Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice 9780230118317, 2012010440

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Breaking Feminist Waves Series Editors: LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF, Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center GILLIAN HOWIE , University of Liverpool For the last 20 years, feminist theory has been presented as a series of ascending waves. This picture has had the effect of deemphasizing the diversity of past scholarship as well as constraining the way we understand and frame new work. The aim of this series is to attract original scholars who will offer unique interpretations of past scholarship and unearth neglected contributions to feminist theory. By breaking free from the constraints of the image of waves, this series will be able to provide a wider forum for dialogue and engage historical and interdisciplinary work to open up feminist theory to new audiences and markets. LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF is professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her books include Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self ; The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy (coedited with Eva Kittay); Identity Politics Reconsidered (coedited with Moya, Mohanty, and Hames-Garcia); and Singing in the Fire: Tales of Women in Philosophy. GILLIAN HOWIE is a senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. Her previous work includes Deleuze and Spinoza: Aura of Expressionism; Touching Transcendence: Women and the Divine (coedited with Jan Jobling); Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (coedited with Stacy Gillis and Rebecca Munford); Menstruation (coedited with Andrew Shail); and Gender, Teaching and Research in Higher Education (coedited with Ashley Tauchert). Titles to date: Unassimilable Feminisms: Reappraising Feminist, Womanist, and Mestiza Identity Politics by Laura Gillman Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone edited by Mandy Merck and Stella Sandford Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone? edited by Kimberly Hutchings and Tuija Pulkkinen Femmenism and the Mexican Woman Intellectual from Sor Juana to Poniatowska: Boob Lit by Emily Hind Between Feminism and Materialism: A Question of Method by Gillian Howie Resonances of Slavery in Race/Gender Relations: Shadow at the Heart of American Politics by Jane Flax

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The Many Dimensions of Chinese Feminism by Ya-chen Chen Rousseau in Drag: Deconstructing Gender by Rosanne Terese Kennedy Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice edited by Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, and Fanny Söderbäck

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Undutiful Daughters New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice

Edited by

Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, and Fanny Söderbäck

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UNDUTIFUL DAUGHTERS

Copyright © Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, and Fanny Söderbäck, 2012. All rights reserved. Cover art: 1271–07 © Vicky Colombet First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–11831–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Undutiful daughters : new directions in feminist thought and practice / edited by Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, and Fanny Söderbäck. p. cm.—(Breaking feminist waves) ISBN 978–0–230–11831–7 1. Feminism—History—21st century. I. Gunkel, Henriette. II. Nigianni, Chrysanthi. III. Söderbäck, Fanny, 1978– HQ1155.U547 2012 305.42—dc23

2012010440

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: September 2012 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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C on ten ts

Series Foreword

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Preface: The Society of Undutiful Daughters Rosi Braidotti

ix xxi

Acknowledgments

Part I

New Concepts

Introduction: A Politics of Polyphony Fanny Söderbäck 1

The Future of Feminist Theory: Dreams for New Knowledges Elizabeth Grosz

3

13

2 The Need for the New in Feminist Activist Discourse: Notes Toward a Scene of Anachronism Red Chidgey

23

3 The Interruptive Feminine: Aleatory Time and Feminist Politics Emanuela Bianchi

35

4 Écriture Futuriste M. F. Simone Roberts

Part II

49

New Bodies and Ethics

Introduction: A Politics of Displeasure Chrysanthi Nigianni

65

5

Feminist Extinction Claire Colebrook

71

6

Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water Astrida Neimanis

85

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CONTENTS

7

The Breathing Body in Movement Davina Quinlivan

101

8

Incubators, Pumps, and Other Hard-Breasted Bodies Katie Lloyd Thomas

113

Part III

New Subjectivities

Introduction: A Politics of Visibility Henriette Gunkel 9

Rethinking Sexual Difference and Kinship in Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism Judith Butler

10 Transgenres and the Plane of Gender Imperceptibility Jami Weinstein 11 Primal Scenes, Forbidden Words, and Reclaimed Spaces: Voice, Body, and Poetic Form in Recent South African Writing Gabeba Baderoon 12 Going Gaga: Dissent, Refusal, and Feminism Jack Halberstam

129

141 155

169 183

13 (Un)naming the Third Sex After Beauvoir: Toward a Third-Dimensional Feminism Kyoo Lee

195

List of Contributors

209

Index

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Ser ies For e wor d

Breaking Feminist Waves is a series designed to rethink the conventional models of what feminism is today, its past and future trajectories. For more than a quarter of a century, feminist theory has been presented as a series of ascending waves, and this has come to represent generational divides and differences of political orientation as well as different formulations of goals. The imagery of waves, while connoting continuous movement, implies a singular trajectory with an inevitably progressive teleology. As such, it constrains the way we understand what feminism has been and where feminist thought has appeared, while simplifying the rich and nuanced political and philosophical diversity that has been characteristic of feminism throughout. Most disturbingly, it restricts the way we understand and frame new work. This series provides a forum to reassess established constructions of feminism and of feminist theory. It provides a starting point to redefine feminism as a configuration of intersecting movements and concerns, with political commitment but, perhaps, without a singular center or primary track. The generational divisions among women do not actually correlate to common interpretive frameworks shaped by shared historical circumstances, but rather to a diverse set of arguments, problems, and interests affected by differing historical contexts and locations. Often excluded from cultural access to dominant modes of communication and dissemination, feminisms have never been uniform nor yet in a comprehensive conversation. The generational division, then, cannot represent the dominant divide within feminism, nor a division between essentially coherent moments; there are always multiple conflicts and contradictions, as well as differences about the goals, strategies, founding concepts, and starting premises. Nonetheless, the problems facing women, feminists, and feminisms are as acute and pressing today as ever. Featuring a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, Breaking Feminist Waves provides a forum for comparative, historical, and interdisciplinary

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work, with special attention to the problems of cultural differences, language and representation, embodiment, rights, violence, sexual economies, and political action. By rethinking feminisms’ history as well as their present, and by unearthing neglected contributions to feminist theory, this series intends to unlock conversations between feminists and feminisms and to open up feminist theory and practice to new audiences. —LINDA M ARTÍN A LCOFF AND GILLIAN HOWIE

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Pr eface: The S o cie t y of Undu t if ul Daughter s

One is not born, one becomes an undutiful daughter. Moreover, and depending on one’s theoretical disposition, one can be undutiful to one, three, or a multiplicity of structural and occasional others. Strangely enough, though, it is more difficult and slightly more problematic to be undutiful to two others simultaneously. The oedipal constellation surrounding one’s relationship to two others raises issues and contestations of an altogether different order. Let me start therefore by exploring this numerical sequence of self-others relations and the different forms of dutifulness they may engender. It mostly comes down to zeros and ones. Disloyalty to One is a must for any self-respecting theorist wellread in the classic feminist texts of the second half of the twentieth century. The rule of One—the universalistic standard of the dominant vision of the subject as coinciding with rationality, consciousness, and self-regulating moral agency—has come under fire from the very early days of the second feminist wave right through the successive waves of poststructuralist, postcolonial, punk, queer, and other branches of critical theory. This hegemonic or majoritarian vision of the subject is indexed, as psychoanalysis teaches us, onto a symbolic order that establishes the phallic rule of One—as in the Name-of-the-father—reducing the rest to the status of unrepresentable others; that is to say, to a lack or necessary absence: non-ones. Marxist dialectics, on the other hand, can enlighten us on the necessary and often violent antagonism that opposes One to constitutive binary others. This scheme structures the triangulation between the self, the oppositional others, and the transcendent breaking point of a new order of relations to come. It also institutionalizes a hierarchical system that defines difference as structural pejoration: to be different from means to be worth less than—that is to say, to settle for the position of One Minus.

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Disloyalty to a multiplicity is almost a contradiction in terms and calls for more imaginative forms of sustainable betrayal. As Gilles Deleuze convincingly argues, a nomadic process of becoming de-links difference from both the black hole of symbolic lack and the oppositional dialectics of hierarchical subcategories. It also, however, dissolves any specificity related to actualized identities, thus de-linking One from both transcendent categories and ontological foundations. Nomadism leads to the overcoming of all bounded and steady unitary identities. Multiplicities and process-oriented complex becomings frame a conceptual apparatus that aims at freeing difference from negativity and at unfolding its affirmative potential. Compared to all of the above—that is to say, fractions of One and subtractions of wholes on the one hand, and multiple series on the other—being unfaithful to Two emerges as a singularly difficult challenge. The figure of Two seems to be so systematically deterritorialized that it becomes slippery. Luce Irigaray’s work—especially in the second phase, which is devoted to reconfiguring radical heterosexuality—is the most creative contribution to a different relationship to Two—the sexually differentiated yet multiple space of difference. Thinking about Two rests on what I have called a “virtual feminine,”1 which I set in opposition to Woman as Other-than or different-from; the second sex of the dominant One, which is specularly connected to the same as its devalued Other. Taking off from Irigaray, as the undutiful daughter I have always been, I have defended sexual difference as a political practice, constructed in a non-Hegelian framework. Rejecting negation, I have nomadized difference, stressing the need to work through many differences between, among, and within women.2 Just like Marilyn Frye, I see “differences among women” as being constitutive of the category of sexual difference and not exterior or antithetical to it.3 The sexual politics of this project is clear, albeit complex. For Irigaray, it is about how to identify points of exit from the universal model of Man as the measure of One-ness, toward a radical version of heterosexuality based on the recognition of the specificities of each sexed subject position. More specifically, Irigaray wonders how to elaborate a site, that is to say a space and a time, for the irreducibility of sexual difference to express itself, so that the masculine and feminine libidinal economies may coexist in the positive expression of their respective differences. This positivity is both horizontal/ terrestrial and vertical/celestial, and it entails the (re)thinking through of gender-specific relations to space, time, and the interval between the sexes, so as to avoid polarizing oppositions. Issues of

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“other differences,” notably religion, nationality, language, and ethnicity are crucial to this project and integral to the task of evolving toward the recognition of the positivity of difference. This radically heterosexual project of rethinking the Two, however, is not heterosexist, nor does it imply the dismissal of homosexual love. Elizabeth Grosz, for instance, refers to Irigaray’s advocacy of a “tactical homosexuality modeled on the corporeal relations of the preoedipal daughter to her mother.”4 This mother-daughter bond aims at exploring and reclaiming bodily pleasures and contacts that have been eradicated from conscious memory. It thus becomes a tool for undoing the oedipal plot and allowing women to experiment with different approaches to their morphology and identity formation. That this can be empowering for female homosexual identity is explicitly stated by Irigaray. She argues that radical heterosexuality postulates the need for a female homosexual nucleus: a primary homosexual bond that is required to recompose women’s primary narcissism after it has been badly wounded by the phallocentric symbolic. The recovery of primary narcissism is the ontological foundation for this fundamentally political practice of transformation or autopoietic self-assertion. The other woman—the other of the Other—is the site of recognition of one’s effort of becoming in this special sense of in-depth metamorphosis. This primary narcissism must not be confused with secondary narcissistic manifestations—with which women have been richly endowed under patriarchy. Vanity, the love of appearances, the dual burden of narcissism and paranoia are the signs of female objectification under the power (potestas) of the One. Nor is it per se the prelude to a lesbian position: it simply states the structural significance of love for one’s sex, for the sexual same, as a crucial building block for one’s sense of self-esteem. Whereas under phallogocentrism, the maternal marks the lack or absence of symbolic recognition, in the “virtual feminine” proposed by Irigaray, it can be turned into an empowering and affirmative gesture. In this respect, Irigarary’s Two accomplishes the magical trick of turning non-ones into One-plus or super-ones capable of fecund multiples. We can therefore relax and be dutiful with regard to a virtual feminine as the stepping-stone to a future, multiple Two, while continuing our struggle against maternal despotism and paternal control. All of the above therefore can provide undutiful daughters with rigorous and gratifying grounds to demonstrate the precise scale and intensity of their transgressive undutifulness. The preliminary conclusion I would draw from this is that, considering the variety of

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possible strategies, one actually cannot just become undutiful once and for all. A paradoxical sense of commitment is therefore needed by undutiful daughters in order to actually endure the challenge of their undutifulness. This statement is itself—and rather willfully—loyal to Michel Foucault’s analysis of process-oriented relations of power as being both restrictive and productive, positive and negative, potestas and potentia. Deleuze travels much further down this road and stresses the necessity of pursuing critical theory not as the critique of representation or the struggle for recognition within the logic of Law and Lack, but rather as the actualization of intensities and forces. The point therefore is to practice undutifulness as affirmative politics and to endure in the process.

On the Advantages of Defamiliarization Endurance can be supported by practical strategies. One of the defining features of the undutiful daughters’ mind-set is a productive form of conceptual disobedience. Ever since Adrienne Rich defined the feminist project as a way of being disloyal to one’s civilization, out of love for that same civilization, the transformative aspects of this project require a radical repositioning on the part of the subject, which is neither self-evident, nor free of pain.5 No process of consciousness-raising ever is. Post-structuralist feminism has implemented the methodology of disidentification from familiar and hence comforting values and identities.6 Disidentification involves the loss of cherished habits of thought and representation, a move that can be exhilarating in its liberatory side-effects, but that can also produce fear and a sense of insecurity and nostalgia. Change is certainly a painful process, but this does not equate it with suffering, nor does it warrant the politically conservative position that chastises all change as dangerous. The point in stressing the difficulties and pain involved in the quest for transformative processes is rather to raise an awareness of both the complexities involved—the paradoxes that lie in store—and to develop a nomadic “ethics of sustainability.”7 Changes that affect one’s sense of identity are especially delicate. Given that identifications constitute an inner scaffolding that supports one’s sense of identity, shifting our imaginary identifications is not as simple as casting away a used garment. Psychoanalysis has taught us that imaginary relocation is as complex and time-consuming as shedding an old skin. Moreover, changes of this qualitative kind happen more easily at the molecular or subjective level and their translation

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into a public discourse and shared social experiences is a complex and risk-ridden affair. In a more positive vein, Spinozist feminist political thinkers like Genevieve Lloyd8 and Moira Gatens9 argue that such socially embedded and historically grounded changes are the result of “collective imaginings”—a shared desire for certain transformations to be actualized as a collaborative effort. They are transversal assemblages aimed at the production of affirmative politics and ethical relations. Let me give you a series of concrete examples of how disidentifications from dominant models of subject-formation can be productive and creative. First of all, feminist theory is based on a radical disengagement from the dominant institutions and representations of femininity and masculinity, in order to enter the process of becoming-minoritarian or of transforming gender. In so doing, feminism combines critique with creation of alternative ways of embodying and experiencing our sexualized selves. Secondly, in race discourse, the awareness of the persistence of racial discrimination and of white privilege has led to serious disruptions of our accepted views of what constitutes a subject. This has resulted on the one hand in the critical reappraisal of blackness10 and on the other in radical relocations of whiteness.11 Specifically, I would like to refer to Edgar Morin’s account of how he relinquished Marxist cosmopolitanism to embrace a more “humble” perspective as a European.12 This process includes both positive and negative affects: disappointment with the unfulfilled promises of Marxism is matched by compassion for the uneasy, struggling, and marginal position of postwar Europe, squashed between the United States and the Soviet Union. This produces a renewed sense of care and accountability that leads Morin to embrace a postnationalistic redefinition of Europe as the site of mediation and transformation of its own history, which I discussed above. All these disidentifications occur along the axes of becomingwoman (sexualization) and becoming-other (racialization), and hence remain within the confines of anthropomorphism. A more radical shift is therefore needed to break from the latter and develop postanthropocentric forms of identification. Donna Haraway’s work is fundamental in actualizing this shift. My nomadic theory’s vital geocentrism—the love of Zoe —is a parallel effort in the same direction. Becoming-animal/-earth or becoming-imperceptible are more radical breaks with established patterns of thought (naturalization) and introduce a radically imminent planetary dimension. This anthropological exodus, however, is especially difficult emotionally as well as methodologically. It actually establishes disloyalty to our own human

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species as a practical alliance with nonhuman others. All closeted anthropocentric feminists need to come out at this point and express their dutiful adherence to their own species supremacy. The others can move on and run with the she-wolves of nomadic becoming. The positive benefits aspects of disidentification are epistemological but extend beyond; they include a more adequate cartography of our real-life conditions and hence less pathos-ridden accounts. Becoming free of the topos that equates the struggle for identity changes with suffering, results in a more adequate level of self-knowledge. It therefore clears the grounds for more adequate and sustainable relations to the others who are crucial to the transformative project itself. On the methodological front, de-oedipalizing the relationship to both human and nonhuman others is a form of radical pacifism that sets strong ethical requirements on the philosophical subject. It locates the core of subjectivity in relationality and collaboration, not in aggressive self-assertion. This requires a form of disidentification from a century-old habit of anthropocentric thought and humanist arrogance. Defamiliarization is a sobering process by which the knowing subject evolves from the normative vision of the self he or she had become accustomed to. The frame of reference becomes the open-ended, inter-relational, multisexed, and trans-species flows of becoming by interaction with multiple others. A subject thus constituted explodes the boundaries of humanism at skin level and turns undutifulness into the generous proliferation of complex, internally contradictory, and productive relations. Nonhuman others are therefore no longer the signifying system that props up the humans’ self-projections and moral aspirations. Nor are they the gatekeepers that trace the liminal positions in between species. They have rather started to function quite literally, in a code system of their own. Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of “becoming-animal” expresses this profound and vital interconnection by positing a qualitative shift of the relationship away from species-ism and toward an ethical appreciation of what bodies (human, animal, others) can do. An ethology of forces emerges as the ethical code that can reconnect humans to nonhumans. De-oedipalizing the relationship to nonhuman others is a method of defamilarization that expresses a posthuman bodily materialism and lays the grounds for bio-egalitarian ethics.13

Ode to Dolly, the Undutiful Sheep Let’s take, for example, Dolly the sheep as the main figuration for becoming-animal as the expression of the perverse temporalities and

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contradictions that structure our technological culture. Dolly is that sex which is not one—a collective entity repackaged as a bounded self. She/it is simultaneously the last specimen of her species— descended from the lineage of sheep that were conceived and reproduced as such—and the first specimen of a new species: the electronic and biogenetic sheep that Phillip Dick dreamed of, the forerunner of the android society of Blade Runner. Cloned, not conceived sexually, a heterogeneous mix of organism and machine, Dolly simply changes the name of the game. Severed from reproduction and hence divorced from descent, both the gender and the kinship, Dolly is no daughter of any member of her/its old species—simultaneously orphan and mother of her/itself. First of a new gender, she/it is also beyond gender dichotomies. Her undutifulness defeats our powers of comprehension. A copy made in the absence of one single original, Dolly pushes the logic of the postmodern simulacrum to its ultimate perversion. She/it brings Immaculate Conception into a biogenetic third-century version. The irony reaches a convulsive peak when we remember that Dolly died of a banal and all too familiar disease: rheumatism. After this, to add insult to injury, she suffered a last indignity: taxidermy. She was embalmed and exhibited in a science museum as a scientific rarity (shades of the nineteenth century) and a media celebrity (very twentieth century!). Dolly is simultaneously archaic and hypermodern, she/it is a compound of multiple anachronisms, situated across different chronological axes, she/it inhabits different and self-contradictory time zones. Like other contemporary techno-teratological animals or entities (the onco-mouse comes to mind), Dolly shatters the linearity of time and exists in a continuous present. This techno-electronic timeless time is saturated with asynchronicity—that is to say, it is structurally unhinged. Thinking about Dolly blurs the categories of thought we have inherited from the past—she/it stretches the longitude and latitude of thought itself, adding depth, intensity, and contradiction. Because she/it embodies complexity—this entity that is no longer an animal but not yet fully a machine, is THE philosophical problem of today. Like Dolly the sheep, we need to become nobody’s mother or daughter—machines célibataires (bachelor machines); we must pursue a genealogical line that got us to the point where it is possible for us to think at all. The undutiful antidaughters of unrepresentable mothers and long-dead fathers can mutate into anti-oedipal agents of complex processes of reconfiguring what bodies can do, what the

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task of thinking is, and how we can allow the inhuman elements to emerge productively.

Nomadic Feminisms In conclusion, undutiful daughters of contemporary cognitive capitalism constitute the political branch of complexity theory. Heterogeneity is injected into their practice from the word go and unitary formations get undone accordingly along the way. The “molar” line (that of Being, identity, fixity, and potestas) and the “molecular” line (that of becoming, nomadic subjectivity, and potentia) constitute two dissymmetrical paths. The central challenge nomadic feminism faces is how to undo the gravitational pull toward dualistic thinking, so as to redistribute the power relations rhizomatically, asymmetrically, and unpredictably. The differences in the starting positions are important in that they mark different qualitative levels of power relation. In other words, you can have a becoming-woman that produces Lady Thatcher and one that produces Lady Gaga: neither of whom is “feminine” in any conventional sense of the term, and yet they are as different from each other as the workhorse is from the racehorse. The collapse of the empire of One makes it all the more urgent to reassert sexual difference as the privileged principle of alterity, of notOne as constitutive of the subject, and to elaborate nomadic forms of ethical accountability to match it. What is needed is an ethics of embodied differences that can sustain this challenge: an undifferentiated grammar of becoming simply will not do. Not a minus, not a lack, nomadic feminists are complexity in action. What needs to be abandoned once and for all is the delusional fantasy of unity, totality, and One-ness. To recognize this basic, ego-deflating principle is the ground zero of ethical subject formation. Nomadic subjects are the expression of irrepressible flows of relations and encounters, and hence also affectivity and desire, that they are not in charge of. This humbling experience of radical relationality, which is constitutive of the nonunitary subject, far from opening the doors to relativism, anchors the subject in an ethical bond to alterity, to the multiple and external others that are constitutive of that entity that, out of laziness and habit, we call the “self.” The split, or nonunitary nature of the subject entails the recognition of an affective, interactive entity endowed with intelligent flesh and an embodied mind. What matters here is to keep open the disloyal process of becoming-minoritarian and not to stop at the dialectical role-reversal that usually sees the former slaves in the position of new masters or the

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former mistresses in the position of dominatrixes. The point is to go beyond the logic of reversibility. This is especially important for those social subjects—women, blacks, postcolonial and other “others”— who are the carriers of the hopes of the minorities. The process of becoming nomadic is not merely antiessentialist, but asubjective, beyond received notions of individuality. It is a transpersonal mode, thoroughly undutiful and ultimately collective. Becoming nomadic unfolds by constructing communities where the notion of transience, of passing, is acknowledged in a sober secular manner that binds us to the multiple “others” in a vital web of complex inter-relation. Kinship systems and social bonding, like political agency, can be rethought differently and differentially, moving away from the blood, earth, and origin of the classical social contract. A nomadic politics of becoming-minoritarian is a posthumanist, vitalist, nonunitarian, and yet accountable recomposition of a missing people. A community not bound together by the guilt of shared violence or by unpayable ontological debts, but rather by the compassionate acknowledgment of our shared need to negotiate processes of sustainable transformations with multiple others in the flow of monstrous energy of a “life” that does not respond to our names. You can never therefore be fully and self-assuredly undutiful; you can only go on trying to become undutiful. Faithful to the premise that politics begins with our desires and that desires escape us, are always ahead of us in that they are the driving force that propels us, I want to argue that we need to remain loyal to the process of becoming-undutiful. This is the lucid expression of our paradoxical political passion in the peculiar historical context in which we are trying to make a positive difference. Being children of our times—and not born fully clad and armed for combat from our fathers’ head—we are in love with the changes and transformations we have witnessed in our lifetime. Neither nostalgia nor utopia will do. We rather need a leap forward toward a creative reinvention of life-conditions, affectivity, and figurations for the new kind of subjects that we have already become. In the meantime, we need to live with transitions and processes, in-between states and transformations, lingering within complexities and paradoxes, resisting the fear for the imminent catastrophe. There is consequently little time or space for nostalgia. Deleuze’s hybrid nomadic selves; the multiple feminist-operated becomingwoman of women; Irigaray’s virtual feminine; Haraway’s cyborgs; the overexposed faces of celebrities and the anonymous faceless masses of migrants and asylum-seekers who, not unlike Hélène Cixous’s new Medusa express the transposed differences that constitute our era.

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They are often rendered in the old-fashioned social imaginary as monstrous, hybrid, scary deviants. What if what was at fault here, however, was the very social imaginary that can only register changes of this magnitude on the panic-stricken moralistic register of deviancy? What if these unprogrammed-for others were forms of subjectivity that had simply shrugged off the shadow of binary logic and negativity and moved on? Through becoming-animal, machines, earth—through met(r)amorphoses and meta(l)morphoses—the process of transformation of the feminist subject goes on. So what if the undutiful nomadic daughters look, feel, and sound a bit unusual? What if their texts are disturbing, challenging, and often too dense for the sedentary reading habits of the majority? There is something monstrous, hybrid, and vibrant in the air; dear readers, I feel new ideas coming our way. We just do not know yet what this new corpus can do. ROSI BR AIDOTTI Notes 1. See Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). 2. See Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); and Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 3. Marilyn Frye, “The Necessity of Differences: Constructing a Positive Category of Women,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 21:4 (1996), pp. 991–1010, see especially pp. 1001–1002, 1006–1007. 4. Elizabeth Grosz, “The Hetero and the Homo: The Sexual Ethics of Luce Irigaray,” in Engaging With Irigaray, ed. Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor, and Margaret Whitford (New York: Colombia University Press, 1994), p. 338. 5. See Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976). 6. See Joan Kelly, “The Double-Edged Vision of Feminist Theory,” Feminist Studies 5:1 (1979), pp. 216–227; Teresa De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); and Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects. 7. For a more detailed account of this notion, see Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006). 8. Genevieve Lloyd, Part of Nature: Self-knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).

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9. Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). 10. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imaging Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York and London: Routledge, 1991). 11. Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London and New York: Verso Books, 1992); and Gabriele Griffin and Rosi Braidotti, eds., Thinking Differently: A Reader in European Women’s Studies (London: Zed Books, 2002). 12. See Edgar Morin, Penser l’Europe (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). 13. Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).

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Ack now l ed gmen t s

Many people have contributed to bringing this book into existence. First and foremost, we would like to thank all the authors, who were simply wonderful to work with throughout the various stages of the process. We are grateful to Gillian Howie and Linda Martín Alcoff for their unwavering support of this project; to Brigitte Shull, Maia Woolner, Deepa John, and Joanna Roberts at Palgrave Macmillan for their tireless work in preparing the manuscript for publication; and to the anonymous reader at Palgrave Macmillan for insightful feedback on our book proposal. Great thanks go, as well, to Kristin Cacchioli, Christopher Childs, and Andrew Lomaglio at Siena College for their invaluable assistance with quote checking; and to Michelle Ty for her help with tracking down references for Judith Butler’s chapter. Our gratitude also goes to Vicky Colombet for painting such a beautiful cover image; and to Evi Michalaki for compiling the index. Finally, we would like to thank the four members of our advisory board— Rosi Braidotti, Adriana Cavarero, Julia Kristeva, and Jasbir Puar— who have supported our project from its inception.

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PA R T

I

New Concepts

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Introduction: A Politics of Polyphony Fanny Söderbäck

One of the defining features of the undutiful daughters’ mind-set is a productive form of conceptual disobedience. —Rosi Braidotti1 At its best, feminist theory has the potential to make us become other than ourselves, to make us unrecognizable. —Elizabeth Grosz 2

When the Occupy protesters moved into Zuccotti Park in September 2011, they were met by stubborn silence, followed by widespread complaints about the lack of a unified coherent message. The broad agenda of the movement led to suspicion and frustration on the part of journalists, politicians, and the general public alike, all of whom were concerned that a protest without clearly formulated demands and explicitly defined leadership would be futile at best, mob-like at worst. What, exactly, did these people want? What were their goals? And to whom should such questions be directed? Faced with this demand for coherence, one might respond, as did Jack Halberstam, that “the occupation groups do not need an agenda, their pain and their presence is the agenda. They do not want to present a manifesto, they actually are themselves the manifestation of discontent.”3 But the demand for a unified message and a cohesive voice is symptomatic. We are not sure how to deal with the vague, the multilateral, the horizontal, or the polyphone. A coalition as broad and amorphous as “the 99%” is bound to undo traditional partisan lines and familiar utopian discourse. Its unruliness is seen as a threat, and the only response authorities have been able to muster is unparalleled doses of teargas and pepper spray.

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Criticisms of this sort have often been raised against the feminist generation typically labeled as “third wave” too. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, feminists have, allegedly, been lacking a single cause, and this has made it hard to claim or even identify concrete victories or progress. Our grandmothers (“first wave”) fought for the right to vote, and our mothers (“second wave”) got reproductive rights and equality in the work place, but the agenda of the unruly and undutiful daughters of the third wave has, just like the Occupy movement, been difficult to label in any coherent way.4 This has led to declarations that feminism is dead, that we have entered a “post-feminist” era. It should be noted, however, that “post-feminism” was an expression coined by a women’s literary group as early as 1919.5 Feminism has had to resurrect itself multiple times, and through multiple voices. I am far from the first to point out that this linear/generational wave-model fails to recognize the fact that one feminist voice, with one single agenda, never really existed. There have, arguably, always been a multiplicity of voices, always only feminisms, in the plural. If the second wave—as more recent feminists would have it—was hegemonic in nature and tended to silence or marginalize women and feminists who did not fit the white middleclass hetero mold (queer women, disabled women, poor women, subaltern women, trans women, women who had deliberately rejected motherhood, women of color), those women, albeit marginalized, have of course always offered alternative discourses, critical discourses, discourses from the margins.6 The issue of whose voice gets heard is, nevertheless, a challenge. It always has been. And it remains a challenge for third wave feminists and occupiers alike. In whose voice do we speak, and to whom? What does it mean to speak in one’s own voice? And what spaces are made available for that voice to unfold in? While the Occupy movement lacks a single voice and agenda, the human microphone—a tactic protesters have used to circumvent police bans on electronic amplification of speech in public spaces and that Richard Kim in The Nation calls a “horizontal acoustics of the crowd”7—has brought a new way of speaking to the public sphere. It embodies a conceptual revolution on the level of dissemination, and, more importantly, it energizes people, “amps” us if you will, in that it vocalizes horizontally the collective demand for change. Many are by now familiar with the prompt that sparks public discourse and protest these days: “Mic check! Mic check!” From intellectual superstars such as Slavoj Žižek, Cornell West, and Judith Butler, to community organizers, war veterans, college students, workers seeking to organize, anarchists, and men and women whose homes have been foreclosed—they all speak their message sentence by sentence, echoed by an assembly of people repeating their words,

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5

the sound traveling like rings on the water through the crowds. The human microphone is a concept that turns my voice—our voices—into a mouthpiece for anyone with a message to share. Their voices become my voice, and my voice becomes theirs. And in the process, we are forced to listen, forced to hear each of these voices, one at a time. But what does it mean to speak not of others, not for others, not even with others, but to speak the voice of others? What are the implications of my having to repeat, with my voice, claims and statements with which, sometimes, I may very well disagree? I find myself standing in the middle of a crowd of protestors, hesitatingly repeating words that I find problematic and at odds with my own commitments and views. Am I the one who is speaking, or am I just the tool for amplifying someone else’s words? Do I need to believe in and identify with what I/we say? Should I speak up or remain silent if I do not agree? Or resort to the sign language that has been developed to express silent assent or dissent? Will I be held responsible for what I say? Is the human microphone a powerful tool for maintaining a multiplicity of voices, or does it run the risk of reducing many voices to one? Halberstam puts this last question succinctly: “Is the ‘human microphone’ technique of amplification a brilliant metaphor for the multitude or a sign of the propensity for consensus politics to weed out eccentricities while centering pragmatic and ‘reasonable’ statements?”8 This seems to me a question that all feminists must ask themselves insofar as both feminisms and feminists are many. Can we ever speak in one voice? Is consensus possible? Or even desirable? Does the human microphone have to repeat dutifully, or can it take off on its own paths, undutifully challenging and changing the discourse and its intended course? Might it be a healthy exercise to commit oneself to a movement despite the fact that one does not embrace each and every claim made in the name of that movement? But how can this be done without the appropriating forms of representation Henriette Gunkel speaks of in her introduction later in this volume? How, in other words, can this be done without sacrificing difference and singularity, and without a demand for dutiful unity? To use the trope introduced by Rosi Braidotti in her preface—a trope that lends its name to this entire volume: What would it mean to be undutiful together? What might we accomplish as undutiful daughters so long as we remain committed to this very undutifulness? *

*

*

If no single feminism exists, no book can accomplish the task of mapping feminist voices in any coherent and systematic way. That is,

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therefore, not the task this book sets out to accomplish. If anything, it seeks to highlight the very multiplicity of voices and agendas that are necessarily integral to feminist thought and practice. Its aim is to create an experimental space where feminist voices can be articulated. It is meant as a cartography that reveals the points and the lines where tension and dissent happen and change occurs—a cartography, in other words, that points to the peripheral positions where a permanently undetermined revolution is at work. Our hope is that it will function as a map that traces new tendencies in the existing body of feminist thought while at the same time probing the cracks of the present so as to open up horizons for feminisms-to-come. The essays presented here are thus both responses to and reflections on the specific circumstances of our present, and attempts to dream and envision possible alternatives for the future. To this end, contributors diagnose and discuss issues related to the environmental crisis; reproductive technologies; queer and racialized subjectivities; activist strategies and aesthetic practices; conceptual challenges; transnational alliances; and modes of dealing with our own feminist history and memory. The feminisms and feminists of this collection offer an array of critical analyses and dreams for futures-to-come, just like those who presently occupy public spaces and college campuses around the world present us with a wide range of worries and visions alike. In both cases, it may be hard to identify leaders, to articulate clearly defined solutions or even demands, and to measure victory and progress. But this does not make such projects and protests futile. Rather, it makes them ever more attuned to the complexity and heterogeneity of political life. And just like the occupiers have been forced, in the face of unique circumstances, to reinvent the means for protest and public discourse—as in the case of the human microphone—the contributors of this book are seeking to reinvent the conceptual toolbox so as to be better equipped to deal with and respond to the particular and unique circumstances of our time. *

*

*

In the opening chapter of this book, “The Future of Feminist Theory: Dreams for New Knowledges,” Elizabeth Grosz takes the opportunity to dream. What, she asks, is feminist theory at its best? What is its radical promise? To what can it aspire? It seems appropriate to open a volume like this with a kind of manifesto for the future. If Grosz is right that the possibility of any radical change first and foremost

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INTRODUCTION

7

depends on new concepts, then the conceptual apparatuses developed by the many authors included here (“feminist anachronism,” “aleatory time,” “interruptive time,” “écriture futuriste,” “swervy writing,” “polylectorality,” “feminist extinction,” “hydrofeminism,” “hardbreasted bodies,” “transgenre,” “dandyism,” “shadow feminism,” “gaga feminism,” “the third sex,” “third dimensional feminism,” and so on) have the potential of providing new frameworks not only for thinking through the issues at hand but also for generating a different future. As Grosz puts it, concepts are “what we produce when we need to address the forces of the present and to transform them into new and different forces that act in the future.” But if concepts indeed are the dynamite that can catapult us beyond the current state of affairs, and if concepts, as Grosz puts it, render change possible “by adding incorporeals, immaterials, to the force or weight of materiality,” then how might we as feminists avoid repeating the common trope that equates concepts with masculinity and matter with femininity? How, in other words, might we embrace concepts without reproducing a traditional duality between the abstract and the concrete, form and matter, the ideal and the real—couples that all-too-often have been conceived as running parallel to an imagined dualism between male and female? The essays included in this first section could be seen as attempts to address this very question. The authors gathered here take on central conceptual issues in our culture and give them a feminist face. If Grosz emphasizes the role of concepts in creating the new, Red Chidgey, in her chapter, “The Need for the New in Feminist Activist Discourse: Notes Toward a Scene of Anachronism,” explores the very category of novelty through an examination of feminisms’ relationship to the past and to history. Her text could be seen as resonating with Grosz’s claim that theory and practice must go hand in hand; that practice—in this case, activist voices in feminist zines—needs concepts in order to make change. Chidgey provides a conceptual toolbox that helps us account for the nonlinear genealogy of feminist generations. Her chapter is one of several that treat the very question of political change through a temporal lens, and the concept of time is indeed one that feminist thinkers across the disciplines have grappled with in recent years so as to dislodge it from its patriarchal moors and give it a feminist/feminine face.9 As Grosz puts it in her chapter, questions of time “are no longer the concerns of cosmologists and physicists but also of those committed to social and political change.” Time has always provided the frame in which we are able to articulate both continuity and discontinuity, yet the progressive

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temporal paradigm that we moderns take for granted (linear time, which, I have argued elsewhere, functions through a repression of cyclical time and the material conditions of our existence10) is one that runs the risk both of “forgetfulness” (it does not allow for the “return” into the past that would ground us in history and provide us with continuity) and, at the same time, “repetition” (it simultaneously and paradoxically traps us in the past, foreclosing the possibility of a radical break or the production of “new” horizons). As Tina Chanter has noted, we “need an understanding of processes of social change that accommodates both a sense of continuity with the past and the possibility of and need for discontinuity.”11 This is a dynamic that I take to be one of the important challenges for feminist theory today, and each of the contributors in this section takes on this challenge. Chidgey deliberately seeks to address the tension between past and future feminist horizons. How, she asks, can feminist activist discourse respond to and relate to its own past, and how will such a response come to shape our future? How, in other words, do we negotiate the need for continuity with the desire for discontinuity and change? On her reading, it is through our relation with—and return to—the past that we can articulate new feminist agendas of the present and future. Drawing on examples from British feminist zines, she traces four distinct ways of articulating this tension, all of which fall under the broader category of what she brands “re-feminisms”: reverberation, repudiation, recall, and repetition. Chidgey’s discussion of these four strategies—each of which is an attempt to explain the relationship between continuity and discontinuity—is less concerned with how feminists ought to deal, or how we do deal, with the past of a patriarchal tradition, and more so with how feminists deal (or fail to deal) with our own feminist pasts. The challenge, again, is that of the relationship between continuity and discontinuity—both temporally and in terms of feminist agendas and voices. How can a feminist cultural memory (or feminist cultural memories) form the basis for a politics of transformation? And how can such cultural memory be attentive to the heterogeneity of voices that we call “feminism”? How, in other words, might we build coalitions of solidarity that resist institutionalization; that are driven by a passion for collective productions of unpredictable and untamed “dissident voices” rather than a mass-movement of likeminded feminists? As we have seen already, so long as there is diversity among feminists, and different feminist voices and subjects, feminists will have to be well equipped to deal with such differences in a way that

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9

neither excludes some feminist subjects nor annihilates or collapses the differences between us.12 *

*

*

In her chapter, “The Interruptive Feminine: Aleatory Time and Feminist Politics,” Emanuela Bianchi explicitly tackles the question of time in the context of feminist thought. Again, if time is a concept that traditionally has been associated with male subjectivity and disembodied ideality, Bianchi seeks to articulate time in feminine, corporeal terms. Somewhat surprisingly, she finds her conceptual toolbox in the work of Aristotle, whose discussion of woman as the result of a disruption in the generative process, a force that acts against nature in an unruly way, provides a starting point for her own discussion of feminine time as aleatory and interruptive in nature—a rupture in the smooth flow of masculine/linear/progressive time. What for Aristotle doubtless was meant as misogynist remarks about woman as an evolutionary “error,” Bianchi uses as a resource to establish woman’s disruptive, subversive potential. Women, on this account, are undutiful not only genealogically (vis-à-vis their mothers and fathers), but also more broadly through their most basic relation to time. On Bianchi’s account, discontinuity (interruption) stands at the forefront of a political program of radical change. If we moderns have conceptualized progress and change in terms of masculine/linear time (typically juxtaposed with feminine/cyclical stasis), Bianchi draws from the work of Aristotle an alternative coupling, namely that between continuous cyclical and teleological masculine time, on the one hand, and an aleatory and interruptive (undutiful?) time, marked as feminine, on the other. The latter “offers a non-essential temporal, phenomenological, ethical, and political modality that supplies a vitally necessary resistance” to the masculine narrative of modern progress—a narrative that has casted woman as a passive and atemporal bystander. But Bianchi, too, runs into the challenge of negotiating the tension between discontinuity and continuity: if women indeed represent interruption as a creative force and locus for change, then women’s lives can easily be interrupted and their bodies encroached upon. As Bianchi puts it, “Developing a feminist conception of being as interruptive thus requires a framework for freedom from interruption.” Women’s right to bodily integrity (continuity in relation to their own needs and projects) must therefore be publically recognized and protected under the law. We begin to see the immediate ways in which the conceptual analysis carried through here can come to

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inform more pragmatic concerns such as sexual rights and the legal protection of women and women’s bodies. The aleatory appears, again, in M. F. Simone Roberts’s chapter, “Écriture Futuriste”—this time as a swervy figure, a mode of undutiful writing, disrupting the lexical surfaces of the written text. As the other contributors in this section, Roberts returns to the past in search of the conceptual tools that we might use for renewal and change. More specifically, she returns to the long lost past of the Bronze Age, to Sumer, where to be literate was to read two—gendered— languages. In the royal houses of the city of Emar, the feminine fine tongue Emesal and the masculine princely tongue Emegir together made up the Sumerian language. Feminists in the 1980s, particularly French feminists such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, experimented with what has become widely known as écriture feminine— a unique and poetic writerly style meant to express the specificity of female subjectivity, morphology and desire; of this we might say that they in fact attempted to revitalize an age-long tradition of what Roberts calls polylectorality. The issue, for Roberts, is not only our capacity to speak or write differently, but also our capacity (or, more accurately, incapacity) to read and understand such swervy writing. If the Sumerians were polylectoral, our culture is decidedly monolectoral. We are thus poorly equipped to approach anything other than the linear/philosophical/objective masculine language that has come to largely dominate our discourse. Not only what we say but how we say it matters. We saw this in our discussion of the human microphone. One of the most important conceptual insights reached by feminist thinkers is, as noted above, the inseparability of form and content. Ever since we left the platonic cave, the rigid distinction between form and matter has been heralded as a powerful tool in the hands of patriarchal thinking. Language, philosophy, culture, thought, reason—they have all triumphantly tried to master the unruliness and undutifulness of matter. Such separation has come at the expense of women and women’s bodies: the separation of form and matter (like that of time and space) depends on a sexual division of labor. Feminist thinking is thus often marked by stubborn attempts to collapse such distinctions, to put into question the alleged purity of conceptual thought. Roberts, too, takes on this task, stressing that “the tension between these terms be kept open,” and that language—conceptual language, philosophical language— be allowed to be swervy, impure, embodied, and subjective. But if feminists before her emphasized the need for such experimental writing, Roberts goes one step further, stressing that “the écritures

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produced by feminine writing subjects (men and women) need to be taught, read, and published as legitimate textual practices and as critical methodologies” (my emphasis). It is, in other words, a matter of dissemination, of our capacity to read and to listen, to hear voices other than our own. To bring it back to the discussion with which I opened this introduction, it is as monolectorals that we demand one voice, one message, one agenda. As polylectorals, we might be better equipped not only to deal with experimental writing and voices from the margins, but also to hear many voices at once, sometimes contradicting voices, without imposing a demand for a unified and coherent message. This requires that we listen actively and with patience. Anyone who has participated in an exercise of humanly amplified speech knows that it is a slow and sometimes painstakingly frustrating process. The speech is disseminated through the crowd word by word, sentence by sentence. And while real microphones amplify the sound of one speaker, located in the center, the human microphone reverses this dynamic: at the center stands an individual whose voice is barely audible, while the echo created by the crowd—a crowd that grows larger the further we move from the center—intensifies and can reach deafening volumes at the periphery. On this model, amplification happens on the margins, not in the center. The aim of this book is to gather polyphonic feminist voices from our present. We ask the reader to approach them polylectorally and with attentive patience, putting aside for a moment the demand for a unified coherent message and voice. Such is the task of an undutiful feminism. Such is the task of feminisms-to-come. Notes 1. Rosi Braidotti, “The Society of Undutiful Daughters,” p. xii in this volume. 2. Elizabeth Grosz, “The Future of Feminist Theory: Dreams for New Knowledges,” p. 22 in this volume. 3. Jack Halberstam with Jayna Brown, “Riots and Occupations: The Fall of the US and the Rise of The Politics of Refusal,” October 19, 2011, http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com, accessed on February 10, 2012. 4. For an illuminating discussion of the familial/generational language that tends to mark our discourse on the feminist “waves” of the last century (grandmother—mother—daughter), see Astrid Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). Henry borrows the term “matrophor” from Rebecca Dakin Quinn to illustrate “the persistent nature of maternal metaphors in feminism” (2).

