account for the differences between spheres of labour and production. My last aim was to combine a perspective on immaterial production and labour with a focus on the image. The labour of fashion models is foremost bodily and can be defined in the material terms of energy and affect. Drawn from my own experiences, I have learned how to work and play with the camera and to transmit the right emotions. This corporeal aspect of labour vital to the production of image cannot be explained in a vocabulary most theories of labour provide. Thus grounded in the affective turn, I argued that a theory of affect and in particular the biological idea of affective transmission described by Brennan, Paasonen and Clough is a promising path to assess the corporeal roots of visual conventions and immaterial production.

References Buikema, Rosemarie and Marta Zarzycka. 2011. “Visual Cultures: Feminist Perspectives.” In Theories and Methodologies in Postgraduate Feminist Research, edited by Rosemarie Buikema, Gabriele Griffin and Nina Lykke. London; New York: Routledge. Clough, Patricia and Jean Halley, eds. 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Clough, Patricia and Jean Halley. 2008. “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies.” Theory Culture Society 25(4):1-22. Dyer, Nick Witheford. 2001. “Empire, Immaterial Labor, the New Combinations, and the Global Worker, Rethinking Marxism.” A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 13(3):70-80. Hardt, Michael. 1999. “Affective Labor.” Boundary 26(2):89-100. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2001. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 1999. Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. Hemmings, Clare. 2005. “Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn.” Cultural Studies 19(5):548-67. Hennesey, Rosemary. 1992. Materialist Feminism and the Politics of

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Discourse (Thinking Gender). London; New York: Routledge. Fortunati, Leopoldina. 2007. “Immaterial Labor and its Machinization.” Ephemera 7(1):139-57. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 1996. “Immaterial Labor.” In Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, translated by Paul Colilli and Ed Emery, edited by Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. Marcus, George E. and Erkan Saka. 2006. “Assemblages.” Theory, Culture and Society 23(2-3):101-06. McRobbie, Angela. 2011. “Reflections on Feminism, Immaterial Labour and the Post-Fordist Regime.” New formations 70(1):60-76. Mears, Ashley. 2011. Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model. Oakland: University of California Press. Negrin, Llewllyn. 2013. “Fashion as Embodied Art Form.” In Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts, edited by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt. New York: I.B. Tauris. Paasonen, Susanna. 2011. Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Terranova, Tiziana. 2006. “Of Sense and Sensibility: Immaterial Labour in Open Systems.” Curating Immateriality. New York: Autonomedia. Virno, Paolo & Michael Hardt. 1996. Radical Thoughts in Italy: A Potential Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Weeks, Kathi. 2007. “Life Within and Against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics.” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 7(1):233-49. Wissinger, Elizabeth. 2007. “Modelling a Way of Life.” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 7(1):250-69. —. 2007b. “Always on Display: Affective Production in the Modeling Industry.” In The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, edited by Patricia Clough and Jean Halley. Durham; London: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER SIX “I DIDN’T KNOW THAT I DO NOT KNOW”: WRITING THE FEMININE IN ANNE ENRIGHT’S WHAT ARE YOU LIKE MARIËLLE SMITH

Figure 6.1 Bracha L. Ettinger, Woman-Other-Thing, n. 12. 1990-1993. Oil and mixed techniques on paper mounted on canvas. 30x29,5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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Introduction When I look at Bracha L. Ettinger’s Woman-Other-Thing, No. 12, I discern the image of a doll and a fragment of Sigmund Freud’s 1914 essay On Narcissism. At first I wondered which of the two was ‘on top’. Was the text covering the image, making it less visible, or was the image drawing attention away from the text? My questions were answered by Ettinger herself, who explained to me via e-mail that “we cannot say if the text is on top of the visual figure or the visual figure on top of the text […]” (Ettinger, pers. comm.). My next question was what the two represented, and Ettinger told me that, through the text “Freud gives his version about maleness and femaleness .... and then through the visual I give mine ....” (ibid.). This reminded me of the literary work of Irish novelist Anne Enright. In my research of her prose, I discerned a struggle between two different perspectives on masculinity and femininity; one taking a phallic Freudian view and one more in line with the branch of French feminist philosophy that considers the womb as vital to our understanding of femininity. Through her playful questioning of the limitations of language, Enright is able to demonstrate that something meaningful is happening on a level that goes beyond her protagonists’ understanding of the self. As such, her protagonists are always struggling to give meaning to events and emotions that they cannot put into words: whenever they try to make sense of it, language fails them. In most of her work, if not all, this ‘level’ can be traced back to the maternal womb. The tension I found in Woman-Other-Thing, No. 12 is similar to the one I came across in Enright’s fiction. In both cases, the hegemonic tools at my disposal—language and the Freudian text that inspired our notion of the linguistic system—could not explain the presence of this other level that was clearly seeping through the words on the canvas and the paper. What draws me to this specific struggle is that, despite language’s inability to include this ‘other story’ into its linguistic framework, the latter‘s presence cannot be denied. In her critique on French feminist philosophers such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, renee c. hoogland argues that “the assertion of sexual difference by way of positing the ‘feminine’ as that which falls outside the symbolic order eventually cannot but reinforce the very foundation of patriarchal thought, i.e. the notion of the female body as the site of excess to the (male) cogito” (hoogland 1991, 19). I, too, have trouble with this notion and not only because it sustains phallic structures; it prevents us from theorising the ‘feminine’ as something that, as both Ettinger and Enright demonstrate in their work, is already part of our world, shining through the gaps left within phallic reasoning.

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Although Ettinger acknowledges the hegemonic patriarchal system for what it is, she also argues that another story, one that does justice to the feminine, exists within its limited boundaries. Like Enright’s narratives, Ettinger’s story begins in the womb. She argues that one’s subjectivity does not have its onset in the child’s submission to phallic law, when the child breaks with the mother and identifies with or attaches itself to the father. Phallic—Freudian/Lacanian—subjectivity begins here, but according to Ettinger this is not the only subjective level. For her, subjectivity has its onset in an event situated within the ‘feminine field’ she has called the “matrixial borderspace”: the intrauterine encounter between mother and child (Ettinger 2006a, 64). Although this feminine dimension exists before the symbolic order, it is not merely pre-Oedipal. The child’s first encounter with this feminine sphere happens before the Oedipal plot makes itself known, but knowledge of this sphere remains ingrained within the subject’s psyche throughout its life (ibid.). Within the Oedipal plot knowledge of this sphere should be repressed, but, as she demonstrates in Woman-Other-Thing, No. 12, Ettinger argues that the phallic stratum does not foreclose the presence of a feminine one. The two are both already present and interacting; all we need is to find a way to discuss those “elements of subjectivity that phallocentrism cannot articulate, fantasise or symbolise” (Pollock 2009, 9). As already said, it is through the womb that the trouble Enright’s protagonists have in understanding their selves can be explained. In Enright’s Man Booker Prize winning novel The Gathering (2008), for example, the protagonist relates her uncanny relationship to her brother to the mere two months between the time that the one was born and their mother become pregnant with the other (Enright 2008, 11; Smith 2013). Although I would indeed argue that this feminine narrative is present in most of Enright’s literary work, it is in her second novel What Are You Like? (2001) that the struggle between the phallic and the feminine is most central. In a similar fashion to Ettinger in Woman-Other-Thing, No. 12, in What Are You Like? Enright demonstrates how the feminine stratum interacts with the dominant phallic one, making visible a layer of meaning that we thought foreclosed. In this chapter, I will analyse the presence of this feminine stratum in What Are You Like? and how it manifests itself in the lives of the two main characters: the twin sisters Maria and Rose. I will also analyse how they deal with its presence. In my analysis I will argue that Enright does not merely make this level present, but that she, when we interpret her work from within a theoretical framework that understands the intricate play between the feminine and a world that believes itself to have no place for

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it, goes a long way to do justice to the feminine, the maternal and women.

What do we need to forget in order to live? What Are You Like? tells the story of two identical twin sisters—Maria Delahunty and Rose Cotter/Marie Delahunty—who have been separated at birth and do not meet each other until the end of the narrative. In this disorganised and non-chronological narrative, an external narrator discusses the events and lives of a group of people knowingly and unknowingly connected to each other. Most of the characters are given the focal point somewhere in the narrative, such as Maria, Rose, their father Berts, their mother Anna, Berts’ second wife Evelyn, and Sr Maura Reynolds, the nun who took care of the adoption of Rose. In the seventh chapter, the only chapter narrated by one of the characters, Anna speaks from her grave. Throughout the novel, both female and male characters are troubled by the presence of a past that they try but fail to repress. Because of this, boundaries are never as clear as the characters would like them to be. No matter how hard they try, the world continues to “bulge and push”, is full of “gaps and holes” and their lives are constantly interrupted by things that are forgotten and/or cannot be named (Enright 2001, 5, 194). Within what Jacques Lacan calls the symbolic order—the social, linguistic and economic structures of our society—it is necessary for the subject to understand the self as a coherent entity (Lacan 2007, 78-79). Before a child can enter this order, it has to go through the Oedipal process, for Freud, and the Mirror stage, for Lacan (ibid.). During this period, the child acquires language, learns to differentiate between itself and its maternal environment, and takes up its designated position vis-à-vis the symbolic phallus, the signifier of power. Since the child’s entrance into the symbolic order is, according to traditional Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic thinking, premised on the split from the maternal environment, it is this pre-symbolic sphere that “we need to forget in order to live” (Ettinger 2012). However, for the characters in What Are You Like? the maternal sphere does not belong entirely to the past: it is always there, lurking around the corner, affecting their sense of self in a most debilitating way. The narrative begins with the newborn Maria, and Berts’ need for a second wife, which he soon finds in Evelyn. From Maria’s early life onwards Berts and Evelyn suggest that something must be horribly wrong with her, because “[s]he was not enough” (Enright 2001, 5, 14-15). Whether this is due to the absent mother or the absence of both mother and sister remains implicit: both Berts and Evelyn are afraid of what Maria might turn into when she grows up, but only Berts knows that Maria has a

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twin sister. Despite the absence of her mother and sister, there is a presence in Maria’s life that she cannot name and that makes her question her identity. When Maria moves to New York and falls in love with a boy named Anton, she finds a photograph of Rose in his bag. Despite the shock, it also makes complete sense to her: “She had always felt like someone else. She had always felt like the wrong girl” (Enright 2001, 37). Being confronted with this kind of proof, Maria reminisces the day of her holy communion, where she lost sight of Berts. When she found him, another girl was walking by his side and the six or seven-year-old Maria wondered for a moment whether that girl was actually her (Enright 2001, 31). When Maria receives the photographs of that day, she again wonders who she is looking at: “This is the other girl. Maybe it is the girl in the communion dress that she saw with Berts” (Enright 2001, 35). In Rose’s life there’s is a similar presence. She may feel incomplete, having “the kind of mind where nothing was ever enough”, but when asked about her being adopted something comes to the surface that she does not know how to express: “Rose felt all her features jumble and strain. Her face was full of people she did not know, and they were fighting their way out of her. Some woman’s mouth. Some man’s nose” (Enright 2001, 126, 129). Although Rose is much more concerned with finding what she thought she had lost—her biological mother—throughout the novel, there is also something already inside of her desperate to get out and make itself known (Enright 2001, 137). Throughout the novel there is an explicit “transconnection” between the sisters and their mother (Mulhall 2012, 273). Explicit for the reader, that is, because they themselves cannot make sense of it. Particular bits of information are present that connect these women, demonstrating a feminine link. The sisters have been in love with the same boy and it is through him that Maria finds out that Rose exists. Rose imagines what it must feel like to watch someone kill herself around the same time Maria is trying to take her own life (Enright 2001, 156-158). On their separate ways to Dublin, they both think of strings of DNA when their bags go through X-ray at the airport (Enright 2001, 163, 218). When Rose attends a funeral without a body, she imagines the coffin on a baggage carousel, endlessly circling (Enright 2001, 192). A year earlier, Maria is taken to a mental ward after being found at the baggage carousel of Dublin airport, looking at her endlessly circling baggage, waiting for the ‘other girl’ to claim her bags and her life (Enright 2001, 162). Maria gets angry at the sight of crockery after visiting her mother’s parental home with Berts, which echoes in the peculiar relationship Anna had with crockery when she was pregnant and dying of a brain tumour (Enright 2001, 5). During

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her stay, Maria is continuously surrounded by the image of roses, which has, according to Mulhall, become the "embodied ‘sign’”' of the trauma done to mother and daughters (Mulhall 2012, 273). When pregnant, Anna is “drinking out of the hot tap”, an action later repeated by Rose, with the “sound of a tap dripping smel[ling] of roses” to her, and she buried “the name of flowers: wallflower, phlox, peony rose, dog rose, tea rose” (Enright 2001, 6, 247; Mulhall 2012, 274). Within traditional psychoanalytic thinking it is acknowledged that the repressed—that what we need to leave behind in order to become a subject—is able to return. Not everyone might be consciously aware of this, but to be a phallic subject means to secure one’s boundaries by keeping the past at bay. Indeed, it is the consistent presence of their feminine lineage that makes Maria and Rose unable to make sense of their lives. But what if it is not a question of returning? What if, as Ettinger claims, we never really left it? According to her, the supposedly repressed feminine sphere remains with the subject when it enters the symbolic order: “[t]he matrix informs all three registers, the originary, the primary, and the secondary, participating in the Real, the Imaginary, and the broader Symbolic” (Ettinger 2006a, 64; emphasis in original). Ettinger’s use of the term “broader” underlines her aim not to “overthrow” the Symbolic order, but to demonstrate that it can include another stratum of meaning. The symbolic order might be founded upon the idea that the feminine needs to be foreclosed in order for the subject to be, but that does not necessarily mean that we have left it behind. On the contrary, the use of psychoanalytic ideas such as ‘the return of the repressed’ already implies that the repressed feminine sphere plays a part within the symbolic order, whether traditional psychoanalytic thinkers were able to perceive it as such or not.

I remember that I do not remember anymore The undeniable presence of this feminine sphere prevents the two sisters from repressing what they supposedly need to forget in order to participate —to ‘live’—within the symbolic order. As such, they cannot draw clear lines between themselves and their environment. Although the ability to draw these lines and believe in them is deemed necessary within the phallic system, to Lacan it was actually already clear that the solid image that we see when looking into the mirror is an illusion (Lacan 2007, 76-77; Grosz 1990, 39). Although the subject, according to traditional psychoanalysis, is whole before it enters society, it is split once the Oedipal process or Mirror Stage is completed. After all, to become a subject means

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to be cut off from the mother. As a result, “we misrecognize in our mirror image a whole and coherent subject in contrast to the fragmented body and self-identity that we actually experience” (Cahill 2011, 92). Mirrors have always troubled Maria. Similar to her mother, who could not “pass a mirror without turning it to the wall”, looking into a mirror makes Maria want to “throw it across the room” (Enright 2001, 6, 24). Immediately after finding Rose’s photograph, Maria stands naked in front of the mirror in her room, feeling “completely robbed” (Enright 2001, 25). The confrontation with her sister's picture, with the “other girl”, further deteriorates Maria’s already problematic relationship to the mirror. When not at work, Maria wanders the streets of New York in search not only of Anton, who she blames for making her feel lost, but also of herself. Maria is hoping “to see herself, her old self, or a different self, passing her by and escaping down the street”, since all that is left of her own self is the “ghost of her reflection in shop windows” (Enright 2001, 55, 144). According to Susan Cahill, “Maria appears to have had an altered ‘mirror stage’” (Cahill 2011, 92). Where the mirror is supposed to help secure one’s sense of self by offering a solid image, “[f]or Maria, the mirror instead reflects back and reinforces her feelings of loss and incompleteness” (ibid.). Maria cannot believe in the phallic image offered to her by the mirror, because the mirror, instead of fooling her, reminds her that her body and self-identity are indeed fragmented. Since we are not supposed to see ourselves as such, Maria is unable to articulate what she is looking at. The same thing happened to Anna, who is speaking from her grave here, during her pregnancy: “I looked at Anna Kennedy starkers in the middle of the afternoon, with her dress around her ankles, and I could not find the words for it” (Enright 2001, 247). Trying out a couple of words—“Pink. White. Hill. Cunt. Move.”—Anna suddenly repeats a string of words that her own mother used when Anna was a little girl: “You move the tea cosy from the pot to the table, you move it to the side of the range, you turn the cosy inside out” (Enright 2001, 234, 247). Although Anna argues that when she “died the mirror went blank”, this could be no further from the truth (Enright 2001, 247). On the contrary, Maria’s “feelings of loss and incompleteness” signify the very presence of a feminine lineage. Here, the mirror does not aid repression, but makes Maria, in the words of Ettinger, remember that she does not remember anymore (Ettinger 2004, 62). Unsure of what she is supposed to remember, Maria can no longer make sense of herself within society. She is, in the narrator’s words, “in the country of the lost” (Enright 2001, 57). Maria readily admits that she “had always known it was there” but it is not until being confronted with Rose’s existence that, “now she was in it, she did not know how to get

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back out again” (ibid.). Living in this “parallel world”, full of people that no longer know how to function within the ‘real’ world, Maria loses the ability to recognise even her own reflection: “She passed a sad-looking woman who ignored her, and recognised, too late, her own reflection. Even she did not know what she looked like any more. Finally. She had wiped herself off the map” (ibid.; Enright 2001, 145). Convinced that she has finally lost herself completely, Maria tries to take her own life and is admitted to a mental ward in Dublin. Within Rose’s life the mirror is not an overly present trope. While Maria knew that her mother died and that she would never see her again, Rose is convinced for the first twenty-one years of her life that she, one day, will meet her mother and that everything she does not understand about her herself will be made clear. The undeniable presence of a feminine genealogy does not immediately lead Rose to lose control over her life. On the contrary, her hope for a happy ending seems to dominate the tragic feminine story that tries to make itself known. It is around the time that Maria finds her photograph that Rose, too, begins to lose control over her life. However, it is not until Rose learns that her biological mother died in childbirth that the mirror becomes significant. After hearing the news, Rose is so confused that she first wanders through the streets of London, like Maria did in New York after finding the photograph. She decides to visit her adoption parents, and, when she enters the door to their home, “she was startled by her own reflection in the coatstand mirror” (Enright 2001, 167). Although it is not made explicit what made her startle, it is clear that Rose’s hope of ever finding her biological mother and, as a result, to find out who she is, is now lost. What else is lost, according to Rose, is the link between them: “[a]ll her life, she had been attached by an invisible rope and when, finally, she got around to tugging on it there was no one holding the other end” (Enright 2001, 166). Obviously, that invisible rope is still there: it is hereafter that Anna, and Maria, become more present through the “verbal and gestural inscriptions” that echo through Rose’s life: the hot tap, the baggage carrousel, the suicide attempt, and so on (Mulhall 2011, 83). Rose, however, is so convinced that she has lost that link forever due to her mother’s death, that it’s continuing and growing presence only makes her more confused about herself.

What do we need to remember in order to live? When Maria is released from the mental ward she was admitted to after her suicide attempt she becomes stuck in space and time. Not literally— she has a room she goes home to every night—but figuratively. Except for

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three lines, in which her walk home from work is narrated, her life, from the moment she is released from hospital until she meets Rose, takes place within the mirrored walls of the fitting room she is in charge of (Enright 2001, 188). This is not without a reason. As Maria explains to Evelyn, “she was waiting for something”, “though she did not know what she was waiting for” (Enright 2008, 63, 180). Spending almost her entire time in a room where mirrors are the most important attribute, Maria “tried to forget what she was looking at” (Enright 2001, 201). Not because she does not recognise the person in the mirror— “as she straightened up, Maria caught a glimpse of her own eyes”—but because she always saw more than just herself: “She was someone else again. [...] Some days she was just nothing. Some days she was a woman who was just waiting for herself to walk in the door” (Enright 2001, 202; my emphasis). Although she admits she “knew this feeling and was not afraid of it”, it makes it impossible for her to be an active member within society (Enright 2001, 180). While Maria has become a passive bystander watching her life pass by, Rose seems too active in her attempt to come to terms with her past. Determined to figure out who she is sooner rather than later, she forecloses an understanding of the female link that has found a way into her life. She has not foreclosed its presence—it is there, whether Rose likes it or not— but Rose does not take the time to figure out what it could mean. She, therefore, also feels robbed of herself when she runs into Maria in the latter’s fitting room: “It was true, she thought, she did not exist. [...] Rose Cotter, Marie Delahunty. Everything she had done—the hard choices, the willed compassion, her difficult educated heart—all a joke” (Enright 2001, 253). Instead of seeing the child as coming into the world through a separation from the mother, Ettinger argues that mother and child coemerge: they come into life together. From a matrixial perspective, one’s subjectivity is thus based on becoming with and not on separating from. There is as such no symbiosis: mother and child are definitely part of each other but they are never truly one. They are also not two: their interdependence makes it impossible to see the mother and the child as two entirely separate beings. Because the subject is always already part of something outside of its self, it was never whole. When we look into a mirror, we are thus not merely trying to believe in something we once were, we are trying to see ourselves as we have never been. We might need to believe in that image to participate in the symbolic order, but that does not take away the fact that, if looked at from a matrixial point of view, we become only through connection. Within the phallic system the subject needs to understand the self as

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one and the other can therefore only be perceived as “a parasite destined for annihilation either by assimilation or by banishment” (Ettinger 2006a: 111). After all, within a phallic understanding of the self, the other is seen as threat. Within the matrixial sphere, subjectivity must be understood as subjectivity-as-encounter, the first encounter being the one between mother and child. As such, in this sphere, “the stranger [...] cannot be articulated as a parasite and cannot be rejected” because it is crucial to our becoming (ibid.; emphasis in original). Since a matrixial encounter calls for the subject not to harden itself against to other, as it has learned to, but to allow for “the transgression of individual boundaries”, it cannot take place without a certain experience of pain and anxiety (Ettinger 2006b: 219). Before Maria and Rose met they were unable to share the trauma that they suffered during their birth because it was silenced and supposedly foreclosed. When they meet in Maria’s fitting room, they cannot but share it. Despite Maria seeming more ready—she has been waiting for this moment ever since she was released from the mental ward—both sisters need time to allow for a “self-relinquishment and fragilization” of their selves (ibid.). Maria was already aware of her own fragility, but she did not embrace it; she merely waited for things to change. Rose has not even accepted her fragility yet, so when they meet; it takes time for them to access the situation: “[t]he thing that amazed them both afterwards was the time it all took” (Enright 2001, 253). After they turn away from each other, Rose cannot help but think “about the woman in the corner, who looked just like her” (ibid.). Maria immediately realises that Rose “is the girl in the photograph. Or rather, the girl in her mind” (ibid.). Despite the pieces of the puzzle falling into place, it takes a while for them to resist the “paranoid tendencies of one’s own self” (Ettinger 2009, 3). Their initial reaction is, after all, a phallic one: they both see the other as a threat to their sense of self, as someone that robs them of their identity. Allowing time for the encounter to happen, Maria and Rose eventually “yield to and tolerate this fragile positioning vis-à-vis their I, the Other, and the world” (Ettinger 2006a, 143). No longer avoiding the matrixial link that went unacknowledged throughout their lives, and accepting that the other does not pose a threat, they can finally relax: “they each took two steps. Who was it raised her hand first. Perhaps it was Rose. Who was it laughed?” (Enright 2001, 253). When the two sisters arrive at Maria’s parental home, it becomes clear that their encounter challenges the limited boundaries of the linguistic system. Evelyn merely utters “‘This is amazing,’” and when Berts tries to put it into words, we are offered a confused account of events:

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At three o’clock, the taxi pulled up and he saw his daughter getting out, twice. He saw his daughter pay the driver while his daughter put her hand to her throat and looked at the house. He saw his daughter walk up the path while his daughter shut the gate. He saw his daughter smile at his daughter, who was also smiling. He saw his daughter look his way, while his daughter looked his way, and he saw one of them nod hello (Enright 2001, 251).

When the two girls go to England to meet Rose’s adoption parents, Mr Cotter’s account is similarly confusing, and full of contradictions: He smiled at them both, but particularly at Rose. He looked at one girl who was not his daughter, and at another girl who was not his daughter, and thought that life was a cruel bonus. He had no difficulty in telling between them, alike as they were. And he was interested to discover that he loved them both equally, though he preferred his own. (Enright 2001, 257)

To understand and give meaning to the feminine link that bound and brought the two sisters together, we thus need to venture outside of the linguistic system and into the affective realm. That its limitations call for sacrifice already became explicit when Maura Reynolds, the Sister who took care of Rose’s adoption, explains the origin of her chosen name Mater Misericordiæ, Mother of Mercy. She had read the name when she was a child, and what “she liked best was the way the A and the E stuck together” (Enright 2001, 82). Since the Latin diphthong “wasn’t grammatical, apparently”, she “had to lose the ‘e’” and accept the name Misericordia when she became a nun (ibid.). When she meets Berts, she is abhorred to learn that he wants to separate the twins and that he, after naming Maria, refuses to name his second daughter (Enright 2001, 87). Despite her own sacrifice, Mater Misericordia still believes A and E to belong together, and this is why she names the second child Marie (Enright 2001, 89). Although it, being ungrammatical, exists outside of the linguistic system, she uses the Latin diphthong in what seems to be an attempt to do justice to the connection between the two sisters and undo the atrocity committed by the girls’ father, a man who does not understand why he cannot separate the girls. Although the linguistic system might never be fully able to address their feminine connection, this does not keep the two sisters from acknowledging the presence of this non-phallic dimension in their lives. In the end, it is the combination of both a feminine and a phallic understanding of the self that enables Maria and Rose to spend their lives together. Maria even discovers that the co-existence of these two levels makes life better: “[t]he fact that there were two of them made it somehow

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easy. They could be happy and sad at the same time” (Enright 2001, 254). It is not easy to tolerate one’s matrixial vulnerability alongside a phallic understanding of the self. Now Maria and Rose realise what they “need to remember in order to live”—their matrixial encounter—they are able to share their lives without being further traumatised (Ettinger 2012).

To forget that we needed to forget In Woman-Other-Thing, No. 12 two strata are at work. There is the phallic level, signified by Freud’s hegemonic text. There is also the feminine level, represented through the image of the doll. Although I, at first, was determined to figure out which of the two strata was dominant within the painting, I eventually realised that this was beside the point. It is not a question of either/or: they are both present. As such, it is not about uncovering another possible story and deciding which one is preferred in one’s life. Obviously, the phallic text has been used to cover up the feminine story, but that does not mean that the phallic framework in itself forecloses it. Indeed, these two dimensions are not antagonists per se. I was the one trying to determine which of the two was “winning the fight”, and it took quite some time before I realised that this struggle was happening in me and not on the canvas. At the end of What Are You Like? the same conclusion is reached. In the closing pages, Maria has become an active agent in her life again. She is no longer stuck in space and time, but living a life with Rose. Rose, too, gained back control over her life once she acknowledged the feminine presence in her life. She is no longer frantically searching for her own self; this self gradually unfolds itself in front of her after when she meets Maria. The struggle in their lives only existed because they did not know how to acknowledge the feminine stratum next to their phallic understanding of their selves. This struggle did not end when one stratum gained control over the other; it ended when the two dimensions were placed side by side. As Cahill rightly points out, “[d]espite the sense of potentiality that the twins’ encounter with each other produces, the narrative remains troubling about the place of the mother” (Cahill 2006, 207). Indeed, before the sisters meet, their mother Anna is overtly present in their lives but she becomes absent when the secret of their birth unfolds. Berts, for example, finally agrees to let Evelyn remove the carpet that reminded him of Anna and that he therefore refused to let go of, and when Rose mentions she would like to visit her mother’s grave, he avoids telling her where it is (Enright 2001, 219, 255). Nevertheless, Cahill has to admit that Enright

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“goes some way toward making the position of the mother explicit and offering an attempt at symbolisation” (Cahill 2006: 209). Although I understand Cahill’s concern, Enright’s treatment of Anna reminds me of Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s description of Eurydice, a recurring figure in Ettinger’s artistic and theoretical work. According to Buci-Glucksmann, Eurydice is “a proto-image, an image that exists before there is any image” (Buci-Glucksmann 2012, 69). Like Eurydice, Anna is “something that cannot be described, something vacillating and fleeting” (ibid.). She is a “‘matricial’ figure” “that forces us to think, and paint, with and against the self in order to survive the trauma and the infamy” (ibid.). Enright might not be able to return the mother figure fully in What Are You Like?, but in her attempt to recover the feminine she goes a very long way in thinking with and against the self in order to make present the matrixial feminine sphere that Anna is an intrinsic part of. Enright does so not only through showing that this sphere is present within the subject; she makes explicit that her characters might not “survive the trauma and the infamy” if they refuse to acknowledge it. It is, after all, not the presence of the matrixial in itself that troubles the subject; it is the fact that we “didn't know that [we] do not know” (Ettinger 2004, 62). In other words, it is only when a phallic understanding of subjectivity is the only understanding available that “a certain dimension of the feminine does become psychotic” (Ettinger 2006a, 69; emphasis in original). Foreclosing the feminine is thus not what keeps us sane, as the disturbed characters in What Are You Like? clearly demonstrate. It is only when they realise that the feminine was always already there, despite their attempts to forget about its existence, that their lives are saved.

References Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. 2012. “Eurydice’s Becoming-World.” In Art as Compassion, edited by Catherine de Zegher and Griselda Pollock. Brussels: ASA Publishers. Cahill, Susan. 2006. Bodyscapes: Mapping the Body in the Novels of Anne Enright, Colum McCann, and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne. PhD dissertation: University College Dublin. —. 2011. “‘Dreaming of Upholstered Breasts’, or, How to Find your Way Back Home: Dislocation in What Are You Like?” In Anne Enright, edited by Claire Bracken and Susan Cahill. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Enright, Anne. 2008. The Gathering. London: Vintage. —. 2001. What Are You Like? London: Vintage.

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Lacan, Jacques. 2007. Écrits. London; New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Ettinger, Bracha L. 2004. “A Coil Withdraws Inside a Coil or: Traces of Trauma of the Other—Inside the Autistic Kernel.” Poiesis: A Journal of the Arts and Communication 6:62-67. —. e-mail message to the author, February 25, 2013. —. 2012. “Fragilizing the Self, Resisting the System: A Four Part Event with Bracha L. Ettinger.” Paper presented at Room: Red Scar in the Sky, Purple Scar in Ourselves. Resisting the Self, Resisting Endless Fragmentation, Utrecht, The Netherlands, April 18. —. 2009. “Fragilization and Resistance.” Studies in the Maternal 1(2):131. —. 2006a. The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 2006b. “Matrixial Trans-subjectivity.” Theory, Culture & Society. 23:218-22. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1990. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. Durham; London: Routledge. Mulhall, Anne. 2011. “Now the Blood is in the Room: The Spectral Feminine in the Work of Anne Enright.” In Anne Enright, edited by Claire Bracken and Susan Cahill. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. —. 2012. “This is where my Head Begins: Things, Trauma and Feminine Proximities.” Poligrafi 17(67-68):253-76. Pollock, Griselda. 2009. “Mother Trouble: The Maternal-Feminine in Phallic and Feminist Theory in Relation to Bracha Ettinger’s Elaboration of Matrixial Ethics/Aesthetics.” Studies in the Maternal 1(1):1-31. Smith, Mariëlle. 2013. “Subjectivity as Encounter: Feminine Ethics in the Work of Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger and Anne Enright.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 28(3):633-45.

CHAPTER SEVEN INTIMATE ENCOUNTERS IN FUSES AND ONE NIGHT STAND SARA JANSSEN

Figure 7.1 Emilie Jouvet, ‘Red Fetish Bathroom,’ in One Night Stand, 2006.

Introduction One Night Stand, the first feature length film by French filmmaker and photographer Emilie Jouvet, premiered at the Berlin Porn Film Festival in 2006. As a no-budget DIY (Do-It-Yourself) film, it was shot and edited by Jouvet herself with a simple DV-camera. Rather than using a professional crew and actors and a pre-written script, Jouvet invited friends and acquaintances from the Parisian queer and lesbian community to bring their fantasies to life in front of the camera. This resulted in a film that consists of six independent scenes that each show a different sexual

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encounter. With its gritty, shaky camerawork and harsh lighting, and the action unfolding in dark alleyways and dim lit staircases, raunchy toilets and squeaky beds, the film has a raw, in-your-face aesthetics. The film shows a wide variety of sexual practices and bodies: from girly-girls, girls next door, and elegant parisiennes with long hair, garters, and stockings, to butches with shaven heads and dog collars, and a trans guy with fetlock and leather jacket. They have pimples, love handles, glowing red cheeks and strap-on dildos, and none of them look like your stereotypical porn star. Furthermore, Jouvet added interviews with the participants, asking them about their experiences of making the film, their motivations for being in it, and their views on pornography and sexuality. Even though the film is still straight-up pornography, the scenes are intimate at the same time. They do not focus merely on bringing to the screen “the mechanics” of the sexual act (Beugnet, 2013), but also aim to capture the ‘feel’ of the sex that is shown; the pleasure and the excitement it invokes, as well as the nervousness and the clumsiness that sometimes accompanies it. At first sight, the film Fuses, made by filmmaker, performance artist, and painter Carolee Schneemann, has very little in common with One Night Stand. Fuses was made long before One Night Stand, between 1964 and 1967 and can be described as a prototypical second-wave feminist artwork examining the representation of female sexuality and the body. Schneemann recorded herself having sex with her then boyfriend Jim Tenney, with a 16mm camera. She then altered the film by staining, burning and directly drawing on the celluloid itself. Whereas the style of One Night Stand is raw and direct, Fuses is poetic, soft, and associative, with splashes of sunlight rendering the image undistinguishable at times, and sounds of birds, the ocean, and the wind through the trees. Like Jouvet, Scheemann does not use professional porn actors. Rather, the artist herself is the protagonist of the film, together with her lover, and her cat Kitch. Even though Fuses contains hardcore sex, it displaces it at the same time, through its fragmenting editing style and treatment of the celluloid. Watching twenty minutes of almost indistinguishable body-parts and bodies, images of nature, blots of colour, burning stains, and scratches, offers a very different viewing experience than watching your average porno. It requires endurance, forcing the viewer to give up its usual distance from what is to be seen on screen, and immerse in the experience. But how to make sense of this vagueness, intensity, and confusion that makes the viewer feel, rather than see the film? Despite their differences, neither Fuses nor One Night Stand fulfils the cliché of women-made explicit images: there is no rug in front of a fireplace, no narrative to ‘get you into the mood,’ or softly whispered

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words and gentle caressing. Instead, these films exemplify powerful, convincing and feminist portrayals of female sexual agency; not because these films are somehow more artistic, alternative or tasteful than mainstream porno—even though they may be all of those things—and neither because the sexual acts they show are somehow better, or even different, than the acts portrayed in mainstream pornography. Rather, these films are feminist because they seek to convey what it feels like to have sex in a way that pays attention and does justice to the everyday sexual experiences of women, and do so in a way that allows for a non-normative understanding of the body and sexuality. They seek to do justice to the multiplicity of sensations that are distributed between bodies, and the displacement of the primacy of vision in favour of other sensory experiences that occur during a (really great) sexual encounter, thereby troubling the formulaic aspect of pornography which portrays sex as a series of prescribed and goal-oriented events, and which is focused on seeing every single detail of the technical execution of sex.

Structure Thinking through this potential of screening sex differently is not an easy task, and instead of leading to quick and definite answers, it is more likely to spur even more questions. It also entails a very different approach than the highly polarized work that makes up a lot of past feminist discussions of pornography, reaching a peak with the so-called “sex wars” of the 1980s (Chapkis 1997), and which focus on a critique of the ways in which pornographic images repeat patriarchal, and even misogynist, power structures and gender dichotomies. This chapter takes as its starting point that these kind of discussions are not very productive, for they reduce the question of pornography to being either good or bad, oppressive or liberating. Although critique is crucial to any feminist research and praxis, reducing the discussion to a question of morals is not the answer. Resisting stasis, and creating movement through the affirmation of thinking differently, of making other propositions, formulating alternatives is equally important to feminist work. This is what this chapter aims to achieve by taking up the concept of the encounter: it asks not what these films are, or what they represent, but rather what these films do, how they allow us to think otherwise about bodies and sexualities. Instead of analysing Fuses merely as a prototypical example of secondwave-feminist art, and contrasting it with the in-your-face queerness of One Night Stand, implicitly or explicitly stating a preference for one over the other as the most successful strategy for resisting traditional

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representations of female sexuality, I want to take seriously the issues they each bring to the table and the strategies they adopt to think bodies and sexualities differently. First, I engage with current debates concerning pornography and investigate how alternative pornography is usually tied to issues of identity, representation, visibility, and authenticity. Then I turn to recent developments within film studies, in particular to the concept of haptic visuality, and investigate how this epistemological shift may allow for a very different reading of alternative pornography, specifically Fuses and One Night Stand. In the last part of this chapter, I investigate how a shift from meaning-making concepts such as identity and representation, towards a consideration of aesthetics and the tactile and affective qualities of these films, allow for a reconfiguration of the body, one that might be better, or more productively, understood through Deleuze en Guattari’s concept of the machine.

Object of an Encounter In order to understand what makes Fuses and One Night Stand function as vital vehicles for a feminist intervention within visual culture, especially the genre of pornography, it is important to first take a look at how explicit portrayals of sex act are usually represented, and how these representations function as a way of naturalizing and stabilizing certain truths about what sexuality is, what a body is, and what sex looks like. Most influential in understanding pornography in this respect, has been the work of Linda Williams, whose studies of screen pornography have become classic in the field (1999). Williams builds on the work of Michel Foucault to describe how pornography functions as a specific discourse on sexuality that expresses a scientific will-to-knowledge, scientia sexualis, which is bent on uncovering the ‘truth’ about sexuality. Opting for a strategy of maximum visibility, pornography pushes the realist tradition of cinema to an extreme, resulting in what Williams calls “the frenzy of the visible.” This maximum visibility is acquired through a specific range of filmic tactics, of which the “money shot,” the male ejaculation that takes place outside of the woman’s body and makes up the grand finale of the pornographic formula, is the most striking. In her work on alternative pornography, Ingrid Ryberg adopts Williams’ concept of maximum visibility, and focuses on the problematic notion of visibility within alternative, lesbian, and queer pornography, stating that within this subgenre of pornography, the notion of visibility turns out to be two very different, if sometimes conflated and confused, notions (2005, 72). On the one hand visibility in pornography relates to the

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fore-mentioned scientific will-to-knowledge through an explicit cinematic language aiming at revealing all the body’s secrets and sexual pleasures; on the other hand, visibility is central in various identity politics projects aiming at rendering visible marginalized subject positions. If the aim of alternative pornography is to render certain groups and practices visible, Ryberg asks, how can this aim be achieved without repeating patriarchal assumptions that take maximum visibility as the only satisfying way to represent sex? Whereas the money shot is the reference point for most pornography, as the ultimate expression of pornography’s demand for maximum visibility, female sexuality is a ‘problem’ within this framework of visibility, and does not comply with that demand, for the female orgasm takes place inside the body, and is usually without visible ‘evidence.’ Within alternative and lesbian pornography, the representation of female ejaculation is often seen as a solution, making female pleasure visible, and at the same time functioning as some sort of ‘proof’ that the women in the scene are ‘real lesbians’ or at least ‘really’ enjoying themselves (ibid., 75). In this case, however, the tactic of maximum visibility remains unquestioned and unproblematised. There is still no question of representing female pleasure on its own terms, since it simply repeats existing strategies of representing sexual pleasure and does not trouble the emphasis on vision. However, adopting an opposite strategy of resisting maximum visibility by decentring of the female genitals is equally problematic, Ryberg concludes, for it runs the risk of representing female sexuality in stereotypical terms, as somehow more romantic and less straightforward than men’s sexuality, implying an alignment with a traditional view on femininity as less sexual and more sensual than masculinity (ibid., 77). This leaves feminist, lesbian, and queer pornography in a conundrum. For how to resist the persuasive demand for maximum visibility in the representation of sexual acts, and avoid representing female sexuality through a masculine lens, without hiding it behind the veil of romanticized metaphor or distraction, and rendering female pleasure invisible all over again? Thus, not only is the notion of maximum visibility problematic when it comes to bringing to screen ‘invisible’ female pleasure, within the genre of alternative pornography the notion of visibility is also tied to the representation of female, lesbian and queer sexuality, which usually remains equally ‘invisible’ within visual culture. Even though making visible certain sexual identities, practices and bodies is often claimed as the motivation for producing alternative pornography, the notion through which its success is measured—that of authenticity—cannot be unquestionably adopted. As Niels van Doorn shows, the recent trope of

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‘amateur’ Internet pornography that is distributed through websites such as YouPorn, thrives on a fetishation of the ‘real’ experiences of ‘real’ people through an aesthetics that produces an “aura” of authenticity (van Doorn, 2010). This authenticity is established, not by minimalizing or annihilating the presence of the medium, but rather by emphasising its mundane and “homemade” quality. Even though Jouvet is a trained and professional filmmaker, and not an amateur, her film plays into this aesthetics of authenticity. However, as van Doorn warns, one should be very cautious to award too easily all sorts of emancipatory effects to these films based on this concept of authenticity, for this aesthetics of authenticity does very little to disturb the widespread adoption of a normative “pornoscript” within ‘amateur’ pornography, perpetuating an essentialist and sometimes sexist gender ideology (ibid., 425). Similarly, one should be weary of too easily equating the “aura” of authenticity within One Night Stand with an actual redefinition of lesbian and queer bodies and sexualities on “their own terms.” Rather than relying on notions of visibility or authenticity, another analytical lens is needed in exploring the political potential of films like Fuses and One Night Stand, which no longer takes representation as the yardstick for understanding explicit screen portrayals of the sexual act. In his book Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation Simon O’Sullivan takes up Deleuze’s distinction between an object of an encounter and an object of recognition (O’Sullivan, 2002, 1). With the latter, our knowledges, beliefs, and values are reconfirmed. As such, the object of recognition is a non-encounter; it is the event of representing something that is already in place. The consequence of this non-encounter is that no thought takes place, for it only reaffirms and reinforces our habitual ways of acting in the world. In bringing the sexual act to screen, mainstream pornography functions as an object of recognition, as it is made with the sole intention to fulfil the expectations of the viewers, repeating a series of prescribed acts, meant to summon and confirm pre-existing affects and sensations. Through the continuous repetition of the demand of maximum visibility, and organizing the sexual act around penetration, making the money shot the grand finale, pornography affirms the ‘truth’ of sexuality, thereby inscribing and reconfirming normative sexuality. With a genuine encounter, the opposite takes place, O’Sullivan asserts, for our typical ways of being in the world are challenged, our systems of knowledge are disrupted and we are forced to thought. This encounter that ruptures our habitual modes of being, and produces a cut, a crack, at the same time contains a moment of affirmation, a creative moment that

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allows us to see the world differently, and obliges us to think otherwise. Fuses and One Night Stand disturb the recognition and repetition that come about through the re-presentation of sex within pornography, by no longer taking maximum visibility as their main concern. The DIY style of One Night Stand, with its gritty, shaky camera work, often zooming in to the point that bodies become indistinct and blurry, and Fuses’ poetic style and treatment of the celluloid so that blots of colour and burning stains, obstruct access to the ‘truth’ about sexuality. Rather, these films challenge the viewer to think about what makes up a sexual encounter. Is it the repetition and hierarchy of certain acts, the mechanics of it, as pornography suggests, or is it the sense of fragmentation, the unsettling of boundaries, the in- and unfolding of inside and outside, and the intersubjective distribution of affects, intensities and sensations, as Martine Beugnet describes it in her chapter on Fuses, what makes up the experience of the sexual act (Beugnet, 2013)? Beugnet states that it is precisely the commonplace experience of the sexual encounter which is denied within mainstream pornography, because pornography’s scopophilia and demand for maximum visibility collide with the actual experience of sex where “we tend to close our eyes because we concentrate not exclusively, but primarily on the other sense—touch mainly, but also taste and smell, and on how they affect us internally” (ibid., 178). Focused on maximum visibility, and invested in buttressing gender differences, mainstream pornography relies on processes of looking, whereas it is not the optical, but tactility that defines the everyday experience of sex, where the “skin becomes an interface between feelings and sensations, percepts and affects” (ibid.). Rather than focusing on issues of visibility, an analysis is needed of the way in which One Night Stand and Fuses disrupt habitual notions of seeing and being in the world, and instead engage with this tactile experience of the sexual encounter. Focusing on the aesthetic strategies of these films, the way in which they visualise these experiences, may allow for a more productive reading of these films, which may allow going beyond the problematic notion of authenticity and visibility. However, in order to understand these films as objects of an encounter, the representational system of resemblance and repetition of identities does not suffice, making the usual conceptual tools of film theory inapt. A different approach is needed to describe how these films renounce the necessity of maximum visibility and the optical scopophilia that dictates mainstream pornography. Recent scholarly interest in the question of tactility and the senses in the cinematic experience, in particular Laura Marks’ concept of “haptic visuality”

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(2002), may offer precisely such an approach, shifting the focus to the very materiality, or surface, of film.

Haptic Visuality After years of feminist film theory focusing primarily on the ideological strategies at work within mainstream cinema, with Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the gaze (1975) as a definite benchmark, in the last decade there has been a shift towards a way of thinking film and the cinematic experience in terms of embodied spectatorship, as part of a larger trend within cultural theory that has been referred to as the “affective turn” (Clough & Halley, 2007). This focus on embodiment and affect, and in particular Laura Marks’ understanding of the eroticism of haptic visuality (2002), may prove productive in getting out of the conundrum and to think through the aesthetic strategies that define Fuses’ and One Night Stand’s feminist and queer politics. Marks describes the erotic capacities of the haptic as two-fold: first, “its puts into question cinema’s illusion of representing reality by pushing the viewers back to the surface of the image,” and second: “it enables an embodied perception, the viewer responding to the video as to another body and to the screen as another skin” (ibid., 4). Rather than focusing on the narrative structure, or the representation of identities, and the objectifying gaze from a position of mastery, Marks describes “the invitation of a small, caressing gaze” as an alternative economy of looking, a look that is directed at all the intimate details of an image, that calls attention to the surface, and that is more in line with the notion of the glance than the “deep” mastering gaze (ibid., 6). Not only does haptic visuality shift the attention to the surface of the image; it calls attention to the interactive character of cinema viewing. Marks states: “rather than witnessing cinema as through a frame, window, or mirror, [...] the viewer shares and performs cinematic space dialogically,” for “cinematic perception is not merely (audio)visual but synesthetic, an act in which the senses and the intellect are not conceived of as separate” (ibid., 13). Viewing, in this sense, is no longer an act from a distance, initiated by a pre-existing subject, but rather a mutually constitutive exchange. It is precisely this shifting between distance and closeness, the giving up of visual control and the sense of separateness of the viewer, that makes the relationship between viewer and the image an erotic relationship, or, as Marks calls it, an “intersubjective eroticism,” which is defined by “a kind of visuality that is not organized around identification, but that is labile, able to move between identification and immersion” (ibid., 17). Since it is this particular kind of intersubjective

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relationship between the beholder and the image that determines its erotic nature, and not its content, “the fact that some of these are sexual images is, in effect, icing on the cake” (ibid., 14). However, this does not mean that a film cannot be both sexual and erotic, allowing for the possibility of a haptic pornography: Pornography is usually defined in terms of visibility—the inscription or confession of the orgasmic body—and an implied will to mastery by the viewer. The erotic relationship I am identifying in haptic cinema depends on limited visibility and the viewers’ lack of mastery over the image. Haptic visuality suggests ways that pornography might move through the impasse of hypervisuality that by this point seems to hinder rather than support erotic representation (ibid., 15).