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5. Nancy F. Scott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 282. 6. Think, for example, of Celestine Ware, who already in 1970 (in her book Woman Power) challenged the then emerging second wave to address not only racism in general, but also its own internal racist tendencies. See Leslie L. Heywood, ed., The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism, vol. 1 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), p. 136. 7. Richard Kim, “We Are All Human Microphones Now,” The Nation, October 3, 2011, http://www.thenation.com/blog/163767/we-are -all-human-microphones-now, accessed on December 23, 2011. 8. Halberstam, “Riots and Occupations.” 9. See, for example, Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002); Tina Chanter, Time, Death, and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion (New York: Routledge, 1995); Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); and, most recently, Christina Schües, Dorothea E. Olkowski, and Helen A. Fielding, eds., Time in Feminist Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 10. See Fanny Söderbäck, “Revolutionary Time: Revolt as Temporal Return,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37:2 (2012), pp. 301–324. While time and change by no means are identical (the relationship between the two has indeed been disputed among philosophers since Aristotle), I hold that they are interdependent and that we can only conceive of (social and political) change in light of a discussion of time. Grosz has argued that a politics of change depends on a reconsideration of and an attention to the question of time: “The more clearly we understand our temporal location as beings who straddle the past and the future without the security of a stable and abiding present, the more mobile our possibilities are, and the more transformation becomes conceivable” (Grosz, The Nick of Time, p. 14). 11. Chanter, Time, Death, and the Feminine, p. 22. 12. For a succinct discussion of this very challenge, see Lori J. Marso, “Feminism’s Quest for Common Desires,” Symposium 8:1 (2010), pp. 263–269.

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CH A P T ER

1

The Future of Feminist Theory: Dreams for New Knowledges Elizabeth Grosz

Instead of asking questions such as, what will feminist theory become in the future? how will it change? or how will it remain the same? I want to address here a series of questions regarding what feminist theory could be, or what I dream a future feminist thought should be: what is feminist theory at its best? What is its radical promise? How is it to be located relative to other fields of knowledge, to the range and variety of interests of women understood in all their differences, and to what remains unsaid, unspoken, and unrepresented in other knowledges? To what, in short, can feminist theory aspire?

Concepts In What Is Philosophy?, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari ask, what is it to think? What is philosophy? What is a concept? In addressing the question of what feminist theory is, and what it could become, we need to understand first what theory in general is and might become. Deleuze and Guattari’s work is, if not indispensable, then at least extremely useful: they enable us to understand that concepts and theories are strategies, struggling among themselves with forces and effects that make a difference, that are significant beyond themselves insofar as they become techniques by which we address the real. In exploring what feminist theory is, I am primarily addressing the question of what it is to think differently, innovatively, in terms that have never been developed before, about the most forceful and impressive impacts that impinge upon us and

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that concepts can address, if not resolve or answer. Concepts are one of the ways in which we come to address and attempt to deal with the overabundance of order that surrounds us; other ways include the functive, which orders science, and percepts and affects, which organize the arts. Concepts emerge, have value, and function only through the impact of problems, problems generated from an absolute outside, from the real. Concepts are not solutions to problems—most problems, like the problem of gravity, of living with others, or that of mortality, have no solutions—but ways of living with problems. They are the production of immaterial forces that line materiality with incorporeals, potentials, latencies: concepts are the virtualities of matter, the ways in which matter can come to be otherwise, the promise of a future different from the present.1 Concepts are ways in which the living add ideality to the world, transforming the givenness of the real, the pressing problem, into various forms of order, into possibilities for being otherwise. Concepts are practices we perform, not on things, but on events to give them consistency, coherence, boundaries, purpose, and use. Concepts do not solve the problems that events generate for us: they enable us to surround ourselves with possibilities for being otherwise, which the direct impact of events on us does not. So concepts are not answers or solutions—we tend to think that solutions eliminate problems when in fact the problem always coexists with its solutions—but modes of address, modes of connection: they are “movable bridges” between those forces that relentlessly impinge on us from the outside to form a problem and those that we can muster within ourselves to address such problems.2 This is why concepts are created: they have a date and often, also a name; they have a history that seizes hold of them in inconsistent ways, making of them new concepts with each seizure and transformation insofar as each concept has borders that link it up to and evolve it with other concepts. Perhaps most interestingly, concepts cannot be identified with discourses or statements, which means that concepts can never be true. Truth is a relation between propositions and states of affairs in the world; concepts are never propositional because they address, not states of affairs, but only events, problems. Events are, by definition, problems, insofar as they are unique, unrepeatable conjunctions of forces that require some kind of response under peril of danger. For Deleuze, one of the mistakes of institutional philosophy is to collapse the concept into the proposition, to assert questions of truth in place of questions of force.3

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We need concepts in order to think our way in a world of forces that we do not control. Concepts are not means of control, but forms of address that carve out for us a space and time in which we may become capable of responding to the indeterminate particularity of events. Concepts are thus ways of addressing the future, and in this sense are the conditions under which a future different from the present—the goal of every radical politics—becomes possible. Concepts are not premonitions, ways of predicting what will be; on the contrary, they are modes of enactment of new forces; they are themselves the making of the new. The concept is what we produce when we need to address the forces of the present and to transform them into new and different forces that act in the future. It is an excess over matter that enables matter to become other. The concept is indispensable to addressing the new, not through anticipation or forecasting but through the task of opening up the real, the outside, or materiality that it performs. The concept is thus the friend of all those seeking radical social change, new events, and new alignments of forces. The concept does not accompany revolutionary or radical change (change must be accomplished in its own terms, in the field or territory in which it functions) but renders it possible by adding incorporeals, immaterials, to the force or weight of materiality. Materiality does not contain this incorporeal, which lines its surfaces or facets, but they (matter plus the incorporeal) are its virtualities or the possibility of becoming-other. The concept is how living bodies, human bodies—male and female bodies of all types— protract themselves into materiality and enable materiality to affect and transform life. The concept is one way in which life attaches itself to forces immanent in but undirected by the present. Along with the percept and the affect, the concept is how we welcome a people to come, a world to come, a movement beyond ourselves rather than simply affirm what we are. In short, theory is never about us, about who we are. It affirms only what we can become, extracted as it is from the events that move us beyond ourselves. If theory is conceptual in this Deleuzian sense, it is freed from representation—from representing the silent minorities that ideology inhibited (subjects), and from representing the real through the truths it affirms (objects)—and it is opened up to the virtual, to the future that does not yet exist. Feminist theory is essential, not as plan or anticipation of action to come, but as the addition of ideality or incorporeality to the horrifying materiality of the present as patriarchal, racist, and ethnocentric, a ballast to enable the present to be transformed.

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The Force of Concepts Feminist theory is the production of concepts relevant to understanding women, femininity, and social subordination more generally, and that welcome women’s transformation beyond or at the very limits of those concepts that have defined men, women, and their relations up to now. Both patriarchal and feminist theory, each in their different ways, address an intractable problem, the problem of sexual difference, the problem of morphological bifurcation, the production of two different types of bodily form, and consequently two different types of subjectivity, two different types of being that cannot be understood through or reduced to a singular, universal, or purely human model. This is a problem that every society, however small (whether human or animal), must face—an ongoing event that cannot be evaded but for which there is no solution. How the two sexes are to coexist is a question that life itself, in its unpredictable variability, addresses without universal solutions, for it is one of the pressing frameworks (along with birth, illness, and mortality) that every society must manage if it is to continue. Sexual difference is managed in two contrary ways through patriarchal and feminist conceptualizations: for patriarchy, the task is to ensure a certain or guaranteed precedence of masculinity and male privilege even as sexual difference remains open-ended and to be resolved or lived through various strategies. For feminism, the task is to seek either a more equitable distribution of resources between men and women (for liberal and Marxist feminism) or the possibility of dual sexual symmetry entailed through an acknowledgement of sexual difference. Each is a contestatory relation, a struggle that attempts to bind or unbind certain forces through the elaboration of concepts that singularize, specify, and surround these forces. Each struggles to generate concepts that bring into existence a future that serves its interests. Patriarchy and feminism, however, are not two protagonists in an evenly matched struggle, for feminism is the very excess and site of the transformation of patriarchy. Their relations are more discontinuous, open-ended, and intertwined, each calling into existence its own constituencies, its own future peoples, and its own landscape of events without direct reference to one another. Whether patriarchal, racist, colonialist, or otherwise, theory is one means by which we invent futures, one intense practice of production (like art, economic production, or many other kinds of labor) that makes things—in this case, concepts—that did not exist before, thus opening up worlds to come. This is not a privileged production

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(indeed, within capitalism, its value is quite minimal), but it is nevertheless a necessary condition for the creation of new horizons of invention. Theory is by no means the only path to social change but remains a necessary condition for the creation of new frameworks, new questions, new concepts by which social change can move beyond the horizon of the present. Although struggles at the level of practice are obviously crucial for the accomplishment of social change, without concepts—concepts that both face materiality and extract from it some of its uncontained force, while providing us with a minimal order with which to address and frame it for our purposes—we have no horizon for the new, no possibility of overcoming the weight of the present, no view of what might be. Without concepts, without theory, practice has no hope; its goal is only reversal and redistribution, not transformation.

The New At its best, feminist theory is about the invention of new practices, positions, projects, techniques, and values. Feminist theory must understand and address what is and has been in attempting to preapprehend and control what might come into being; to that extent, feminist theory is committed to critique, that is, the process of demonstrating the contingency and transformability of what is given. There needs to be a production of alternatives to patriarchal (racist, colonialist, ethnocentric) knowledges and also, more urgently and less recognized, a freedom to address, make, and transform concepts, so that we may invent new ways of addressing and opening up the real, new types of subjectivity, new relations between subjects and objects. To be more explicit, the emphasis feminist theory places on certain questions needs to be reoriented and directed to other concerns. I do not want to suggest that these questions are useless, for each has had and will continue to have its historical significance for feminist thought; rather, I would like to see their dominance of the field end, and new questions be asked. There are four areas of feminist concern that I believe it would be good now to displace in favor of other issues, other inquiries: 1. The overwhelming dominance, even among those who lament its existence, of identity politics; the concern with questions of the subject’s identity, experiences, feelings, affects, agency, and energies. The multiplication of subject positions; the opening up of the subject to all the vagaries of a hyphenated existence as class, race, gender, and

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sexually specific being; the proliferation of memoirs; the overwhelming emphasis on the personal; the anecdotal; the narrational—while important for a long period of feminism’s existence, they have now shown us the limit of feminist theory. To the extent that feminist theory focuses on questions of the subject or identity, it leaves questions about the rest of existence untouched. Feminism abdicates the right to speak about the real, about the world, about matter, about nature, and in exchange cages itself in the reign of the “I”: who am I? Who recognizes me? What can I become? This focus on the primacy of the subject has obscured two issues. One relates to what constitutes the subject that the subject cannot know about itself (the limits of the subject’s subjectivity; the content and nature of the agency or agencies that we can attribute to a subject). The other relates to what is beyond the subject, bigger than the subject, outside the subject’s control. The subject does not make itself or know itself. The subject seeks to be known and recognized, but only through its reliance on others, including the very others who function to collectively subjugate the subject. We need to ask with more urgency now than in the past, if the subject strives to be recognized as a subject of value in a culture that does not value that subject in the terms it seeks, what is such recognition worth? And once the subject is recognized, what is created through this recognition? In focusing on the subject at the cost of the forces that make up the world, we lose the capacity to see beyond the subject, to engage with the world, to make the real. We wait to be recognized instead of making something, inventing something that will enable us to recognize ourselves, or more interestingly, to eschew recognition altogether. I am not what others see in me; I am what I do, what I make. I become according to what I do, not according to who I am. This is not to ignore the very real differences between subjects and their various social positions, only to suggest that these differences, and not the subjectivities between which these differences are distributed, are the vehicles for the invention of the new. It is the inhuman work of difference, rather than its embodiment in human identity, subjectivity, consciousness, its reflection in and through identity, that may direct a future feminism. We may become more interested in those differences that make us more than we are, recognizable perhaps for a moment in our path of becoming and self-overcoming, but never fixed in terms of how we can be read (by others) or how we classify ourselves, never on the basis of an identity or a position. Instead of seeing difference as the external and

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preconfigurable relation between two distinct objects or things, difference in itself must be considered primordial, as a nonreciprocal emergence, that which underlies and makes possible all identities. As Deleuze claims, Instead of something distinguished from something else, imagine something which distinguishes itself—and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it. Lightning, for example, distinguishes itself from the black sky but must also trail it behind, as though it were distinguishing itself from that which does not distinguish itself from it.4

Difference is the point at which determination (the lightning) meets the undetermined (the black sky). This difference in itself is continually subjected to mediation, restructuring, or reorganization—to a neutralization—and identified with entities or things. Whatever identity there may be—lightning has the most provisional and temporary form—difference is that movement of self-differentiation, that movement of internal differentiation that separates itself from the difference that surrounds and infuses it: difference produces its own differentiations from the undifferentiated. 2. Linked to the preeminence of the subject is the privileging of the epistemological (questions of discourse, knowledge, truth, and scientificity) over the ontological (questions of the real, of matter, of force, or of energy). Epistemology is the field of what we, as knowing, suitably qualified subjects, can and do know of the objects we investigate, including those objects that are themselves subjects. Thus it makes sense that in a politics of intellectual struggle, epistemological questions have prevailed, and have come to displace or cover over ontological questions. The whole of twentieth-century thought has followed this trajectory—the translation of (metaphysical) questions about the real into (epistemic) questions of the true—which is also a translation of the categories relevant for the object into those concerned with the subject. Feminist theory needs to turn to questions of the real—not empirical questions regarding states of affairs (for these remain epistemological), but questions of the nature and forces of the real. This means that, instead of further submersion in the politics of representation, in which the real can only ever be addressed through the lens imposed on it by representation in general and language in particular, where ontology is always mediated by epistemology, we need to reconsider representational forces in their impact on the

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mediation of the real. We need to reconceptualize the real as forces, energies, events, impacts that preexist and function both before and beyond, as well as within, representation. This opens us up to a series of new questions and new objects for feminist interrogation: not just social systems but also natural systems; not just concrete relations between real things but also relations between forces and fields; not just economic, linguistic, and cultural analysis but also biological, chemical, and physical analysis; not just relations between the past and present but also between the present and the future. 3. Feminist theory needs to affirm, not the human subject and what it knows, but rather what is inhuman in all its rich resonances. This is entailed in the very idea of difference itself. The concept of difference, ironically, links together various categories of subject, various types of identity, all of them human, not through the elaboration of a shared identity but through the variation or difference that the human, in all its modalities, asserts in differentiating itself from the inhuman, that is, both the subhuman (the material, organic, and living worlds) and the superhuman (the cultural, the collective, the cosmic, and the supernatural). This perspective, which inserts cultural and political life in the interstices between two orders of the inhuman—the pre-personal and the impersonal—provides a new framework and connection, a new kind of liberation for the subject, who understands that culture and history have an outside, are framed and given position only through the orders of difference that structure the material world. A future feminism needs to place the problematic of sexual difference, the most fundamental concern of feminist thought, in the context of both animal becomings (we have tended to oppose culture to nature, to see culture as variable and nature as fixed) and the microscopic and imperceptible becomings that regulate matter itself. Sexual difference—the bifurcation of life into at least two morphological types, two different types of body, two relations to reproduction, two relations to sexuality and pleasure, two relations to being and to knowing—is not only our culture’s way of regulating subjects, it is the way in which the dynamic natural world has generated a mechanism for the production of endless difference. Sexual difference is an invention of life itself, which the human inherits from its prehuman past and its animal connections. We have devoted much effort to the social, cultural, representational, historical, and national variations in human relations. We now need to develop a more complex and sophisticated understanding of the ways in which natural forces—both living and nonliving—frame,

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enrich, and complicate our understanding of the subject, its interior, and what the subject can know. In other words, feminism needs to direct itself to questions of complexity, emergence, and difference that the study of subjectivity shares with the study of chemical and biological phenomena. We need to understand in more explicit terms how newness and change are generated, and what mechanisms are available below or above the level of the social to explain the unpredictability of social and political change. These are no longer just the concerns of cosmologists and physicists but also of those committed to social and political change. 4. Finally, perhaps the very notion of separate forms or types of oppression, or the notion that various forms of oppression are recognizable, systematic, and distinct needs to be reconsidered. I certainly do not want to suggest that there is no such thing as oppression, but I would like us to reconsider the terms by which this is commonly understood. Oppression is made up of myriad acts, large and small, individual and collective, private and public: patriarchy, racism, classism, ethnocentrism are all various names we give to characterize a pattern among these acts, a discernable form. I am not suggesting that patriarchy and racism don’t exist and don’t have mutually inducing effects on all individuals, just that they are not structures, not systems, but immanent patterns, models we impose on a plethora of acts to create some order. What exists, what is real, are these teaming acts—the acts of families, of sexual couples, of institutions and the very particular relations they establish between experts and their objects of investigation: the acts of teachers and students, or doctors and patients. Patriarchy, racism, and classism are the labels we attach, for the sake of convenience, a form of shorthand, to describe the myriad acts that we believe are somehow systematically connected. Patriarchy is not a self-contained system that can be connected to the self-contained system that is racism to form an intersectional oppression: there are only a multiplicity of acts, big and small, significant and insignificant. If we understand that this multiplicity configures in unique ways for each individual, yet enables shared patterns to be discerned for those who share certain social positions, then we will not confuse these acts for a latent order or, worse, for a coercive system. Instead, we will be able to see, not just how socially marginalized groups are discriminated against, but the agency and inventiveness, the positive productivity that even the most socially marginalized subjects develop or invent through the movements they utilize and the techniques that their marginalization enables them

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to develop. Perhaps there are only differences, incalculable and interminable differences for us to address; no systems, no identities, no intersections—just the multiplying force of difference. Race, class, gender, and sexuality—although they appear as static categories and, of course, are capable of conceptually freezing themselves through various definitions for various purposes, are precisely such differences that cannot be determined in advance. What an intersectional analysis means for, say, a poverty-stricken woman in Sri Lanka, or a working class lesbian in Japan, or a single mother in Nigeria remains to be determined, and it is wishful thinking on the part of the analyst or activist to believe that these differences can be represented by first-person voices, or measured by any “objective” schemas (no voice ever represents a group, category, or people without dissent, and no categories are so clear-cut and unambiguous that they can be applied willy-nilly without respect for the specific objects of their investigation). In a future feminist theory, we may no longer look inward to affirm our own positions but outward, to the world, and to what we don’t control or understand in order to expand, not confirm, what we know, what we are, and what we feel. Feminist theory can become the provocation to think otherwise, to become otherwise. It can be a process of humbling of the pretensions of consciousness to knowledge and mastery and a spur to stimulate a process of opening oneself up to the otherness that is the world itself. At its best, feminist theory has the potential to make us become other than ourselves, to make us unrecognizable. Notes 1. “The concept is an incorporeal, even though it is incarnated or effectuated in bodies” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], p. 21). 2. Ibid., p. 23. 3. Concepts, unlike propositions, move, change, and transform—that is why they do not form systems or have forms of truth: “Concepts are centers of vibrations, each in itself and every one in relation to all the others. This is why they all resonate rather than cohere or correspond with each other” (ibid.). 4. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 28.

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CH A P T ER

2

The Need for the New in Feminist Activist Discourse: Notes Toward a Scene of Anachronism Red Chidgey

There is nothing as inevitable as declarations of “the new” in feminist activist discourse. Whether across or within generations, this strategy partakes in hybrid logics of post-feminism and grassroots agendas. In an attempt to mobilize, these “new feminisms” often claim innovative and historically specific materialisms, agendas, and identities, whilst unconsciously disseminating a usually atrophied understanding of feminist histories past.1 The purpose of this chapter is to rethink feminist claims to the new through the lens of cultural memory. Drawing on excerpts from feminist zines—self-produced, noncommercial, photocopied publications—this chapter develops a concept of what I will call a “scene of anachronism.” This creative strategy seeks to traverse the current impasse concerning “third wave feminism,”2 and to re-read British feminist activisms across established time-lines.

Feminism and Other Anachronisms Anachronism, derived from the Greek ανά (ana: up, against, back, re-) and χρόνος (chronos : time), refers to a rupture in the chronological order. It is a term that can be used when (and where) something— a mode of utterance, an artefact, a behavior, a being, or an event—is outside of its assumed historical reference. As an adjective, to be anachronistic implies an old-fashionedness that is out of step with

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the present. This assumed taboo and embarrassment carries a certain attachment to feminism. In repeated cycles from early to present surges of Western feminisms, advances in women’s rights have been met with the anachronistic claim that feminism is dead, or no longer needed.3 Even feminist narratives of loss, progress, and return commonly feature “the paradoxical positioning of feminism itself as over, or as anachronistic.”4 Analytically, the anachronism names “a range of temporal anomalies” as opposed to the “regular, linear, and unidirectional pattern” of straight time.5 Recalling Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida’s “methodological and political attention to undecidability,”6 the anachronism can be used to rethink feminism’s frame of reference and epistemic commitments.7 As Michael Rothberg puts it: “Although forms of anachronism constitute different types of ‘error’ when perceived from a historicist perspective, they can also be powerfully subversive and demystifying in the ways that they expose the ideological assumptions of historicist categorization.”8 To propose a scene of anachronism, therefore, is to think through the assemblages of who and what gets remembered, forgotten, revived, and reclaimed—in what times and places—and of the inherent power-lines that amplify such discursive practices. Such strategies have already been explored in feminist scholarship, including reading “queer tendencies” in the women’s peace camp held at Greenham Common, United Kingdom (1981–2000); mapping “third wave” praxis in the activities and politics of the British 1970s feminist theater troupe Sistershow; and comparing similar textual strategies in suffragette scrapbooks, women’s liberation movement periodicals, and contemporary feminist zines.9 A strategy of anachronism has also been used to reread second wave activism and theory, to critique hegemonic narratives, and to generate more racially diverse activist chronologies.10 I propose a scene of anachronism that can be used in five ways. First, for interpreting convergences between generations (whether deemed politically progressive or not). Second, to clarify socio-politicaltechnical changes and the ways in which feminists have responded to and appropriated these, especially with regards to “new” as well as residual forms of media, technologies, and hybrid articulations thereof (such as zines in a digital age). Third, to identify and deconstruct discourses proscribing feminism as being “out-of-date” (anachronistic to the present). Fourth, to pay attention to how feminists seize past moments and figures to activate their present moments, and what this indicates about the production and economy of feminist cultural

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memory. And finally, fifth, to encourage leaps in our political imaginations to flesh out a fuller feminist historical consciousness.

Re-Feminisms In tracking discourses of the new in mainstream media and feminist activism, an interesting temporal theme may be identified. From conferences provocatively titled “Re-branding Feminism,” to art activists such as the Guerilla Girls, who tag their cultural work as “reinventing feminism,” to the heading of the recent book Reclaiming the F-Word: The New Feminist Movement,11 a symptom of the current moment is the temporal politics of the “re”: rebranding, reinventing, and reclaiming. Etymologically, “re” is a prefix coming from the Latin “again, back, against” and meaning “back to the original place, again.” Such a temporal framing implies a repetition and a backward motion, as well as a fantasy of origins or cohesion. It has reverberations with the notion of anachronism, which means “up, against, back, re-time.” There is of course a “perpetual ‘re’ for things feminist.”12 It has long been the work of feminists to recover, reclaim, rebuild, rewrite, and rethink social, cultural, political, and economic structures to put women center stage—whether in historiography, literature, the arts, political representation, business, or other fields. In her early 1970s article “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” Adrienne Rich expresses a sentiment about canon revisioning that can be applied more broadly to the task of feminism: “Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.”13 Contemporary “re-feminisms” are also an act of survival, but now the old text, the referent, has become the idea of feminism itself. The re-feminisms of our time are enmeshed within post-feminist logics (trying to sidestep the stereotypes of feminism, for example), even as they aim for the undoing of post-feminism and the continuation of a political feminist project in the present. Just how these dynamics work—how they unfold the “happening again” of feminist identity and contestation—will now be examined with reference to four UK zines: Riot Girl London; Trans-Feminism: Exploring the Connections Between Feminism and Transgender ; Shape & Situate: Posters of Inspirational European Women; and Race Revolt. These issues will be addressed through four scenarios, each treated in a section of this chapter: reverberation, repudiation, recall, and repetition. Reverberation (from the Latin re [back] and verberāre [to whip,

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lash]) considers how feminist discourse often incorporates rhetoric and images of the antifeminist “backlash” within its own systems of intelligibility; repudiation provides a category of analysis for how feminist dissent, rejection, and disavowal (and attempts at coalition) are managed within feminism’s own ranks; recall speaks to how feminists draw on aspects of the past in order to re-invigorate and legitimize struggles in the present; and repetition speaks symptomatically of the anxiety within feminist movements of duplicating past oppressions by feminists. Within each scenario, we can examine aspects that are brought to the fore and aspects that are disarticulated or suppressed.

R EV ER BER ATION : Feminism as Rumor Our first scenario takes place in an article written by a teenage girl, Sophie Lawton, in the 2001 issue of Riot Girl London —a collective zine, published between 2000 and 2002, for a feminist group of the same name. The mission of the group, according to the publication’s editorial, was “to bring young feminists together to form friendships and to spread a grrrl positive message.”14 The content of the 2001 zine includes articles on street abuse, women in art, women in Iran, radical menstruation products, the Guerilla Girls, Riot Grrrl, and an interview with Natasha Walter, the author of The New Feminism.15 Lawton’s article, entitled “grateful?” begins: “How often do you think about what women in the past have done for us? Are you grateful? I know I am.”16 The author proceeds to discuss the achievements of the first wave, women’s role in the Second World War and the context of the 1970s feminist movement, before criticizing the lack of women’s history taught in school. She writes: “All I got was two half-hearted lessons on the crazy, violent vandals that were the suffragettes.”17 In a tongue-in-cheek move elsewhere in the zine, some myths of feminism are then laid out by Lawton and Clair Gilbert, including accusations that feminists are man-haters, bra-burners, unshaven, lesbians, angry, violent, and humorless. In turn, feminists are cited as being justifiably angry; embodying a range of sexualities, genders, and body types; seeking equality; and being human in their emotions. In response to the particular accusation that feminists are angry bra-burners, the authors note that this was only so “at a one-off event that happened in the early 70’s,” and suggest that we should “Get over it!”18 This appeal to cultural memory may get the date wrong (braburning is an event commonly associated with the 1968 Miss America pageant), but it is, more importantly, worth noting that bra-burning never actually happened at all. What did happen was that The New

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York Post ran the headline “Bra Burners and Miss America,” associating radical feminism with the burning of draft cards during the Vietnam war, and a myth was born.19 This myth then crystallized into one of the most persistent misconceptions of Western feminism today. What actually took place at the pageant was that women dumped their bras into a “freedom trash can” with other props of restrictive femininity such as high heels and women’s magazines. The way in which the bra-burning myth has traveled across geographical and generational boundaries speaks to the strength of cultural memory and the iterability of mainstream media. The eventual revisionism of the 1968 pageant, its stickiness and subsequent misrepresentation, demonstrates how backlash discourses are incorporated into feminists’ archive of meaning: reiterated, mutated, and passed on (even if disavowed for their antifeminist sentiments). The production of feminism as rumor and reverberation conceptualizes the texture of feminist transmission of knowledge and the ways in which contemporary feminist pasts can be productively assembled through (antagonistic) mainstream and cultural discourses. This process demonstrates that antifeminist backlash discourses are far from ontologically distinct from profeminist discourses, and that they are culturally mediated entanglements producing hybrid articulations, re-articulations, and disarticulations of feminist identity.

R EPU DI ATION : Feminism as Radical Break Much has been written about the third wave’s presumed break with the politics and limitations of second wave feminisms around issues such as sex, transphobia, and racism.20 An example of such a break appears in the zine Trans-Feminism. Published in 2008 by the Feminist Activist Forum (F.A.F.), this zine includes contributions from transgendered, cisgendered, and gender-queer authors mostly in their 20s.21 The zine features discussions about sex binaries, being a trans ally, transphobia and gender myths as well as a trans-feminism manifesto and a glossary of terms. One article, titled “Reclaiming Gender: On building coalition between ‘Reclaim the Night’ and Trans activism,” details tensions between activist groups around the women-born-women policies of the London Reclaim the Night march.22 In this article, Cassandra Smith discusses a queer counter-protest of women in drag that took place at the 2007 Reclaim the Night event: Come the march, the Queer Bloc, and, in particular the F. A. F. member who had initiated the idea of a “Reclaim the Night” march was

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heckled and booed by other marchers . . . and denounced by one of the speakers . . . as a “F***king Idiot.” The spat that broke out at the march is symptomatic of the intensity of feeling and the potential for conflict inherent to the issue, one where the tensions running between second and third wave feminisms on a rhetorical level are seen to publicly and violently surface.23

Two things are illustrative in this excerpt. First, the reminder that re-feminisms (in Rich’s sense) constituted an activist strategy during the second wave, as epitomized in the idea of Reclaim the Night, that sought to consolidate en masse a woman’s right to feel safe and free from violence as she moves through the streets.24 Second, differing feminist paradigms are not presented here as a neat generational schism, but rather as a matter of theory and tactics. What the author identifies as usually playing out on the “level of rhetoric”—where the second wave is commonly associated with essentialism and the third wave with queer deconstruction—is repositioned as an embodied scenario and an effect of transgenerational ideologies (or, as “waves” co-existing). Since women of different ages organize and attend the annual Reclaim the Night march in London, this article cannot be about pitting the “new” or “young” feminists against “old” feminists. Instead, a radical break is called for in understanding who the feminist subject can be; the idea of gendered violence is called to be expanded to include women-born-women and trans-people who face high levels of violence in response to their perceived gender transgressions. The kind of feminist recognition the author is calling for marks a radical break able to transverse the limitations of wave paradigms and theories and to expand the parameters of feminist subjectivity.25

R EC ALL : Feminism as Radical Continuity Despite accusations that contemporary young feminists mobilize from “depoliticised and dehistoricised” contexts, 26 zine feminists frequently express a sense of pride in reclaiming feminist legacies. One example of how zines can function as pedagogical tools is the comic zine Shape & Situate, published in 2010 and featuring contributions from feminists ranging from their 20s to their 40s. Including 22 posters depicting women—from athletes to artists, from scientists to activists, and from political groups such as Rote Zora and The Red Wheelies to Dolle Mina—this comic zine represents a conscious

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and aesthetic attempt to reactivate cultural feminist memories in the present. Taking inspiration from poster projects in the United States such as Inspired Agitators and Celebrate People’s History, the editor Melanie Maddison writes in her introduction: This process of unearthing, revealing and uncovering important lived lives has the ability to act as inspiration and agitation, helping us to shape and situate our own lives. It’s documenting history from a strategic engaging perspective— not just consuming women’s histories, but to incite participation. We too can learn from women in this zine, and recognise that we too can create a world that we want to exist in, and do the things we need to do, and it’s totally possible because it has happened before, and it will happen again.27

This extract is underscored by the affective need to remember feminist predecessors and to create an embodied repertoire of agitation. Like UK feminists from the early twentieth century onward, historical precedence is sought to create a structure of feeling across time and place, and to bolster “fantasies of participation.”28 The structural forgetting taking place in this scenario, however, includes the disarticulation of feminist memory’s contested nature: who is marginalized or championed within women’s movements, and how problematic trajectories may be sidelined or silenced in favor of celebratory appeal. For instance, one of the submitted posters depicts Boudicca—the “warrior queen” who led an uprising against Roman occupation in the first century AD and who has been heralded as a strong female icon in UK feminist movements since the suffragettes—celebrated as “a face of a nation since the Victorians.”29 What is left out in this poster is that under Queen Victoria the figure of Boudicca became emblematic of the British Empire and its iconography of imperialism. As an article on the feminist webzine The F-Word asks, “Is the idea of empire something we want our social justice movements to be linked to? Nor was it just the Victorians and the suffragettes—Boudicca has been appropriated by many social movements—nationalism, conservatism (Margaret Thatcher was often compared to her). Perhaps it’s time to let her go.”30 Such discourses alert us to the politics of remembering in order to “forget” old vocabularies and aesthetics—not just the staid but also the politically suspect —as discourses of the past inevitably highlight conditions and contentions of the present.

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R EPETITION : Feminism as Déjà Vu One of the most seductive invocations of contemporary feminisms is that third wave “is a form of inclusiveness; a feminism that allows for identities that previously may have been seen to clash with feminism.”31 Witnessing contemporary feminists commenting on their movements and scenes, however, deflates any such guarantee of feminist cognizance. For example, the zine Race Revolt, dedicated to addressing race within feminist, queer, and “Do It Yourself” (DIY) scenes through essays, reviews, art, poetry, and auto-ethnographic reflections, maps continuing problems around racism and race privilege. In an early issue, a contributor in her 20s, Terese Jonsson, discusses a white-dominated DIY feminist music and cultural festival that she is involved in. She writes: Racism (and classism) and white feminists’ ignorance marred and weakened the women’s liberation movement in the 60s and 70s. As a white feminist of the next generation, I am worried that we are making some of the same mistakes again. If Ladyfests are meant to be some of the most progressive feminist spaces of the new millennium, part of a “third wave” of feminist cultural activism, then what does its failure to diversify its appeal say about its political relevance?32

This anxiety about “making some of the same mistakes again” speaks of a concern about feminist amnesia, especially around the politics of race and class. The sentiment underscoring this article is that of feminist déjà vu, not as the uncanny but, as Peter Krapp has put it, “the overly familiar, the tediously repetitive, the already known, the always present”33 —that which refuses to be learnt and continuously acts out. Two years after this article was published, the founder and editor of the zine, Humaira Saeed—having also written a piece critiquing Ladyfest for its white centrism and racism—wrote an introduction to issue 5 of Race Revolt, drawing on the ideas of forgetting and forgiving: Forgetting about imperial pasts means creating imperial presents, it repeats. And these “alternative” “radical” communities will do the same unless people stand up and be counted. Let’s talk about forgiving. Communities repeatedly forgive racism for the sake of some kind of community cohesion, or appearance of the same. This is a demand that is made of people of colour repeatedly, that their experiences, needs and oppressions be denied because of the needs of the larger (white) community.34

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By putting these articles next to each other, a more complicated image of feminist amnesia begins to emerge. It is not just the threat of forgetting the lessons of the women’s liberation movement that is of pressing concern. Urgent is also the forgetting of more recent “present pasts,” of the actions and events of white activist networks, and of the failed-to-transmit colonial histories within collective memory, especially when this cumulatively means the erasure of the experiences of people of color and the repetition of traumatic experiences of racism.35 Certainly, more work needs to be done in mapping and understanding reflexivity, accountability, and transformation in feminist cultural memory under late capitalism: how knowledge of feminist activist pasts, as well as their intellectual legacies, are passed on and acted upon. As Krapp reminds us, “To tell the story of déjà vu is to deal with such distortions of the frame of reference . . . strictly speaking, déjà vu is neither a failure of memory nor a form of forgetting . . . déjà vu figures as a reserve: it is a kind of memory without memory, a kind of forgetting without forgetting.”36 Such memory without memory, or forgetting without forgetting, can be seen to enact scenarios of class and race privilege and oppression. To forge transformative social justice and cultural memory based on solidarity rather than competitive understandings of identity and social struggles must, I believe, be an integral part of decolonizing the feminist political projects of today. Such re-imaginings would raise questions as to who the feminist subject can be, how feminist and resistance knowledge is generated and accessed, and what understandings of the present pasts are held as accountable for current injustices.

Concluding Remarks By articulating these four dynamics of producing the feminist new— which have been plotted around the notion of the “re” to include reverberation, repudiation, recall, and repetition—I have attempted to think through some of the re-temporalities of current feminist activist discourse, of the feminist past present, as it intersects and meshes with broader media and political rhetoric. In feminist activist scenes, these dynamics provide an affective function of survival and transmission. Whether to quash feminist stereotypes or mobilize new feminists, the “need for the new”—as well as the critique of the new—involves more complex negotiations of time, space, and subjectivity than established backlash, post-feminist, or wave temporalities signaling distinct, linear periodization can account for. Creating an alternative scene of

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anachronism, I propose, can generate a creative prompt for re-visiting feminist antagonisms and alliances within and across movements, and across and beyond the ubiquitous generational wave model that has been played out in feminist narratives to this day. Notes Many thanks to the zine editors and writers discussed here, and to Dr. Anna Reading and Dr. Hillegonda Rietveld for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 1. Appeals to the “new” can be an activist rhetoric. Germaine Greer famously named, and simultaneously helped bolster, the “second wave” with her bestseller The Female Eunuch (1970), in which women liberationists were pitched as different from the perceived reformism of the suffragettes. See Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, rev. ed. (London: Harper Collins, 2006). In 1992, Rebecca Walker, daughter of novelist Alice Walker and goddaughter of Ms. Magazine founder Gloria Steinem, wrote an article entitled “Becoming the Third Wave,” distancing her feminism from both second wave and postfeminist trajectories. See Rebecca Walker, “Becoming the Third Wave,” Ms. Magazine 39 (January/February 1992), pp. 39–41. 2. See Leslie L. Heywood, ed., The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006). 3. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Crown, 1991). 4. Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 136. 5. Valerie Rohy, Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), p. xiv. 6. Ibid., p. xvi. 7. More can also be made of the anachronism’s relation to aleatory time (see Emanuela Bianchi’s chapter in this volume). 8. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 25. 9. See Sasha Roseneil, Common Women, Uncommon Practices: The Queer Feminisms of Greenham Common (London: Continuum, 2000); Deborah M. Withers and Red Chidgey, “Complicated Inheritance: Sistershow (1973–1974) and the Queering of Feminism,” Women: A Cultural Review 21:3 (2010), pp. 309–322; and Alison Piepmeier, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (New York: New York University Press, 2009). The women’s liberation movement was a name used within emerging feminisms in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and North America from the late 1960s to the 1980s.

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10. See Hemmings, Why Stories Matter ; and Rosalyn Baxandall, “Re-visioning the Women’s Liberation Movement’s Narrative: Early Second Wave African American Feminists,” Feminist Studies 27:1 (2001), pp. 225–245. 11. Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune, Reclaiming the F-Word: The New Feminist Movement (London: Zed Books, 2010). 12. Alexandra Juhasz, ed., Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 3. 13. Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (London: Virago, 1980), p. 35. 14. Clair Gilbert and Sophie Lawton, Riot Girl London 2 (London: SelfPublished, 2001), p. 1. 15. See Natasha Walter, The New Feminism (London: Virago, 1999). 16. Sophie Lawton, “grateful?,” Riot Girl London 2, p. 19. 17. Ibid., pp. 19–20. 18. Clair Gilbert and Sophie Lawton, “Feminists,” Riot Girl London 2, p. 20. 19. Bonnie J. Dow, “Feminism, Miss America, and Media Mythology,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6:1 (2003), pp. 127–149. The bra-burning myth is discussed on pp. 129–134. 20. For an account of “third wave feminism,” see Astrid Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 21. In the zine, “cisgender” is defined as “a gender identity formed by a match between your biological sex and your subconscious sex. May also be used as a synonym for non-transgender (‘trans’ means across, ‘cis’ means on the same side).” “Cissexual” also refers to people who are not transsexual, with “cissexual privilege” experienced by “cissexuals as a result of having their fe/maleness deemed authentic, natural and unquestioned by society at large. It allows cissexuals to take their sex embodiment for granted in ways that transsexuals cannot.” See Helen G, “Trans* 101,” in Trans-Feminism: Exploring the Connections Between Feminism and Transgender, ed. Kris Hubley (Bristol: Feminist Activist Forum, 2008), p. 31. 22. The London Feminist Network’s (LFN) tacit position is that the march is open to all self-defined women. However, this is never specifically outlined in any literature surrounding the event and the organization has a history of alignment with transphobic feminists such as Julie Bindel. 23. Cassandra Smith, “‘Reclaiming Gender’: On building coalition between ‘Reclaim the Night’ and Trans Activism,” in TransFeminism, p. 26. 24. Inspired by actions in Germany earlier that year, Reclaim the Night marches were initiated in the United Kingdom in 1977. They targeted sex shops as a symbol of male violence against women. See

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25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

“We Will Walk without Fear,” in Spare Rib Reader: 100 Issues of Women’s Liberation, ed. Marsha Rowe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), pp. 590–594. The UK night demos petered out in the 1990s and were revived in 2004 by the LFN. To enact a scene of anachronism is to also realize that transgender debates were happening in suffrage-related UK publications such as The Freewoman in 1912, and that queer counter-protests involving drag took place during the beginnings of the British women’s liberation movement. See Lucy Delap, “Individualism and Introspection: The Framing of Feminism in the Freewoman,” in Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere, ed. Maria DiCenzo, Lucy Delap, and Leila Ryan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 182–183; and Deborah M. Withers, Sistershow Revisited: Feminism in Bristol 1973–1975 (Bristol: HammerOn Press, 2011), p. 33. Stacy Gillis and Rebecca Munford, “Genealogies and Generations: The Politics and Praxis of Third Wave Feminism,” Women’s History Review 13:2 (2004), p. 170. Melanie Maddison, Shape & Situate: Posters of Inspirational European Women (Leeds: Self-Published, 2010), p. 3. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 54. Verity Hall, “Boudica,” Shape & Situate, p. 10. Hanna Thomas, “Out with the old warrior queens, in with the new?,” The F-Word , http://www.thefword.org.uk/features/2010/10/out _with_the_ol, accessed on January 3, 2010. Leslie L. Heywood, “Introduction: A Fifteen-Year History of ThirdWave Feminism,” in The Women’s Movement Today, vol. 1, p. xx. Terese Jonsson, “Ladyfest, Race, and the Politics of Coalition Building,” Race Revolt 1, ed. Humaira Saeed (Manchester: SelfPublished, 2007), p. 2. Ladyfests are autonomous art, activist, and music festivals with a women-positive and feminist focus. They were first launched in Olympia, Washington, in 2000, and have since become transnational events. Peter Krapp, Déjà Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. x. Humaira Saeed, Race Revolt 5 (Manchester: Self-Published, 2010), p. 3. See Blanche Radford Curry, “Whiteness and Feminism: Déjà Vu Discourses, What’s Next?,” in What White Looks Like: AfricanAmerican Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, ed. George Yancy (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 243–262. Krapp, Déjà Vu, p. x.

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CH A P T ER

3

The Interruptive Feminine: Aleatory Time and Feminist Politics Emanuela Bianchi

Do modes of gender and sexuality have a time? Or more specifically, does it make sense to speak about women’s time or queer time as different modes of lived temporality, and if so, can thinking through these temporalities illuminate and enliven feminist politics? Feminist and queer thinkers of time have argued that a linear, progressive conception of lifetime and history is not only distinctively modern, but is also rooted in patriarchal kinship, in male/masculine styles of embodied experience, and in a philosophical tradition that understands itself either as a practice of death or transcendental freedom—incorporeal and absolute.1 Temporality is at stake in numerous dimensions of our lives: embodied, phenomenological, familial, historical, social, academic, metaphysical, and existential. None of these are reducible to one another, yet they arguably form a complex in which the temporal textures of other kinds of lives—women’s lives, queer lives, nonWestern lives, black lives, subaltern lives, trans lives, disabled lives, or even lives beyond the human or animal—are often suppressed and rendered invisible. In the twentieth century, philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva provided a vocabulary for thinking temporality in sexed and gendered terms. In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir analyzed women’s time as cyclical and static, entrapping women in the plane of immanence from which they have little access to the linear projects of transcendent subjectivity so dear to existentialism.2 In her important essay on feminist generations, “Women’s Time,” Kristeva complicated this scene by drawing attention to a certain jouissance to be

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found in feminine cyclicity as it corresponds with the rhythms of the cosmos, and also by directing us to the Nietzschean category of monumental time to describe the temporality of women.3 Monumental time is time transformed into a kind of stasis; time expanded so far beyond the line of the project and history, or that of a life ending in death, that it can hardly be called time at all but rather becomes an all-encompassing “imaginary space.”4 While they may offer redeeming pleasures, these modalities of time also situate women outside history and politics—beyond the social as such. These accounts obviously draw on women’s bodily experiences—the cyclicity of menstruation and reproduction—and their accompanying association with the register of species-being, as well as women’s traditional labor and practices, functional and affective: the ever-repeated tasks of housekeeping, food preparation, child rearing, caring for bodies and psyches, mourning, and so on. Such allocations risk placing women in a certain bind: if we wish to follow linear projects and participate in public life, we must shake off our experiential, affective ties and associations with the cyclical, and enter into the time of masculinity. Or, conversely, if we seek a transvaluation of feminine time, we find that these modes threaten to exclude us from the narrativity and transformative potentials of history, entrapping us in the realms of nature and the household, bound to cyclical temporality and monumental eternity. Here I want to move beyond these potentially stultifying binds, tracing out and bringing into focus a rather different and submerged dimension of temporality that has accrued to the side of women and the queer under Western patriarchy and metaphysics—what I will call “interruptive time.” Interruptivity indicates a kind of being in time that is both interruptible and interrupting; in its middle-voiced formulation may be heard simultaneously the passive capacity to be interrupted and the active ability to interrupt. The association of interruption with the feminine is discernable at the very inception of patriarchal metaphysics. I will accordingly trace it from Aristotle, through phenomenologies of female body experience, and then bring it into dialogue with recent work on queer temporalities, considering some consequences of interruptivity for queer and feminist politics. As Donna Haraway has argued, the association of women with what is passive in certain strands of (especially second wave) feminist thought, exemplified by Catharine MacKinnon’s assertion that “man fucks woman; subject verb object,”5 achieves “a totalization producing what Western patriarchy itself never succeeded in doing— feminists’ consciousness of the non-existence of women, except as

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products of men’s desire.”6 Instead of countering this picture with a fully legible activity (figured in MacKinnon’s current work by a benevolent, enlightened, white, Western feminism reaching out to rescue an abject, passive, brown, non-Western victim of trafficking7), a politics cognizant of an opaque and subterranean aleatory interruptivity opens us to the radically contingent possibility that both patriarchy and the metaphysics that constitutes it may—suddenly or slowly—finally play themselves out.

Aristotelian Interruptions As a philosopher of antiquity, Aristotle is not yet concerned with the idea of history, nor progress, nor does he conceive human subjectivity as a project of freedom. Indeed, we might say that he is not concerned with any of the features that are typically associated with modern linear time, and although his teleological world is directed toward an end, it is not historical but metaphysical. The heavens move in circles and the earth proceeds in cycles, natural beings are born and grow, and men make things, act in the world, and organize themselves, all in pursuit of what is best: the good and the divine. Aristotle’s own conception of time in the Physics as “following on” from motion8 means that it is in his account of motion rather than time, and specifically in the movement of natural generation, that we may find the association of the feminine with what waylays and interrupts the unfolding of natural teleology. As is well known, for Aristotle any phenomenon may be explained by recourse to four kinds of cause or explanation: material, formal, efficient, and final.9 In nature, the latter three are really the same: an adult (male) horse causes another horse to come to be, and the adult horse is also both the form and the final cause of the resulting foal’s development. In effect, there are thus only two causes at play here: the material on the one hand, and the formal/efficient/final on the other, and these are apportioned to each of the sexes. According to the famous account of sexual reproduction in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals, the form is transmitted through the male semen, while the female contributes only matter to the offspring, which as many feminist commentators have pointed out relegates the female to the order of pure passivity.10 The female contributes only the matter, while the semen provides form, or logos, and the spark of soul for the new creature. But a difficulty in this schema immediately appears, for if the male contributes form, how is it possible that a female offspring might result, as it indeed does approximately half of the time?

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Aristotle’s answer is that a female is the result of a disruption in the process, an error in the matter due to insufficient heat, which may occur because of some exigency such as youth or old age, or a wind in the south.11 While Aristotle normally portrays matter as passive or at best inclined toward form “as the ugly desires the beautiful, and as the female desires the male,” this account discloses a submerged feminine materiality with the capacity to interrupt the smooth unfolding of nature’s processes.12 The female, then, is characterized less by passive materiality than by matter’s irrepressible unruliness or its unaccountable aleatory propensities, invisible within Aristotle’s traditional rubric of the four causes. Indeed, in the Physics, chance and spontaneous motions in nature appear as accidental supplements to the four essential causes.13 Instead of being identified with nature, then, the female is the result of forces that act against nature as a constant interruption in the natural unfolding of motion toward what is best, even though she is of course also necessary for the continuance of the species.14 In this ancient scene, then, the opposition between masculine and feminine time is less an opposition between linear and cyclical time (as we moderns would have it) than one between a continuous cyclical and teleological time that is masculine, and an aleatory and interruptive time marked as feminine. I want to suggest that retrieving this ancient articulation of the feminine as aleatory may be a fruitful gesture for contemporary feminist politics. Although radical epochal shifts have occurred since antiquity in everything from formations of personhood and politics to the very outlines of the cosmos, the ancient association of the feminine with passivity and the masculine with what is active is still very much alive in our contemporary world, persisting even in contemporary accounts of the biology of sexual reproduction.15 At the time of writing, I am listening to news reports of the death of Osama bin Laden. The first press release by John Brennan, the White House’s counterterrorism chief, announced that bin Laden had used his wife as a human shield and that she, as a consequence, had been killed—a story eagerly embraced by a public intent on envisioning the last moments of a misogynist Islamic monster. The next day, White House spokesperson Jay Carney said that bin Laden’s wife had rushed the invading commandos and was shot in the leg, but was still alive. It is worth wondering how the almost unimaginably courageous action of this unnamed woman—swerving in as if from nowhere like Lucretius’s clinamen, rushing the commandos —became so quickly reformulated as mute passivity, how she was so quickly reduced to an object, tool,

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and obstacle—a shield—in a scene of action that can and must take place between men alone. If the dominant modern construction of temporality has shifted to that of linear historical progress, I contend that this ancient notion of an aleatory feminine offers a nonessential temporal, phenomenological, ethical, and political modality that supplies a vitally necessary resistance to that masculine narrative. While I am aware of the theoretical risk involved in the elision of a clear distinction between “female,” “women,” and “the feminine,” I am interested in a certain metaphysical complex they form, embedded in the procrustean fabric of our philosophical and cultural inheritance, of which passivity is the most resounding characteristic. Women may be more or less feminine, and indeed more or less female, and yet they, we, are ineluctably caught up in and bound to negotiate a sex/gender complex framed by a patriarchal metaphysics that posits a dualism between activity and passivity. The aleatory feminism I am articulating here is an intervention into that ancient, persistent metaphysics, and in fact grows out of it as its monstrous, queer symptom, claiming the goddess Fortuna and the interruptive forces of Dionysus for a politics that strenuously resists even the possibility of fixed identity and essence. After all, if what is found at the level of nature is no longer what is in illo tempore monumental, frozen, essential, passive, and fixed, then what is found in the psyche, and in social, political, and philosophical dimensions, can hardly be fixed either. The argument here is not quite analogical, and not quite causal, and not quite organic. The claim is rather that at different levels of magnification and temporal duration, each with its own formations, assemblages, and topographies, the aleatory and the interruptive is at work, and may be harnessed for feminist ends.16

Interrupted Bodies Beginning with the register of materiality and corporeality, it is worth noticing that we encounter interruption as an insistent trope at the level of female bodily experience. The woman’s menstrual cycle is not experienced as a continuous cycle, but as a punctuation that interrupts her daily activities with messy blood flow and sometimes painful cramping. In penetrative intercourse, the very boundary of the body is interrupted. If a woman becomes pregnant, her very being is further interrupted by the new presence. If she miscarries, that interruption is itself interrupted. If she breastfeeds a child, the hunger of another being interrupts her bodily integrity, and she literally, materially, flows out of herself, becoming food and nourishment for another.

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As a primary caretaker, she is continually interrupted by the various and more or less immediate demands for sustenance and attention by those she cares for.17 In her classic second wave essay “Throwing Like a Girl,” Iris Marion Young describes the inhibitions and discontinuities that beset the girl in her movement through the world: the girl fears that, for example, she cannot reach the apple up in the tree, so she does not really jump for it; her rivenness by immanence and the weighty drag of objecthood continually thwart her in her projects, undermining her motility and her ability to make the space around her her own. Her awareness of her materiality as such, as well as her subjection to the gaze of the other, is experienced as interruption of a linear trajectory toward a goal.18 Yet in reflecting upon that essay 20 years later, Young is critical of her own acceptance of the specific temporality of the linear project as universal, and the examples of “sport, labor, and travel” as paradigms of free movement.19 She asks us to consider a Tillie Olsen character canning tomatoes while minding a baby, commenting: “The movement is plural and engaged, to and fro, here and yonder, rather than unified and singly directed.”20 In “Pregnant Embodiment,” Young transvalues the impositions of maternity, viewing them less as a weighty immanence than an oftentimes pleasurable awareness: As I sit with friends listening to jazz in a darkened bar, I feel within me the kicking of the fetus, as if it follows the rhythm of the music. In attending to my pregnant body in such circumstances, I do not feel myself alienated from it, as in illness. I merely notice its borders and rumblings with interest, sometimes with pleasure, and this esthetic interest does not divert me from my business.21

These rhythms of the maternal body certainly resonate with Kristeva’s account of the semiotic chora —the dimension of the material, rhythmic, pleasurable drives that inhabit language identified with the space of the mother’s womb—but in this essay, Young rather connects movement in pregnancy with a spatial awareness emanating from the body, and with a mode of motility that is decidedly not linear, namely dancing. In dance—especially in improvisational dance—movement is ambiguously active and passive as one alternately responds to and anticipates the music, creating a flow of rhythm and syncopation that is not known or conceived in advance. Does music, even sound more generally, or perhaps any sense experience, stand here in the place of a longed-for Other that would interrupt the monotony of

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passive femininity?22 Or does it signify a more primordial enmeshment in the world—a sensual, corporeal immersion beginning with the iambic maternal heartbeat, and with which we thereafter find ourselves entangled in sensorimotor relations of call and response, call-response, anticipation, play, and interruption?23 Associating a phenomenology of women’s bodily comportment, and especially pregnant embodiment, with the aleatory qualities of dance, enmeshment in sound, and the improvisational space of the jazz club, Young’s narrative takes us far from a reading of feminine corporeality as passive and interrupted by a transcendent exteriority, toward an understanding of this bodily experience as interruptive.

From Feminine Time to Queer/Feminist Time This interruptivity I am locating on the side of the feminine (albeit strategically and provisionally) also brings us closer to the lived temporalities of queer subjects. Queer theorists such as Elizabeth Freeman and Judith Halberstam have argued compellingly for a substantial phenomenological difference in the way time is structured, experienced, and created in queer lives and texts. Freeman describes how seemingly innocuous phenomena such as schedules, calendars, time zones, and even wristwatches function as a kind of Foucauldian “implantation,” granting what she calls “chrononormativity” and appearing to give a “natural” sense of time while regulating populations and individuals.24 Halberstam argues that the experience and logic of lived temporality in the hegemonic, heteronormative mode are structured first and foremost by the scheduling demands of family, and are governed by certain beliefs about childrearing, generational cycles of inheritance, the work ethic and demands of the workweek, wage labor, and capitalist accumulation. She contrasts this “straight time” with the time of certain modes of life on the margins experienced by queers, but also “ravers, club kids, HIV-positive barebackers, rent boys, sex workers, homeless people, drug dealers, and the unemployed”—all of whom she includes as “queer subjects” whose experience of and relationship to temporality is radically, qualitatively at odds with straight life.25 Queer temporality veers away from normative time in unpredictable ways. The queer spaces of the nightclub and the bathhouse, the bar and certain areas of the park, come alive when good children are sleeping, and are experienced under a different sort of temporal logic—an unaccountable and dilated time, often altered by drugs and alcohol, where watches are not consulted

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and whose narratives are sculpted through fantastical and genderreconfiguring performances, the skill of the DJ, and the dance of the hookup. Such practices of radical openness to the aleatory encounter, with their intensification of pleasures and dangers, and their stark contrast with the times and rhythms of heteronormative reproductivity, have been assiduously theorized by Lee Edelman and others as involving a necessary accession to the death drive.26 In the face of this, it may seem perverse to argue that pregnancy and motherhood share in this queer temporal quality. However, as Freeman argues, this queer temporality is not simply a time of the new and different, of open erotic counternormativity prised away from the reproductive imperative. It is rather “weighed down” by a certain history, whether that of the queer archive or of certain failed political projects such as the Equal Rights Amendment campaign of the 1970s, 27 or by a faintly embarrassing second wave lesbianfeminist past characterized by a stifling essentialism, for which a repetitive cyclicity or even monumentality in Kristeva’s sense was the governing temporal schema. Freeman complicates the queer emphasis on the counternormative, the aleatory and the new with what she calls “temporal drag”—a queer engagement with a sometimes hardto-love past whose tangencies may also be erotic and affective—a queer past with which queer subjects are necessarily entangled, and which thereby necessarily conditions queer presents and futures.28 While I am not concerned here with the specific practices of queer history, foregrounding a relation to the past or pasts is nonetheless central to my formulation of interruptivity insofar as it advocates and also enacts a certain “working through” of a patriarchal legacy in which we are seemingly relentlessly mired. Such working through requires the painstaking work of tarrying with what drags us down and holds us back, with what repeats as well as with what is different and new. The radicality of this openness, that of aleatory interruptivity, is that it is neither simply an openness to or libidinal drive toward life, love, production, or reproduction, nor a queer accession to the death drive whether figured as stasis or destruction. Rather, the aleatory roll of the dice is embedded in a context that it interrupts, giving unpredictable outcomes: love, life, and/or death. This, in turn, should alert us to the possibility that this mode of being may not, in fact, be sustainable without certain basic protections. Living this interruptivity is also to live with a certain vulnerability: one may be easily brutalized through abuses of hospitality, be subjected to aggression by those threatened by this most courageous mode of being, be instrumentalized by state and biopolitical forces,

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and so on.29 Any formulation of women’s time as interruptivity must take into account the necessity for protecting against hostile and unwanted interruptions as well as promoting a liberatory transvaluation of interrupted time as a mode of living in precarity, in openness to what is aleatory, and to strange, new, queer formations of kinship, gender, and social life. Women’s characteristic capacity to be interrupted, by the demands of family, by pregnancy, in their labor as caregivers and as managers of human relations, and as a flexible and often home-based labor force, requires specific theoretical and legal measures to provide a degree of protection against exploitation. Here we might usefully turn to Drucilla Cornell’s conception of the imaginary domain as a resource that resonates in the sphere of interpersonal ethics as well as that of political ontology and legal rights.30 Cornell formulated this notion in order to articulate a minimalist legal standard that would protect women from unwanted encroachments in relation to abortion, sexual harassment, and pornography, creating a zone in which they would be free to imagine themselves as whole and integral. She draws on the psychoanalytic notion of the imaginary as a fantasized, temporalized bodily boundary: bodily integrity and individuation grounded not by recourse to a past, a history, or an ontological present, but by appeal to the temporality of the future anterior—the tense of the “shall have been.” The imaginary does not deny the aleatory as a factical, material dimension of corporeality and lived temporality. According to this analysis, the bounded and enclosed body, uninterrupted, is always a matter of fantasy; unachievable in the here and now, and therefore always futural and projective. But for Cornell’s psychoanalytically nuanced argument, the protection of this imaginary domain must be considered a legal right, since despite its futural and fantasized status, it nonetheless functions in personal development as a minimum condition for individuation and thus personhood. In order to become a person, one must have access to a vision of oneself as a being free from interruption and encroachment with a right to bodily integrity, and the right to that projective vision must be publically recognized and protected under the law. Developing a feminist conception of being as interruptive thus requires a framework for freedom from interruption, but it also forms a possible ground for a mode of feminist politics that is neither simply reactive, nor simply exhausted by the protection of one’s ability to open and close one’s bodily boundary at will. The interruptive is also that which disrupts, simply because that is part of what it means to be on intimate terms with the aleatory encounter, and

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this interruptivity thus reveals the precarity of the existing (heteropatriarchal, white-supremacist, capitalist) order.31 This analysis thus points toward a feminism that would rush toward commandos from nowhere, that would take to the streets, that would—in the words of queercore singer Lynn Breedlove—“unleash the teenage boy within” or—as Twitter sensation Feminist Hulk puts it—“smash patriarchy, smash gender binary,” and that would rise up, burgeon, and celebrate with an eye to neither origin nor telos, but with humor, guile, and a healthy disrespect for authority. The much remarked-upon presence of women in the uprisings in the Arab Spring of 2011; the visibility of women during anticuts protests in Britain in 2010 and 2011; and the Slutwalk protests mushrooming across the United States, Canada, and Europe at the time of writing all testify to this interruptive and aleatory feminist spirit. Interruptivity revels in corporeality, sensation, play, and sexuality. It is a sensuous activity that is also always responsive—motor and sensory—and this receptive/creative capacity is itself not something that ever stays in one place. In all its openness and motility, the radically counternormative force of aleatory interruptivity cannot ultimately sustain or retain its articulation with what is specifically feminine. Interruptivity countenances all possibilities, all reconfigurations of past and present circumstances, including queer and transgender reconfigurations of gender and sex. Interruptivity is as much trans and intersex as it is feminine; it is necessarily open to differences (all differences in embodiment and circumstance) among and between women and queers, or indeed anyone, male or female, intersex or trans bodied, who is committed to challenging fortified, essentialized, and teleologically egoic modes of subjectivity and sociality. Starting from a feminine conception of temporality as interruptive thus opens to an understanding of the opaque interruptivity of being as such.32 The restless encounter and negotiation with what is exterior—welcoming, incorporating, hosting, and shutting out, from moment to moment growing into whatever it is that we are in the process of becoming—must take place without forgetting that the “welcome” is also always a contextualized performative act, laden with a past but never simply a matter of factical passivity. With minimal conditions in place securing women from the travails of interruption, but not jettisoning its value as an openness to the unexpected encounter, we are freed up to imagine and enact other modalities of lived temporality beyond the dichotomies of feminine and masculine, queer and straight: toward generative, protean, and as-yet unthought temporalities to come.

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Notes 1. Obviously this version of “dominant time” is schematic and fails to capture various complex philosophical understandings of historicity and temporality, and particularly ways of being toward the future that might include dialectical materialism, Messianism, utopianism, Heidegger’s temporal ek-stases, “destining,” the Derridean à venir, and so on. While space constraints prevent my addressing any of these conceptions directly in this paper, the account I develop here may function as a critical engagement with any one of them. 2. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1973). In contrast with de Beauvoir’s universalism, Dana Luciano’s Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2007) traces this separation of temporal spheres in nineteenthcentury US bourgeois culture. While I acknowledge the historical specificity of these temporal formations, I explore them here in their philosophical and phenomenological dimensions, assuming a larger (though not universal) scale of normative entrenchments. 3. Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” in The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 351–371. 4. Ibid., p. 354. 5. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 124. 6. Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” chap. 8 in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 159. 7. See Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human?: And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). For the critical stance, see Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance and Redefinition, ed. Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema (New York and London: Routledge, 1998) as a useful starting point. 8. Aristotle, Physics, trans. Philip H. Wicksteed and Francis M. Cornford (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), IV, 11, 219a20 and 219b16, my translation. 9. Ibid., II, 3, 194b24f. 10. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), I, 2, 716a2ff. Feminist engagements include Lynda Lange, “Woman is Not a Rational Animal: On Aristotle’s Biology of Reproduction,” in Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, ed. Sandra Harding and Merill B. Hintikka (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1983); Luce Irigaray, “How to Conceive (of) a Girl,” in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Judith Butler, Bodies That

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11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993); and Cynthia A. Freeland, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). For a review of the legacy of Aristotle’s theory of reproduction in the West, see Nancy Tuana, The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious, and Philosophical Concepts of Women’s Nature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Aristotle, Generation of Animals, IV, 2, 766b28f. Aristotle, Physics, I, 9, 192a23–4, my translation. Ibid., II, 7, 198b6f. and 4–6 passim. I analyze this causal overdetermination on the part of the female as precisely symptomatic in “The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos” (manuscript under review). See, for example, Emily Martin, “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles,” Signs 16:3 (1991), pp. 485–501; and Cynthia Kraus, “Naked Sex in Exile: On the Paradox of the ‘Sex Question’ in Feminism and in Science,” NWSA Journal 12:3 (2000), pp. 151–176. There is certainly a confluence here with the Deleuzian feminism of thinkers such as Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Claire Colebrook, and Luciana Parisi. However, this project does not seek to simply replace an outdated metaphysical regime with a new, immanentist ontology of flows, intensities, assemblages, and unfoldings. It seeks instead to attend to our enmeshment and situatedness in a context, in a history, in a legacy, to both tarry with it and interrupt it, thinking through interruptivity less as the new, but rather as a painstaking labor and practice of working through. See Lisa Baraitser, Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (London: Routledge, 2009) for a compelling analysis that seeks to transvalue such interruptions in maternal experience as uniquely generative and transformative. Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” chap. 2 in On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Iris Marion Young, “‘Throwing Like a Girl’: Twenty Years Later,” in Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Donn Welton (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), p. 288. Ibid., p. 289. Iris Marion Young, “Pregnant Embodiment,” in Body and Flesh, p. 278. For a powerful expression of this longing, see Faith Wilding’s 1972 performance poem “Waiting,” http://faithwilding.refugia.net/wait ingpoem.html, accessed on May 5, 2011. Kristeva’s account of the semiotic chora in Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 25–30, sharply distinguishes its inherent “ordering”

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24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

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from the symbolic law that will subsequently interrupt it through the destructive wave of negation issuing from the death drive and the paternal function. Here, I want instead to emphasize a continuity, in which aleatory interruptivity is already at work in the chora on the side of the maternal and the feminine, not just as a later intervention on the side of the masculine. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 3 and passim. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), p. 10. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). See also the work of Leo Bersani and Michael Warner. Elizabeth Grosz, “Animal Sex: Libido as Desire and Death,” in Space, Time, and Perversion (New York: Routledge, 1995), chap. 12, esp. pp. 204–205, complicates this characterization of queer sexuality as death-driven by positing it as productive (of sensations, transmutations, and intensities) if not reproductive. The Equal Rights Amendment (ER A), seeking to constitutionally guarantee equal rights on the basis of sex, was approved by Congress in 1972 but failed to gain the required state ratification and was therefore dismissed in 1982. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds, chap. 2, p. 62 and passim. Rosalyn Diprose, “Women’s Bodies Giving Time for Hospitality,” Hypatia 24:2 (2009), pp. 142–163, considers various political developments in which women’s time has been interrupted and redirected, put to the work of national security, of public health, and of economic production. Such instrumentalizing encroachments on women’s given time obviously needs to be strenuously resisted. Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography and Sexual Harassment (New York: Routledge, 1995). See Louis Althusser, “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,” in Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–87, trans G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Verso, 2006), pp. 163–207, for an account of the radical instability disclosed by the aleatory encounter. This position is closely aligned with that developed by Elizabeth Grosz, “Becoming . . . An Introduction,” in Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures, ed. Elizabeth Grosz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).

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CH A P T ER

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Écriture Futuriste M. F. Simone Roberts

“Would disrupting or upsetting the lexical surfaces, and the deeper structures disrupt other contracts (social, political) we have entered with those who have continually tried to dismiss us?”1 The answer to this question, raised by Carole Maso in Break Every Rule, is, in my mind, yes. The evidence? The ongoing resistance to the teaching and publication of the experimental tradition that much “feminine” écriture is part of (a tradition that I will describe as “swervy” in what follows). But, here I swerve away from this question to some history of gendered language. First, by way of definition, the swerve is a writerly strategy of logical leaps, of associative connection that privileges theme and motif over plot (in fiction) or over chronology linearity (in philosophy or history). It is an aleatory writing; paratactic and disjunctive in structure. It may also use more “linear” and transited tactics, but only as one among many strategies. I think of it as a feminine strategy. Feminine, not female, since male authors such as Michel de Montaigne and Friedrich Nietzsche can be just as swervy as some of their female colleagues. The term “swerve” becomes an aesthetic and political term in Joan Retallack’s work. She defines it as a wager both writerly and political, a wager that consists, in part, of “antiromantic modernisms, the civil rights movement, feminism, postcolonialist critiques”—which she in turn describes as “necessary to dislodge us from reactionary allegiances and nostalgias” such as longing for an unquestioned masculinist society or knee-jerk rejections of writing that investigates both a topic and the standard modes of writing about that topic.2 Aesthetically and politically, the swerve defamiliarizes our

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comforts and asks us who we are and who we want to be; it has a profound ethical dimension of reciprocal alterity.3 A swerve: In Sumer, in the Bronze Age, to be literate was to read two—gendered—languages, that is, to be polylectoral.4 Maryanne Wolfe’s Proust and the Squid —a study of how the human brain must rewire itself in order for us to be able to read—pauses in its examination of the unnaturalness of all reading (the brain must bend to culture in order for us to read) to consider the two languages of Sumer. In the royal houses of Emar, a major city in the first civilization, women were literate and read and wrote in their own parole within the Sumerian langue. Men also had their own parole. The two paroles differed in lexicon and pronunciation. The feminine Emesal (the “fine tongue”) and the masculine Emegir (the “princely tongue”) together made up the Sumerian language. In the vatic poetry of Sumer, the gods and goddesses spoke to each other in these paroles.5 A form of what Luce Irigaray would call “being two” was a standard aspect of culture from the beginning. A transition: In our own age, in literary studies and in the world of letters, we are faced with a similar polylectoral situation. We have masculine and feminine writing subjects—some are feminist, some are not, but their écriture is of concern to feminisms and to future feminist subjects. Why? Because much of the architecture and expression of any subjectivity is symbolic—be it one’s écriture, RSS feed, clothes, body art, playlists, or politics, any of the ways in which we participate in and create culture. Even on the ontological level of our sexes and sexualities, our genders and transgenders, our ambiguities and paradoxes, the spectrum of masculine and feminine attributes varies within any one subject’s personality. The resistance to our presence, our thriving, our imaginative, and our political agendas finds its architecture and expression in the symbolic realms of our culture and politics. Our literatures and our reading habits are crystallizations of these symbolic flows. For the sake of future feminist subjects, we must therefore learn to read both masculine and feminine écritures, to read both Emesal and Emegir again, to read both the traditional and the experimental tradition, and to let them inform our reciprocal alter-subjectivities both in content and in form. Another swerve: One of the intriguing topics in 1980s and 1990s feminist theory courses was “écriture feminine.” It was a difficult category to pin down, and a controversial term from its inception, owing to the tensions between symbolic and ontological understandings of the word “feminine.” Some of this writing seemed to be just experimental and perhaps more part of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school

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of poetry or various postmodern gestures in fiction. Categorization was difficult but allegedly necessary—a box was needed. Several questions arose: do women write/think/experience in this swervy way? Yes. Is this women’s writing? Not only. Women do write perfectly traditional novels, and they can construct perfectly linear arguments and, as mentioned, men sometimes write in a swervy way. No box was ever really built. The “masculine” need to categorize just could not be met. Scholars trained only to read and think in Emegir, the princely tongue, wanted to remain monolectoral. They had a very difficult time with an écriture that asked them to both expand and to question their familiarity with poetry, literature, and philosophy; with reading and language and epistemology. The situation was and is not that swervy = feminine = feminist = experimental.6 The situation was and is that in ways both subtle and overt, and in ways that are often structurally similar, all these kinds of writing were and are often seen as irreconcilable with categories such as acceptable, logical, worthy, clear, readable, rigorous, valid, publishable, and so on. What swervy, or feminine, or feminist, or experimental writing—and especially writing that has all of these qualities—have in common is that they deliberately pose a challenge, a counter-proposition to one or more orthodoxies of form, or gender normativity, or patriarchy, or tradition, or aesthetic decorum. An example: Carole Maso is a novelist writing in the experimental tradition. Her literary ancestors include such aberrations as the German romantics, the French symbolists, the international postsymbolists, and many modernist modes of literary and philosophical production. If we were to build a name cloud around her, it would include Gertrude Stein, Charles Baudelaire, James Joyce, H. D., Virginia Woolf, and some less-famous contemporary figures such as Ron Silliman, Joan Retallack, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Luce Irigaray. She is not published by Random House. Her work is not “popular.” It is distinctly literary, and distinctly counter-traditional. Her work is not welcomed by critics, most of whom still want to read in Emegir only, to be monolectoral. This narrowness is a problem for emerging feminists—whether authors or not, we often feel this restriction or expulsion personally, and we sense it culturally. In 2000, Maso published some backtalk aimed at this critical and political narrowness in her essay “Rupture, Verge, and Precipice / Precipice, Verge, and Hurt Not”: You wonder where the hero went. You ask where is one sympathetic, believable character?

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You ask where is the plot? In fact you’ve been happy all these years to legislate literary experience. You think you know what the writer does, what the reader does. You’re pretty smug about it. You think you know what the reader wants: a good old-fashioned story. You think you know what a woman wants: a good old-fashioned—7 ... You rely on me to be dependent on you for favors, publication, $$$$$$$$, canonization. You are afraid. Too smug in your middle ground with your middlebrow. Everything threatens you. ... You think me unladylike. Hysterical. Maybe crazy. Unreadable. You put me in your unreadable box where I am safe. Where I am quiet. More ladylike. In your disdainful box labeled “experimental.” Labeled “do not open.” Labeled “do not review.” ... Debase me and in the future I shall rise anew out of your cynicism and scorn—smiling, lovely, free. ... The future is all the people who’ve ever been kept out, singing. In the future everything will be allowed. So the future is for you, too. Not to worry. But not only for you.8

The struggle voiced in this complaint at a refusal to read and value Maso’s Emesal writing is not only an academic matter. The structure of that struggle and the gendered terms in which it is cast are symptoms of resistance to feminist cultural productions and political demands. The monolectoral mind—rational, masculine—balks at the notion of reading a feminine swerve. Upsetting lexical surfaces, it turns out, does disrupt other social contracts by showing us that we can think and be differently—possibly embodying ourselves and producing culture in a whole range of Emesals and Emegirs. These swerves open futures and wager the present; an écriture futuriste. The thesis: If one shared goal of feminisms is the establishment of feminine/female subjectivities in a feminine symbolic order as nexuses of cultural agency, and not merely as an ideal ephemera in the marginal meta-territories of theory and literature, then the écritures produced by feminine writing subjects (men and women) need to be taught, read, and published as legitimate textual practices and as critical methodologies.