Fuses serves as an example of how aesthetic strategies produce a haptic visuality that draws attention to the surface of the image and thereby disturbs the will-to-know that both Marks and Williams recognize as a defining characteristic of pornography. This is achieved through the treatment of the celluloid that resulted in blots and blurs of colour, of scratches and trembling of the image that veil the content of the image, and at times renders it completely invisible. Much of the twenty minutes of Fuses exists of blots of colour, scratches, and hardly discernable trembling and shaking images. The film is accompanied by the sounds of seagulls and the waves, not Schneemann and her lover. The films starts out with a black screen, and for a second, we see an image of Schneemann, with her back to the camera, walking across the sea line. The screen goes black again, and then blots of red appear: they vaguely look like body parts, and they seem wet, but what it is precisely that we see remains unclear. Then they figures are gone again, and we see shapes of bodies moving, making love, but they are blue, white, and green, and hard to make out because the image is shaking so much. At the moment the bodies become clearly recognizable, the image is cut with images of Kitch the cat, Jim Tenney driving a car, a close-up of the lovers faces looking into the camera, a curtain flowing in the wind, a field, a pond. During the film, we increasingly see images of the two lovers engaged in sex, and extreme close-ups of their body-parts, but never long enough to really identify with what is there one the screen, and achieve that mastering gaze. As soon as the viewer can make out what is going on and create some sort of narrative, or at least a coherent sequence of events, the image is cut, superimposed, or rendered indistinguishable and abstract through the treatment of the film itself, producing blots, colours, and scratches, disturbing the gaze and forcing it to become a glance, in Marks’

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terminology. The viewing experience is one of endurance, a contradictory play of distance and immersion between viewer and film. The rhythmic editing style gives it a feeling if timelessness which forces the viewer to immerse in the film, giving up its mastering distance. At the same time, the focus on the materiality, of surface of the film, makes it impossible to identify, or apply meaning to the images, resulting in a distancing effect. Fuses creates an intersubjective relationship between the viewer and the image because the images are so hard to make out. It is impossible to simply sit back, and passively consume this film from a distance. Rather, engaging with this film requires a tactile look, a look that touches every intimate detail of the image, desiring to approach it, and enter into a dialogue that is corporeal, rather than rational. The haptic visuality of One Night Stand is most apparent in the scene ‘Red Fetish Bathroom’ which shows the sexual encounter between Cameron and Shadow. Prominent music in the first half of the scene sets the mood and rhythm of the scene, but contrastingly only the sounds of breathing and moaning remain in the second half of the scene. This absence of the music is significant, because as Martine Beugnet notices, the sounds of lovemaking are usually replaced with the unifying, covering effect of music, “as a way to cover over what might appear to some as the tasteless grunts and moans of sex” (Beugnet 2013, 176). Furthermore, Cameron, Shadow and the camera all move within the cramped space of the bathroom, with its red coloured walls, making it appear like the camera is part of the sexual encounter. There are hardly any wide shots, and more often than not, the images consist of (extreme) close-ups, filling the shot with indistinct body parts. At times it is hard to make out which body-part it is that fills the screen, whose body it belongs to, and what is going on exactly. This confusion is amplified in the moments that the camera zooms in to the extend that only blurry spots of colour remain, limiting the visibility of the scene, and once again disturbing the will to knowledge that usually defines pornography. The intimacy and immersion that is suggested through the camerawork, together with the usage of the actual sounds of sex without an underscore of music, creates a sense of directness and un-mediation; a way of speaking sex that is raw, direct, and in-yourface, and which can be described as a hyperauthenticity. Contrasting the hypervisuality that usually dictates pornography, this aura of authenticity is paradoxically produced precisely by disturbing the maximum visibility, and replacing it with a haptic visuality. Through this DIY aesthetics, showing only blurs and indistinct figures and body-parts, the scene draws attention to the surface of the film. The scene still contains hardcore pornography, but more important than the visibility of the sexual practices

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is the sense of tactility, the affects, intensities and sensations that are produced, and implosion of distance between the viewer and the images. The sweat, the shaking, the breathing that quickens or stops, the harsh lighting combined with the red walls and cramped space of the bathroom, all contribute to an experience that gives the viewer the feeling of being part of the sexual encounter. They reel the viewer into the film, creating an intersubjective relationship that makes the viewer partake in the encounter, rather than offering the gratification of seeing every single part of the physical sexual act from the outside. The haptic visuality of the scene emphasizes the rhythm, the speed and the slowness of the sexual encounter, rather than the technicalities of the sexual acts that are performed. Rather than simply showing the sex, the intersubjective relationship that is established between the viewer and the image accounts for the intense tactility, the temporal differences and the blurring of boundaries that make up the sexual encounter, but which maximum visibility fails to grasp. However, even though maximum visibility is no longer at stake, the scene does not fall back on the stereotypical representation of female sexuality as soft, romantic, and sensual rather than sexual, which Ryberg warned about, for sex is very much at the core of this scene; it is overt, intense, leaving nothing to the imagination. As a conceptual tool, haptic visuality offers a way out of the impasse of maximum visibility, or hypervisuality, and allows for thinking through the tactility of alternative pornography, in this case Fuses and One Night Stand. But what does this attention to the haptic offer us, besides an alternative, and maybe more adequate way of analysing these particular films, an increased consciousness of the intersubjective relationship between film and viewer, and maybe a re-appreciation of film aesthetics? Marks states: “While many have embraced the notion of tactility as a feminine form of perception, I prefer to see the haptic as a feminist visual strategy” (ibid., 7, emphasis original). If this is the case, and I would agree, then what exactly does this strategy offer us, as feminists? What is its political potential, i.e. how does it affirm the possibility of thinking, seeing, doing the world differently? I would argue that the haptic as a feminist visual strategy, as it is utilized by Jouvet and Schneemann, focuses on representing female sexuality on its own terms, and does so through a reconfiguration of the body as fragmented, contingent and provisional, and which may be understood through Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the machine.

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Machinic Connections In concluding this chapter, I would like to briefly sketch how a consideration of the haptic as a feminist visual strategy allows for a reconfiguration of the body, which may be productively understood through the concept of the machine, as formulated by Deleuze and Guattari, because I think that there the political potential of the haptic becomes most interesting and challenging. As we have seen so far, pornography typically functions as an object of recognition, one that calls upon normative conceptions of the body. These habitual notions pose the body as self-evident and natural, an hierarchically organized totality, where some body-parts are deemed more important than others, and where the boundaries between the body in question and another body, and the world around it, are not only clear, but stable and fixed. By focusing on genital sex, in particular penetration, and centralizing the orgasm, most specifically male ejaculation, pornography repeats phallocentric assumptions about gender and sex, literally. Sex is portrayed as a series of goal-oriented actions, an execution of pre-described connections between certain body-parts in a specific manner. Whereas some erogenous zones of the body are deemed important, others are ignored, and while some bodyparts are imputed a particular function, other possibilities are denied. As objects of an encounter, Fuses and One Night Stand resist to conform to the demand of maximum visibility, disturbing its claim of speaking the ‘truth’ about sexuality, and its understanding of the body as a self-evident, knowable totality. Rather, the haptic qualities of One Night Stand and Fuses disturb any hierarchical organization and privileging of body-parts. Although in both films the genitals are clearly visible, sometimes in close-up, they no longer function as the centrepieces of the scene. Their centrality is displaced, and the linearity of the scene, building up towards an orgasm, is undercut. In One Night Stand the genitals are often hidden from view because of the limited space in bathroom, and their centrality is displaced through the scenes’ attention for other corporeal signs of excitement, in particular the increased sweat on Cameron’s body and her facial expressions. And although Fuses shows both lovers’ genitals in full-focus, including images of Schneemann conducting fellatio on Tenney, their visibility is also compromised through colours, scratches and burns. Furthermore, the centrality of these images is complicated by their equation with other erogenous zones of the body, as well as non-human elements such as the sea, the wind through the curtains, blots of colour and Kitch the cat, bringing to the forefront the blurring of both sensory and spatio-temporal dimensions that may occur during a

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sexual experience. Lastly, Fuses does not provide a “money shot” or other orgasmic finale, thereby disrupting the linearity of the scene, replacing it rather with a fragmented order of events. How to understand this notion of the body that is made possible by reading these films through the concept of haptic visuality, and which may no longer depend on identity, representation, stability, and fixity? Here the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari may prove productive. According to Elizabeth Grosz, their notion of the body as a discontinuous series of processes, flows, intensities, corporeal substances and incorporeal events can be of great help to feminist politics, for it enables a reconfiguration of the body outside binary and hierarchical organization (1994). Deleuze and Guattari argue that instead of looking at what a body is in order to understand the truth about a body, one should investigate what a body does, for “it is the relations of motion of rest, of speeds and slownesses between particles that define a body” (Deleuze, 2005, 58). As such, the body can no longer be understood as a coherent, stable and isolated entity, but should be defined by its encounters with other bodies; the connections and collisions that force the body in a state of constant transformation, what Deleuze and Guattari call the process of “becoming.” Rather than understanding the body as a static and self-evident totality, a harmonious and stable “being,” Deleuze and Guattari utilize a terminology of machines, assemblages, and productions in order to designate the body as fundamentally fragmented and artificial. Deleuze and Guattari offer an alternative for conceptualisations of the body that fixate human embodiment, such as identity and representation, instead describing the body as immanent, denaturalized and provisional. Their machine is defined only by its production and interruption of flow and its connections to other machines (1983). It consists of nothing else than pure production and connection: not the production of something by someone, but production for the sake of production itself. Taking up this notion of the machine in order to read lesbian desire in terms of “bodies, pleasures, surfaces, and intensities” Grosz asserts that a machinic notion of desire forces us to let go of our understanding of a body as an integrated totality, and instead focus on the different elements of which this totality is constructed (1994, 180). Thinking through bodies and desire in terms of machines and production does not mean a return to the “mechanics” of sex, and neither does it designate sex that is impersonal or detached, despite the terminology. Grosz asserts, “neither anonymous nor yet entirely personal, bodies are still an intimacy of encounter, a pleasure/unpleasure always of and for themselves” (ibid., 182). Using the concept of the machine to think through the bodies in Fuses and One Night

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Stand, then, means to concentrate on the particular connections that are produced within those specific encounters, and the relations of motion, the speeds and slowness that define those conjunctions, not only of one bodypart to another, but also of one image to another, and of body of film to that of the viewer’s body, as a production that is always moving, changing, becoming something else. This entails letting go of formulaic ways of representing sex, and asking different questions than is this ‘good’ sex, are those women ‘authentic’ lesbians, and is this a ‘feminist’ practice. Although I have only been able to hint at its potential, the concept of the machine may serve as a next step in thinking through the feminist potential of these films. Each in their own way One Night Stand and Fuses serve as examples of how pornography may move beyond the impasse of hypervisuality, and towards an approach that not only enables erotic representation, but creates a visual language that affirms female agency and allows for an alternative understanding of bodies, desire, and sexuality, through haptic visuality and attending to the tactile quality of the sexual encounter. Although these films displace the linearity of the sexual act and the centrality of the orgasm, this does not result in a more sensual and oblique representation of female sexuality. Rather, it expresses a particular feminist visual strategy, experimenting with alternative ways of bringing sex to the screen, and representing female sexuality ‘on its own terms.’ Instead of offering the viewer the satisfaction of knowing the ‘truth’ about sex, by exposing its physicality in every detail, Fuses and One Night Stand express the eroticism of what it feels like to engage in a sexual encounter, by creatively utilizing the medium’s aesthetic possibilities. In an age of maximum visibility, this feels rather refreshing.

References Beugnet, Martine. 2013. “Tactile Visions: From Embodied to Encoded Love.” In Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics, edited by Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzycka. London: I.B. Tauris. Chapkis, Wendy. 1997. “The Meaning of Sex.” In Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor. London and New York: Routledge. Clough, Patricia T., and Halley, Jean. 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 2005. “Ethology: Spinoza and Us.” In The Body: A Reader, edited by Marian Fraser and Monica Greco. London and New York: Routledge.

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Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Doorn, Niels van, 2010. “Keeping it Real: User-Generated Pornography, Gender Reification, and Visual Pleasure.” Convergence 16:411-29. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1995. “Refiguring Lesbian Desire.” In Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. London and New York: Routledge. Marks, Laura. 2002. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16(3):6-27. O’Sullivan, Simon. 2006. Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari. Thought Beyond Representation. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Ryberg, Ingrid. 2005. “Maximum Visibility.” Film International 36:72-79. Williams, Linda. 1999. Hard Core. Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible.” Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER EIGHT WHEN THE PERSONAL MEETS THE THEORETICAL: REFLECTIONS ON MY CONVERSATION WITH LUCE IRIGARAY KRIZIA NARDINI

Figure 8.1 Paris May 2012, Courtesy of the Author.

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Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world—by her own movement — Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

Starting from oneself In May 2012, the route of my PhD feminist research praxis passed via Paris. Who would have thought that one day, a day like every-day, I could be sitting at the feet of the Eiffel tower voice-recording my thoughts after meeting with Luce Irigaray? I could not believe the encounter had just taken place. But I had felt it in my knees, when I rang the bell of Irigaray’s house in Paris earlier that day. With my research-notes at hand, I stood for a while sensing the mixture of incredulity and excitement accompanying me there. Meeting Luce Irigaray does not happen every day; however, it seemed to fit happily within my everyday feminist research praxis. In fact, next to contributing to my understanding of sexual difference feminisms in their early 1980s French-Italian connections, Irigaray’s work stimulates my empirical study on men who engage with a sexual difference framework and their desire for reconfiguring Italian masculinities. One such group of men is the focus point in one of my empirical case studies: the Italian men’s network “Maschile Plurale.” In this network, different ways of be(com)ing men are explored by sharing men’s experiences starting from oneself in men-only groups, most often acknowledging and thinking through “male sexual difference” (Ciccone 2012). My research is in fact dedicated to exploring the ways in which men’s activism relate to (previous) women’s feminist practice. In this way, particularly in relation to the Italian case study, sexual difference theories, in their activistphilosophical expressions and French-Italian relations, came in conversation with my research praxis. The opening image of this chapter, a sepia collage consisting of a Paris postcard and the first page of the book Luce Irigaray: Teaching, signed by the author, is meant to provide the readers with a sense of my starting point in writing this chapter. Therefore, the aim of this chapter is to work through some of the personal-theoretical questions that affected my feminist research praxis after my conversation with Luce Irigaray. For her frank honesty and intellectual passion, for inviting me in Paris, I thank her. Most of all, I thank her for stimulating my thinking process around these questions and affects that would have otherwise remained in the background of my research, knocking at the door every now and then, without really becoming transformative. In Paris, May 2012, important questions emerged during our conversation. As I wanted to talk about how some men, in Italy, are

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rethinking masculinity using the concept of “male sexual difference” and the feminist practice of starting from oneself, Luce Irigaray was concerned about whether I was allowing myself ‘a room of my own,’ so to speak, in conducting this research as a woman. In fact, she addressed this element in our conversation by stating: You stress the practice of “partire da se” [starting from oneself] but you don’t act in this way, and I am afraid that speaking of men you remain trapped in a traditional metaphysical abstraction without concrete and experienced proposals to overcome it (Irigaray 2012, emphasis mine).

In receiving this message, more than one aspect affected me on a personaltheoretical level. I take the material-symbolic room of this chapter to voice them. My feminist research praxis argues for an onto-epistemological method of the always already interaction of practice and theory (Barad 2003). However, according to Irigaray it would be contradictory for me, as a woman, to talk about men, meanwhile adopting the practice of starting from oneself. According to Irigaray, starting from oneself—as a feminist and as a woman—would entail studying women in our/their sociosymbolic facets, first; and then, only after that, as an addition, it would be logical and possible to look at what men could do in order to change phallocentrism. This approach comes from a feminist separatist practice. From an activist/political practice of separatism, comes Irigaray’s suggestion for a strategy applied to academic research. According to this approach, women and men should follow separate (maybe parallel but obviously not symmetrical) paths of self-reflexivity and cultural critique, and a development of a different feminine/masculine symbolic(s). The work of “Maschile Plurale” goes along these lines, as we can read from Trasformare il maschile: nella cura, nell’educazione, nelle relazioni (Deiana and Greco 2012, 34) when it refers to Irigaray’s separatist strategy in Key Writings (Irigaray 2004) which in Italian has been translated as In tutto il mondo siamo sempre in due. Chiavi per una convivenza universale (Irigaray 2006). From this would follow that, in order for my PhD research project titled Men Strategies for Change to be epistemologically accurate, consistent and grounded into “concrete and experienced proposals” (so to do justice to my own personal development as a woman), it should either be executed by a different researcher, a man, or it should address different research-questions. As I prepared myself for this meeting, nobody told me that engaging with Irigaray would pose no difficulties. Certainly, I knew it would be potentially transformative, and indeed, in hindsight, this conversation

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stirred a lot of thoughts about my praxis as a feminist and as a researcher. My best intentions and theoretical creativity notwithstanding, my personal conversation with Luce Irigaray started from a “yes, but…” from her part; and, theoretically, I was straightforwardly confronted with the issue of negotiating my positioning as a (un)dutiful daughter to feminist-theory (Van der Tuin 2009). Should I listen to Irigaray’s suggestion and revise my PhD questions completely? Or, instead, should I ignore Irigaray’s inputs? Finally, I choose neither of these options. I went for a different style of answering and tried to think through this conversation in a more engaging and thus more productive manner.

Personal-Theoretical Reflections The conversation with Luce Irigaray indeed has lead me to consider “generation” in its multi-layered meanings as explained by Iris van der Tuin (2009). In my words, thinking “generational” entails addressing the conceptual creativity of generating new theoretical connections through the question of how to relate with previous generations of (feminist) thinkers. Thinking about “generation” came with the urge of explaining, at least to me, the intricate ways of how I got there: there/here where my everyday feminist research praxis involves writing about “men rethinking masculinity within a sexual difference framework.” Already in Paris, listening to Irigaray’s feedback, my mind was wrapped around these noisy questions: How come that I study (heterosexual) masculinities? Am I putting myself into the text—as into the world—by my own movement (Cixous 1976, 875)? In other words: what has my everyday feminist research praxis become? The first question has been asked to me many times by different people, most often bringing up quasi-ironic outcomes. In generalized terms, sexual difference separatist feminists do not understand why I do research on men (because, “men should do it themselves”); equality feminists do not grasp the utility of using sexual difference theorizations; and queer activists/theorists do not share the urgency of “still, talking about (heterosexual) men/women binaries.” All I knew is that I left the meeting with Irigaray with a mix of enjoyment, striking surprise and, yes, a lot of troubling food-for-thought. At first, a deep sense of frustration led me wandering for some time through Paris and then, later, finding a reasonable spot where I could put

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together my feelings. I still could not believe what had just happened. A part of me, as well, did not want to believe it. Then I opened my new book Lucy Irigaray: Teaching (Irigaray and Green 2008). Irigaray gave it to me at our meeting. The book consisted of previous Summer Seminar’s papers. And there, browsing through the chapters, I found one word that I could relate to in order to loosen up my way towards answering Irigaray’s questions. Desire. As a feminist, desire is an easy entry-point, some could say. Indeed, so easy that I did not think to bring it up during our meeting, as I was especially focused on my theoretical interventions regarding men and sexual difference. So I was brought back to desire, asking myself where my desire would stand in relation to my PhD project; and finally, this thinking motion craved a hole inside the memory of my feminist subjectivity to be(come). How could I have not mentioned it? Women’s desire(s), sexual as well as ontological. Taking as a starting point the statement that “feminist practice is the expression of women’s ontological desire” (Braidotti 1991, 166, emphasis mine), with the latter I understand women’s desire to exist (as subject) as well as women’s desire to become – in the world – building on their own agency and empowerment. The discursive dis-connections between (female) desire and subjectivity had been, in fact, at the heart of my previous study on the Italian public/political debate on prostitution. This was the topic of my Bachelor’s thesis at Siena University entitled (Sex)Work in Progress: Gender Relationships and Debate on Prostitution from the “Merlin” Law to the “Carfagna” Bill. Exploring the discursive dynamics around the phenomenon of sexual-economic exchange (Tabet 1987, 2007, Pheterson 1996), this work allowed me to dive into many different issues at once, i.e.: women’s desire, “sex” and “work,” female body and subjectivity, the social construction of “female” and “male” sexuality, sexual politics, power and reproductive labour. Analysing the discursive configurations characterizing the last fifty years of the Italian prostitution-debate (1958-2008), I could track the material-symbolic implications of what has been termed “the political economy of sex” and (hetero) sexuality (Rubin 1975) on gender relationships within the Italian context (see for instance Tatafiore 1994, Danna 2004, Bellassai 2006), and what I found was a problematic absence, in the discourse, of a critical take on men’s practices and masculinity. My research process included tracing—within feminist debates—the relocation(s) of female subjectivity and desire (as I said, sexual as well as ontological) beyond women’s material and symbolic function of objects of exchange among men, as in the compulsory heteronormative sexual contract (Pateman 1997, Héritier 2004). Thus, for me, this BA thesis has

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been also an opportunity to reflect on those questions close my daily life as a (white) heterosexual woman: female agency/ies—in their intersectional differences; female sexualities beyond phallocentrism that, in Irigaray’s words, “are not One” (Irigaray [1977] 1985); the anthropological explanation of kinship ties; women’s absence from the symbolic – alongside masculinity’s unmarked dominance. As a result, this process brought me to feel passionate about feminist statements such as: “the future of the world is open: it lies in starting along the path from the beginning again with woman as a “subject” (Lonzi 1970 in Kemp and Bono 1991, 59). And indeed, my exploration has been simultaneously personal, theoretical and political, driven by my own desire to understand and intervene within the politics of gender relations in which I was/am embodied-embedded; in which I felt the urgency to make room for my own female-feminist subject and desire to emerge and speak up. Therefore, writing this thesis has been important for me also in regards to academic writing per se’: in my personal drive of becoming a researcher and as a female-embodied thinking subject. Looking back, my research path so far has been a journey driven by the “passion for difference” as in the definition by Maria Luisa Boccia: “the symbolic room in which women’s thought and actions can and must operate” (Boccia 2002, 67; translation mine). Being passionate for difference remains at the core of my current PhD research as well, in the sense that it allows me to practice the type of research I would like to create. In my feminist research praxis, what intrigues me is the interaction between concepts and practices, how this contributes to stimulating profeminist men’s activism and their active role in changing heteronormative sexist power relations. My interest tackles the generative aspects of feminist theories, the concept-practices entanglements, the theoreticalpersonal-activist intra-actions (Barad, 2003) and how movement is inserted into cultural critique and creativity (Van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2012).

Speaking is never neutral Luce Irigaray invited me to have a meeting with her in order to discuss my essay entitled Questioning Abstract Masculinity: On the Potentiality of the Concept of Male Sexuate Difference, which I had intended to present at Irigaray’s Summer-Seminar in Bristol. Our conversation had already started via regular mail; through hand-written letters we discussed the possibility of my participation at her 2012 Summer Seminar. I had sent Irigaray my essay, together with a summary of my research project and my

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motivation for participating. For me, this seminar seemed the perfect occasion to discuss the role of men and masculinity within and in relation to theories and practices of Difference Feminism(s). Secondly, the meeting in Paris was aimed to find a new topic for my presentation at the Irigaray summer-seminar since my proposed essay, as she said, “does not suit for the seminar because does it not focus on my work” (Irigaray 2012). My own entry-point into Irigaray’s work in connection with “Maschile Plurale’s activism was triggered by a story of a specific event. During the Graduate Seminar held in 2006 at Linköping University and titled Luce Irigaray and the Future of Sexual Difference, a man in the audience asked Irigaray about the task assigned to men within the framework of sexual difference thought. Irigaray replied in the following direct manner: “be a man.” Personally, I have encountered this anecdote via one of the participants at the seminar: Dr. Jami Weinstein, who told the story of this event during one of the courses I took at Utrecht University (2009/2010). Building on this event, my essay intended to explore what the role of men/masculinity in sexual difference theory could possibly be(come). Grounding my theorizing into the research I have conducted with the members of the Italian men’s network “Maschile Plurale,” my analysis was interested in tracing the limits and possibilities for male-sexed subjects to engage productively with the concept of sexual difference and in particular with the thoughts and practices of French-Italian sexual difference theories.

Engaging with sexual difference Emerging within the framework of French poststructuralism, sexual difference thinking (with the prominent figure of Luce Irigaray both in general and in the wider context of the Italian feminist landscape) powerfully criticize, both on a symbolic and on a social level, the centrality of disembodied and universal masculinity in western culture (Irigaray 1985 [1977], Cavarero 1987, AA.VV. 1987, The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective 1990). Sexual difference philosophies denounce the universal value attributed to the masculine gender through diagnosing the “perverse” logic underpinning the phallogocentric system (Braidotti 2005): the asymmetrical Same/Other dualism that organizes all the other dichotomous couples (body/mind, immanence/transcendence, nature/culture, personal/political, etc.) in a hierarchical and gendered way. Willing to overcome dualistic oppositions and disembodied subject-positions, sexual difference theorists argue that corporeality is constitutive of what it is and means to exist and think; thus, the embodied and gendered character of

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subjectivity is addressed as the site of resistance (ontologically and epistemologically) against the sexually undifferentiated (universally masculine) logic of the Same. Therefore, by deconstructing phallogocentrism and situating it within its historical geo-political context, sexual difference theories contributed to unpacking historical power/knowledge relations (Foucault 1980) that gave the thinking subject the attributes of white rationalist masculinity (Lloyd 1984), or “abstract virility” (Braidotti 2005, 299), or, in the words of Nancy Hartsock (1987, 170), “abstract masculinity.” Indeed, the Universalist epistemic tendencies of the modern Subject grounded their certainties on faith in a disembodied western Reason that allowed masculinity to emerge as an unmarked and disembodied category, partaking to the requirements of the subject. Man became “the invisible gendered subject” (Whitehead 2004) and as a result dominant men’s practices passed unquestioned and invisible (Seidler 1989, Bellassai 2001). Although the notion of “abstract masculinity” has been widely criticized by feminist theories from different perspectives owing to that fact that “under the impact of feminist criticisms, in fact, the complicity between the masculine and the universal is unveiled and rejected” (Braidotti 1991, 10), the project of acknowledging one’s own embodiedembedded subjectivity and situated perspective has rarely been embarked by men themselves. However, in drawing a conversation with the aforementioned sexual difference theories, the urgency to “speak out and make a commitment as men” has been the main concern of the members of “Maschile Plurale” in recent years: by acknowledging men’s subject positions as sexed-embodied, this network of men’s groups is engaged in re-thinking normative masculinity in order to make room for a more open reformulation of men’s practices understood as social relations, political practice and modes of thought (Maschile Plurale 2006). The majority of participants in “Maschile Plurale” (MP) (a national organization since 2007) is made of heterosexual, middle-class, white men, aged between 35-60, with an already existing experience of public engagement of various kinds (social, political, religious) —although the most recent men’s participation also involves more diverse masculinities (young fathers, gender-oriented researchers, feminist-aware mediaactivists). Various interests energise this type of men’s collective engagements, starting with men’s desires for change and transformation. From “Maschile Plurale” document-letter Da Uomo a Uomo (man to man), from November 2009, we can read: “I am a man and I see male violence around me. I can also see, however, the desire for change of

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many men. I choose to face that violence and to listen to that desire of change” (Maschile Plurale 2009, all translations are mine unless indicated differently). For many of these men, thinking themselves as sexed/gendered is a new step in their everyday praxis. Acknowledging the social processes affecting men and masculinity goes a step further. Even more, acknowledging the gendering of masculinities collectively among men, including the possibility of change, does make something different happen. In particular, recognizing the relevance of the feminist socio-symbolic practice of consciousness-raising (The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective 1990), men’s groups of “Maschile Plurale” found their group activity on the interrogation of one’s own experience as man: tracing back one’s gendered history and addressing one’s own experience as partial and historically located. Interrogating men’s experiences is performed by adopting the Italian feminist practice of partire da se’: i.e., for the members “starting from oneself, as man” (a partire da sé, come uomo) means sharing men’s stories while digging into those personal-political prescriptive norms affecting men’s gendered lives. In other words, beyond the centrality of the all-too-neutral Man (Neutro Maschile), members of “Maschile Plurale” speak about the importance of “situating themselves, exploring male difference” (situarsi nella differenza - maschile) in order to perform differently as men. As the co-founder and member of the network Stefano Ciccone explains in his most recent article Il maschile come differenza (masculinity as difference): Focusing on “male difference” allows us to verify the productivity and the implications of our positioning as men: acknowledging our partiality. This implies not only acknowledging our responsibility in fighting against the discrimination of women and of sexual minorities, but also affirming a male demand of transformation starting from the partiality of our condition (Ciccone 2012, 24-25; all translations are mine unless indicated differently).

What Ciccone and other members of MP claim to work for is creating “a public discourse as men that provides a common ground for reflection, to help construct a language that both comes from, and enables us to see, our partiality as men” (Ciccone 2009: 16); because, as we can read: what became visible, what was expressed, has been the difference explored and thought through by women; male experience has remained unspoken, confused with the normative patriarchal system and its historical representation that denies and hides its partiality (ibid., 10).

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This move, according to a shared commitment among the members of MP, is thought to become transformative not only in the way men understand their subjectivities; but also in the way societal roles and relationships are enacted, on a personal and political level. The differential enactment stimulated by this reflexive practice obviously necessitates further empirical research. As a matter of fact, through their meetings and public actions, MP members are promblematizing masculinity while creating critical approaches towards dominant masculinitist postures in the Italian context. Accordingly, the questions tackled by MP discussions mostly revolve around male violence, sexism, homophobia and racism and their interferences with the normative construction of male heterosexuality. On the relations between the MP practice of partire da se’ (triggered by male desire of change) and its possible outcomes specifically on the understanding of male (hetero)sexual desire, see Nardini (2013). Evidently, my research topic on the possibility and potentiality of men thinking male difference and what this can do is not, directly, emerging from Irigaray’s body of work. Nevertheless, it does connect with the theorization of sexual difference in its French-Italian voices (in which Irigaray’s work has featured since the 1980s), and it does relate—in a relevant manner—to feminist practices and politics of difference within the Italian context. Most of all, it does speak to my personal-theoretical interests in societal transformations, which is to say, to my desire of changing gender and power relations beyond the heteronormative sexual contract.

My Passion for Differing In Boccia’s terms “passion for difference” implies also that “our task is to signify difference, to give ground to women and men’s sexed being” (Boccia 2002, 67). While Irigaray would definitely agree with this definition of practising a passion for difference, she would go for a separatist take. The latter would imply for women to focus primarily on women’s lives and contribute to women’s empowerment. Therefore, in my current PhD project I face the undutiful daughter’s task of researching men’s processes of gender-awareness and their outcomes in the reconfigurations of masculinities. Generally speaking, by looking at men’s relationships with feminist movements previous to my own generation, from my positioning as a young female researcher this task not only involves, as in Van der Tuin’s terminology (2009), “jumping generations,” but also jumping gender, one could say. As I have explained in this chapter, my interest in conducting this research springs from critically

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unpacking “abstract masculinity” by giving voice to men’s personal and located rethinking masculinities; as questioning “abstract masculinity” is virtually seen as one possible starting point for engendering feminist transformations in men’s practices and masculinities. Building on my socio-anthropological as well as feminist philosophical interest in personal-theoretical transformations, I therefore would like to introduce my “passion for differing” activated both on the personal level of my everyday relational praxis and on the theoretical level of the genealogy of feminist thinkers I have encountered in my research journey (such as Luce Irigaray). Moreover, enabling a conversation with the framework of Third Wave Epistemologies (Van der Tuin 2009) and New Feminist Materialism (Van der Tuin and Dolphijn 2012), my “passion for differing” at the same time relates to—and can be seen as a slightly differing passion from— Irigaray’s separatist approach (could this also relate to a generational level of difference?). Content-wise this passion allows me to research masculinities with a particular attention to transformative relational processes that are rewriting the gender order. Theoretically, it allows me to work with concepts as creative forces, to address theory making as embodiedembedded and at once located yet traveling (Rich 1986, Haraway 1988, Braidotti 2011), and to relate with previous generations of feminist thinkers in an engaging manner. In the case of men taking up the task of thinking male sexual difference while rewriting the gendered history of their be(com)ing men, my (visionary) writing pushes the questioning of “abstract masculinity” to his limits and argues that the reflection of “Maschile Plurale” does not ‘come from nowhere,’ but rather emerges from men’s relations with women’s thought and feminist practice. In addition, my approach argues that rethinking masculinity through the concept of male sexual difference can be a critical/creative moment, a differing force for men to engage transformatively with corporeality, sexed lived experience, power-locations as well as with the reformulation of masculinities beyond the (heterosexual) homosocial contract. Finally, (although) focusing on masculinity research, this “passion for differing” allows the generative space of my feminist subjectivity—thought and action—to become; to actualize itself both in academic and activist settings. In Paris, after Irigaray’s scrutinised my current PhD research questions, I started digging within my personal-theoretical motivations in conducting a project on men, masculinities and feminist theory. I felt torn between ‘the personal’ and the ‘theoretical’ of my academic choices and that is why I returned to the very personal of my desiring forces of being and

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knowing—in the world. These very forces have been the ones motivating my onto-epistemological desire of pursuing a PhD in Gender Studies, and thus also my visit to France and the conversation with Luce Irigaray and her work. It is truly exciting, empowering and a bit scary to be the first in your family to pursue a University education, let alone as a woman, let alone within an international setting. Clearly, this is a journey, in which the multiple sites of desire coexist, and the personal and the geo-political keep enriching each other constantly, faster and more surprisingly than I could have imagined. Indeed, I arrived in Paris after participating in the 8th European Feminist Research Conference in Budapest and before flying to Bologna to talk at another International conference entitled Postfeminism? The Culture and Politics of Gender in the Age of Berlusconi. In both occasions I presented some of the questions emerging from my PhD research, Men’s Strategies for Change, questions that, as I explained in this chapter, are for me theoretically and practically relevant. In both occasions I brought up my standpoint as a feminist, interested in problematizing masculinities and in changing dominant men’s practices. In both occasions I was speaking from my experience of doing gender in the Netherlands as a PhD student, a position in which, as I try to combine social change with feminist theories, the personal meets the theoretical. Thus, I have written this chapter as a nomadic-international, selffunded PhD student, who landed in the Netherlands almost four years ago from Italy with the pervasive desire to dive into Gender Studies, and then, to keep on doing research towards a PhD: the desire of finding my way, a way of creating (starting from) myself. In fact, working at the Graduate Gender Programme at Utrecht University—as a young, Italian female researcher—is for me a highly empowering experience, e/affecting me personally and academically in various kinds of ways, making my everyday-ness simultaneously stimulating and challenging, critical and creative. Luce Irigaray probably did not see my personal feminist journey, my theoretical feminist kinship, and how they have influenced each other in pursuing my PhD project. What I realized, after meeting Luce Irigaray, was that starting from myself, in a way, had always already been part of my feminist outlook within my everyday research praxis.

Speaking to you: conclusive thoughts Sooner or later, the question how does it (a text, a research project, a theme) speak to you? Will come up in your gender studies class, in your favourite feminist theory seminar, and finally, in your feminist research

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praxis. Necessarily, how does it speak to you? Is a question that no feminist researcher can leave unheard; it is a question that runs through a feminist research project as such, a question that keeps haunting the everyday of a feminist research project. Primarily, this is important in order to show the mutual constitution of knowledge and experience, where power is always already part of the game. In other words, doing gender in a feminist manner involves working through the transversalities of the personal-political-theoretical continuum(s). One could argue that ‘the personal’ is always already partaking in ‘the theoretical’—in the way certain topics or questions are raised rather than others, and vice versa. However, as philosophy students we are trained to think outside the “I” of the personal, and approach the theoretical where it should belong according to malestream philosophical practice: out-there, or even up-there. As students in feminist studies we learn that no voice, no view, no affect can ‘come from nowhere.’ We learn that no subjectposition is “innocent” because, as one of Irigaray’s book-title suggests, “to speak is never neutral” (Irigaray 2002 [1985]), and that not only we should acknowledge the ground of our own claims, but also turn the specific grounded-ness of our research into our ethical-epistemological accountability. Doing gender in the Netherlands, for me as for many of my fellow students, comes with an important baggage of hopes, ambitions, frustrations, click!-moments (awakening of a feminist consciousness) and productive encounters. Doing Gender Studies in the Netherlands brought me in conversation with Luce Irigaray; theoretically, and also literally. In this chapter I have traced the coordinates of this theoretical-personal encounter, walking through the tensions, desires and questions of my feminist research praxis before and after this event. I went through the connections that have enabled this encounter to happen; and how this has e/affected my everyday feminist research praxis in its futures to be(come). I wrote this chapter with great enthusiasm and I tried “to put a bibliography to my experiences” (as Rosemarie Buikema advises her students, 2010), while voicing some of the affective relations emerging from my everyday feminist research praxis, bibliographical and empirical. Many questions remain open, among which is the following: when the personal meets the theoretical—and their lips speak together—will they live happily ever after?

Acknowledgements I would like to thank my friends Piera Simon for her kind hospitality in Paris and Carlotta Caciagli for her valuable support during my visit to

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France. I would like to thank also my supervisor in Utrecht, Dr. Iris van der Tuin, for her encouragement in trusting the productivity of personaltheoretical encounters. Finally, I would like to thank my family in Italy, who might not have given me feminist-theory insights, but certainly have thought me all it takes to feel and trust my desire(s), starting from myself.

References AA.VV. 1987. Diotima, Il pensiero della differenza sessuale. Milano: Tartaruga. —. 1994. “Ridefinirsi donna, ridefinirsi uomo. Itinerari nella differenza.” Alfazeta 40. Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3):801-31. Bellassai, Sandro. 2001. “Il maschile, l’invisibile parzialità.” In Saperi e libertà. Maschile e femminile nei libri, nella scuola e nella vita. (Vol.II), edited by Ethel Porzio Serravalle. Milano: Polite-Associazione Italiana Editori. —. 2006. La legge del desiderio. Il progetto Merlin e l’Italia degli anni Cinquanta. Roma: Carocci. Boccia, Maria Luisa. 1989. “Pensare la differenza al maschile,’ interview by Nicola Coppola e Claudio Vedovati.” In Amori difficili (June edition 2006). Boccia, Maria Luisa. 2002. La differenza politica. Milano: Il Saggiatore. Buikema, Rosemarie. 2010. Researching Gender and Ethnicity, Academic Course 2010, Graduate Gender Programme, Utrecht University. Braidotti, Rosi. 1991. Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press. —. 2005. “Sexual Difference Theory.” In A Companion to Feminist Philosophy, edited by Alison M. Jaggar and Iris Marion Young. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. —. 2011. Nomadic Subjects. Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (Second Edition). New York: Columbia University Press. Cavarero, Adriana. 1987. “L’elaborazione filosofica della differenza sessuale.” In La ricerca delle donne, AA.VV. Torino: Rosemberg and Sellier. Ciccone, Stefano. 2009. Essere maschi. Tra potere e libertà. Torino: Rosenberg and Sellier. —. 2012. “Il Maschile Come Differenza.” AG AboutGender: International

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Journal of Gender Studies 1(1):15-36. Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “The Laugh of Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paola Cohen. Signs 1(4):875-93. Danna, Daniela. 2004. Donne di mondo. Commercio del sesso e controllo statale. Milano: Eleuthera. Deiana, Salvatore and Massimo Greco. 2012. Trasformare il maschile: nella cura, nell’educazione, nelle relazioni. Assisi: Cittadella Editrice. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972 – 1977, edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14(3):575-599. Hartsock, Nancy. 1987. “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism.” In Feminism and Methodology, edited by Sandra Harding. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Héritier, Françoise. 2004. Dissolvere la gerarchia. Maschile/Femminile II. Cortina Raffaello. Irigaray, Luce. 1985 [1977]. This Sex Which is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. —. 2002 [1985]. To Speak is Never Neutral. Translated by Gail Schwab. London: Continuum. —. 2004. Luce Irigaray: Key Writings. London: Continuum. —. 2012. Personal correspondence (March 31, 2012). Irigaray, Luce and Mary Green. 2008. Luce Irigaray: Teaching. London: Continuum. Tema Genus. 2006. Luce Irigaray and the Future of Sexual Difference – A Graduate Seminar. http://www.tema.liu.se/tema-g/nordic-researchschool-in-interdisciplinary-gender-studies/past-events/luce-irigarayand-the-future-of-sexual-difference-a-graduate-seminar?l=en (accessed October 3, 2013). Kemp, Sandra and Paola Bono. 1991. Italian Feminist Thought. Oxford: Blackwell. Lloyd, Genevieve. 1984. The Men of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy. London; New York: Routledge. Lonzi, Carla. 1991 [1970] “Let’s Spit on Hegel.” In Italian Feminist Thought, edited by Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp. Oxford: Blackwell. Maschile Plurale. 2009. “Da uomo a uomo”. http://maschileplurale.it/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=ar ticle&id=231:una-lettera-contro-la-violenza-sulle-donne&catid=49:25nov-2010-qda-uomo-a-uomoq&Itemid=44 (accessed October 3, 2013).

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—. 2006. “Let’s speak out and make a commitment as men.” http://maschileplurale.it/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view =article&id=220:violence-against-women-concernsus&catid=46:2006-la-violenza-contro-le-donne-ci-riguarda&Itemid=46 (accessed October 4, 2013). Nardini, Krizia. 2013. “¿Como lo hacen los Italianos? El Deseo Masculino (de Cambio) en la Reflectión de Maschile Plurale.” Translated by Juanjo Compairé. Hombres Igualitarios Online Journal. http://www.hombresigualitarios.ahige.org/index.php?option=com_cont ent&view=article&id=1605:icomo-lo-hacen-los-italianossegundaparte&catid=40:un-mundo-global&Itemid=59 (accessed October 4, 2013). Pateman, Carole. 1997. Il contratto sessuale. Roma: Editori Riuniti. Pheterson, Gail. 1996. The Prostitution Prism. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Rosemarie Buikema. 2010. Researching Gender and Ethnicity. Academic Course at the Graduate Gender Programme, Utrecht University. Rich, Adrienne. 1986. “Notes Towards a Politics of Location.” In Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985, edited by Adrienne Rich. London: Virago. Rubin, Gayle. 1975. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press. Seidler, Victor. 1989. Rediscovering Masculinity: Reason, Language and Sexuality. London; New York: Routledge. Tabet, Paola. 1987. “Du don au tarif. Les relations sexuelles impliquant une compensation.” Les Temps Modernes 490:1-53. —. 2004. La grande beffa. Sessualità delle donne e scambi sessuoeconomico. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino. Tatafiore, Roberta. 1994. Sesso al lavoro. Milano: Il Saggiatore. The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective. 1990. Sexual Difference: A Theory of Socio-Symbolic Practice. Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Van der Tuin, Iris. 2009. “Jumping Generations: On Second- and ThirdWave Feminist Epistemology.” Australian Feminist Studies 24(59):1731. Van der Tuin, Iris and Rick Dolphijn. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press. Whitehead, Stephen. 2004. “Man: the invisible gendered subject?” In The Masculinities Reader, edited by Stephen Whitehead and Frank Barrett. Cambridge: Polity Press.

SECTION III: NEGOTIATING PRIVATE-PUBLIC

PREFACE LIZA MÜGGE

The slogan “the personal is political” captures one of the key contributions of second wave feminist scholarship and activism. It symbolizes feminist analyses of the public-private divide which pushed our understanding of the ‘political’ beyond formal state politics (Dhamoon, citing several authors, 2013). While early analyses of the public-private predominantly dealt with traditional gender roles within patriarchal structures in clearly defined Western nation states, current scholarship examines local and transnational dimensions in a post-colonial and post-migration political order. In this section a new generation of scholars continues to inquire the blurred zones of the public-private distinction, keeping up with the power struggles of today’s world. While the first two contributions focus on the effect of immigration on the public-private in the West, the other two chapters provide in-depth studies of the fuzzy borders of the public-private in non-Western societies in a post-colonial/post-apartheid setting. Immigration is indispensably connected questions of adaptation. European immigration countries increasingly interfere in the private lives of immigrants and their descendants through integration policies and citizenship programs. It is expected that newcomers invest all resources in the receiving society and do not express signs of the ‘other’ culture in public space (e.g. veiling) and private sphere (e.g. language). Ideally the outcome is a Western—read modern—national citizen. Roodsaz and Huang examine the extent to which cultural norms of the immigration country (the Netherlands) are internalized by individual citizens. Interestingly, notions of modernity determine to which aspects of Dutch culture Chinese mothers and Iranian youngsters adapt. Contrary to the Dutch government Chinese mothers see their children primarily as global and transnational citizens. Consequently, in their children’s language education they prioritize English, then Mandarin and finally Dutch. Iranian youngsters self-identify as modern through the acceptance of female premarital sexuality and by rejecting traditional Iranian ‘restricted sexuality.’ Focusing on rural South-Africa and Bangladesh respectively, Mona and Laila address how the public and private become intertwined in HIV

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and childbirth healthcare programs. Both authors demonstrate that strong norms and values regarding health issues within families determine the success or failure of national healthcare. In Bangladesh gender norms and taboos related to the body and sexuality promote child delivery at home in the private domain causing a dramatically high maternal mortality rate. Recent institutional changes to prevent complications are designed for treatment within the walls of clinical institutions. This, argues Laila, is ineffective as it does not reach the whole target group, which also includes the family. Similarly, Mona discovered that interventions of the SouthAfrican government to manage the HIV pandemic are unsuccessful. People with HIV suffer from stigmatization and discrimination in all levels of society. Since social support of family members and society appeared to be crucial to adherence to therapy, successful medical treatment should be combined with a more social approach to public policy.

References Dhamoon, Rita Kaur. 2013. “Feminisms.” In The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics, edited by Georgina Waylen, Karen Celis, Johanna Kantola, and S. Laurel Weldon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER NINE IN THE SERVICE OF MODERNITY: THE GENDERED DEPLOYMENT OF PREMARITAL SEXUALITY IN PROCESSES OF IDENTIFICATION AMONG THE IRANIAN DUTCH RAHIL ROODSAZ

Figure 9.1 Words, in Persian, used by one of the informants for the author’s research, Hamid. Word-cloud made by Rahil Roodsaz.

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The reason why you are so indecisive about what to think of sexual relationships before marriage is that you cannot make up your mind about where you stand. […] I think we should try to position ourselves more clearly. I mean culturally. Are we modern people with modern thoughts? Are we traditional people? Or are we in the process of becoming modern? — Hamid

These words were spoken by Hamid, an Iranian Dutch man, in a focus group on various issues concerning sexuality, which I organized as part of my research project in 2011. It shall be noted that, for privacy reasons, the names of all informants in this chapter are fictive. Four men and five women of Iranian descent with varying educational and occupational backgrounds and from three different generations participated in this discussion in the Dutch city of Nijmegen. A few participants were emphasizing the importance of “love” in premarital sexual relations, when Hamid suddenly interrupted them and demanded a “clear positioning” in what he assumed to be a teleological and evolutionary process from being traditional to becoming modern. Whether to accept and tolerate sex before marriage would reflect one’s position in that inevitable process. To him talking about the importance of love was distracting the discussion from the main issue concerning either the acceptance or the rejection of premarital sex. He added: “everyone would agree that love is a good thing, but let us talk about the real issue here. Do we expect women, like our wives, daughters and our sisters to remain a virgin until marriage?” Hamid not only connected the virginity norm directly to women, he also challenged the other participants to imagine something personal. What was the meaning of emphasizing the role of “love” in the articulations on virginity and premarital sexuality by most of the informants? What was Hamid hoping to achieve by asking such confronting questions? How are women’s premarital sexuality and one’s position towards modernity related to each other in this conversation? The main concern of this chapter is to analyse the ways the Iranian Dutch deploy premarital sexuality in identity constructions, having “modernity” as the referential point. More specifically, I will focus on the gendered character of this deployment and illustrate the complexities and contradictions of what the Iranian Dutch label as “a battle between tradition and modernity.” I use the term “Iranian Dutch” to refer to my informants in order to recognize their Iranian background, their current position as immigrants as well as their citizenship in the Netherlands. All these positionings might play a role in their constructions of sexuality. The deployment of premarital sexuality here refers to the productive role of certain conceptions of sexuality in processes of identity construction.