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While the creative arm of this feminine writing has always been under threat of amputation (e.g., the banning of Joyce’s Ulysses as pornography in the United States), the critical and philosophical arms are phantom limbs. Overly poetic, or swervy, or experimental works in criticism or philosophy are difficult even for professional academics to process and learn from, because they have not been trained to read swervy works, much less swervy works of criticism or philosophy. These small circles of likeminded writers and their limited readerships form “schools” and often function as counter-traditions, historical examples being the Vorticists, the Beats, and the more contemporary L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and conceptual writing collectives. Within these contemporary schools, there are women’s/feminist collectives of writers, especially exemplified by the 1996 anthology Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK.9 That this anthology is published by Small Press Distribution signifies its marginality. Small Press Distribution often publishes work considered “too risky” (the writer is new and not a “name”) or “avant garde” (a host of works fall into this category, among them feminine and/or feminist works). The mainstream presses can “invest” in a money-losing book but do not. Such books lose money partly because so few people know how to read them, and that lack of another kind of training is a cultural choice. One does not immediately and naturally understand Emily Dickenson or Carole Maso or Luce Irigaray. One must learn to associate while reading, not just to follow a line of argument or a plot. One must learn this kind of reading to understand or enjoy Joyce or the Beats as well, but their work does not offer a feminist point of view or critique or imagination. They did, however, offer a critique (of “the epic” and of “post-war American social expectations”) as écriture, which is a kind of swerve, and were considered suspect for it. Meanwhile, the influence of these writerly subjects and discourses has gone a bit more mainstream and much more global as exemplified by American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, in which we find recognizably lyrical poems heavily inflected with experimental methods, and Language for a New Century, in which many of the works from India and the Middle and Far East bear clear traces of counter-poetics.10 To read these poetries, it helps to be polylectoral, to be able to comprehend both transited and disjunctive works. But, that’s just poetry, and as poetry these works pose no threat to the “real” authority attributed to scholarship and its lexical structures. Yet, discourses of scholarship (in literary and philosophical studies) remain “disinterested” and “transparent” (once you learn all the lingo,

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and the habit of the embedded clause, that is). They remain “linear” and “rational” and transited and didactic and legitimate. Or, the serious and approved work does. In relation to those creative styles, they remain “objective,” monolectoral, “masculine.” Phallogocentric scholars will talk about the experimental and swervy methods, but they will not let us or themselves think in them. Forget teaching the stuff. Monolectores find the methods of the experimental/feminine writer (1) unreadable, (2) primary texts, to be parsed by experts, so don’t bother yourself about them, and/or (3) unrigorous. They are, *sniff*, poetic. We are to feel our unease with these texts to be fine and a sign of our social good standing and patriarchal identification. Few critical scholarly journals publish such work. Most that do are literary, not critical ones. One is not to do the rigorous thinking, the thinking that matters, in these aleatory, paradoxical, and juxtaposed syntaxes. All these critics and scholars have to do is not learn something; not become polyliterate in this way; not discover the rigor of these other forms. Not read. Not teach. Not publish. That is, one can read Joyce or Stein as canonical examples of visionary genius, but this is to be taken to mean that a new writer ought not follow them. Genius is a term that both lauds and cages an artist or a work of art. It is so exceptional that the critique it offers is secondary to its aesthetic accomplishment, rather than taken to be part of its aesthetic accomplishment. Genius works are not really to be assimilated. The same goes for the term poetic. It is used to say that something is beautiful or admirable, and also to say that it is unrigorous, not consequential. Hence theory, or criticism, that is written in a swerved/poetic/even feminine style, because that is the best form in which to offer that particular insight or critique or question, is “poetic,” not serious. The rather feminine both/and of the rigor of such work smacks into the either/or of established categories and bruises its forehead. This choice that feels like tradition/clarity/reason prevents access to the flexibility of the mind, the kinds of subjectivities people need for living in the culture of differences which is feminisms’ logical result. This choice prevents a more productive and very possibly more enlivening conversation between tradition and counter-tradition—a writerly reciprocal alterity. It does so via social and economic mechanisms that operate like the sexism of patriarchy—as the subtext of Maso’s passage above clearly indicates. Maso argues for space to share—the future is for you, too, but not only for you—in reading and living. Long rehearsed conventions (of gender, transcendent signifiers, certainty, objectivity, economics, and mimesis) are placed at

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stake in these migratory and interdicting (swerved) logics and the verve of these logics. For wagering tradition, they are called resistant and experimental and put in the box marked “Do Not Review.” Especially when they are written by women—still. Somehow, the ontological fact of a writer’s sex still has a great deal to do with his or her chances at publication and praise. The reality for most women writers is to get published by some brave polylectoral editors, at small publishing houses or university presses, ensuring a devoted but culturally marginal coterie of readers. What these published discourses do when one reads them, or writes them, is to expand and let in more of the “blue air” DuPlessis refers to when she imagines the book as a shared space in which at least two subjects commune: “A book should be porous; it should have enough air and space, enough blue air, so that whoever enters it can breathe.”11 Her early book, The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice is one of the texts that inspired the term écriture feminine. Reflecting on her own écriture, DuPlessis writes: In my essays’ psychic and speculative search for contradictions, for wholeness, linear and constellated forms coexist. The work is metonymic (based on juxtaposition) and metaphoric (based on resemblance). It is at once analytic and associative, visceral and intellectual, law and body. The struggle with cultural hegemony, and the dilemmas of that struggle, are articulated in a voice that does not seek authority of tone or stasis of position but rather seeks to express the struggle in which it is immersed.12

The cultural hegemony, authority, and stasis to which she refers are coded as masculine in DuPlessis’s discourse, monolectoral in mine. Her work combines genres of meta-theory, autobiography, and literary criticism. All of those topics and methods are available to her in wrestling with the question, how can and do women even enter the writing traditions? To make matters more complex, the methods she uses are also placed under scrutiny. In The Pink Guitar, she excerpts reviews of the work collected in that book: (“I have a sense of the writer drunk on her own shrill voice”) (“confessional”) (“repeatedly questioned the integrity”) (“not authentic”) (“too experiential”) (“healthy self- doubt nonexistent”) (“garish”) (“untransmuted, not art”) (“perso- nal”) (“narcissistic”) [as she interprets their meaning] and therefore suspect.13

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DuPlessis describes part of her project as a “struggle to break into the sentences that of course I am capable of writing smoothly. I want to distance. To rupture. Why? In part because of the gender contexts in which these words have lived, of which they taste.”14 Her project as a writing and feminist subject was to think about how she thinks, often about gender, and foregrounding this swerved style offers readers that same chance to think about how they think and who they are—if they learn to read it. DuPlessis shares with Irigaray a concept of aesthetic production and cultural life that the latter develops in her philosophical work. Irigaray insists that a flourishing world would be one in which masculine and feminine, in cultures and in selves and among selves, would be in conversation, would provide to culture two fully legitimate phenomena and sources of truth and reason and imagination— a world of Retallack’s reciprocal alterity. Irigaray’s style also places her in this experimental tradition, this écriture feminine, and she, too, gets jilted. In “Ecce Mulier? Fragments,” Irigaray lashes out in fine Nietzschean fashion at monolectoral critics who can/will not read her work. She complains of being charged with “maliciousness.” Her retort: “Who could conceive of rigorous thought, coming from a woman, that was anything but malice?”15 It gets worse: “And if such a thought is expressed artfully, our categoricians and synthesizers will be quite incapable of viewing it as philosophical, so strong is the assumption that wisdom cannot express itself with grace or poetry. Yet there is never a great philosopher who is not a poet as well.”16 Both aesthetic pique and sociopolitical commitments reveal themselves when readers choose or refuse to learn a new reading strategy, or understand the creative tension between content and form. And if one is a woman philosopher (and not Parmenides or Nietzsche) “who claims to think and create without submitting to the masculine order—[this] is a phenomenon that is still inadmissible.”17 But it’s not just these women writers. It’s that whole tradition over there that we call avant garde, experimental, counter-traditional. In James Joyce’s streams, Roland Barthes’s chimera, and David Foster Wallace’s footnotes and one-sided conversations, we find models of commitment to the hybrid reality demanded by and coming to be with the evolution of feminist subjectivities. It’s not just the subject matter—Irigaray’s two lips18 —but the form and the textual strategies that stretch the mind into seeing in more than one shape, or style, or even gendered style. Between the narrow masculine in whose hegemony we live and the robust feminine (and more robust masculine

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than is currently available) that is yet to be, there could be an open word, that blue air, that wagered social space that does not presuppose the other’s being to be a threat to self or natural order, but a source of wonder and vivacity. Another swerve: In 1975, William Gass published On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, which wonders and wanders aloud in disjunctive, aleatory, and generally feminine ways around the epistemology of blue. It is a book of epistemological and linguistic eroticism. He writes a particular autobiographical male desire (coveting his slovenly neighbor’s lovely and beleaguered wife) into the midst of an investigation of the Eros of syntax, about the difficulties of literary erotic writing, and about the near entire cultural field of “blue.” It is an essay written in a recursive meander often noted as a mark of écriture feminine. Blue partakes in vast regions of connotation and social meaning from the honorable—as in the blue of first prize, blue bloods, and the azure mantel of the Virgin Mother—all the way over to the out of bounds, as in the blues, sex, blue stockings, or death itself. Gass is most interested in the latter region: So blue, the word and the condition, the color and the act, contrive to contain one another, as if the bottle of the genii were its belly, the lamp’s breath the smoke of the wraith. There is that lead-like look. There is the lead itself, and all those bluey hunters, thieves, those pigeon flyers who relieve roofs of the metal, and steal the pipes too. There’s the blue pill that is the bullet’s end, the nose, the plum, the blue whistler, and there are all the bluish hues of death. Is it the sight of death, the thought of dying? What sinks us to a deeper melancholy: sexual incompleteness or its spastic conclusion?19

His prose follows the wandering mind of the essayist, the experimental poet, and while the syntax is not ruptured, the line of thought veers and juxtaposes at wild rates. We wouldn’t call it hardcore experimentation, but we could call it swervy, even feminine. The reviewers of the Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, The New Republic, the New York Times Book Review, and the ALA Booklist are all excerpted on the dust jacket: (“virtuoso performance of great imaginative force”) (“such eclectic Scrutiny”) (“gives philosophy back its good old name”) (“fascinating, pro- vocative reading”) (“person who loves writing and the sound writing makes”) (“enchanting”) (“exceptional for its insight, eloquence and humor”).20

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The facile sermon is part of my point: when men write their sex, their body, it’s good philosophy. It’s brave. But the other point is that this book presents itself as a philosophical trifle, an entertainment, not one of Gass’s serious works. And yet, it is a very serious book, by a man, pointing out that not only blue but also many of our nodes of cultural organization are paradoxical, unstable, and given to mischief, and that we do well to live with them as such rather than by them. Gass is making a point rather like Retallack’s and DuPlessis’s, who make the “mistake” of presenting their work as serious—and kudos to him. He got one over on the monolectores. But getting over on the masculine hegemony, conning him, is not the point. As Retallack puts it in “The Experimental Feminine,” in which she, as I do, associates the whole experimental tradition with a feminine logic and rigor: What’s the difference between the unintelligible world of the Feminine and the knowable ideal of the Masculine? Counter to common wisdom, I want to assert that one (F) is a challenge, the other (M) a mystique. To the extent that the Feminine is forced into service as consolation for the loss of meaning within the emptiness of logics of “world reason,” the energy of a productively conversational M-F is lost to culture.21

The demand is the possibility of life, in this case enacted in writing that can be dialogical, polyvocal, polylogical, sensuous, curious, serious, and still intelligible. The methods of the ethical poetic, the poethic, first expose the mystique of default masculinism (where most readers object), and then go on to enact many versions of that M-F conversation (where most readers tune out). That kind of turn in reading and writing practices (which are practices of subjectivity) might allow a real gendered conversation in culture—as culture! What this nexus of writers is after is a complex realism that sees gender, its narrow ideology, its real effects, and the language that enforces that ideology and its effects as part of the substance of that reality—including its wide spectrums of embodiment, writerly expression, theoretical validation and inquiry. A complex, nonpatriarchal reality would be for the masculine, too, but not only for it. Swerve and conclusion: To arrive at feminist ends—at a minimum, a culture of dialogue between masculine and feminine (or tradition and experiment, or reason and imagination)—will require that the tensions between genders, styles, and modes of cognition be kept open. That is probably the most difficult part of the project to grasp—its

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deliberate lack of overdetermined telos. It requires new feminist and new social subjects generally, those who can live without the closure, the conclusion, the win of the masculine monolectore and risk the unplannable openings of polylectores as a normal mode of life. This a-telosity is an interval in which dialogue among gendered persons, and gendered aspects of a person, becomes a state of being, culturally. It requires not that tradition be replaced with experiment, but that they and all their instances remain in creative and mutual tension or relation—feminine and masculine, neither, both, and more. For that complex and robust health to be possible, more people, both scholars and nonscholars, should be trained to read in Emesal and Emegir, to code-switch, to be polyliterate. A new culture needs a new poetics, a new aesthetics, of both art and of living the wager that a radically new kind of future presents to humans. Our lives are the points where the real, the imaginary, the symbolic, and power collide, naturally. When we take the reading and writing of the (masculine) tradition and engage it in a conversation with the (feminine) experimental tradition, we get closer to realism, to truth/s. The real world is infinitely more astonishing and just plainly weird than our traditional knowledge, or reactionary nostalgias, will let us easily see. The subjectivities of the future will need their languages, their paroles. Some of them will develop from these experimental traditions, and if we want to read that new and inevitable realism, we will need training for it. We will need to think critically in these swerved ways as well as in the linear ones. The future is for you, but not only for you, dear Reason, dear Law, dear Transcendental Signifier. Is the continued resistance to this deliberate aleatory writing a concern for a future feminism, or future feminist subjects? Are the strategies one learns in reading Gass, DuPlessis, Retallack, Irigaray, and Maso culturally useful, and are they useful to (the) feminist project/s? Should we be not only glancing at them critically, but also writing critically with them? My sense is that the answer to all these questions is yes. The time-space of masculine and feminine paroles inheres in usage and experiment, in the tensions between form and content, reception and rupture, the play between denotation and connotation, logic and metaphor. Because the real is wildly complex and disturbing to our neat ideologies, language swerves and rustles to greet it. Because we need expanded, not exchanged, literacies in order to shape ourselves as subjects—feminist, complex, swerved enough to inhabit this complex world. Because écriture futuriste, it’s already coming, whether we can read it or not.

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Notes 1. Carole Maso, “Break Every Rule: Remarks Made at Brown University’s Gay and Lesbian Conference 1994 and at Outwrite, Boston, Massachusetts, 1998,” chap. 9 in Break Every Rule: Essays on Language, Longing, and Moments of Desire (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2000), p. 159. 2. Joan Retallack, “Essay as Wager,” in The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 3. 3. Ibid., p. 5. 4. Polylectoral: neologism of mine, adjective; n. polylectore. Able to read many styles; with valences of Sigmund Freud’s polymorphously perverse, the ability to find pleasure from many sensual sources. Vars. polyliterate. The term is compared and co-paired with monolectore and monoliterate. Their meanings will become clear. 5. Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), pp. 39–40. Wolf references a dissertation from 2003, now published as Yoram Cohen, The Scribes and Scholars of the City of Emar in the Late Bronze Age (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009). 6. For instance, the hosts of “chick lit” novels, the plots of which revolve around fashion choices, gossip chains, shopping, and lattes might be “feminine” in many traditionally recognizable ways, but they are not feminist, or swerved, or experimental. 7. The word implied here is “fuck.” 8. Carole Maso, “Rupture, Verge, and Precipice / Precipice, Verge, and Hurt Not,” chap. 10 in Break Every Rule, pp. 162–170. 9. Maggie O’Sullivan, ed., Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK (Berkeley, CA: Small Press Distribution, 1996). 10. Cole Swensen and David St. John, eds., American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009); and Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, and Ravi Shankar, eds., Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008). 11. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Blue Studios: Poetry and its Cultural Work (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), p. 4. 12. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 13. 13. Ibid., p. 166. 14. Ibid., p. 144. 15. Luce Irigaray, “Ecce Mulier? Fragments,” in Nietzsche and the Feminine, ed. Peter J. Burgard, trans. Madeleine Doby (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994), p. 321. 16. Ibid., p. 323. 17. Ibid., p. 325.

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18. See Luce Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak Together,” in This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 205–218. The essay imagines the vulva as an ontological stratum supporting a logic of difference as a counterpoint to the Phallus and the logic of the Same. 19. William H. Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (Boston: David R. Godine, 1976), p. 11. 20. To be fair, the jacket copy on The Pink Guitar begins, “ . . . is as much a work of art as a book of feminist criticism . . . fuses meditation and passion, an extensive critical understanding of modernism, and the intensive rhythms of art.” Jacket copy is jacket copy after all. 21. Joan Retallack, “The Experimental Feminine,” chap. 5 in The Poethical Wager, p. 96.

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PA R T

I I

New Bodies and Ethics

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Introduction: A Politics of Displeasure Chrysanthi Nigianni

The earth is evil; we don’t need to grieve for it. Nobody will miss it. —Justine in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia1 It is time to abandon the world of civilized men and its light. It is necessary to become totally other, or cease to be. —Georges Bataille 2 I do think that one cannot work with political theory without a sense of the unforeseeable, without anticipating a break within the present regime that cannot be known in the present. I’m always searching for such breaks. I also think that what appears as a radical rupture usually turns out to have within it a trace of the past. That produces a certain irony in the end. —Judith Butler 3

Not the militant, not the radical, but the melancholic then. She is the one who can bear the unforeseeable (and not the predetermined); she sees but cannot represent (for she does not belong, she cannot participate in the rituals of our civilization); she is capable of breaking from the present (she is already inhabiting this rupture—heavily breathing within her crack, caught between, arrested, suspended from our time). There is no before and after, just a fragile, insecure, contingent threatened living on in a here and now; an enduring existence without ends. She does not dream renewal, rebirth. She does not act (against the norm, the symbol, the figure, or the stereotype). She is a

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watery body, always liquidated, in flow, in touch. Grief is watery. The ground is burning her feet.4 She longs for the water. The melancholic does not possess knowledge, though she knows, she remembers, the moment when “they had to walk on their feet and ‘bear themselves’ whereas hitherto they had been borne by the water; a dreadful heaviness lay upon them.”5 Porous skin, enlarged pupils, heavy breathing, trembling body parts. “Simply a silence with only the sound of my own breathing.”6 She mobilizes the political economy of affect, the value of breathing, the value of moving by staying still. “Hearts are racing and bodies are breathless . . . skin vibrating . . . perception and movement is to become attuned to the rhythms of one’s breath, to take a step back and retreat to an interior world” (Davina Quinlivan, in this volume). It’s an alchemic experiment she does not control. She senses and mocks at the false sense of an “I,” the metaphysics of presence. She is, but does not act, sterile: not (re)productive but receptive. She does not claim to possess, nor does she demand: a different ethics of relating to Life and Earth as not one’s own (against the tradition of huMANism as possessive individualism). Not a feminist body-to-come as the self-righteous Subject, the political Promise, the Truth, the Revolutionary, the Radical, but the “second” coming of the melancholic “I” as radical falsification: the falsification of the subject of enunciation, the “I think.” “Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time?”7 The melancholic as the one who incarnates “modes of existence that are not based on survival” (Claire Colebrook, in this volume), passes fully through becoming-imperceptible, becoming-extinct (she has nothing to lose), leaving the space for a future to be radically other and not simply an extension of her present. Melancholia: a feminine inflection. Only man perceives loss as his loss, in terms of lost objects. Only he can mourn. For him there is no difficulty in reconstructing himself: another object-choice (the woman, the animal, nature). Man: an exclusive devotion to mourning. Melancholia: an oceanic feeling. The distance between the subject and the object is not as clear for her as it is for him. It “is at once as distant as the primeval sea, yet also closer than our own skin” (Astrida Neimanis, in this volume). Melancholia has the capacity to embrace disappearance, to pass through the overcoming of mankind (she has already passed through the overcoming of her self); the melancholic mocks and dances the dance of death, playing with nonexistence, refusing to pay her due

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services to mankind and its capitalistic organization. She refuses to be Man’s redemptive other. The Melancholic is the Exhausted. The melancholic has lost interest in the outside world. She has taken distance from life so that it is no longer her life but life in its own endurance, in its own terms and not in terms of her survival. It is only she, Justine, the melancholic, who can take pride that her depression has provided her with the greatest ability of any of the characters to cope with Melancholia’s impending destruction of Earth, of our Earth, of the planet with a human face. A true man of action, John simply kills himself.8 A politics of displeasure goes against the pleasure man derives from his capacity to exist “as a being who ends himself” (Colebrook), insofar as he is able to give birth to himself as a proper new man, and always finds himself anew through recuperating vampire gestures of reincarnation. The melancholic lives beyond man, “for beyond ‘man’ one cannot figure the good life but only contingent, fragile, insecure, and ephemeral lives” (Colebrook). The melancholic is more of a troubling than a troubled figure, because she challenges our notions of action, mastery, futurity. The melancholic refuses pleasure, the pleasure of his organization, for the economy of her affect. “Think of how we could change society if only we rejected all of its shallow claims on our wellbeing and attempts to instill in us a belief in consumerism as a panacea . . . Our culture tends toward duality”9 — the Man and the WoMan are its archetypes. The melancholic as a watery unstable self “dives far deeper than human sexual difference, and outswims any attempts to limit it thus” (Neimanis). The melancholic is neither a woman nor a man. The Man has already becomewoman. Despair as genocide. His “being lies in some not-yet realized becoming” (Colebrook), and is justified as an intrinsically posthuman animal. Melancholia as the absolute negation of postexistence. She refuses to be the host body. She is “unmooring maternity from female essence, ‘natural’ reproduction, heterosexual intercourse, and mother-father families” (Katie Lloyd Thomas, in this volume).10 She is bleeding no milk anymore but finds “tenderness in the act of syringe feeding despite the sterile packaging . . . and the literal distance” (Lloyd Thomas). She can communicate (with) the inanimate. Melancholia: a feminine inflection, it has a female sex. The melancholic as a becoming-woman-child-animal-imperceptible. A feminism developing around the WoMan will always entail the Man. However radical its claims, it cannot escape the instinct of survival and selfpreservation. Hence, a project of prolongation: prolonging the project

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of saving mankind. “Man lives on by feminist critique” (Colebrook). The melancholic is not part of the oedipal family of humanity. The melancholic is an orphan. Her bonds, her blood ties to humanity, are ruptured. She cannot hide in the general concept of Woman or in society, nor can she adapt to being a princess or to classes, to parties, or to opinions of her time. She is the one who “can see the world ending over and over again.”11 This is unmistakably internal. The melancholic is “the women that are missing,”12 loyal to this loss, refusing to forget and forgive, “a kind of female genealogy of breath preserved” (Quinlivan). She denies “normal” mourning. “The ocean remembers” (Neimanis).13 She realizes that she has deceived herself, that she has let herself be tempted. Not that she has done anything wrong, but now she is presented with the cold facts. She “extends her self-criticism back over the past; (s)he declares that (s)he was never any better.”14 She wants to grieve on her own terms, publicly, under conditions in which grief is explicitly prohibited. Her grief is not that of compassion—the melancholic denial for compassion toward herself, toward his world. The melancholic denial to go on living the same. The melancholic longing. Gravity changes. It is no longer his gravity, his laws, his nature.15 The man who promises our survival, an ecological redemption, a religious saving. The man, the priest, the analyst, the philosopher, the activist—they give the final warning. Only the melancholic does not listen. Through breathing, not listening, she can understand words and voices better. She cries: “You’re so damn arrogant!” She refuses to raise her glass and give a toast to Life with him. She questions “just who this ‘man’ is whose survival we seek to maintain” (Colebrook). Eden is the scariest of places for her.16 She is the antichrist, emptied of ideals of resurrection, of an afterlife. She refuses to cling to (his) Life. Holding up to her future self, to her ego, getting better, means holding up to his construction: the Ego. She comes to question her very sense of self: “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”17 She can sense the great injustice done in the world. She has a keener eye to the truth, to the cold fact that “we have sacrificed our humanity to rapacity and venality has already arrived, because that is how man has always lived” (Colebrook). Melancholia: between life and death, animate and inanimate. An Ophelia floating, lying on the river shore, seduced by “a light without representation.”18 “Lying down is never the end or the last word; it is the penultimate word.”19 But how can one speak without prolonging voices? The melancholic is the exhausted because she has arrived at

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the limit, a limit always displaced: “hiatuses, holes, tears we would never notice, or would attribute to mere tiredness.”20 The women who are missing:21 “all so seen unsaid.”22 An Ophelia floating: an image standing in the void that loosens the grip of words. Not an object but a process. An inclination for death as a failure of the will. A longing for death as a change in will. Not willing death itself but something in it, something yet to come. The melancholic longing outside the livable and the loveable. The melancholic longing for “touching, looking, singing, speaking, talking, and ‘magical thinking,’ which will enable [her] to cross the distance, to traverse the gap which is both the separation and the very possibility of relation itself” (Lloyd Thomas). Not pleasure. Not desire for. Just the melancholic longing. Notes 1. Lars von Trier, Melancholia, part II, “Claire” (Zentropa, 2011), film. 2. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 179. 3. Judith Butler, “On Speech, Race and Melancholia,” interview with Vikki Bell, Theory, Culture and Society 16:2 (1999), pp. 163–174, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/judith-butler/articles/on-speech-race -and-melancholia, accessed on February 9, 2012. 4. Lars von Trier, Antichrist (Zentropa, 2009), film. 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, “O my Animals,” in Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity, ed. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 4. 6. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, quoted in Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 176. 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josephine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 119, §125. 8. Von Trier, Melancholia, “Claire.” 9. Anonymous blogger, “Depression, Melancholia, and Me: Lars von Trier’s Politics of Displeasure,” “Occupied Territories,” http:// occupiedterritories.tumblr.com/post/13114178124/depression -melancholia-and-me-lars-von-triers, accessed on February 9, 2012. 10. Katie Lloyd Thomas is here quoting Suzanne Bost, “From Race/ Sex/Etc. to Glucose, Feeding Tube, and Mourning: The Shifting Matter of Chicana Feminism,” in Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), p. 354. 11. Anonymous blogger, “Depression, Melancholia, and Me.”

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12. Von Trier, Antichrist. 13. Astrida Neimanis is here quoting Robert Kandel, Water from Heaven (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 132. 14. Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, vol. 14, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), p. 245. The text was originally published in 1917. The “(s)he” pronoun indicating both genders is my addition. 15. Von Trier, Melancholia, “Claire.” 16. Von Trier, Antichrist. 17. Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, p. 245. 18. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 13. 19. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 155. 20. Ibid., p. 158. 21. See Amartya Sen, “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing,” The New York Review of Books 37:20 (December 20, 1990). Sen points out that while we might expect that there are as many women as men in the world, the ratio of women, especially in Asia, is in fact lower than that of men, due to the widespread use of sex-selective abortion and female infanticide, or to the malnutrition and inferior health care that girls and women receive. 22. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 158.

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CH A P T ER

5

Feminist Extinction Claire Colebrook

The Bloated Monster As the human race hurtles toward extinction, primarily as a result of the annihilation of its own milieu, we feminists might start by saying, “I told you so.” Feminism is, like any “ism,” perhaps too diverse to be given any grounding identity, yet it has most certainly been marked by criticisms of man. Even in its earliest, liberal, and inclusive phases, feminism’s claim to include women within the category of “man” or humanity did so not so much for its own sake as for the sake of life in general. Feminism has never been a special interests claim but has always appealed to some broader justice in which all humans would be included. As long as man excluded and enslaved what was other than himself—as long as he treated women as mere chattels— his own humanity would be diminished. As Mary Wollstonecraft pointed out in 1792, the relation of master to slave not only enslaves the weaker party, but also precludes the full development of “man” as a rational being: “Birth, riches, and every extrinsic advantage that exalt a man above his fellows, without any mental exertion, sink him in reality below them. In proportion to his weakness, he is played upon by designing men, till the bloated monster has lost all traces of humanity.”1 Wollstonecraft’s argument is a typical early instance of an insistence on feminism as a better logic for all life. Even before the emergence of explicitly ecological modes of feminism, there had been a long-standing criticism of the limits or self-enclosure of man. But this long-standing resistance to man is intrinsic to the history of humanist self-critique. Feminism is best seen as an ultra-humanism in that it has,

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from its inception, been based on the idea that man can only come to himself and be properly human through the recognition of women. The very concept of feminist emancipation harbors an implicit ecology. From liberal to radical and post-structuralist feminisms, women have always fought for themselves in the name of justice and equilibrium (and not as a warring special-interest group). It should come as no surprise, then, that feminism would eventually claim an affinity to otherness in general, 2 and see itself as extending naturally into environmental and class concerns: More and more men are embracing eco-feminism because they see the depth of the analysis and realize that in shedding the privileges of a male-dominated culture they do more than create equal rights for all, that this great effort may actually save the earth and the life it supports.3

There is—according to most forms of eco-feminism—something like an affinity and passion for life as such that has been deflected by male “power-over” and that might be redeemed by a return to a saved earth. It is not only in the seemingly minor branch of an “ethics of care” or eco-feminism that the critique of masculinism becomes intertwined with a concern for the nonhuman. Eco-feminism is no minor offshoot of feminist thought but structures its genealogy: liberal feminism begins by saying that one cannot exclude a group of bodies from the rights of the human animal; second wave feminism questions the very nature of “the human,” and certainly does not embrace its “self-evident” values of instrumental reason and universalism; and by the time eco-feminism emerges, the concern for the environment explicitly takes feminism from a mode of human-human combat (women fighting for their rights) to a war on the man of reason, whose drive to mastery for the sake of his own self-maintenance has resulted in an unwitting suicide. Feminism’s recent turn to life (in environmentalism and “new materialisms”) should not appear as an addition or supplement but as the unfolding of the women’s movement’s proper potentiality. Indeed, this is just how eco-feminism has presented itself. It makes no sense to strive to transform our relation to the environment without transforming our own mode of being. Feminists’s criticisms of man would not be add-ons to environmentalism but would be crucial to any reconfiguration of ecological thinking. Insofar as man has always been defined as a rational animal who calculates, manipulates, and represents a world that is his proper domain—and if we

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assume that “a dominating position alienates human beings from the environment on which their survival depends”—a thought of life without or beyond man becomes imperative: “When human beings ignore natural processes, their antagonistic attitude towards nature leads not only to the destruction of the environment but also to selfdestruction.”4 It is with this recognition of self-destruction that feminism gains general purchase. Feminism’s criticism of man will not only transform humanity and its milieu but will open up a new thought of life. It is not only the case that a reformed relation to the environment requires a reconfiguration of man; it is also the case that the project of transforming man—allowing him to become something other than the subject of instrumental reason—requires going beyond the bounds of the organism to consider life in general. But here we arrive at two questions: Is care for the environment really an exit from the mode of anthropocentric blindness that has accelerated the destruction of the biosphere? And, would not a thought of life beyond the human environment—beyond our world, our environment, the place or home for which we care—be a more adequate response to man’s suicidal world tour?5 Put differently, what I am suggesting here is that the very concept of “the environment” (seen as that which is vulnerable to our destruction and that we, therefore, ought to save) shares all those features and affective tendencies that structured the self-enclosed Cartesian subject that feminism has always had in its sites. The very notion of an “environment” that encircles our range of living practice, and the very notion of “woman” as tied to place and oriented to care, always figure the world as our world. To say, as eco-feminists do, that we are essentially world-oriented and placed in a relation of care and concern to a world that is always place rather than meaningless space is to repeat the (masculine) reduction of the world to its sense for us. Indeed, the criticism of the scientific disenchantment of the world, along with the lament that the world loses its meaning to become mere raw material as we fall further into a mode of patriarchal domination, maintains an insistence on the figure of the globe, or the environment as a selffurthering and self-organizing totality: it is assumed that the proper relation to the milieu that sustains us would be an extension of virtues of respect, care, concern, and even communication to a nonhuman that is always presented in a normatively homely manner.6 What remains out of play is a consideration of forces of life that are not discernible within our milieu, and that do not perturb our coupling with nature.

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Even when the word vitalism is not used explicitly, we might observe, today, a vitalist ethics in general that dominates our time. Just as traditional vitalism set itself against René Descartes’s positing of an extended substance that was the basis for a mechanistic and calculable material world, so there is now a persistent, vehement, and near-universal denunciation of Cartesianism, summed up by Antonio Damasio as “Descartes’ error.”7 Against the idea of a mental substance that represents an inert material world, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, cognitive archaeologists, researchers of artificial life, and philosophers have insisted on characterizing life not in static terms but as dynamic creativity. The mind or the self emerges from life rather than being the privileged point from which life is known. One could characterize this new anti-cognitive turn to life as a vitalism precisely because it, too, places an emphasis on dynamism, relations, active becoming, and creativity. Cartesianism is deemed to be horrific for all the same reasons that it was condemned (mainly by theologians) in its first articulation: the Cartesian subject is a disconnected, characterless, disembodied, disenchanted, and disaffected ghost in a machine. If life has meaning—if it is never mere matter but always this particular felt life for this particular living organism—then one must discard Descartes’s error and arrive at a new Spinozism. For Damasio, this means that there is no self who perceives the world in a certain way and who is affected emotionally by it. In the beginning is affect; an emotion that may or may not come to consciousness. The self is the “feeling” of this happening. In terms of environmentalism and questions of the human being’s relation to the milieu that it has for so long disregarded, this might seem to be a salutary elimination of man as homo faber. It appears, perhaps, that from within their own trajectory, theories of “mind” have arrived at the immersion of mind in life, at the recognition of the inextricable intertwining of the mind with its milieu—and perhaps even at the most profound of feminisms. Man as master representer and disembodied thinker has, without assistance, and in his own good time, recognized himself as an originally environmental being. Feminists have, in other words, been right all along. But is redemption this easy? Although we know that events are occurring for which the old models of calculative reason are inadequate, it is uncertain just what or how much we could tackle from our supposedly new point of view of engaged, dynamic, extended, embodied, and emotive selfhood. Is this new vitalism really a felicitous shift in modes of thinking that will allow us to deal with the current critical state of our milieu, or is it a reaction formation? I would suggest

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the latter, especially if we consider not only the joyous affirmations of life—with the discovery of empathy,8 affect,9 embodiment,10 universal creativity,11 and wondrous futures12 —but also seemingly dire warnings. James Lovelock’s “final” warning is, after all, a warning for us —otherwise it would not be final. It assumes our duration, the end of life for us.13 What is not considered—beyond questions of warning, surviving, saving, and death knells—is what kind of life the actual death of man might enable, whether “we” ought to live on, and just what this saved “we” approaching finality might be. It is just at the point at which the future’s potentiality and openness appears to be radically lacking in life that thinking discovers a life that goes beyond the old, limited, finite, and all too concrete models of mind. Man has always existed as a being who ends himself: as soon as the human is given some natural or limited definition, man discovers that his real, creative, futural being lies in some not-yet realized becoming that will always save him from a past that he can denounce as both misguided and at an end.14 Today, just as the human species faces possible and quite literal extinction, “man” extinguishes himself: he declares that he is not a brain in a body or a mind in a machine, but always already ecological—sympathetically, emotionally, and systemically attuned to a broader milieu of life. Once again what is affirmed—against all the evidence for a malevolent relation or intrinsically suicidal system of humanity and its environs—is an original human connectedness, an irreducible system in which the world is never alien raw matter but always this particular world as it is disclosed for this particular organic life. But has man really extinguished himself? Has there not always been an insistence that thinking and being are the same, that—in old Parmenidean terms—to think is to be in accord with a movement of life that affirms and sustains itself? That is to say, man has continually realized that the world that he has depicted is to some extent a projection of his own mastering reason, and he has then gone on to claim that—after the Enlightenment—that mythic world has been vanquished.15 If there has been a reaction against Platonism and intellectualism, has this not been because such idealisms set values above life? For the systems theory of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, which has been so influential across a range of domains, there is not a primary world that is taken up and represented by a separate subject, since there is just this coupling of organism and the world the organism inhabits.16 It is against this anti-Platonism or naïve literalism that I would suggest that we consider the world not as our own milieu but in its own duration. Should we not be considering

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ourselves and conscious life not as emergent properties, but as a monstrosity that we do not feel, live, or determine but rather witness partially and ex post facto? That is to say, the end of man is both desirable and necessary, yet also impossible. Any attempt to vanquish man as a blight on earth always depends on the notion of a proper human who would find himself, again, being at one with the earth.

The Sex of Extinction Here we must turn to the sex of extinction. As man, today, faces his death in the literal sense, he calls upon his figural death; he demands and declares that man must become one with the life of which he is an expression. In this becoming-with-the-world has man become woman? In one sense the answer is yes, but this is not a new becoming-woman, nor is it a new vitalism. There has always been an affirmation of the life from which man emerges, a life that can be relived, reaffirmed, and plundered so that man may overcome his isolated subjective detachment in order to feel at one with his world. Man has always been an environmental animal, has always viewed the world as his environs, has always been a mode of becoming-woman: he lives his proper being not in fully actualized and detached isolation, but through a more profound autonomy in which he recognizes and affirms himself through a world that is never alien, never mere matter, but always a sign of his proper and profound life. That is—and this is in the spirit of a quick, moral, and unthinking antiCartesianism—man is most properly himself when he relates to and lives himself through his own indispensable otherness.17 If there has been a historical shift from instrumental Cartesianism—where the world is dead matter to be mastered—to environmentalism, then the latter move is a hyper-Cartesianism (since for the environmentalist the world is not really other, alien, or inhuman but always already at one with man’s proper life). A feminist critique of man—a man who has always been vitalist in his profound communion with life—would be the most tired of gestures. Man lives on by feminist critique, by continually surpassing and reviving his rationality through imbibing the blood of the dead, by returning to and retrieving the life beyond the bounds of his own life. Neither a traditional vitalism that regards matter as supplemented by spirit, nor a “new” vitalism where matter is already dynamic will save us. What any vitalism will sustain is just this lure of saving life (as though one might find, in life, means for salvation). What we need to consider is the dead end of life: man lives on either by gathering all

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proper life within himself (seeing all life as mindful) or by positing a good life that will save him from himself. It is perhaps in this double bind (where man maintains himself in the face of extinction by extinguishing himself) that a radical feminism could provide a genuine thought of life beyond the human. Here, there would be no woman who remains close to the earth, life, and cosmos: no woman who provides man with the other he has always required for his own redemption. Feminism, today, facing the extinction of the human, should turn neither to man nor to woman: both of these figures remain human, all too human, as does the concept of the environment that has always allowed man to live on through a vitalist ethic. One would also need to say the same about posthumanism, which is more often than not an ultra-humanism. In many ways, what passes for posthumanism consists in the assertion that man is not an isolated animal with any specific features that would mark him off from life, for he is always already at one with life, animality, and technology. Rather than thinking of woman, the finality and redemption of man, or living beyond man in an era of the unified post-human (which takes heed of the final warning for us), what really needs to be confronted is the way in which the figure of “life” has always justified man as an intrinsically post-human animal. Man has always been other than himself, always more than his own mere being. If vitalism has any general sense—and it has at least a performative force in current calls for a new vitalism—then it does so in opposition to what is perceived to be a long-standing condition of Western man. Man, according to anti-Cartesian and post-human critiques, has conceived of himself as an autonomous, mastering, representing, elevated, and rational near-divinity who owes nothing to his world. The turn to the environment, to becoming one with a vitality that exceeds the bounds of his own being, would supposedly be a departure from a history of instrumental reason. But the turn to vitalism is another vampire gesture: man consumes himself, and then imagines that he is no longer the rapacious animal he once was. Man believes he has exited his self-enclosure to find the world and his better postfeminist self. The concept of the environment—as that surrounding and infusing life from which we have emerged, and which, so the argument goes, would be retrievable through a vitalist overcoming of our malevolent detachment—maintains the same structure of anthropomorphism. What needs to be thought today is that which cannot be thought, lived, retrieved, or revitalized as the saving grace of man or woman.