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Around thirty-three thousand Iranians live in the Netherlands, a minority group that is noticed for its “prosperous integration” into Dutch society, measured by their participation in the job market, education, contact with “the autochthon Dutch,” their level of income and independence from governmental aid (CBS 2012, 11). In the last decade, the number of critical studies on integration policies in Western societies has grown; these studies focus on the process of creation of a “liberal modern self” and on disciplining “the Muslim other,” considered as intolerant and backward regarding issues of sexuality (Mepschen et al. 2010; Wekker 2009; Butler 2008; Ewing 2008; Fassin 2006; Puar 2007). However, the perceptions of the immigrants concerning questions of sexuality and “modernity” remain underexposed, especially in the case of a group that, based on certain criteria, has “integrated” well, such as the Iranian Dutch. In fact, in-depth socio-cultural research on the Iranian Dutch in general is scarce at best. The aim of this chapter is to problematize the gendered connection between notions of “liberal” sexuality and “modernity” from the perspective of a minority group with an Islamic background. Through this approach, a rather new terrain becomes elucidated, one in which the discourse on modernity is employed in the constructions of sexuality. Writing about modernity and sexuality in the current global situation is a tricky affair. Simplistic notions of modernity as a sign of “civilization” have too often been associated with a liberal attitude towards sexuality that would characterize the West as opposed to the backward, repressive Muslim other (Massad 2005, 175). I am very aware of the sensitive and contested connotation of these discussions as well as their potential utilization in justifying discriminatory and nationalistic agendas. Being an Iranian Dutch woman myself, however, I feel the need to pay close attention to what I have observed and what I read as an anxiety with “becoming modern” among the Iranian Dutch; an anxiety that in recent years has once again become strongly allied with sexuality. Importantly, the ideal of becoming modern as related to appropriating certain sexual norms has a long history among Iranians (see, for example: Najmabadi 2005; and Tavakoli-Targhi 2001, especially ch. 4). A random visit to important Western-based Iranian media, including social media such as Facebook, reveals the firm tone involved in positioning the self and the other in relation to a modern-versus-traditional binary when dealing with sexuality. I am in the first place interested in the processes of identity construction in these discussions, but I have also noticed the frequently over-simplified and overwhelmingly self-evidential use of sexuality for the means of identity politics. For this reason, I choose to take up the risky task of opening up a critical discussion on the

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discourse of “modernity” and sexuality, also considering its widespread implementation in the Iranian Dutch community. Furthermore, in order to avoid reproducing a civilisational account, rather than an evaluation of my informants’ perceptions as being “modern” or “traditional,” I am concerned with their constructions of modernity in their approach to sexuality as the means to constitute their subjectivity. In other words, I reject preconceived notions of “modern” or “traditional” sexuality as indicators of the Iranian Dutch level of ‘true’ integration in the Netherlands, and instead focus on how notions of “modernity” and “traditionality” in relation to sexuality enable the informants to claim a sense of self. This approach to sexuality among the Iranian Dutch, as an understudied field, allows for a shift of attention from evaluative to productive accounts of sexuality in the Dutch multicultural context.

Conceptual and methodological approach My theoretical lens to scrutinize modernity as an identity deployment process builds on the work of the historian Frederick Cooper. In a critical review of the ways modernity has been addressed in academic debates, he makes a distinction between four main approaches: (1) modernity applauded as central to European history and culture and as an aspiration for the rest of the world, (2) modernity as a European imperial construct imposed on others, (3) modernity as an exclusively European accomplishment that needs to be defended against “others” and (4) modernity as plural, such as reflected in notions of “multiple modernities” or “alternative modernities” (2005, 113-114). According to Cooper, the shared problematic aspect about these conceptualizations is that they all ascribe homogeneity and coherence to modernity, neglecting “the questioning, contestation, and critique that were and are part of the history,” and obscuring “the ongoing, unresolved conflicts at the heart of European culture and politics.” Even in the fourth approach, which might seem less exclusionary and more democratic than the other options, the very notion of “alternative modernities” assumes the existence of an “original or real modernity.” The Islamic or Chinese modernity would then be an extraction from Western or European modernity. Neither does the fourth perspective deconstruct the assumption of an evolutionary movement from tradition to modernity. Furthermore, if we were to understand modernity as a global condition of “the now” that includes everything and everyone, then the concept would lose its analytical potential altogether. Instead of thinking in terms of a metanarrative, Cooper proposes, we should regard modernity as “a claim-making device”

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and look for what has been said in its name, by whom, in what context and why. Through this “unpacking” of modernity (ibid., 132) and a focus on more precise understanding of how people frame this concept, we might be able to break out of the inevitability of modernity as an abstract reference point. This emphasis on modernity’s role as a claim-making device will serve as my theoretical guide in approaching my informants’ articulations on female virginity. Moreover, the un-packing of modernity could lead to a serious revision of simplistic, exclusionary, and gendered identity politics in discussions of “modern sexuality.” The analyses in this paper are based on the data gathered through indepth interviews with thirty Iranian Dutch men and women and six focus group discussions with another twenty-two informants in the years 20102012. Initially, I used my own network to contact informants for interviews and later, through snowball sampling, I was able to conduct the rest of the interviews, most of which were in Persian. The informants were drawn from small to large urban communities, consisted of both men and women of various ages (twenty to fifty-four years old), Muslims and atheists with at least a secondary education. The transcriptions of interviews and focus groups analyzed here are not regarded as providing access to words that can be taken for deeds, but as a discursive field where people act symbolically. In this sense I follow James Farrer’s approach in taking “sexual culture as a broad symbolic field of stories, performances and metaphors in which conventionalized actors, scenes, instrumentalities and purposes are as important as acts” (2002, 5). Sexual culture then becomes a site where cultural change is conceptualized, behaviour is regulated and public sense is constituted. I am particularly interested in Farrer’s understanding of “the rhetoric of the sexual culture,” which focuses on how sexuality is employed in order to articulate and negotiate certain “cultural elements” (ibid., 7). In short, the discursive micro-politics of sexuality, in this case female virginity, form the main concern in my analyses of the deployment of notions of sexuality by the Iranian Dutch. In Dutch debates on multiculturalism and the integration of Muslim minorities, sexuality has become a central site where “us-versus-them” categorizations are constructed. In these debates a liberal attitude towards sexuality has come to represent Dutch culture, against which an Islamic intolerance of sexual freedom is positioned, measured and dismissed (Mepschen et al. 2010). Because of this highly sensitive context, I tried to be careful in approaching the topic of sexuality during my interviews with the informants. Using a topic-list, each time I started with questions about more general issues such as their experiences as immigrants in the

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Netherlands. However, it soon became clear that in fact, because of the sensitivity of the topic of sexuality in current Dutch national discussions on immigrants, the informants were quite eager to clarify their “distinctive” position. A considerable number of them emphasized that contrary to Moroccan and Turkish Dutch minorities who experience difficulties in adapting to Dutch norms and values, they had been able to successfully re-evaluate and transform their previously traditional stance on sexuality into a modern attitude. Therefore they distanced themselves explicitly from other Islamic minorities in the Netherlands that they generally associated with tradition and backwardness. Rather than appropriating “victimhood” in light of exclusionist politics, they in fact claimed to belong to the “good” side. In this chapter, I am interested in the construction of a sense of belonging to the “good”—i.e. “modern”—side among the informants with a focus on the instrumentalization of gender in claiming this position. The remainder of the chapter is structured as follows. In the next section I will discuss the importance of “modernity” as a referential point in conceptualizing female virginity. My intention in this regard is to illustrate diversity in the configurations of identity construction through female premarital sexuality in the Iranian Dutch context. Next, the complexities and ambiguities in the assumed relation between modernity and female sexual liberty will be focused on. I will conclude with a critical refection upon the deployment of female premarital sexuality in the informants’ identity constructions.

Premarital sex as the claim-making device Other informants shared various versions of Hamid’s assumption about how female premarital sexuality would function as the vehicle towards becoming modern. Talking to Ahmad, a middle-aged man, in an in-depth interview, he expressed how he had difficulties in being an understanding father when it comes to his older daughter’s premarital sexual relationships. It is still difficult. It is still very difficult. Look, sometimes you accept something and try to convince yourself that it has to be like that. That is different from not even being willing to think about it and just decide beforehand that she is doing something wrong. Maybe, now I think like, I do not have a choice, I need to accept it. Given the changes that I have been going through in the past years, I think that it will be easier to deal with my second daughter, easier compared to the older one, for me as well as for her mother.

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Ahmad is determined that he should accept his daughter’s sexual relationships, even though this acceptance does not come to him easily. It seems that he praises himself for not being dogmatic about it and for “at least” taking it into consideration rather than rejecting it immediately. The element of time, associated with growing, is even more apparent when he assumes that dealing with his younger daughter’s premarital sex in the future would be less difficult. When I asked him about where this expectation of being an understanding father in relations to premarital sex came from, he started talking about the changes that he went through upon his migration to the Netherlands: “It is absolutely a consequence of living here. In Iran, I regarded it as something unimaginable, a taboo. Now, I see it as a natural thing.” Interestingly, despite having described the difficulties he experienced with his teenage daughter’s sexuality earlier, Ahmad presented premarital sex as “natural” here. He continued: There is no good reason for assuming that only a corrupt person would have sex before getting married. They [the Dutch] have sex before marriage and can still manage to create a healthy and functional family. In the past, I thought that it would absolutely ruin the life after marriage. Yes, I have been influenced by living in the Netherlands. Maybe if I had relationships with other kinds of people, with traditional families, I would have stayed the same or only changed marginally. I feel that my contact with modern Iranians and Dutch people has influenced me.

The modernity in the description “Modern Iranians and Dutch people” in the aforementioned quote represents a superior understanding of premarital sex as something natural, rather than as a corrupt act, as Ahmad himself used to think. Because of contact with “Modern Iranians and Dutch people,” Ahmad had found himself in the process of becoming more modern and less traditional. However, as it later became clear, the connection between corruption and sex before marriage, which Ahmad had believed in previously, only applied to women but not to men. He said that he had been regularly engaged in premarital sexual activities with women in Iran, but that he never considered marrying one of those sexual partners, because “a woman willing to have sex with just a guy, would never be serious marriage material.” For this reason, modernity associated with the acceptance of premarital sex was considered as something to be achieved only in the case of women. The gendered double standard, which Ahmad ascribes to his past, already allowed him as a man to engage in premarital sexual relations. In order for him to “become modern” in the present, he “needs” to attribute the same freedom to women. Through female sexuality, then, a “modern” identity can be claimed.

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Together with her mother, Hoda, a 22-year-old woman, participated in a focus group on virginity and relationships before marriage. After being invited to speak about significant personal experiences, she was the first one to react. She started sharing with the group her feelings of anxiety and insecurity about her relationship with her boyfriend. Hoda explained that although both her mother and her father were aware of this relationship, she and her boyfriend did not dare to express affection in front of her parents as freely as they would want to. Neither did Hoda feel comfortable being seen by other Iranian Dutch people while walking outside hand in hand with her boyfriend: I know that my parents accept him, because he comes to our house regularly and has met my parents at various occasions. But still, when we walk outside, I always worry about being seen by Iranian acquaintances. I think that they might tell my parents about their daughter walking on the street hand in hand with a boy. I know that my parents accept it, but I still feel ashamed. […] When we are alone, we sit next to each other, but when my parents come home we both think we should take some distance. Not that we are afraid, but we feel ashamed. It is one thing to be allowed to have a relationship, even a sexual relationship, but it is something very different to dare being open about it when you know that people are not ready to deal with it.

Hoda’s middle-aged mother, Minoo, who had been listening very carefully, responded to these statements by expressing her regret and confusion. Minoo emphasized that she and her husband explicitly allow Hoda and their other younger daughter to have relationships with boys and would always respect their privacy and individuality. She added: “as parents, we try so hard to liberate ourselves from the backward traditional culture in which we grow up.” This reference to the “liberation of oneself” reminded me of what Minoo had mentioned earlier: Until a while ago I felt uncomfortable about expressing my feelings towards my husband in public. This has to do with my background and how I was raised. In my family it was a taboo to show affection towards one another, especially as a woman. I thought it was a bad thing, something to be ashamed of, a sign of disrespectfulness. Now I have decided not to act according to these notions anymore. That is in my view an important part of modern behaviour; to be honest and to respect your individual feelings. I try to be different now and I must say it is working.

Here, Minoo makes a connection between “modern behaviour” and transgressing a public-private boundary by acting upon one’s feelings of

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affection. This openness about one’s affection towards another person would imply a sexual relationship, in Hoda’s perception. From Minoo’s as well as Hoda’s perspective, to act “modern” is to prioritize the individual above the collective. However, they are both talking about a specific kind of collective here. They associate this collective with a repressive, “traditional” and in their words “backward” Iranian background. Criticizing the latter and liberating oneself from it is the vehicle to “become modern.” In her role as a parent, Minoo tries to construct this modernity by allowing her daughters to express themselves romantically (and sexually). But from her daughter’s perspective, Minoo is nevertheless part of the collective that limits an individual’s freedom of expression, which is frustrating. The adjective ‘collective’ is then a floating category, since depending on the perspective it may include or exclude the same person, in this case Minoo. Keeping in mind Cooper’s concept of “unpacking modernity” (2005, 132), modernity is defined here as the process of an individual claiming space within the collective. It entails showing affection publically. If this is a criterion for becoming modern or liberating oneself from backwardness, then Hoda’s reservation in openly engaging with her boyfriend could be interpreted as the inability of the Iranian community, as well as of her parents, to actually create the necessary circumstances for someone to “be modern.” In this example, the attitude towards female premarital sexuality serves as a litmus test for evaluating and measuring the “true modernity” of the Iranian community. Lida, a young woman in her twenties and highly educated, described her parents as two people who were raised in “traditional Muslim families, which determined the way they dealt with sexuality.” This, she claimed, effected also her own perceptions of relationships and how she felt about sex as a teenager. When they moved to the Netherlands about fifteen years ago, her parents “realized that their traditional ideas about sexuality had no place anymore” in Dutch society. Assuming that this process of transition was inevitable, Lida added that especially her father was facing difficulties in letting go his old ideas and beliefs. “He could not really accept the way of life here. For example, one day he came and saw me dancing during my class and he was very upset about how we were supposed to move our legs in front of boys.” This, Lida emphasized, made her feel “ashamed” of her sexuality, and, because of this, having sex with her first boyfriend became a huge anxiety. “When it [first sexual intercourse] finally happened, I did not have a good feeling about it. I felt used. I felt ashamed. I had lost something valuable. It took me years before I learned that sex was not a filthy thing.” Lida also suggested that she had been able to free herself from the traditional perceptions of what it means to have sex, as a woman:

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“Now, I am actually very glad that I had sex before marriage. I have learned that women were also allowed to feel pleasure. I decided to be in charge of my own life. It made me more self-conscious.” In retrospect, losing her virginity was a crucial starting point for what Lida perceived as a process of emancipation in her life. Although Lida has a lot of “modern Iranian friends” now, who she did not know “existed” before moving to Amsterdam, she still has her doubts about how truly modern they are. “I do not know for sure whether they are acting or if they are really that modern. They seem to accept women having sexual relationships before marriage, but they also joke about it.” By questioning the credibility of the modern attitude of her friends, Lida simultaneously ascribes a “true modern identity” to herself. She, after all, has gone through a troublesome journey before internalizing modernity. Using this rhetoric, Lida allies with an assumed Dutch or Western “true modernity” and dissociates herself from those Iranians who are only partially or superficially “modern,” implying a real and an unreal “modernity.” This construction of real and unreal “modernity” by Lida is a highly productive rhetorical strategy to implicitly claim a “real modern” identity for herself. Beside “tradition,” also “unreal modernity,” intended as insincere or incomplete, might serve the production of “modernity.” The examples discussed in this section illustrate the deployment of female premarital sexuality in claiming a “modern” identity. These informants regard a tolerant attitude towards sex before marriage as a condition to “become modern.” The ability to recognize the “natural” character of sex, the freedom to express one’s affectionate feelings as an act of individuality, and to claim ownership of one’s life are notions associated with modernity, which can be achieved through the acceptance of premarital sexuality. These notions are assumed to correspond to “the western way of life” as articulated through narratives of (inevitable) teleological transition from being “traditional” to becoming “modern” upon coming to the Netherlands. Most importantly, the constructions of “modernity” are specifically related to female premarital sexuality, which I assume has to do with its contested and culturally loaded meaning. Much less would be gained by using the tolerance of male premarital sexuality as the condition of modernity. As Ahmad suggested, sex before marriage was not an uncommon phenomenon in his “traditional” past. This association between male premarital sexual relations and tradition makes the former unsuitable for identity politics that would lead to “modern” subjectivity. Female premarital sexuality, on the other hand, is the qualified vehicle for identity constructions leading to “modernity.” These stories suggest a cultural anxiety with “becoming modern” through the acceptance of

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premarital female sexuality. The following section will deal with the informants’ rhetorical strategies involved in the creation of certain circumstances under which women’s premarital sexuality is perceived as tolerable.

The mental hymen During a focus group with only male participants, Hammed, a married man and father of two girls and one boy, emphasized the importance of experiencing sex before marriage for young people. “I regret the fact that my wife and I were raised in a country were these things were not even thinkable. We fell in love, we married shortly after and then we got three children. Now, especially here, young people can experience so many things before entering a committed relationship.” When I asked him what exactly the advantages of such premarital relationships were in his view, he replied: “You get to know yourself and learn a lot about what you want.” Comparable statements about the growth of self-knowledge through multiple relationships before marriage were mentioned by a considerable number of my informants. Later, I introduced a new aspect to the group discussion about the parental role in dealing with children’s sexuality as all the participants were fathers. Hammed was the first one who reacted: “My wife and I treat our daughters just like our son. Iranians usually think that it is ok for their son to have a lot of girlfriends. They treat their daughters very differently as I am sure you are aware of. They have to remain clean virgins until they get married. Our daughters are allowed to have boyfriends, as long as they use their ‘mantegh’.” “Mantegh” is Persian for logic or rationality as opposed to feelings. Using one’s “mantegh” implies thoughtfulness rather than recklessness and spontaneity. Hammed continued: “We expect them not to have superficial relationships.” In his view, the limited duration and the focus on sex would characterize a “superficial” relationship, whereas “profound” relationships are those that “take years to develop and are mentally robust.” In other word, instead of sexual abstinence until marriage, a rational attitude would guard Hammed’s daughters’ chastity. The unrestrained sexual behaviour associated with multiple short-term relationships, rather than the loss of virginity, would endanger their chastity. While Hammed seems to endorse the “modernity” discourse introduced in the previous section by tolerating and accepting his daughters’ premarital sexual relationships, the rhetoric of “rationality” allows him to construct a limitation for this freedom. As rational women, the chastity of Hammed’s daughters will remain preserved. “Rationality”

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here includes a self-disciplined and cautious attitude and is presented as something that serves women’s own interest, rather than being an external norm forced upon them. Through the rhetoric of “rationality,” therefore, Hammed manages to perform as a “modern” father and at the same time to assure his daughters’ chastity. Some of the informants, both in one-on-one conversations as well as in focus groups, connected premarital sexuality with the danger of losing control and with psychological damage. The general idea was that young women with multiple sexual partners would suffer from emotional stress resulting in a sense of insecurity. In one of my conversations with a highly educated married woman in her late thirties, Raha, the issue of multiple sexual partners came up. Having a boyfriend before getting married, she said, was not an option for her as her family “was too traditional and too religious to accept it.” She then explained that her ideas about sexuality in general and premarital sex in particular had increasingly diverged from those of her family, since she came to the Netherlands. Her family is still living in Iran and she left the country after marrying her husband: “My husband had already modern ideas about these things, but that is because he already lived here for years before I came. I needed some time to change my way of thinking.” When I asked Raha whether this meant that she now would tolerate premarital sexual relations, she replied: Yes, but it depends. Well, I do think that when people have lots of sexual relationships, their souls get affected. I think that no one should start a sexual relationship without considering certain things. You should not get close to someone without enough knowledge, which takes a lot of time. Women should not think they need men to feel secure. […] All those experiences affect your soul in a negative way. They damage you spiritually. […] Before the age of 30, a woman does not know what love is. She has to be very careful.

In various moments, Raha emphasized the importance of spirituality, which she had grown fond of in the past years: “I read a lot about spirituality and try to use it as a guide in my life, in every aspect.” For Raha, spirituality has to do with emotional health and stability: “It makes you feel fresh and calm. You become more healthy and stronger.” This rhetoric of spirituality was also deployed in the way in which Raha conceptualized premarital sexual relationships. Emotional health and stability as opposed to spiritual damage and insecurity are the main indicators of how Raha perceived sexuality before marriage, explicitly in the case of women. Spirituality would provide the necessary strength and guidance to safeguard women’s fragility when engaging in relationships

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before marriage. While Raha presents the absolute restriction of premarital sexuality in the context of tradition and religion as something that one is ought to leave behind, spirituality enables her to preserve some sense of limitation and control. “Spirituality” then functions as a modern version of traditionality and religiosity. Whereas religion and tradition might be interpreted as backward and restrictive collective realms, spirituality as perceived by Raha concerns the individual’s emotional and psychological affairs. On the one hand, Raha utilizes a popular anti-religion and antitradition discourse by distancing herself from a previous religiosity. On the other hand, she employs the concept of “spirituality” to hold on to some transcendental guidelines. Spirituality, therefore, disposes tradition and religion from their backward connotation via references to secular notions of emotional strength and stability. At the same time “spirituality” takes over, to a certain extent, the assumed functionality of tradition and religion by restricting female premarital sexual behaviour. The spiritual self as claimed by Raha is neither dogmatic nor noncommittal. Moreover, a distinction between sex on the one hand and love and romance on the other hand—associating the former with temporality and the latter with profoundness and endurance—was made by some of the informants. For instance, Fariba, a middle-aged woman described her position on premarital sexuality as such: “real intimacy has nothing to do with sex. “Ta’ahod” [commitment] is the most important sign of a profound, meaningful relationship.” Whether to engage in premarital sexual relationships or not was in Fariba’s view not the real issue. It is, according to her, rather a matter of “quality.” This “quality” was primarily described by the willingness of both partners to commit. “Especially women are good at that,” she added. Fariba ascribed commitment, as a valuable quality in a relationship, to the domain of femininity, which entails not giving up in difficult times: “some women think they should be happy all the time, but I believe in persistence and commitment. That is what makes relationships romantic.” Premarital sex and happiness are here positioned against romance, commitment and femininity. Specific to this femininity is “self-sacrifice,” which implies that one should be prepared to abandon one’s own needs for the sake of the relationship’s stability. Premarital sex opens up a space in which relational continuity becomes threatened, as Fariba posits it. By establishing boundaries, the rhetoric of commitment allows Fariba to imagine a solution for this potential relational discontinuity associated with premarital relationships. “Commitment” celebrated as a sign of true romance appeals to the individual’s ability to exceed him/herself for a greater good: the relationship. This connection between commitment and romance

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dispossesses the former from oppressive connotations. Like Raha and Hammed, rather than referring to a dogmatic religious or traditional condemnation of sexuality before marriage, Fariba employs a gendered secular vocabulary in order to ensure some sense of control and limitation.

Conclusion This chapter opened with Hamid’s quote in which he invited the other participants of the focus group to face what he saw as the “real” issue of having to position oneself in the spectrum of identifications with “modernity” and “tradition” as its two opposite ends. The references to “love” he assumed were manoeuvres to avoid a culturally sore point. The tolerance or rejection of premarital sex would reveal the actual position of the participants in the teleological and evolutionary transition from being “traditional” to becoming “modern.” The “modernity” discourse underlying Hamid’s statements is exemplary of the various ways in which other informants in other settings conceptualized female premarital sexuality. As such, extending Cooper’s suggestion to understand “modernity” as “a claim-making device” (2005), the deployment of female premarital sexuality in constructions of subjectivity was illustrated in the informants’ narratives. To become “modern” is assumed to be reached through the acceptance of women having sex before marriage. This approach allowed me to elucidate the productive role of “modernity” in processes of construction of subjectivity. This manner of understanding “modernity” is opposed to the role “modernity” has in dominant Dutch integration debates, where it is used as an evaluative tool to determine the position of Islamic minority groups. In the last section of the paper, I focused on the rhetorical strategies used by informants to create some sense of confinement in the otherwise unrestrained field of “modern sexuality.” Whereas they all invested considerably in the constructions of a “modern” identity through the acceptance of female premarital sexuality, attempts were simultaneously made in order to assure a certain degree of restriction through female chastity. In this regard, the informants employed the rhetoric of “rationality,” “spirituality” and “commitment” as non-religious, secular tools, which secured part of the assumed restrictive functionality of religion and tradition. What these rhetorical strategies have in common is that they emphasize the role of a certain mentality or attitude as that which would safeguard female chastity, rather than a certain physical status such as virginity. I argue that, for these informants, in the processes of constructing a modern identity, a “mental hymen” has come to replace the

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“actual” hymen. The concept of mental hymen then functions as a modern alternative for the perceived backward cult of virginity. Female sexuality is the site where these micro identity politics are performed, whereby notions of “modernity” and “tradition” enable the identity constructions of the informants. Finally, the unpacking of these notions reveals a continuity of female chastity, symbolized by a mental hymen, in an imagined transition from being “traditional” to becoming “modern.” Accordingly, this process rejects a binary opposition between “liberal sexuality,” considered as belonging to the “modern” realm, and restrictive sexuality considered an integral part of religion and “religiosity.”

References Butler, Judith. 2008. “Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time.” British Journal of Sociology 59:1-23. Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek. 2012. Jaarraport integratie 2012. Den Haag and Heerlen: CBS. Cooper, Fredrick. 2005. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ewing, Katherine Pratt. 2008. Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Farrer, James. 2002. Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press. Fassin, Eric. 2006. “The Rise and Fall of Sexual Politics in the Public Sphere. A Transatlantic Contrast.” Public Culture 18:79-92. Massad, Joseph A. 2008. Desiring Arabs. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press. Mepschen, Paul, Jan Willem Duyvendak and Evelien Tonkens. 2010. “Sexual Politics, Orientalism and Multicultural Citizenship in the Netherlands.” Sociology 44:962-79. Najmabadi, Afsaneh. 2005. Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. Berkley: University of California press. Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages; Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad. 2001. Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography. Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wekker, Gloria. 2009. “Van Homo Nostalgie en Betere Tijden. Multiculturaliteit en Postkolonialiteit.” Paper presented at the annual George Mosse meeting, Amsterdam. September 16, 2009.

CHAPTER TEN BARGAINING BETWEEN HUSBANDS AND SOCIETIES: THE OBSTACLES AND DIFFICULTIES OF CHINESE MOTHERS TEACHING THEIR CHILDREN MANDARIN IN THE NETHERLANDS SHU-YI HUANG

Figure 10.1 “He can’t even write his own name in Chinese,” said the obviously disappointed Betty about the heritage language loss of her son. These characters were written by Shu-Yi Huang in 2013.

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This chapter explores practices of motherhood of first generation overseas Chinese women in the Netherlands. Based on an analysis of twenty-eight in-depth interviews, the focus is on the experiences of differential dynamics of heritage language loss. Language plays a vital part in our daily lives; people use language as a tool to express themselves, to convey thoughts and to communicate with each other. Language is not only a bridge for human beings to interact with the outside world but also a heritage for parents to pass on their cultural orientations to their children. For most overseas Chinese families, when emigrating to a monolingual society, the biggest challenge is to learn a new language. The pressure to integrate often leads to heritage language loss in the second generation. Pierre Bourdieu (1991) argued that language is not only a tool for daily communication in a semantic field but also has a symbolic power in the political representation in a society; it intervenes in a material field. The official language, particularly, represents symbolic power as excellence. Language becomes a capital that supports individuals to establish or expand their positions in a social space structured by power relationships (Bourdieu in Adamuti-Trache 2012, 3). Elites must rely on this power to sustain their superior social position and privileges. Dominated people acquiesce because language imposes schemes of classification that produce a legitimate form of social order to hide the arbitrariness of its foundations (Kelly 1993, 1200). This study focuses on mainly two forms of symbolic power, two languages, which clash when intersecting with processes of migration: one is the official language of the host country (Dutch); the other one is the heritage language from the pre-migration country (Mandarin). Each of them is valued differently depending on where the actors are situated. According to Bourdieu, a ‘field’ is a form of social organization with two main aspects: (a) a configuration of social roles, agent positions, and the structures they fit into and (b) the historical process in which those positions are actually taken up, occupied by individual or collective actors (Hanks 2005, 72). Family, educational institutions, government authorities can be regarded as fields. These fields are relatively bounded. A language is socially valued, through speaking a language one is embedded in a universe of categorization, selective distinctions, and evaluations. Additionally, it should be remembered that symbolic systems are to be understood as structuring as well as structured (ibid., 77). I regard motherhood as a field (Bourdieu, 1991), where several powers operate at the same time, and I especially focus on its relation to matters of language education. Bourdieu wrote that: A field is always the site of struggles in which individuals seek to maintain or alter the distribution of the forms of capital specific to it. The

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individuals who participate in these struggles will have differing aims, depending on where they are located in the structured space of positions (1991, 14).

From my analysis of the narratives of the informants—first generation Chinese women in the Netherlands—language loss emerged as one of the key issues. From the first three pilot interviews, all three interviewees mentioned right away parent-child communication and Mandarin education as problems for their children when being asking the question, “What do you consider to be the most difficult thing as an immigrant mother in the Netherlands?” I still remember how Betty1(note that, to protect the privacy of the interviewees, all their names in this article are pseudonyms), who has four children, expressed her resentment by saying with a trembling voice, “they (referring to her two younger sons,) don’t even know how to write their own name (in Chinese).” The fear of losing one’s identity, from Betty’s perspective, is embedded in the ability to write and speak one’s heritage language or mother tongue. In her view, the capacity to use the heritage language is a symbol of who you really are and where you come from. Her strong emotional reaction when discussing this issue has prompted a number of questions to me. What causes heritage language loss for Chinese immigrants? Why does the second generation lose their heritage language during the process of assimilation into Dutch society? Are the reasons that cause a loss of heritage among second generation Chinese related to gendered relationships inside the family? How can we make sense of the interaction between immigrant Chinese mothers and mainstream society when they are fighting for their children’s Mandarin education? In this chapter, I answer these questions by elaborating on them from two perspectives. One of these is Pierre Bourdieu’s theory on language and symbolic power; the other is feminist intersectional theory (Davis 2008; Wekker 2009). The mothers I interviewed, with the different geographic regions where they grew up, the different generations, the different educational levels and having husbands of different nationalities, present a multiplicity of narratives on motherhood, womanhood and identities. This very structural complexity of first generation immigrant Chinese women has never been elaborated and systematically illustrated in an intersectional manner in the field of gender studies in the Dutch context. What happens when people migrate to another country whose inhabitants speak a different language? I argue that at least two symbolic powers clash during the process of migration: one is the official language of the host country; the other one is the heritage language migrants bring from their pre-migration country. In this research, Dutch and Mandarin are

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the two dominant languages I analyse as they both perform a symbolic power in an immigrant family in distinct ways. Following Bourdieu, immigrant families can be considered as a social field, where parents often speak other languages than the state-imposed national language. Simultaneously, these parents try to maintain the social order in the family by drawing on their experiences that are largely embedded in their homeland culture. To this complexity, one should also add the specific influence of the intersection of age, gender, class and nationality. I should clarify why I refer to Mandarin as a heritage language rather than as a mother tongue. For example, I am a Taiwanese woman, and my mother tongue is Taiwanese not Mandarin. Bejing Guanhua (Bejing dialect), the so-called Mandarin or Standard Mandarin nowadays, became an official language in 1949, not even half a century ago, in the year when People’s Republic of China was founded under the rule of the Communist Party. In mainland China, Mandarin has been taught in every educational institutions starting from 1956. There are an estimated 129 dialects (usually distinct into 7 linguistic groups: Guan, Wu, Yue, Min, Xiang, Kejia, Gan) in mainland China alone, and 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities with their own languages (Chun 1996). However, we must be aware that the rising of Mandarin supremacism inside Chinese communities is having a negative impact on the cultural varieties of ethnic minorities; it is also causing the gradual extinction of minority dialects. The chapter is structured as follows: firstly, I will review some previous research, conducted mostly in English speaking countries, related to the heritage language loss for second generation Chinese immigrants. Secondly, I will give a brief background of my research method. Thirdly, I will elaborate on the heritage language loss of the Chinese community in the Dutch context. I will conclude discussing the experiences of firstgeneration Chinese women in teaching Mandarin to their children through the lens of Bourdieu’s concept of language as a symbolic power.

Language loss and family struggles Research on language shift within Chinese migrant families has predominantly been conducted in English-speaking countries. Along with the rapid increase of the Chinese population in English-speaking countries such as the United States3, UK, Australia and New Zealand, the successful academic performance of second generation Chinese makes this group a “model minority group.” For example, the 2000 U.S. Census report showed that Chinese language is now ranked the third most frequently

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spoken language in the United States, behind English and Spanish (Li 2005). However, the quicker they become proficient in English, the faster a loss of the heritage language occurs among the second generation. This issue has only recently been noticed by scholars. Wen-Jui Han (2010) criticized past researchers and policymakers for focusing too much on migrant children’s academic performance, and paying little attention to their socio-emotional well-being. Lily Wong Fillmore (1991) found that 50.6% of the Chinese immigrant families reported that children shifted from using Mandarin into using English at home. Laurie Olsen (2000, 196) considered this phenomenon might result from a “language shock” in the early assimilation process of children coming from minority families. However, writing about transcultural identification among ChineseAmericans, Youngjoo Yi notes that youth re-connecting with their heritage language can be perceived as “cool” by their American peers, and it may also foster the construction of a “positive self-image” (2009, 108). Scholars have pointed out that societal pressure and the political ideology shaping a monolingual country play a big part in accelerating the loss of the home language. When speaking English is constructed as a symbolic icon for national loyalty, children will displace their home language (Fillmore 2000; Taylor 2008; Ho 2010). Desiree Boalian Qin (2006) vividly illustrated how Chinese migrant parents feel sad and hopeless when this happens: when their children become more oriented towards American culture and society, Chinese migrant parents become more passive and silent at home. As they grow apart emotionally, the parent-child relationship becomes troubled and this in turn leads to a less intimate connection. The situation can be then expected to deteriorate further under the traditional Chinese style of obedience and discipline. Additionally, Mandarin is not only a tool for constructing ethnic identity and to strengthen the connection between parents and children, it is also an economic resource and social capital within the worldwide Chinese (diaspora) community. Illustratively, Aihwa Ong (1999) analyzed tycoons from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Indonesia; they hold passports from Western countries which offer them socially flexible citizenships. Another key feature that makes them successful is their Mandarin capital, which, she explained, is important for constructing an Asian fraternal network. These networks are representative of the modern Asian way of doing business—man to man, and usurping the paternalistic role of the government in economic activities. In this way, Ong recognized the importance of Mandarin as social capital and the mechanisms for Chinese heritage to stand out in global capitalism and to compete with the Western world.

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From the studies mentioned above, language education for secondgeneration immigrants seems largely a gender-neutral matter. However, in everyday life situations, women are the ones mainly playing care-giving roles, and therefore spend more time with their children. Nonetheless, little is known about the role of Chinese migrant women and their bargaining power regarding the use of the dominant, Western, language and its symbolic implications. More specifically, scholars have paid little attention to how first generation immigrant mothers interact with their husbands and schoolteachers when they decide to make their children learn Mandarin in Western societies. Besides the peer pressure on children to speak the dominant language and a lack of opportunities to speak Mandarin outside their home (Kleyn & Reyes 2011), the gendered aspects of the decision making dynamics in the family play an important role. Both the choice of the mothers of having their children to learn Mandarin and the real space for actions that the women have are intertwined with power mechanisms. In this chapter, I will intervene in this field of scholarship by describing two power mechanisms at work in the processes of language use and transmission, namely: patriarchy and the symbolic power of language.

Methodology and profile of interviewees In order to know how first generation immigrant Chinese mothers teach their children Mandarin in the Netherlands, I chose in-depth interviews as my main research method. In my in-depth interviews I sought to understand the lived experiences of the individual informants. I was interested in getting at the subjective understanding an individual brings to a given situation or set of circumstances. The in-depth interview method is issue-oriented, thus a researcher might use this method to explore a particular topic and gain focused information on the issue from the respondents (see, for example, Brooks and Hesse-Biber 2009, 118).. I began my search for potential interviewees in September 2011 by sending out mail and email requests. I wrote several emails to different Chinese organizations in the Netherlands, namely: The Foundation 100 Years Chinese People in the Netherlands, Taiwan Shian-Chin Association, Voor Welzijn Den Haag, Chinese women’s association in Den Haag, and Overseas Chinese women’s organizations in the Netherlands. It shall be noted that I did not get any response from The Foundation 100 Years Chinese People in the Netherlands. In October 2012, I engaged in participant observation at a Mandarin class in a weekend Chinese school. Weekend Chinese classes in the Netherlands are private, organized by Chinese parents themselves, and mainly located in big cities, such as

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Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Den Haag and Utrecht. At all such events and during each interview, I observed interesting interactions and conversations. Take two examples: some mothers asked their children to chat with me only in Mandarin to show how well they had taught them. Some interviewees insisted on me staying for dinner. When I volunteered to help in the kitchen, some interviewees started to share more experiences, told with highly emotional voices, about mothering in an alien country while the husbands were not around. All these information were recorded in written field notes and through a digital voice recorder. Besides the fieldwork and the interviews, I also searched for useful data in Chinese newspapers, and Dutch magazines and newspapers. For the latter, I have to thank my PhD supervisor, Prof. Dr. Gloria Wekker, as she often gave me some interesting articles from Dutch magazines and newspapers, which I would have otherwise not noticed. I spent one year studying Dutch both in Taiwan and in the Netherlands, so that I could have basic daily conversation with the interviewees and their families in the case they wanted to converse in Dutch. The analysis of this paper is based on Twenty-eight interviews with first-generation overseas Chinese mothers; all were face-to-face semistructured questionnaires with digital recordings from one to six hours in length. The interviewees all had at least one child and the mean age of the interviewees was forty-four years old. The oldest informant was seventy and the youngest thirty. Only one of them was a second generation Chinese. The average number of children was 1.7. Eighteen informants came from Taiwan and ten of from China. Their mother tongues varied, and included Taiwanese, Cantonese, Wenzhounese, and Shanghainese. Mandarin, as an official language in China and Taiwan, can be seen as a heritage language of all the interviewees. Due to the separate regimes of two Chinas—the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC)—the term ‘official language’ has various names. In Taiwan it is called Guoyu, ᅧㄒ (national language); in Mainland China it called Putonghua, ᬑ㏻ヰ (common language or common speech). Most of the interviewees could speak Mandarin, English and Dutch. The mean length of time they have been residing in The Netherlands ranged between two and forty years, the average period was fifteen years. Among the twentyeight interviewees, one was a widow, one divorced, one separated, fourteen women married white Dutch husbands, two women married second generation Chinese-Dutch men, seven women married Taiwanese husbands, one woman married a Hongkongese husband, and four women married first-generation overseas Chinese husbands. The highest educational level of the interviewees was a PhD and the lowest was

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elementary school level. Two of them received their highest education in the Netherlands and are currently PhD candidates in the Netherlands, one of them received her Master diploma in the United Kingdom, and the other twenty-six received their education in their countries of origin. The interviewees were either full-time mothers or worked part-time. Apart from one interview which was conducted in a village near the Dutch and German border, the other twenty-seven interviews were conducted in major Dutch cities: Amsterdam, Utrecht, Den Haag, Eindhoven, Rotterdam, Leiden, and Leeuwarden. In the next section, I will show narratives of how women feel, the difficulties they experienced, and the rejection and disagreement of their children in receiving a Mandarin language education both inside and outside the family. The interviews reflected the fact that the process of decision making concerning the learning of a heritage language is not easy for immigrant mothers. They must bargain with both the unequal gender power they have in the relationships with their husbands and with the symbolic powers at work in the society they live in.

Mothers negotiating autonomy The opinions of the male spouses play a vital role on whether mothers can teach their children Mandarin or not, the narratives of the informants reveal. All the interviewees tried to teach Mandarin to their children by themselves, from the age of two, or to send them to a weekend Chinese school between the ages of five and seven. Two Taiwanese mothers used the three-month summer vacation to enrol their children in an intensive Chinese summer class in Taiwan. Not all mothers succeeded; besides the resistance from their own children, the attitudes of their husbands was also crucial. In the following discussion, the study is divided into two parts. The first part of the analysis charts examples about unsupportive husbands who hold negative opinions on children learning Mandarin and explores how mothers struggle and negotiate their autonomy. The second part will provide counter examples about supportive husbands and also unravels how couples manage to negotiate with resistant children. Let us consider two examples from transcultural families. With transcultural families I mean those families where husbands and wives share different countries of origin and speak different mother tongues. The common language they use to communicate is English. Rachel is fiftyeight; she has two children, both in their thirties. She married a white Dutch man in her early twenties, having no previous working experience.

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She identified herself as an extremely lonely mother dedicated to the education of her children, and she felt angry towards her unsupportive husband for not letting her teach Mandarin to her children. During the interview, I could tell that she had become very emotional. She kept repeating how selfish and chauvinistic her husband acts with regard to this issue; how foolish and docile she was in the past; and how the topic of Mandarin education for their children became a taboo topic and a trigger for arguments with her husband. For several years she begged her husband to allow her to take her children back to Taiwan to take intensive Chinese summer classes but her husband rejected all her suggestions. Now two of her children only understand very basic conversational Mandarin and cannot read or write in Chinese. She shared: Every year before the start of summer vacation, I would ask his permission to take our children back to Taiwan to study Mandarin, but he always said no. He didn’t want us to be separated for three months and he said there is no need to speak Mandarin in the Netherlands. At that time, I was very young. As long as he disapproved, I would follow his decision. But now I really hate him for that, it is very important to me, as a mother. That is one missing piece in my life. My children are totally westernized. Language is a way of thinking, and so sometimes I feel distant to them. Like Xiàoshùn, (Ꮥ㡰; filial piety11) although he (my son) knew this vocabulary in English, he couldn’t understand the deeper meaning of it. It is beyond translation; it is culture, isn’t it? Now I saw you nodding because you know exactly what I am talking about. I wish my son could have had the chance to learn Mandarin then he could at least realize my feelings as a mother.

Note that all the narratives are translated from Mandarin to English. Only some specific terms mentioned by interviewees were uttered in Dutch, English or Taiwanese. Rachel’s husband is eleven years older than she is. As a young wife who speaks very limited Dutch and earns only a small income from a parttime job, she must get financial support from her husband for flight tickets and tuition fees for Mandarin classes in Taiwan. Thirty-five years ago, there were few weekend Chinese schools in the Netherlands. Rachel lived in the countryside outside Utrecht, and the only Chinese school in Utrecht taught Cantonese and not Mandarin. The unequal positions in terms of age, financial resources, language, and broader cultural/social gender power relations kept Rachel from making decisions autonomously. Whatever her husband liked and disliked, she would have to obey. Although she kept fighting for almost ten years, her husband still denied her requests and regarded Mandarin as a useless language in the Netherlands. In a monolingual society, people take for granted that the

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dominant language is the only correct choice for children. Rachel shared an anecdote from her conversation with a neighbour on children’s language development: My daughter couldn’t talk well when she was 2. I asked my neighbour’s opinion about that, she told me that was because the languages we spoke at home were too complicated. Sometimes Mandarin, sometimes English, and sometimes Dutch, that’s why my daughter felt confused. She strongly suggested that I only speak Dutch, and keep one single language at home. At that moment, I tried to learn and speak only Dutch or English to my children. Years later, I finally found the answer from an article in a newspaper about children’s early linguistic development. It explained that children can distinguish different languages on their own as long as parents create a constant bilingual environment for them. That report really came too late.

Here we see a desperate immigrant mother seeking help from mainstream society. When a mother with a foreign background encounters a children’s language education issue in the Netherlands, mainstream society does not encourage her to teach her children her mother tongue or even the heritage language but a language which is also new and difficult for her to learn. In everyday-linguistic exchanges, in comparison to Mandarin and English, Dutch has a higher hierarchical position in people’s daily life. Foreign spouses should learn Dutch in order to show loyalty and their willingness to quickly orient towards Dutch society. Speaking only Dutch to their children is seen as the legitimate and correct thing to do. Before the 1990s, people tended to believe that children should learn only a single language at an early age otherwise they would become confused by different linguistic systems. However, in the 1990s, innovative theories and new discoveries broke the myth of a single language. Jim Cummins’s Dual Iceberg theory argues that bilingual proficiency implies that experience with either language can promote the development of the proficiency underlying both languages, given adequate motivation and exposure to both either in school or in the wider environment (1992, 22). Earlier linguistic studies only focused on surface language proficiency where most school educators prevented their students from speaking their heritage languages. This resulted in unfortunate consequences for language minority students as well as for immigrant mothers like Rachel, who suffered from the idea that only learning the dominant language is best for children. The second example comes from Bonnie who has been living in the Netherlands for thirty years. She met her native Dutch husband in the United States. When she lived in the States, before marriage, she could

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speak English and Mandarin freely to her son. She told me that things changed after moving to the Netherlands: My husband spoke to me and my son to our face “from now on we can only speak Dutch at home. Since right now we are in the Netherlands, we must speak Dutch. Forget Mandarin and you will learn English later in school anyway…. I was in total shock that he made that decision without asking me.….I tried to spoke Mandarin to my son while he was not around…I am really glad my son bought himself a series of Mandarin selflearning DVDs at the age of 18. He told me he wanted to find his roots. Now we can communicate many ideas in Mandarin.

This is another example that shows how unequal gender power relations, along with the symbolic power of Dutch as the dominant language, lead to the decision about which language is spoken at home. Only Dutch, the father’s language, the official language, is considered legitimate and correct. Chinese women who are raised according to the tenants of Confucianism are generally taught to not verbally fight against injustice and patriarchy. Here we see Bonnie reacting to her husband in an indirect and non-confrontational manner. Standing in an inferior position, as a wife, she might not have the power of veto but she still performs her autonomy by speaking Mandarin while the husband is absent. I am not claiming that Chinese husbands are always supportive of their children’s Mandarin education, but it can be observed that they react in a different way compared to Dutch husbands who are against their children having a Mandarin education. Five of my interviewees, married to Chinese husbands, reported that their husbands were indifferent about their children’s education. These Chinese husbands simply leave all children’s education responsibilities to their wives and, as a result, also made these immigrant mothers feel alone and isolated. For instance, Betty, the woman I mentioned at the beginning of this article, told me that her husband was busy running a Chinese restaurant all day long. He simply put all of the responsibilities of caring for their children on her. However, she is not able to just be a stay-at-home mother because she still has to help in the restaurant as well. She sent all four children to weekend Chinese classes for at least four years; unfortunately she could only spend a little time with her children and all of her children complained about their extra Mandarin homework and weekend school. Since there were no signs of improvement in their Mandarin, she gave up in the end. She expressed her feeling with despair in her voice:

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However, on the other hand, some husbands are very supportive and let their children learn Mandarin; most of these husbands are between thirty and fifty years old. They see bilingual education as useful for their children and they acknowledge that it benefits the harmony of the family. I will begin with an example of a transcultural family to look at the discourse beyond the father’s supportive attitude. Fanny has a son who is nearly three-years-old. Due to her husband’s job, they have to live for four months in the Netherlands and eight months in Taiwan every year. Her husband majored in Mandarin in the Netherlands and the languages they use everyday to communicate are Mandarin and Taiwanese. Fanny discusses the communication situation that emerged during the period when they lived in the Netherlands with her in-laws: We tried to speak only Dutch in front of my in-laws because they asked us to. They said it is better for my son when he comes back for kindergarten. But my husband wants to raise our children in Taiwan. He likes the weather and food there. He also considers Mandarin has more potential than Dutch in the future, if we raise our son in the Netherlands; it is very difficult for him to master Mandarin.

The quotation reveals a typical reason for fathers who support their children’s Mandarin education. In his choice, the father focuses on the market value of Mandarin for their children’s future career. Three interviewees told me they reached a consensus with their husbands to let their children go to weekend Chinese classes for at least five years before the commencement of high school. In this way they can speak Mandarin to their mother and Dutch to their father at home. Parents cooperate together in order to maintain a bilingual environment for their children to learn two languages simultaneously. In fact, after the 1970s, scholars have verified that bilingualism is cognitively and academically beneficial for children (Cummins 1979). However, when children grow up, peer life can become an obstacle that decreases the willingness of children to speak Mandarin. Quentin told me that peer pressure outside of the home was strongly felt when their children reached a certain age. Their children wanted to be the same as their Dutch classmates. No one speaks Mandarin at school and since they are young, they could not foresee the future potential of

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learning Mandarin. When their children started to resist learning Mandarin, she spoke about feeling very fortunate of having her husband as an ally: My husband respects me when it comes to our children’s education. My son hates to learn Mandarin although he has been studying it for six years. He came to negotiate with his father several times because he knew it was useless to talk with me. Sometimes my husband almost gave in but he kept telling my son that he must respect his mother’s culture. Besides, Mandarin will be very useful and important in the future. He also tried to comfort him by telling my son he will be free from weekend Chinese school after two years.