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Not the Postapocalyptic (Not the Posthuman), Not Now To give a sense of what this might mean both critically and positively, we should perhaps ask what the future would be like beyond the figure of man (a figure that has always included both the post-human and woman). What if we were to approach the future through sexual difference, where sexual desire would be distinct from any notion of survival or organic self-maintenance? Here, one would need to abandon notions of survival, and of the post-human, precisely because these are recuperating gestures. If one considered sexual difference outside dualist gender binaries, one might confront proliferating differences. Difference is sexual, rather than gendered, when it is not the coupling of two kinds (or genres) for the sake of mutual self-maintenance and ongoing recognition.18 If a body connects with another body, not for the sake of its own survival or reproduction but through something like touch as such, then sexual difference would relate to what is other than itself without a view to shoring up its own being. To be open to what is not one’s own—to what cannot be figured as environment, ecology (with all its motifs of oikos and interconnectedness) or the post-human—would have two consequences. First, one might ask about future modes of existence that are not based on survival (for such would always be an extension of the present). Margaret Atwood’s great counter-post-apocalyptic novel The Year of the Flood does just that. In this novel, Atwood seems to be opening with a (now) standard post-apocalyptic landscape in which human life in its civilized and urbane modes has been destroyed, leaving a world of fragile living on. Through the use of flashbacks, Atwood describes a world prior to this wasted landscape: a world of traffic in women, of the manipulation of life for corporate expediency and commercial novelty, of a subclass of humans who function as waste for a technoscientific capitalist elite, and where the language of (once communicating) humans circulates as noise and brand-names. Here, Atwood opens one path for thought: our supposed post-apocalyptic future has already arrived. The nightmare dystopia of some supposedly sciencefiction inhuman future whereby we have sacrificed our humanity to rapacity and venality has already arrived, because that is how man has always lived. Second, and more important for my purposes here, Atwood describes another cult of the future—the Gardeners—whose ecological discourse of sacred life and the purity of the origins of their own retrieved humanity is structurally akin to the imagined “biopolitical” corporatism of managed life. What Atwood suggests, against the

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present idea that man might surpass himself and find a new ecological future, is that such redemptive imaginaries have always allowed man to master life in order to maintain himself. Atwood also presents the hint of a future of refusal in which the women who are traded, exchanged, and managed for the sake of biological variation and reproduction reject the biological family and familial production to produce new modes of haphazard social bonding (beyond sexuality) and new forms of bio-art that decay upon impact. In a world where a war takes place between eco-fascism (or saving life at all costs) and bio-politics (the management of life for the sake of maximized reproduction), Atwood describes fragile female characters who make their way through this landscape, forming friendships rather than effective communities of kinship systems. One of the characters has a successful career in bio-art, where she uses wasted bodily materials to produce artworks that are fleeting and ephemeral: “She liked to watch things move and grow and then disappear.”19 Atwood challenges the fetishized motif of life, the human mode of monumental archives, and the idea that in turning to “life,” art and man might find endurance.20 What Atwood poses is a world beyond woman as man’s better other. The Year of the Flood continues two critical traditions in feminist writing. Like Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, which aligned the Romantic artists who imagine nature as a benevolent feminine other with the scientist’s domination of nature as dead matter, The Year of the Flood presents a world in which ecological redemption (as ecofascism) is the flipside of a bio-political management of life. The two warring factions in the novel are an Adamic cult, the Gardeners, who appeal to the vital value of the earth as a way of controlling bodies, production, and reproduction, on the one hand, and a governing corporation (CorpSeCorp) that aims at maximizing life through genetic manipulation and data management, on the other. Both these factions are enabled by the post-apocalyptic imaginary or, to borrow a phrase from Lovelock, the imaginary of “final warning.” If our only value and horizon is that of life, then only one path is permitted: that which saves and survives. Both Shelley’s Frankenstein and Atwood’s Year of the Flood display a quite common urge in feminist fiction writing to question the value of the maximization of life. Such literature instead conducts thought experiments of futures that open up reproduction beyond any notion of self-managing man. The Year of the Flood continues a feminist-novelistic-radical capacity to question the very value of survival (which is also to say the value of value, if value has always been

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given as that which furthers life). It would be incorrect to label this tradition as science fiction, for the worlds depicted are those of the present scientific imaginary: in both Frankenstein and The Year of the Flood it is both science (as instrumental reason) and its supposed other (the ecological connectedness with life) that are presented as redemption narratives that fail to question just who this “man” is whose survival we seek to maintain. One might say that the consequences one can draw from this feminist tradition are that man always plans his escape through imagined post-human futures and others, and that what is required is a sense of the contamination of the ecological imaginary. This brings us to the second consequence, and the second tradition, in which the very figures of art, creativity, and production—tied to fruitful life—are also interrogated. This second critical tradition extended and radicalized by The Year of the Flood is the feminist counter-aesthetic. In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse —a novel that, like Atwood’s, ends with an ambivalent figure of the approach to (or refusal of) light—the central maternal nurturing figure, Mrs. Ramsay, dies. After an interlude that presents a falling of darkness, the final section of the novel concludes with the young female artist Lily Briscoe having a vision that prompts her to act almost destructively toward the conventional canvas. Not only does her vision result in a single dark line painted down the center of the picture of Mrs. Ramsay that she has been struggling to compose throughout the novel, but it is also coupled with a recognition of art’s decay—as though Briscoe’s refusal of art history and representation is also an embrace of transience. This is not man as homo faber, being infused with a life other than his own that he goes on to present, represent, and preserve, for Lily’s approach to her canvas occurs quickly and almost as a distraction: Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its green and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something . . . With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.21

The Year of the Flood also presents an art event amid a world of destruction that has occurred because of the shrill and myopic desire for life. Just as To the Lighthouse is structured around the falling of an immense darkness (the “great” war) that is the consequence rather than the destruction of man’s apocalyptic imaginary (where he will

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arrive fully at nothing other than his own mastery), so The Year of the Flood presents the future of man. The minor ray of disturbance is given in a practice of bio-art that, quite unlike the dominant bio-art of the present that maintains man’s watchfulness over life, embraces disappearance: Amanda was in the Wisconsin desert, putting together one of the Bioart installations she’s been doing now that she’s into what she calls the art caper. It was cow bones this time. Wisconsin’s covered with cow bones . . . and she was dragging the cow bones into a pattern so big it could only be seen from above: huge capital letters, spelling out a word. Later she’d cover it in pancake syrup and wait until the insect life was all over it, and then take videos of it from the air, to put into galleries. She liked to watch things move and grow and then disappear . . . Her Wisconsin thing was part of a series called The Living Word—she said for a joke that it was inspired by the Gardeners because they’d repressed us so much about writing things down. She’d begun with one-letter words—I and A and O —and then done twoletter words like It, and then three letters, and four, and five. Now she was up to six. They’d been written in all different materials, including fish guts and toxic-spill-killed birds and toilets from building demolition sites filled with used cooking oil and set on fire.22

Atwood depicts the artist, Amanda, not as a retrieval of all that is proper, foundational, and eternal in life, but as a scammer, joker, or player who will take man’s game of life, money, and survival—including the sanctity of the word—and play with nonexistence. Beyond “man,” there is perhaps only “woman” and “life,” and so rather than think apocalyptically in terms of our own finality we might—finally— be given the opportunity to think of a world without ends. Here lies the significance of Atwood’s work. First, she presents the imagined nightmare of a future world of man’s psychotic drive to master life as already evidenced in the present (rather than being some imagined or possible post-apocalyptic future). We are always and already so tied to life that it becomes the screen or tableau upon which we imagine nothing other than our own living. Second, like Shelley before her, she does not place a feminized nature outside man, for beyond “man” one cannot figure the good life but only contingent, fragile, insecure, and ephemeral lives. Finally, one cannot appeal here to art or the aesthetic, for here, too, one encounters the fetishized figure of redemptive creation. In its place, Atwood, like Woolf and Shelley before her, imagines what life would be like if one could abandon the fantasy of one’s own endurance.

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Notes 1. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York: Cosimo, 2008), p. 53. 2. See Gabriele Schwab, The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in Literary Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 34; and Peter Hitchcock, Dialogics of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 3. Judith Plant, “Learning to Live with Differences: The Challenge of Ecofeminist Community,” in Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, ed. Karen J. Warren and Nisvan Erkal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 129. 4. Rosi Braidotti, Ewa Charkiewicz, Sabine Häusler, and Saskia Wieringa, Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development: Towards a Theoretical Synthesis (London: Zed Books, 1994), p. 149. 5. I use the term man quite deliberately here: for it is this figure of man that has been adopted by both parties, both those who deploy notions of a generic humanity and those feminists who seek to find a space of “woman” outside the man of reason. The concept of man also brings with it a certain concept of world: as Heidegger and others have pointed out, the earth becomes “world” when it is lived as our own. 6. For a stringent critique of the myopias of environmental thinking, see Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 18. 7. See Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Putnam, 1994). 8. Jeremy Rivkin, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). 9. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 10. Mark Rowlands, The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). 11. Peter Russell, The Global Brain: The Awakening Earth in a New Century (Edinburgh: Floris, 2007). 12. Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, trans. Robert Bononno (New York: Perseus Books, 1997). 13. See James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (New York: Basic Books, 2009). 14. Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30:1 (1969), pp. 31–57. 15. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

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16. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Boston: Shambhala, 1992). 17. It is for this reason that Luce Irigaray does not see Descartes as an “error” in the history of thought but instead recognizes in the Cartesian cogito an ongoing appeal to a necessary otherness that will enable man to return to himself, and live himself as nothing more than the process of reflecting his own outside. See Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 18. Unlike contemporary moralisms of evolutionary psychology that tie sexual selection to species maintenance and identity (Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life [New York: Pantheon Books, 1994]), Elizabeth Grosz insists that Darwinian sexual selection creates couplings and creations that are no longer either organic or species-bound. See Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 19. Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2009), p. 67. 20. For an insightful criticism of bio-art’s putative break with “man”— a critique that would resonate with Atwood’s attempt to figure a bio-art of dead waste—see Nicole Anderson, “(Auto)Immunity: The Deconstruction and Politics of ‘Bio-Art’ and Criticism,” Parallax 16:4 (2010), pp. 101–116. 21. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 170. 22. Atwood, The Year of the Flood, pp. 56–57.

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CH A P T ER

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Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water Astrida Neimanis

We are all bodies of water. To think embodiment as watery belies the understanding of bodies that we have inherited from the dominant Western metaphysical tradition. As watery, we experience ourselves less as isolated entities, and more as oceanic eddies: I am a singular, dynamic whorl dissolving in a complex, fluid circulation. The space between ourselves and our others is at once as distant as the primeval sea, yet also closer than our own skin—the traces of those same oceanic beginnings still cycling through us, pausing as this bodily thing we call “mine.” Water is between bodies, but of bodies, before us and beyond us, yet also very presently this body, too. Deictics falter. Our comfortable categories of thought begin to erode. Water entangles our bodies in relations of gift, debt, theft, complicity, differentiation, relation. What might becoming a body of water —ebbing, fluvial, dripping, coursing, traversing time and space, pooling as both matter and meaning—give to feminism, its theories, and its practices?

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Hydro ǀ Logics Our cells are inflated by water, our metabolic reactions mediated in aqueous solution. —David Suzuki1 The oceans are in constant motion . . . thermohaline circulation . . . occurs deep within the ocean and acts like a conveyor belt. —Environmental Literacy Council2 The land biota has had to find ways to carry the sea within it and, moreover, to construct watery conduits from “node” to “node.” —Mark and Dianna McMenamin3 Somewhere at the bottom of the sea, there must be water that sank from the surface during the “Little Ice Age” three centuries ago . . . The ocean remembers. —Robert Kandel 4

Sixty to ninety percent of your bodily matter is composed of water. Water, in this sense, is an entity, individualized as that relatively stable thing you call your body. But water has other logics, other patternings and means of buoying our earthly world, too. Not least, water is a conduit and mode of connection. Just as oceanic currents convey the sun’s warmth, schools of fish, and islands of degraded plastic from one planetary sea to another, our watery bodies serve as material media. In an evolutionary sense, living bodies are necessary for the proliferation of what scientists Mark and Dianna McMenamin call Hypersea, which arose when life moved out of marine waters and by necessity folded a watery habitat “back inside of itself.”5 Today, when you or I drink a glass of water, we amplify this Hypersea, as we sustain our existence through other “webs of physical intimacy and fluid exchange.”6 In this act of ingestion, we come into contact with all of our companion species7 that inhabit the watershed from which that water was drawn—book lice, swamp cabbage, freshwater mussel. But we connect with the sedimentation tanks, and rapid-mix flocculators that make that water drinkable, and the reservoir, and the rainclouds, too. Hypersea extends to include not only terrestrial flora and fauna, but also technological, meteorological, and geophysical bodies of water.

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Even while in constant motion, water is also a planetary archive of meaning and matter. To drink a glass of water is to ingest the ghosts of bodies that haunt that water. When “nature calls” some time later, we return to the cistern and the sea not only our antidepressants, our chemical estrogens, or our more commonplace excretions, but also the meanings that permeate those materialities: disposable culture, medicalized problem-solving, ecological disconnect. Just as the deep oceans harbor particulate records of former geological eras, water retains our more anthropomorphic secrets, even when we would rather forget. Our distant and more immediate pasts are returned to us in both trickles and floods. And that same glass of water will facilitate our movement, growth, thinking, loving. As it works its way down the esophagus, through blood, tissue, to index finger, clavicle, left plantar fascia, it ensures that our being is always a becoming. An alchemist at once profoundly wondrous and entirely banal, water guides a body from young to old, from here to there, from potentiality to actuality. Translation, transformation. Plurality proliferates. As a facilitator, water is the milieu, or the gestational element, for other watery bodies as well.8 Mammal, reptile, or fish; sapling or seed; river delta or backyard pond—all of these bodies are necessarily brought into being by another body of water that dissolves, partially or completely, to water the bodies that will follow. On a geological scale, we have all arisen out of the same primordial soup, gestated by species upon watery species that have gifted their morphology to new iterations and articulations. On a more human scale, we gestate in amniotic waters that deliver to us the nutrients that enable our further proliferation. Our waste is removed by similar waterways, and we are protected from external harm by these intrauterine waters, too. Gestational waters are also themselves (in) a body of water, and participate in the greater element of planetary water that continues to sustain us, protect us, and nurture us, both extra- and intercorporeally, beyond these amniotic beginnings. Water connects the human scale to other scales of life, both unfathomable and imperceptible. We are all bodies of water, in the constitutional, the genealogical, and the geographical sense. Water as body; water as communicator between bodies; water as facilitating bodies into being. Entity, medium, transformative and gestational milieu. All of this enfolded in, seeping from, sustaining and saturating, our bodies of water. “There are tides in the body,” writes Virginia Woolf.9 We ebb and flow across time and space— body, to body, to body, to body.

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Feminism ǀ Leaks We ourselves are sea, sands, corals, seaweeds, beaches, tides, swimmers, children, waves . . . seas and mothers. —Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément 10 Woman’s writing . . . draws its corporeal fluidity from images of water . . . This keeping-alive and life-giving water exists simultaneously as the writer’s ink, the mother’s milk, the woman’s blood and menstruation. —Trinh T. Minh-ha11 In me everything is already flowing. —Luce Irigaray 12

Thinking about embodiment in ways that challenge the phallogocentric Enlightenment vision of discrete, atomized, and self-sufficient Man has been a long-standing concern for feminist thinkers. Particularly within the French feminist tradition of écriture feminine, the fluid body of woman is invoked as a means of interrupting a philosophical tradition that both valorizes a male (morphological, psychological, symbolic, philosophical) norm, and elides the specificity of “woman.” At the same time, accounts such as Hélène Cixous’s, Luce Irigaray’s, and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s have been criticized by other feminist thinkers for their purported incarceration of women within a biologically essentialist female and normatively reproductive morphology. Cixous and Clément’s “Sorties,” for instance, connects the female body to the sea, in that both are gestators of life. Irigaray, in her love letter to Friedrich Nietzsche, continuously admonishes him for forgetting the watery habitat that birthed him, and to which he owes a great debt.13 Both Minh-ha in Women, Native, Other and Cixous in “The Laugh of the Medusa” invoke the “mother’s milk”14 or the “white ink,”15 which seems to reductively connect the woman writer to a lactating female body. Is not, then, the “fluid woman” just another way of invoking the phallogocentric fantasy of “woman as womb”? The last century of (primarily Western) feminist thought has cultivated the view that to reduce a woman to her (reproductive) biology is problematic, first, because of the troubling symbolic meanings— passive, empty vessel, hysterical, contaminating—that persistently imbue this biology. Moreover, within the social, political, and

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economic contexts in which this thought has circulated, compulsory reproduction has generally foreclosed rather than facilitated meaningful participation of women outside of the domestic sphere. But why should this history predetermine any appeal to biological matter as necessarily antifeminist or reductionist? The desire of water to morph, shape-shift, and facilitate the new persistently overflows any attempt at capture. Is not “woman” similarly uncontainable? After all, “woman’s” beings/becomings in these texts are not determined in advance—even as she may be, like water, temporarily dammed by dominant representations and discourse. As watery, woman is hardly (statically, unchangeably) “essentialist.” She too becomes the very matter of transmutation. In an effort to circumvent the trap of biological essentialism, the texts of Irigaray, Cixous, and Minh-ha have also been read as merely metaphoric of gestation: women’s fluidity births new ways of thinking, writing, being.16 But surely, the watery body is no mere metaphor. The intelligibility of any aqueous metaphor depends entirely upon the real waters that sustain not only material bodies, but material language, too.17 And are we not all bodies of water? In Marine Lover, while Irigaray’s descriptions highlight woman’s aqueous embodiment, she posits no clear separation of the man’s body from the amniotic waters he too readily forgets. Irigaray’s male interlocutor in this text is birthed in and by a watery body—yet this water is also an integral part of his own flesh: “Where have you drawn what flows out of you?”18 And, while what her lover thinks he fears is drowning in the mother/sea, Irigaray subtly reminds him that what he should really fear is desiccation, drought, thirst. No body can come into being, thrive, or survive without water to buoy its flesh. Similarly, Minh-ha suggests that woman’s writing draws from the wellspring of her reproductively oriented fluid forces (menstruation, lactation)—yet all bodies have reservoirs to be tapped.19 We might ask: if the fluids of otherwise gendered bodies were acknowledged rather than effaced, how might such attentiveness amplify the creative— and even ethical and political—potential of these bodies? Rather than alerting us to some “essentialist” difference between masculine and feminine (or normatively reprosexual and nonreprosexual) embodiment, such aqueous body-writing might invite all bodies to attend to the water that facilitates their existence, and embeds them within ongoing overlapping cycles of aqueous fecundity. The fluid body is not specific to woman, but watery embodiment is still a feminist question; thinking as a watery body has the potential to bathe new feminist concepts and practices into existence. What if

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a reorientation of our lived embodiment as watery could move us, for example, beyond the longstanding debate among feminisms whereby commonality (connection, identification) and difference (alterity, unknowability) are posited as an either/or proposition? Inspired by Irigaray, we will still affirm that the rhythms of the fluid woman belong to what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called “the species of alterity”20 (for this alterity also safeguards plurality). But Irigaray also reminds us that no body is self-sufficient in its fluvial corporeality; we have all come from the various seas that have gestated us, both evolutionarily and maternally.21 Water, in other words, flows through and across difference. Water does not ask us to confirm either the irreducibility of alterity or material connection. Water flows between, as both: a new hydro-logic. What sort of ethics and politics could I cultivate if I were to acknowledge that the unknowability of the other nonetheless courses through me—just as I do through her? To say that we harbor waters, that our bodies’ gestation, sustenance, and interpermeation with other bodies are facilitated by our bodily waters, and that these waters are both singular and shared, is far more literal than we might at first think. Neither essentialist nor purely discursive, this watery feminism is critically materialist.

Membrane, Viscosity Probably the most important feature of a biomembrane is that it is a selectively permeable structure . . . [which is] essential for effective separation. —Wikipedia22 “Viscosity” retains an emphasis on resistance to changing form. —Nancy Tuana23

Bodies need water, but water also needs a body. Water is always sometime, someplace, somewhere. Even in our aqueous connections, bodies and their others/worlds are still differentiated. The question, then, of “what is” is never sufficient. How is it? Where is it? When is it? Speed, rate, thickness, duration, mixture, contamination, blockage.24 If we are all bodies of water, then we are differentiated not so much by the “what” as by the “how.” But what are the specific mechanisms of this differentiation? Attention to the mechanics of watery embodiment reveals that in order to connect bodies, water must travel across only partially

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permeable membranes. In an ocular-centric culture, some of these membranes, like our human skin, give the illusion of impermeability. Still, we perspire, urinate, ingest, ejaculate, menstruate, lactate, breathe, cry. We take in the world, selectively, and send it flooding back out again. This selection is not a “choice” made by our subjective, human selves; it is rather always, as Nietzsche has taught us, an impersonal expression of phusis’s nuances—affirmative material energies striving toward increasingly differentiated forms.25 Selection traverses other more subtle membranes, too—those that are either too ephemeral or too monumental to be perceived by us as such, yet that choreograph our ways of being in relation: a gravitational threshold, a weather front, a wall of grief, a line on a map, equinox, a winter coat, death. Nancy Tuana refers to this membrane logic as “viscous porosity.” While the concept of fluidity emphasizes traversals across and between bodies, viscosity reminds Tuana that there are still bodies— all different—that need to be accounted for. Viscosity draws attention to “sites of resistance and opposition” rather than only “a notion of open possibilities” that might suggest one indiscriminate flow.26 Despite the fact that we are all watery bodies, leaking into and sponging off of one another, we resist total dissolution, material annihilation. Or more aptly, we postpone it: ashes to ashes, water to water. At what point is the past overtaken by the present? What marks the definitive shift from one species to a “new” one? Where does the host body end and the amniotic body begin? Our bodies are thresholds of both past and future. The precise material space-time of differentiation is only a matter of convenience, but any body still requires membranes to keep from being swept out to sea altogether. There is always a risk of flooding.

Adrift in the More-than-Human We are in this together. —Rosi Braidotti27 The problem was that we did not know whom we meant when we said “we.” —Adrienne Rich 28

The mostly watery composition of my body is not just a human thing. From the almost imperceptible jellies in the benthos of the Pacific, to

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the Namibian desert catfish hibernating in the mud; from mangrove to ragweed; from culvert to billabong to the roaring Niagara; cushioned between fractocumulus cloud and deep earth aquifer, we are all bodies of water. In acknowledging this corporeally connected aqueous community, distinctions between human and nonhuman start to blur. We live in a watery commons, where the human infant drinks the mother, the mother ingests the reservoir, the reservoir is replenished by the storm, the storm absorbs the ocean, the ocean sustains the fish, the fish are consumed by the whale . . . The bequeathing of our water to an other is necessary for the custodianship of this commons. But when and how does gift become theft, and sustainability usurpation? “Trickle down”: While species extinctions are occurring at around 10 percent per decade, aquatic species face a higher threat of extinction than birds or mammals. Much of this oceanic swan song is due to the automotive fluids, household solvents, pesticides, mercury, and other toxins that make their way from human home to culvert to sea. Most affected are those animal bodies that dwell at or near the bottom of an aquatic habitat—such as fish eggs and filter feeders—where pollutants tend to settle.29 “Currency”: Resources such as salt and sand have long been harvested from the sea for human use, but marine organisms—tunicates, cnidaria, mollusks—also provide us with pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, food additives, depilatories. For example, antigens derived from eleven pounds of sea squirts can supply enough anticancer drugs to satisfy the world’s demand for a year. Flows of power are inaugurated between marine life, human bodies in pain, and Big Pharma. Into which currents and what currencies are the sea squirts being commandeered?30 “Liquidity”: The “human” has probably been around for five to seven million years, but sharks are at least 420 million years old. In recent decades, many shark species have been threatened by a black market finning industry that nets over US$1 billion a year. A single whale-shark fin can sell for ten thousand dollars.31 Cash in hand, they say, is the most liquid asset. The seeping of the biological into the cultural, of the more-thanhuman into the human, happens in more ways than one. Watery bodies sustain other bodies, but biological life buttresses our language, our ways of making sense of the world, as well.32 Hydro-logics suggest to us new ontological understandings of body and community, but how might feminism ensure that this aqueous understanding of

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our interbeing become not another appropriation and usurpation of the more-than-human world that sustains us? To say that my body is marshland, estuary, ecosystem, that it is riven through with tributaries of companion species, nestling in my gut, extending through my fingers, pooling at my feet, is a beautiful way to reimagine my corporeality. But once we recognize that we are not hermetically sealed in our diver’s suits of human skin, what do we do with this recognition? What do we owe, and how do we pay?

Ecotone I like places and times that are pregnant with change. —Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands 33 Inorganic life is the movement at the membrane of the organism, where it begins to quiver with virtuality, decomposes, and is recombined again. —Pheng Cheah 34

As transition areas between two adjacent but different ecosystems, ecotones appear as both gradual shifts and abrupt demarcations. But more than just a marker of separation or even a marker of connection (although importantly both of these things), an ecotone is also a zone of fecundity, creativity, transformation; of becoming, assembling, multiplying; of diverging, differentiating, relinquishing. Something happens. Estuaries, tidal zones, wetlands: these are all liminal spaces where “two complex systems meet, embrace, clash, and transform one another.”35 An ecotone is a sort of membrane, too: a pause, or even an increase in velocity, where/when/how matter comes to matter differently. If we consider membrane logic as belonging to the species of the ecotone, we are again made aware of the rich complexity of the hydro-logics that sustain us. The liminal ecotone is not only a place of transit, but itself a watery body. In other words, an ecotone has a material fecundity that rejects an ontological separation between “thing” and “transition,” between “body” and “vector.” The watery membrane, then, is no passive prop for the ontologically weightier bodies that traverse it. In Gilles Deleuze’s terms, this event-full zone could be called “inorganic life.”36 But saturated with lively water, inorganic life is organic, too. The virtual is also actual. These and other pairs begin to creep. Eco: home. Tone: tension. We must learn to be at home in the quivering tension of the in-between. No other home is available.

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In-between nature and culture, in-between biology and philosophy, in-between the human and everything we ram ourselves up against, everything we desperately shield ourselves from, everything we throw ourselves into, wrecked and recklessly, watching, amazed, as our skins become thinner . . .

Transcorporeal Creep The material self cannot be disentangled from networks that are simultaneously economic, political, cultural, scientific, and substantial . . . what was once the ostensibly bounded human subject finds herself in a swirling landscape of uncertainty. —Stacy Alaimo37

Tuana reminds us that our porosity is what enables us to live at all, but “this porosity . . . does not discriminate against that which can kill us.”38 Because water is such a capable vector, not only does life-giving potentiality course through our transcorporeal waterways, but so also does illness, contamination, inundation. There are things we do know: skyrocketing rates of cancer in aboriginal communities downstream from the Alberta tar sands megaproject in Northwestern Canada are directly attributable to the toxic tailings ponds created by the bitumen extraction process. In November 2010, seven months after the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the deaths of 6,104 birds, 609 sea turtles, and 100 mammals could be directly attributed to the oil spill—and the death toll continues to rise. Ongoing death and illness in the residents of Bhopal, India, almost three decades after the Union Carbide methylisocyanate gas leak are directly attributable to persistent groundwater contamination stealthily poisoning all that flows beneath. But at what point do the sharp edges of our certainty begin to blur? Consider that in addition to fat, vitamins, lactose, minerals, antibodies, and other life-sustaining stuff, North American breast milk also likely harbors DDT, PCBs, dioxin, trichloroethylene, cadmium, mercury, lead, benzene, arsenic, paint thinner, phthalates, dry-cleaning fluid, toilet deodorizers, Teflon, rocket fuel, termite poison, fungicides, and flame retardant.39 Reducing direct exposure to toxins cannot negate the fact that our bodily archives have deep memories, our flesh fed by streams whose sources are beyond our view. As Stacy Alaimo notes, transcorporeal threats are often invisible, and risk is incalculable. The future is always an open question, and our bodies must be understood as flowing beyond the bounds of

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what is knowable. Aqueous transcorporeality therefore demands of us a new ethics—a new way of being responsible and responsive to our others. On this “ever-changing landscape of continuous interplay, intra-action, emergence, and risk,”40 even as we insist upon accountability, we must also make decisions that eschew certainty and necessary courses of action. This is an ethics of unknowability. Moreover, this new ethics must also be itself transcorporeal, transiting across and through diverse sites of contestation. For whom should rocket-fuelled breast milk be an issue, and why? Consider that due to cold temperatures and little sunlight, persistent organic pollutants (POPs) flowing from the industrial and agricultural wastes of far-flung rich, Westernized outposts break down slowly in the Arctic. A thumb-sized piece of maktaaq, a staple in the Inuit diet, contains more than the maximum recommended intake of PCBs for an entire week.41 As a result, Innu women’s breast milk is an especially toxic substance, absorbing the liquid runoff of a global political economy that produces vastly divergent body burdens. The inequalities of neocolonialist globalization course through waterways at scales both individual and oceanic. Nursing one’s young becomes a complex congeries of questions in which we all are implicated, rather than an issue for the biologically essentialized, lactating woman alone. The flows of global power meet the flows of biomatter.

Hydrofeminism It is a constant challenge for us to rise to the occasion, to catch the wave of life’s intensities and ride it on, exposing the boundaries or limits as we transgress them. —Rosi Braidotti 42

Watershed pollution, a theory of embodiment, amniotic becomings, disaster, environmental colonialism, how to write, global capital, nutrition, philosophy, birth, rain, animal ethics, evolutionary biology, death, storytelling, bottled water, multinational pharmaceutical corporations, drowning, poetry. These are all feminist questions, and they are mostly inextricable from one another. A key priority for feminism today, as Chandra Talpade Mohanty has claimed, is building a transnational, anticapitalist, and anticolonialist solidarity, where local and global thinking and acting are simultaneous.43 Few things are more planetary and more intimate than our bodies of water. New feminisms thus must also be transspecies, and transcorporeal.

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Not only does water connect us, gestate us, sustain us—more than this, water disturbs the very categories that ground the domains of social, political, philosophical, and environmental thought, and those of feminist theory and practice as well. Thinking about our selves and our broader communities as watery can thus unmoor us in productive (albeit sometimes risky) ways. We are set adrift in the space-time between our certainties, between the various outcrops we cling to for security. It is here, in the borderzones of what is comfortable, of what is perhaps even livable,44 that we can open to alterity—to other bodies, other ways of being and acting in the world—in the simultaneous recognition that this alterity also flows through us. Current feminisms have their own ecotones, where the “objects” of feminist thought extend rhizomatically into areas one might never have considered “feminist.” To follow our bodies of water along their rivulets and tributaries is to journey beyond the cleaving and coupling of sexually differentiated human bodies: we find ourselves tangled in intricate choreographies of bodies and flows of all kinds—not only human bodies, but also other animal, vegetable, geophysical, meteorological, and technological ones; not only watery flows, but also flows of power, culture, politics, and economics. So if projects that move us to think about animal ethics, or environmental degradation, or neocolonialist capitalist incursions are still “feminist,” it is not because such questions are analogous to sexual oppression; it is rather because a feminist exploration of the inextricable materialitysemioticity that circulates through all of these bodies pushes at the borders of feminism, and expands it. By venturing to feminism’s ecotones, and leaping in, we can discover that feminism dives far deeper than human sexual difference, and outswims any attempts to limit it thus. Here is gestation, here is proliferation, here is danger, here is risk. Here is an unknowable future, always already folded into our own watery flesh. Here is hydrofeminism. At least this is what becoming a body of water has taught me. Notes 1. David Suzuki with Amanda McConnell, “A Child’s Reminder,” in Whose Water Is It? The Unquenchable Thirst of a Water-Hungry World, ed. Bernadette MacDonald and Douglas Jehl (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2003), p. 179. 2. “The Great Ocean Conveyor Belt,” Environmental Literacy Council, http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/545.html, accessed on April 23, 2011.

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3. Mark and Dianna McMenamin, Hypersea (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 5. 4. Robert Kandel, Water from Heaven (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 132. 5. McMenamin and McMenamin, Hypersea, p. 5. 6. Ibid., p. 15. 7. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003). 8. See Mielle Chandler and Astrida Neimanis, “Water and Gestationality: What Flows Beneath Ethics,” in Thinking with Water, ed. Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, forthcoming). 9. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Penguin Classic, 2000), p. 124. I am indebted to Janine MacLeod for drawing my attention to the tidal imagery in Woolf’s work. 10. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays,” in The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 89. 11. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 38. 12. Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 37. 13. “And isn’t it by forgetting the first waters that you achieve immersion in your abysses and the giddy flight of one who wings far away” (ibid., p. 38). 14. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other, p. 38. 15. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs 1:4 (1976), p. 881. 16. For example, see Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993); or Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London: Routledge, 1991). 17. See Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1993); and Janine MacLeod, “Water, Memory and the Material Imagination,” in Thinking with Water. 18. Irigaray, Marine Lover, p. 38. 19. “A woman’s ink of blood for a man’s ink of semen” (Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other, p. 38). 20. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 72. 21. See Irigaray, Marine Lover, pp. 12–13, where Irigaray makes allusions to Nietzsche’s evolutionary “descent.” 22. “Biological Membrane,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Biological_membrane, accessed on April 23, 2011.

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23. Nancy Tuana, “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina,” in Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2008), p. 194. 24. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on bodies and their composition, for example, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 152–153. 25. See Melissa A. Orlie, “Impersonal Matter,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 134. 26. Tuana, “Viscous Porosity,” p. 194. 27. Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (London: Polity, 2006), p. 119. This refrain is a motto for Braidotti’s posthumanist ecological thought. 28. Adrienne Rich, “Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” in Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, ed. Carole R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 451. 29. “Aquatic Extinction,” Earth Gauge, http://www.earthgauge. net/2008/aquatic-extinction, accessed on April 23, 2011. 30. Astrida Neimanis, “‘Strange Kinship’ and Ascidian Life: 13 Repetitions,” Journal of Critical Animal Studies 9:1 (2011), pp. 117–143. 31. “About Shark Finning,” Stop Shark Finning: Keep Sharks in the Ocean and Out of the Soup, http://www.stopsharkfinning.net, accessed on April 23, 2011. 32. See MacLeod, “Water, Memory and the Material Imagination” for a complex analysis of the predatory relationship between the language of capital flows and watery materiality. 33. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, “The Marginal World,” in Every Grain of Sand: Canadian Perspectives on Ecology and Environment, ed. J. Andrew Wainwright (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2004), p. 46. 34. Pheng Cheah, “Non-Dialectical Materialism,” in New Materialisms, p. 88. 35. Mortimer-Sandilands, “The Marginal World,” p. 48. See also Cecilia Chen, “Mapping Waters: Thinking with Watery Places,” in Thinking with Water. 36. See Cheah, “Non-Dialectical Materialism,” p. 88. 37. Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 20. 38. Tuana, “Viscous Porosity,” p. 198. 39. Florence Williams, “Toxic Breast Milk?” New York Times Magazine, January 9, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/09/magazine /09TOXIC.html?pagewanted=1&r=1, accessed on February 16, 2011. 40. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, p. 21.

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41. Andrew Duffy, “Toxic Chemicals Poison Inuit Food,” Ottawa Citizen, http://www.chem.unep.ch/POPs/POP_Inc/press_releases /ottawa-1.htm.5_July_1998, accessed on February 16, 2011. 42. Rosi Braidotti, “The Ethics of Becoming-Imperceptible,” in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 139. 43. See Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles,” Signs 28:2 (2003), pp. 499–535. 44. Spatio-temporal dynamisms “can be experienced only at the borders of the livable” (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], p. 118). Braidotti expands this notion as an ethics of sustainability (Braidotti, “The Ethics of Becoming-Imperceptible”).

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CH A P T ER

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The Breathing Body in Movement Davina Quinlivan

No other element can for him [the human being] take the place of place. No other element carries with it—or lets itself be passed through by—light and shadow, voice or silence . . . No other element is in this way space prior to all localization, and a substratum both immobile and mobile, permanent and flowing. —Luce Irigaray 1

Air, if we are to believe Luce Irigaray, is the most fundamental aspect of human habitation. It is important, then, to question how to move between, or inside, such a space when it is always already part of ourselves, as we inhale and exhale the air around us. When we breathe, two types of movement occur: first, the micro-movement of our bodies, the fall and rise of the chest; then, the movement through space itself, through the air and the exterior world. In what follows, I want to demonstrate the potential of art to harbor the question of the breathing body.2 I focus on the shared experience of a gallery space and its configuration of breath and movement. This leads me to the examination of two possibilities: first, the ways in which Irigaray’s thoughts on feminine perception and the sexed, breathing body offer fresh perspectives on the issue of embodied subjectivity; and, second, borrowing a term from Giuliana Bruno, how the figure of the flâneur or “streetwalker” provides an articulation of such Irigarayan embodied movement. As a principal example of how contemporary art can enable us to think through the feminist specificity of the breathing body, I will turn to a piece by Korean artist Kimsooja, which will

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prompt reflection on the experience of hearing and seeing the breathing body in movement. Irigaray’s philosophical engagement with the topic of breath is one of the most sustained and wide-ranging studies treating breath beyond its biological function. While the recent cultural theory of Steven Connor in his book The Matter of Air also offers a rich exploration of the topic of breath from the broader perspective of embodiment and society,3 Irigaray’s discourse is most attuned to questions of female perception and the breathing body. Most notably, in her 1983 volume The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger —her phenomenological engagement with air—Irigaray develops an important stage in her overarching project of sexual difference, where the elemental nature of air is also seen as corresponding with a particularly feminine form of being.4 Subsequently, Irigaray develops several distinct philosophical enquiries into breathing, in texts such as “The Way of Breath,” Being Two: How Many Eyes Have We?, “A Breath that Touches in Words,” Everyday Prayers, and, most importantly, “The Age of the Breath.”5 In these texts, Irigaray’s critical examination of Western philosophy synthesizes Buddhist ways of looking at and thinking about the world in order to suggest that breath might preserve sexual difference in the body.6 For Irigaray, air fulfills a mediatory role between the sexes. In simpler terms, it engenders a positive space within which to live. Indeed, Irigaray contends that the sharing of breath between men and women is more fundamental than any and all verbal communication between them. This idea forms the basis for her own philosophical elaboration of breath as well as her practical assessment of how to address real, lived, subjective experience. Above all, Irigaray’s thought draws attention to the shared breath between mother and child—an intrauterine sharing of air that occurs even before birth. Her view is that woman “communicates through air, through blood, through milk, and even through voice and love before and beyond any perceptible thing.”7 While woman possesses a more natural relationship with air, man “uses his energy in to order to fabricate, to make, to create outside of himself. He puts his vital or spiritual breath into the things that he produces.”8 As we shall see, Irigaray’s thought enables a better understanding of the sexed, breathing body and its locus in the art of Kimsooja. Irigaray’s thought is valuable to aesthetic theory because it widens an appreciation of materialist perspectives on the sexed body and embodiment outside monolithic and essentialist perceptions. Furthermore, Irigaray’s thought is especially relevant to contemporary

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art experience and its increasing fascination with a more interactive and participatory form of aesthetic encounter. While classical models of spectatorship and viewing pleasure privilege binary oppositions and a patriarchal exercise of power, the thought of Irigaray lends a different set of contours to modes of looking and viewing participation, precisely organized around the phenomenological dimensions of the breathing body.

Bruno and Irigaray: Movement and the Breathing Flâneur One of the most significant ways in which Irigaray’s thought offers new perspectives on embodiment and viewing relations in art is through her sensuous reflection on breath and the space of air. This is to say that physical sensation, on her account, necessarily interplays with breathing. For example, smelling is also an act of inhalation, and touch is also a gesture made possible by the air flowing through our bloodstream. Her thought challenges existing conceptions of embodied perception and, especially, the hierarchy of vision over the senses so prevalent in Western philosophy. Her insistence that breathing is intertwined with the senses both substantiates and complicates the logic of discourses of the body and the materiality of language. Most feminist discourse attempting to return to the body in general and the materiality of language in particular has done so without accounting for the vital role that breath plays in our existence. By bringing attention to this repressed element, Irigaray offers a new order through which to explore the meaning of our senses and their implications for lived experience. Aesthetic experience, and indeed criticism, invariably privileges questions of visibility and invisibility, but its frequent search for new means in which to think about liminal and ambivalent notions of vision resonates with the treatment of perception and embodied subjectivity that we find in Irigaray’s philosophy. Above all, her work invites a new, feminist phenomenological discourse that breaks with the paradigm of vision (one represented in what follows by the figure of the flâneur), and that introduces, instead, an “aesthetic” paradigm of moving through a space haptically, with attention to breath. While the nineteenth century French poet Charles Baudelaire originally developed the concept of the flâneur (stroller, or streetwalker) in response to the increasingly sensual and spectacular allure of urban life (especially its many attractions and opportunities for consumerism), the thought of Giuliana Bruno emphasizes the ways in which motion

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is inextricably linked with the theorization of space in Baudelaire’s account of urban France—places and locales, linkages and connections, mapped out according to various pleasurable ways of looking and engaging with the world. For Bruno, lived space is experienced as psychical geography or psychogeography, where emotion materializes as a moving topography.9 Importantly, Bruno describes such perception as “feminine,” or, rather, as belonging to a kind of female strategy that counters the male gaze and its all-encompassing, appropriating vision. Thus, Bruno’s investment in the notion of the female streetwalker, in particular, opens up a space in which to fruitfully introduce Irigaray’s philosophy of breath to haptic discourse and to articulate the position of the breathing, female viewer. Bruno is concerned with bringing to light a different way of looking, or “a desire to know,” mapped on the lust of the eyes.10 For her, knowledge is embedded in the senses and vision is implicated in sensory experience; her pyschogeographical analyses reflect a kind of lived experience of space that is antithetical to the penetrating, scopophilic gaze of Bauderlaire’s flâneur. She rethinks the power relations of looking in terms of desire and openness to the sensations it arouses: Curiosity came to signify a particular desire to know, which, for a period, was encouraged constantly to move, expanding in different directions. Such cognitive desire implies a mobilization that is drift. It is not only implicated in the sensation of wonder . . . but located in the experience of wander.11

Bruno’s thought resonates with Irigaray’s deconstruction of patriarchal vision and her emphasis on embodied perception and contemplation. My interest lies in how the question of breath might also be involved in such a mode of being, looking and wandering, as Bruno suggests. Bruno is well-known for her art criticism and her delicate treatment of art spaces and spatiality in visual culture as a whole, and her work sets up useful questions regarding the viewing experience of art and its invitation to the senses that I too privilege in this chapter. But Bruno has rarely commented on the topic of the breathing body or its participation in the experience of lived space. In her book Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, she quotes a passage from Barbara H. Channing’s A Sketch of Naples Sent from the Sisters Abroad: Or an Italian Journey (1856), in which the female protagonists encounter the Bay of Naples: “Our travellers held their breath,

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as their eyes caught, one after the other, the different points of this wondrous panorama.”12 The passage foregrounds an interesting relationship between viewing and breathing; the panoramic view elicits an embodied response and this is actualized by an intake of breath. In this context, breathing can be seen to represent a kind of expression of delight and wonder, precisely motivated by visual stimuli and the experience of space. Irigaray’s work enables further clarification and elaboration of such sensual pleasure and embodied experience resulting from the evocation of space in the art gallery and the viewer as a “wandering” streetwalker, as my discussion of Kimsooja’s artwork will demonstrate in what follows. To think about the intertwinement of breathing, perception, and movement is to become attuned to the rhythms of one’s breath, to take a step back and retreat to an interior world while moving forth and making contact with the environs of the outside. The next section of this chapter will closely examine the resonant connections between Irigaray and Bruno’s theoretical discourse, focusing on the key questions of embodied subjectivity and haptic discourse on which this chapter’s main argument is based—to think through the various ramifications of the sexed, breathing body in the aesthetic encounter and its heralding of a new feminist discourse.

Kimsooja and Her Breathing Audience The notion of the breathing female viewer, or streetwalker, to use Bruno’s term, is foregrounded in the work of the Korean artist Kimsooja. Rather than merely explicating or illustrating the theoretical discourse of Irigaray or Bruno, however, her work uniquely configures questions of the sexed breathing body in motion and its intersubjective implications. It permits an interrogation, and reckoning with, aesthetic experience as socially, as well as politically, significant. In her 2006 experimental installation Respirare—To Breathe, Kimsooja invited audiences into the space of Venice’s Teatro la Fenice.13 Seated, the audience waited, patiently, until the artist began her work. A projection of color accompanied the sound of Kimsooja’s breathing, transforming the auditorium into an extension of her body, positing the audience inside a breathing, sepulchral prism of light and sound. In particular, a recurrent motif emerged through which Kimsooja used her voice to mimic the sound of a weaving tool— an invisible blade of noise and breath incisively piercing the air. The effects of such experiential manipulation served to channel the ghost

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of Kimsooja’s grandmother, a former employee of one of the numerous factories in Korea. While the factory was absent, its ghost also insinuated itself in la Fenice. Yet, while such “ghosts” were invoked, the projected spectrum of colors continued to illuminate the quivering sonic frequencies of the artist’s own breath; her body became a conduit not only between herself and her ancestor, but between the screen of light, her breathing, and the viewers themselves. It is rather apt that la Fenice, Venice’s opera house, was selected as the exhibition space for this piece. Geographically, and topographically, Venice is a fissuring mass of arterial linkages, its multiple canals weaving in and out of itself like a vast, organic, respiratory system, passing oxygen to the innermost, and outermost, parts of the city. Such correlations between space and the body, matter and flesh, are frequently alluded to in Kimsooja’s work, but Respirare manipulates such a context in order to emphasize the interstices between movement and stillness and the visual corollaries of rhythms and sound waves articulated through her breathing body. Kimsooja’s body offers a different kind of arterial linkage that the viewer must traverse, mediated through screens and speakers, light and color. Unlike Bruno’s streetwalker, Kimsooja’s viewers are made acutely aware of their own breath and the breath they share with others as they journey, and wander, through the sights and sounds of Respirare. While Channing’s protagonists might hold their breath, vision is resuscitated through Kimsooja’s artwork and her sculpting of color, sound, and air. Indeed, Respirare conjoins the material and nonmaterial world via its technological and biological simulacrum and it is this dimension of Kimsooja’s art that is especially Irigarayan. While Respirare is, principally, sculpted from two female bodies—that of the female artist and her grandmother, or rather, the notion of her grandmother’s weaving needles converted, in the piece, to a weaving voice—the viewer’s breathing body is also implicated in the aesthetic experience of the piece. Kimsooja’s audiovisual installation (formed via the twinning of her individual pieces Invisible Woman and Invisible Needle) places emphasis on the female body as itself a ubiquitous site of creation, repossessed through breathing and, consequently, refusing its commodification through labor. Recalling the intrauterine sharing of breath foregrounded in the work of Irigaray, Kimsooja’s invocation of her grandmother makes visible, through her manipulation of color and light, a kind of female genealogy of breath preserved, biologically, through oxygenated cells that pass between mother and child. Only women can give life to another being through their own breathing

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and Kimsooja foregrounds this possibility through her emphasis on her grandmother’s weaving, breathing presence. While the installation consists of a projection of color that is accompanied by the sound of Kimsooja’s breathing (from her piece The Weaving Factory 5.1, 2004), it is the use of sound that ultimately shapes the audience’s perception of the piece, and the viewer’s hearing body is elicited more than any other aspect of their sense perception. Indeed, during a discussion of the work featured on her website, Kimsooja describes breath as a material object—an “invisible needle”14 —that threads through flesh and the exterior world; a movement emphasized by the projection of colors manipulated and distorted by the vocal intensity of the piece. Vision is secondary to sound. Kimsooja invites a comparison between breathing and weaving where the object being woven is exchanged for air itself, flowing through her body or what she describes as the “weaving factory.” Kimsooja’s comparison of breath with a needle, a tool that implements creation, also calls to mind the Greek notion of technē, a concept based on understanding the value of craftsmanship, not only as an activity but as a “manner of knowing,” as the phenomenological film theorist Vivian Sobchack writes: a bringing-forth of a greater truth.15 Kimsooja’s “needle” of breath informs a view of technē as a “practice” of carnality, or what could certainly be described as an Irigarayan assertion of the self, and of the body, as an instrument of truth itself. Furthermore, it is the human, breathing voice that heralds such enlightenment. Kimsooja subverts the commodification of a (literally) laboring, breathing body by transplanting it to a theater, an arena for the production of art, not objects such as the woven fabric generations of women would have worked on in the factories of Kimsooja’s homeland. Unlike the European art space of la Fenice, the Korean industrial space that is also invoked through Respirare politicizes Kimsooja’s art, reminding audiences of the exclusivity of ideas and art in bourgeois culture and, conversely, the universality of breathing and the different ways in which two spaces operate as “breathing entities,” as it were. If Irigaray equates male subjectivity with a form of breathing that fabricates and produces, while female subjectivity attends to a more “natural” form of creativity, then the weaving machines in the factory suggest a male, breathing body, and the art space of la Fenice adopts a female mode of breathing. Thus, the weaving machines in their original, factory location can be seen to represent a male form of breathing that appropriates the breath of the female factory workers, stinging their lungs with chemicals and, more abstractly, stifling their creativity to serve consumerism and the labor

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market. Replayed and refigured in the space of Kimsooja’s art installation, the sounds of the factory are displaced and take on a distinctly female form. In this context, the factory sounds suggest a creation of breath rather than any commodified means of production. Ultimately, Kimsooja’s Respirare takes its viewers on a journey through and with the body of la Fenice and the body of the artist herself, fostering a connection between subjects that is innovatively forged through the locus of breath in her art. While Baudelaire’s thought operates according to a logic of appropriation and mastery, Kimsooja’s artwork suggests a kind of feminine “streetwalking” that builds on Bruno’s sensuous discourse in which subjects and objects are reversibly enmeshed within each other; it’s an intersubjective encounter of the living and the lived space. However, Kimsooja might have taken the concerns of her art even further if she had situated the piece, and its viewers, in a public space. Indeed, the experimental sounds of Kimsooja’s voice calls to mind the whistling howls of wind beneath wooden slats at a pier, or the echoing underpasses in the suburbs. If the key elements of Respirare were transported to a public area, in the form of simple interactive devices and loudspeakers, its meaning might change, but it would also evolve and shape a different form of participatory encounter and social project. For example, the work of the British sculptor and artist Antony Gormley has successfully employed public space in order to situate art alongside everyday life. On the Sefton coast near Liverpool city in the United Kingdom, Gormley’s cast-iron sculptures of his own body gaze out at the shoreline, prostrate and accumulating debris, burnished and oxidizing as a result of their coming into contact with the sea air.16 Members of the public intermingle with the silent figures of Gormley’s Another Place, some even leaning or sitting on the shoulders of the life-size sculptures. Perhaps Respirare could be reborn as a permanent soundscape colored by the natural patterns of light and shadow in a child’s playground or at a beach, like Gormley’s art, a defunct lighthouse wired to the soundscape, projecting waves of colors over a sandy beach.

Conclusion A spring evening in 2006: At the end of Kimsooja’s Respirare, the audience filters out into the narrow Venetian alleys, their paths streaked with light. Hearts are racing and bodies are breathless. Their breath has mingled with the artist’s and she has sculpted it into image, sound, and color. Ears are ringing. Skin vibrating. For Baudelaire, the flâneur’s gaze embodies the hierarchy of the senses,

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vision encapsulating the apparatus of appropriation par excellence. However, those who experience Kimsooja’s artwork submit to her alchemic experiment in which the sight and sound of breathing stimulates the senses and disrupts dominant modes of reception and spectatorship. In the space outside la Fenice, the audience breathes differently, watching air particles dance in the light and foam gathering by the canals. Contemplating air is like contemplating the invisible, intersubjective spaces between and inside us all, as Irigaray’s philosophy of breath suggests. Breathing breaks down the distinction between the inside and the outside—it exists in the interstices of such binaries. Irigaray’s work informs a new kind of feminist thinking in which matter, and the material world, holds the key to our existence. This chapter has offered a new materialist perspective on the body, and has sought to articulate embodiment outside monolithic and essentialist perceptions. Breathing incarnates a kind of relating that is attuned to the presence of others, contemplating the intimate flow of life and breath that is shared among us. If we can respect this commonality, while remaining separate subjects, then we can understand words and voices better. The breaths shared between two people, or a community of breathing bodies, symbolize, for Irigaray, a vital aspect of existence that constitutes the foundation for all bodily, linguistic, and environmental linkages pertinent to human life. All humans enter into a dialogue with each other through breath, a relation that is established the moment we take our “first breath.” As this chapter has emphasized throughout, the very notion of two breaths and the possibility of “breathing together” can lead to a more fruitful dialogue between subjects, between communities and cultures. For Kimsooja, Venice is an apt meeting place for such breaths to intermingle, a place in which air and light passes through the city’s narrow veins, its embodied passages, attuning travelers, wanderers (as Bruno might suggest), to new ways of seeing and being, wondering and wandering with each other. Irigaray’s philosophy of breath might be viewed as a utopian discourse, but this is to undermine its sharply political and ethical dimensions. For example, Irigaray’s reflection on the intrauterine sharing of breath between mother and child prompts new ways in which to treat the subject of bioethics and intersubjectivity. If we can understand and embrace the intersubjectivity of breath, we might be able to live together more peacefully, and this relates to issues such as the development of housing (architecture designed on the basis of sharing breath and air as a community), education (listening and

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attending to the breath and voices of others), and indeed the cathartic qualities of art, as I have suggested here.17 Back in the Venetian alley, a tiny dust particle settles in the sky and we take another breath, subjectively and intersubjectively, toward our future. Notes I would like to thank Dr. Sarah Cooper, my PhD supervisor, for introducing me to the work of Luce Irigaray, and for her continued and unrelenting support of my work. 1. Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, trans. Mary Beth Mader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), p. 8. 2. For a more detailed reflection on the role of breath in the contemporary art experience, see the introductory chapter of my book, The Place of Breath in Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 3. See Steven Connor, The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal (London: Reaktion, 2010). 4. Breath is also tentatively gestured toward in Luce Irigaray’s Elemental Passions, trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still (New York: Routledge, 1992). 5. See Luce Irigaray, “The Way of Breath,” chap. 3 in Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, trans. Stephen Pluháček (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Being Two: How Many Eyes Have We?, trans. Luce Irigaray, Catherine Busson, and Jim Mooney (Russelheim, Germany: Christel Gottert Verlag, 2000); “A Breath that Touches in Words,” chap. 12 in I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity In History, trans. Alison Martin (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); and “The Age of the Breath,” chap. 14 in Luce Irigaray: Key Writings (London: Continuum, 2004). Irigaray’s poetry also contains frequent references to breathing. See Everyday Prayers, trans. Luce Irigaray with Timothy Mathews (Maisonneuve and Larose: University of Nottingham Press, 2004). 6. For example, Irigaray’s engagement with Buddhism is implicitly felt throughout her critique of Martin Heidegger in Being Two. 7. Irigaray, Introduction to Key Writings, p. xiii. 8. Irigaray, “The Way of Breath,” p. 85. 9. Giuliana Bruno, Prologue to Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London: Verso, 2002); and Streetwalking On a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 57. 10. Bruno, “The Architecture of the Interior,” chap. 5 in Atlas of Emotion, p. 156.

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11. Ibid., emphasis mine. 12. Barbara H. Channing quoted in Bruno, “Views from Home,” chap. 11 in ibid., p. 381. 13. Kimsooja’s Respirare—To Breathe was curated by Francesca Pasini and inaugurated on January 27, 2006, at Teatro la Fenice, Venice, Italy. Further details on the installation are available at Kimsooja’s website: http://www.kimsooja.com/projects/breathe.html. 14. Kimsooja, http://www.kimsooja.com/projects/breathe.html. 15. Vivian Sobchack, “‘Susie Scribbles’: On Technology, Technë, and Writing Incarnate,” chap. 5 in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), p. 132. 16. Images of Gormley’s sculptures can be seen on the Sefton Council website: http://www.sefton.gov.uk/default.aspx?page=6216. 17. For examples of such work on Irigaray’s philosophy of breath and its political meaning, see, in particular, Andrea Susan Wheeler, With Place Love Begins?: The Philosophy of Luce Irigaray, The Issue of Dwelling, Feminism and Architecture (Saarbrücken, Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010); and Luce Irigaray, “Teaching How to Meet in Difference,” in Luce Irigaray: Teaching, ed. Luce Irigaray with Mary Green (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), pp. 203–218.

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CH A P T ER

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Incubators, Pumps, and Other Hard-Breasted Bodies Katie Lloyd Thomas

It is now more than six years since I gave birth to my son at 26 weeks and was catapulted into the unknown and then terrifying environment of the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), where he stayed for the third trimester of my “pregnancy.” He is now a robust little boy, but the experience remained central when with taking place —a group of feminist artists and architects—I was part of initiating a series of temporary and permanent art interventions entitled “The Other Side of Waiting” for the mother-and-baby unit at Homerton Hospital in East London, where he had been looked after.1 For my own piece, This Is For You, 2 I chose to work in the NICU and to “celebrate” the collective work of the medical equipment, mass-produced and handmade objects, staff, and others in caring for very preterm babies. The outcome of This Is For You is a bespoke display cabinet installed at the heart of the unit, based on my own research and a series of interviews and workshops with a group of nine other mothers of preterm babies, with much of its contents provided or created by them.3 Their experiences and contributions inform this piece of writing and their words are included here, in italics and marked only by their initials, as they requested. Early on in the project, I made a drawing detailing the network of machines and equipment supporting a baby in the highest dependency room of the unit: the syringe drivers that give the infant nutrition, fluids, drugs, and blood transfusions; the ventilator that delivers oxygen; and the monitors and endless tests that regulate these flows and the related practices of care. In a second drawing, I mapped some

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of this kit onto an image of a placenta, and, onto an image of the womb, the parts of the kit that replace the containment of the womb: the incubator; the bedding; the practices of making, remaking, and cleaning them; and the constant hygiene and security procedures that are an ongoing part of life on the unit. The work of the NICU is typically described as taking care of sick babies. It is rarely included in the plethora of feminist and other commentaries on artificial reproductive technologies (ARTs)4 except in occasional references to gestation outside the womb. These tend to focus on more literal versions of the artificial womb such as rearing fetuses in lab-grown womb linings.5 But some consider it more likely that full ectogenesis will actually come about through the meeting of IVF techniques, where embryos can be kept alive for six or seven days before implantation, with neonatal care, where fetuses have been known to survive even at less than 22 weeks of gestation.6 My drawings imagined this matrix of equipment and medical procedures as ectogenetic—as a specific assemblage of humans and nonhumans that replaces the gestating maternal body. This premise is central to the development of This Is For You, and because of it I interviewed only birth mothers. It is the work of their bodies that is replaced by kit and staff, even if the new situation in the unit means, with the exception of milk expressing, that most of the “cares” (nappy changing, syringe feeding, applying oil to the baby’s skin, and so on) can be carried out by both parents. It is their prenatal relationship with their baby that is cut short and might somehow be remade in these new circumstances. The staff on the unit also seemed to recognize this dissymmetry between parents. They named us women “mums,” and in what follows I use this term for the mothers I interviewed. Understanding the sociotechnological matrix of neonatal care as an alternative to the womb also entails that we consider it in terms of relations—between mothers, babies, carers, nonhuman kits, and myriad practices that are constructed through a specific materiality. If feminist theorists such as Bracha L. Ettinger and Luce Irigaray privilege naturalized intrauterine relations in their figurations of becoming subject in the feminine,7 I want to be able to include technological and social constellations in our accounts of maternal and feminine subjectivity and relationality. I want to recognize that altering “natural” processes might also lead to changes in social realities, as utopian feminists such as Shulamith Firestone and Marge Piercy did in their advocacy of ectogenesis as a means to liberate women from their biological role.8 In distinction from these two thinkers,

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however, I want to make this claim without resorting to the eradication of sexual difference. These new constellations can—even in the rather harrowing conditions of the NICU—bring about new possibilities for living and relating (although in less revolutionary terms than Firestone proposed).

Mother the Machine A door slid aside, revealing seven human babies joggling slowly upside down, each in a sac of its own inside a larger fluid receptacle . . . All in a sluggish row, babies bobbed. Mother the machine. Like fish in the aquarium at Coney Island. —Marge Piercy 9

In Piercy’s 1978 science fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Time, the heroine, Connie, travels into the utopian future of Mattapoisett where technology has liberated women from their childbearing role. Fetuses are grown from selected genetic material and gestated in the “brooder”—a yellow, windowless building that hums gently and disinfects visitors on arrival. We might recognize the NICU in its “strange apparatus, the tanks and machines and closed compartments.”10 Indeed, Piercy’s reference to Coney Island recalls one of the many displays of incubators with “live” preterm babies inside what appeared as futuristic exhibits in amusement parks and international expositions at the turn of the last century.11 For most parents, their first encounter with the NICU is in the midst of an unexpected and frightening emergency and the environment seems strange, even futuristic: C: We had three miscarriages before we had [our first son] T. It all became quite surreal really. Then just the idea that [our second son] C was born and he was in this incubator. It was like it’s not real somehow. It’s space age—that whole thing about the baby in the box.

Despite the dramatic life and death stories of the NICU that make the press and the fact that a stay in the unit is now relatively common,12 the environment and the day-to-day reality of having a baby there remains little known and retains its “science fiction” image. What is perhaps most disturbing about Piercy’s image of the brooder is that the attendant has no interaction with the babies as they bob up and down in their receptacles. Only “mother the machine” is needed to take care of them. This is very different from the NICU,

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where staff constantly minister to the infants. Some of their routines are clearly medical, such as the insertion of “long lines” for feeding, while others, such as “gentle stimulation”—the prods and pats nurses give to stimulate breathing during frequent apnoea—are more basic but no less essential. In addition, the mother’s involvement is encouraged as soon as it is possible and is supported in the design of the technology.13 In his extraordinary and nuanced history of incubator technology, The Machine in the Nursery, Jeffrey P. Baker makes clear that this has not always been the case. Whether incubator technology has tended toward the fully automated or has made space for maternal care, it has at least in part depended on the prevailing attitude toward mothers and/or whomever is believed to care best for the infant. Baker explains that in the United States in the early twentieth century, incubators were developed to be as fully automated as possible with mechanical regulation of air temperature and humidity. “Minimal stimulation” was considered the best treatment for the baby, and formula milk was preferred because it did not vary on account of “emotional causes.”14 In the North American context, the mother was seen as unreliable and nervy, whereas science (and medical practitioners) “could imitate and improve on nature . . . and save the infant from the harmful influences of its own mother,” Baker explains.15 A photograph of the American Chapple Bed of 1933 shows a nurse standing, peering down through a small vision panel, her hands entering an otherwise entirely closed, flush metal box through two holes to minister to the infant.16 But in France, where incubator technology had developed in maternity hospitals, two obstetricians recognized that a mother’s involvement could improve survival rates. First, Pierre Budin realized that rising infection rates amongst infants were caused by using wet nurses to supply milk. Second, Adolphe Pinard’s research suggested that infants survived better once they went home if breast-feeding had already been established. As a result, mothers were encouraged to “lie-in” with their sick babies and feed them. And incubators became transparent on all sides to allow mothers to watch over their babies and tend to them. A journalist described the change in rather flowery terms: “The glass cover permits the mother to watch every moment of the poor, fragile little being. And thus by watching him, almost minute by minute, the mother becomes attached to her baby; she trembles for him during the weeks she remains at the Clinique.”17 Budin’s approach greatly reduced premature infant mortality rates. It also produced a technology that allowed for a relationship between

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mother and child, by involving her in feeding, by allowing the maternal gaze, and by enabling proximity. When a baby is still very dependent on medical technology, proximity and watching may be the only ways parents can maintain a relationship with their child. A: You know it was a life-and-death thing. I just wanted to know whether she was going to survive and I felt that it was so primitive, the only things I could do were have skin-to-skin contact, touching, and looking into her eyes. Nothing else.

Neonatal technology did not go down the fully automated route. In contrast to Piercy’s vision of babies growing in a self-regulating environment free of human involvement, in the NICU the side of the incubator opens and allows for nurses and others to hold and touch the baby. Mothers routinely express milk, managing to retain milk production until the baby’s suck reflex develops and breast feeding can begin, and alongside the nurses, they (and other family members) are encouraged to take part in what is sometimes referred to as the “cares.” L: When they were very small, there were rare occasions when somebody would say, “Do you want to do the tube feed?” and they’d let me . . . hold it, and it felt like I was actually doing something; I was taking care of her. I think it does make a difference no matter what way you’re feeding them, whether it’s a tube feed or a bottle or whatever. It gives you more of a connection to their care and to getting to know them.

The “machine” in the NICU is an assemblage of humans, nonhumans, and ongoing procedures, but it is not by chance that Piercy’s vision of ectogenesis was fully automated. Woman on the Edge of Time was heavily influenced by Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, first published in 1970.18 In Firestone’s analysis, “sex class” was a more invisible and fundamental social problem than class, and led to even deeper oppression. According to her radical polemic, “the development of a technology capable of freeing women from the tyranny of their sexual-reproductive roles” provided an opportunity that feminism should not ignore.19 As the attendant explains to the visitor in the brooder: “It was part of women’s long revolution . . . Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we’d never be equal.”20

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What becomes apparent in Piercy’s vision is that it is not so much the work of bearing and birthing a child as the maternal relation that women must be freed from. “Blood” ties are to be ruptured by genetic engineering, and the bond created in carrying a child is to be severed by ectogenesis. Even the sounds of a heartbeat, of voices and music are automated and the relation that might be forged through ministering to the “babies” in the tanks appears to be eradicated. In these radical formulations of alternative gestation, Piercy and Firestone recognized only too well that the maternal relation (that in their feminist politics is part of the problem constituting women’s oppression) might arise through other situations and practices than when a child grows in the “haven” of a mother’s womb.

Her Womb, then, Haven of Skin, of Membranes, of Water During that time in her womb, then, haven of skin, of membranes, of water—a complete world, in fact, in which and through which he receives all he wants, with no need for work or clothing—air, warmth, food, blood, life, potentially even the risk of death, come to him via a hollow thread. —Luce Irigaray 21

In her groundbreaking Psychoanalysis and Feminism, first published in 1974, Juliet Mitchell devoted a chapter to The Dialectic of Sex, and argued that, despite her claim that the Freudianism and feminism of the early twentieth century both grew out of the same concerns with sexuality, Firestone missed the point of psychoanalysis, in that there was no theory of the unconscious in her polemic, only an entirely rational subject.22 We might add that neither Firestone nor Piercy asks what the implications of ectogenesis might be for the formation of subjectivity, and indeed these questions are worryingly absent or glossed over in many of the contemporary discussions of the artificial womb. In Irigaray’s work, instead, the prenatal relation that is imagined as so completely severed in their utopias becomes a central resource for figuring feminine subjectivity. According to Ettinger, psychoanalysis, too, has omitted fundamental aspects of the formation of subjectivity in that it has failed to include any account of the prenatal mother/infant relation. How might Irigaray’s and Ettinger’s work on the prenatal maternal relation inflect these reflections on the neonatal matrix, even if it is naturalized in their thought?

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For Ettinger, the third trimester of pregnancy—the period of gestation that is denied to the mother and infant with very premature birth—sets up the conditions for the formation of a partial subjectivity, prior to the entry into the symbolic order that Jacques Lacan identifies. According to Ettinger, this “matrixial time and space” provides the conditions for both the “becoming-mother (the mother-to-be) and the becoming-subject (baby-to-be)” to “turn into partial subjects” or “I(s) and non-I(s).”23 As Griselda Pollock puts it, Ettinger’s so-called matrixial borderspace challenges conventional psychoanalytic models of subjectivity by taking prenatal experience into account and by insisting that “the Several comes before the One.”24 Matrixial borderlinking establishes an aspect of subjectivity that is specific to intrauterine experience and the (prenatal) maternal relation. Clearly it is not replicated by the matrix of machines, medics, and procedures that care for the premature infant, but Ettinger doesn’t ask what it might mean for the developing fetus to miss out on this phase, or to experience a version of it that would be anything other than the naturalized “haven” of the womb.25 Ettinger’s account of prenatality is thus characterized by being the scene of another kind of becoming in relation and in the feminine; one that is also necessarily presocial (and pretechnological). This is so for Irigaray, too. In her work, the “placental relation” has a special significance. Following biologist Hélène Rouch’s work on the placenta, she suggests that it represents not a fusion between mother and fetus, but coexistence that is “respectful of the life of both,” “redistributing maternal substances” in ways that both sustain the mother and allow the fetus to develop.26 Rouch describes the role the placenta plays in ensuring that the mother’s immune system does not reject the fetus, and that this involves a recognition of the fetus as the nonself in a continuous negotiation.27 For Rouch and Irigaray, the placental economy represents a condition that is neither (psychotic) fusion nor separation; that in Irigaray’s terms “respects the one and the other.”28 More generally, Irigaray problematizes the notion of womb as container, since, as she puts it in “Place, Interval,” if the woman (in general) is the place (or container) for the infant (and in sexual relations, for the man), where is the “container for herself”? She proposes that we think of what surrounds the infant—the womb, the membranes, the fluids, and the placenta—as less a container and more as in continuum and at the same time as interval between infant and mother: “In gestation, there will always be a gap, an interval between the body that is in the envelope and the envelope itself which will

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more or less fit that body, and the amniotic fluid which separates the two.”29 As with other figures in Irigaray’s work—air, mucus, breath or voice—the gap is thought in terms of its material constitution that both separates and connects, that is shared and allows for exchange. In “Belief Itself,” this fleshy corporeal gap is also conceived as a kind of matrix of relations: “Within her womb, an amnion and a placenta, a whole world with its layers, its circuits, its vessels, its nourishing pathways, etc., a whole world of invisible relations.”30 Just like Ettinger, Irigaray is not concerned with any sociotechnological matrix that would replace this maternal corporeal “world, with its layers, its circuits, its vessels.” But she gives us a figure of identities that are neither fused nor separate but bound by a fleshy relational gap, comprising a specific materiality of tissues, fluids, and nourishing pathways. We can’t suggest that the neonatal matrix is in any way a direct replacement of this naturalized intrauterine condition, but we might ask what its “invisible relations” are comprised of. We might also recall that in the NICU, the mother is still part of this sociotechnological matrix, albeit very much relocated, and that she (and others) come into relation with the infant despite and through Perspex, tubes, syringes, bloods, gases, milk, and procedures that include the gaze, the voice, and the caress—a matrix of relations that also has its own specific materiality.

She’s Listening, We Have a Connection S: It’s weird to think your child is in this little box being looked after by a lot of machines. Somehow I didn’t feel that distance. I used to talk to her a lot . . . R and I both did this—we used to tell her what she needed to do . . . As the days went by and I started to understand what the monitors meant then we would tell A that she needed to bring her blood pressure up or down, or her heart rate down or up. This is magical thinking but it seemed like she did it. I know that’s mad but it did feel like, “She’s listening, we have a connection.”

I was struck by the many ways in which the mums involved in This Is For You made connections with their preterm babies. I myself had done so through storytelling and acts of imagination. I discovered tenderness in the act of syringe feeding despite the sterile packaging, the medical procedures, and the literal distance above the incubator from which I handled the syringe to instigate the flow of milk into my son’s feeding tube. Other mums educated themselves so they could enter into negotiations about treatment with the doctors, or

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became experts in nursing procedures. One mum learned to insert the nasogastric tube; another couple learned the art of towel rolling and made the “nests” that give some containment to the tiny exposed bodies in the cavernous space of the incubator: J: We were experts in building nests . . . At the beginning the nurses did it, but I knew how to build a nest with some towels so I just got some new towels and wrapped them and put them in . . . We could feel that he liked to have boundaries especially because he loved his feet, he liked to kick against something, so we felt “he is lost without anything,” so . . . [we would] do it at the sides, so they would surround him.

Here the containment of the womb is endlessly reenacted in the remaking of the bedding. For others it will be touching, looking, singing, speaking, talking, and “magical thinking” that will enable them to cross the distance, to traverse the gap that is both the separation and the very possibility of relation itself. In including the mother, this specific matrix also opens this role to others, even if in only the most partial of ways. At the furthest remove of community, these may be blood donors or milk donors. At Homerton, there are volunteers who knit blankets and clothing; there is the staff who cleans, maintains supplies, and makes bespoke hats for the tiniest babies to keep the breathing kit close to their heads. There are technicians, doctors, administrators, and nurses who perform the endless routines of cares when parents are not there. And there are families, friends, parents—men as well as women—for whom this social matrix transforms the maternal exclusivity of some aspects of infant care. As one mum recalled, while expressing milk took her away from her daughter’s side, it enabled a powerful connection for her daughter’s father: S: It [the situation in NICU] really equalized things. There was really nothing I could do that he couldn’t do except for the milk expressing, and in some senses that was a disadvantage because it meant that I had to leave L [laughs]. It got him more contact time with L. I still think it was incredibly good for their relationship and created a bond that he might not have . . . there would still have been a bond but I don’t know if it would have been as strong.

While we can detect some ambivalence in this mother’s words—what is an opening for her child’s father is also something of a loss for her—the space that is made for the maternal role in this alternative

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gestational matrix also sets up new possibilities for others to take that role. In Waiting in the Wings, Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga narrates her encounter with the NICU, when her son Rafa was born at 28 weeks. It was “artificial insemination” (amidst laughter, she recalls) that enabled her to conceive him in a same-sex partnership, and it was the sociotechnological matrix of the NICU that enabled him to survive after his early birth.31 For her, the neonatal matrix had transformative potential beyond the fact of finally taking her baby home. Her account is permeated with recollections of the new connections she made not only with her son but also with medical procedures, technologies, and with people such as those on the nursing staff and other (heterosexual) parents whom she had previously felt separate from. She finds herself praying for all the babies: “for Alex, that her sleeping limbs will awaken; for Nathaniel, that his heart will heal; for Simone, that her eyes will see clear and far; for Freddy with Downs; and for all the others I’ve seen.”32 When it is time to leave, she fears for her dependency on the nurses (“Rose, Stacey, Bobbie, Sue, Gurline, Donna, Terry, and others whom we never met ”) who have shown a mother’s love for her son.33 And in the midst of the routines of sitting, watching, pumping, expressing, and feeding, she makes a link between her own “milk-hard-breasted body” and the “incubator walls”: In that place [my heart] resides a seamless connection between my baby’s essence beating inside those incubator walls and my milk-hard-breasted body.34

As Suzanne Bost has put it, Moraga’s experience also challenges the social norms of maternity: “This intimacy of life with machine further ‘queers’ the ‘queer motherhood’ Moraga narrates, unmooring maternity from female essence, ‘natural’ reproduction, heterosexual intercourse, and mother-father families.”35 This “queering” of maternity does not take us to the utopian future envisaged by Firestone and Piercy, however. It holds on to the maternal relation, while nevertheless taking us away from the naturalized intrauterine relation described by Ettinger and Irigaray. The sociotechnological matrix that replaces the mother’s body in the NICU is specific. It involves the mother when, as Baker has shown, it could be otherwise. It values the mother and in so doing it enables others to take part in the maternal role and, as a consequence, provides openings for new social practices and subjectivities that are worth exploring. To insist that we look at its specific material constitution, as one possible

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matrix amongst others, is to recognize that, as Karen Barad puts it, “material constraints and exclusions and the material dimensions of regulatory practices are important factors in the process of materialization.”36 As has been suggested here, an open incubator that allows the gaze, that is set up for handling, bed-making, feeding, and the caress, is not the same as one designed to function automatically. Such a matrix produces specific closings and openings that in turn give rise to new practices of maternal relation and care that may be extended to a wider community, at the same time revealing, in the ways Moraga found so transformative, one’s own already intimate connection to those not so radically other “hard breasted bodies” that replace, support, or exist alongside our own. Notes 1. For more on “The Other Side of Waiting,” see www.takingplace.org. uk; and Katie Lloyd Thomas with taking place, “The Other Side of Waiting,” Feminist Review 93:1 (2009), pp. 122–127. 2. The title of “This is For You” is taken from Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 292. 3. Most of the “mums” involved in this project gave birth to their babies within 27 weeks (“very premature”), and all of the babies required intensive care. The group included a same-sex couple and a single mother. Most of their babies’ journeys were fairly straightforward, while two babies were in the unit for more than eight months. I am extremely grateful to all of them for their involvement with the project. 4. For example, Dion Farquhar, The Other Machine: Discourse and Reproductive Technologies (London: Routledge, 1996); and Charis Thompson, Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 5. See Jeremy Rifkin, “The End of Pregnancy: Within a Generation There Will Probably Be Mass Use of Artificial Wombs to Grow Babies,” The Guardian, January 16, 2002. Christine Rosen argues for the extension of existing technologies in “Why Not Artificial Wombs?,” The New Atlantis 3 (Fall 2003), pp. 67–76. For a more politicized debate, see Gena Corea’s “The Artificial Womb: An Escape from the Dark and Dangerous Space,” chap. 12 of The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 250–259. 6. See Aida Edemariam reporting on the survival of Amillia Taylor, born at 21 weeks and 6 days, in “Against All Odds,” The Guardian, February 20, 2007.