Another everyday dynamic can be observed with Chinese immigrant families. When both parents are Chinese, learning languages becomes a priority in their children’s education. Twelve interviewees told me that as the Euro crisis becomes worse and worse and the political atmosphere in the Netherlands becomes more and more conservative and unwelcoming towards immigrants, their children might have a hard time finding jobs in the Netherlands. So, with concerns about their future career, they must learn Mandarin to at least a basic level. Then, after Mandarin, in order of priority comes English, while Dutch is recognized as the least important language. Doris, a fifty-year-old Taiwanese mother, followed her husband to the Netherlands after he got a promotion. Thirty-one years went by, and with the uncertainty of her husband of keeping his transnational work contract, Doris sent two of her sons to international schools in the Netherlands to develop a better English proficiency. She also continued sending her children back to Taiwan for six years for intensive summer Mandarin classes. Of course she encountered great resistance from and got into fights with her children. She tried to convince them about the market capital of learning Mandarin: When you apply for a job in the future, people assume you can speak Mandarin because you are Chinese in appearance. No matter how well you can speak Dutch, people will never see you as a native speaker. The only advantage you have is your Mandarin ability. The market in Asia is a hundred times bigger than in the Netherlands, so how will you find jobs in Taiwan, China and Hong Kong if you speak only Dutch and English (as a Chinese person)?

Here we see the clear hierarchy of languages from the standpoint of an immigrant mother. She knows exactly how mainstream society regards immigrant children as “Other” no matter how good is her children’s

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proficiency of the Dutch language. Feeling like an outsider in Dutch society made this first-generation migrant Chinese mother rely on languages with a stronger symbolic power, namely Mandarin and English, as providing positive cultural and economic capital for her children’s future. The same kind of sense for immigrant women of feeling alienated, marginalized, and forever stranger is also documented, for example, in Halleh Ghorashi’s study (2002). She argued that because of the small Iranian community in the Netherlands, even though first-generation migrant women who have been living in the Netherlands for decades can speak fluent official language, they still feel very isolated and unwelcomed by the political discursive construction of Dutchness. Following from this analysis of the strategies Chinese mothers use concerning language education, I argue that the language that is considered most important for children to learn is the one that is seen as an investment; therefore those that have the most market value and market capital come first. This can be also read as a practical resistance to survive in a rather close society not very welcoming to migrants.

Learning Mandarin in order to stay in the global Chinese fraternal network From the above arguments it becomes clear that for first-generation immigrant Chinese mothers teaching their children Mandarin is a complex issue. For the immigrants who arrived early in the Netherlands, when information and Mandarin resources were hard to access, women found no materials to teach their children Mandarin. Additionally, when husbands held decision-making power over their wives and claimed Dutch was the only legitimate and correct language for their children, immigrant wives could do nothing but obey. I propose to read the husbands’ unsupportive discourses through Pierre Bourdieu’s theory ([1983] 1991) about the symbolic power of an official language and field. As previously mentioned, the family-home could be seen as a field of a unit of society. When a (white) Dutch husband regards Mandarin as useless and declares that all family members should start speaking the official language, Dutch, we could argue, through Bourdieu’s perspective, that he is making a political statement to strengthen the value of his language. This action gives him power over his wife by subordinating and devaluing her heritage language. The power the husband exerts in this case can be read as a disciplining power that works at two levels: he declares his unquestioned masculine and superior role at home and he also confirms his role in society at large. Thus, in this study, Chinese women and their Dutch

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husbands come to represent the two opposite poles of the argument on the question of the importance of languages and of language acquisition. Family thus becomes an arena where Dutch and Mandarin, represented respectively by fathers and mothers, are invested with differential symbolic powers. Moreover, intersections of gender, age, class, ethnicity, nationality and financial inequality all intertwine with the languages spoken inside immigrant families. For those white Dutch fathers who instead support their children’s Mandarin education, such decision comes more from career concerns rather than as an attention to the Chinese identity of their mothers. In this sense, the job market can also be seen as a social field, and thus parents’ decision on language learning depends not simply on personal preferences but also on the symbolic market value of the language. Although Dutch is the official language in the Netherlands and has its own legitimate symbolic value, Dutch-Chinese parents with second-generation children see the world from a more globalized perspective, where English and Mandarin are valued more than Dutch. The boundaries between home and society then appear unclear. The decision-making process on a child’s language acquisition at home is a field controlled by different powers. Parents and children all struggle to interact with outside fields such as mainstream society and the symbolic market value of languages. To conclude, based on the narratives of my interviewees, I have unravelled the ways in which first-generation Chinese immigrant women struggle to teach Mandarin to their children in Dutch society. To compete with the symbolic power of the Dutch language, children’s language education becomes a priority for Chinese women in the Netherlands. In this context English is considered the first and most important language, then comes Mandarin and then Dutch in third place. Chinese women foresee their children’s future career potentialities in a global Chinese perspective. Therefore, these mothers rely on the stronger symbolic power of the Mandarin language and seek to insert their children in the global Chinese fraternal network. Most of the mothers do not question the Mandarin supremacism, as they do not question this “Chinese must speak Mandarin” ideology. As such, the oppressive function of Mandarin is reproduced in the practice of overseas Chinese motherhood. In short, I argue that the first-generation Chinese immigrant woman in the Netherlands is not an autonomous, singular subject; she is comparatively vulnerable, embedded in an intricate network of intersectional power relations and she is exploited by the power mechanisms of both Dutch and Mandarin language.

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Kleyn, Tatyana and Sharon Adelaman Reyes. 2011. “Nobody Said It Would Be Easy: Ethnolinguistic Group Challenges to Bilingual and Multicultural Education in New York City.” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 14:207-24. Li, Mengying. 2005. “The Role of Parents in Chinese Heritage-anguage Schools.” Bilingual Research Journal: The Journal of the National Association for Bilingual Education 29(1):197-207. Olsen, Laurie. 2000. “Learning English and Learning America: Immigrants in the Center of a Storm.” Theory into Practice 39:196-202. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Qin, Desiree Baolian. 2006. “‘Our Child Doesn’t Talk to Us Anymore’: Alienation in Immigrant Chinese Families.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 37:162-79. Taylor, Lisa K. 2009. “Of Mother Tongues and Other Tongues: The Stakes of Linguistically Inclusive Pedagogy in Minority Contexts.” The Canadian Modern Language Review 65:89-123. Wekker, Gloria. 2009. “Into the Promised Land? The Feminization and Ethnicization of Poverty in the Netherlands.” In Teaching Intersectionality: Putting Gender at the Centre, edited by Martha Franken et al. EU: ATHENA 3 Advanced Thematic Network in Women’s Studies in Europe, University of Utrecht and Centre for Gender Studies, Stockholm University. Youngjoo, Yi. 2009. “Adolescent Literacy and Identity Construction among 1.5 Generation Students.” Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 19:100-29.

CHAPTER ELEVEN A NARRATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE EXPERIENCES OF WOMEN ON ANTIRETROVIRAL THERAPY IN THE MOPANI DISTRICT OF THE LIMPOPO PROVINCE: COMPARING PRIVATE AND PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS IN SOUTH AFRICA TINY PETUNIA MONA

Figure 11.1 “One pill a day will greatly improve adherence. Prior the introduction of the Fixed Dose Combination Therapy (FDC), people on antiretroviral therapy had to take 8 tablets or more a day.” A chart designed by Hoedspruit Training Trust (Hlokomela). Photo taken by Tiny Petunia Mona.

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Introduction South Africa has the highest number of people living with HIV and AIDS in the world. The estimated total number of people living with HIV in 2012 was 5.6 million (Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic 2012). The prime mode of HIV transmission is heterosexual sex and this is followed by mother-to-child transmission (Country Progress Report 2010). The estimated number of adults receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART) in 2011 was 1,058,399 (Mid-Year Population Estimates 2011). The HIV and AIDS epidemic has negatively impacted upon every sphere of our society. Various research studies continue to confirm that women are more vulnerable to the epidemic than men (CDC HIV/AIDS Fact Sheet 2008). It is thus imperative to address this dilemma as a collective. Curbing the spread of HIV should not only be the sole responsibility of governments. Other stakeholders such as NonGovernmental Organizations (NGOs) also have a crucial role to play. Hence, this study seeks to critically analyse experiences of women on antiretroviral therapy (ART) by comparing programmes of private and public institutions in the Mopani District of the Limpopo Province, South Africa. The focus is in particular on challenges to antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence. The data analysed in this chapter was gathered as follows: in-depth interviews were conducted with clients on ART and a key informant survey was conducted with health care workers and lay counsellors implementing the ART programme. I am a female South African sociologist and have been working in the HIV and AIDS field for the past thirteen years. This study is close to my personal experience as I have worked with people living with HIV and AIDS as a member of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as well as within Government Departments. With great concern I have noticed that some clients face challenges that make it difficult for them to adhere to their medication. Some of these challenges include poor treatment adherence due to unemployment, illiteracy, inadequate support, fear of disclosure, stigma and discrimination as well as side effects. To situate these obstacles, I apply three theoretical perspectives in this chapter. The first perspective concerns “medicalization” as set out by Ivan Illich. He emphasizes that clients now have an active role in their own health care. This active role is more apparent in the ART programme where clients are encouraged to adhere to their medication and to take responsibility for their medical care. The second theory mobilized here is the Self-determination theory set out by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan.

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This perspective emphasizes the distinction between independent behaviours and controlled behaviours. Research and HIV Counselling and Testing (HCT) statistics indicate that many people who are counselled and tested for HIV do so due to circumstances beyond their control, mostly illness. Finally, through the Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “social capital,” I will attempt to emphasize the role played by Governments in the prevention and treatment of HIV.

Situating the study sites in the context of South Africa At the end of 2011, 34.0 million (31.4 million-35.9 million) people were infected with HIV globally. An estimated 0.8% of adults aged between fifteen and forty-nine years old are living with HIV worldwide. The HIV and AIDS epidemic has brutally affected the Sub-Saharan region. The region has almost 1 in every 20 adults living with HIV (UNAIDS Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic 2011). South Africa has the highest number of people living with HIV and AIDS. The country is very unique compared to other African countries due to apartheid. The policies of the apartheid era contributed to fuelling the spread of the HIV epidemic. People were displaced as they were forced to move from rural areas to urban areas to seek employment. The negative effects of apartheid were reinforced by the effects of a migratory work system that was created to support the mining industry. Some women augmented their salaries by becoming commercial sex workers. The migrant patterns also encouraged men to have many sexual partners as they were very far from their wives. Accordingly, there was a rapid spread of sexually transmitted infections that led to the outbreak of the HIV and AIDS epidemic (Fletcher 2008). The first case of HIV in South Africa was identified in 1982. The first annual national survey was conducted in 1990 and it was found that the estimated HIV prevalence was 0.8% among pregnant women. The following year, the HIV prevalence was 1.5%, an indication that the country was facing an AIDS epidemic (Fletcher 2008). The Limpopo provincial HIV prevalence was at 22.1% in 2011. There are many people who commute to this province for employment on a daily basis and some have relocated to the cities leaving their families behind and only go home on weekends or at the end of the month. This encourages people to have extra-marital affairs which expose them to HIV. The HIV prevalence in the Mopani district is estimated at 25.2%; this is a farming district and there are many immigrants as well. Some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are responsible for implementing HIV and AIDS programmes are active in the district as they

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enjoy funding from many international donors (National Antenatal Sentinel HIV and Syphilis Survey in South Africa 2011). Fieldwork for the study was conducted focusing on the NGO Hoedspruit Training Trust (Hlokomela) programme and the governmental treatment in the Letaba Regional Hospital. Hlokomela is a private HIV and AIDS educational and treatment programme. Its main target groups are: workers, including foreign migrants, those in the agricultural sector, nature conservation and tourism sectors. The programme aims at reducing the HIV vulnerability through peer education, awareness raising, prevention and treatment. An estimated 12,000 farm workers and their families benefit directly from Hlokomela services. Every month, Hlokomela helps about 500 people to access voluntary HIV counselling and testing services. There are 488 adults who are on antiretroviral therapy. There are three wellness clinic sites where people living with HIV and AIDS receive their treatment (Du Preez 2013). Letaba Hospital is a regional hospital in the Mopani District Municipality of the Limpopo Province. The hospital received accreditation for provision of ART in 2004. The hospital also provides HIV Counselling and Testing and has an ART clinic named Nyeleti, which means ‘a star which brings light to HIV infected people and their families.’ The clinic offers Comprehensive, Care, Management and Treatment support. The clinic is operated by a team of medical doctors, professional nurses, lay counsellors and social workers. There are currently 1,650 adults on antiretroviral therapy (Sister Nobela, ART Manager, interview by Tiny Mona, 17 January 2013).

Theoretical framework This study is informed by Ivan Illich’s theory on “medicalization” (1976, 1995), “Self-determination Theory” (Deci and Ryan 2000) and Bourdieu’s theory of “Social Capital” (O’Brien and O’Fathaigh 2005). With medicalization is intended when internal and external market forces prescribe what is suitable to health care. Illich (1995) believes that clients need to be given the freedom to decide what is appropriate for their own health. Medicalization was initially promoted and advanced by philosophers such as Illich, who was also very passionate about the empowerment of clients. He was indeed passionate about maintaining human dignity, and for clients to be self-reliant and independent. He paid particular attention to the marginalized and vulnerable. According to Illich it was crucial for individuals to be independent as he strongly believed that

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this enhanced the freedom of the person. He observed that people were capable of taking control of their social environment and this would ensure that they would claim back their independence. From his point of view, institutions were established in order to serve the society (1995). Illich also maintained that the institutions that were created by society were initially meant to benefit the people, but instead these institutions now exist in order to serve their own personal agendas rather than the people (Otto 1993). Illich was however silent on gender issues; hence, he met an antagonistic reaction by feminist scholars in this regard. Nonetheless, he did provide an account of some of the social and cultural gendered stereotypes that he said were deeply rooted to personal identity and similarly reproduced by men and women alike (Rose, 2007). Along these lines, this study seeks to determine whether the structures and institutions that were established to support people on anti-retroviral therapy are fulfilling their role. “Self-determination Theory” considers that people are dynamic and lively by nature and always apply their personal experiences to the challenges that they encounter, so as to manage them effectively (Deci and Ryan, 2000). As a result, even people who are diagnosed with HIV are able to deal with challenges of disclosure, stigma and discrimination. Many studies show how gender roles are taught to children in society at a very young age, and thus, people who violate gender norms are often sanctioned by society. For example, women who act assertively and are confident are viewed in a negative light and men who are more sensitive and display caring attitudes are similarly regarded as less proficient (Good and Sanchez, 2010). As a result there would be a tendency for these individuals to down-play their talents so as to conform to the expectations of society. Women who are perform their gender according to these cultural and social norms run the risk of basing their existence and actions on the approval of others, and, as a result, they become submissive in sexual relationships (Good and Sanchez 2012, 204). In the context of HIV and AIDS, this poses a major challenge as women are more likely to find it difficult to negotiate for safer sex practices. This exposes them to HIV and other sexually transmitted infections or to unwanted pregnancies. Additionally, gender-norm conformity has been shown to have negative effects on women’s and men’s self-esteem and close relationships in South Africa. Programmes such as the Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission of HIV, become difficult to implement as some women find it daunting to carry out their decisions. For instance, if a woman has decided that she is going to feed her baby with Infant Formula rather than breast milk, her mother-in-law and other relatives may pressure her to

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breastfeed, which may ultimately lead her to mix-feeding which can expose the baby to risks of HIV transmission. Society expects males and females to conform to certain gender expectations and they may feel compelled to do so; on the other hand, deviating from gender norms may not be a result of external pressure (Good and Sanchez 2010, 205). Self-determination theory focuses on human development and the socialization processes within society. This theory is also concerned with how human interactions are determined by individuals. The theory posits a distinction between “autonomous behaviours” (those believed to be performed voluntarily and because of having personal importance) and “controlled behaviours” (those that are performed due to pressure or coercion) (Deci and Ryan, 1991). This theory therefore provides an overarching context for intervention delivery (Toynbee 1925). The same notion can also be applied in the context of HIV and AIDS programmes, in instances where clients will be motivated to test and disclose their HIV status so that they can access ART and improve their well-being. On the other hand there are those HIV-positive mothers who will only be motivated by the need to give birth to HIV-free babies; their behaviour is thus controlled by the circumstances. Gender issues have always been central within development policy, but research has shown that gender issues are not taken into consideration in the design and implementation of many programmes (Molyneux 2002). Women are often central to the forms of social capital that development agencies and governments are keen to mobilize in their poverty-relief and community-development programmes. There is evidence across many countries that women among low-income groups are frequently those with the strongest community and kin ties, such women have social and support networks within their communities. These women are also found in voluntary projects (Molyneux 2002). In South Africa, many HIV and AIDS projects are implemented by women and more often than not on a voluntary basis. Programmes such as the Home Community Based Care (HCBC) and Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) are largely implemented by women who work as volunteers, and sometimes receive stipends from the non-governmental organization (NGO) they are attached to. In order for social capital to be viable, resources need to be evenly distributed amongst the sexes, and policies that are gender-sensitive need to be developed and implemented. As cases of women in conditions of poverty have demonstrated, women can devise coping strategies that can by far surpass social capital (Molyneux 2002). Women’s projects need to be taken seriously and funded just like men’s projects.

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Social Capital theory can be sourced to the works of three main authors, James Coleman, Robert Putnam and Pierre Bourdieu. The theory as used by Coleman has strong structural-functionalist roots. Putnam’s theory similarly has strong functionalist roots, however he emphasised more the problem of social integration. Bourdieu’s approach instead offers socio-cultural explanations for why under-represented groups remain excluded from certain services or institutions. He thus explores what are the cultural barriers to participation in various activities (Gauntlett 2011). The ART programme is available to all who qualify to be enrolled, but among the people who are qualified, there are those who are hindered by cultural barriers from accessing the programme. Robert Putnam’s theory of social capital (1995) has functionalist roots especially in its focus on social integration. His point of view is that a society that functions well economically—coupled with a very high level of political commitment— is the result of that society’s capacity to successfully collect social capital. Social capital according to Putnam’s view has three components: moral obligations and norms, social values and social networks. These forms of social capital are central to the promotion of civil communities and civil society in general. The government has an obligation to provide decent jobs and the community has an obligation to take advantage of the opportunities presented before them. Finally, the notion of “symbolic capital” is used by Bourdieu to explain the ways in which capitals are viewed in the social structure (Bourdieu 1977). Within the ART programme, it can be said that the symbolic capital is represented by people living with HIV and AIDS who act as ambassadors and advocate for the rights of people living with HIV and AIDS. They are the “faces of HIV.”

Research Design The research design of this study is exploratory. Some of the more popular methods of exploratory research include literature review, in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and case studies. Researchers conduct exploratory research for three interrelated purposes: first, to diagnose a situation; second, to screen alternatives; and third, to discover new ideas. The objective of the study was to gain in-depth information. Eleven respondents participated in this study. Four of the respondents were individuals on ART at Hlokomela (a private institution); other three were individuals on ART from the Letaba Regional Hospital (a public institution). Respondents were selected through the purposive sampling method. This method relies solely on the judgement of the researcher.

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Respondents were women who have been on ART for at least six months and were eighteen years old or older. Additionally, two Health Care Providers and two lay counsellors working at ART clinics at both sites were selected through the key informant sampling method: one health care provider and one lay counsellor were interviewed at each of the sampled facilities. Effective counselling is critical to help maintain adherence, face stigma, identify and link people to referral and support services as well as to build overall community support (WHO 2004). Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted based on an interview protocol with seven clients on ART. The respondents were allowed to talk freely about various aspects of the topics prompted. In addition, a survey was conducted with key informants who comprised of Health Care Professionals and lay counsellors responsible for managing comprehensive Care Management and Treatment of HIV (CCMT) sites at accredited public and private health facilities in the Mopani District of the Limpopo Province. Medical records of all clients interviewed were retrieved after securing permission from medical managers. These records provided information regarding ART use and treatment adherence as well as allowed me to back up the findings of the in-depth interviews. The presentation of data, the management thereof and the analysis were integrated into a coherent unit. Quantitative data was analysed through the Statistical Package of Social Sciences (SPSS). Information gathered from in-depth interviews was transcribed and translated. The typology data analysis method was applied. This method is a sorting method that considers patterns, themes or other kinds of grouping of the data (Lacey and Luff 2001). Researchers are accountable for upholding the dignity and wellbeing of all participants. This obligation also involves protecting them from harm, unnecessary risks, or mental and physical distress that may be intrinsic in the research procedure. Approval to conduct the research was therefore sought from various relevant committees and Research Ethics committees within the University of Limpopo and the Provincial Department of Health. Anonymity was maintained throughout the study, to prevent disclosure of respondents’ HIV status. It was also explained that all information would be treated with utmost confidentiality and that the results would only be used for the purpose of the study and to strengthen interventions.

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Analysis In presenting my data I have chosen to identify critical areas that may impact on ART adherence; these areas were addressed in the questions to the respondents and they were allowed the freedom to talk openly about each topic. My analysis is divided into two sections: Challenges of ART adherence: Clients’ issues; and Challenges of ART adherence: Health facilities’ issues. All of my respondents chose to speak in either Xitsonga or Sepedi languages, as these are the languages they are most comfortable with. Their accounts were translated during the interview and were not back-translated. In order to protect the identity of the respondents, a coding system was applied. HTT represents respondents who were interviewed at Hoedspruit Training Trust (Hlokomela) and (LET) represents respondents who were interviewed at the Letaba Regional Hospital. In my analysis I am going to single-out the questions that have a gender dimension, focusing on the differences between the private and the public health facilities.

Challenges of ART adherence: Clients’ issues When asked whether they have disclosed their HIV status to their sexual partners, four women from the private health facility indicated that they had disclosed their HIV status to their partners, whereas amongst respondents from the public health facility only one woman indicated that she had disclosed it and the other two women had not. Health Care Workers in the private health facility encourage their clients to be open about their HIV status, and there are many support systems available to clients who are infected with HIV. Clients attending public health facilities may be reluctant to disclose it because of insufficient support networks. According to Deci and Ryan, “when people are controlled, they experience pressure to think, feel, or behave in particular ways” (2008, 182). “Pressured motivation” may result from the promise of rewards for behaving in a given manner, or from the threat of sanctions when not behaving in the prescribed way (ibid.). In the case of clients from the private health facility it can be concluded that because they know that there are support structures available to them, they may feel motivated to disclose. Those from the government health facility may not feel motivated because of the lack of support systems. Support networks are crucial for those who are HIV positive and more so for those who are on antiretroviral therapy. There seems to be a challenge

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regarding the establishment and maintenance of support groups for people living with HIV and AIDS at both private and public health facilities. Most respondents from both health facilities indicated that they did not belong to support groups. Some of the women pointed out that they could not afford to attend support groups due to work commitments. One of the women indicated that people were too inquisitive and that this made her feel uncomfortable to join a support group. Because the number of clients on ART is increasing, ensuring that there is regular attendance at support groups has become challenging (Western Cape Department of Health 2005). In the Mopani district of the Limpopo Province and many other parts of South Africa, women have always played a passive and submissive role in sexual matters. Men are the ones who are given the responsibility to decide the terms and conditions of engaging in sexual intercourse in that they make decisions on where, when, how and with whom to have sex. Women have been socialized to play a subservient role and not to challenge their partners and their authority under any circumstances. This state of affairs exposes women to sexually transmitted infections. Six women indicated that their male partners are the ones who usually initiate sex. Only one woman from the private health facility indicated that she also feel empowered enough to initiate sex. Conforming to gender roles means to be consistent with societal expectations: men and women alike may feel compelled to conform to such ideals (Good and Sanchez 2010). Non-conformity may result in isolation and rejection. The South African public is always encouraged to adopt safer sex practices consistently. The National Department of Health, in its endeavour to curb the spread of HIV, distributes male and female condoms at public and private institutions. However, research has since revealed that negotiating for safer sex practices needs tact and certain skills. Five women indicated that they found it easy to negotiate for safer sex practices, one woman pointed out that her husband did not like condoms, and the other woman said she and her partner were trying to conceive. Women are socialized to be community-oriented; they are expected to demonstrate warmth and a caring attitude and also to be able to respond to other people’s needs, usually at the expense of their own. Women are also considered to be more group focused compared to men. Men on the contrary are expected to be independent, assertive and confident as well as dominant over others, and individually focused (Conway, Pizzamiglio and Mount 1996). Six women indicated that they had taken care of family members infected with HIV and only two women from the government

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health facility had not. All four women from the private health facility indicated that they had taken care of people infected with HIV, and most of the people that they took care of were very close family members and mostly female siblings. In South Africa, most non-governmental organizations that implement HIV and AIDS programmes are managed by women and those who are tasked with the responsibility of delivering services in terms of prevention and treatment are also women. These women volunteer their services and in some instances their services are not compensated or, in instances where they are, the remuneration is usually inferior to that of men and other people who are considered to be “formally employed.” Families that are affected and individuals who are infected with HIV are cared for through the Home Community Based Care programme, and children who have lost their parents to AIDS are cared for through the Orphans and Vulnerable Children programme (OVC). Projects that assume that women are free and available for unpaid work, and those which are designed to increase women’s labour productivity or intensify their caring responsibilities, have been shown to fail time and again because they overload exhausted women without offering them adequate remuneration. These women are not given support with regard to child care and usually these programmes do not even provide sufficient training to enable the women to obtain decent jobs afterwards (Molyneux 2002). I will turn now to the specific issue of antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence. In order for antiretroviral therapy to be effective the client needs to maintain high levels of treatment adherence, as non-adherence may result in resistance (Steel et al. 2005). Complete adherence implies that a client is able to take 100% of the prescribed amount of medication. Five women indicated that they have never experienced any challenges in being consistent with their ART treatment; one woman from the government health facility pointed out that she had instead experienced challenges. One woman said that the lack of food made it difficult for her to adhere and she pointed out that her body shape was changing and her child who is also HIV positive was sickly. The enablers of ART adherence were identified as: acceptance of one’s HIV status, not having preconceived ideas about what other people might say about them, recovering from illness, receiving support from family members and health care workers, and the will to live. Antiretroviral therapy (ART) is a lifelong treatment; it is therefore not astounding that all of the women had treatment supporters, except one.

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Close family members are the ones that are trusted with disclosure of HIV status. Female family members are highly preferred compared to their male counterparts, with mothers being very popular in this regard. Encouragement and support were very common amongst those whom the HIV statuses were disclosed to. The African family in South Africa has traditionally drawn on the strengths of the extended family. Many families who support family members who are infected with HIV are subjected to stigma and discrimination by other members of the community. The spirit of Ubuntu (humility) is witnessed when care and support are provided to those who are infected, especially when care is provided to orphans (Smit 2007). South Africa has a very high rate of illiteracy and the responses from the women regarding their level of education supports this perception. According to Nakiyemba et al. (2004) illiteracy has a negative effect on treatment adherence, whereas being knowledgeable and literate has been found to have a positive effect. The findings of my study dispute this notion as it was apparent that among women who had little formal education their adherence levels were high; this is supported by the improvement of their condition, as tested through medical exams (namely, the improvement was visible in their CD 4 Cell count and undetectable viral load results). The South African Government has made tremendous efforts in mobilizing and educating communities on HIV and AIDS. Communities are now more accepting and supportive of people living with HIV. Many families have been directly affected by the epidemic in that there are one or more people living with HIV in many families. There were only two women who indicated that they had experienced stigma and discrimination. Their colleagues and family members were responsible for mistreating them due to their HIV status. Stigma strikes even the family, where people most need support; it affects adherence, as people living with HIV and AIDS are reluctant to take their drugs at a time or place where others might see them (The Panos Global AIDS Programme 2006).

Challenges of ART adherence: Health facilities’ issues As previously explained, Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) can either be provided by a public or private institution. Through the articulation of my articulation so far, it has become evident that the two sectors operate differently in their approach. My analysis will now continue seeking to highlight some of these differences, the challenges experienced at the facilities and the strategies employed to deal with these challenges. The

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aim here is to develop an anti-retroviral therapy (ART) adherence Model that I will recommend to institutions both from the public and the private sector. The two sectors can adapt the model the way they deem fit. A professional nurse and a lay counsellor were interviewed at each facility. The lay counsellors that are placed at public health facilities are attached to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) funded by the government and I was responsible for training most of these counsellors. Professional nurses and lay counsellors at both facilities receive mentoring from more experienced counsellors, so as to prevent stress and burn-out. The total number of adults on ART at Hlokomela is 488 and the total number of adults on ART at the Letaba Regional Hospital is 1,650. The Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission Programme (PMTCT) was introduced almost a decade ago, but it is astonishing to learn that there are still babies who are born infected with HIV. My study found that there were only 14 babies on ART at the Hlokomela and 360 babies were on ART at the Letaba Regional Hospital. South Africa is one of the countries that have ratified the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); the sixth of these goals (MDG 6) seeks to: Combat HIV and AIDS, malaria and other diseases. Target 6A specifically states that respective countries, by 2015, should have halted and begun to reverse the spread of HIV and AIDS. The World Health Organization (WHO) is working with various countries including South Africa to support prevention programmes such as the Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission of HIV (WHO 2013). From my analysis of the data collected from the public health facility, it appears that this goal seems unattainable when considering the high number of babies who still contract HIV from their mothers. The individual’s rate of adherence that is considered satisfactory by the private institution is 100%, whereas the public institution’s acceptable level of adherence was between 80%-90%. With regard to the rate of adherence considered to be satisfactory for the health facility, Hlokomela indicated that they did not know and the Letaba Regional Hospital pointed out that it was between 80-90%. There are two issues here: the individual’s rate of adherence and the facility’s rate of adherence. Hlokomela indicated that they expect their clients to adhere at 100%, but did not know the expected rate of adherence for the entire health facility, which is a combined percentage for all clients on ART. With regard to the description of the monitoring system to ensure that clients receiving ART attend scheduled appointments, Hlokomela indicated that the institution phones the person that the client disclosed their HIV status to so as to remind them of the appointment. The Letaba Regional Hospital keeps a diary where they record all clients’

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appointments including the names of the contact persons and the clients’ contact details. Pertaining to the description of the monitoring system to follow up clients who do not come for an appointment, Hlokomela phones the person that the client disclosed to and the Letaba Regional hospital phones the clients themselves, but they are not able to follow up any further due to financial constraints. Health facilities also have a way of knowing if the client is ill, has died or has dropped out of the system. At the private institution this is done by contacting the client’s family telephonically; they will then inform the institution if the client is ill or has died. The public institution phones the clients themselves and the treatment supporter. Professional nurses and counsellors also go to the wards to assess the recorded deaths list. They also rely on other clients to keep them updated. It is therefore astounding to learn that at the Letaba Regional Hospital, 70 clients on ART are lost to follow-up in a quarter. This raises concerns that perhaps the strategies employed may not be as effective as the health facility would hope. The private institution organized re-fresher courses as part of the intervention strategies to improve health care workers’ motivation to promote better client adherence. The public institution did not have any intervention strategies in this regard.

Recommendations and Conclusion The aim of the study was to investigate the challenges to anti-retroviral therapy (ART) adherence amongst women clients in private and public institutions. The study sought to ultimately plan and develop an intervention strategy in a form of a treatment adherence model that could be useful for the South African Government. Continuous information dissemination on prevention and treatment of HIV and AIDS is needed in various South African communities. I am now going to outline some of the most important recommendations that the outcomes of my study suggest would improve ART adherence and the general improvement of the wellbeing for patients with HIV and AIDS. For a comprehensive overview of my recommendations see Table 11.1; here I will instead elaborate on some of these suggested implementations.

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Table 11.1: Proposed Treatment Adherence Model

Social support can take place at different levels, namely within the family by family members; within the health facility by health care workers; at the workplace by employers and colleagues; and in the community by community leaders. Social support services currently being provided to people living with HIV and AIDS and those on antiretroviral therapy (ART) by private and public institutions need to be strengthened so as to ensure sustainability. There are also non-governmental organizations (NGOs) of People Living with HIV and AIDS that have expertise in establishing and maintaining support groups, and their services can be sought after by both institutions. Empowerment of HIV positive clients on disclosure of HIV status is crucial. This could be done through HIV positive lay counsellors placed at health facilities, who could act as ambassadors for people living with HIV and AIDS. The environment in which people disclose their HIV status has to be conducive. Women empowerment clubs could be established at

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health facilities to provide women with the necessary skills that can assist them to prevent HIV infections and live positively with HIV. The Hoedspruit Training Trust (HTT) is an NGO that relies on funding from donor agencies and government departments. In recent years, NGOs in South Africa have been witnessing a marked decrease in available grants and other funding from both overseas and local donors. As a farming community Hoedspruit Training Trust (HTT) could capitalize on their traditional growing and selling patterns. In order to ensure long-term sustainability, farmers and farm-workers need skills in improved agricultural techniques and agri-business techniques. The South African government has made tremendous strides in educating people about HIV and AIDS, however, continuous education in communities about HIV and AIDS is crucial, so as to minimize stigma and discrimination. It became evident in the study that many families in South Africa have one or more family members living with HIV. It is therefore imperative to provide these families with strategies on how to deal with the epidemic. Families could be assisted to establish support groups and couples could be encouraged to go for couple counselling. There is currently no coherence amongst health facilities regarding data management. Owing to the scale-up of antiretroviral therapy in high burden countries, many treatment sites are no longer able to cope with monitoring large numbers of patients with paper-based systems alone. Full electronic medical record (EMR) systems could be implemented at all private and public health facilities. Private and public health facilities need to be encouraged to share best practices so as to improve their services. To conclude, it is important to stress that family and social support are crucial to ensuring good adherence to antiretroviral therapy, and that the prevention of HIV should always be treated as a priority as prevention would be more cost-effective compared to treating a client. I also suggest the need to replicate the Hlokomela ART model by other farming communities. Finally, the political will in managing HIV and AIDS cannot be over-emphasized; and a gender sensitive and family centred approach is highly recommended.

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References Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CDC HIV/AIDS Fact Sheet. 2008. HIV/AIDS Among Women. Available at http://www.cdc/hiv (accessed March 3, 2013) Conway, Michael, Teresa Pizzamiglio and Lauren Mount. 1996. “Status, Communality, and Agency: Implications for Stereotypes of Gender and other Groups.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71:25-38. Country Progress Report on the Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS. 2010. Republic of South Africa, National Department of Health. Deci, Edward and Richard Ryan. 1987. “The Support of Autonomy and the Control of Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53:1024-037. —. 2000. “The ‘What’ and ‘Why’ of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and Self-determination of Behaviour.” Psychological Inquiry 11(4):227-68. Du Preez Christine. 2013. Annual of Hlokomela Training Trust. Hoedspruit, Limpopo, South Africa. Fletcher Haley Kim. 2008. Conflict, Contradition and Crisis. Master Thesis: Rhodes University. Gauntlett, David, 2011. Making is Connecting: The Social Meaning of Creativity, from DIY and knitting to You Tube and Web 2.0. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gilbert, Leah and Liz Walker. 2010. “‘My Biggest Fear Was that People Would Reject Me Once They Knew My Status…:’ stigma as experienced by patients in an HIV/AIDS clinic in Johannesburg, South Africa.” Health and Social Care in the Community 18(2):139-46. Good, Jessica and Diana Sanchez. 2010. “Doing Gender for Different Reasons: Why Gender Conformity Positively and Negatively Predicts Self-esteem.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 34:203-14. Illich, Ivan. 1995. Limits to Medicine. London: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd. Interview at the Letaba Regional Hospital, Comprehensive Care, Management and Treatment Manager. January 17, 2013. Malangu, Ntambwe Gustav. 2008. “Self-reported Adverse Effects as Barriers to Adherence to Anti-retroviral Therapy in HIV-infected Patients in Pretoria.” South African Family Practice 50(5). Mid-Year Population estimates. 2011. Statistical Release. P0302. Statistics South Africa.

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Molyneux, Maxine. 2002. “Gender and the Silences of Social Capital: Lessons from Latin America.” Development and Change 33(2):167-88. Moodley, Tammy. 2003. Adherence Counselling: Participant Guide. Durban University. Nakiyemba, Alice, Richard Kwasa and Dorothy Akurut. 2004. Barriers to Antiretroviral Adherence for Patients Living with HIV Infection and Aids in Uganda. Busoga University. National Antenatal Sentinel. 2011. HIV and AIDS Syphilis Survey in South Africa. National Department of Health. 2013. Changes in the Antiretroviral Therapy Regimen in South Africa: What to tell Pregnant and Breastfeeding Women about Fixed-dose Combination ARV’s. Pretoria, South Africa. O’Brien, Stephen and Mairtin O’Fathaigh. 2005. “Bringing in Bourdieu’s Theory of Social Capital: Renewing Learning Partnership Approaches to Social Inclusion.” Irish Educational Studies 24(1):65-76 Otto, Lene. 1993. “Medicine, Disease and Culture.” Ethnologia Scandinavica 23:25-35. Putnam, Robert. 1995 “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital.” Journal of Democracy 6(1):65-78. Reviewed Integrated Development Plan, 2006 to 2011. Mopani District Municipality. Unpublished Nikolas, Rose. 2007. “Beyond Medicalization.” The Lancet 369:700-01. Ryan, Richard and Edward Deci. 2000. “Self-determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Wellbeing.” American Psychologist 55:68-78. SA HIV Clinicians Society. 2013. “Fixed-dose Combination for Adults Accessing Antiretroviral therapy.” Southern African Journal of HIV Medicine 14(1):41-43. Steel, Gavin, Joshi Mohan and Sarah Paige. 2005. Antiretroviral Therapy Adherence Measurement and Support in South Africa: Initial Activities from July 4 to 26. http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDACG463.pdf. Smit, Ria. 2007. “Living in an Age of HIV and AIDS: Implications for families in South Africa.” Nordic Journal of African Studies 16(2):161-78. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, Act 108 of 1996. Pretoria, South Africa. The Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic, fact sheet. 2012. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

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The Panos Global AIDS Programme. 2006. “Antiretroviral Drugs for All? Obstacles to Access to HIV/AIDS Treatment. Lessons from Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Nepal and Zambia.” Lusaka: Panos. Toynbee, Arnold Joseph. 1925. “Survey of International Affairs.” The American Historical Review 33(3):659-61. UNAIDS 2002 “Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic.”Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS. Geneva: WHO Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data —. 2011.“Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic.” Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS. Geneva: WHO Library Cataloguing-inPublication Data —. 2012. “Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic.” Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS. Geneva: WHO Library Cataloguing-inPublication Data Western Cape Department of Health. 2006. The Western Cape Antiretroviral Programme: Monitoring Report. Cape Town, Provincial Government of the Western Cape: Bloemfontein, University of the Free State. World Health Organization (WHO). 2004. HIV Status Disclosure to Sexual Partners: Rates, Barriers and Outcomes for Women. Geneva: WHO Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. World Health Organization (WHO). 2013. Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s). Geneva: WHO Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. .

CHAPTER TWELVE PUBLIC-PRIVATE BOUNDARIES AND GENDERED CODES IN LIMITING INSTITUTIONAL CHILDBIRTH IN RURAL BANGLADESH RUNA LAILA

Figure 12.1 Demonstration of the position of women during childbirth. Photo taken by Runa Laila.

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Introduction In Bangladesh, in the absence of skilled health professionals, women are dependent on Traditional Birth Attendant (TBA) or relatives during childbirth. This situation results in huge maternal mortality rate. To improve maternal health, the government introduced the possibility of giving birth at a health facility a decade ago. However, this attempt did not yield the anticipated outcome yet. Still most births occur at home and maternal mortality due to childbirth-related complications continues to be high. There remains a gap in the way the government and the development agencies understand the home delivery tradition and the policy assumptions aimed at promoting facility-based childbirth. A large part of the gap lays in the lack of understanding of existing gendered norms and values that promote the tradition of home delivery. Policies promoting facility-based childbirth do not take into account these gendered norms which are mutually constituted in the household and other social institutions. To improve maternal health conditions it is crucial to understand these norms and values that shape women’s decision for home delivery. Through analysing women’s narratives of their childbirth and maternal health experiences, this research explores the gendered codes and the public-private boundaries that shape the decisions of rural Bangladeshi women with regards to childbirth. In particular this research seeks to explore how existing norms and taboos related to the body, purity and sexuality promote home deliveries. The research further seeks to explain how the subordination of women in everyday private spheres of domesticity, household work and mobility, renders childbirth at the health facilities inaccessible. This research is situated within the broader feminist contribution to the literature on gender and development. I believe a better understanding of existing norms and values that shape women’s real life experience would allow policy makers to design more informed policies to improve maternal health condition in Bangladesh in particular and in many other countries with similar norms in general. This chapter is divided into three main sections. The first section provides a brief description of the context in which the government, with the support of donors, introduced facility-based childbirth initiatives to reduce maternal deaths. The second section introduces the analytical framework and research methodology I deployed to understand women’s decisions for home delivery. Based on empirical findings, the third section analyses how gendered codes and boundaries related to women’s body,

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purity and sexuality influence women’s decisions for home delivery and render childbirth at health facilities inaccessible. At the end of this chapter a conclusion is drawn suggesting the implementation of community-based female skilled birth attendants, and the importance of addressing the gendered norms and values that create inequality across different institutions in order to ensure women’s access to health facilities.

The context of Bangladesh Bangladesh is currently Asia’s fifth and world’s eighth most populous country. According to recent estimates the total population of Bangladesh is 162 million on 143,998 sq km of land. The current population growth rate is 1.39% annually (Planning wing 2011). The population growth is considered to be the main constraint to economic development. Bangladesh ranks 146 out of 187 countries in the Human Development Index (HDI) and 112 out of 146 countries in the Gender Inequality Index (GII) (WHO 2012). A profound gender inequality in Bangladeshi society is reflected in the fact that the country has one of the highest Maternal Mortality Rates (MMR) globally. One major cause of the high maternal mortality rate is the lack of Emergency Obstetric Care (EOC) during childbirth. The majority of the childbirth (71%) occurs at home in the absence of Skilled Health Personnel (Mitra and Associates 2012). Most of these births are attended by untrained TBAs, relatives or friends; this is considered unsafe and often leads to high maternal mortality and morbidity.

Government’s initiative to reduce maternal deaths After the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), the government launched a “Safe Motherhood Initiative” in 1997 to address the high maternal mortality rate in Bangladesh. In 2000, the government committed itself to the Millennium Development Goals, where goal five is to improve maternal health. To achieve goal five the indicator has been set to reduce the maternal mortality ratio from 574 in 1991 to 143 by 2015 per 100,000 live births by increasing the proportion of births attended by skilled health personnel from 5% in 1991 to 50% in 2015.

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Table 12.1: Selected Millennium Development Goal Base Target Current year 2015 2012 1990

GOAL

Global Target

Bangladesh Target

Goal 5

Reduce by three quarters between 1990 and 2015, the Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR)

Reduce MMR from 570 death per MMR(death 100.000 live per 100.000 570 births in 1990 live births) to 143 by 2015

Indicators

143

Increase the Proportion proportion of of birth Improve birth attendants Maternal 5% 50% attendants by by skilled health skilled health health personnel personnel Source: (Planning Commission 2008, Mitra and Associates 2012)

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31%

Though the number of maternal deaths has declined from 574 in 1991 to 143 in 2012 per 100,000 live births, most of this reduction is due to the fertility decline (WHO 2012). The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) has declined significantly in Bangladesh from 3.3 in 1991 to 2.3 in 2012 (Mitra and Associates 2012). However, the proportion of childbirths attended by skilled health personnel did not increase as it was envisioned. On an average, 31% of the total deliveries are attended by skilled personnel, the rest of the births are still assisted by untrained TBAs, relatives and friends, while in the rural areas 95% of the childbirth occurs at home (Mitra and Associates 2012).

Institutionalizing childbirth to ensure Emergency Obstetric Care Acknowledging the importance of skilled personnel during childbirth in the rural areas, the Bangladesh government initiated a program called Skilled Birth Attendant (SBA). Development agencies such as United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and World Health Organization (WHO) collaborate in this programme. The main objective of this programme is to provide a special nine-month training on pre and post-delivery to Family Welfare Assistants (FWA), those who are primarily responsible for contraceptive method delivery and counselling at the door-step. The community-based FWAs are trained to identify high-risk pregnancies and

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advice women to visit the nearest available government health facility (Murakami et al. 2003). When women with high-risk pregnancies are referred to the health facilities, to provide Emergency Obstetric Care (EOC) during delivery there are doctors and nurses at the sub-district hospitals. Nurses receive a six-month midwifery training during their three-year diploma in Nursing. Nurses work in the maternity unit on a rotational basis; therefore they do not develop their expertise in delivery (Minca, 2011). To address this problem, in 2007 the Obstetrical and Gynecological Society of Bangladesh (OGSB) proposed a short-term solution to provide a six-month midwifery training to the existing nurse-midwives and a long-term solution to introduce a new cadre of midwives. This new cadre of midwifes will receive a two-year pre-service nursing and midwifery education. The Bangladesh government, with the help of UNPFA and WHO, committed to educate approximately 3,000 midwives by 2015. This new a cadre of midwives is proposed to provide twenty-four-hour services in sub-district hospitals (Minca 2011). To address women’s unequal access to the sub-district hospitals, the government, in collaboration with the World Bank and WHO, initiated a “demand-side financing maternal health voucher scheme” for poor pregnant women in 21 sub-districts/upazila of Bangladesh. Under this scheme poor pregnant women were identified by local committees and provided with vouchers to buy maternal health-care services (including treatment for obstetric complications). According to the recent policy document: The demand side financing scheme (maternal voucher scheme) has evidence that this has helped to increase the utilization of safe motherhood service, but there are some concerns […] the risk that some aspects of the design of the incentives (e.g. cash payment, service coverage) may be changing provider and patient incentives in ways that are not supportive of the maternal health objectives (Planning Wing 2011).

A concern was raised that due to the incentives (maternal voucher) women from poor households were encouraged to increase their fertility and pregnancies while the aim of the policy is to ensure maternal health by reducing the number of pregnancies. Therefore this measure is currently on hold.

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Analytical framework and Methodology This chapter is a part of an ongoing PhD research. The objective of this chapter is to explore and analyse the reasons that motivate women’s decision for home delivery. Within the qualitative approach, an ethnographical study was considered to be the best suitable for this purpose. An ethnographic design provided a holistic rather than a reductionist understanding of women’s real life decisions (Bloomberg 2008). My choice of research approach to understand childbirth practices was guided by a combination of so-called “Capabilities” and “Social Relations” frameworks. The “capabilities framework” recognizes gender dynamics in explaining existing inequalities where individual capabilities are transformed by so-called “social arrangements” and where positive trends in female capabilities do not always translate automatically into greater opportunities for women (Sen 1992). However, despite the acknowledgement of the gender dynamics, “capabilities theory” does not challenge these inequalities; it merely suggests the government to take affirmative action. The “social relations” framework acknowledges that access to resources is determined by a complex interplay between existing gender-systems and other structures of inequality such as class, location and ethnicity. Accordingly, culturally constituted rules about different capabilities and aptitudes of men and women not only determine gender differentiated roles, obligations and responsibilities, but underpin their differentiated claims, rights and entitlements to resources (Kabeer 2000 and 2001). A village named Gacchhabari in Madhupur upazila under the Tangail district of Dhaka Division was purposively selected to conduct the ethnographical research between March and November 2008. The Gacchhabari village is situated within the 10km periphery from the Madhupur Thana Health Complex (THC), which is the lowest level of government health facility that provides support for childbirth in the rural areas. A reasonably good transport system, of bus, rickshaw or threewheel "van" (cargo rickshaw), and the distance between the THC and the village, made Gacchhabari a suitable location to conduct this research. The epistemological stance this research adopted is a feminist standpoint approach. Feminist standpoint methodologies consider women’s experiences as a valid source of knowledge; a research that start from these experiences would result in a more inclusive and less distorted explanation of reality (Harding 2004; Wolf 2011). Individual women’s narratives provide reasons and rationale for their particular behaviour

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regarding childbirth practices. A variety of combination of methods such as participant observation, focus groups, key informants interview and a primary household survey were used to establish a triangulation with the information gathered through interviewing the women. To achieve a deeper understanding of how women make their decisions concerning childbirth, individual women’s narratives were documented through in-depth interviews. I trust that no other research method is better than the interviews, as only women’s own narratives can portray women’s feelings, thoughts, aspirations, choices and decisions: the realities that women experience in everyday life. Allowing respondents to provide narratives of their own life experiences also help to address some of the power differentials women experience (Camfield 2006) and the meanings women attach to their own reality. Fifty women were interviewed ensuring the maximum variation among the participants, in order to display multiple perspectives about their childbirth-related practices. A list of fifty women emerged over the period of nine months; and I decided to not include new participants since I was not receiving new insights for my analysis. The same respondents were visited several times over a period of nine months to follow up the conversation or just to create a private moment for them to share their deep personal feelings, emotions and experiences. Respondents are given a fictitious name to maintain confidentiality. Narratives are transcribed as verbatim; the quotations included in this analysis are my own translations from Bangla into English. To verify the interpretation of individual women’s narratives, information gathered through different methods and different sources were combined. A primary household survey among 502 households provided the general information on childbirth and health-seeking practices among the total population. To identify the availability of healthcare services and the perception of the community towards childbirth and maternal health condition, five focus groups were conducted, where men and women were grouped separately. Two focus groups included 19 and 21 men, and three focus groups included 18, 19 and 7 (the latter with TBAs only) women respectively. During the focus groups a diversity of participants from different generations and socio-economic backgrounds was ensured. Participatory rural appraisal techniques such as community mapping, mobility mapping and body mapping were used during the focus groups. Twenty-one key informants, including doctors and nurses at the Thana health complex, local NGOs, missionary health providers, traditional birth attendants and religious healers were interviewed to triangulate the information gathered through in-depth interviews. Direct observation was

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also used to verify information and to develop a personal understanding of the cultural context. Informed consent was ensured in each stage of the data collection process.