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7. See, for example, Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Luce Irigaray, “Body Against Body: In Relation to the Mother,” chap. 2 in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); and Luce Irigaray, “On the Maternal Order,” interview with Hélène Rouch, chap. 4 in Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1993). 8. See Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Bantam Books, 1970); and Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976). 9. Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time, p. 102. 10. Ibid. 11. For details on these exhibits, and the resident incubators exhibit in 1903 at Luna Park, Coney Island, see Jeffrey P. Baker, The Machine in the Nursery: Incubator Technology and the Origins of Newborn Intensive Care (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 93–99. 12. Figures given for the numbers of babies who are treated in NICUs in the United Kingdom range from around one in eight to one in ten babies born. 13. The need for parental involvement and attention to the baby’s developmental needs beyond mere survival is increasingly promoted in UK units. See Caroline Scott, “Bubblewrap babies,” The Sunday Times, February 27, 2005. 14. Baker, The Machine in the Nursery, p. 73. 15. Ibid. 16. See Felix F. Marx, Die Entwicklung der Säuglings Inkubatoren (Bonn: Verlag Siering KG, 1968), p. 72. 17. A. Belmin, “Visites de la Societé Internationale: La Clinique Tarnier et le Dr. Budin,” Revue philanthropique 18 (1905/6), p. 491. Cited in Baker, The Machine in the Nursery, p. 60. 18. For an analysis of the relationship between the two, see Sarah Mary Lawrence, Beyond Revolution: The Theory of Shulamith Firestone and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (Phoenix: Arizona State University Press, 2009). 19. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, p. 31. 20. Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time, p. 105. 21. Luce Irigaray, “Belief Itself,” chap. 3 in Sexes and Genealogies, p. 33. 22. Juliet Mitchell, “Shulamith Firestone: Freud Feminized,” chap. 5 in Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 346–350. 23. Bracha L. Ettinger, “The Matrixial Gaze,” in Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: The Eurydice Series, The Drawing Center’s Drawing Papers no. 24, ed. Catherine de Zegher and Brian Massumi (New York: The Drawing Center, 2001), p. 93.

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24. Griselda Pollock, “Femininity: Aporia or Sexual Difference?,” in The Matrixial Borderspace, p. 14. 25. In passing, I asked Ettinger about premature birth, and she answered that the effects could only be known through analysis. 26. Irigaray, “On the Maternal Order,” pp. 38f. 27. Ibid., p. 40. 28. Ibid., p. 41. 29. Luce Irigaray, “Place Interval: A Reading of Aristotle, Physics IV,” chap. 3 in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 42. 30. Irigaray, “Belief Itself,” p. 33. 31. For a detailed discussion of ARTs in the context of lesbian practices, see Laura Mamo, Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 32. Cherríe Moraga, Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood (New York: Firebrand Books, 1997), p. 69. 33. Ibid., p. 78. 34. Ibid., p. 57. 35. Suzanne Bost, “From Race/Sex/Etc. to Glucose, Feeding Tube, and Mourning: The Shifting Matter of Chicana Feminism,” in Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), p. 354. 36. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” in ibid., p. 140.

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PA R T

I I I

New Subjectivities

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Introduction: A Politics of Visibility Henriette Gunkel

Protest must also shape itself around new social media formats that favor the remote over the immediate, spectacle over speech, form over content. —Jack Halberstam1 I am a believer of every word I say and I am willing to live in danger under the many threats I receive in order to obtain the real freedom all Egyptians are fighting and dying for daily. —Aliaa Elmahdy 2

When Aliaa Elmahdy posted on her blog an image of her naked self, demanding “real freedom” for all Egyptians, she became the undutiful daughter to many: to Facebook, which removed the image from her site; to the April 6 Movement in Cairo, which gathered in Tahrir Square in 2011 demanding a different life and democratic elections, and which quickly distanced itself from Elmahdy before she could be linked to its cause and become its face;3 and, finally, to a number of feminists worldwide, who could widely and across differences identify with the demands expressed in Egypt to end oppression, including oppression against women, but who envisioned the unveiling of heads and faces only, not entire bodies.4 Considering the body as the “best artistic representation,”5 and propelled by the desire to end the objectification of, and violence against, women in her society, Elmahdy used her own body and agency to push forward a radical politics of visibility. She took a self-portrait in which she posed with a red flower in her long hair, wearing only red shoes and black stockings, with one leg heightened and placed on a stool, and turned slightly outward. With her eyes looking confidently and defiantly into the camera, here

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was a daughter from the South who was clearly not waiting to be saved (by the North); defiantly also in relation to one of the continuous splits within feminism—among mothers, daughters, and granddaughters, among those who are in favor of and those who are against the pornographic. By posting her image on the Internet, Elmahdy made use of the media strategies that were already in place and so important for the success of the people in the streets of Cairo—pointing not only to the traps of new media and communication technologies (such as the constant surveillance and mapping of [the movement of] bodies, and the endless collection of data for marketing strategies, etc.), but also to its possibilities by allowing the world to witness in live time what was going on in Egypt, and in neighboring countries such as Tunisia and Libya. This way, people throughout the world not only turn into witnesses of wars (through unmanned drones, embedded journalism, 24-hour news cycles, and so on), but also of protests against oppression, torture, violence, and discrimination, thus of local political actions transmitted globally. This was also true of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement which the protests in North Africa affected, as well as rather marginal movements, movements that claim land rights, demand houses and basic services such as water, electricity, health service, and so on; movements that took action before, during, and after the revolutionary moments in North Africa, and that fail to make it into the global newspapers, television, and/or radio stations—hence, into mainstream media.6 In the live transmission of the recorded event, the protesting and resisting body turns into a platform for broadcasting messages, as Jack Halberstam argues in this volume; it’s the body that records, and gets recorded digitally, directly connected and sent out of the local context into a global world of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook—you name it. As cultural texts, the images and sounds—transmitted live and/or sampled; real and/or fictional—take us into one, two, three, and many other different worlds and lives. They inspire us, affect us, and allow us to imagine different levels of undutifulness (as set out by Rosi Braidotti in the preface of this volume), of choices, of intensities, of collaborations, of improvisations that help us to come closer to the multiplicity we aim to become. And it is not only the stories of success and happy endings that inspire and affect us to become undutiful. It is also the images and texts that represent the apocalyptic, the melancholic, the unpleasurable that propel our desire to intervene in social and political life, to reformulate radical politics and hold together and shift the lived multiplicity of positioning. The visual and the virtual

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hence remain crucial sites for the practice and process, and for the production of subjectivity—online and offline. *

*

*

As Fanny Söderbäck points out in her introduction, in the current OWS movement the demands are not single demands under which the movement as a whole can be subsumed. While the dream of a different life is still central, there is no single vision and version of what such life should look like, and how it can be reached. The visions are in fact (irritatingly?) manifold and multiple, not identifiable—and hence not controllable—from the outside. The political strategies we use and the alliances we form—through processes of political sociality, through an intersubjectivity, or, possibly, an interviduality, as Jami Weinstein proposes in this volume—impact our understanding of ourselves in relation to others. They impact how we want to appear in front of others—not only to the immediate other, but also to an other that could be anywhere in the world.7 As the case of the Amina hoax8 has highlighted, however, the strategies we use not only impact our self-understanding, but they also impact our understanding of others, how we make them appear, and hence render them intelligible. A recent critique formulated by South African activists in response to international online petitions against hate crimes in the post-apartheid country further highlights the need to continuously rethink strategies of visibility or appearance as a precondition to effect social and political change.9 Since the beginning of 2011, we have seen an increase in online petitions and campaigns, emerging from Europe and North America, against hate crimes in South Africa—notably against black lesbians—creating a specific visibility of queer African subjectivity with some remarkable global success. One petition by AVAAZ.org—a global organization with its main office in New York—was particularly effective, collecting nearly a million signatures worldwide in a short period of time in an attempt to force the South African President Jacob Zuma to act. The petition mobilized its political goal against a (supposed?) increase in hate crimes in the country around a specific image, the battered face of Millicent Gaika. Through its international circulation, Gaika’s face quickly came to symbolize the cruelty of homophobic violence and rape in South Africa, despite the fact that her “case” dated back nine months at the moment the petition was circulated. Here we have a battered face that is used and in fact exploited10 to mobilize political forces and signatures; an image that stands in stark

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contrast to the one taken by Elmahdy of herself to mobilize around sexual politics. The difference between these images could not have been more striking, and the global response is perhaps equally meaningful: while the face that can be turned into a victim attracts support and mobilizes feminist and queer global solidarity, the one that refuses victimization—and hence does not provide the feel-good moment that petition-signing can engender—fails to generate such support. In the online petitions, and the irritated responses they effected amongst South African LGBTIQ organizations, we, therefore, not only see the need for an applied ethics in virtual politics, but also (and perhaps more importantly) the need to historicize the form of subjectivity employed, an argument that is made strongly by Gabeba Baderoon in this volume. It is the historicization of subjectivity that allows us to trouble the strategies of visibility at work in global activism by questioning exactly the hypervisibility of African queer bodies in virtual spaces when it comes to hate crimes. Instead of reproducing and exploiting this hypervisibility, we might draw attention to the multiplicity of local and transnational LGBTIQ activists organizing throughout the African continent, alongside new academic scholarship on nonheteronormative sexualities and socialities, and the rich cultural archive created by African activists, artists, filmmakers, and writers. This way we can offer a historiography that constitutes a different reading, away from the ordinary and the normative, that enables new concepts, new theories, and new forms of feminist practices—as, for example, offered by Toni Morrison who, as Kodwo Eshun has pointed out, argued that the African subjects that “experienced capture, theft, abduction, mutilations, and slavery were the first moderns,” and by doing so rendered modernity forever suspect.11 A politics of alliance, therefore, not only raises questions around visibility and representation, but also the very question of the political: what is constituted/defined as political? What is defined as feminist politics? And who is constituted as a political subject? What are the (theoretical, geographical, legal, cultural, economic, social) references that we use in measuring politics and the political? Whose reference points are we using? And who is the target of that framework? Linked to this is the question of the globalization of movements, demands, actions, and legal frameworks—not only in order to get international financial support, but also the moral support needed. Are such movements one dimensional in that they get funneled through the United Nations in Geneva or its tribunal in The Hague to the rest of the world? Or are they, instead, two-, three-, or four-dimensional, to use Kyoo Lee’s approach in this volume? Are they rhizomatic? How do we

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relate and refer to one another? To each other’s desires? In the context of the OWS movement, we saw similar events happening throughout the globe, mostly symbolic actions of an international solidarity mixed with local politics and demands. In other cases, a globalized and often universalizing form of politics and demands seems more difficult, as visible for example in the context of the hate crime legislation and the legal recognition of the term “corrective rape” requested in the online petitions against hate crime in South Africa, or the Slut Walks that regained global popularity in 2011 and effected various responses, not only supportive ones, in the global South.12 In an interview that followed the posting of her image, Elmahdy claims that although she partially joined the protests in Cairo, and refuses to remain silent, she “was never into politics.”13 Although Elmahdy employs the strategy of visibility, and hence the politics and art of representation, she resists being identifiable, perceptible for organized politics; in fact, she develops a formation of active subjectivity whose aim is not at all to achieve political subjecthood. Her subversive strategy resists an absorption into liberal feminist thinking and politics, and pushes the question of representation further. It triggers not only the question of who is considered a political subject, but also that of who can be considered a subject in a politicized environment in need of (international) protection. The contributions of this section all deal in one way or another, and from different perspectives, with the question of how to become an undutiful daughter—theoretically and practically—via processes of identification and dis-identification, loyalty and dis-loyalty, remembering and dis-remembering, doing and un-doing. This section in fact shows that there is not only one undutiful way; being and/or becoming undutiful itself consists of a psychic, bodily, semiotic, and discursive web of subversive strategies and desires and does not reflect any form of universality. As Halberstam states in this volume in reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a feminist politics does not only need to include the reflection on why struggles are supported and how, but it must also include and listen to the multiplicity of struggles that are not considered properly feminist by liberal feminists. The link between theory and social reality/subjectivity therefore needs to be constantly rethought, questioned, and re-enacted in our workings toward a desired non-normative future. *

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In her chapter, “Rethinking Sexual Difference and Kinship in Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism,” Judith Butler returns to a

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feminist classic from 1974 that Juliet Mitchell herself revised in 1999. Butler does not simply reject an inspiring but—in light of current debates—also problematic text from another generation of feminists but, instead, motivates us to think through the text, through the relationship between sexual difference, psychoanalysis, and the politics of kinship that it presents us with, in order to respond to current political backlashes—in this case, the public perception around and against gay parenting, as well as single parenting, and its underlying questions as to who can be a parent, and what is considered a functioning, healthy family (environment). While Mitchell insists, as Butler argues, that sexual difference has largely unconscious dimensions, and that these are transmitted through generations across time and space (with women then constituted as the “ascribed repositories of that human conservatism”), this transmission is at the same time unaffected by broader social dimensions and workings of and toward social change, and hence toward the futures that feminists strive to achieve. By following Mitchell’s own examples, Butler explores the question of whether the social really is as separable from the unconscious, and whether sexual difference can in fact be viewed as a supposedly universally organized structure transmitted into the present “without translation, transposition, without some loss or new twist and turn, without some queer derailment or deviation.” It is Butler’s insistence on alternative politics and theorizations of kinship that makes her analysis so compelling for raising questions about subjectivity. It allows us to include, imagine, and perform forms of subjectivity that are not considered by Mitchell: the subject positions that represent a possibly queer “derailment” of sexual difference through—conscious—modes of generational transmission (such as the subject position of female husbands and ancestral wives, for example, that are available to sangomas [traditional healers] in South Africa who inhabit their gender position through their ancestors, a gender position unbound to the reproductive organization of sexuality).14 In her chapter, “Transgenres and the Plane of Gender Imperceptibility,” Jami Weinstein is similarly interested in rendering sexual difference, based on a heteronormative gender dichotomy, porous in order to oppose (biopolitical) controls of desire. Inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Weinstein traces the political implications of the notion of becoming imperceptible—as the end of all processes of becoming—in relation to a queerfeminist practice that seeks the “ability to reorganize, re-oedipalize the affects, intensities, and forces that constitute our corporeal materiality.” In

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order to move beyond the boundaries of gender, and to explore “one alternative for transcending” the oedipal organization of sex/gender/ sexuality, Weinstein focuses on becoming as an aesthetic and linguistic self-creation. She offers what she calls a “transatlantic linguistic ping-pong” by proposing a shift from the concept of gender to that of transgenre, which allows a “transversal, rooting and shifting, deterritorializing and reterritorializing, sexual politics.” A sexual politics that includes relations between humans, non-humans, the bacterial, and so on (hence, a transspecies sexual politics), and that, at the same time, “parallels a transition from the self as autonomous and individual to what we might call interviduals.” What kind of subjectivity, we must ask, does gender imperceptibility and transgenre create? Weinstein approaches this question by focusing on the figuration (as a relatively stable hardening of bodily practices) of the dandy. While Weinstein understands the dandy as “precisely the sort of imperceptibility of affectively intensive bodies without organs,” she also acknowledges that the dandy is generally understood as an effeminate male. But does this not make the dandy, at least in terms of gender, perceptible? Weinstein pushes the intensities of imperceptibility further by asking, “What would it mean if a woman-identified female underwent a becoming dandy?” For Weinstein, the concept of transgenre makes us better equipped to answer this question than would a concept more readily familiar to us, namely transgender. By asking the question in this way, then, Weinstein indirectly pushes toward the end of a politics of representation and toward new formations of political subjectivity: not visibility, but imperceptibility. Gabeba Baderoon’s chapter, “Primal Scenes, Forbidden Words, and Reclaimed Spaces,” picks up on questions around the strategy of visibility and its aesthetic self-creation by providing a “productive attention to [contemporary South African] poetic language and form.” Baderoon offers a dialogue between two approaches in contemporary literary texts, both attending to representations of the systemic (sexual) violation of black women’s bodies in different historical contexts. In her reading of Makhosazana Xaba’s poem on Sara Baartman, Baderoon introduces the concept of “preferred silence”— a very timely concept that works against a quite common feminist, but also queer and antiracist, understanding of representation as the goal of all politics—a concept, as Baderoon argues, that “involves a strategic refusal to engage with dominant modes of rendering bodies visible.” She develops this in particular in relation to the representations of Baartman in the last 30 years, joining herewith a relatively

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recent critical scholarship that argues that it was postcolonial theory (initiated by Sander Gilman’s text “Black Bodies, White Bodies”15) that finally succeeded in reducing Baartman to her genitals. Baderoon thus uncompromisingly questions the way black women’s bodies appear in public through discourses, even in postcolonial and feminist discourses, that end up reproducing the very visibility that they sought to work against in the first place. Baderoon points to the limits of what can be known and urges us to think of “new parameters for calling her into visibility” while keeping Baartman at the “center of heroic women” whose memories need to remain alive. Baderoon hence does far more in her chapter than just assemble counter-memories that contest the colonial archive: she works with a cultural archive in South Africa to expand into a (pleasurable and hopeful) future. In her reading of the drama “Reclaiming the P . . . Word,” Baderoon further points to the political strategy of reclaiming and bringing into visibility in a different way the meaning of “proclaimed words”—swear words that address (often sexual) parts of the female body being reclaimed and redefined in order to articulate “a radically different claim on public space by black women in South Africa than previous narratives have,” which “ultimately comes to include pleasurable meanings,” without erasing the painful histories that the words refer to. It is the insistence on not only pain but also pleasure and power that moves Baderoon’s analysis into a slightly different direction than what Halberstam proposes in this volume—namely masochistic refusal—or what Chrysanthi Nigianni in her introduction names “a politics of displeasure.” Baderoon focuses on a pleasure that for centuries has been denied, exactly due to the colonial and apartheid history that imbued black bodies in South Africa with “unsettling sexualized meanings.” She seeks to “reclaim” the space that is already occupied by several uses of the p-word, almost all damaging to women. It is, as Baderoon argues, the very title, “Reclaiming the P . . . Word,” that signals the ongoing nature of this attempt. In the chapter “Going Gaga: Dissent, Refusal, and Feminism,” Jack Halberstam also offers a shift in focus to not so obvious forms and representations of resistance, a shift to what Halberstam calls a “shadow archive of resistance,” which is traceable from activist traditions and feminist memories to contemporary protests such as the OWS movement. Halberstam presents a genealogy of this different (black, postcolonial, queer) archive of resistance and links it to the hypermedialization of contemporary politics and sociality and hence “around new social media formats that favor the remote over the immediate, spectacle over speech, form over content.” This includes

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the human microphone (that Söderbäck set up for this book in her introduction), as well as Lady Gaga’s ability to media manipulation and her subjectification as a “kinetic avatar of feminism”—an ability combined with a “spirit of (pop) anarchy” that gives these new politics a name: “Gaga Feminism.” What at first sight looks like a glamorous and popular politics and archive turns out to include a politics of failure and disidentification in the sense of self-destruction and queer masochism—an anti-social feminism that builds its project around an “anti-heroic, disintegrating subject.” As shown through different literary texts that deal with the undoing of conventional womanhood and femininity and also with the dismantling of generational relationships and kinship narratives, the concept of feminist refusal that Halberstam proposes can extend to a complete undoing/unbecoming/dismantling of the self. Here, again, the focus is not any more the request for recognition (and here we are dealing with similar issues as those discussed in relation to the politics of imperceptibility in Weinstein’s chapter) but rather multiple forms of resistance “that can be overlooked or misread but constitute an elaborate web of subversive gestures.” In fact, we deal with a political response “that does not announce itself as politics,” and hence with political subjectivities, at least not in the Western, liberal sense, as Halberstam argues, “where being has already been defined in terms of a self-activating, self-knowing, liberal subject.” Halberstam hence proposes an anti-oedipal feminism that is, nevertheless, not a Deleuzian body without organs, as in the case of Weinstein. In her chapter, “(Un)naming The Third Sex After Beauvoir: Towards a Third Dimensional Feminism,” Kyoo Lee in effect also questions the choices that feminisms offer—feminisms, as she argues, that give way and are in fact conceptualized via a continuous centering of the first or the second, while “the ‘third’ remains or tends to get colonially ‘replicated,’ it remains of secondary significance, ‘foreclosed by the seminal-ontological order to the original-copy’”; feminisms, in other words, that are bound to leave minorities on the move, searching for the “real freedom” beyond the choices offered. In her workings toward a third dimensional feminism, rather than a temporal and geopolitical third feminism, Lee refers back to an archive of resistance, to feminist memories and struggles that are informed by black and queer politics—in this case women/queers of color in the United States—and asks the question of how to respond to the problems of the continuous generational transferences of social categories and subjectivities, of sexual difference, and colonial-colonized relationships from way back then that remain

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relevant today. Lee responds to this question by linking the archive of resistance to a thinking “with and after Beauvoir,” to a reconfiguring of the “critical intimacy” of the The Second Sex , in order to “see that ‘third’ voice traveling, to keep the second voice of the second proliferating itself, so as to prevent the critically minoritarian force of the other from becoming regressively ‘white-washed.’” This way, Lee acknowledges the “decentered, displaced, or diffused” potentiality of the second in relation to the first, while pushing forward a third dimensional that is accumulative rather than additive—a third dimensional that invests in the potentiality of the transformative, in a “more transparadigmatic inter-feminist dialogue” that possibly enables nondefined “radically new sorts of feminism” instead of an investment in yet another form of othering, or gendering for that matter. She is interested in a third dimensional that allows a “fourth dimensional world, a fifth in one with four dimensions, and so on”—a multiplicity of differences, contexts, categories, and dimensions that enables the subjectification of one that, in turn, enables the subjectification of another: “this one, that one, another one—one, two, three, four . . . every single one.” We might not only want to relate this transformation of multiplicity back to Weinstein’s proposed politics of becoming (imperceptibility), and to Halberstam’s proposed unbecoming; it also enters an interesting dialogue with what Kodwo Eshun proposes in his afrofuturistic reconfiguring of W.E.B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness”: afrodiasporic assemblages of “conceptual approaches and countermemorial mediated practices in order to access triple consciousness, quadruple consciousness, previously inaccessible alienations”16 —alienations that in undutiful ways highlight the complex relations of subjectivity, history, the psychic, and (cultural) politics, while working toward a multiplicity of choices, toward the “real freedom” that not only Elmahdy but also many of the undutiful daughters in this volume strive for. Notes 1. Jack Halberstam, “Going Gaga: Dissent, Refusal, and Feminism,” p. 183 in this volume. 2. Aliaa Elmahdy in an interview with Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, “Egyptian Blogger Aliaa Elmahdy: Why I Posed Naked,” CNN.com, November 19, 2011, http://articles.cnn.com/2011–11–19/middlee ast/world_meast_nude-blogger-aliaa-magda-elmahdy_1_egyptian -blogger-nude-photo-ka reem-a mer?_ s=PM:M I DDL EE A ST, accessed on February 8, 2012.

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3. See, for example, http://colombotelegraph.com/2011/11/18/egyp tian-feminists-blog-received-2–5-million-hits-with-her-full-frontal -nude-shot-2, accessed on February 8, 2012. 4. Elmahdy’s image initiated various and diverse responses, also amongst feminists, and in this introduction I am polemically only referring to one strand. This line of thought emerged within discussions amongst feminists friends, as well as in virtual discussions on Facebook, various blogs (see, for example, http://www.cook dandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?PHPSESSID=eec5f2c3443a 88b6bb4c33aa6f0125eb&topic=30043.0, accessed on February 8, 2012), and in response to online articles (see, for example, http:// colombotelegraph.com/2011/11/18/egyptian-feminists-blog -received-2–5-million-hits-with-her-full-frontal-nude-shot-2, accessed on February 8, 2012). 5. Fadel Fahmy, “Egyptian Blogger Aliaa Elmahdy.” 6. At the same time, we see an increase in (moving) images documenting the violence perpetrated by the state and its institutions such as the police, the military, or the paramilitary against those who resist—as well as images by the perpetrators themselves that find entry into the global net and get multiplied; for example, the images of the tortures perpetrated and staged by the US military in Abu Ghraib, or more recently of the desecration of dead bodies in Afghanistan. 7. For a theory of alliance, see also Judith Butler’s recent re-reading of Hannah Arendt, in particular her theorization of political action in relation to the “space of appearance” (Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, September 2011, http://www.eipcp .net/transversal/1011/butler/en, accessed on February 8, 2012). 8. For more information on the so-called Amina hoax, see, for example, Esther Addley, “Syrian Lesbian Blogger is Revealed Conclusively to be a Married Man,” The Guardian, June 13, 2011, http://www .guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/13/syrian-lesbian-blogger-tom -macmaster, accessed on February 8, 2012. 9. For a critique of various online petitions addressing homophobia in a post-colonial African context, see, for example, the open letter posted by Triangle Project, a well-established LGBT organization in Cape Town, South Africa, in which the organization explains its refusal to sign online petitions against so called “corrective rape” in South Africa: http://www.triangle.org.za/news/2011/02/online -corrective-rape-campaigns-and-petitions, accessed on February 8, 2012. 10. As Susan Sontag has argued so convincingly, “There is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it . . . or those

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13. 14.

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who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be” (Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others [New York: Picador, 2003], p. 42). Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” The New Centennial Review 3:2 (2003), pp. 287–302. Elaine Salo, for example, issued the following statement on Facebook in response to the idea of introducing the Slut Walk tradition to South Africa: “And NO, we do not need to hook up SA feminist protests to what begun in Toronto just so we can claim ‘Cool Global Status.’ Renaming local protests against GBV Slut Walk means that the local concerns about and causes of GBV are swallowed up, ghettoised by the concerns elsewhere of an equally local northern context . . . The insistence upon local, particular histories and roots of GBV must occur whilst still acknowledging that GBV is a global issue” (https://www .facebook.com/note.php?note_id=260534060642680, accessed on January 29, 2012). Fadel Fahmy, “Egyptian Blogger Aliaa Elmahdy.” For a succinct discussion of this question of gender among sangomas, see, for example, Nkunzi Nkabinde’s autobiography, Black Bull, Ancestors and Me: My Life as a Lesbian Sangoma (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2009). Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12:1 (1985), pp. 204–242. Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” p. 298.

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CH A P T ER

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Rethinking Sexual Difference and Kinship in Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism Judith Butler

There are surely many reasons to return to Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism (originally published in 1974), if only because she herself returned there in 1999 in order to revise her earlier view and make an even stronger case for what she calls the shared terrain of psychic life.1 Upon reflection, she considered whether certain invariant or, at least, recurrent laws of sexual difference were transmitted through generations, and whether there might be a way through a consideration of such rules to understand what links human cultures and historical periods, despite their apparent variability. What may we derive from this reading about the relationship between sexual difference, psychoanalysis, and the politics of new kinship? How does our understanding of generational transmission presuppose what a generation is and how it relies on certain conceptions of kinship and its modes of transmission? To what extent does the theory of sexual difference in this founding text prefigure and reach its limit in a new theorization of kinship? What is at stake here are less new structures of kinship than the modes of its transmission. In revisiting Psychoanalysis and Feminism, does Mitchell’s new introduction revise her former theory and, if so, what implications does it hold for how we understand the temporal, even translational, modalities of kinship? We will see that the problem of generational transmission informs many of the contemporary debates about who can be a parent and

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what can function as a family. In the first instance, Mitchell insists that sexual difference has largely unconscious dimensions, and that these unconscious dimensions are transmitted through time and across generations. Moreover, there is a kind of stasis or “drive to stay put” that characterizes sexual difference, some way in which it endeavors to stay in place even as it is transmitted, conveyed from place to place, time to time (xix). If we focus on what sexual difference is, we find no easy ontological determination; however, the following formulations prove central: sexual difference has to be included among those phenomena that “persist” and that remain “incommensurate with the real social situation” (xvii). These claims prompt Mitchell to deliver the bad news to socialization theory: “deliberate socialization is inadequate to explain the structure of sexual difference and the inequalities that always arise from it, despite the fact that there is enormous diversity of social practice” (xvii). At a certain point, she tries to find other metaphors for explaining this “persistence,” suggesting that it is perhaps more like a persistent and transmissible recalcitrance. For instance, she asks, “Why, despite massive social, economic and legal changes, is there still a kind of underwater tow that makes progress regress on matters of ‘gender’ equity?” (xviii, my emphasis). I should note here that “gender” is in quotation marks, suggesting that it is a term that Mitchell is only provisionally willing to use to make her argument. Indeed, it will be some presuppositions of the language of gender equity that she seeks to contest. So, sexual difference is not exactly defined, though something about its operation is characterized in an initially paradoxical way; it stays in place, pulls backward, and poses a problem for notions of gender and progress alike. Although it persists, it does not exactly move forward; it is “a kind of underwater tow” or, again, a “current,” as she puts it: “feminism seems always to be rowing against a current that is ultimately the stronger force” (xviii). She concludes here—still in the new introduction—with the following remark: “conservatism actually seems inherent in the very construction of sexual difference—as though the difference itself has in its construction insisted on stasis” (xviii). This conservatism is inherent in what Mitchell calls “the psycho-ideological living of sexual relations” (xviii), and it is distinguished by the fact that “it is ‘women’ . . . who become the ascribed repositories of that human conservatism” (xix). The category of “women” here seems to emerge as a sociological given, which means that whatever sexual difference is, it depends on those sociologically demonstrable women to receive it at the same time as it remains irreducible to any account of socialization. So how do we distinguish

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among senses of the social in this account? And how do we understand them in relation to the unconscious? Mitchell tells us that this conservatism is largely unconscious. She does not give us a precise topography of the unconscious, nor does she let us know whether any topography would suffice to explain its operation. As something received and transmitted, sexual difference seems by definition not to have a circumscribed place, but instead to be exceeding the topographical as a necessity. Even under the best possible circumstances, we would not be able to locate this conservatism somewhere. Rather, we are asked to understand it as being transmitted across generations, as a kind of passage or conveyance, a translation from one modality or instance of kinship to another. There is a “kind of thought” about masculinity and femininity— understood as equivalent to the thought of sexual difference—that takes place in the course of a transmission and that is understood as a relay or a transposition; the mobility and temporality of this thought, although partially conscious, “is primarily an unconscious process” (xix). If sexual difference is a transmitted process, if it is itself a transmission, then transmission is the mode of its reality: it spans and links psychic life across time and place. Sexual difference does not belong to a single psyche, and when it does structure a psyche, as it invariably does, it does so by virtue of having been transmitted from somewhere else, from another time, and as that which is in the course of being transmitted elsewhere. So, any given psyche would be a kind of way station or relay point for the transmissibility of this thought. This point seems to be important for Mitchell’s argument in favor of “a shared mental terrain” (xxii), one that ultimately serves as the condition for understanding the nexus of the psyche and ideology, a central thesis of Psychoanalysis and Feminism to which we shall return. *

*

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I propose to consider the two examples that Mitchell offers to support her claim about the transmission of unconscious ideas, especially the transmission of unconscious ideas regarding sexual difference. But first, I want to draw attention to the commitment that her position makes to a semantic understanding of masculine and feminine. She not only refers to ideas about sexual difference that are transmitted from one psyche to another across space and time, those that undoubtedly include interpretations and semantic delimitations, but she is also willing, throughout, to identify sexual difference with the

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masculine and feminine. Is there anything about sexual difference that makes that very identification difficult? I am wondering whether it is not possible, even within a psychoanalytic account of sexual difference, to agree with the propositions that sexual difference is persistent, that it works as an undertow, even that it is characterized by a constitutive conservatism, without thereby concluding that sexual difference is invariably identified with masculine and feminine subject positions. Some of the questions I pose here are certainly not new, but that seems only to confirm the idea that some problem is echoing here that does not assimilate well into any notion of temporal progress: can there be sexual difference, say, within homosexuality that cannot quite be described as masculine and feminine? If so, what implications would that have for separating sexual difference, understood as a deep-seated and largely unconscious thought transmitted over space and time, and specific social ways of determining the itinerary of that thought? In other words, at what point is sexual difference separable from its social determinations, if ever? To answer these questions, we may have to separate the question of social determination from socialization per se. Hence, on the one hand, if we follow Mitchell, we need to assume such a separation when we claim that changes in the social organization of men and women are impeded by a conservatism that seems to be inherent in sexual difference itself. On the other hand, if we define sexual difference as “masculine and feminine,” are we not already giving social organization to those terms? Can we use the terms without attributing a specific semantic sense to them, or without them accruing a semantic sense that exceeds whatever intentions we may have? Moreover, if the “shared mental terrain” established through the generational transmission of the terms is also a social reality (how else would we understand that “shared” character of the terrain except as a social one, even if a partially unconsciously articulated set of social linkages), then we are not precisely referring to a psychic reality, presumptively unconscious, and a social reality, presumptively conscious, but rather to two modes of sociality, even two temporalities of the social—one that lags behind, struggles to impede progress, and another that forges ahead, trying to effect social change. At the same time, we are supposing that we are mistaken about the ideal of the social if we cannot account for those forms of transmission that rely on unconscious processes and their effects. Just to be clear: those theories of socialization that maintain that gender relations and the prospects for gender equity are determined

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only by social conditions and effects preclude the operation of the unconscious on the assumption that the unconscious forms no part of the social. And yet, if the rejoinder to that theory takes as its presupposition that the unconscious is definitely separable from the social, that it undercuts the progress made in the name of the social, then that position tends to share the same dichotomy that the first position supposes. My suggestion is that, just as the theory of the social invariably relies on unconscious dimensions, so the theory of the unconscious cannot be elaborated on without reference to modes of transmission that form an important, if undervalued, dimension of social relationality. I think we can find both dimensions of this argument in Mitchell’s analysis, even though her explicit theoretical commitment is to divide the one from the other. For instance, there are progressive social reforms involving gender equity that find themselves impeded by something unconscious that is understood as the persistent and impeding effect of sexual difference. And yet, what impedes such social reforms is itself “a largely unconsciously acquired history” (xxi), one that presumes “a shared mental terrain” (xxii). If this shared domain is a largely unacknowledged or devalued domain of social connectedness, then the social clearly occurs twice, each time in a modality of history: one is acquired and performs a regressive and conservative function; the second belongs to a more deliberate present, operative in reforms that seek to make change in and for the future. Mitchell aptly cites Sigmund Freud in this regard: “Mankind never lives entirely in the present. The past, the tradition of the race and of the people, lives on in the ideologies of the superego and yields only slowly to the influences of the present and to new change” (xxx, Mitchell’s emphasis). Of course, it is this phrase—“ideologies of the super-ego”—that interests Mitchell, and rightly so. The super-ego belongs to the later topography of Freud, and it is the one that Jacques Lacan largely neglects when he considers the conscious (mapping it almost exclusively onto the castration complex). Mankind does not live fully in the present: some history is transmitted at the level of the unconscious, and this is surely part of what is meant by sexual difference. How do we understand this slower and recalcitrant history, this strange undertow or persistent counterhistory, as part of an ideology of the super-ego? I am not altogether sure that this link can be established in a definitive way, but one of the two examples Mitchell offers starts to shed light on the connection. The first is “the unconscious sense of guilt” experienced by those who have not committed any crime, the topic

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of Freud’s essay “Criminals from a Sense of Guilt.”2 Mitchell makes use of this example to support her idea of “a shared mental terrain” or a generationally transmitted set of unconscious thoughts.3 What remains unclear is whether we are asked to assume that the guilt passed along was once attached to past deeds and whether, at some point in the course of its transmission, the guilt was taken to be a sure sign of a crime. And yet, as we know from Freud’s analysis, guilt can be related to a wish or a fantasy, even grounded in confusion about where the line is drawn between wish and deed. The criminal act that sometimes follows from a sense of guilt seeks to make the guilt commensurable with a crime, fulfilling that imperative of induction, “if there is guilt, there must be a crime.”4 In other words, there is no reason to infer from a sense of guilt that there was a crime, even if committed long ago and only with belatedly registered aftereffects. Guilt may be no more than a sign of anxiety over unacted desire and its ambiguities (“Did I merely wish it, or did I do it? Was the wishing itself the guilty deed?”), coupled with a desire to be done with the anxiety over whether or not the act has happened or will happen. The sense of guilt may thus be the self-infliction of a punishment in advance of any acts yet to be committed, even those that most likely will never be committed. When guilt proves more bearable than anxiety, it is doubtless because it allows for a temporal shift at the level of the psyche: guilt presumes that the act has already taken place, presumes the deed even when it has never been committed and so resolves the anxiety that attends the inability to distinguish wish from deed. One can imagine well enough how criminal deeds are averted through preemptive guilt: the fear of punishment is supplanted by guilt, understood as an instrument of self-punishment, at once fulfilling the expectation of being punished as a consequence of committing the deed and preempting the commission of the deed itself. But in the case in which criminal deeds are committed from a sense of guilt, the psyche seeks ratification of its conviction in the form of action. Guilt seeks its guilty action and, when it cannot be found, brings it about. What is coursing through the psyche in the form of guilt? For Mitchell, that guilt has been passed from a certain past, acting we might say on the model of the “curse” in Greek tragedy. If I commit an act from this guilt, I am unconsciously affirming that psychic bond to those—or that one—who came before. Of course, there are other ways of explaining this guilt that at first corresponds to no culpable deed. In Melanie Klein’s analysis, guilt that corresponds to no act may well be a way of managing an impulse that could possibly

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destroy an object of love and dependency, and so operates as a prophylactic against destructive aims. In any case, we can see that the existence of an unconscious sense of guilt (or partially conscious one) that seems to correspond to no misdeed may well seek to foreclose a possible future trajectory of action.5 And yet, if the one who suffers guilt acts criminally to fulfill the demands of the guilt, is there not, even for Klein, a certain acting out of a history that remains largely unconscious at that time? What remains unclear is whether it is a fantasy that is transmitted from one generation to another, or whether it is the deeds of the former generation for which the latter bears responsibility. If it is the incest and murder committed by Oedipus, or some historical version thereof, it does not answer the question of whether or not what courses through the psyche in the form of guilt is motivated by a transmitted deed or a fantasy. Indeed, that particular equivocation seems to be precisely what is transmitted and crime becomes the way to overcome that equivocation—and its anxieties— for the moment: it’s a deed! *

*

*

Mitchell likens this example of criminals who act from a sense of guilt to a second example that focuses on kinship in order to make the case for sexual difference as an unconsciously acquired history that proves recalcitrant to social change. In the second example, “a child raised by two parents of the same sex . . . may make a ‘normative’ adjustment to heterosexuality” (xxi). In fact, the argument suggests that the child emerges into heterosexuality (by which, I suppose, she means a presumptively normative heterosexuality) not only by virtue of biology, educational influences, media, and other environmental factors, but also that some other force has intervened, one that cannot be accounted for by “the actual situation” (xxi). Mitchell writes: “Unconscious thought processes are an important contribution to these instances of normalization” (xxi). In this example, sexual difference contributes to the forming of the child’s sexuality, and so exercises a formative power. So in this second example, we are meant to assume that unconscious thought exercises its “conservative” force on sexuality, that a set of socially transmitted and acquired thoughts about sexual difference emerge in (or as) the heterosexuality of the child, where it might not be predicted on the basis of parental influence and expected forms of identification. In some ways, this confirms what Mitchell argued in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, namely that “conscious, deliberate socialization is inadequate to explain the