Analysis To describe women’s decision for home delivery, the empirical findings are presented in relation to three themes. The first theme discusses existing norms and values that encourage home delivery, the second theme explores gendered codes and boundaries that render institutional childbirth inaccessible, and the third theme explains the cultural way of dealing with childbirth related complications.

Traditional norms and values that promote home delivery Despite the availability of delivery services at the THC located within the 10 km periphery of Gacchhabari, according to the primary household survey, only twenty-four children were born in the hospital, which is only 5% of the total births; 95% of the childbirth occurs at home in the village. This section elaborates on how existing norms and values promote the tradition of home delivery in the village. Public/ private space for child delivery Home delivery is an old cultural practice in Gacchhabari, the village where I conducted this research. Women’s knowledge and preference for home delivery is rooted in existing norms and values regarding childbirth. Women associate child birth with the Bangla term “lajja” and “shorom.” Lajja/shorom means being shy or bashful or timid or being ashamed (Dasgupta 1980). Lajja/shorom symbolises the shyness of Bengali women, socially constructed as a normative feminine characteristic. It is often said that shyness is the clothing of Bengali women (lajja bangali narir bhushon). The opposite of lajja is the term shameless (belaj/beshorom/ behaya). The term lajja is also connected to sex. The sex organs of males and females are named “lajja sthan” (place of shame). Due to patriarchal norms, shyness regarding body and sexuality is part of the socialization process of women since childhood (Hossain and Mashuduzzaman 2006). These lajja norms draw an imaginary boundary between public and private domains, where pregnancy and delivery are dealt as a private matter and are not disclosed publicly. A husband or a family member would refer to a pregnant woman as “sick” while she is pregnant.

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Due to these lajja norms, women prefer to give birth secretly at home and endure their labour pain silently. Sabiha, a nineteen-year-old woman mother of one child said: I didn't scream during delivery. Because people will realize that I'm giving birth. It is a matter of Shorom (shame). People will find it out anyway, after the child is born.

Women even mentioned their preference to give birth at night so not to spread the delivery news in the public domain. Due to lajja norms, husbands are not even welcome to be present during their wives’ deliveries. Women internalize these socially expected norms and are not comfortable with the idea of their husbands being present during delivery. As Farida, a thirty-five-year-old woman, mother of three children claimed, If husbands would be present during delivery, women would feel shy. They will suffer from more pain. Husbands’ presence will prevent women from pushing the baby (hul dewa), which will eventually delay the birth.

Husbands can only wait outside and be available if needed. Otherwise, delivery is considered solely a married women’s business and thus confined to the private space. Traditional views regarding childbirth as a natural process Childbirth is perceived as a natural process. Parboti, a twenty-seven-yearold woman, mother of two children, said: “When the head of the child comes on the “mokam” (uterus), dais (TBAs) just have to pull the baby out.” To express their preference for home delivery women often mentioned that “by the grace of Almighty God I never had to go to the Hospital. I prayed to God to give delivery at home normally.” Existing norms and values thus promote the tradition of home delivery. In the absence of skilled health professionals in the community, women in the village have long been dependent on the TBAs for home delivery. TBAs are locally known as “Dai,” “Dhatri” or “Dhoroni.” They are generally middle-age or elderly women who live in the community and mastered their profession through observing births, by helping senior TBAs and using their own intellect (Afsana 2005). TBAs are readily available to help women at any time during home delivery. After a delivery, TBAs normally receive a new cloth (Shari) or some money, according to the wealth of the household, as a gift but they never ask for anything beforehand for their service.

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Among seven TBAs identified in the village, four of them received training on safe delivery from a non-government organization called KARITUS. The women of the village have faith and trust in the knowledge and expertise of these TBAs. As Fouzia, a twenty-one-year-old woman, mother of one child, said: Somola dai helped my mother when I was born, my birth went without any complications. When I was pregnant I wanted her to help me during my delivery.

When the delivery is complicated (julum), TBAs are also known to apply different techniques. For example, when the cervix does not open up sufficiently dais put some coconut oil on the index finger and help to open the cervix gently. One dai explained, “If someone doesn’t open it up, how will the baby come out alone?” After the delivery, TBAs also help to close the mouth of the cervix. However, during normal delivery, TBAs only wait for the baby to come out naturally. There are amazing stories in the community about how Samola dai is capable of helping women to give birth during complicated situation such as the delivery of dead foetus or of twin babies. A woman like Fouzia thus takes a decision based on previous experience, knowledge and resources available in the community. Women only consider going to the hospital in case the placenta does not come out after delivery. Women are aware that if the placenta (fuler nari) does not come out after delivery women will die and therefore they need to be taken to the hospital to remove the retained placenta immediately. Aside from this case, home delivery is certainly the most desired choice among women.

Gendered codes and boundaries that render institutional delivery inaccessible The public-private boundaries that promote home delivery are rooted in the notion of “purity and pollution” regarding the female body, purity and sexuality. In a patriarchal society, men are responsible for protecting the family’s honour. This idea of family’s honour, which Bourdieu defined as a symbolic capital (Rozario 1992), justifies men’s control over women’s mobility (Connell 2002), so that confining women to the private domain is seen as a means to safeguard their purity. In a patriarchal society men do not only have control over female mobility and sexuality, they also have control over female labour. This section explains how these gendered codes and boundaries regarding women’s mobility, and household roles and responsibilities render childbirth at the health facilities inaccessible.

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Norms of Purdah “Purdah” is a norm that withholds women from giving birth at the health facility. The term “Purdah” means veil. Veiling practices range from covering one’s head or face or both, to full concealment (Dasgupta 1980). In the patriarchal social system, the tradition of veiling originated so as to assure the fatherhood of the children, by controlling women’s sexuality and mobility. The norm of veiling further contributes to keeping women away from having social, economic and political power in the public domain, and thus helps maintaining the authority of men (Hossain and Mashuduzzaman 2006). Due to the presence of male doctors and lack of privacy, giving birth in the hospital is considered as a “bepurdah” (absence of veil) practice. During the focus group discussions with traditional birth attendants, it was revealed that the traditional way of giving birth is different from a hospital delivery (see figure 12.1). Traditionally, women take a squatting position as if sitting on a toilet. A woman bends her body forward, hugging a close female relative, while leaning on her knees. The TBA stays behind the delivering woman and waits for the baby to come out naturally. A good TBA is known not to touch or insert her hands into the birth canal during delivery, while giving birth in the hospital involves vaginal examination. The delivery room of a hospital is crowded and thus privacy is not assured. In the hospital, women have to lie on their back spreading their legs wide open, while other patients are present. Sometimes women are also required to undergo an Episiotomy (a surgical incision made in the area between the vagina and anus to enlarge the opening of the vagina to prevent uneven perineal tear). To give an impression of the privacy situation in government hospitals I will share the story of Shornolota, a nineteen-year-old woman, whom I met at the Madhupur Thana Health Complex (THC) during the repair of her Perineal tear after her first delivery. In the maternity section of the THC, there are two big wards for patients. Next to one ward is the labour room. There are no doors, only curtains to separate the labour room from the patients ward. I was looking for a Nurse (a key informant) who was busy in the labour room. I could just walk in, while the Nurse was busy repairing the Perineal tear of Shornolota after her home delivery. Next to Shornolota was another woman screaming for her pain during labour, two of her female relatives were accompanying her. I was watching the Nurse repairing the Perineal tear without any anaesthesia. Shornolota was biting her lips to suppress her pain. When the nurse was making a knot on a stitch, it came off

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making a tear on the stitched area and Shornolota started to bleed. I felt serious cramp in my belly; I could not stand there anymore. I left the labour room and went outside to breathe some fresh air. I returned to the hospital after an hour. Meanwhile Shornolota was transferred to the maternity ward. I went to her and asked why she did not go to the hospital for delivery, in which case she might not have to suffer from so much pain from the repair of her perineal tear. Her response was: How can I decide for myself to go to the hospital when I am in labour pain? My male guardians have to decide whether to take me to the hospital or not. A TBA (Dai) already delivered the baby at home but the head of the baby is so big that I got this big tear. I was bleeding to death and the Dai suggested my guardians to take me to the hospital.

Shornolota’s statement shows women’s dependency on their husbands or male guardians to be taken to the hospital, while their decision is influenced by traditional norms and views regarding childbirth as well. In addition to the privacy situation in the labour room, the presence of male doctors during delivery in the hospital is considered a bepurdah practice. The male doctor at the maternity unit confirmed the purdah norm by saying: Rural women do not want to see a male doctor during delivery. Nurses take care of the deliveries. In case of Caesarean Nurses call me. Then everything is arranged in the operation theatre. Caesarean does not involve exposing women’s private part (Dr. Narayan Chocroborti, Medical officer, maternal health and child care centre, Madupur Upazila health complex).

Analysing the doctors’ narratives I started wondering whether the caesarean section is a way to manoeuvre around the purdah norms to deal with complicated deliveries. However, the doctor could not provide me any convincing answer; rather he explained the increasing number of caesarean births at the THC by saying: “nowadays women are not so strong to push the baby like our mothers and Aunts.” The increasing trend in caesarean sections is also visible in the national data, with a six fold increase in the use of caesarean section from 2.6% to 17% between 2001 and 2012 (BDHS 2012). Whatever the medical reasons might be for the increasing need for caesarean procedures, the following section elaborates on how, beside purdah norms, the increase trend in caesarean sections further discourages poor women from giving birth at the health facility.

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Patriarchal demand on female labour Bangladeshi society is built on a strong patriarchal ideology of female subordination and male control over female labour (Mies and Bennholdt 1988; Chowdhury 2009). Dominant gendered codes dictate women to perform their daily household chores during pregnancy and delivery. In a rural community where women are busy from dawn to dusk, they give birth in between those household chores. As Farida, a thirty-five-year-old woman, mother of three children described: During my third delivery I was sweeping the yard in the morning. Right at that moment I felt a cramp in my lower belly. I experienced labour pain before. I knew how it feels. I immediately ran to the toilet. I didn’t even have the time to fetch water to use in the toilet. I asked my sister-in-law to give me some water to use in the toilet. I quickly washed myself off. As soon as I came out from the toilet I gave birth in the backyard. I could not even reach my room.

There is a shared understanding among women from different generations that it is better to do daily household chores during pregnancy to have a smooth delivery. Marufa, a forty-eight-year-old woman, mother of four children explained: Doing household work during pregnancy is good for giving birth easily. I worked the whole day during my pregnancy and took rest only in the evening. I gave birth easily. I didn’t even need any TBA (Dai) to help me during my delivery. I did everything alone.

This patriarchal control on female labour varies across class. Poor women experience more patriarchal demand on their labour. This demand is reflected in their observation of traditional customs. Traditionally, rural women move to their in-law’s house after marriage. It is also a custom for women go to their parent’s house during delivery (naior jawa), especially during the first delivery. This ritual releases women from performing their household responsibilities for a few days. Anita, a twenty-one-year-old woman who went to her mother’s house during her first delivery, stated: I had to do everything in my husband’s house during my pregnancy. If I would have stayed in my husband’s house, I would have had to do everything up to the point of my delivery. Now I can just stay in bed and take rest in my parent’s house. I know my mother will do everything for me; she will even serve food for me in my bed. After the delivery she will take care of my child until I can take over.

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However, not all women are as fortunate as Anita to go to their parental house during delivery. Women have to negotiate in order to enjoy this traditional right. When a woman is away to her parents’ house, another member has to take care of her domestic chores. In a patriarchal society, such person is always a woman. A fifty-five-year-old mother-inlaw, Jamila Khatun, mother of four children, expressed her dissatisfaction in such a situation by saying: This time I allowed my daughter-in-law to go to her parent’s house (naior) to give delivery. But I will never allow her to go for naior anymore. It is a big problem for me. When she goes for naior, all her household responsibilities come on my shoulder. I can’t take care of all these responsibilities anymore at this age.

Among the rich households domestic help is often arranged by hiring a poor woman. Therefore rich women can exercise more agency in order to benefit of this traditional right. Women in poor households have to stay at their in-laws house and continue their household chores until delivery and resume their responsibility, mainly cooking, immediately after delivery. In this reality, where dominant social norms dictate women to perform their daily household chores during pregnancy, doctors’ advices seem absurd to women. Women create a kind of natural resistance against pregnancy check-ups and institutional delivery. Hoimonti, a fifty-three-year-old woman, mother of six children said: As soon as you become pregnant the doctor will tell, you are not allowed to carry big water Jars (kolosh) on your hip; you are not allowed to push the tube well; you are not allowed to sweep your yard (uthan); you are not allowed to step on a dheki, (a wooden frame to husk rice from paddy/bara bana), what kind of language is this? I did everything. (Bara banchi, gobor felchi, uthan jharu dichi). I didn’t have any problem.

Existing norms thus not only determine gender differentiated roles and responsibilities, they also underpin differentiated claims and entitlements to healthcare services. These norms are reflected in Marufa Begum’s (a fifty-five-year-old woman, mother of five children) opinion when she mentioned: Those who are wealthy and live a comfortable life (aramey thaka), they need a Caesarean. The child grows bigger inside their belly. They have to go up and down to the hospital and spend money for doctors. Those who do hard labour (porisrom), deliver normally (shustho bhabe). It is a blessing from God that poor people give birth normally at home.

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Thus poor women perceive caesarean birth as unnecessary and as a way for the doctors to earn money. This is the perception of older and younger women alike. Shaleha, a nineteen-year-old woman, who gave birth to her first child at home a few days before our conversation, said: If I would have gone to the hospital the doctors would have cut my belly by now and make me disabled for the rest of my life. A TBA waits for the baby to come out for the whole day and the whole night, but the doctors do not wait for half an hour. They will just cut the belly to take the baby out as quickly as possible. After the Caesarean you would not be able to make a kilo of rice from the paddy, while I have to start cooking for my family at best five days after my delivery. Poor women thus perceive the caesarean section as a problem, which will jeopardise their future performance of gendered roles and responsibilities in the household. The fear of caesarean sections thus discourages poor women from giving birth at the health facility.

A culture of shame around childbirth related complications During the in-depth interviews, when women were to report about their own health and wellbeing, it was revealed that women suffer from longterm and short-term delivery-related complications, such as Perineal Tear (tears in the perineal tissue between the vagina and rectum), Uterine Prolapsed (the falling or sliding of the womb/ uterus from its normal position into the vaginal area) and Obstetric Fistula (a hole between either the rectum and vagina or between the bladder and vagina). Despite these self-reported health complications, women are dependent on home remedies such as using a heat source (cheka) or herbal medicines to treat the perineal (vaginal) tear. Women consider these problems as inevitable, as it expressed in Kabita’s (a twenty-eight-year-old woman, mother of two children), narrative, when she said: During the delivery the vagina will tear a bit. Otherwise how will the baby come out without tearing it? After the delivery it hurts to go to the toilet and it burns during urination. This is the pain all women have to suffer even if they go to the hospital for delivery. It is unavoidable, after a few days it will be over.

A norm of shame further promotes women to endure their childbirthrelated complications silently in their private space. Khadiza Begum, a forty-nine-year-old woman, mother of four children mentioned her Uterine

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Prolapse (Joraiu neme Jawa) during her last delivery. She suffers from lower abdomen pain after doing any physical work and it also burns during urination. She knows that it is possible to get an operation done at the district hospital; however, she already spent many years of her life in misery. She says: What is the use of doing an operation at this age? It is very itchy and smelly. It would be a matter of shame (shoromer bepar) to show this to the male doctors. It is better to die than to live in shame (shoromer cheye moron bhalo).

These norms that promote silent sufferings of women again contribute to birth-related problems. Norms and taboos related to women’s body, purity and sexuality promote early marriage, which in turn also contributes to the development of Fistula. During home delivery, women end up waiting too long in labour pain and women with early pregnancy develop fistula. To prevent child marriage, the Bangladesh government passed the Child Marriage Restraint (Amendment) Ordinance in 1984, making it illegal for females to marry under the age of eighteen. However, according to UNICEF data, still 74% of Bangladeshi girls are married off before the legal age of eighteen. Poor girls are often married off at an earlier age compared to richer girls, as younger brides require smaller dowries (AlMahmood 2012). The practice of child marriage is further rooted in a complex socio-economic context. Phalguni Banu, a fifty-four-year-old woman, mother of three daughters and two sons justified marrying off her daughter at an early age by saying: We can see that rich people send their daughters to school and marry them off at a later age but we can’t. Poor people have to marry off their daughters earlier. Nobody can say anything against the rich people’s daughters. The daughters of the rich family (ghor) make ‘Jaira pet’ (become pregnant as a result of relationships before marriage) and abort the foetus. Nobody can say anything against them. If their daughters fled away from their parent’s house (palaiya jay) with a boyfriend girls are brought back and their parents arrange their marriage (gochaia deya) with a suitable marriage candidate with a huge amount of dowry. If wealthy girls have an abortion people will say she had a tumour operation. If our girls have a zit (phora) people will say they made a pet (became pregnant due to extra-marital affair).

Phalguni Banu’s statement provides a powerful insight into how a complex interplay between the notion of “purity and pollution” and the demand for dowry plays a role in maintaining the tradition of early

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marriage. Therefore, as wonderful as the Child Marriage Restraint Ordinance sounds it cannot bring significant change unless the deeprooted social norms are addressed and the dowry practices are eliminated. Bonna was married off at the age of fifteen and had her first child at the age of seventeen. During her delivery she developed the fistula. She suffers from severe lower abdominal pain during intercourse, but she never went to visit any doctors. Focus group discussions revealed that women remain silent due to the fear of polygamy. If women complain and are not able to perform their household responsibilities, their position will be threatened. Men will find justification for marrying a second wife, which will bring more misery for women. The traditions of early marriage, dowry, polygamy and home delivery thus create a vicious cycle that causes women’s silence and sufferings around birth-related complications. As a committed but partly detached observer, my understanding of the women’s decision for home delivery is that it is shaped by women’s unequal position in the household, which is based on deep-rooted gendered norms and values concerning women’s body, purity and sexuality. These norms are also mutually constituted in different institutions, which then further substantiate inequalities. In Bangladesh, women’s unequal position has been institutionalized through the practice of child marriage, polygamy, dowry, unequal inheritance, guardianship rights and so forth. To break the silence regarding the complications related to childbirth and to broaden women’s choices it is important to provide them with the necessary conditions that enable them to exercise their full agency. Promoting institutional delivery implies addressing unequal gender systems and class inequality. Inequalities will certainly not change overnight. This change requires a conscious effort of policy-makers to be aware of gendered norms and values on which existing inequalities are based. Transformative policies based on a layered understanding of women’s real life experiences can bring about a significant improvement in the maternal health condition of Bangladeshi women.

Conclusion The high maternal mortality due to home delivery is a result of profound gender inequalities persisting in Bangladeshi society. This chapter has shown how the tradition of home delivery is rooted in a complex interplay between women’s subordinated position, perpetuated by patriarchy, and other inequalities. I have explored how existing gender norms and taboos related to the body, purity and sexuality create a public-private divide.

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Additionally, I have discussed how these factors together contribute to the practice of deliveries taking place at home, confined to the private domain. The custom of child marriage, polygamy, dowry, unequal inheritance and guardianship rights, all contribute to this practice. A combination of women’s unequal position in both the private and public domain further promotes a silent suffering of women concerning the complications related to giving birth. Considering the tradition of home deliveries in the rural areas, the most feasible option to improve maternal health would be to provide skilled health personnel at a community level, so as to ensure safe home delivery. An experimental research done in a village in Bangladesh (Nasreen et al. 2010) also suggests that the presence of midwifes in the community reduces maternal mortality to a great extent. Besides ensuring safe home deliveries, to break the silence regarding childbirth-related complications and to ensure women’s access to health facilities it is necessary to address the existing gendered norms and values that render institutional delivery inaccessible and that create inequality across different institutions. It shall also be noted that policies are also often a product of dominant social norms; hence, so far, policymakers have not challenged existing inequalities, rather they tend to reproduce and reinforce them. Therefore, the real challenge is to design policies with a transformative potential aimed at building the necessary conditions to challenge and change existing inequalities.

References Afsana, Kaosar. 2005. Disciplining Birth: Power Knowledge and Childbirth Practices in Bangladesh. Dhaka, Bangladesh: University press limited. Al-Mahmood, Syed Zain. 2012. “Bangladeshi Girls Call in ‘Wedding Busters’ to Tackle Child Marriage.” The Guardian, section: global development, 11 October, 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/globaldevelopment/2012/oct/11/bangladeshi-girls-wedding-busters-childmarriage (accessed March 28, 2013). Bloomberg, Linda Dale and Marie Volpe. 2008. Completing your Qualitative Dissertation: A Roadmap from Beginning to End. London: Sage publications. Camfield, Laura. 2006. The Why and How of Understanding ‘Subjective’ Wellbeing. Exploratory Work by the WeD Group in Four Developing Countries. University of Bath.

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Chowdhury, Farah Deeba. 2009. “Theorizing Patriarchy: The Bangladesh Context.” Asian Journal of Social Science 37(4):599-622. Connell, Robert. 2002. “Gender: Short Introductions.” In Gender Relations. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Dasgupta, Sri Birendramohan, ed. 1980. Samsad English-Bengali Dictionary. 5th ed. Kolkata: Sahitya Samsad. Demeny, Paul. 1975. “Observations on Population Policy and Population Programme in Bangladesh.” Population and Development Review 1(2):307-21. Harding, Sandra, ed. 2004. “Introduction: Standpoint Theory as a Site of Political, Philosophic and Scientific Debate.” In The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies. London; New York: Routledge. Hossain, Selina and Mashuduzzaman, eds. 2006. Gender Encyclopedia. 1st ed. Vol. 1. Dhaka, Bangladesh: Mowla Brothers. —. 2006. Gender Encyclopedia. 1st ed. Vol. 2. Dhaka, Bangladesh: Mowla Brothers. Kabeer, Naila. 2000. “The Condition and Consequence of Choice: Reflection on the Measurement of Women's Empowerment.” UNRISD, Geneva. Discussion paper. —. 2001. “Resource, Agency, Achievements: Reflections on the Measurement of Women’s Empowerment.” Discussing Women’s Empowerment - Theory and Practice, Sida Studies 3:17-57. Mies, Maria, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Claudia von Werlhof. 1988. Women: The Last Colony. London: Zed Books. Mince, Mihaela. 2011. “Midwifery in Bangladesh: In-Depth Country Analysis, 2011.” http://www.unfpa.org/sowmy/resources/docs/country_info/in_depth/Ba ngladesh_SoWMYInDepthAnalysis.pdf (accessed April 4, 2013). Mitra and Associates. 2007. Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) 2007. Dhaka: National Institute of Population Research and training, Mitra and Associates: ORC Macro USA. —. 2012. Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey 2011: Preliminary Report. Dhaka: National Institute of Population Research and Training (NIPORT), Mitra and Associates: ORC Macro USA. Murakami, Izumi, Yuriko Egami, and Susumu Wakai. 2003. “Training of Skilled Birth Attendants in Bangladesh.” The Lancet 362(9399):1940. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS01406736%2803%2914983-5/fulltext (accessed April 15, 2013). Nabi, A. K. M. Nurun. 2012. “Population Challenges for Bangladesh.” The Daily Star. July 11, 2012.

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http://www.thedailystar.net/forum/2012/July/population.htm (accessed May 19, 2013). Nasreen, Hashima-e, Syed Masud Ahmed, Housne Ara Begum, Kaosar Afsana. 2010. Maternal, Neonatal and Child Health Programmes in Bangladesh: Review of Good Practices and Lessons Learned. Research Monograph series no.32. BRAC: Research and Evaluation Division, Dhaka, Bangladesh. http://www.bracresearch.org/monographs/Monograph_32.pdf (accessed June 21, 2013). Planning Commission. 2008. Millennium Development Goals: Bangladesh Progress Report. Dhaka, Bangladesh: Government of the People's Republic of Bangladesh. Planning Wing, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. 2011. Strategic Plan for Health, Population & Nutrition Sector Development Programme (HPNSDP). 2011-2016. Dhaka, Bangladesh: Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. Rozario, Santi. 1992. Purity and Communal Boundaries: Women and Social Change in a Bangladeshi Village. London: Zed books. Sen, Amartya Kumar. 1992. Inequality Re-Examined. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wolf, Diane. 2011. “Feminizing Global Research, Globalizing Feminist Research: Methods and Practices.” In The Handbook of Feminist Research: Theory and Praxis, edited by Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber. London: Sage publications. Woodhouse, Philip. 1998. “People as Informants.” In Finding Out Fast: Investigative Skills for Policy and Development, edited by A. Chataway Thorns and M. J. Wuyts. London: Sage publications. World Health Organization. 2012. Trends in Maternal Mortality: 1990 to 2010, WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, and World Bank estimates. Geneva, Switzerland: Department of Reproductive Health and Research, WHO. http://www.unfpa.org/webdav/site/global/shared/documents/publicatio ns/2012/Trends_in_maternal_mortality_A4-1.pdf (accessed March 7, 2013).

SECTION IV: NEGOTIATING TECHNOLOGIES AND MEDIATIONS

PREFACE KATHRIN THIELE

Sf is this potent material semiotic sign for the riches of speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, science fact, science fantasy. —Donna Haraway, Speculative Fabulation and String Figures

This section presents contemporary feminist research on technology/-ies and mediation. While sometimes still seen as a ‘new’ field within feminist research, the engagement with (new) technologies can build on a rich canon of feminist technoscience studies and feminist media and visual culture studies that has become established since the 1960s. This multifaceted body of knowledge has seen the early critical debates in respect to the general question of technology, with its focus on either the emancipatory or the subjugating effects of an increasing technologization in the 20th century (think of Shulamit Firestone’s 1970 radical embrace of technology versus the ecofeminist rejections). It witnessed the exponential growth of feminist technoscientific engagements after Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto in the later 1980s that got even further broadened by the simultaneous emergence of interdisciplinary media and cultural studies within the curricula of the humanities in the 1990s. And it today recognizes the most recent developments of transdisciplinary posthuman(ist) studies in-between the arts, the natural and the human sciences, which since the early 2000s populate feminist research and drive the field in yet new futural dimensions. The chapters to be found in this section articulate themselves at the interface of this rich body of knowledge in feminist media and technoscience studies, and its up to date use and appliance in the evershifting body of material that we cannot but continue to call ‘new technologies.’ And it is in this sense that recurrent references to ‘the new’ when it comes to engagements with technology and media, remain also justified. A major characteristics of engagements with technology and medialization is that they bring to our attention (and today more than ever) how dynamic and shifting living experiences are, how technology and/or machines move ever closer in-to our (human) lives, and how these

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continuous processes affect and transform our most intimate experiences with-in life. A great focus within technology studies today is the critical awareness of the move from ‘analog’ to ‘digital’ or ‘the digital revolution’. All contributions in this section reflect on specific dimensions of this transformation for our lives: in filmic representations (Olivieri), online intra-actions (Klumbyte), digital women’s writing (Lamerichs), and images of thought (van Hulst). Each chapter works through specific transformations that take place within this complicated process of virtual and real re-locations. The most significant research impetus in these feminist engagements is that the matters at stake are explored critically, i.e. in a manner of investigation that expresses concern with and care for the subject matters at stake. It is from such engagements that the productive work on the multifaceted body of knowledge continues. A canon in the SF-mode: ‘so far.’

References Firestone, Shulamit. 1970. The Dialectic of Sex. The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Haraway, Donna. 1985. “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review 80:65-108.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN IN THE INTERVALS BETWEEN ‘NOW’ AND ‘THEN,’ ‘HERE’ AND ‘THERE’: TRANSNATIONAL SPACES PERFORMED AND REIMAGINED IN DIGITAL HYBRID DOCUMENTARY DOMITILLA OLIVIERI

Figure 13.1 “This image is not available in your country.” Screenshot taken and manipulated by Domitilla Olivieri But I do have special affection for the places that go with travelling: stations and airport lounges, trams, shuttle buses, and check-in areas. Inbetween zones where all ties are suspended and time stretched to a sort of continuous present. —Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects

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Movements In the last eight years, I have taken at least six flights per year, often even a couple more, and reaching a peak of fourteen and eighteen flights respectively in 2008 and 2012. All these trajectories of travel have been determined either by affective relationships, i.e. going to visit close friends, my parents and other families, or by academic activities. Although these movements, both emotionally and in practice, have not been easy; they also speak of a very privileged position, that of a white, southern European scholar, who started and finished her PhD degree just before funding for research in the humanities started being even scarcer than it was before the arrival of the ‘global financial crisis,’ which, so we have been told, hit the western economies from 2008 on. This chapter departs from two of the main concerns that pervade my daily experience and praxis as a feminist scholar and a transnational subject affected by and invested in the poetics and politics of documentary images: digital video technologies and representations, and the experiences of displacement and diaspora. According to the Eurostat’s “Migration and migrant population statistics,” during 2011, “about 3.2 million people immigrated to one of the EU-27 Member States, while at least 2.3 million emigrants were reported to have left an EU-27 Member State” (Eurostat, 2013). EU-27 refers to the twenty-seven country members of the EU between January 1, 2007 and June 30, 2013. While these numbers are already impressive, these statistics do not take into account the millions of untracked migrants who illegally cross the European borders and are not in the position of applying for asylum or other legal recognitions. All these 3.2 million people cross borders in uneven trajectories, in paths informed by hierarchies and power inequalities, to save their lives or to find better ones. They (we?) cross check-ins and custom controls, answer questions and are policed in airports, waiting rooms, harbours and train stations. These transits change our bodies, and foreclose or enable certain subject positions; for some, in painful when not lethal ways, for others, for me, only in a ritualised manner that, again, tells a story of long-consolidated, historical, geo-political, ethnocentric privileges. These travels activate and reproduce practices of inclusion and exclusion, practices that operate across intersectional axes of identities, belongings and locations. In other words, these transnational movements create subjects and others, classify who is appropriate and who is inappropriate. They are at once very tangible experiences—of which, in their most dramatic and urgent forms, in Europe we read and hear daily in the news—and a metaphor of the

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spaces we can and cannot inhabit, the actual physical and geographical spaces as well as social and political subject positions (many postcolonial and feminist scholars have written about this, see, for example, Anzaldua 1987; Balibar 2002; Braidotti 2011; and specifically for the European context see also “The Traffic in Feminism: Contemporary Women's Movements in Europe,” special issue of the European Journal of Women’s Studies 9(3), 2002). It is not only people who travel across borders, but also images, sounds, documents, recordings, videos, books, data, emails, products, photos, stories, viruses and memories, in their digital as well as analogue forms. Also these objects, tangible and intangible, are subjected to rules and procedures of screening, selection, approval and policing. Animals, human and animal parts, DNA and biological samples from animal and plants specimens are a also significant part of these transnational traffics; however, considering the specific focus of this chapter, I will not include them in my analysis. Importantly, like for people, products that are considered appropriate and commercially exploitable travel more easily than their inappropriate, unsuitable, un-exploitable counterparts. At the same time, the traffic of the illegal, immaterial, digital objects flourishes, following routes generally easier and less painful than the ones available to illegal migrants. Nonetheless, the seemingly free movements that supposedly characterised our globalised world are but free and limitless; they are controlled by commercial logics, by uneven wealth distribution, and by dynamics of privilege. For quite a while, I have been looking for an image that would be suitable for the opening of this chapter; I decided it had to fit some aesthetic criteria and convey a certain message. While most artists whose videos I will address below would have been willing to let me use stills from their films, I have decided I did not want to use one of them as it would have shifted the emphasis of my text too much towards one or the other. Thus, after having looked into my books and films collection, browsed through all sorts of free and non-free websites and search engines, I found some possible options, such as: screen-shots of visualization software for flight-tracking, film-stills, and photographs. After having read lengthy documents about the Terms and Conditions for the use of such images, having asked official permission to use them, having received no answer or the request of paying a fee I could not afford, I realised that publishing an image in a scholarly publication requires a very specific set of skills or

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resources I barely have. Additionally, another aspect of my own “situatedness” seemed to matter too: “This image is not available in your country” (Figure 13.1); “the uploader has not made this video available in your country;” “this video is not available in your country;” “due to copyright law restrictions this image is not available for your country.”

Messages similar to these kept appearing on the screen of my computer during my research. Such sentences address me in my geographical location: “in your country.” What country? Why? Is it because I am, right now, in the Netherlands? How do you know this is “my” country? Or is it because I am in Europe? What do I need to do to have access to it? Pay? Physically travel elsewhere? Find illegal ways, using proxy-servers, to override my IP identification as if I were geo-located elsewhere? It should be mentioned that the issue of copyrights for creative products (music, images, films, software, etc…) divides practitioners as well as activists and scholars (see, for example, Caves 2000; Vaidhyanathan 2003); but what I want to address here is the relation between certain images and the experiences of travel and transnational movements. Images, sounds and videos travel across geopolitical spaces, especially in their digital form, but not everyone everywhere has the same rights of access to them. How easily they travel and who has access to which images and imaginaries is determined by very similar rules as the ones that regulate the offline world of the transnational movements of people. Moreover, not only the meanings of these travelling images are changed in and by these travels, but, like for people traversing borders and spaces, their materiality is shaped and reshaped through these crossings. Several those contemporary artists have been exploring the materiality of images. Hito Steyerl is one of them; in the digital video project In Free Fall (2010) for example, she addresses very literally the relation between film, travels and the material support of images. An airplane is being blown up in a Hollywood disaster movie scene, its debris are collected and shipped to China where the aluminium would be melted down and applied on DVDs; finally the pirated version of the film in which the plane is blown up in the first place is printed on the recycled DVD: “And so the materials that carry images would keep circulating, from image content (exploding plane) to image matter (recycled DVD)” (Steyerls and Olivieri 2013, 217).

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Additionally, these media and mediated representations, the experiences of migration, transnational movements and diaspora are not only interconnected but they inform and transform each other. In these regards, addressing the contemporary relation between migration and the “massmediated imaginary that frequently transcends national space” (1996, 6) Arjun Appadurai writes: Those who wish to move, those who have moved, those who wish to return, and those who choose to stay rarely formulate their plans outside the sphere of radio and television, cassettes and videos, newsprint and telephone (ibid.).

This chapter explores a particular aspect of this complex connection: the relation between digital video and the material reality of those displaced subjects living in the liminal space between ‘here’ and ‘there,’ ‘now’ and ‘then.’ More specifically, I take as a focus and starting point of my argument Trinh Minh-ha’s film The Fourth Dimension (2001) in order to address the relation between what I call digital hybrid documentary and the representation and experience of diaspora. It shall be noted that the term ‘diaspora’ is here intended in a broad sense: “to denote the dispersion of a population, group, or community of people from their country of birth or origin. Overseas diasporas are created by international migration— forced or voluntary” (Martin and Yaquinto 2007, 22). The argument will unfold as follows. First, I will clarify the aim by addressing the transformative potential of documentary film, understood as a tool for knowledge production, and in terms of its effects on the social world. Next, I will briefly outline debates on how space and time are modified and performed in digital filmic technology and in experimental documentary films in particular. Moving on into the analysis of The Fourth Dimension, I will identify the relevant themes and strategies deployed in the film. Then, an elaboration of Trinh Minh-ha’s notions of the “inappropriate/d Other” and of the “interval” is introduced: the former as a viable way to conceptualise subjectivities across borders, and the latter as a tool to focus the attention on specific cinematic strategies. Going back to the film, I will then illustrate how it manages to make visible the invisible yet very embodied experience of geographical and emotional mobility and displacement. Time, the traversing of spaces, cultural otherness and proximity, curiosity and alterity are the key themes explored in The Fourth Dimension. Both at the level of its content matter and of how it is shot and edited, the film engages with the issue of travelling and with the paradoxes and possibilities opened by gaps and spaces in-between, by distances,

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speeds and movements. Accordingly, investigating how this film is constructed, I will show how its aesthetic strategies and technological materiality are deeply interconnected with its political dimension: performing and making sense of the embodied realities of transnational movements and spaces. Finally, I will conclude by proposing an understanding of experimental documentary as a tool for knowledge production and for critical intervention; one that can represent, make visible or perform subjectivities and places at the intersection of several cultural and geo-political borders. In doing so, this chapter opens to the transformative potential of digital experimental documentary as a critical space for triggering social and cultural change.

From cinematic image to social world and back Several scholars in the last two decades have theorised the relation between cinema and migration (Appadurai 1996, Marks 2000, Naficy 2001, Ponzanesi 2011, among others) as being multifaceted and complex. For the sake of this chapter I consider this relation as being, at least, twofold. Elaborating on Appadurai’s discussion of how the politics of adaptation and movements are affected by a mass-mediated imaginary, Mark Poster summarises that “media are thus central to the story of diaspora” (2007, 384). This is one side of this two-way relation. Additionally, I maintain that cinema can not only represent, but also ‘make sense of,’ ‘make present’ and to that extent contribute to create and modify the experience of movement and return, of geographical and cultural dislocation and relocation. One way to consider this side of the relation is by mobilising semiotic approaches to film studies such as the one elaborated by Jean Gaines when she writes that: The degree to which the social world determines the cinematic image of it is the degree to which it can be transformative of that same world. The source of the awesome magic, its political pathos, is a realism beyond realism, no longer just realism (Gaines 2007, 19).

Gaines, in the text this quote is taken from, Documentary Radicality, focuses her attention on documentary film or rather on the documentary aspects of radical documentary film and photography, the “realism beyond realism.” Albeit the film I consider in this chapter, The Fourth Dimension, is not simply definable as ‘documentary,’ I argue it has the elements and potential to indeed be transformative and contribute to making sense of the

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social realities and embodied experience of migration and transnational movements. Accordingly, I propose to study a certain kind of digital hybrid films in terms of what they can do, their effects, thus pointing the attention to the links between these cinematic practices and the processes of knowledge production. Therefore, the broader aim of this study is to open a space for a critical, affirmative, and hence transformative (Braidotti 2006, 8-9), understanding of hybrid films, at the crossroad between documentary and experimental cinema, as being: tools to stimulate new knowledge and alternative ways of thinking of and studying experiences of displacement; tools to produce new realities, images and imaginaries; and ultimately, in Trinh Minh-ha’s words, as tools “to solicit a new seeing” (Trinh 2005, 13). Digital cinematographic technology is particularly apt to represent, perform and make visible the invisible and at times unrepresentable experience of being elsewhere, far from ‘home.’ One of the specificities of digital video is that it allows for a degree of manipulation of images (and sounds) that was not achievable with analogue cinema. The potential of audio-visual digital recording, editing and production technologies allows for this ‘manipulation’ to appear seamless and realistic (now intended as plausible, believable, like-real). Digital technologies however also mean the possibility of infinite reproduction as well as of easier modification, editing and ‘falsificating’ of what can be considered the ‘original’ footage. Indeed, never before have the issues of originality, forgery and copyright been as central in media and visual studies, as well as the fields of anthropology, documentary studies, film studies and game studies in the last ten years. The prominent journal Anthropology Today (2001 Vol.17, Issue 3) hosted a debate on this topic, led by one of the most renowned anthropologists and filmmakers, David MacDougall, and a thematic issue of Studies in Documentary Film (2008 Vol. 2, Issue 1) was fully dedicated to this matter. For the relation between documentary and video games, see for example Raessens (2006). From within film studies several feminist scholars engaged with the relation between the digital and indexicality, among others, Sobchack (1999) and Doane (2007b); the latter also edited an issue of Differences entitled “Indexicality: Trace and Sign” (2007a), where the implications of digital technology are addressed at length. However, though it is certainly true that technological changes influence, shape, and are affected by new modes and aesthetic forms of filmmaking, I find it reductive to think of an almost deterministic correlation between new technologies and new filmic styles, as implied at times in certain new media theories. However, the specificities of the medium of digital video have to be acknowledged in

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order to take into account the specific materiality of different media and accordingly, the relation between technology, aesthetics and politics. Through the study of Trinh’s The Fourth Dimension, I propose an understanding of experimental video practice, of digital hybrid documentary, as one that has the potential to represent, make visible or perform the movements through places, the displacement of travelling subjectivities, the experiences of curiosity and alienation when traversing transnational spaces. Albeit this film is not a film about migration and diaspora specifically, I show how it addresses some of the themes and experiences which are typically connected with the diasporic experience in terms of: transit, alterity, intimacy, vicinity and displacement. In other words, it is the relation to time and space/place that—dealt in this film with regards to Japan specifically and in abstract terms at once—I wish to elaborate upon in relation to digital filmic technology. Additionally, it is also because of Trinh’s disciplinary and artistic location that it becomes possible, if not unavoidable, to establish a connection between concerns which are critical to postcolonial studies and this specific film. But first, let us take a step back to time and space.

Debates on digital video, time and space Several scholars, in the last decade, have been interrogating the links between time and digital technology, and how digital media manage to manipulate and compress time and space. Laura Mulvey, for example, in Death 24times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006), commences her research reflecting on time, specifically on the passing of time—“now” and “then”—and on the new possibilities made available by digital technologies in making the hidden stillness of film perceivable, and in altering the speed of the moving image. She discusses how the relation between the movement of the film and time itself is changed by and within the digital technology of reproduction: she studies the effects of pauses, freezes and delayed time on the narrative and the reality of film, and on the very conception of the passing of time. It is in this milieu that Trinh’s explorations in the The Fourth Dimension can be understood. Additionally, Mulvey’s work can function as a bridge to move from analyses of cinema in general to the specific hybrid genre of film I am here considering. Some aspects come to the fore vis-à-vis digital film and time when taking into account The Fourth Dimension as a hybrid video between art

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and documentary, an experimental film, or as other have defined it, an essay video. Whatever the label, the film can be considered hybrid in terms of genre, playing with different styles, with experimental editing and documentary footage, with reality and artificiality, with documentary strategies and artistic interventions. In other words, it is a film which engages with the representation of reality, of the Other, which employs documentary images but which, at the same time, moves in the domain of artistic experimentation. In this sense the film is a documentary that “remains sensitive to its own artifice” (Trinh 1990, 89), a film so aware of the legacies and limits of the documentary genre that it exceeds and deconstructs them by playing with the creative fictional strategies usually connected with experimental film and video-art. Considering now the digital materiality of Trinh’s film, I will briefly address how digital technology affected conceptions and debates on documentary film, as this highlights important elements of the relation between film and reality, hence bringing the discussion back to one of the main focus of this chapter: the possibility of digital hybrid documentary to be affected by reality (in this context, the reality of transnational movements) and to produce effects on reality. The privileged relationship that documentary is supposed to have with reality has been either completely denied or, at least, questioned when digital film entered in the arena of documentary. The high degree of manipulation made possible by digital technologies has been read as the process that would—potentially or unavoidably—erase the relation between image and reality. The possibilities for altering the film images seemed to be countless, any claim of realism, factuality or actuality in digital documentary would be liquidated as unfeasible. The reactions to this digital revolution range from the complete disavowal of any possibility of talking about documentary at all (e.g.: Lev Manovich 2001; Brian Winston 1995), to the acknowledgment that digital technology produces a new aesthetic style (Landesman 2008, 33) yet without leading to the erasure of the distinction between documentary and fiction film. The main concern of this trend of scholarship focuses on the status of documentary image as truth, evidence or document and the risk that this specificity of documentary would be “radically challenged by the new ontological status of digital imagery” (Landesman 2008, 35). It should be stressed that it is precisely because of the complex relation between reality and the digital sign and because of the specific possibilities opened by digital technology, that a film such as The Fourth Dimension manages to perform the visible and invisible complexities of travels and transnational

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spaces and the material reality of the subjects who inhabit these places and times. In another context but in a framework similar to the one of this chapter, I have discussed the work of Ursula Biemann, an artist who makes video essays, another kind of digital hybrid documentary (Olivieri 2012; 2014). Discussing her own video praxis, she states: “[t]he essayist approach is not about documenting realities but about organizing complexities” (Biemann 2003, 3). Along the same lines, I maintain that it is specifically the invisible spaces and realities—created at the interconnections between global networks, the possibilities of long-distance travels, transnational media, geo-political inequalities and intercultural relations—which can be, if not documented, then performed by digital video in such a way as to organise and present their complexities. Space then, and specifically the space in-between, is the other important aspect, together with time, that I propose to address in the context of Trinh’s theoretical framework and with regards to her film in particular. However, before moving to the concepts of “inappropriate/d Other” and of the “interval” that I borrow from Trinh’s work in their relation to space(s), some key terminology has to be clarified: the somewhat ambiguous definition of diasporic cinema. Various terms have been introduced by scholars to refer to the history and experience of peoples moving, more or less voluntarily, from their country of origin to a new place, or to the experiences of the second and third generations of these migrants and the communities they have created in their country of destination, or to the effects of globalization on movements of people. Post-colonial, cultural and ethnic studies have interrogated and analysed how these new communities function and have researched how and why these movements of people and communities have relocated from and through Western and non-Western countries. Additionally, cinema has been a medium that has contributed to creating communities or at least to identify or re-create spaces where identities and identification could become possible and (new) migrant diasporic subjectivities and social memories could take shape and be shared. The kind of cinema that deals with these movements and dislocations has also been variously defined and studied from multiple interdisciplinary perspectives. There is a corpus of films where migrant and diasporic communities, experiences, memories and identities have been addressed, found, redefined and represented. This is a diverse, complex and international cinema—where cinema is intended as a movement as well as a variety of styles and aesthetics. “Intercultural cinema” (Marks 2000), “postcolonial cinema” (Ponzanesi and Waller 2012), “accented cinema” (Naficy 2001),

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“migrant cinema” (Ponzanesi 2011) are but some of the terms scholars have elaborated to make sense of the multifaceted production and distribution of films for, by and about “a group of people who share the political issues of displacement and hybridity, though their individual circumstances vary widely” (Marks 2000, 2). While these approaches to cinema and migration already provide precious frameworks to study the relation between films and the experiences of displacement and movement, I would like to add another perspective. I propose theoretical tools to look at the parallels and similarities between digital hybrid documentary and diasporic experiences. Specifically, I introduce concepts that allow for a close-reading and a medium specific approach to the materiality of these films; that can put in a direct relation the content matter of the film (what the film is about), with its strategies and techniques of framing and editing (the how of the film); that can contribute to analyse what these films can do, their impacts. My way of conceptualising this relation is through Trinh’s concepts of the “inappropriate/d Other” and of the “interval.” Albeit they refer to two separate domains in her work, and to two different sets of issues and disciplinary problems (the former in her earlier work on postcolonial subjectivity, gender and the Other; and the latter in her theorization of her filmmaking practice), what they have in common is not only that they have been theorised by the same scholar, but that they both refer to a liminal space, a space in-between.

The Fourth Dimension Nomadic activism and art prove that the real function of borders is to ensure control over the mobility of populations and goods and thus by being crossed. —Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects

Before addressing some of the key concepts that I bring forward in my ongoing study of transnational experiences and digital hybrid documentary, I will first provide a brief account of the film and the filmmaker this chapter’s inspiration sprang from. The Fourth Dimension is a film by Trinh T. Minh-ha, produced by Trinh together with Jean-Paul Bourdier, in the United States, in 2001. Its running time is eighty-seven minutes and it has been screened in museums and art venues (such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Graz Biennale, Austria), and at several International Film Festivals. The film was completed during a four-month teaching position Trinh had at the Ochanomizu University’s Center for Gender Studies in Tokyo, Japan.

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Trinh T. Minh-ha is an independent filmmaker, writer, composer and feminist and post-colonial theorist. Born in Vietnam, she moved to the United States to study. She teaches in the Gender and Women’s Studies Department and in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. Trinh has travelled the world and lectured extensively on film, art, feminism, visual culture, philosophy and cultural politics. Aside from the eight books she has published, her work also includes large-scale multimedia installations and feature-length films such as: Reassemblage (1982), Naked Spaces (1985), Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), Shoot for the Contents (1991), A Tale of Love (1996), The Fourth Dimension (2001), and Night Passage (2004). The multiplicity of locations (both disciplinary and geographical) of the filmmaker is reflected in the complexity of her films, all of which are in fact hard to categorise in terms of genre. While I am aware that this is but a very personal account of the film, in order to at least provide a sense of this film, I will now provide an account of the The Fourth Dimension to those who have not seen it. Its peculiar significance and viewing experience resides in its slow, circular pace, in its ritual extra-ordinary rhythm that unfolds throughout the almost ninety minutes of the screening. Images of Japan are captured through mobile frames, doors, windows and gates; through the crowd or from a constantly moving hand-held camera. The shots are of great aesthetic quality, pursuing a familiar visual pleasure, the pleasure of beautiful framing, colours and composition. Such aesthetic quality becomes almost disconcerting at times, when ‘stolen’ images are shown, secretly recorded shots of unaware subjects (e.g.: sleeping women on the train). In these moments the film borders upon a voyeuristic curiosity. Although it aims at revealing and criticising the conquering tendency typical of a touristic colonialism, it also reproduces it to a certain extent. The video-editing conveys a sense of circularity, with its juxtapositions, repetitions and contrasts. Shots of the inside and outside, light and darkness, ultra-modern machines and human bodies, all to be disclosed and perceived, at least for a fraction of this digital-video-time, in their interactions, bridges and gaps: the “outside in and inside out” (as in the title of one of Trinh’s essays, 1989), or through “the interval” (as I will discuss below). Conjoined with the poetic narration of the voice-over and a multilayered sound design, the images assume complex, always-shifting and

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multivalent meanings that the audience is challenged to interpret and make sense of. In this way, the film encourages the viewer to take on an active and attentive role that can or should become uncomfortable. Such a role becomes indeed unsettling when the fog dissipates and a new place and new picture appears, when the world opens up to the traveller through paths, gates and corridors (to paraphrase the voice-over of the film). In short, in my reading, key themes of the film are: time; the traversing of spaces; cultural otherness and proximity (yet in the film there is no real encounter); curiosity and alterity; displacement and intimacy; speed(s); rites of passage, the art of framing time, the art of ‘pass’/‘age’; light and darkness; and empty spaces.

Spaces in-between: the Interval and the Inappropriate/d Other Borrowing the concepts from Trinh’s corpus of work, I put forward the notion of “Inappropriate/d Other” as a possible way to conceptualise migrant/ transnational/ hybrid/ diaporic subjectivities; and of the “interval” as a tool to focus the attention on some specific cinematic strategies, present and prominent in experimental digital video practice albeit not uniquely (i.e.: also applicable—as Trinh herself does—to analogue film). She defines the “Inappropriate/d Other” in various texts, she describes it, for example, “as someone whom you cannot appropriate, and as someone who is inappropriate” (Trinh 1998). This is an Other that resists labelling, that is “outside in” and “inside out” of the boundaries of definitions and genres (Trinh 1991). It is a subject that crosses, unsettles and challenges the self/other dichotomy, and with it other binary categories such as “science and art; documentary and fiction; universal and personal; objectivity and subjectivity; masculine and feminine; outsider and insider” (Trinh 1989, 133). In this sense, it is a subject and a subject position that is inappropriate, excessive, but that is also inappropriated, not easily locatable, detainable or controllable as it resists being seized by either end of the binary: “Not quite the Same, not quite the Other, she stands in that undetermined threshold place where she constantly drifts in and out” (Trinh 1986, 9). Such inappropriate/d-ness is a space where power is deconstructed, where the dominant set of criteria are ineffective (Trinh 1991, 71). Therein, power, as well as the criteria of analysis and knowledge production can be carefully inspected and re-evaluated. Furthermore, Trinh explicitly elaborates on her understanding of subjectivity in relation to the cinematic apparatus, documentary and fiction film, when describing

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her concept of Inappropriate/d Other, arguing that the subjectivity at work here cannot be submitted to the old subjectivity/objectivity paradigm (Trinh 1988). What is at stake is a subjectivity aware of its role in the production of meaning, and aware of filmic representation as a mediation and a technique, rather than merely as a representation of something. Accordingly, all of Trinh’s films can be considered “attempts to bring out that process with and within the image. Because of the very tight ‘alwaysin-relation-to’ situation, it is also difficult to simply indulge in the subject matter, as if it pre-exists out there, waiting to be retrieved ‘as it is’” (Trinh 1999b, 134). Trinh theorised what she has called, in different contexts, the gap, the interval, the silence, the intra or “the space in-between” (Trinh 1992; 1999a; 2005) as “a space in which meaning remains fascinated by what escapes and exceeds it” (Trinh 1990, 96). It is also the space between viewer and film, image and text. Furthermore, she writes that “working with intervals means working with relationships in the wider sense of the term,” relationships within a text, or a film, and between one’s voice and the others’ voices, between oneself and the other (Trinh 1999a, 38). It shall be stressed how renowned theorists such as Gilles Deleuze (1986) and Dziga Vertov (1984) have also been discussing the concept of the interval. The latter, for example, writes: “‘Intervals’ (the transition from one movement to another) are the material, the elements of the art of movement, and by no means the movements themselves” (Vertov 1984, 8). Crucially, at times he describes his very own and pioneering theory, the “kino-eye,” as the “theory of intervals” (ibid., 41). The interval therefore is a concept that refers, simultaneously, to the content matter of a film, to its techniques and to a certain understanding of experimental (and I shall add, political) documentary-making itself. I therefore propose the interval as a critical space: in these intervals alternative images, imaginations, and imaginaries can be produced. It is the in-between space between visible and invisible, presence and absence; present and memory; known and unknown. In other words, it is in the gaps and the pauses, in the space created in between images, sounds, silences and black screens, between the aural and the visual, that new visions and new meanings can be created.

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Some further insights into The Fourth Dimension The political is a form of subjectivity that cannot be dissociated from the cultural or the aesthetic, simply because it involves the creation of sustainable alternatives and social horizons of hope. —Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects

What I want to show using The Fourth Dimension as an example, is how this film, because of its digital materiality, manages to make visible the invisible yet very embodied experience of geographical and emotional displacement. In focus here is the relation between the aesthetics and the politics of this film: the what, the how, and the effects. That is to say: both at the level of its content matter and of how it is shot and edited, the film engages with the issue of travelling and with the paradoxes and possibilities opened by gaps and spaces in-between, by distances, speed and movement. Accordingly, investigating how this film is constructed, it becomes possible to identify how its aesthetic strategies are deeply interconnected with its political dimension, that is: performing and making sense of the affective reality of transnational movements and connections. I have addressed the framing of the images, the audio and visual editing techniques, the style of narration and the rendering of colours; to then dive further into issues of time, digital speed and displacement. As a result, I argue that speed and rhythm are not only the subject matter of the film, but its very fabric and material substance. What the film is about and how the film is constructed constantly echo each other and are deeply intertwined. Once again, the focus is on the relation between the aesthetic forms and the political transformative potential. I would like to proceed presenting one example, focusing on one aspect of The Fourth Dimension, its relation to time. At the level of the filmic strategies/the how, the film plays with time, with ‘now’ and ‘then,’ with the rhythm(s) of the editing, the digital manipulation of the images, the speeds of sequences. At the level of the content, the film addresses various times: the present time, memory, temporal dislocation, thoughtful pauses, and sudden ruptures. The film is a journey; represented as a “rite of passage” (these words appear of the screen after less than four minutes into the film). Both the elements of rituality and of passage entail a specific conception of time and rhythm. Passage is the travelling, the tourist’s transit into another culture, the moving machine controlled ‘bullet’ train, speed. The ritual time is not necessarily slow—although Trinh seems to suggest so—but it is surely analysed and carefully organised, it is a break in the flux of daily

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life, a dynamic agent in creating meanings and making sense of the world: the human time, the bodily dance and embodied rhythm. These are the layers through which Trinh tailors her audio and visual suggestion of time, or rather of times: the distinct but co-existing human and machine time, women’s and Japan’s time, self and other, past and present, still and speed, ordinary and extraordinary. The film seems to suggest and offer another dimension to perceive the filmic time and the time of the encounter: that of the still-speed and of infra-ordinary. Such “infra,” she lets us understand, is also that which could be represented in cinema, in the cracks and bridges of digital audio-visual technologies: “today the gap becomes the bridge, what tends to separate film from video can offer a passage” (voice-over in the film). Not only filming becomes the “craft of framing time” (voice-over in the film) but the specific materiality of the medium, a digital film, is brought into focus, as a fundamental agent not only in the aesthetics but also in the politics of representation. Thus Trinh’s film, by addressing the absences, the gaps, the silences, opens up a semiotic space that is at once also political: the in-between space, the interval, where new engagements with reality and with the Other can be enacted, as well as where other meanings and new subject positions can be imagined. Finally, expanding this concept further, I propose that Trinh’s understanding of the interval strongly resonates with the border as a geo-political as well as metaphoric space. Other artists have worked on the relation between geo-political borders and subjectivities more directly; I am thinking in particular of the work of Ursula Biemann, whom I have referred to earlier in this chapter. Biemann writes: “I want to elaborate on the space of negotiation in-between because that’s where the complexity of our lives is located” (Biemann 2005, 4). Ultimately, then, the border is a space inbetween, and the interval, the gap, is located at the border: they both are, physically as well as symbolically liminal spaces. More importantly, these are the spaces, the fissures where encounters and redefinitions take place and where alternative images, imaginations and imaginaries can be produced. The border as a metaphor also mobilises the performative dimension of bodies in these transnational movements, and the relations between power, the organisation of space and disciplining of subjects. It becomes a metaphor for conceptualising the crossing of multiple boundaries: between nation states, identities, global economy and local experiences, between control and resistance, between humans and machines.

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For Trinh, the space in-between is a space that opens to the possibility of meaning(s) that escape or exceed it. Similarly, the transnational crossing of places and borders is also a space of possibilities—alongside it being a space of control and disciplining—and therefore a political space. Both the interval and the border are spaces where new engagements with reality and with the Other can be enacted, as well as where other meanings and new subject positions can be imagined. This “interstitial space” (Trinh 1992, 173) then is both a theoretical and an actual space, which has at once an aesthetic value, and an epistemological and political dimension. The interval allows for a proliferation of interpretations, unsettles dominant conceptions, and creates the space for new meanings and new subject positions to be imagined. In other words, it is through this space inȬbetween, these intervals, that the experiences and subjectivities of the Inappropriate/d Others can be represented or performed.

Conclusion In sum, in this chapter I have argued for an understanding of digital hybrid documentary as an exemplary tool to represent, recognise, construct and share the stories and the experiences of diaspora and migration. It is specifically in the effects of digital hybrid film that I have focused the attention; these effects being the potential to perform if not represent: the invisible realities of space and time, and the experiences and the memories in-between places, through symbolic, geographical as well as cultural borders. To cross and perform borders and spaces; to re-define time and place; to perform and ‘make present’ the experiences of migrant subjects; to imagine invisible realities; to provide the space to redefine meanings and realities. These are some of the main potential impacts of such digital, hybrid films, or we could also say, of such “Inappropriate/d” films, as well as the possibilities opened by a critical, interdisciplinary, feminist perspective that goes deep into the materiality of digital film, their construction, the relation between ‘the what’ and ‘the how.’ Ultimately then, this is the aim of this study. Exploring the interconnections between the politics and aesthetics of one example of digital hybrid documentary, this chapter pointed the attention to what these films can do, to the links between experimental documentary practices and the processes if knowledge production. Finally and importantly, the focus is on the critical and transformative promise that resides in the encounters between documentary film studies, feminist theory and postcolonial studies, to explore the relation between digital

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video and diaspora, technology and transnational movements, media, experiences and subjectivities. After all then maybe that pop-up window I opened the chapter with, the one that reminded me that a film was not available in my country, was but a push to look beyond what I was allowed to see. The problems with borders and disciplining, with practices of inclusion and exclusion, access and legality, are far from being easily theorised or generalised. But maybe, after all, at least that one digital sign on my computer screen that prevented me to go ‘there,’ to see further; that one pop-up window that pinned me down to my geographical location, by forbidding me to see, gave me access to something more important than just a new image: for “the question is not so much to produce a new image as to provoke, to facilitate, and to solicit a new seeing” (Trinh 2005, 13).

References Anzaldua, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Balibar, Étienne. 2002. Politics and the Other Scene. London: Verso. Biemann, Ursula. 2003. “Writing Counter-geography.” In Appel à témoin. Le Quartier, Centre pour l’art contemporain, Quimper (cat.). —. 2005. “Border Videographies. A Gendered Reading of Globalization Processes.” In JGCinema, web portal on Cinema e Globalizzazione. http://www.jgcinema.com/single.php?sl=border-videographies (accessed January 20, 2014). Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press. —. 2011. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (second edition). New York: Columbia University Press. Caves, Richard E. 2000. Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dziga Vertov. 1984. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Cambridge: University. of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 2005 [1986]. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London: Continuum. Doane, Mary Ann. 2007a. ed. “Indexicality: Trace and Sign.” Special issue Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18(1).

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—. 2007b. “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18(1):128-152. Eurostat. 2013. Migration and Migrant Population Statistics. European Commission. http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Migrati on_and_migrant_population_statistics (accessed November 10, 2013). Ezekiel, Judith, and Mieke Verloo, eds. 2002. “The Traffic in Feminism: Contemporary Women's Movements in Europe.” Special issue European Journal of Women’s Studies 9(3). Gaines, Jane M. 2007. “Documentary Radicality.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 16(1):5-24. Hight, Craig, ed. 2008. Studies in Documentary Film. 2 (1). Landesman, Ohad. 2008. “In and Out of this World: Digital Video and the Aesthetics of Realism in the New Hybrid Documentary.” Studies in Documentary Film 2(1):33-45. MacDougall, David. 2001. “Renewing Ethnographic Film.” Anthropology Today 17(3):15-21. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Martin, Michael T., and Marylin Yaquinto. 2007. “Framing Diaspora in Diasporic Cinema: Concepts and Thematic Concerns.” Black Camera 22(1):22-24. Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books. Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Olivieri, Domitilla. 2012. Haunted By Reality Toward a Feminist Study of Documentary Film: Indexicality, Vision and the Artifice. Doctoral dissertation. —. 2014. “Video di confini: attraversamenti fra realtà, visioni e visualizzazioni.” DWF- donnawomanfemme. Ponzanesi, Sandra. 2011. “Europe in Motion: Migrant Cinema and the Politics of Encounter.” Social Identities 17(1):73-92. Ponzanesi, Sandra, and Marguerite R. Waller, eds. 2012. Postcolonial Cinema Studies. London; New York: Routledge. Poster, Mark. 2007. “Postcolonial Theory in the Age of Planetary Communications.” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 24(4):379-393.

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Raessens, Joost. 2006. “Reality Play: Documentary Computer Games Beyond Fact and Fiction.” Popular Communication 4(3):213-224. Sobchack, Vivian Carol. 1999. “Toward a Phenomenology of Nonfictional Film Experience.” In Collecting visible evidence, edited by J. Gaines and M. Renov. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Steyerl. Hito. 2010. In Free Fall. Germany, 32 min. Digital video. Steyerl, Hito, and Domitilla Olivieri. 2013. “Shattered Images and Desiring Matter. A Dialogue between Hito Steyerl and Domitilla Olivieri.” In Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics, edited by Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzycka. London; New York: I.B.Tauris. Trinh, T. Minh-ha. 1986. “She, the Inappropriate/d Other.” Discourse 8 (Fall-Winter). —. 1988. “Not You/Like You: Post̺Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference.” Inscriptions 3-4. http://www2.ucsc.edu/culturalstudies/PUBS/Inscriptions/vol_3̺4/min h̺ha.html (accessed March 10, 2011). —. 1989. “Outside in Inside Out.” In Questions of Third Cinema, edited by P. Willemen and J. Pines. London: British Film Institute. —. 1990. “Documentary Is/Not a Name.” October 52:76̺98. —. 1991. When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics. London; New York: Routledge. —. 1992. Framer Framed. London; New York: Routledge. —. 1998. “Inappropriate/d Artificiality, interview with Marina Grzinic.” http://www.ced.berkeley.edu/faculty/bourdier/trinh/TTMHInterviews0 02.htm (accessed March 08, 2011). —. 1999a. Cinema Interval. London; New York: Routledge. —. interviewed by Akira Mizuta Lippit. 1999b. “When the eye frames red.” InterCommunication 28:130-137. —. 2005. The Digital Film Event. London; New York: Routledge. Vaidhyanathan, Siva. 2003. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity. New York; London: New York University Press. Winston, Brian. 1995. Claiming the Real: the Griersonian Documentary and its Legitimations. London: British Film Institute.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN SCHOLARSHIP AS GEEK FEMINISM: SUBVERTING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN GLEE FAN FICTION NICOLLE LAMERICHS

Figure 14.1 Kurt and Blaine by ZephyrianBoom.

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I first met Kelly, the author of The Lost Nightingale (2011), through a private message. I was looking for participants for my study on fan communities or “fandom” – the online and offline spaces where fans of popular culture such as television shows or video games meet. I noticed that the popular high school series Glee was gaining a large following (2010-ongoing). This television series follows the events of several teenagers, in the conservative American state Ohio, who participate in a show choir or “glee club” called New Directions in the high school setting of McKinley High. I could not help being drawn to Glee for its songs, cheeky wit, fast dialogues and overly stereotyped, ironic characters. Glee “fan fiction” became one of my research sites to explore the creativity of media fans and this is where I stumbled upon Kelly’s stories. Fan fiction is a type of interpretive reception that allows fans to study existing characters deeply, as well as a productive activity in its own right. Fan authors transform existing texts by infusing them with other texts and images or by transferring the characters to a new setting. Kelly’s The Lost Nightingale, for instance, darkens the conservative, contemporary Ohio setting into a crime narrative that does not shy away from gay erotica. Its theme and setting immediately appealed to me as a critic and I asked for permission to analyse her story. Kelly was immediately enthusiastic and warmly recommended different Glee stories to me. She also introduced me to many of her online friends including some that she had co-authored texts with. I still have not met Kelly face-to-face offline but her work has inspired me tremendously. Her passion for noir resonates with my own interests. Moreover, Kelly frequently writes about two of my favourite characters, the young homosexuals Kurt and Blaine. Their romantic relationship is often shorthanded as “Klaine” and has drawn a large following over the years. In the featured drawing, fan artist ZephyrianBoom depicts the boys maturely with a hat, a cigarette and an open coat in a nostalgic gray colour scheme (figure 14.1). This erotic tableau reminded me of Kelly’s fan fiction. The online drawing, hosted at the social media platform deviantART.com, is characteristic of how audiences mediate the bodies of their beloved characters time and again. Its title, Gift for Lie, plays with dubious moral standards and perhaps sexual bribery, themes that also emerge in The Lost Nightingale story. Though the drawing and text are not explicitly related to each other, they connect thematically. That is to say, both the fan story and the fan illustration are rooted in complex historical and contemporary gender patterns that negotiate queer identity. The authors, both women, may qualify as geek feminists, like me, though they perhaps would not say it.

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In this chapter I focus on the intermediality of Glee fan fiction and discuss how this genre constructs new representations of gender and sexuality. After explaining the concept of intermediality, I detail my methodology and analyse three stories written by fans. Then I will conclude with some final remarks about the critical potential of fan fiction and geek feminism.

Intermediality Kelly is but one example of a female fan who mixes portrayals of gender and sexuality both in her writing and online identity formation. Her texts, as those of any fan, are more complex than outsiders often assume. Fans combine various media texts and modes. In this study, I use the concept of intermediality to capture the structure of these texts circulating online. Intermediality refers to the dispersion of media content across various media platforms. It considers the individual medium as entwined with other media, both in terms of content and form, and as embedded within a broader cultural discourse. For instance, the fan fiction of Glee is deeply connected to form and content of television, creative writing and social media. The term intermediality is derived from intermedium, coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1812) to discuss aesthetic modes in various media and revisited in 1966 by Dick Higgins in his manifesto “Statement on Intermedia”; it became associated with the art scene through the artistic network Fluxus. The concept has been developed further in Germany in the late 20th century aesthetic and literary studies and is sometimes combined with discourses on intertextuality (Helbig 1998, Rajewsky 2005, Meyer and Simanowski 2006). Today, intermediality has again become relevant. Creators of art, media, and literature make use of multiple media sources, either to make a new product or to adapt existing content. With the advent of new media and the interest in combining various forms of media, modes such as opera, film, and novels may now also rely on other media, thus becoming hybrids (Helbig 1998). There is also an increasing trend toward intermediality in the media industry itself, described by Henry Jenkins (2006) as “transmedia storytelling.” In this process, various media are combined to tell one story. The Matrix, for instance, told its story across three movies and a video game that allowed audiences to make full sense of its characters and plot. Each medium retains its own characteristics, and ideally, these texts need to be combined to fully understand the narrative. However, this concept pertains primarily to the franchises of the industry

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and does not advance our understanding of fandom where particular texts, such as the Glee television show, are still hailed as the source text. The field of fan studies has often considered the relation between fan fiction and its source text as intertextual—as a complex interplay between a text and other texts that shape its interpretation (Hellekson and Busse 2006). Intertextuality however seems too narrow a term for such writing which is given shape by interactivity. User comments, recommendations and favourite options structure fan fiction and its reception. Authors and readers thus share a creative space and advance each other’s creations and interpretations. This writing is, in other words, highly medium-specific (Hayles 2004). Fan fiction is often characterized as a “participatory culture” in which authors, readers, critics and industry personnel communicate on a similar level (Jenkins 2006). Intermediality embraces the media text and also creates ample role to discuss media platforms themselves. Thus, I analyse the online fiction of Glee fans and how it mediates the television text. Specifically, I consider how these narratives allow for emancipative gender performances, such as the construction of an adolescent gay identity or an asexual identity. Thus, I will argue Glee fandom constitutes a space of creative writing where feminism flourishes through new representations and voices.

Geek girls The cultural domain of fan fiction has been qualified as a unique feminine space where women mediate intimacy through stories (Lothian, Busse, and Reid 2007). Glee fan fiction is a female space constructed by women in their teens and twenties. In fandom, such gendered differences can amply be observed, not only by examining which texts draw female or male audiences, but also by exploring the activities that fans undertake. A blog post by Obsession_Inc (2009) caused much attention when she suggested that men engage in “affirmational” activities that celebrate the media text and mastery over it. In her dichotomy, male fans are characterized by figures as the collector or reviewer that celebrate the unity of the text. She instead aligns female fans with autonomous spaces and activities that are transformative and creative. Women explore the blanks of the texts, she suggests, while men honour its textual unity and facts. Though this gendered divide may be criticized, studies have shown that creative and interpretive activities are partly gendered (Pearson 2012, Bacon-Smith 1992). Female fans are still subjected to patriarchal discourses as particular domains and activities are portrayed as male, such as gaming

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(Nakamura 2012). Both in media representations (e.g.: narratives, visuals) and sociality, gender functions as an exclusionary mechanism. To explore these issues, I adopt the viewpoint of “geek feminism” which promotes the critical online activity of women and their engagement with media technologies. In her studies on female computer users, linguist Mary Bucholtz coined the term geek feminism to outline a theoretical and socially engaged view point informed by the legacy of feminism while retaining geek identity: “Geek feminism, like all political affiliations and identities, is not a category with which to classify individuals but a stances that shapes and is shaped by social practice” (2002, 282). Bloggers have been quick to pick up this concept and founded the platform GeekFeminism.org in 2009. This blog articulates female geek identity and critically assesses media representations and user cultures. Today, the term “geek” refers to a positive alignment with popular culture rather than being a pejorative. Geek connotes enthusiasts and hobbyists, and even suggests a particular life-style that swirls around internet or gaming capital. Increasingly, the merchandise lines of Hot Topic and ThinkGeek cater to “geek girls” as well. Geek is becoming a female, marketable identity. These emerging cultural repertoires also influenced early Glee fans who labelled themselves “gleeks,” a portmanteau of Glee and geek. Not much later, the industry stamped Glee DVD covers and tours with the same word. This exemplifies the broader participatory climate in which the industry caters to its fans and commodifies their language and tokens. The identity of the female geek is re-invented through these commercial paradigms. She is often overlooked or excluded as a creative fan that operates outside of the media industry, but increasingly she returns through the backdoor as a loyal consumer. Female fan authorship is a fertile testing ground to see how geek feminism can take shape through media interaction. While fandom seems niche, its ideas increasingly perpetrate the mainstream industry. The popular BDSM-romance Fifty Shades of Grey (2010-2012), for instance, is a rewriting of a Twilight fan text of E.L. James. This text cannot be separated from the social context in which it emerged, and from the common acceptance of “kink” as an erotic genre in fandom. The emergence of Glee kink and its narrative tropes have been detailed by Hannah Elison (Ellison 2013). Fandom thus suggests a unique field of creative and erotic writing that needs to be explored further.

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Methodology Geek feminism captures an independent critical perspective that unites my roles as a fan and scholar. Like my informants, I invest in creativity and free culture. I do not shy away from interventions with my subjects and progressive discussions on gender and sexuality. As an anime fan and science fiction enthusiast, I am well aware of the (gendered) communicative styles and social protocols within fandom. Since my early teens, I painstakingly articulated myself online through art and interaction. I engage in many fan practices and I also help organise the annual fan convention YaYCon, since 2010, that celebrates gender patterns in Japanese media. Geek feminism to me means a critical pursuit of media content and its social wealth together with an agenda for social change. My study focuses on the female fandom of Glee fan fiction. With over 80.000 fan texts, Glee is the most popular television series on Fanfiction.net (15 October, 2012). Glee fan fiction draws a largely female demographic that came to the fore in online profiles. The anonymous fan authors who revealed their gender to me for the purpose of this research were all women as well. I believe that these gendered observations are not a norm but I still perceive them as an analytical context to explore the cultural backdrop of fan fiction. I followed the guidelines as formulated by fan scholars in the journal Transformative Works and Cultures (2012) who recommend asking for permission to use fan works. I followed this guideline because the status of fan works—both in an ethical and legal sense—is liminal. I contacted the authors and asked them whether I could conduct an analysis of their work and use their nicknames. This also meant that I could not use some outstanding fan fiction because the author did not respond. In my sampling, I used different media platforms and contacts. As Roberta Pearson (2012) argues, this multi-platform methodology is not unethical but rather a must in today’s media landscape. Fan practices take place on different sites and platforms, and the same text might even be uploaded on various sites. The methodology of a fan scholar should reflect this heterogeneity. She/he should focus on social protocols that are characteristic of the fandom, rather than isolating traces of its lived online culture. While I did not restrict my sample to one media platform, the selected texts were all uploaded on the blogging platform LiveJournal. com. Here, the blog architecture allows readers to comment on the uploaded fan texts. While authors commonly do not modify the fan text, they do engage in interpretation with their readers.

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The focus of this chapter is on three Glee texts. These three texts are selected based on their appraisal within the fan community. All three rank highly within TV Tropes—a renowned Wiki that collects the narrative tropes in media. Users of the site also collect and recommend their favourite fan fiction. I consider the three texts to be exemplary and representative of the literary qualities and genres of fan fiction. Other key criteria were the text’s relations to the source text, the thematic qualities of the text, its coherence and the focalisation of the characters. The three texts narrate Kurt’s queer identity and incorporate gay motives or, in fan terms, slash. While slash connotes erotic intimacy between men; the term femmeslash (also spelled femslash) is used to more specifically refer to fiction depicting sexual relations between women. Slash involves the queering of characters who are emotionally confronted with homosexual feeling (Jenkins 1992, Penley 1991, Pugh 2005). Slash emerged as an exploration of homosocial and latent homosexual texts in television and movies. While slash used to be based on subtext, modern shows such as Glee include gay characters, thereby problematizing the phenomenon of slash. By now, slash and femmeslash both provide complicated representations of gender and put emphases on different types of sexualities, including asexuality as well as same-sex sexuality. To assure for internal coherence, the fan fiction that I selected mediates an important character in the series, namely the young homosexual Kurt Hummel. After his coming-out, Kurt is bullied by the closeted homosexual Dave Karofsky, and as a result leaves McKinley High to attend the allmale boarding school Dalton Academy. There, he joins The Warblers, a glee club that rivals with New Directions, where he meets his first boyfriend Blaine. The three stories explore the character of Kurt and some of the other members of New Directions. I conduct a narrative and intermedial analysis of the three fan works and I specifically explore their mediations in terms of focalization, genre and characterization.

Pick Up Where We Left: Narrating the Bully Pick Up Where We Left (2011) by Lookninjas fills the blanks after Kurt is transferred to Dalton Academy. Dave Karofsky, the boy that bullied Kurt, decides to pay him a visit. Throughout the text, focalized by a confused Dave, the reader is unsure whether he wants to apologize to Kurt, intimidate him or whether he is possibly longing for him. Dave has to come to terms with his identity as gay but even at the end of the story, he cannot.

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The title, Pick Up Where We Left, is an allusion to Amanda Palmer’s song Guitar Hero. Palmer’s song, which describes the game Guitar Hero, mediates depression and anger. It narrates the loneliness of the addressed gamer, portraying him as a false hero, who sits at home “making out to faces of death.” The lyrics suggest that the game provides a deep, immersive context that is at once shallow and possibly a waste of energy. The bridge of the song builds up to: “I could save you baby but it isn’t worth my time,” thus abandoning the narratee, who resembles Dave Karofsky. The story opens as follows: Sooner or later, someone’s gonna stop him. It hasn’t happened yet, although he’s been waiting for it for a long time. Waiting for a teacher to step in before he can slam the next kid into the lockers; waiting for Coach Beiste to throw him off the football team […]; waiting for his dad to do something more than shake his head and sigh when he comes home with another shitty report card.

The beginning of the fan text suggests that Dave has low self-esteem and that his negative acts are signals he sends to the outside world. The responsible adults that he addresses—all of them in a position of power— overlook him because they do not read his behaviour as it is meant, as being full of signals of self-destruction. The reader knows that Dave hopes to be stopped, as the excerpt above highlights. Though Dave is well-aware of his wrongdoings, he persists because there are no repercussions to his actions. Dave successfully manages to infiltrate the boarding school and confronts Kurt. The characterization of Dave in the fan text is not that of a mere bully but reveals a character that projects his anger upon others. The narrative refers to him as “Karofsky” rather than Dave. The choice for his last name in part results from the source text in which the glee kids often refer to Dave as Karofsky to create a distance from him. It also closely resembles the language of Glee, in which the athletes or jocks—to which Dave belongs—often address each other through their last names. However, I propose that this stylistic device also stages Dave as a persona and stresses his inability to accept himself. Similarly, the inadequate style of the narrative draws out Dave’s ineptitude through chaotic sentences, curse words and casual indicators (e.g.: “yeah,” “whatever”). The narrative tone supports his rudeness, anger but also his pretence and flaws. Despite this limited perspective, Dave’s narration is clever on several occasions as he expresses unpopular insights about the glee club and reveals its fraught sentiments and dreams.

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Kurt can be read as a positive mirror image of Dave, a more comfortable young queer on whom Karofsky projects his self-loathing and the part of himself that he cannot accept. An additional dimension is created by the idea that Kurt is the only one who can stop Dave’s aggression and possibly redeem him. Dave looks up to Kurt as a strong and proud person, and that is exactly why he thinks that Kurt will not accept an apology. In the comment section, the readers of the blog appreciate that Dave’s actions towards Kurt are not interpreted as romantic but rather as a type of queer projection. Whereas Kurt is comfortable with his homosexuality and is successful, Dave cannot acknowledge his desire and lashes out to Kurt as a result. Within Glee fandom, Dave’s actions in the source text have led to interpretative conflicts rather than consensus. Some fans romantically invest in the relationship between Kurt and Dave, and develop this within their own slash fiction. They seek to explore Dave’s desire and resolve the source text by narrating forgiveness and intimacy between the two characters. Other fans purposely do not want to do this and even dismiss romantic motives as false since they are not in line with the characters or with Dave’s psychological state. Though both readings have their own merits, the fans make clear distinctions between those that romantically support the pairing and those that closely rework their tensions (e.g.: possible forgiveness or friendship on the one hand, and intimidation on the other). Pick Up Where We Left suggests a more complex view. The intimidation of Dave is understood in this fan text as a pleasure of its own and reveals his motivations as slightly sadomasochistic. When Dave finally goes to Daltons to apologize to Kurt, this dark queerness can be read very clearly: It takes Karofsky a few seconds to find [Kurt] Hummel’s pale, stunned face in the crowd of blue-jacketed boys, and when he does, he smiles. He’d forgotten how good it feels, that first moment where Hummel can’t cover up how scared he is. It never lasts long, but that’s why Karofsky likes it so much. (It makes him a little sick, actually, how much he likes it. But not sick enough to stop).

When Dave scolds Kurt and his friends at Dalton, Kurt calls him a fag that is scared of himself and resolves his issues through violence. Dave protests: “I'm not -” Karofsky’s voice is too loud, and he cuts himself short before he even knows what he was going to say next. Not a fag? Not scared? They’re both lies, and they both know it, even if Hummel’s the only one who’ll actually say it out loud. “You are,” Hummel replies, and his voice

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is flat but his eyes are wide, glittering like he’s about to cry or something, and his hands are shaking.

Dave apologizes to Kurt, but like he envisioned, Kurt only laughs and says that he cannot accept his gesture. Dave has come to Kurt to redeem himself but first he needs to accept who he is. One theme clearly suggests that Kurt is not ready to forgive him. Dave tries to atone for his deeds in the fan text by returning the wedding cake topper to Kurt, a symbol from the source text. In the TV series episode Furt (2011), Kurt attentively bought the centrepiece for his father’s wedding but Dave taunts him by stealing the topper from him—a scene with much innuendo as he traces Kurt’s chest and snatches the centrepiece. In the fan text, Dave returns the topper to Kurt who ultimately refuses this peace offering, upon which Dave aggressively breaks the topper. This act suggests that Dave’s relationship with Kurt, but also with himself, is still fragmented and damaged. He is not at ease with himself. Although the author suggests in her comments that she does not perceive Dave’s feelings towards Kurt to be romantic, symbols as this cake topper show that Kurt and Dave’s struggle is deeply emotional and intimate.

The Lost Nightingale: Queer noir The Lost Nightingale rewrites the popular teen drama to a mature crime story that stars Blaine—Kurt’s love interest at Dalton—as a queer detective in 1940s Los Angeles. We meet Blaine as he is asked to solve Kurt’s disappearance and we slowly learn about the detective’s past through first-person narration and flashbacks. While Blaine is matured in the fan text, Kurt seems hardly any older than in Glee. Slowly the reader finds out that Dave Karofsky is behind Kurt’s disappearance in an attempt to cover-up the crimes of his boss, Jesse St. James. When Blaine finds Kurt, their love story unravels parallel to the detective story. The ending is grim as Blaine admits his love for Kurt but lets him return to Ohio. The Lost Nightingale (2010) takes place in a sort of post-war noir film landscape, thus depicting the social anxiety of urban life. The text deeply associates itself with early Hollywood cinema and its ideals. The characters Kurt and Rachel (one of the other New Direction’s member in the TV series) have retained their ambition from the source text Glee to become stars, but now they mention as their idols people such as Bette Davis. The writing is specked with intertextual one-liners reminiscent of the nineteen forties movies. “Frail must not like you much, bub” (chapter 4), “Always with the Quips” (ibid.) and “Wise crack all you want, Gum

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Shoe” (ibid.) are highly intermedial transfers of this use of language. Through these references, the text explicitly frames itself as part of a historical and cultural tradition. Blaine’s narration in The Lost Nightingale echoes the sense of disenchantment characteristic of the noir genre (Silver & Ward, 1992). He describes the rottenness of the town and its characters. I leaned my head back and tried to clear my mind listening to the drone of the shower. After a while my eyes shut and I began to drift. Drift from car crashes that left innocents maimed. Drift from thugs who tied men to chairs and killed them. Drift from boy’s with pretty faces and big problems (The Lost Nightingale 2010).

In the fan text, this dark tone is countered by romantic narration as Blaine describes his desire for Kurt. “Watching him go, I put a hand to my chest. My palm rose and fell with every breath. Still alive.” Kurt is portrayed as fragile, an innocent in need of protection. “He placed a hand onto my arm. It felt like a stray eyelash” (ibid.). Blaine describes Kurt’s skin as “ivory” (ibid.) which not only makes him seem fragile and pale, but also rich and precious. Though Blaine’s narration signifies queer desire, his idolization of Kurt also purposely distances himself from a love that cannot be. The motives of Kurt as frail and exotic are furthered by comparisons to birds. Kurt’s first stage name is “Nightingale” (ibid., chapter 2) while the owner of the Pavarotti Club considers renaming him “The Black Bird” (ibid., chapter 6). Club Pavarotti refers to the name of the bird from Glee, named “Pavarotti” in honour of the famous opera singer. Pavarotti is the pet mascot of the Dalton student choir, the Warblers; and it carries much symbolic meaning in the series. Wes, one of the Warblers, explains to Kurt: “This bird is a member of an unbroken line of canaries who’ve been in Dalton since 1891. It’s your job to take care of him, so he can live to carry on the Warbler legacy. Protect him. That bird is your voice.” (Glee episode: “Special Education” 2011). The metaphoric linkage of the bird and the voice is significant. When the canary dies, shortly after The Warblers competed in the regional competition for show choirs, Kurt and Blaine are reminded of their relationship (Glee episode “Original Song” 2011). During the pet’s funeral, Kurt sings The Beatles’ Blackbird which the fan text alludes to. Kurt’s beauty is admired by Blaine as well as by Dave Karofsky. Similarly to the previous fan text discussed above, Karofsky is initially portrayed as an aggressive individual. The reader assumes that he is to be blamed for Kurt’s disappearance. As Mercedes, the singer in night club The Fury, explains: “He’d work Kurt until his voice was hoarse and still want it again. Better. Louder. More” (The Lost Nightingale, Chapter 2).

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Her last observations give an erotic and sadistic dimension to Kurt’s singing practice. One night, Karofsky makes Kurt practice even longer than usual and Mercedes hints at sexual harassment. Karofsky battles against his feelings and kisses Kurt—an echo of the kiss scene in the TV series episode Never Been Kissed (2011), interpreted by some viewers as a threat and by others as repressed desire. The fan text explores Dave Karofsky’s dark love but ultimately ends the motif romantically as Karofsky turns out to protect Kurt. Homosexuality shapes the transgressive public sphere of The Lost Nightingale which emphasizes the dark aspects of modern urban life. In his analysis of the film Double Indemnity (1944), Barton Palmer notes that the public sphere in the genre of noir cinema is charged “by a desire for the illicit,” ranging from alcoholic abuse to extramarital affairs (Palmer 1994, 52). Although these morals are reflected in The Lost Nightingale, which amongst others features alcohol addiction, its public sphere is characterized by an inability to perform desire rather than by a desire to escape from traditions. Homosexuality, for example, is only accepted in the gay night club, Pavarotti, a place that even Blaine is hesitant to enter. The incorporation of a gay plot, and possible hate crime, connects the gay detective to the gay victim. Even though the erotic interest of the detective in the victim is nothing new in noir, the engendering of the victim as a gay male deconstructs the role of the female victim. Kurt’s character is presented as an understanding lover that could possibly redeem the detective. Kurt is not portrayed as many heroines in noir that are “vicious, deadly, venomous or alcoholic” (Borde, Chaumeton, and Hammond 2002, 12). The role of Kurt is that of the “good woman,” the one woman in noir detectives that is faithful, morally just and not promiscuous (ibid., 94). Except that now, the good woman is a man. The focalization of the queer detective becomes a means to escape the anti-women sentiment common to noir. The portrayals of women in the fan text are generally favourable because the detective does not desire them and objectify them. The male gaze in The Lost Nightingale is directed at men rather than at women. The fan text does not only mediate relationships and events from Glee, by emphasizing queer desire, the text plays with and deconstructs the heterosexual genre topography of noir.

Mostverse: Friendship and asexuality While the previous texts discussed Kurt’s relationship with Karofsky, Miggy’s Mostverse (2010) represents the rivalry between Kurt and Rachel in Glee and develops their relationship into an intimate friendship. Set

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after graduation, Mostverse describes Rachel and Kurt’s disappointments when moving to New York and the loss of contact with their former friends, while its sequel focuses on the beginning of their careers. Mostverse is a universe consisting of various stories that are all connected. While the stories are focalized by different characters, the butting friendship of Kurt and Rachel is a central motif. The story begins as the Glee characters graduate. Rachel and Kurt are both accepted to schools in New York, Rachel at the classical performance school Julliard and Kurt at the Fashion Institute for Technology (F.I.T.). Since Rachel’s school is quite expensive, she asks Kurt to move in together and he agrees. They hardly go out and they invest all of their time in their study. Both of their schools are demanding and among likeminded, ambitious individuals, they do not stand out as much anymore as they were in Ohio in the Glee narrative. Though Rachel and Kurt do not get along at first, they slowly become aware that they share many qualities, drives and ambitions. The plot swirls around break-ups and other severe themes, such as eating disorders, depression and possible sexual harassment. Eventually, both characters land a job and consider staying together and having a baby together as friends, not as lovers. The fan fiction develops the relationship between Kurt and Rachel as portrayed in the first season of the TV series, in which they tolerate each other as best. In New York, the two behave awkwardly around each other. Though Mostverse is narrated in third person, the first stories are focalized more through Rachel and they emphasize her loneliness. Rachel is afraid that she is getting in Kurt’s way and tries not to bother him. She is in his apartment, after all, and it is because of her expensive education that they have to move in together. She feels that she forced herself upon him. Eventually, Rachel realizes that they should communicate and bond as friends. The two friends become more sociable by uploading movies to the online video sharing platform YouTube together but it is clear that Rachel fills her own void with these movies. She uses them to show that she does have friends and to remind her old friends of Kurt and herself. YouTube also fills the emptiness of her unsuccessful, lonely Manhattan life. From an intermedial perspective, this theme holds much meaning as these online videos are included in the written text and emphasize Rachel’s interest in stardom. Making these movies is free from the pressure to excel and gives instant gratification, unlike school. Their sessions were so easy. They would practice performances, record them, and finally find a take they were pleased with. Up it went to YouTube. No auditions. No permission needed to step forward. And,

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stupid as it was, Rachel looked at every single thumbs up that came in and it felt like a round of applause.’ (Most Changed since High School, 2010).

This online presence on the YouTube and Facebook platforms helps Kurt and Rachel to stay in touch with their old friends who live elsewhere. Slowly, the two become better friends. The characters’ struggle is at the heart of this fan universe. One of the most emotional passages in the story is when Finn (Kurt’s step-brother) notices Kurt’s eating disorder. The pressure of school and his own perfectionism is getting to Kurt, and as a fashion designer he feels that he needs to look at his best. Kurt’s problems have escaped Rachel’s attention and she feels bad that she did not notice that her best friend was this seriously ill. Since Rachel focalizes the narrative, the disorder may also come as a surprise for the readers. Rachel explains the disorder to Finn as a result of their perfectionism: “We have to be perfect. The entire world will seek reasons to cast us aside” (ibid.). The possibility of failure and the need to compensate through perfectionism is furthered in the fan fiction by the idea that relationships and self-images do not grow stronger but instead become more brittle. While the characters began as confident young people, they struggle as they grow older. Rachel and Kurt also grow more dependent of each other: Rachel was glad they were together, so glad, but suddenly felt as if the two of them had grown very hard. And when things grew too hard they became brittle. She hoped it wasn’t too much to promise, saying she would look out for him. They should be healthy on their own. They should be happy on their own. She’d still try. Besides, she didn’t know if the two of them really could make it apart (ibid.).

While the characters are unhappy, they make little changes for the pursuit of their dreams and thus remain immature in their social lives. Their psychology—Kurt’s eating problems, and later his anxiety about sexual harassment and Rachel’s loneliness and depression—reflects the bitter truths and harshness of their lives. Kurt and Rachel endure each other’s support only because they share similar positive and negative character traits. Nonetheless, Rachel realizes that this relationship is insufficient for them to mature and that they need to look at other “good things” too (Least Likely Couple, 2010). The fan fiction initially ended with this insecurity about the characters’ future, until Miggy decided to make this sequel to the popular text. The new ending of Mostverse closes on a happier note. Rachel realizes that no one understands her better than Kurt, and she suggests that they

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might have a baby together. The premise of asexual romance between a heterosexual girl and homosexual man goes beyond common paradigms of family, gender and sexuality. In sum, Mostverse furthers some of the textual motives present in Glee: friendship between outsiders, dreams and ambitions, popularity among peers, the meaning of social media in everyday life, and the pressure of education. Through careful development, Miggy’s versions of the characters gain credibility and make them advance from rivals to possible co-parents. Mostverse does not only mediate and continue Glee but effectively deconstructs its teen ideals as the characters are forced to grow up.

Conclusion I have focussed on Glee fan fiction as exemplary of the female space of media fandom. Through the concept of intermediality, I analysed three fan works and their relations to the original Glee text. The three narratives show that fan fiction cannot be analysed as a mere derivative genre. The repertoires and literary strategies of fan authors are diverse and cannot be taken at face value. These fan authors create innovative portrayals of gender and sexuality as they integrate coming-out problems, historical queerness or portray the possibility of asexual family life. However, no matter the transformation, the authors show that the characters are still themselves in these new settings and retain their recognizable qualities and histories. Critically, this creative process is transformative, which means that some aspects of the source text might be lost in the mediation process. For instance, the fan texts focus on the interiority of the characters and their emotional lives but are not invested as much in the comedy or musical aspects of Glee. Moreover, fan fiction flourishes within a particular media space—an online domain that is characterized by interactivity with the audience. The influence of fandom and appraisal of fans directly influence the text. It is no wonder that these representative fan fictions flourish around the most popular character Kurt and value queer fiction, which is a dominant genre within fandom. It also seems that especially Mostverse has benefited from the interaction with its readers. After the original ending, the author wrote a sequel that provided better prospects for the characters instead of an insecure future. Within fan fiction, geek feminism emerges in two ways. First, it signifies a concern with representation as fans establish new portrayals of well-known characters. Their attention to gender and sexuality creates a vital platform where we see how audiences interpret fiction and construct

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new images. Second, geek feminism is also a methodological stance, one that effectively connects the endeavours of scholars, like myself, and informants, like the fan fiction writers that I am studying. My dialogue with authors such as Kelly and artists such as ZephyrianBoom has shaped the ethics of my research as well as my critical stance. Rather than distancing myself from the fans, I showed that we have similar interests and share a common critical agenda. For me, conducting quality research means paying attention to regimes of exclusion. I learned from my research on the audience that the starting point for any feminist scholar should be to include her subjects, share their space and focalize their concerns; that is to say, proper feminist analysis can only advance through dialogue.

References Bacon-Smith, Camille. 1992. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth, Series in contemporary ethnography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Borde, Raymond, Etienne Chaumeton, and Paul Hammond. 2002. A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941-1953. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Bucholtz, Mary. 2002. “Gendered Practices in Language.” In Gendered Practices in Language, edited by S. Benor, M. Rose, D. Sharma, J. Sweetland, and Q. Zhang. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Ellison, Hannah. 2013. “Submissives, Nekos and Futanaris: a Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of the Glee Kink Meme.” Participations 10(1). Hayles, N. Katherine. 2004. “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” Poetics Today 25(1):67-90. Helbig, Jörg, ed. 1998. Intermedialität: Theorie und Praxis eines interdisziplinären Forschungsgebiets. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag. Hellekson, Karen, and Kristina Busse. 2006. Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co. Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Studies in Culture and Communications. London; New York: Routledge. —. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

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Lothian, A., K. Busse, and R.A. Reid. 2007. “Yearning Void and Infinite Potential: Online Slash Fandom as Queer Female Space.” English Language Notes 45(2):104-11. Meyer, Ulrike, and Richard Simanowski. 2006. Transmedialität: Zur Ästhetik paraliterarischer. Verfahren: Wallstein. Nakamura, Lisa. 2012. “Queer Female of Color: The Highest Difficulty Setting There Is? Gaming Rhetoric as Gender Capital.” Ada: a Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 1. Palmer, R. Barton. 1994. Hollywood's Dark Cinema: The American Film Noir, Twayne's Filmmakers Series. New York; Oxford: Twayne; Maxwell Macmillan International. Pearson, Roberta. 2012. “‘Good Old Index’; or, the Mystery of the Infinite Archive.” In Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series, edited by Louisa Ellen Stein and Kristina Busse. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Penley, Constance. 1991. “Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology.” In Technoculture, edited by Constance Penley and Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pugh, Sheenagh. 2005. The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context. Bridgend: Seren. Rajewsky, I. O. 2005. “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation.” Intermédialités 6:43-64.

Fiction Lookninjas. 2011. Pick Up Right Where We Left. http://lookninjas.livejournal.com/123513.html. (accessed October 15, 2012). Miggy. 2010. Mostverse. http://miggy.livejournal.com/851279.html#mostverse (accessed October 15, 2012). Mothergoddamn. 2010. The Lost Nightingale. http://goddamnwrite.livejournal.com/3048.html (accessed October 15, 2012).

CHAPTER FIFTEEN “A SHOCK TO THOUGHT”: THE AFFECTS OF AN ONLINE ENCOUNTER WITH POSTHUMAN IMAGERY SIMONE VAN HULST

Figure 15.1 ‘Posthumanism’ according to Google search, in Images. The emergence of visual culture as a transdisciplinary and crossmethodological field of inquiry means nothing less and nothing more than an opportunity to reconsider some of the present culture’s thorniest problems from yet another angle. —Irit Rogoff, “Studying Visual Culture”

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Chapter Fifteen In either case, Moravec and like-minded thinkers believe, the age of the human is drawing to a close. —Katherine Hayles, How we became Posthuman

Introduction: ‘Everyday’ Mediations of Posthumanism On December 8, 2012, I entered the keyword ‘posthumanism’ into the Google search engine for images. I wanted to follow up on an experiment performed by Cary Wolfe. In What is Posthumanism (2010) he recalls that in the summer of 2008 he entered the keywords ‘humanism’ and ‘posthumanism’ into Google search (an “appropriately posthumanist gesture,” he writes). Entering ‘humanism’ led to 3,840,000 hits; whereas ‘posthumanism’ produced merely 60,200 hits. For him, this was an illustration of the fact that ‘humanism’ as such is still very alive in spite of the rise of posthumanism and its inherent critique on humanism. In my experiment, I decided to focus on posthumanism and make a first diagnose of the visual imagery that the Google search engine associated with this notion. A complication that frustrated me is that the compilation of images the Google search presents changes order and content constantly. Entering ‘posthumanism’ today leads to a totally different collection of images, due to changing algorithms that ought to keep the results of the Google search relevant and ordered, and the interventions of site owners, as Google’s nice and tidy but slightly condescending instruction video taught me. The vantage point of this chapter is the search experiment performed on December 8, which resulted in an interesting visual variety. There were visual expressions of biotechnological innovations and developments: humans with several kinds of technological extensions or prostheses, humans with wires coming out of their bodies, robots with human features, and humans with robotic features. Another category concerned the utopian fantasy of the posthuman visualized in romantic images of humans with wings, floating human heads that move by means of peculiar plant-like limbs and humans whose bodies are assemblages of animal heads, paws and tails. Yet another series of images borrows from fashion imagery, showing skinny models dressed like ‘extraterrestrials’ (or so it seems) and equipped with technological attributes attached to their clothing and bodies. The models gaze at their spectators with severe but indifferent eyes and perched lips. Then there is a collection of pictures that displays galactic images. Shots of the Milky Way or exploding stars seem to point at a dimension of life that moves beyond the central status of the human species, to that of the entire universe. A final category I was able to discern concerns the well-known motif of the teleological development from animal to human species, as for instance visualized by Leonardo Da

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Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” and the many references to Darwin’s theory of evolution. A short sidetrack that I will discuss later in detail is that water in general is a recurring theme or element in regard to beginnings and endings. In relation to such motif, a recurrent ‘location’ is the beach. From the immense variety of images one image in particular had an impact on me. This image displays the United States’ Statue of Liberty surrounded by water, a dramatic but powerful picture that affected me in particular, as I will explain in this chapter, because of its suggestiveness. Why did I choose this image and not an image of larvae with cameras on their backs which would be weirder and scientifically and politically stimulating? In this chapter, I explore what motivated this choice. I will make this choice productive by asking how the image can work in a feminist context, how it stimulates thought and what causes its affective responses. The chapter is structured as follows. First, I will turn to the notion of affect in relation to the image. I will analyse the visual object from an interdisciplinary perspective, building on visual studies, literary studies and feminist philosophy. Subsequently, I will situate the analysis in the discourses of posthumanism and feminist philosophy. Working with an online encounter is part of my interest in widely accessible, ‘everyday’ images and their ways of shaping our thinking about the fate of the human species. Irit Rogoff formulates elegantly that images, “these new objects of inquiry go beyond analysis towards figuring out new and alternative languages which reflect the contemporary awareness by which we live out our lives” (Rogoff 1998, 26). Inspired by Rogoff, I analyse here how posthumanism is visually mediated, focusing in particular on the role of affect. Furthermore, the chapter unravels philosophical implications of posthuman thought and imagery in relation to feminist discourses. Feminist philosophy and posthumanism share an orientation, namely the engagement with a future, and more specifically, the future of the (post)human species. The image confronts the viewer with a possible, still suggestive, future or fate that concerns us all. For me, looking at the image was an ethical moment that provoked questions that cannot be answered, and generated speculations that cannot be sustained by a purely rational, logical mode of thinking. In feminist philosophy, the posthuman is mostly discussed in relation to humanism, conceptualizations of human nature and the emergence and implications of dominant biotechnologies (Haraway 1985; Halberstam and Livingston 1995; Hayles 1999; Sharon 2012; Braidotti 2013). At stake in these feminist accounts is the radical disturbance of dualist principles that dominate humanist discourses and accordingly infect ‘common sense’ modes of thinking about the human subject in relation to what is not ‘self’:

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the other (Barad 2003; Braidotti 2013). Besides, posthumanism addresses the question what it means to be human which remains a crucial issue in not only feminist philosophy, but philosophy in general (Nietzsche 1882; Russell 1963; Foucault 1970; Pickering 2005; Braidotti 2013). So, what is at issue in discussing a visual object, the posthuman and affect in the context of feminist philosophy? Rosi Braidotti gave me an idea of how to answer this question: Far from being the nth variation in a sequence of prefixes that may appear both endless and somehow arbitrary, the posthuman condition introduces a qualitative shift in our thinking about what exactly is the basic unit of common reference for our species, our polity and our relationship to the other inhabitants of this planet (Braidotti 2013, 2, emphasis mine).

The qualitative shift in thinking about the human species is responded to in various ways. A humanist adaptation of this shift is the celebration of a next step in the progress-narrative of human development. However, and this is the response that I am most interested in, it also provokes anxiety and concern “about the possibility of a serious de-centering of ‘Man,’ the former measure of all things” (Braidotti 2013, 2). In this sense then, this shift in thinking engages a rejection of dualisms and of the humanist sterile method of dissociating the self and the other, the subject and the world. In feminist philosophical discourse, the posthuman condition is a way to scrutinize the sharp humanist cut between the subject and the object, between Man and the world, an example of which is the distinction between Man and technology (Barad 2003; Sharon 2012). In reaction to this humanist cut, Braidotti writes: My anti-humanism leads me to object to the unitary subject of Humanism, including its socialist variables, and to replace it with a more complex and relational subject framed by embodiment, sexuality, affectivity, empathy and desire as core qualities (2013, 26).

The alternative subject is not shaped in the Cartesian sense, carrying a body along with a mind, but is constituted in terms of embodiment, affectivity and empathy. These terms, that have a high feminist allure, are key terms in my reading of the posthuman image that follows. With the feminist aim for an alternative relational subject that is not thought of in terms of the dualist distinction between body and mind, self and other, subject and object, I analyse below how the visual object encourages nondualist relating and explores and scrutinizes the future of humanity.

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The Image, its ‘Visual Impact’ and Affect I have chosen the image of the iconic statue of liberty because it affected me. How can one make sense of the notion of affect in the analysis of a visual object? And how is this a significant move in the context of feminist philosophy and the posthuman? Affect is a controversial subject in the discourse of cultural studies and as elaborated in section two of this volume it has given rise to passionate discussions about its relevance and productivity. In fact, affect has even been ascribed its own ‘turn,’ next to for example the linguistic turn and the cultural turn. The affective turn takes up the question of the body and the bodily capacities to affect and be affected (Clough and Halley 2007). Theoretical works on this matter share the conviction that affects cannot be theorized exhaustively, but can only be hovered around (Massumi 2002; Hemmings 2005; Clough and Halley 2007; Gregg and Seigworth 2010). Such state of perpetual inaccessibility was already anticipated in Spinoza’s well known claim that we do not yet know what a body can do (Spinoza 1985). Affect is rooted in the body and in the relation between bodies; accordingly the foundations and detailed mechanisms of affect remain in a state of relative obscurity as well. In this chapter, I will work with a Deleuzian understanding of affect. In Gilles Deleuze’s work, affects are generators of sensation and thought. Affects, he argues in collaboration with Félix Guattari, “are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 164). Deleuze writes on affect in many ways, in the context of art, literature and also philosophy. Through art and literature and the affects they provoke, thought is stimulated. Ernst van Alphen summarizes Deleuze’s valorisation of affect in the process of thinking as follows: For him [Deleuze], an affect is a more effective trigger for profound thought than rational inquiry because of the way in which it grasps us, forcing us to engage involuntarily (van Alphen 2008, 22).

Deleuze’s point is that the ‘thing’ which evokes thought is more important than the thought itself. Sensation and thought are not separate entities in his philosophy. They are not understood in terms of a binary opposition but are mutually informing and infecting each other. Sensation is valued as mode of thought that generates a different kind of knowledge that is not inferior or superior to philosophical or logical thought (Deleuze 1964, 1994). In “Affective Operations of Art and Literature,” Van Alphen argues that affect and thought have an intimate relationship and characterizes such relationship as a “shock to thought” (2008, 21-25). This

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is a reference to the Deleuzian affirmation of sensation as “catalyst for critical inquiry or thought” (Deleuze 1964, 22). The Deleuzian conception of affect is salient, providing a frame with which to understand how the image of the drowning Statue of Liberty works and its relation to the posthuman. For a moment, I will concentrate on the key image I have briefly introduced in the previous section. Its composition consists of three main elements, the water, the weather and the Statue of Liberty. Black and grey tones dominate the whole image, including the Statue of Liberty. Without the light of the sun the statue does not have its copper radiance but merges with the colour of the water and the clouds. In the background, behind the statue, there is a minimal speck of light which illuminates the vague shapes of havocked buildings visible on the horizon. Another slightly illuminated part is the torch that is still proudly held by the symbol of American civilization. The water level has not reached the tablet with the inscription of the date of American Independence and the torch yet. However, I can imagine that the water continues to rise and will at some point swallow the entire monument. Water is the element of nature that, in this image, indicates the disturbance of human civilization. Referring back to the introduction and the imagery that I found via Google search, next to biotechnological horrors, the element of water is a predominant existential threat. Apparently, water is one of the most dominant associations and imaginations in a context of looming disturbance of the status quo. Unsettling the human status quo and the human habitat is in many images ascribed to ‘natural’ elements such as water. These natural elements perpetually escape human control. Control is a recurrent topic in feminist and posthumanist discourse. As Katherine Hayles writes in How we became Posthuman (1999), feminist critics of science point us to the relation between the desire for mastery, objectivist accounts of science and imperialist projects of “subduing nature” (Hayles 1999, 288). Hayles argues that “the posthuman offers resources for the construction of another kind of account” (ibid.). I argue that the image I have just described embodies such other kind of account. This image shows no sign of humans controlling anything at all. In fact, the image does not contain any ‘real’ human protagonists. Obviously, the statue is shaped as a giant female human being, but seems to be referring to a ‘human’ civilization. In this sense, a statement that I found on the official American government website is revealing:

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The Statue of Liberty is more than a monument. She is a beloved friend, a living symbol of freedom to millions around the world. These exhibits are a tribute to the people who created her, to those who built and paid for her, to the ideals she represents, and to the hopes she inspires (National Park Service 2012).

The strong affection the official record expresses gives a helpful direction in the exploration of why destroying an ‘everyday’ object like the Statue of Liberty has a powerful and symbolic impact. The Statue of Liberty represents freedom, democracy and international bonds or “international friendships” as the official website formulates it. She is referred to as majesty, a deity that symbolizes the American Dream and the possibility of change and progress. In fact, the monument is one of the most highly circulated icons in the world. This is another indication of the impact of the hypothetical destruction of the statue. A possible drowning of ‘Lady Liberty’ does not only refer to the destruction of New York, apple of the eye of the United States, and of one group of people (for example Americans), but it has a much wider reach. References to the statue as symbol of the entire human civilization have been evoked several times in the cinema of Hollywood, for example in films such as Franklin J. Shaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968) and Stephen Spielberg’s A.I. (2001) Hence the popular statement that circulates on the internet and is inevitably encountered when browsing on this subject: “If the Apocalypse ever happens, stay away from the statue of liberty.” Popular Hollywood productions thus encourage the association between the statue and human civilization as a whole. Another reason for choosing to focus on this specific image is that it, unlike some of the other visuals briefly mentioned in the introduction, does not depict modified human beings, human-animal assemblages or pictures of evolution but shows a stage, an event that does not explicitly centralize human beings but addresses the idea or the sentiment of the possible ‘fate’ of humankind. Even though I cannot actually ‘see’ myself in the image, it is an acute and disturbing confrontation that forces itself on me. Visual culture theorist Irit Rogoff writes about visual culture, critical theory and contemporary art. She offers tools with which to analyse visual objects and, more specifically, tools with which to analyse the dynamic between spectator and object (e.g.: Rogoff 1998). According to Rogoff, “images do not stay within discrete disciplinary fields such as ‘documentary film’ or ‘Renaissance painting’ since neither the eye nor the psyche operates along or recognizes such divisions” (Rogoff 1998, 26). The image has the quality to reach beyond the literal codes such as ‘drowning Statue of Liberty’ and ‘bad weather’ into a posthuman sphere

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that elicits profound concern in regard to the future and fate of civilization and humanity. Furthermore, the image is an example of what John Berger discusses in his well-known book Ways of Seeing: “We never look just at one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves” (Berger 1972, 9). The ‘thing,’ the fall of the Statue of Liberty, is not a plain depiction of a ‘possible’ event but asks for an active engaging with its consequences: What remains of the human species in a post-catastrophic stage? What are the repercussions of this event for the everyday lives of human beings? The way in which the spectator is forced to relate to the central spectacle is crucial to exploring the possible affects of the image. The viewer is positioned slightly lower than the Statue but very close to it. Remarkably, the icon is not placed in the centre of the composition. My position as spectator suggests that I took a quick step aside (to the left), in order to be able to see what happens behind the statue. The decentralized position of the ‘main event’ is striking. Is the drowning Statue still the main event? one could ask. I would suggest that what seems to be placed in the middle of the picture is the spectator. The positioning of the spectator suggests that the main event is taking place in the audience. Hence, I have to turn to myself in contemplating the image. Van Alphen writes about this intriguing process. Describing how perspective and distance provoke the engagement of the viewer with the image, he argues that the ‘beholder’ of the image actually becomes the protagonist of the visual experience (van Alphen 2005). This is an intriguing rhetorical move, which leaves it up to the spectator itself to imagine what is yet unsaid and unseen by and in the image: why are human beings absent from the composition? What has happened to them? The image does not show human species of any kind, but is an imperative to think about the ‘fate’ of humankind and about the possible decentralization of the human race. The distance between the spectator and the event becomes minimal due to the fact that the image addresses not only American people but, possibly, people in general: all human beings. Distances, as van Alphen writes, “are of such crucial importance because they exert an almost magnetic pull over the eyes; they engage viewers by compelling them to ‘plow’ into the image” (van Alphen 2005, 80). In the context of the posthuman image, the affect the image produces is maximal due to the minimal distance between the spectator and the event. Van Alphen explains this kind of dynamic by means of the work of Canadian artist Eleanor Bond. The perspective of some of her paintings, a bird’s eye perspective, affects the viewer in a fundamental way: the position of the

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spectator becomes one in which “she literally has no ground under her feet” (van Alphen 2005, 81). A result is the impulse to ‘fall’ into the image, which thus causes the viewer to become an accomplice in the events. It energizes a very strong dynamic, van Alphen writes: The compulsion to enter the painting’s space is more than a visual effect. One experiences it viscerally or bodily, like the feeling of vertigo (2005, 81).

As such, the experience of looking is embodied. Within feminist theory such non-dualistic embodied engagement is vital (Butler 1990; Braidotti 1991, 2006, 2011; Haraway 1985, 1991). The act of looking is not restricted to the eyes alone, in which case, sight would render all other senses irrelevant. The eyes have, as Haraway clearly elaborates, traditionally been associated with the mind, knowledge and control (Haraway 1985). Looking has been a synonym for mastering the object that is looked at. Haraway argues that seeing is in fact a matter of partial vision. Transposing this to the analysis of the image in question, I suggest that it provokes an embodied experience especially in transcending the eye as a mere tool of gaining knowledge; addressing the entire body and confronting the spectator with their lack of knowledge. The questions that arise when looking at this image, ‘what happened?’ and ‘what will happen?’ cannot be univocally answered. Knowledge that answers to a logic of cause and effect is not produced, quite the contrary, the image ensures that the spectator is left with questions. To engage with the image in an embodied way means to engage with possibly different or alternative futures. What or whose futures we are seeing remains unclear. The only thing I know is that in ‘real’ life, such an event has not yet taken place. Apart from that, the image is ‘timeless’ and leaves the spectator in the dark regarding the contours of the possibly destructive event, the consequences of which are yet unknown. This adds to the way in which the image disturbs the spectator. The ‘visual impact,’ a term coined by Gillian Rose (2001, 52), altogether dramatises the disruption and decentralization of mankind that is taking place in the image. This picture is not an apocalyptic one of the kind in which cars are upside down, plants are growing on famous buildings and there is a protagonist (myself), a person from the past, feeling lost in such a future. On the contrary, the suggestive nature of the image makes explicit appeal to my sentiments and imagination regarding the consequences of the ‘event.’ There are no reassuring answers in the image. What remains is an imperative: stay with the question of what it means to engage with the (symbolic) decentralization of the human species.

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I see an important parallel here with feminist endeavours to think differently, to engage with a future that might not be comforting or soothing. Moreover, a convergence between (my reading of) the image and the feminist call to “imagine the unimaginable” can be drawn (in Whitford 1991, 19). To imagine a form of life beyond the reign of the human species seems an impossible task. Feminist scholars such as Braidotti, Haraway and Hayles provide theoretical and methodological tools to initiate such stretching of thought. Their work explores the ethical implications of manoeuvring thought towards the posthuman and posthumanism. The posthuman is a crucial direction of thought, especially in the discourse of feminist philosophy. As mentioned before, the posthuman poses questions about the dominance of the human species and about the extensions of human faculties by means of technology; additionally, it scrutinizes the concept of ‘human nature’ and the dualist mode of thinking that informs the western imaginary and that was inherited from the Enlightenment (Braidotti 2013). Instead of claiming new imperatives for the future, feminist philosophies of the posthuman question the way in which to methodologically approach these possible futures. Luce Irigaray states in an interview that thinking differently about the future is not a matter of projecting the present imagery and ourselves into the future and that “to concern oneself in the present about the future certainly does not consist in programming it in advance but in trying to bring it into existence […];” and, she adds: doing otherwise would be assuming “that the future will be no more than the past” (Jardine and Menke 1991, 14). In this chapter, I have shown that an everyday visual object is capable of a similar engagement with questions of the future. The image I have selected and analysed activates the imagination; it stimulates the spectator to think differently about the future without visually determining it. The figure designates a point of departure and elicits thought on the posthuman but does not determine or codify possible futures. In a similar vein, Judith Butler addresses the question of how to engage with the future. Thinking about sexual difference and the imagination of thought outside of a binary mode of thinking, she argues for an approach towards the new that is not determining or codifying. Butler writes that her aim is to “open up the field of possibility for gender without dictating which kinds of possibilities ought to be realized” (Butler 1990, viii). Dictating the figuration of the new or of the different is not desirable when thinking about change and the future. Butler’s argument is not imperative but stimulates the move to open up thought towards what is other and to move to other ways of thinking.

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At this point, one could question the visual object I have chosen. Why should one choose a commonplace figuration instead of a more original, authentic or ‘proper’ artwork? In other words, why would one want to work with visual objects derived from a Google search in the context of the posthuman? Popular culture, mass culture and online culture have a fundamental role in the general scrutiny of humanism, Neil Badmington writes in Posthumanism. The Hollywood films that I have already mentioned are but a few examples of the thorough questioning of the human future in popular culture. Badmington writes that: In these science-fiction films—as in their literary counterparts—Man faced a threat from an inhuman other: ‘his’ position at the centre of things was at risk. ‘They’ were ready to take over, to subject ‘us’ to ‘their’ rule. Debate about the end of humanism, in other words, was not the exclusive property of critical theory: it pervaded everyday life (2000, 8).

The notion of everyday life Badmington talks about is crucial and takes me to the conclusion of this chapter. I have searched for ways to understand how visual objects in everyday (online) life are able to provoke feminist considerations of the posthuman and posthumanism and I have referred repeatedly to the notion of affect as a possible answer to that question. The affects of the image I have analysed are provocations of thought. Not thought in general but a very specific and situated thought of the posthuman future and of my, or one’s, position in this future. I have tried to demonstrate how the image lays an ethical claim on the spectator. What I see here concerns me not only as member of the human species but also personally. Engaging with the image becomes an ethical provocation that forces me to think about the future, making me aware of mankind’s possible absence in such future. Relating to this image disrupts the axiomatic nature of human existence.

Conclusion I suggest taking this analysis as an example of the way in which a rather random ‘hit’ from a fairly commercial and sometimes also controversial search engine can lead to an exploration of the productive parallels between affect, feminist philosophy and posthumanism. The image is a common place in showing the destruction of an iconic yet somewhat cliché architectural figure that is demolished by a natural phenomenon (another cliché). Nevertheless, I have argued how such image provokes affects and that these affects stimulate thought, in a Deleuzian sense. In particular, the image elicits thought on the future of humanity and

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expresses a very strong call to really engage with what we see. The image is not posthuman per se but stirs a profound uncertainty and a fearful fascination about the fate of the human species, which resonates with this definition of posthumanism: [It] names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrications in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore, a historical development that points towards the necessity of new theoretical paradigms (but also thrusts them on us), a new mode of thought that comes after the cultural repressions and fantasies, the philosophical protocols and evasions, of humanism as a historically specific phenomenon (Wolfe 2010, xvi)

Accordingly, posthumanism is not just a trend but is “a mode of thought.” The image triggers this mode of thought, disturbs my sense of existential certainty and forces me to engage with the possibilities and consequences of a posthuman stage and state of mind. Thus, the picture forces me to think about the future, not from a universal perspective but from a personal and particular point of view. Feminist theory has taught me to not shy away from these issues but to actively engage with them. As Donna Haraway stated repeatedly in her work, it is crucial to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway 2011). Translated to the current context, it means that I need to investigate why the image is disturbing to me, what sentiments are stirred and how. Feminist theory enables me to scrutinize my own choices, values and sentiments. The vital lesson I have learned from scholars like Irigaray, Butler and Haraway but also from scholars that are not associated with feminist philosophy per se, like Deleuze, van Alphen and Wolfe is that we should not turn our backs on what fascinates and affects us. In the words of Haraway, to obtain objective knowledge is an illusion (Haraway 1988, 582-589). To play the “God trick,” to pretend to be objective and thus to not be part of the discourse or phenomenon one writes about (Haraway 1988, 581), is counterproductive in the process of thinking about the posthuman and its affects The alliance of posthuman discourse and feminist discourse is especially productive since they both emphasise the need of positioning oneself, the importance of including the person that is formulating the argument or performing the research in the research process itself. Both discourses demand engagement, conscious inclusion and awareness of what drives us. What stirs our thought is sometimes more important than the thought itself (van Alphen 2008, 2125). In itself the image here analysed might be somewhat of a cliché, considering the fact that there are many representations that use the Statue

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of Liberty as indicator or main conveyor of an apocalyptic message of doom. However, looking at an accessible, ‘everyday’ image and inquiring into my own relation to it, is, I argue, a means to affirm the importance of objects that might not be considered ‘properly’ academic in themselves. As “alternative language,” the visual object has the quality to pull the viewer in (Rogoff 1998, 26). In dialogue with theory (feminist theory, visual culture or literary studies), the image turned out to be a compelling mediation; it generated various affects and forced me to enter into a relation with it. This image is an example that demonstrates the earlier recalled argument by John Berger: the act of looking is not unilateral but resides in the relation between what we are looking at and ourselves. Without determining or dictating answers, options or possibilities, the visual object stirs a mode of thinking, which for me is a feminist posthumanist mode of thinking that questions the axiomatic nature of the existence and superiority of the human species. Furthermore, it does not codify or programme the future—an approach that also Irigaray would disapprove of—but keeps it open and stirs the imagination to think with or without fear beyond the possible and probable.

References A.I. 2001 Directed by Stephen Spielberg. Burbank CA: Warner Bros Pictures. DVD. Alphen, Ernst van. 2008. “Affective Operations of Art and Literature.” Res 53/54:20-30. Alphen, Ernst van. 2005. Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Badmington, Neil, ed. 2000. Posthumanism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of how Matter comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3):801–31. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books. Braidotti, Rosi. 1991. Patterns of Dissonance. Cambridge: Polity Press. —. 2006. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press. —. 2011. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York; London: Routledge. Clough, Patricia Ticineto and Jean Halley, eds. 2007. The Affective Turn:

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Theorizing the Social. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1964. Proust and Signs. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Braziller. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1994. What is Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon Books. —. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by A. Sheridan. London: Allen Lane. Gregg, Melissa and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. 2010. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Halberstam, Judith, and Ira Livingston. eds. 1995. Posthuman Bodies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Haraway, Donna. 1985. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review 5:65-107. —. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14(3):75-99. —. 2011. “Staying with the Trouble: Becoming Worldly with Companion Species.” Lecture for the Women's Studies Program 5th Annual Feminist Theory Workshop held at Duke University, Durham, March 18-19. Hayles, Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hemmings, Clare. 2005. “Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn.” Cultural Studies 19(5):548-67. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which is Not One. New York: Cornell University Press. Jardine, Alice, and Anne Menke, eds. 1991. Shifting Scenes: Interviews on Women, Writing and Politics in Post ’68 France. New York: Columbia University Press. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974. The Gay Science. New York: Random House Inc. Pickering, Andrew. 2005. “Asian Eels and Global Warming: A Posthuman Perspective on Society and the Environment.” Ethics & The Environment 10(2):29-43. Planet of the Apes. 1968. Directed by Franklin J. Shaffner. Calabasas CA: Twentieth Century Fox. DVD.

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Rogoff, Irit. 1998. “Studying Visual Culture.” In The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff. London; New York: Routledge. Rose, Gillian. 2001. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. London: Sage publications. Russell, Bertrand. 1963. Has Man a Future? Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Sharon, Tamar. 2012. “A Cartography of the Posthuman Humanist, NonHumanist and Mediated Perspectives on Emerging Biotechnologies.” Krisis Journal for Contemporary Philosophy 2:4-19. Spinoza, Benedictus de. 1985. The Ethics in The Collected Works of Spinoza, edited and translated by Edwin Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press. National Park Service, 2012. “The Statue of Liberty.” www.nps.gov/stli/ (accessed December 18, 2012). Whitford, Margaret. 1991. Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine. London; New York: Routledge. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN WIRED FINGERS, STICKY KEYBOARDS: TOWARDS AN EMBODIED APPROACH TO INTERNET PORNOGRAPHY GODA KLUMBYTƠ

Figure 16.1 “Insert Body Here”: a DYI collage by Goda Klumbytơ. Sometimes I get the sensation that I’m actually having sex with my Mac, holding it between my legs, which tremble with the imminent orgasm, with the keyboard impregnated by my flow. —María Llopis, Revising Gender Roles and Stereotypes through Art and Technology

The late 1970s and 1980s saw a clash of feminist attitudes towards sexuality, sexual representation and pornography both in academic and legal fields. This clash became known as the feminist sex wars or porn

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wars, and it roughly coincided with the growing interest in pornography research among feminists in general. While anti-porn feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon argue that pornography entails objectification of and violence against women (for example Dworkin 1981), pro-porn feminists (or sex-positive feminists) point to the sources of women’s empowerment in the very same phenomenon (for instance Hartley 1987, Miller-Young 2013). Today, with most of pornography going online and appropriating media sharing technologies (such as ‘tube’ video-sharing to create ‘youtubes of porn’) Internet porn has become the everyday business-asusual. Critics now concentrate not so much on porn’s relation to oppression of women and gender inequality, but rather on issues of age (child porn but also the easiness of access), privacy (non-consensual exposure of private videos and pictures) and addiction (so-called ‘porn addiction’). This is not to say that porn is no longer controversial, but rather that the focus has shifted from issues of gender to other questions, at least in the mainstream popular media. Given that pornography is ultimately a mediated phenomenon (after all, one can speak of porn only when sex becomes mediated through text, painting, picture or videos), it is quite surprising that research on pornography in feminist studies concentrates almost exclusively on the content, such as specific genres and forms of representation. This focus corresponds with the somewhat common sense understanding of what pornography is: in the end, it is the sexual and explicit nature of the image that qualifies it as pornographic. However, as I plunge to one of the many porn tube sites, reaching for the keyboard and tuning myself into the mode of quick sexual satisfaction through porn, I cannot help but ask whether my embodied response comes only from the content or a fantasy that it represents. Overwhelmed with the abundance of genres, scenarios, types of bodies and sexual ‘numbers’ available, I might go for whatever attracts my attention and sometimes, after the goal is reached, I cannot help but be slightly grossed out: was it really this image that led me to orgasm? Being surprised by the response of my own body (what exactly did get me aroused?) motivates me to look further into what happens at the moment of the encounter between a body and a networked computer—an encounter that has as its specific aim to bring sexual gratification to the body. There are thus multiple questions to be asked: does consumption of mediated pornography affect other sexual encounters? What possibilities does it open for creators of pornography that aim at challenging the mainstream narratives and gender roles? What kind of possibilities for women to enact their desires are opened up by online porn? And what kind

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of relation between bodies and technologies emerges in this process? Consider the opening image of this essay (figure 16.1). It contains multiple screenshots of several random videos from tube websites YouPorn.com and RedTube.com layered on top of each other, including a still of a short clip in which I filmed myself watching and masturbating to these videos. It is a collage, produced and edited on a personal computer, and it includes ‘live’ action (videos running at the moment when the screenshots were taken) as well as parts that have been edited (cut, adjusted, recompiled) by digital software. Thus this image is not a ‘whole:’ there is hardly any unity in it. It is also not a mirror-like representation of what online porn is: the image is produced by me and, as any digital image, fundamentally malleable and susceptible to further re-productions. The image is also excessive because of the multiplicity of layers, but also because it purports the excessiveness of the kinds of sex and the sheer numbers of sex videos that one can find online. And yet, this image is not just about representations that are simply ‘out there,’ a flow that I can just tap into and emerge back unchanged, integral, ‘whole.’ The creation of this image as well as the tapping into the space of online porn are practices that are made possible by my body working with technology (the networked computer). Therefore, in this essay I take a step away from analysing pornographic content and turn instead to unravelling mediated practices of online porn consumption and what traces these practices leave on consumer bodies. I will start with discussing two approaches to pornography: porn as speech/discourse and porn as practice, and will continue with claiming that the ‘practice approach’ can be a useful lens to look at Internet porn, if ‘updated’ with the embodied phenomenological approach to new media and virtual reality proposed by Mark B. Hansen. Focussing on bodily engagement with Internet porn I will argue that practices of its consumption reveal not only that the body is the primary gateway to virtual reality, but also that bodily desires are enacted through the very material and close body-technology intra-action. Finally, I will show that this intra-action is no less important, affective and potent than the content of pornographic imagery itself.

Pro/con ‘speaking sex:’ pornography as speech/discourse One way to look at pornography is to consider it a form of speech or discourse. In feminist analyses of porn this approach is most common among pro-pornography or anti-censorship (also sometimes called antianti-pornography) scholars. This strand of thought emerged during the ‘sex wars’ as a response to the anti-porn feminist argument, the milestone

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of which was Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981). In her book Dworkin claims that pornography is an embodiment of masculine power over women and patriarchal order in general: it sexualizes violence and subordination, thus perpetuating the same power relations that it feeds upon. It teaches men that all women want sex and that oppression and certain physical and/or psychological pressure are legitimate and justifiable. At the same time, it teaches women that their role is to be subordinate and that sexual interaction is about submitting oneself. Dworkin’s account has been heavily criticized by anti-anti-porn feminists for being reductive, for putting women in the role of a victim, and especially for denying any alternative interpretations of pornographic imagery (e.g.: Burstyn 1985; Segal&McIntosh 1992). If women have to experience terror as they look at pornography, as Dworkin suggests, it seems to be automatically presumed that they have to identify with females and that men have to identify with males in porn. In other words, Dworkin’s argument (and anti-porn feminist argument more generally) does not leave much space for the possible variety of interpretations of sexually explicit materials labelled as ‘mainstream porn,’ and fixes the meaning of porn imagery as being degrading to women. One of the key pro-pornography/anti-censorship thinkers Linda Williams, in her classic book Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (1989), tries to overcome this lack of attention to the complexity of the interpretative process. She highlights that there is fluidity and complex layering of meaning, even in the so-called mainstream pornographies, since pornography ultimately is about the urge to “speak sex”—an obsession to make the body confess it secrets, and especially to make the “female sex” reveal its mystery (Williams 1989, 4950 and 129-30). Thus Williams claims that porn is “the visual (and sometimes aural) representations of living, moving bodies engaged in explicit, usually unfaked, sexual acts with a primary intent of arousing viewers” (Williams 1989, 30, emphasis mine). She highlights that “however much hardcore may claim to be a material and visible thing, it is still fundamentally a discourse, a way of speaking about sex” (ibid., 229). Of course, porn being a discourse does not mean that it is to be understood purely as language. Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of sexuality and power, Williams argues that there is a psychic, technological and social apparatus at work in this realm, all of which results in pornography producing certain effects, such as the fusing of body/world and reality/fantasy, the implantation of “perversions” of voyeurism and fetishism, and the social construction of women’s bodies as objects rather

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than subjects of vision (ibid., 44). The ‘pornography as discourse’ approach envelopes the more specific ‘pornography as speech’ argument, which has been employed most notably in legal debates around the censorship of pornography. For instance, when MacKinnon and Dworkin drafted an ordinance that would have allowed one to pursue legal measures against pornography, it was rejected precisely on the grounds of the First Amendment of the US constitution as potential infringement of the freedom of speech. This ‘freedom of speech’ clause echoes in the anti-censorship feminists’ argument that even though pornography is offensive for women, it is still a certain mode of representation that is powerful yet different from (mater)reality (see Burstyn 1985). Post-1980s feminists such as Lynne Segal or Mary McIntosh tried to establish some middle-ground by claiming that pornography is about representations but it taps into the existing social imaginary of gender roles and thus can be used as a canvas for ‘real’ action (Segal and McIntosh 1992). On a broader level, the ‘porn as speech’ approach makes a clear cut between ‘real sex’ and pornography, especially when employed in general public debates (e.g.: [Redacted]Guy 2010). Most recent attempts to regulate pornography, such as Iceland’s plans to ban online porn as a source of violent or degrading imagery (Associated Press in Reykjavik 2013) shift the focus from the freedom of speech to freedom of access: the main argument by the opponents to the plans concerns precisely the (un)limited access to information. Nonetheless, even in cases like this porn is defined through its content and the power of representations, which are claimed to be harmful to minors. The question of porn’s (non)reality, then, sneaks in through the back door: if porn is harmful for kids, it is because children do not have proper interpretational skills, whereas adults are rational beings able to control pornographic representations and their effects.

‘Doing sex:’ pornography as practice Feminist scholar Joan Mason-Grant attempts to grapple with the issue of the ‘non-reality’ of mediated sexually explicit material through introducing the ‘practice approach’ to porn (Mason-Grant 2004). She tries to recover Dworkin’s and MacKinnon’s anti-pornography claims by stressing what, according to her, has been overlooked in their thought: that pornography is regarded as practice rather than speech. The meaning of the word practice here is two-fold. On the one hand, it refers to the way pornography is used: pornography is practice because it is used for sex, for masturbation,

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as a prelude to the ‘actual’ sexual encounter, etc. On the other hand, it is practice because it is a systemic phenomenon: “any one pornographic ‘act’ always refers to others; this relationality is central to what pornography is” (Mason-Grant 2004, 79). And it is precisely in this constant reference to a larger context that pornography derives its force from. To enforce her argument Mason-Grant employs Judith Butler’s notion of performativity (Butler 1997) and Drew Lerder’s phenomenological theory of incorporation through which social meanings and bodily practices are rendered mutually engendering (Lerder 1990). According to Lerder, our daily functioning is based on the so-called absence of the body, its imperceptible motility and operations. This ‘operating body’ is a context from which agency—not the ‘I think’ but rather ‘I can’—emerges, and at the heart of it lies the irreducibly corporeal know-how. Lerder explains that this know-how is achieved through incorporation at a bodily level (Mason-Grant 2004): for instance, one can watch the swimmer, and then try out swimming themselves, but only when swimming becomes an activity that is not the focus of one’s mind anymore, then it becomes a truly incorporated bodily knowledge. According to Mason-Grant, the same framework can be applied in the field of sexuality. Our sexual practices (understood more widely than just intercourse and outercourse—term used to describe sexual activity that does not include penetration) become tacit bodily know-how and lay the ground for and even produce our (sexual) agency: “over time, as a given form of sexuality is acted out, rehearsed, it seeps into one’s organismic ground, shaping sexual desire and pleasure, shaping perception and expectation, and thereby shaping the way one interacts with others” (ibid., 113). In this way we become not merely beings that have sex – we become sexual beings. Thus using pornography for sex makes it a sexual practice that through reiteration, performativity and reference to other sex/genderdefined practices fuses into the corporeal realm. Such an account points to the affectivity of pornography—i.e. the power of pornography to trigger and induce visceral, felt intensities (Paasonen 2011, 22) —that takes its toll on a much less conscious and much more material level. It also introduces a point that has largely been overlooked in pornography research: the importance of physical engagement with pornographic images and the apparatus of bodily incorporation of social norms that prevail in these images. Focus on the bodily engagement allows to criticise the imaginary of the ‘rational viewer’ who is always in control of the image and its interpretations. Moreover, the process of ‘reading’ and interpreting itself is not only a mind-activity but is also performed through an active bodily involvement.

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However, while scholars approaching pornography as discourse seem to do at least some justice to the mediated nature of pornography (Williams 1989; Gaines 2004; Gillis 2004; Patterson 2004; Jacobs et al. 2007), those who analyse pornography as practice, including Mason-Grant, often put the influence of media aside (Dworkin 1981; Dines et al. 1998). Yet it is quite obvious that mediation lies at the very heart of pornography: it is images, texts, videos that one talks about when talking about pornography. Not accounting for mediation renders Mason-Grant’s analysis incomplete, while her claim that pornography reduces sex to vision implies a somewhat simplified understanding of the visual and ignores other elements of practice that are constitutive of the consumption of pornography. To do justice both to the medium-specific elements of pornography as practice as well as to Mason-Grant’s productive insistence on the bodily involvement with porn, I would like to focus on the newest and by now the most popular way to engage with pornography: the Internet.

Approaching virtual technologies: from representations to embodied enaction Media philosopher Mark Hansen, in his phenomenological account of technology in Bodies In Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (2006), argues that virtual reality has often been seen from a representationalist standpoint (Hansen, 4-5). This type of approach makes a distinctive split between reality and virtual reality—not unlike the split made between ‘real sex’ and ‘porn sex’—where the latter comes to represent the former, often ‘improving’ the imperfections of the ‘physical world.’ Likewise, technology is then seen more as prosthesis in a very simplified way: we incorporate technologies only so much as to operate in place of sense organs, while our ways of experiencing supposedly stay intact (Hansen, 128). While traditional accounts of cyberspace have often centred on freeing the mind from the prison of the body, more contemporary virtual reality projects aim at placing the body as a primary point of access to the virtual. Taking these new virtual reality projects as examples, Mark Hansen argues for an embodied approach to the virtual and to technology in general. Contrary to what is claimed by the representationalist line of thought, the body and embodiment not only serve as primary access to the lifeworld, but also they are that through which technology connects and makes an impact on this lifeworld. A body, being the gateway to the world, naturalizes modifications brought by technical developments, and at the

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same time opens up the opportunity for these modifications to deterritorialize body’s habitual interaction with the world and possibly also expand it (Hansen, 28). Deterritorialization and expansion are made possible by the coupling of body and technics—this is a claim that pertains not only to the status of technology, but also to the way embodiment and body are understood and felt in general. According to Hansen, the representationalist approach reduces virtual reality technologies to mere extensions, and implies that the body is felt first and foremost through the body image: a sort of medium between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ Criticizing body image as an apprehension of body as an external object (Hansen, 39), Hansen argues that body image is actually derivative from the body schema. Body schema is a primary framework within which the body feels itself and gains access to the world. Merleau-Ponty, on whose theory Hansen builds his work, defines body schema as a “flexible, plastic, systemic form of distributed agency encompassing what takes place within the boundaries of the body proper (the skin) as well as the entirety of the spatiality of embodied motility” (ibid., 38). This body schema emerges from the operational perspective of the embodied organism. That is to say, it is based on motility and tactility as primary senses. It gives priority to the internal perspective of the organism, yet by doing so, it opens the door for body-technology coupling, as it includes also what is ‘outside’ of the organism by focusing on movement and embodied enaction. To put it simply, technics can be incorporated in our “phenomenological anatomy” through us interacting with them. This interaction is not a mere relation between two defined entities, but puts the technical “at the heart of human motility” (ibid., 39). The perspective set out above has consequences for how we, so to say, move around the world, how we feel our bodies, and fosters the general indivision of body-technology-world, enabling Hansen to develop an embodied, motor-centric approach to virtual reality. The body whose potential is unearthed or enacted with the help of technology is what Hansen calls a body in code. He writes: “[b]y this I do not mean a purely informational body or a digital disembodiment of the everyday body. I mean a body submitted to and constituted by an unavoidable and empowering technical deterritorialization—a body whose embodiment is realized, and can only be realized, in conjunction with technics” (ibid., 20). To unveil these bodies in code, Hansen focuses not only on movement but also on touch. Together with Merleau-Ponty he claims that touch is the primary sense, the basis for the sensible per se, and the visual, then, is but an expansion of the primary sensibility of touch

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beyond the boundaries of the skin. An embodied motor-centric approach, at the heart of which lie the practices of movement and the sensibilities of touch, works on multiple levels. Firstly, it withdraws from the omnipotence of the visual and puts the moving body to the fore as that through which we gain access to the world. As such, it draws attention to the practices, to the way we engage with objects and environments on a very physical, material level. Secondly, it posits the body and embodiment as a source of creative potential that can be actualized through/with technology, thus challenging the clear-cut lines of organic/inorganic, and human/non-human as well as the hierarchies related to these dualisms. These two points are important as we come to account for and make sense of the practices of Internet pornography.

Bodies-in-eporn: fusing body-technology-desire Internet pornography seems somewhat paradoxical: on the one hand, it has everything to do with the body, yet on the other hand, it enters the realm of sexual practices as a ‘clean,’ even disembodied, sex. However, the practices of using Internet pornography are inextricable from physicality of movement and touch. This movement/touch comes in three layers. Firstly, one has to interact with technology: constantly push the buttons, click the mouse, move through the screen, from video to video, open and close windows, forward, rewind, type on the keyboard, and so on. This is a very basic level of corporeal interaction with the personal computer as a device to get to the desirable content: if one desires easy access to sex as porn, one turns to the machine to get it. A second layer is constituted by a certain macro-logic of movement enacted as one moves around the cyberspace: constant jumping from website to website, image to image creates an experience of incessant flow. It is not a smooth kind of movement, however. Rather it is a syncopated ‘stumbling through’ marked by a multiplicity of fragments, which is especially prominent in free online porn websites, such as RedTube.com or YouPorn.com. Consider the opening image of this chapter: multiple layers of images, some of them static, some of them animated GIF images, some of them (thumbnails of videos in particular) turn into a miniature slide-show preview as I bring the pointer on to them. The space of online porn offers a hectic excess of images, almost to a point of disorientation. The third layer is constituted by the movement and the self-touch of the viewer themselves. As Mason-Grant claims, pornography is used for

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sex. So let me take one possible ideal viewing situation that also constitutes the popular understanding of what happens during the consumption of online porn as an example: solitary masturbation over online porn video. Movement and touch manifest here not only through the apparently obvious self-touching/rubbing. Tuning into the movement already happening around it (the two aforementioned layers), the body of the consumer is moving and being moved, is touching and being touched as it “affectively resonates” (Paasonen, 2011) with other elements of the body-technology-imagery assemblage. As Paasonen explains, “to resonate with one another, objects and people do not need to be similar, but they need to relate and connect to one another” (Paasonen, 2011, 16), thus the concept of carnal resonance describes the force and visceral appeal, but also how users attach themselves to bodies in porn and technologies of porn, and vice versa. All these very material practices of touch and movement establish the corporeality of the encounter with pornography which is brought to the user via a networked computer. Even more importantly, these practices constitute the materiality of the human-machine interaction. In the process of consumption of Internet pornography, body and machine work together as one: they attune and resonate allowing for the transmission of affective forces. It is as if the consumer were a vampire “hooked on the life-blood of the Internet” (Kember 1998, 118), intimately wired with technology— one hand on the keyboard, another on the crotch; one hand clicking, another hand rubbing; fingers typing, body sweating. In other words, the consumption of Internet porn entails not only the ‘gazing at,’ but also, and importantly, a very bodily ‘engagement with.’ At the core of this engagement is the encounter established through touch and movement of the body and the machine. If we look at this corporeal encounter with technology through the concept of body schema, the manifold potential of Internet porn opens up. If body schema is a coupling of the body with the environment, which allows for incorporation and fusion, then engagement with Internet porn has potential to challenge the distinction between my body/body of the other. Interestingly, this ‘other’ does not necessarily have to be human. As performance artist María Llopis argues in the opening quote, as she engages in sex online through Chatroulette.com, what she experiences is not only an encounter with another person, but with the device as such. She also highlights the importance of networked technologies in the enactment of her desires: technology is an active mediator, which is meant not to be controlled but to be intimately worked with. The above example shows that Internet pornography also engenders

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potential to change the status of technics, body and embodiment. Technology becomes incorporated in the “phenomenological sexual anatomy” (Mason-Grant 2004, 107) as an active mediator charged with agency: a medium to enact desire as well as the ‘other’ towards which this desire can be channelled. This does not mean that a piece of technology is then necessarily fetishized or becomes indistinguishable from the actual body of the user. Rather, it means that the organic and the technological are fused into one hybrid body wired with desire: a body-in-eporn. Much like the body in code, this conception stresses the importance of technics for the realization of desires and potentials, or, to be more specific, the importance of the coupling between body and technics. If body in code actualizes the code in a way that helps expanding its interactions with the world, body-in-eporn actualizes a sexual desire that is inextricable from technological mediation, a sexual desire that takes shape in humanmachine interaction. Body-in-eporn also brings forth the productive force of the non-human. If, as Mason-Grant has argued, agency stems first and foremost from the bodily ‘I can,’ body-in-eporn shows that this ‘I can’ (or in this case perhaps rather ‘I desire’) is hardly a purely human domain. In other words, sexual agency (at least in the domain of Internet pornography) arises from intra-action (Barad 2007) with the technological, which is to say: agency is co-constituted through and in relation with technology, as an intra-active phenomenon rooted in techno-biological embodiment. Such embodiments are proliferating as fast as new media do: from social media, to interactive gaming devices such as X-box Kinect, the biological, the organic, and the human get more and more ‘infected’ with that which used to be regarded as the opposite of these categories. Internet porn serves as a double-layered example of an embodied enaction: corporeality in Internet porn is that through which porn makes its appeal as well as that to which it appeals. It puts the body back to the fore with regards to any encounter with technology, tackling the fear of the body prevailing modern technoculture (Gillis 2004). The co-dependent movement of body and machine engaged in the consumption of Internet porn almost literally mixes body fluids with keyboards and wires, thus establishing the inseparability of body and technology. Contrary to clearcut organic/inorganic, nature/culture, human/machine dualisms, Internet porn is a case of hybrids and cyborgs, or, to use Hansen’s/Merleau-Ponty’s term, of a human-world relation based on transduction rather than sterilized compartmentalization.

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For a conclusion: the politics of wired sex The embodied ‘practice’ approach to online porn I have set out in this article has profound implications on how we think about the whole phenomenon of wired, mediated sex enacted through conjunction with technology. Body is a primary gateway to mediated sexually explicit images, yet that body is not a clearly defined entity that utilizes technology as a mere passive tool: its embodiment is enacted in relation to the technology that brings pornography to its users. Moreover, since sexually explicit imagery is inextricable from the media, it calls both pro-porn and anti-porn feminist activists to take into account not only the semantic meanings of pornographic texts, but also the modes of their consumption. What then becomes at stake in these accounts is the question of the affectivity of pornography and sexual agency, which gets re-defined to emerge not as effect but as intra-action and resonance between bodyimage-technology. This resonance and intra-action operates within and leaves traces in wider socio-cultural structures. Rosi Braidotti claims that pornography reenforces the logics of market economy (Braidotti 2011a). Capitalism is well known for incorporating movements and ideas that started as radical and subversive. It also feeds on the production and consumption of affects (Terranova 2004). Thus if at the beginning the phenomenon of ‘amateur porn’—low-cost home-made sex tapes uploaded or otherwise shared online—created an alternative space for San Fernando Valley (where adult entertainment production is concentrated in the US), nowadays large porn corporations issue ‘amateur collections’ to squeeze some profit out of the supposedly ‘real,’ ‘unfaked’ and ‘unscripted’ qualities that amateur porn is said to exhibit (van Doorn 2010). Furthermore, while fragmentation and multiplicity that, as I have shown above, characterize much of online porn, can be a starting point to think through the non-unity and non-fixity of (human) bodies and subjectivities, it also allows for the proliferation of “disposable bodies” (Braidotti 2011b). Think, for instance, of free-access porn websites such as RapeTube.org, functioning on a very thin line between consensual sex and actual footage of sexual violence. In both cases it is the women whose bodies are rendered worthless, and I cannot help but doubt that all of them are “professional actors and models” as the disclaimer on the website says. In a way, online porn is a space of bodies of what Deleuze calls “dividuals”: re/shapeable, de-/trans-formable entities entangled in the networks and workings of power (Deleuze 1992). The particular outline of ‘porn tubes’ collides a variety of different bodies into one collage of

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images (again, see fig. 16.1), while the experience of browsing (‘stumbling through’) puts them in the constant stream of videos. And thus I ask myself: what happens to my own body and the way I live it out when it becomes one flash of flesh in the abundance of online porn? It is quite peculiar to see the image of my own hand seeking into my jeans reflected back to me on the screen (see fig.16.1), doubled by the sensation of the same movement off-screen, certain body parts of mine becoming one of the points to stumble upon, one of the fragments, depersonalized to an extent that I know (and derive safety from it) nobody will recognize. One may wonder, is there any political potential in fragmentation and becoming a dividual (Deleuze 1992)? Performance artist María Llopis, while acknowledging that fragmentation and exposure can be a source of victimization, tries to find ways to make them a source of empowerment (Llopis 2010). Or take porno terrorism or guerilla porn—another field where fragmentation and malleability of bodies is used to produce alternative meanings and politics. Employing sexually explicit imagery, and even visual and narrative codes from the mainstream pornography, porno-terrorists convey a certain political—in the broadest sense of the word—message. These range from invading the Energy Summit and staging a stylized sex act (see: Oil Orgy’ invades Energy Summit, http://vimeo.com/30373841), to reading poetry while masturbating, or addressing the issues of gender norms, violence etc. while having sex or being sexually stimulated (see: videos of Pornoterrorismo, http:// pornoterrorismo.com/mira/video-de-performances/). Queer communities were also quick to appropriate tube website structures for their own means (e.g.: QueerPornTube.com), and it is important to remember that pornography actually has a long-lasting tradition of acting as a form of cultural critique (Paasonen et al. 2007). What is important here is that just as pornography in general, according to Williams, implants perversions with the help of cinema, so these videos try to implant ideas or make statements, or simply affirm the sexual pleasure of ‘deviant’ bodies by using the very same logic and technologies that are used in Internet porn: DYI, making the private public, and a certain degree of depersonalisation. To conclude, I have tried to show that practice-oriented, embodied approach to pornography when coupled with similar approach to new media, allows seeing Internet porn in a way that triggers critical revision of how we think about embodiment, technology and sexually explicit imagery. Seen from the perspective of practices of consumption, Internet pornography appears as a mediated phenomenon that is inextricable from corporeal engagement through movement and touch. This bodily engagement

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creates a complex entanglement of pornographic imagery-body-technology, investing porn with affective power no less potent than appeals to fantasy or certain discursive tropes. Furthermore, the fusion of body-imagetechnology reveals that consumer’s bodies are rather to be seen as bodiesin-eporn, whose sexual desires are enacted with and through technology, pointing to different sources of constraint and potential of mediated sex. I certainly mean neither to valorise nor to vilify pornography as such, or Internet pornography in particular. I even do agree that there is too much “repetition without difference” (Deleuze 1994) of same-old gender normativity and capitalization of bodies and pleasures, and too little affirmation of (differently) embodied sensibilities (Braidotti 2011a). However, as a queer person often labelled ‘not whole’ and ‘too undefined’ when measured against the social yardstick of ‘how things should be,’ I feel that the fragmentation, multiplicity, messiness and ‘unwholesomeness’ of online porn resonates with me. The point, however, is to take even your own felt resonances critically, and to work ‘from within’ through points of constraint towards points of affirmation. This requires pornographic literacy and awareness of porn’s relation to wider socio-cultural as well as economic structures. It also requires critical distance and self-reflexivity, willingness to acknowledge personal entanglements in the structures of power, but also the will to affirm one’s pleasures without reverting to ‘anything [that is pleasant] goes’ attitude. Last but not least, it requires creativity to look for alternatives both in academic critique and in activist practice.

References Associated Press in Reykjavik. 2013. “Iceland seeks Internet pornography ban.” The Guardian, February 25. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/25/iceland-seeks-Internetpornography-ban (accessed February 28, 2013). Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2011a. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 2011b. Nomadic Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Burstyn, Vanda, ed. 1985. Women Against Censorship. Vancouver; Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.

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London; New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59:3-7. —. 1994. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. Dines, Gail, Robert Jensen and Ann Russo. 1998. Pornography. The Production and Consumption of Inequality. London; New York: Routledge. Doorn, Niels van. 2010. “Keeping It Real. User-Generated Pornography, Gender Reification, and Visual Pleasure.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 16(4):411-30. Dworkin, Andrea. 1981. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. London: Women’s Press Ltd. Gaines, Jane. 2004. “Machines That Make the Body Do Things.” In More Dirty Looks. Gender, Pornography and Power, edited by Pamela Church Gibson. London: BFI Publishing. Gillis, Stacey. 2004. “Cybersex.” In More Dirty Looks. Gender, Pornography and Power, edited by Pamela Church Gibson. London: BFI Publishing. Hansen, Mark B.N. 2006. Bodies in Code. Interfaces with Digital Media. London; New York: Routledge. Hartley, Nina. 1987. “Confessions of a Feminist Porno Star.” In Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry, edited by Frédérique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander. Cleis Press. Jacobs, Katrien, Marije Janssen and Matteo Pasquinellei, eds. 2007. C’Lickme. A Netporn Studies Reader. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures/Drukkerij Veenman. http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/24.pdf. Kember, Sarah. 1998. Virtual Anxiety. Photography, New Technologies and Subjectivity. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press. Lerder, Drew. 1990. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Llopis, María. 2010. “Revising Gender Roles and Stereotypes through Art and Technology.” GirlsWhoLikePorno, July 6. http://girlswholikeporno.com/pdf/Lecture_Thecnology_MLlopis.pdf (accessed December 10, 2011) Mason-Grant, Joan. 2004. Pornography Embodied. From Speech to Sexual Practice. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc. Miller-Young, Mireille. 2013. “Empowering to the Women on Screen.” The New York Times, 10 June 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/11/11/doespornography-deserve-its-bad-rap/pornography-can-be-empowering-to-

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women-on-screen (accessed August 14, 2013). Paasonen, Susanna. 2011. Carnal Resonances: Affect and Online Pornography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Paasonen, Susana, Karina Nikunen and Laura Saarenmaa, eds. 2007. Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture. Oxford; New York: Berg. Patterson, Zabeth. 2004. “Going On-line: Consuming Pornography in the Digital Era.” In Porn Studies, edited by Linda Williams, 104-24. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Pornoterrorismo. 2013. “Video de performances.” http://pornoterrorismo.com/mira/video-de-performances (accessed March 15, 2013). [Redacted]Guy. 2010. “Don’t Try This at Home. Stuff Guys Want in Their Porn, Not Their Beds.” Lemondrop, April 28. http://www.lemondrop.com/2010/04/28/pron-moves-dudes-don-t-like/ (accessed February 01, 2012). Segal, Lynne, and Mary McIntosh. 1992. Sex Exposed. Sexuality and the Pornography Debate. London: Virago Press Ltd. Terranova, Tiziana. 2004. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto Press. Williams, Linda. 1989. Hard Core. Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible. Berkley: University of California Press. You and I Films. 2011. “Oil Orgy” invades Energy Summit. http://vimeo.com/30373841 (accessed January 05, 2012).

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN A DIALOGUE ON THE DILEMMAS OF FEMINIST RESEARCH PRAXIS KOEN LEURS, ROSEMARIE BUIKEMA, WILLY JANSEN AND LIES WESSELING

As a way of drawing the themes addressed in this anthology together, Koen Leurs initiated a correspondence between the three board members of the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies Willy Jansen, Rosemarie Buikema and Lies Wesseling between July and September 2013.

To set the stage for this reflective dialogue on the dilemmas of feminist praxis, can you situate yourself in the wider context of the academy and the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG)? Willy Jansen My involvement in the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies has a long history, dating back to the nineteen eighties when we, as women’s studies scholars, used the advice and funds provided by the governmental special development group on emancipation research (STEO 1985-1991) to organize ourselves on a national level and develop research. Around that time, in 1987, I had just defended my PhD thesis Women without Men. Gender and Marginality in an Algerian Town (Jansen 1987) and accepted a position at the newly founded Centre of Women’s Studies at the University of Nijmegen. Part of the work was to submit proposals to STEO or serve as a reviewer. In order to gain more structural access to research funds, we worked towards the establishment of the WVEO, the Section Women’s Studies and Emancipation research of the

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main Dutch funding agency for scientific research NWO. Between 1988 and 1996, I was member and later chair of its board. A number of women’s studies professors were appointed and although we were each other’s competitors for funds, we also joined forces to develop three large national special priority research programmes together. These served later as basis for the Netherlands Research School of Women’s Studies (NOV) founded in 1993 by the same group. I co-directed its research-line Identity, Subjectivity and Diversity, offered PhD courses and supervision and as member of the board participated in getting the NOV recognized (1995) and reaccredited (2000) as a national research school and later its transition to NOG. Most of the co-founders have now retired, but I continue to cooperate with the younger generation in seminars and courses such as those on which this book is based. My academic work as a researcher, teacher and supervisor has been strongly influenced by my background in anthropology. Anthropologists try to comprehend how people in different cultural contexts live their actual daily lives, so describing and understanding ‘praxis’ has really been my core business. In my own work I have shown how gender and gendered power differences are constructed in such mundane and varied practices as eating meals, giving jewellery, going to school, moving in pilgrimage, giving meaning to St. Mary’s breast or practicing sex. Looking at such daily practices through the lens of gender pays off as it enables us to shed a new light on these issues, for instance when we showed that pilgrimage is not only a religious act but also a stage where practices of gender and sexuality are exhibited, contested, or repressed (See e.g. Jansen & Notermans 2012; Samson, Notermans, Jansen 2013). My interest in praxis has not gone unnoticed by the students and PhD researchers at the Institute for Gender Studies of Radboud University. They know that I tend to give greater value to carefully gathered, detailed data on what people say or do and to original analysis of such data, rather than to abstract theories from which humans and the complexities of life seem to have disappeared. We, gender studies researchers stand in service to the people that we study. This includes a self-reflection on one’s own positioning as a researcher and the potential power differences between researcher and researched. Such reflections lead us to generate bettersituated and therefore more insightful data. Working from a holistic approach—which is characteristic of anthropology—is the best fundament for the productive interdisciplinary work we promote in the NOG and at our Institute for Gender Studies. Interdisciplinarity enables us to acknowledge connections, parallels and differences. It allows for the fusing of a variety of approaches and

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theories to come to a layered understand of a specific issue. In sum, the approach I propagate opens the mind to a host of interesting topics pertaining to everyday life, different cultures of thinking and the value of bringing them into dialogue rather than dismissing them out of hand. Rosemarie Buikema My academic profile as current NOG director has strongly been influenced by both my (inter-)disciplinary background as a critical cultural theorist and the work which I did in the past 25 years i.e. helping to build the infrastructure of the field of gender studies both locally, nationally and internationally. The latter has been framed by my membership of the founding Utrecht Gender Studies team—including Rosi Braidotti, Berteke Waaldijk, Maaike Meijer and Gloria Wekker,—my NOG board membership and my co-ordination and partnership of several large EU-or NWO/WOTRO funded teaching and research projects like NOISE, GEMMA, EU FP6 MC EST, Intergender, AtGender, SANPAD and the like. But it all started indeed by a NWO STEO grant as mentioned by Willy before, which allowed me to write my PhD, defended in 1995 at the UvA as one of the first NOV PhD’s (Buikema 1995). Mine was a study about the interconnectedness of fact and fiction in the construction of historical truths or—as my PhD student Doro Wiese would say 15 years later—: about the powers of the false, I illustrated that post-structuralist claim by a semiotic analysis of biographies written by daughters about their famous mothers, famous also because of their being first generation public space invaders, as another former PhD student Koen Leurs would phrase it now. However, those were the days of positive action in academia indeed which we now have to cash and implement. My professional drive is and has been to develop a critical perspective to scrutinize processes of in- and exclusion at work in the academic production of knowledge as well as to the ways in which the knowledge factory is ruled and organized. Sensitivity for what is excluded or forgotten by mainstream knowledge claims and institutions—outside gender studies—needs to be trained. This sensitivity detects knowledge generated not only through high theory but also by detailing everyday practices which precede theories and nourish the need for conceptual rigor. Such a critical perspective remains aware of the possible insights provided by different research methods like reading and analysing against the grain. What we do in feminist studies is to develop what I would like to call a feminist and post-colonial literacy to think and research differently. It is important not to say crucial to interfere in the power of definition, i.e. in the power to determine major and minor issues in science and history and

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to think about equality and justice in such a way that subaltern voices are able to be heard, that is to say able to shape new praxis, spaces and vocabularies, de-stabilize hegemonic ways of seeing and thus effectuate change. It is that engaged analytical rigor, and that literacy which I hope to have contributed to for example in the monograph on innovations by Dutch authors in the literary sphere which I wrote with Lies Wesseling (2006) as well as the feminist teaching and research textbooks which I edited with colleagues in the field of gender studies (Buikema & Smelik 1995; Buikema & van der Tuin 2009; Buikema, Griffin & Lykke 2011). Lies Wesseling I joined the NOG board when I became the director of the Centre for Gender and Diversity two years ago. The core of my intellectual identity as a feminist scholar is my sustained interest in the ways in which the arts (whether low, high or middle brow) offer “repertoires” or “scripts” for identity construction or “self-fashioning” (see e.g. Wesseling 2012). These scripts can be taken up in affirmative or subversive ways, or both at the same time. It is not just the aesthetic artefacts themselves, but also the ways in which makers and audiences put them to use in their own everyday practices of self-fashioning that commands our attention here. Here, literary and cultural studies and cultural anthropology converge. In my own work on “kinning” (an anthropological term), for instance, I study how adoptive parents mobilize the repertoires of time-honoured literary genres in their life writings, that are to transform themselves into parents and adoptees into next-of-kin. In other words, literary studies may enrich the anthropological inquiry into daily praxis that so fascinates Willy, including critical feminist analysis of everyday sexism, everyday racism, everyday ageism, and so on. In artistic practices, identity construction is hardly ever a fully reflexive, conscious, deliberate, purposeful endeavour; there is always certain degree of non-intentional affect involved. Literature and art tend to (de-)construct crucial social differences in subtle, surreptitious, implicit ways. As such, they offer a highly apt research site for scrutinizing social-differences-in-the-making in contemporary modern societies, where discrimination is not primarily a matter of deliberate, strategic exclusion either, but rather a product of an implicit sexist, racist and ageist bias.

How do you understand everyday feminist praxis? And how in particular do you account for the political and ethical intricacies of feminist research and teaching?

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Willy Jansen Feminist praxis has different layers. At the level of making a career in academia it presupposes for women an attitude of expecting and demanding similar treatment and opportunities than men. There were quite a few hindrances on my path that are nowadays unthinkable, such as the headmaster and the parish priest that came to plead with my father not to send me to a better school in town, or the letter from a higher education institute that discouraged me to apply as the market did not ask for female specialists in that field. Needless to say, these obstacles served as invitations to prove them wrong. Young women today will find it easier to pursue a career, but the gender gap in top positions still shows there is significant political work to do to recognize and abolish the mechanisms that sustain inequalities. Young men will have to come to terms with changed gender roles too and include care work in their way of life. At the level of educational work it means paying special attention to unequal starting positions of students and extra work to support those who need extra help. It is no accident that not just women but also gay men and transgenders find an intellectual home at gender studies and respect for the issues they want to study. At the level of teaching it means making students aware of the persistence and mechanisms of social inequality and the need to study these. This means not only to invite them to think further about wellknown inequalities as underemployment, unequal salaries, or lack of women at the top, but also about more hidden and continuously changing mechanisms varying from the gender workings of language, fashion, body correction, participation in religious processions or sexual rights. Not everything is about power, and power is a very complex concept and praxis to understand, but for me, sensitivity to power inequalities remains crucial for feminist research. At the level of research, feminist praxis is giving voice to those who are seldom listened to while simultaneously respecting their viewpoints and trying to understand the structural hindrances to their empowerment. Thus feminist research is inherently a process of constant ethical positioning. Often, but not always, our research concerns women, but gender inequalities are closely intertwined with other stratifications based on age, sexual orientation, religion or ethnicity. Feminist praxis also introduces topics relevant for scientific scrutiny but overlooked in mainstream research. To name a few examples chosen by our PhD students: the female condom, sexual joking in Zimbabwean funerals, Roman widows, or post-abortion pilgrimage.

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Rosemarie Buikema Like Willy stresses and I emphasized in my first answer, feminist practices are characterized by a sensitivity for the multiple engineerings of power, inequality and exclusion, the development of a vocabulary to be accountable for differences and for differences within differences. Last but not least, feminist praxis is characterized by a critical attitude towards claims that “the work is done.” We are not finished, not as long as women and other minority groups globally are still discriminated, that is to say marked by a manifest or latent lack of agency and citizenship. A feminist praxis by implication has to be motivated by dedication and resilience and also by grounded knowledge of the past. It is only since 150 years that women in the West have free access to higher education, libraries and the like, it is only since less than 100 years that women have the vote in the Netherlands (1918) as a consequence female professors are still relatively rare (less than 15% in the Netherlands) and female prime ministers still an oddity. Becoming part of tradition and the public sphere is hard work and needs the contextualisation of events, the linking of seemingly incidents to structures. As Willy points out we need to elaborate on the persistence of inequalities and the need to structurally study these. We are said to experience a third wave of feminism, which means that we are part of a struggle initiated by previous generations of women. Feminist praxis also means to highlight these genealogies of female, queer and feminist thought. Working on the articulation and visualisation of that which remains unarticulated and invisible is unavoidably a political and ethical act. Feminist research is indeed ethical because it fights hegemonic meanings and institutions and produces knowledge in the service of global justice. It produces the knowledge we need in order to reach our goals, that is to say in order to be able to recognize and change injustices. As Foucault but also Irigaray, Haraway, Scott and other great inspirational thinkers for the development of feminist thought have eloquently and meticulously theorized: the taboo and/or the process of normativation is never an innocent historical phenomenon but always a geopolitical sign, it serves the interests of some and constructs power (im)balances. So the academic feminist gesture can be recognized by both the choice of research and teaching subjects as well by the way in which we deal with those subjects and seek to render visible all their paradoxes and complexities. As most of the contributions to this volume illustrate, feminist research praxis necessarily demands for an interdisciplinary approach.

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Lies Wesseling Here I would like to reiterate a term that has gone out of fashion after the second feminist wave, namely ‘consciousness raising.’ I think feminist praxis remains a matter of raising awareness of everyday sexism, ageism, and racism, of the discriminatory categories that we apply blindly and unreflexively, governing our choices and social behaviours all the more effectively. For example, semi-conscious discriminatory mechanisms or biases are the main cause of women’s persistent underrepresentation in the higher ranks of professional organizations nowadays, including the university. Raising awareness of these biases disrupts their power in influencing our choices and preferences. Ongoing cultural work is necessary, as you cannot do this once and for all. Obviously, such efforts presuppose a commitment to the ethical and political ideal of a plural, inclusive society.

In this anthology, the everyday is chosen as the main entry point to feminist research praxis. Can you recount your everyday lived experiences of the relations between feminist theory and activism? What remains of the relation between gender studies with activism and politics in the more ‘traditional sense,’ as a collective endeavour working towards change? Lies Wesseling For me, feminist activism in daily life is very much tied up with the far greater difficulties women (still) experience in combining their family lives with a professional career. It never ceases to amaze me how slow things change for the better in this respect. Case in point is the issue of child-care in the Netherlands. The Netherlands have never managed to organize adequate child care unlike our next-door neighbour, Belgium, and currently things are worse than ever before. Supply still fails to meet the demand (this has been the case for several generations now), but also child care costs a fortune these days, with child care being approached as a market commodity, rather than a service that the government places at the disposal of its citizens to serve the common good. Unlike Belgium, the Netherlands regards the raising of children as a private hobby like sea sailing or mountaineering, and sustained government support is truly lacking. This is neo-liberal idiocy, especially considering the current demographic situation displaying a changing ratio between the older and the younger generations resulting in women being increasingly pressured

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to enter into the job market. When I look around me at the younger generations that are now entering into academic careers, thirtysomethings, it strikes me that there are still a lot of young men with stay-at-home wives who have at best a marginal job. These young men are therefore free to go for it 24-7. Faced with outrageously expensive and inadequate child care on the one hand and unfair competition in the professional sphere on the other, it should come as no surprise that Dutch women are not as career-oriented as some feminists would like them to be. There is a lot of neo-liberal talkie-talkie about the freedom to choose the life you want to lead and it comes as no surprise that the ‘free’ choices are nearly always made in the same way. It is a mistake; however, that mainstream media in their framing only criticize women for this situation. Rather than indulging in persistent mother-blaming, as if they are the only ones responsible here, we should rather scrutinize the wider social context. This is, as far as I am concerned, still a noble and urgent cause for feminist activism, and in my fight I do not hesitate to use my pen as sharply as possible in the national newspapers and affiliated media. Rosemarie Buikema A way of understanding feminist activism in daily life is living according to Spivak’s principle of “strategic essentialism” (1987, 205) as the recipe for solidarity and change. That is to say our feminist literacy, our ability to understand the multi-layeredness of the engineering of in-and exclusion, should help us to be able to analyse and criticize the power structures at hand in daily practices and direct our attempts to enable destabilizing encounters. This often implies ambiguity, for example in some instances feminist researches in the Netherlands should sympathize with women who claim the right to wear a veil, in other instances we should support those who struggle against specific dress codes for women in the public sphere such as the veil or the burka. We have to relate to a world where on the one hand gay people have access to legal partnership registration and on the other hand women can be fined or put into jail if they do not submit to specific dress codes. These are all subjects for feminist activism and solidarity. In some parts of the world women are abused and agonized if they express their desire to have access to education or sporting events in other parts of the world those rights are since (not so) long institutionalized. However, that does not mean that in those contexts gender in education or gender and sports is not an issue anymore. Sexism and racism will not be banned by access to human rights only, although this access is a prerequisite.

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Willy Jansen In my view there is no other entry point to feminist praxis than the everyday. I have little patience with theorizing for the sake of theorizing rather than for better understanding everyday experiences. Any such theory would also need to leave space for the disparities, the contradictions, the indefiniteness, the fluidity, and the loose ends that mark everyday life. Real life often evades even careful generalisations and clear conclusions. Postmodern scholars did of course theorize a lot about this fluidity, about constructions not being fixed and ordered and they warned against too much generalisation. But it would be nice to see more of their conceptual reflection used in analysis of actual social situations while simultaneously saying something coherent about apparent contradictions such as veiled Muslim women who defend gays or career feminists who wear high heels. A scholar has to face that in real life anything may go, and she therefore should be able to relativize the value of theories while developing new ones. There is a broad expectation that gender studies serves to promote activism and collective political action. And indeed a large part of our research is intended to produce results on the basis of which feminist action can be taken. For instance, Marieke van den Brink (2009) studied the underlying mechanisms in selection procedures that lead to fewer women being selected as professors than men, and used these insights to advise search committees on how to avoid a gender bias. Insights into how women in Zimbabwe discuss sexuality during tea parties, was translated by Iris Shiripinda into advice for NGO’s to use these parties to provide women with information on HIV prevention (2012). Yet, feminist praxis and feminist activism of scholars is far more than that. It is also about asking new questions from a gender and power perspective in science or about bringing new topics into fundamental research. Research results need not necessarily be directly applicable for bringing about social change. The aim of a critical gender analysis can also be to refine a concept or theory, or to understand an historical event better.

What are the main obstacles and challenges to feminist research praxis and in particular to students who wish to contribute to feminist academic scrutiny? Willy Jansen There are many obstacles to overcome if you want to truly capture the rich fabrics of the everyday. If you want to know people’s own view of the world, do you speak their language so that you can understand them? Do

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you have sufficient time to listen to their narratives? Do you have sufficient patience and respect to deal with inconsistent, un-ended, or fabricated stories? Can you wait long enough to see whether words match deeds? Do you ‘see’ the myriad of other practices through which people express their worldview and position themselves? If you want to understand their structural position, are you creative enough to include all relevant structures at work? Apart from these methodological problems that need to be solved, there are also challenges of another kind. Such as the challenge to avoid feminist prejudice. Not all inequality is due to gender. Not all gender differences are power inequalities. Patriarchy should not be assumed but shown and analysed. Another is the challenge to disregard and not incorporate society’s disdain for anything connected with women, let alone the word feminism. Courage and perseverance are necessary to maintain pride in one’s scholarly topics and aims against the hidden but strong undercurrent to evaluate people, research topics or candidates for jobs lower when it concerns women or women’s issues. In my research I unashamedly defended the right as well as the relevance of studying topics such as the female condom, women’s religious activities, or Algerian widows against openly voiced discouragements that such research would not be funded, not be published or not lead to career opportunities. This was not true. So just go for what you think is a just cause. Rosemarie Buikema In addition, one of the main challenges for politically engaged research might also be the fact that complex solutions to complex problems are never popular and they are difficult to convey. The complex workings of different axes of power make it impossible to design a feminist programme with blanket catchall-phrases that are applicable once and for all as the popularized interpretations of feminist activism would like to have it. We seem to live in a world where quantitative research outcomes are politically and strategically more convincing compared with thorough qualitative multi-layered analyses of complex phenomena. Nevertheless the power of (historically-) situated narratives and visual imagination is still fully operational and efficacious. Lies Wesseling The situation has become even worse when we consider that universities are changing into knowledge factories. Indeed, a dangerous situation has emerged, members of scientific staff are increasingly employed on a

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temporal basis, meaning that the curtain may fall for you as soon as your short-term contract expires. To put this into perspective, judges are appointed for life to ensure the impartiality of their verdicts. Independent critical thinking and scientific originality also requires some form of ethical and moral safeguard. Instead, the employment of scientific staff is becoming increasingly conditional and fleeting. I am a staunch advocate of explicit quality criteria, as I believe it will enhance gender equality if they are consistently applied, but not as a huge stick for slashing people’s contracts. I do not believe it will enhance scholarly performance if the employment situation becomes this precarious. Managerial university administrators have quick solutions for ridding themselves of people who keep on posing nasty or difficult questions (‘how come there are no women…’) and I am sure young researchers and even students are aware of this. Management decisions guided by neoliberal incentives are not conducive to creativity and new ideas; they are not conducive to any form of critical thinking either. Rather, they stimulate a climate of conformism.

The anthology is structured according to four themes (space-time, affectivity, private-public & technologiesmediations). You are invited to reflect on the role of these four notions. Firstly, what role does space-time play in feminist research praxis? Rosemarie Buikema Feminist scholars have always stressed the necessity to take the historical and geopolitical location of their subjects of research into account. There is no feminist knowledge that is similarly applicable across time and space. Part of our feminist praxis is the acknowledgement of the fact that knowledge is always partial, incomplete and in process. The dialogical nature of the truths we produce means that feminist truth is “intra-active” (Barad 2007). It is in the concept of feminism to be in dialogue with time and place. There are no a priori (non-) feminist issues. Let us ground this idea in material, everyday reality. While we speak there is a fierce discussion going on in Saudi Arabia whether to allow women to attend soccer matches. What can we make of this debate? When going beyond the first impression it shows this is not so much an indication for a progressive transformation of women’s rights and agency within fundamentalist Islamic ideologies but solely inspired by the geopolitics of the 2019 Asia Cup and the 2022 World Cup to be held in Qatar. Access to public spaces is a feminist issue but it can only be properly grasped when

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situated in a proper geopolitical and historical perspective. In every case of structural transformation resulting from fundamental liberation, the crossroads of interests and power mechanisms have to be unravelled to avoid allowing transitions to remain merely cosmetic gestures. Willy Jansen Taking the everyday as an entry point necessarily means that people’s lives are situated in a specific space and time. It has therefore always surprised me that so many sociological or psychological studies get away with hardly mentioning where they are located in time and space, nor reflect on the impact of these dimensions. Many a psychological study hardly mentions that it depends on first year American/European students who fill in questionnaires as part of their required course work. How much insight do such surveys generate in the complexities of everyday life outside the laboratory, where friends, the weather, family, the number of beers consumed, or tiredness may influence the answers? Asking about gendered divisions of space and time has led to interesting insights. Feminist sociologists have upturned dominant definitions of work by taking space into account and thus making visible much of women’s work. Feminist historians have done great work in sensitizing us to the importance of locating research subjects in space and time, and giving women and other subordinated populations their rightful place in the collective memory. Linguists and psychologists have done exciting studies on gendered use of space and time in verbal and non-verbal communication. Lies Wesseling Feminist researchers have been at the forefront of postcolonial studies, and I think the concept of post-colonialism succinctly expresses the types of “chronotopes” (Bakhtin 1981) we are living in at the moment. We have left colonialism behind, but not quite, and therefore it still matters vitally at which end of the globe we are situated. However not categorically, there are multifarious ways in which different regions of the world interpenetrate each other, although hardly ever in a fair, balanced way. The East ceased to be the East and the West ceased to be the West a long time ago now, and the two have met and intermingled in all sorts of ways, but this does not mean that the power imbalance between East and West, North and South has been abolished. On the contrary, across various scales of time and space, they are being reproduced time and again in multiple ways that bear uncanny resemblances to colonialism.

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Affectivity has become a buzzword across humanities and social science scholarship. What do you make of this trend, what is the role of affectivity in feminist praxis? Willy Jansen Our search for and aim to reveal subjugated knowledges and our intention to build an alliance with our respondents through dialogue implies that a certain affect underlies the research endeavour. Said in other words, it is important to establish a trustful and respectful relation between researcher and researched and this can best be done through friendly but systematic social talk as I have recently argued in a piece on the hard work of small talk (Driessen & Jansen 2013). We do not have to love our interviewees, or share their views, but we should respect them for what they are, say and do. Without the willingness, time and energy informants provide us researchers, we would not have been able to carry out the studies that we do. A second engagement of feminist researchers with affectivity lies in understanding its role in (women’s) work, with particular attention for the globalization and commercialisation of labours of love. For examples, see the film The Chain of Love about Pilipino transnational female care workers (Meerman, 2001), or Arlie Hochschild’s book The Outsourced Self (2012). Lies Wesseling In the light of what I have said before about “consciousness raising,” it should come as no surprise that I approach affect theory quite gingerly. On the one hand, I am interested in affectivity, as the arts are all about orchestrating affect and staging emotions. I also fully acknowledge that we are not only the products of our encounters with other thinking subjects, but also of our interactions with our material environment, with things. On the other hand, the focus of affect theory on the pre-rational, prediscursive, pre-reflexive ushers in the dangers of obscurantism, biologism, mystification, and anti-intellectualism, and I fail to see how any feminist cause could benefit from that. I think Raymond Williams’ highly useful concept of “structure of feeling” (1977) provides us with a way of duly acknowledging the importance of affect while steering free from the dangers mentioned. As far as I am concerned, “structure of feeling” is the successor term to “ideology,” the preferred term, as people’s convictions, persuasions, commitments and affinities are hardly ever as conscious, explicit and rational as the term ideology would seem to suggest. I do still adhere to the classic persuasion, however, that feminist analysis should scrutinize these structures of feeling, making the implicit explicit, the pre-

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reflexive reflexive, and the pre-discursive discursive, so as to make them amenable to critical debate and, possibly, change. Rosemarie Buikema I do share Lies’ cautiousness concerning obscurantism, biologism and antiintellectualism in general and in the context of uses and abuses of the term affect in particular. I also share the fear that the epistemological enterprise of post-structuralism will get replaced by the installation of ontology and claims of affects’s independence from culture. But that doesn’t mean that affect theory simply can be put aside since it already plays a major role in cultural and feminist criticism. Consequently the concept of affectivity cannot be referred to without putting a bibliography to it since the concept itself is a topic of neuroscientific, psychological and philosophical debates. First used in psychoanalysis affect is referred to as a quantity of psychic energy. Affect is not referring to a direct emotional representation of an event but to a residue reactivated through the reiteration of that event by some equivalent to it. For instance by means of art. Affect therefore is related to cathexis, to the power to relate. Neuroscientists (like Damasio f.e.) equate affects with a paradigm of basic emotions (including fear, anger, disgust, joy, sadness, surprise) which are unrelated to the functioning of cognitive systems. In feminist theory and Deleuzian based affect theory at large however we explicitly distinguish between emotions and affects. Here emotions are the effect of affects, one could say. Affects are mainly being referred to as intensities, as the bodily reactions being singular and preceding interpretation. Although affects as such are thought to be prediscursive they are also considered to be part of the intra-active process of experience and thought, they are in need of a response. Art as a response for example can contain the traces of affect, as such art sometimes functions as an index to use this semiotic concept. Affect theory as such is interesting for the development of feminist thought because it might help us to think through the bodily and pre-discursive aspects of the encounters between human subjects and things—works of art, nature, food, etc—and between subjects and other subjects, men and women, blacks and whites etc. As such the feminist engagement with affectivity might offer routes for innovative research as among many others is illustrated by the work of NOG members Zarzycka and Papenburg (2013). Working through the concept of affect might help to think about theories of structural change, that is to say change which happens at the level of the imagination, at the level of how people relate to each other and to their environment, of the way in which we imagine things to possibly be, in close conversation with the endeavour of

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organizing justice through regulations, rights, and institutions.

What new knowledge can feminist research praxis produce about the relationships between the private and public? Willy Jansen These dichotomous analytical categories once were useful to reveal gendered social functions underscoring men’s and women’s different roles. Theoretically this binary pair was interesting especially for Marxist feminists to show how the private and public were interrelated, how for example women’s domestic work was a function of capitalism. In a way, these concepts have sort of gone out of fashion nowadays. We have started to dislike dichotomies and prefer to think in terms of axes or ranges. The focus now lies on shifting boundaries or boundary negotiations between the private and public sphere. As a result of different economic, societal and political developments the boundaries between the private and the public have blurred with much of the private becoming public (consider the implications of the increasing mediation of our everyday life on Facebook) and the public becoming private (consider the privatization of public physical space or mobile technologies allowing us to work from home). Rosemarie Buikema In the field of gender studies we tend to think in terms of the coconstitution of private and public, nature and culture, feminity and masculinity, gay and straight, indeed. Heterosexual marriage, this seemingly private and romantic affair, has been analysed primarily as a bourgeois phenomenon, an institution to organize property, which gradually became a tool for organizing the boundaries between the public and the private sphere through the ideology of romantic love until feminist coined the term “the private is political” (Hanisch 1969). Second wave feminists claimed that raising children, taking care of husbands and other wage earners is part of the way in which public life is governed within capitalism. Nevertheless the private and the public nowadays seem to function as symbolic domains that are still loaded with gendered connotations. Men take a share in childcare but this care is marked as a “papa-day” and part of men’s legal excuses to miss a meeting or to leave earlier from work. Although legally accessible for women, white men remain the norm in the public sphere. As a sign of privilege men have an easier access to the power of definition then women have. Having to negotiate various exclusionary mechanisms upon entering the public

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sphere, women and ethnic minorities become “space invaders” (Puwar 2004; Leurs forthcoming 2015). Implementing innovations and being authorative in telling the difference between major and minor, is still something women have to fight for. Lies Wesseling I agree, I also think the famous slogan “the personal is political” (Hanisch 1969) still makes a lot of sense today, not only in the light of what I said about women’s difficulties in aligning their family lives with a professional career, but also in view of the ways in which the organization of family life is changing right now under the pressures of globalization and migration. These days, the personal has become geopolitical as the global circulation of care attests: third world mothers economically provide for their families by becoming nannies to families in the third world, children are bought from ‘baby farms’ that accommodate surrogate mothers in India, children from developing regions are adopted (or should we say bought?) by prospective families in the West, transnational migrant families living worlds apart from each other but nevertheless managing to cultivate their family ties through modern digital media, and so on, and so forth. These processes have spurred my interests in “the politics of home” as described by Jan-Willem Duyvendak (2011): the profound contestation of established notions of “home” and “belonging” as a result of the gender revolution in modern western countries and processes of migration and globalization in the world at large. Today, the personal is political in so many more ways than one.

What interventions do feminists make in developing a richer understanding of mediation and technologies? Willy Jansen The interesting work done on gender and technologies, by for example Nelly Oudshoorn and colleagues (Oudshoorn & Pinch 2003; Saetnan et al. 2000), can be carried on much further with the development of new technologies. Basic questions that could be asked of any new technology are: Who designed it for whom and why? Who gains and who suffers from it? How are users transformed by the technologies? Google-glasses, kitchen designs, industrial tools, games, or electric bikes all have a great impact on everyday gender and gender relations, evoking not just technical and social questions but also ethical ones.

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Rosemarie Buikema Feminists are doing so in particular by inserting concepts such as affect, experience and the body in communication, media and technology studies. As Maureen McNeil and Celia Roberts argue (2011), one of the main issues for a feminist approach to technology is the question of the body. How might we theorize the body as lived and/or socially situated in a digitally mediated environment? So indeed, which relationships can be discerned between humans and machines, and which knowledge can be generated concerning the relationship between sex and gender, race and ethnicity, nature and culture? How does technology constructs or produces subjectivity, which processes of in-and exclusion are at stake concerning the accessibility of technology and new media, which ethics are at stake concerning the use of technology, what is a ‘good’ way of using technology in terms of deploying technology for a just and inclusive society? These questions are key to the feminist approach of technology and new media. Lies Wesseling Let me elaborate upon this question with respect to how new “media technologies” are imagined. I think feminist analysis has a lot to offer here, not only by scrutinizing the scripts that inhere in media technologies and the gender bias these scripts often imply, but also by critically analysing who has access to which media where and when. There is so much talk about the globalizing and deterritorializing force of media technologies: media supposedly transform the world into a global village, media supposedly span the globe and bridge the divides between countries and continents. Such sweeping proclamations tend to make us continually forget that the majority of this world’s population does not have any access to modern media, or only limited access at best. New forms of global and local inequalities manifest themselves, appropriately referred to as the “digital divide” operating between information haves: often whites, westerners, and especially elite males and information have-nots: often non-whites, non-westerners, and especially subordinated females. Or rather we should say digital divides as hierarchies operate on the level of ownership, Internet access, literacies, as well as participation in social media applications (Leurs forthcoming 2015). Here, again, it is up to feminist media studies to “raise awareness” of the rather parochial nature of contemporary media technologies, rather than myopically concentrating solely on issues of privacy for Western media users and all that.

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Reflecting over the field, which processes and dynamics are in urgent need of feminist interventions? Lies Wesseling These are the hot topics as far as I am concerned: - The underrepresentation of women in the higher ranking positions in professional organizations and the precarious work-family balance, the responsibility for family life remains unjustly placed on the shoulders of women only - New modes and forms of family life in today’s globalizing world: the geo-politics of home - The digital divide, in its myriad functioning - The new precariat - Ageism: this is a form of discrimination that still goes largely unnoticed and uncriticized. Given the demographic changes we are facing right now in the Netherlands and Europe more broadly, and the social challenges this creates, age studies is a highly topical and urgent field of academic inquiry, with demonstrable roots in and feedback to intersectional feminist studies - Religion, ethnicity, and gender: contrary to what Max Weber predicted a century ago, religion has far from disappeared from modern Western societies. On the contrary, it currently occupies a highly prominent position in public space, partly because of immigration, partly because of the revival of all sorts of religiosity (New Age, aura healing, etc.) within the West. Willy Jansen There are of course a large number of well-known issues where gains have been made but not sufficiently and that therefore merit further attention: uneven access to care, the labour market, human rights, sexual rights, etc. However, there are a few developments that especially demand our attention. One is, what I would call, the impact of corporate globalisation. With industry and trade becoming more and more international, the large corporations gain in power compared to states. The global financial crisis illustrates that corporate banks can force state governments (read ‘you, the taxpayer’) to save them. In terms of gender, this shifting balance of power, can lead to a situation in which politically achieved rights in national legislations can easily be bypassed in an international corporate context. Moreover, it affects what Lies referred to with the notion of “the geopolitics of home.” Another development, also mentioned by Lies, is the power of social media and the growing importance of the digital world.

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How does easy access to porno sites influence sexual experience? How can we safeguard our privacy, our identity, or our right not to be sexualized? Does the digital world amplify or correct gender notions of the real world? These are but a few of the questions that can be asked. Moreover, also questions that previously have been shunned by feminists might be taken up such as about the empowerment or sense of well-being women can derive from religious participation, care work, or sexual submission. How can we do justice to such instances of empowerment while we simultaneously want to address forms of disempowerment through religions, unequal division of labour and sexual abuse? Rosemarie Buikema In times of economic and environmental crises the gender-issue tends to land on the bottom of the political and academic agenda. However, theories of change and analyses of the mechanisms of exclusion are more needed than ever, and not only in Saudi Arabia—where next to access to football arenas, women were allowed to ride a bicycle only this very year as long as they are dressed properly and are accompanied by a male family member. The challenge for feminist theory is to theorize the differences as well as the similarities of such cases in the Middle East and the liberation struggles in the West. We women do drive bikes, cars, busses and trams in the Netherlands. But female professors still not even add up to 15% of the total amount of professors, there’s still an obvious difference in payment between women and men, latent sexism and racism are still hardly recognized etcetera. Indeed, feminism tends to be hijacked by Eurocentric policies and thoughts: ‘we treat our women better than they do.’ For that reason it is important to trace the genealogy between for example Saudi Arabia and the West in terms of a gliding scale of agency and access to the power of definition, a power which as I argued before is still largely connoted as male. Males are in the position to make claims such as ‘we allow our women to ride bicycles, to vote or do this or that.’ Such performative statements are made to function as markers of civilization. As long as women lack the power of definition globally, the work of feminism to contribute to a more just world has only just begun.

What is the future of feminist research praxis? Willy Jansen I am very much looking forward to all the unexpected exciting studies of specific types of gendered praxes young students come up with. The world is so large and there is so much to explore, understand and improve.

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Lies Wesseling However, in order for there to be a future for a feminist research praxis at all, the precarious situation of university personnel needs to be considered within the global context of the increasing precariousness of employment worldwide. The focus should broaden beyond unskilled workers to include aiming to improve the situation of highly skilled, highly educated workers. Future critical, independent research is at risk, if researchers are increasingly subsidized by industries and only hired on a temporary basis. This is not an exclusively feminist, but certainly also a feminist concern: All contemporary employment has become precarious in neo-liberal society, but some employees are more precarious than others. Rosemarie Buikema In spite of the precarious situation of the neoliberal university the future of feminist research praxis is to implement those revolutionary theories which characterize modern critical thought in general and feminist theory in particular. Psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, post-marxism, newmaterialism, we are only beginning to understand the implications of what it means to be critical about the concepts we use and to be accountable for the re-installation of the dichotomies we want to de-stabilize. Re-thinking justice and rebalancing existing power relations is a process of slow but thorough change. That process needs to account for the differences within. That is what Spivak means with “strategic essentialism” (1987, 205). Marginalized groups have to unite and practice solidarity at the level of their being marginalized, but that does not necessarily mean that they are in agreement regarding other dimensions of life. In order for change not to fail in the end, differences need to be mediated in our ongoing search for a productive commonality. As I have attempted to show in all of my work, especially my recent work on the role the arts play in the implementation of transitional justice in post-apartheid South Africa the visual and performative arts as well as literature provides us with scenarios to live solidarity as well as difference. This is what feminist ethics, aesthetics and solidarity should continue working on. Be united where we have to be united without denying and/or forgetting to mediate the differences within.

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McNeil, Maureen and Celia Roberts. 2011. “Feminist Science and Technology Studies.” In Theories and Methodologies in Postgraduate Feminist Research, edited by Rosemarie Buikema, Gabrielle Griffin and Nina Lykke. London; New York, Routledge. Oudshoorn, Nelly and Trevor Pinch, eds. 2003. How Users Matter. The Co-construction of Users and Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Puwar, Nirmal. 2004. Space Invaders. Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. Oxford: Berg. Saetnan Ann, Nelly Oudshoorn and Marta Kirejczyk, eds. 2000. Bodies of Technology. Women’s Involvement with Reproductive Medicine, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Samson, Judith, Willy Jansen and Catrien Notermans. 2013. “Sexual Minorities: Representing the Devil or a Spiritual Gift? Two Opposing Views in the Same Marian Devotion.” Journal of Homosexuality 60(1):31-50. Shiripinda, Iris. 2012. Sex, Hiv and Aids. Practices and Ideas of Zimbabwean Women on Sexuality and Prevention of Infection. PhD diss., Radboud University Nijmegen. Spivak, Gayatri. 1987. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen. Wesseling, Lies. 2012. “‘Like Topsy, We Grow’: The Legacy of the Sentimental Domestic Novel in Adoption Memoirs from Fifties America.” Neo-Victorian Studies 5(1):202-33. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zarzycka, Marta and Bettina Papenburg, eds. 2013. Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics. London: I.B. Tauris.