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structure of sexual difference” (xvii). And yet, it seems that in this case the heterosexuality of the child raised by two parents of the same sex is another example of this “persistence” of sexual difference. Are we to understand sexual difference in this instance as exemplified by heterosexuality? Is this a paradigmatic exemplification? And if so, does that mean that the persistence of sexual difference, understood as historically transmitted unconscious thoughts, is also the persistence of heterosexuality as the social organization of sexuality? One quick way to test the hypothesis is to ask whether the unpredictable homosexuality of a child raised by heterosexual parents is equally a sign of sexual difference. If not, then it would seem that the heterosexual organization of sexuality and sexual difference are linked in this example, if not in this theory. Sexual difference exercises its formative power in contributing to the making of the heterosexual child in the midst of a gay family (though the example does not let us know whether the significance of this unpredictability alters if the child is a girl or a boy or if the parents are two men or two women). Is the idea that someone else’s heterosexual union from before is transmitted to the child and enters into the formation of sexuality through largely unconscious processes? Is it the heterosexuality of those who came before that emerges as the heterosexuality of the child? And is it their wish or their deed? Would it be equally true that unconscious homosexuality can be transmitted from prior generations as well? If so, does it follow that the role of unconscious transmissions in the formation of sexuality exceeds the operation of sexual difference? And how would we account for ambivalent or “over-inclusive” organizations of sexuality, whether bisexual or indeterminate? Would these be a sign of sexual difference or its limits? In the first example, the person who has done nothing wrong and who, Freud tells us, is not exposed to hypercritical judgments from his or her parents nevertheless suffers from self-beratement and guilt and even commits a crime motivated by this guilt. In the second example, a child—whose sociologically established gender is unknown—is raised by two parents of the same sex, and turns out to be heterosexual in orientation (an example that assumes that orientations can be and are definitively established in this way). In both examples, we are meant to see incommensurabilities. Indeed, we are meant to infer that something has been effectively and consequentially conveyed over a temporal distance that alone can account for this anachronistic emergence of guilt or desire. The crime happened earlier, and so the guilt is effectively acquired from another time. The heterosexuality is also somehow transmitted from earlier times, and

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so emerges now in spite of the homosexuality of the parents. And in both cases, it remains unclear whether what is transmitted is fantasy or the effects of action itself (or some combination of both). The first example does not pertain immediately to sexuality, though it certainly could. If Oedipus is the subtext, then the crime is surely both sexual and murderous. Indeed, whether it is the nameless and recurrent crime of Oedipus transmitted through the ages or some other guilty reactions to what is unconsciously transmitted from an earlier time and another space, there seems to be a living out of someone else’s guilt or desire that suggests that neither really start with the discrete and present ego. Taken together, the examples suggest a transmission of guilt and desire from another time, and the awkward and unknowing ways that others persist in our most basic sense of self and sexuality. Indeed, we seem to be haunted by the actions and fantasies of those who precede us, and sometimes this makes us do things (commit crimes) or assume a given sexual definition (heterosexuality). In either case, we are both haunted and formed by these unconscious processes, both of which are meant to support, directly or indirectly, the thesis that sexual difference is transmitted unconsciously and perhaps also that women are its designated repositories. Let us then reflect on the emergent or accomplished heterosexuality of the conjectured child who is meant to confirm the persistence of sexual difference, even its countersocial force. To understand the importance of this example as a way of confirming historically acquired unconscious thoughts about sexual difference, we would have to accept that sexual difference is not already operative in the home or in the larger circuits of kinship and surrounding social relations. Is any gay or lesbian family so fully sequestered from the social circulation of heterosexual meanings and effects that the emergence of a straight kid confirms the countersocial status of sexual difference? I do not mean to reduce the question of sexual formation to a purely sociological approach, but rather to consider what of psychoanalysis is really pertinent here. In other words, to accept the illustrative power of the example, we would first have to consider the peculiar ways in which “transmitting” and “acquiring” work in the development of more or less stable forms of sexual orientation. After all, if we were to change the example, as I suggested above, and ask how a lesbian is formed within a family with heterosexual parents, we would not be able to conclude with confidence that some unconscious content regarding sexual difference was transmitted to the child, and that this accounts for the incommensurability between the actual parental

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situation and the formation of sexual desire. Apparently, the straight kid who emerges from gay or lesbian parents also acquires a mode of desire that cannot be accounted for by “the actual situation.” But it is equally true that the lesbian kid who emerges from straight parents or a single parent cannot be easily accounted for by the actual situation (it would be good to know where an “actual situation” begins and ends, and whether it is presumptively coextensive with those organizations of parenting that prevailed during the years in which sexual orientation is presumptively established). This unaccountability or incommensurability does not seem to follow necessarily from the constitutive conservatism of sexual difference or, indeed, its ostensible corollary—heterosexuality. It may well be the case that sexuality is formed in response to something that is not manifest in any parenting environment. But why would that be any more or less true for the straight or gay kid, or indeed for the bisexual, questioning, or asexual one? As a psychoanalytic generalization, it can be said that the formation of sexual desire does not emerge on the basis of a clearly readable mimesis. And the idea of parents as “models” not only fails to be explanatory of the social forms that sexuality takes (here Mitchell and I agree), but the idea of the “model” belongs to a behaviorist framework that generally fails to understand how parents or caregivers are diversely understood not only in light of complex and shifting structures of kinship but also in light of the fields of fantasy to which they give rise. Moreover, a number of presuppositions are made by both the behaviorist model and the psychoanalytical rejoinder of the kind that Mitchell makes: (1) the idea that sexuality can be adequately understood by the idea of sexual orientation and that the latter can be explained and established in a definitive way within existing vocabularies; and (2) the idea that parenting structures are the primary causes or formative factors in the establishing of sexual orientation when parenting structures are themselves formed, even haunted, by any number of other social, historical, and economic ways of organizing reproduction and child-rearing. Parents also come from somewhere, and are as formed and haunted by unconscious processes as those they nurture. As a result, the parent-child dyad has to be rethought within the historicity of kinship, and the way transmission occurs—if it does—has to be rethought as well. When Mitchell claims that “we are still all universally conceived by one mother and begotten by one father” (xxiii), she means to articulate that despite reproductive technologies and new kinship arrangements, sexual difference makes itself known in reproductive

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heterosexuality. But more, in claiming that the mother is the one who gives birth, she relies on a theory of kinship that is bound by reproductive functions alone. If reproductive sexuality establishes appropriate kinship terms, then donors are fathers, and there can be no two—or more than two—mothers. Indeed, fathers who adopt or anyone who adopts runs the risk of being designated as “unreal” or deviating from the law. And yet, it seems to me that new kinship not only consists in such deviation from the law, but that deviation is itself the means through which rules are reproduced—and derailed. Thus, queer kinship is not just a form of kinship among several others but also strikes at the very idea of transmission by which the universal law of sexual difference becomes joined with reproductive sexuality. This is also why mimetic accounts of sexuality that focus on the question of what kind of parental “model” a child will have misapprehend the way in which sexuality emerges. There again, a certain possibility of displacement from an original object establishes the possibility of sexuality itself. Neither a recourse to parenting structures nor to the archaic and persistent force of sexual difference can offer an explanation for that unexpected turn of events that is the emergence of sexuality in a particular form or within the rhythms of a particular compulsion. This is not to say that sexuality is ahistorical, but only that we require a broader idea of history to begin to approach its trajectory. This is also not to deny that forms of triangulation persist within the queerest structures. A person socially established as a lesbian can consciously identify with her father or with ideas of fatherhood, or even find intensified traces of the father in another sociologically established woman, or she can fail to find him time and again. But whether that drama takes place at the site of a man or a woman may well be less important than the drama itself. She may well have more in common with some guy who is doing the same sort of thing in relation to his father or some other masculine figure, and the two of them might have a queer alliance of a psychic sort, whether or not they are focused on a woman or a man. We can imagine the explanation that claims that the boy child of lesbian parents may well end up desiring a girl as a form of identifying with his parents’ objects, or even becoming part of the crowd. Indeed, that object-choice may well confirm for him a greater form of loyalty and identification than would becoming gay, since that would introduce the masculine object of desire in a way that could be destabilizing for the operative solidarities in that kinship arrangement. Or maybe straightness is a way to avert the possibility of any rival for the lesbian prince

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who knows he has the absolute and irreplaceable love of both of his mothers, for better or for worse. I relay here a story relayed to me (thus “transmitting” in ways I cannot predict) in which a young adolescent girl says to her two dads, “Will you be disappointed in me if I am not gay?” They respond, listen, and one replies, “If you are gay, you will be like us; if you like men, you will be like us as well, so either case, you can’t escape us!” A strange parental trap, we might say, even a deplorable narcissism, but the story basically eliminates sexual orientation as a possible site of breakage between parents and child. We could certainly say in all of these scenarios that sexual difference is at play, and I do not have a problem with that claim. But if something about sexual difference persists, I am not sure that what persists are established semantic ways of organizing sexual difference, already formed legacies of the past that are relayed into the present without translation, transposition—without some loss or new twist and turn; without some queer derailment or deviation. For this reason, I am even less sure that heterosexuality is a sure way of confirming sexual difference or providing its paradigmatic instance. But even if both of those speculative propositions proved true (and I am not sure how they could finally prove true), an ever more fundamental problem emerges: how do we understand “transmission” and “acquisition”? The problem is not simply accounting for how a specific content is passed from one generation to the next, but of taking stock of how changing organizations of kinship alter the very idea of the generation. Thus, it is difficult to reconcile the two claims that Mitchell makes: first, that sociologically established kinship is the vehicle through which the unconscious thought of sexual difference is transferred, and that changes in kinship are impeded by an operation of sexual difference that, considered as unconscious, is independent of social forms of kinship; second, that heterosexuality is taken to be the sign of that persistent and unconscious sexual difference, meaning that we depend on the sociological form that sexuality takes to affirm the workings of an unconscious whose absolute separability from such social forms is supposed to be illustrated by the example itself. To the extent that generational belonging is determined by patterns of kinship, and those patterns are presumed to be reproduced identically along generational lines, they are at once evidence of a persistent and invariant law and said to be the vehicle through which that law is conveyed. The fallacious character of this argument is clearly exposed by the fact that it builds sexual difference, understood as

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heterosexually organized kinship, into the very definition of what a generation is, so that the laws that generations are said to hand down to one another are actually built into the modes of conveyance themselves. If existing or established organizations of kinship (or sexuality) are the evidence for the universal laws of sexual difference, and if they are defined by that very law, then they do not serve as independent evidence of the law, but rather illustrate the closed economy by which the law projects its inevitability, ruling out precisely those queer deviations that characterize both alternate kinship and the emergence of sexuality. Of course, we have to be able to account for that recalcitrance, that undertow, that reverse current that makes our efforts at social change so difficult. But there is no reason to take that recalcitrance and countercurrent as a sign of the invariant laws of human society. Sometimes change is slow, and loss is difficult, especially when the ideology of the super-ego speaks in the name of such laws. Notes A longer version of this chapter originally appeared as “Rethinking Sexual Difference and Kinship in Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism,” in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 23:1 (2012). This abridged and modified version has been approved by the author and reprinted with the permission of the author. Copyright © Judith Butler 2012. 1. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. xxii. Originally published in 1974, this book was reprinted with a new introduction by the author in 2000. All references to the text are to the new edition, and will be given parenthetically in the main body of the text. 2. Sigmund Freud, “Criminals from a Sense of Guilt,” chap. 3 of Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work, vol. 14 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), pp. 332–333. The essay was originally published in 1916. 3. See Mitchell, new introduction: “From clinical experience psychoanalysts know beyond doubt that unconscious thoughts may be communicated between people, and even through people, across generations—but this is only inexplicable if we deny a shared mental terrain” (xxii). 4. See “Criminals from a Sense of Guilt,” where Freud writes, “Paradoxical as it may sound, I must maintain that the sense of guilt was present before the misdeed, that it did not arise from it, but conversely—the misdeed arose from the sense of guilt” (332).

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5. See Melanie Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of ManicDepressive States,” in The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (London: Penguin, 1986). See also my essay “Moral Sadism and Doubting One’s Own Love,” in Reading Melanie Klein, ed. John Phillips and Lyndsey Stonebridge (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 175–184.

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CH A P T ER

10

Transgenres and the Plane of Gender Imperceptibility1 Jami Weinstein

The problem never concerned the nature of some exclusive group or other, but the transversal relations where the effects produced by any thing (through homosexuality, drugs, etc.) can always be produced by other means. Against those who think, “I am this, I am that” . . . one must think in uncertain, improbable terms: I do not know what I am, there is so much non-narcissistic, nonoedipal research or experimentation necessary to do—no gay can ever say with certainty “I’m gay.” The problem is not that of being this or that in man, but instead of becoming inhuman, of a universal animal becoming: not to be taken as a beast, but to unravel the human organization of the body, through this or that zone of bodily intensity, everyone discovering their own zones and the groups, populations, and species that inhabit them. —Gilles Deleuze 2

Introduction In the passage above, which is part of a response to an ad hominem attack against him, Gilles Deleuze refutes his critic’s misconceived charge that he is an opportunistic tourist who capitalizes on the risks taken by those who inhabit various so-called marginalized positions by dispelling identity politics wholesale and supplanting it with a positive theory of how one might live. The latter, he suggests, could be achieved through the strategic dehumanization process of becoming-imperceptible. As Ronald Bogue explains, “Becoming-imperceptible is a process of elimination whereby one divests oneself of all coded identity and engages

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the abstract lines of a nonorganic life, the immanent, virtual lines of continuous variation that play through discursive regimes of signs and nondiscursive machinic assemblages alike.”3 Becoming-imperceptible is the “immanent end”4 of becoming, a wholesale deterritorialization of the human. Like the homosexuals, drug users, masochists, and schizophrenics the harsh critic blamed Deleuze for objectifying, we all have the ability to reorganize and de-oedipalize the affects, intensities, and forces that constitute our corporeal materiality. We not only can, but also should do this, as Deleuze prescribes throughout his work, especially in that published with Félix Guattari. All becomings, they contend, are “rushing toward” becoming-imperceptible, passing first through a requisite becoming-woman.5 In effect, Deleuze is suggesting that we remediate the very speciation and biopolitical identity construction Michel Foucault famously diagnosed when he proclaimed that in 1870, “the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”6 To codify the homosexual, much like asserting “I am this,” is to reify the fiction of corporeal wholeness and intelligible signification rather than interpreting bodies as intensive maps open to limitless recharting from the impressions made by so many machinic assemblages of forces and affects. It is toward this latter end that, following the Deleuzian prescription, I explore the possibility of shifting from the concept of gender to that of transgenre. This move attempts to unmoor sex/gender/sexuality from the heteronormative and oedipal sovereignty of corporeal affective organization—not only for those who choose to focus their experiential or experimental risks on sex/gender/sexuality resignification, but for all of us. With the concept of transgenre, I aim both to make an intervention into the stalemate surrounding feminist debates on sex/gender/sexuality and to explore one alternative for transcending it. It is a move away from the commonplace views of these concepts with their concomitant normative corporeal baggage, toward body genres, figurations, bodies without organs, and horizontal difference—differences from differences rather than differences vertically counterposed against some standard unmarked norm. And it is a strategic step toward developing a queerer notion of identity, one demarcated according to immutable classificatory schemes. However, as Laurent Berlant cautions, we must not envision this as necessarily liberatory in itself, since “a genre is an aesthetic structure of affective expectation, an institution of formation that absorbs all kinds of small variations or modifications while promising that the persons transacting with it will experience the pleasure of encountering what they expected.”7 Genres are open but, as conventions, still carry some anticipation for the predictable; one could even argue that, to some degree, they involve the

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citation of norms. But, these conventions and their attendant norms have embedded within them their own negation and are, hence, internally self-contradictory, unlike ordinary conventions that cite norms. As Berlant argues, The power of a generic performance always involves moments of potential collapse that threaten the contract that genre makes with the viewer to fulfill experiential expectations. But those blockages or surprises are usually part of the convention and not a transgression of it, or anything radical. They make its conventionality interesting and rich, even.8

Thus, with transgenre, I do not aim to valorize some transgressive potential. Rather, I hope that this concept will both complement the deterritorialization endorsed above—one that sets its sights toward imperceptibility—and offer some critical purchase toward remediating some of the limitations associated with the now classic sex/gender paradigm. In other words, I am not putting transgenre forth as the solution to all our sex/gender woes, but as a strategy for pushing these concepts into a new register. In order to grasp the ways in which transgenre might be better suited to address some of the critical and sociopolitical agendas of contemporary queerfeminist theorists, I will first perform an abridged linguistic and conceptual analysis, productively unpacking the polyvalence of the word genre.9 Here I will trace the genetic lineage of genre and its family relations with terms such as genus, generic, and gender, subsequently discussing the merits of appealing to a perspective focused on aesthetic self-creation. Next, I will provide the background for augmenting this term with the prefix trans. After doing so, I will canvass one of the ways in which I think transgenre may provide a richer account than sex/gender by briefly applying it to the notion of the dandy.

Genre To be clear at the outset, this analysis is not intended to contribute to the field of genre studies. The focus is rather to play a sort of transatlantic linguistic ping-pong with the term such that we open up new lines of flight for understanding gender as it might be if divested from its oedipal organization. Additionally, I draw on Jacques Derrida’s “infolding” of gender and genre in his claim: The question of . . . genre . . . covers the motif of the law in general, of generation [and] birth in the natural and symbolic senses, of the

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generation difference, sexual difference between the feminine and masculine genre/gender, of the hymen between the two, of a relationless relation between the two, of an identity and difference between the feminine and masculine. The word “hymen” . . . serve[s] to remind the Anglo-American reader that, in French, the semantic scale of genre is much larger and more expansive than in English, and thus always includes within its reach the gender.10

It is this reminder and the interrelationship between gender and genre that I, too, want to underline in my deployment of transgenre. For, it was the observation that transgender was translated as transgenre for inclusion in the Paris lesbian, gay, and bisexual pride parade almost a decade ago that sparked my realization of genre’s interlinguistic semantic asymmetry and first inspired this study. Subsequently, I uncovered the genetic heritage of the term genre and its family lineage with its roots in terms such as genus and generic. Briefly, in French, genre is not only used to denote the linguistic gender of nouns but also for what in Linnaean species classification is called genus in English. Interestingly, in a Swedish inversion of the French, genus refers to what in English we call gender, while what we mean by the English use of genus can be found in the Swedish original (since Carl Linnaeus was Swedish) släkten, from the root släkt : family, kin, relatives. But it was the use of genre in English (originally derived from French) that initially captured my attention—genre not in the literary, linguistic, or scientific sense, but rather in the way it signifies type, kind, sort, category, and style. Clearly these latter resonances are more expansive and open, more general or generic than anything we mean when we use the word gender in English. Thus, the translation of transgenre from transgender constructed a franglais faux amis, or “fake friend” coupling: two words in different languages that are similar in spelling and sound, but significantly different in terms of meaning. Often, these dizygotic linguistic twins possess a common etymological parent; in this case, they share genus as their common ancestor. It is, moreover, the very definitional dissonance in the juxtaposition of this particular faux amis paring that I believe generates novel lines of flight for analysis. My own use of generic above is intended not in the adjectival sense of the nouns genre or genus, but in the sense of unspecified, unbranded, unmarked, common, or undefined. Seeing this transposition from noun to adjective, genre to generic, however, provides additional support for the claim that genre, in its link to generic, has a wider scope of less rigid potentialities. Again, Derrida offers ammunition with what he calls “the law of the law of genre,” which he

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claims is “a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy . . . a sort of participation without belonging—a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set.”11 It is precisely this impurity, contamination, and participation without membership that signals the greater semantic breadth and ontological excess of genre in contrast to the well-rehearsed shortcomings of corporeal figurations parsed out on the basis of gender. Another factor to consider is the way in which genre, in its role as a method of aesthetic classification, invokes the Nietzschean concept of aesthetic self-creation when it is applied to concepts like identity. Rather than considering only biological and social criteria, aesthetic and, along with it, affective criteria, become primary. In his study of Friedrich Nietzsche’s aestheticism, Alexander Nehamas holds that “Nietzsche . . . looks at the world in general as if it were a sort of artwork; in particular, he looks at it as if it were a literary text.”12 Pertinent here, he continues, is that to Nietzsche, “literary characters . . . are constituted simply as sets of features or effects that belong to no independent subjects,”13 and “the self . . . is not a constant, stable entity” but “something one becomes . . . constructs.”14 This gels with the proposal to move away from identity bounded by gender and toward framing a self through genre. It also parallels a transition from the self as autonomous and individual to what we might call interviduals,15 capturing the sense in which identity or concepts of it are enmeshed in assemblages of forces and affects, at core relational—connected with both organic and inorganic entities, always already multiple and self-contradictory, inchoate, and chaotic. As Berlant articulates it, “It is a form of aesthetic expectation with porous boundaries.”16 So it is armed with this taxonomic, multilingual, grammatical, sexed, gendered, generalized, unspecific and unmarked, contaminated, and aesthetic polyvalent definition of genre that we now proceed to the addition of the prefix trans.

Trans In this section, in order to transduce17 the notion of trans and genre, I want to push on Bailey Kier’s provocative contention that, Everybody on the planet is now encompassed within the category of transgender . . . Shared interdependent transsex refers to “bodies” as constant processes, relations, adaptations, and metabolisms, engaged in varying degrees of re/productive and economic relations with

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multiple other “bodies,” substances, and things, in which no normal concept of re/production, as based on our common categories of sex, gender, and sexuality, exists.18

This assertion does not seem entirely accurate given the references to (trans)gender and (trans)sex, even with the qualification that it is not founded on “normal” notions of reproduction based, as Kier interprets it, on “common categories of sex, gender, and sexuality.” Normal and common in what sense? After all, sexual reproduction maintains a statistically insignificant percentage of the totality of reproduction performed by organic beings on the planet.19 Moreover, noting that these relations may also be established with substances and things entails that the use of terms such as sex and gender is misplaced, since with such terms we still find ourselves trapped in a humanistic and organicist notion of reproduction and sex difference, a paradigm that has little relevance to nonsexually reproducing species or inorganic entities. Reading Kier more generously, however, we can infer that he is reaching toward something like transgenre, not transgender or transsex. Thus, if we push deeper on the spirit of this contention, employing transgenre instead, we might capture the full flavor of what he strives to argue. This returns us to interviduality, discussed above—an interviduality Deleuze and Guattari advocate in their notion of transversal machinic assemblage portrayed by their example of the reproductive interaction between wasp and orchid: How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of reterritorialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one another? The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome . . . a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. Each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further.20

There can be no clearer rendering of the ways in which transspecies interviduality—and trans mechanisms taken more generally—operate than in this assemblage (agencement). The orchid “masquerades” as and “sexually deceives” the wasp not only by performing wasp (by

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forming an image and tracing of it) but also by producing wasp pheromones.21 The wasp, in turn, simultaneously transduces the orchid. There are no individuals, no singularities, in this process of becoming. This is the very point, I maintain, that Kier intends with his provocation. In the case of the wasp and the orchid, it is about transgenres; sex and gender, even in non-normative or atypical readings of these terms, have no place in this sort of discussion about interspecies “transversal”22 reproductive processes. Scientific research on the wasp-orchid mating process has demonstrated that this “sexual deception” establishes the interspecies reproductive boundary as leaky: male wasps attracted to the orchid based on the visual and olfactory signals it transmits find it so enticing that they ejaculate. While we may think this is the end of the story and declare this practice evolutionarily disadvantageous to the wasp as a species—a squander of wasp sperm that could be better expended enhancing the wasp population—the plot thickens. Wasps can reproduce by two methods: either sexually, spawning only female offspring, or via parthenogenesis of the female, creating only male offspring. Moreover, after repeated liaisons with various orchids, male wasps eventually learn that this form of interspecies sex is not productive and cease ejaculating, suggesting that they then turn to sexual reproduction and produce more females to ensure the future of their own species. Since it is the male wasp that, through his (pseudo) copulation with the orchid, becomes the reproductive vehicle for the orchid, parthenogenic reproduction serves the evolutionary interests of both populations: more male wasps are produced which, in turn, guarantees the perpetuation of the orchid population. Thus, it is a win-win situation for all the interviduals involved.23 It is, in part, for this reason that I want to graft trans onto genre in the present exploration. As the case of the orchid and wasp reveals, the transspecies, transversal, transducing, transgressive transmission of genetic material through one another, the co-constituting and mutually reproductive processes, the deterritorializing and reterritorializing of one another simultaneously, all play in the registers of both trans and genre. And these concepts, together as transgenre, provide a new lens through which to undertake analysis, one that the concepts of sex and gender could only, at best, perform inadequately. Deploying a transgenre analysis, we can see the way the wasp-orchid assemblage becomes “a body without organs [BwO] upon which intensities pass, self and other—not in the name of a higher level of generality or a broader extension, but by virtue of singularities that can no longer be said to be personal, and intensities that can no

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longer be said to be extensive.”24 Imperceptibility here takes the place of identity. For, as Deleuze and Guattari instruct, “The BwO is never yours or mine. It is always a body . . . It is an involution, but always a contemporary creative involution.”25 A final interesting feature of this analysis is the relation it has to the aesthetic self-creation mentioned earlier. Elizabeth Grosz, in her work on Darwin and sexual selection, maintains that in sexually reproducing species, aesthetic attraction is the foundation of mate selection.26 As witnessed in the example above, it is the orchid’s ability to produce a tracing or image of the wasp that attracts the wasp to the orchid where it then detects the alluring sexual pheromones that result in the wasp’s desire to copulate with the orchid, despite their species differences. Aesthetics, then, can be said to be the motor of this assemblage of multiple and transspecies meta-reproductive praxes as much as it can be attributed to cases of binary sexual difference in the classic paradigms. However, given the fact that sex and gender differences do not properly explain this transspecies phenomenon, or at least cannot exhaust the analysis, we might find it more suitable to use the general sense of genres (as types, sorts, and kinds) and more specifically, transgenres, because of the transversal, rooting and shifting,27 deterritorializing and reterritorializing, sexual politics of the wasp being attracted to, and mating with, the orchid. It is also this aesthetic feature, in effect an analysis beyond both the doer and the deed, that will provide the backbone to the transgenre analysis of the dandy that is to follow.

The Dandy as a Transgenre Judith Butler famously cites Nietzsche from the Genealogy of Morals as claiming that “There is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.”28 This, in part, generates her performative theory of gender, where gender is cast as epistemological and repetitiously styled, rather than as an ontological fact, and where sex becomes an effect of gender. However, elsewhere Nietzsche contradictorily asserts that “first an act is imagined which simply does not occur, ‘thinking,’ and secondly a subject-substratum in which every act of thinking, and nothing else, has its origin: that is to say, both the deed and the doer are fictions.”29 If we take Nietzsche’s second proclamation seriously, we are left empty-handed with respect to what, if anything, we could say about “what we are”—as he seems to dash prospects for claiming either a classic substance-based ontological truth of the self or a self based on the sum total of actions. There are multiple

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and ambiguous threads stitched throughout Nietzsche’s work, offering clues to what remains in an effort to understand the self; perhaps the most germane is his call to those of us who “want to become those we are . . . human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves.”30 Thus, despite the claim that neither being nor doing provides us with a definitive ontological self-understanding, we are implored by Nietzsche to “become what we are.” This appeal seems to privilege doing over being, though, unlike Butler, this doing is not affected by citing preexisting scripts or norms. Rather, Nietzsche calls upon us to self-create outside the law, outside of norms, something Butler argues would be impossible even if we can disturb and subvert those laws and norms under her theory. Nietzsche’s claim also seems to imply that there is some thing or substance that we are, and that is what we should become. Lest we misinterpret this as some form of essentialism, note that the emphasis is on the becoming and that what we would become is something new, not prior to the self-construction. Who better to fill the shoes of Nietzsche’s uniquely and aesthetically self-created person than the dandy? Charles Baudelaire, dandy apologist extraordinaire, depicts the dandy as someone “whose solitary profession is elegance,” who “will always and at all times possess a distinct type of physiognomy, one entirely sui generis,”31 and who is “enamoured . . . above all of distinction, perfection in dress consists in absolute simplicity . . . the best way of being distinguished . . . It is, above all, the burning desire to create a personal form of originality, within the external limits of social conventions.”32 Baudelaire’s characterization of the dandy as someone who strives to be distinguished through absolute simplicity—imperceptibility we might say—echoes the themes of transgenre detailed above. These motifs are buttressed by Baudelaire in his claims that the dandy can “establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite . . . be away from home and yet . . . feel at home anywhere . . . see the world . . . be at the very centre of the world, and yet . . . be unseen of the world,” as they are “independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions,”33 and that “these beings have no other calling but to cultivate the idea of beauty in their persons, to satisfy their passions, to feel and to think.”34 The dwelling in flux, being at home anywhere, and the being unseen he underscores here, along with the inability to be linguistically taxonomized and the emphasis on feeling or affect, evince precisely the sort of imperceptibility of affectively intensive bodies without organs described above, which transgenre as a critical tool is intended to map.

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As cited earlier, Derrida chronicles the law of the law of genre as parasitical, contaminated, and impure, a sort of partaking in a class without membership in or identity with it.35 Here, too, we discern reflections of dandyism, which, Baudelaire informs us, “is an institution outside the law, has a rigorous code of laws that all its subjects are strictly bound by, however ardent and independent their individual characters may be.”36 Interestingly, on the surface, dandies exhibit a belonging to the fabric of the aristocratic class. This, like the orchid, is an aesthetic deception, a mere tracing, a deterritorialization of the aristocratic, a trans-class lure, since dandies were generally known to be of the middle class. The aesthetic economy and law of the dandy can thus be said to be both impure and a participation without belonging, a transgenre replete with the Berlantian “prospects of failure that haunt the performance of identity and genre.”37 Furthermore, dandies “all spring from the same womb . . . partake of the same characteristic quality of opposition and revolt . . . that compelling need . . . of combating and destroying triviality,”38 where triviality can be read as simplistic identity politics, intelligibility, and a politics of recognition, while the oppositional tendency aims toward instability, ambivalence, chaos, destabilization, and contamination. One final slant on the dandy transgenre merits consideration: the autobiographical. What would it mean if a woman-identified female underwent a becoming-dandy? Dandies, it should be stressed, are typically gendered as effeminate males—transfigured feminine masculinity. In that light, a female presenting as a male dandy would be considered feminine only in a masculine manner. While a limited analysis of this aspect of this version of the female dandy could be undertaken using gender theories, I want to suggest that the notion of transgenre might provide a fuller account of this phenomenon. Calling such a woman transgendered does not seem quite right, nor does it exhaust the analysis. Transgenre, on the other hand, seems to open up the fuller scope of the various transversal contaminations (class, historical era, gender, sex, nationality, genre, etc.) embedded in that corporeal, affectively intensified assemblage.

Conclusion Gayle Salamon writes that “questions of what we are cannot be extricated from questions of what we do, and if that doing sometimes disturbs presumptions of proper identity or proper place, perhaps that disturbance can be a means of forging hopeful new modes of knowledge and methods of inquiry from the old.”39 I hope to have offered

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such a new method with the foregoing analysis. It is that very dissonance, observed also at the linguistic level, that generates transgenre as a potentially rich analytic tool. Transgenre offers us new, more open, affective, and aesthetic lines of flight with which to approach some of the more thorny issues thought to be exhausted by a sex/ gender analysis. For this reason, it might also offer us a shift in our general perspective of these problematics and lead the way toward imperceptibility and the unraveling Deleuze proposes in the epigraph. Indeed, as he and Guattari declare: “The question is not, or not only, that of the organism, history, and subject of enunciation that oppose masculine to feminine in the great dualism machines. The question is fundamentally that of the body—the body they steal from us in order to fabricate opposable organisms.”40 And it is that very destabilization of the sovereignty of the oedipally organized body and its decoding that transgenre is meant to affect. Notes 1. In “Transgenres and the Plane of Language, Species, and Evolution,” Lambda Nordica 16:4, special issue on Animals (2011), pp. 85–111, I undertake the task of analyzing the concept of transgenre in relation to language, animals, and evolution. I do not see the argument in that article as separate from the one I make here, rather these are two of several parts of a larger whole. It might, thus, be helpful to read them together. 2. Gilles Deleuze, “Lettre à un critique sévère,” in Pourparlers 1972–1990 (Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 1990), p. 22, my translation (with reference to “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” in Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin [New York: Columbia University Press, 1995], p. 11). 3. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze’s Wake: Tributes and Tributaries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 73. 4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 279. 5. Ibid. 6. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 43. 7. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 4. 8. Ibid. 9. See my “Transgenres and the Plane of Language, Species, and Evolution” for a more thorough etymological analysis of the term genre than the one I provide here.

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10. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7:1, special issue on Narrative (1980), p. 74. 11. Ibid., p. 59. 12. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 3. 13. Ibid., p. 5. 14. Ibid., p. 7. 15. I borrow this term from Andrew Miller in “Pan: Orientation,” at: http://thereturnofpan.tumblr.com, p. 3. In this text, Miller cites Christian de Quincey describing Miller’s notion of interviduality: “Subjectivity is not, as Descartes believed, sealed up in the privacy of an individual mind, only to be communicated via sensory utterances such as language or other gestures. Quite the opposite, really: you will have realized that our sense of ‘subjectivity’ is deeply intertwined with other sentient beings, with other subjects. Subjectivity is fundamentally intersubjectivity. We are not so much ‘individuals’ as interviduals. We cocreate each other. And since my very being, my subjectivity, is a cocreation that involves all other sentient beings I am in relationship with . . . then part of my being is literally created by and shared with the ‘Other.’” I employ this term in order to capture that same sense of co-creation and intersubjectivity Miller intends, though expanding it beyond interpersonal or intra-organic relations. 16. Berlant, The Female Complaint, p. 4. 17. “Transduce: 1. To convert (energy) from one form to another. 2. To transfer (genetic material or characteristics) from one bacterial cell to another.” From http://www.thefreedictionary.com/transduce, accessed on July 1, 2011. 18. Bailey Kier, “Interdependent Ecological Transsex: Notes on Re/production, ‘Transgender’ Fish, and the Management of Populations, Species, and Resources,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 20:3 (2010), p. 299. 19. While the majority of animals reproduce sexually, the rest of organic life—bacteria, viruses, fungi, plants, and other microorganisms, which outnumber animals enormously—does not. 20. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 10. 21. See the discussion of wasp-orchid derived from Bob B. M. Wong and Florian P. Schiestl, “How an Orchid Harms its Pollinator,” The Royal Society, July 3, 2002, pp. 1529–1532, at http://kvond.wordpress.com/2008/05/15/23/, accessed on June 27, 2011. 22. Deleuze and Guattari often employ the term “transversal” in these contexts. I am, thus, following suit while simultaneously referencing what Nira Yuval-Davis outlines in “What is ‘Transversal Politics’?,” Soundings 12 (1999), pp. 94–98. 23. See, for example, A. C. Gaskett, C. G. Winnick, and M. E. Herberstein, “Orchid Sexual Deceit Provokes Ejaculation,” The American Naturalist 171:6 (2008), pp. E206–212.

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24. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 156. 25. Ibid., p. 164. 26. See, in particular, Elizabeth Grosz, Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); and Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 27. See Yuval-Davis, who explains rooting and shifting as “the idea . . . that each . . . participant in a political dialogue, would bring with them the reflexive knowledge of their own positioning and identity. This is the ‘rooting.’ At the same time, they should also try to ‘shift’—to put themselves in the situation of those with whom they are in dialogue and who are different” (“What is ‘Transversal Politics’?,” p. 96). To her, “it is the message, not the messenger that counts. This does not mean, of course, that it is immaterial who the ‘messenger’ is” (p. 96). These ideas map neatly onto the Deleuzo-Guattarian notions of deterritorialization-reterritorialization, and to the privileging of imperceptibility over identity advocated in this paper. 28. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 25. Italics indicate the portion not included in Butler but present in the original Nietzsche citation (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals I, vol. 13, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Vintage Books, 1967], p. 45). 29. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), §477, p. 264, emphasis mine. 30. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), §335, p. 266. 31. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), p. 26. 32. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet (New York: Viking Press, 1972), pp. 395–422. Abridged PDF version cited: http://athena.wells.edu:6080/special/user-wganis/ARTH270 /Baudelaire.pdf, accessed on July 1, 2011. 33. Ibid., p. 3. 34. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, p. 27. 35. Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” p. 59. 36. Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” p. 7. 37. Berlant, The Female Complaint, p. 4. 38. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, p. 28. 39. Gayle Salamon, “Justification and Queer Method, or Leaving Philosophy,” Hypatia 24:1, special issue on Oppression and Moral Agency: Essays in Honor of Claudia Card (2009), p. 230. 40. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 276.

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CH A P T ER

11

Primal Scenes, Forbidden Words, and Reclaimed Spaces: Voice, Body, and Poetic Form in Recent South African Writing Gabeba Baderoon

So I guess the P is not for poetry. —Reclaiming the P . . . Word1

The colonial period is the primal scene for understanding images of Black bodies in South Africa. At the Cape, ruled successively by the Dutch and the British from 1652 to 1910, control over sexuality was central to definitions of race. Ann Stoler points out that “the very categories ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’ were secured through forms of sexual control.”2 Slave-owning colonists exercised sexual license over the bodies of enslaved and indigenous women through enforced prostitution and other forms of sexual violence, and European discourses about race and sexuality normalized the sexual violation of such women. As Philippa Levine puts it, notions of “naturalized prostitution, promiscuity, and homosexuality” claimed to be central to indigenous societies “were definitive of what made these places ripe for colonial governance, unworthy of self-rule, and inferior to their colonial masters.”3 In colonial settings, the sexual is therefore central to the making of race, rather than simply acting in concert with already stable, raced identities. Yet, precisely because

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of this European sexual license to indigenous and enslaved bodies, the racial implications of sexual transgression haunted the colonies. Contraventions of permitted sexual relations between Europeans and indigenous people posed an intolerable threat to the racial status of whites, and in the colonies “fears around racial difference” were “often represented in sexual terms.”4 One can track the creation of gendered white identities in the colonies through panics about “Black peril” and the need to protect white women from the perceived threat of indigenous sexuality. Given this history, it is unsurprising that, since colonial times, Black bodies in South Africa have been imbued with unsettling sexualized meanings. Black female bodies, in particular, have been portrayed through patterns of “hypervisibility” that have simultaneously subjected women to heightened levels of surveillance and rendered invisible the systemic violence to which they have been subjected.5 In a range of recent literary texts in South Africa, however, the language for talking about such bodies has been reimagined. This chapter discusses two instances of this shift. One is what I call a theme of “preferred silence,” involving a strategic refusal to engage with dominant modes of rendering bodies visible. Another is the move toward reclaiming and redefining the very meaning of visibility. I suggest that these seemingly divergent patterns articulate a radically different claim on public space by Black women in South Africa than previous narratives have. I discuss these patterns as they appear in two texts: Makhosazana Xaba’s poem “Tongues of their Mothers,” published in a collection of the same name,6 and Reclaiming the P . . . Word, a play in eight scenes written and performed by students and staff at the Gender Equity Unit of the University of the Western Cape (UWC). These texts present views of women’s bodies that are unprecedented in South African writing in their attention to forms of sexual violence suffered by Black women since the colonial period, and their insistence, crafted in poetic language, that a holistic exploration of Black women’s bodily experiences incorporates pleasure and power as well as pain. While the two texts differ significantly in terms of genre, time, and subject matter, I show that they are connected by what I see as their productive attention to poetic language and form. Both texts draw on the discursive possibilities opened up by poetry to convey the violation of Black women’s bodies without reproducing an intrusive gaze on their suffering. Poetic form works in distinctive ways in the texts. “Tongues of their Mothers,” on the one hand, uses the formal qualities of poetry to craft a narrative of a life that

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is invisible in official archives, and creates a vivid portrait through a combination of poetic image and silence. The poem traces new pasts and lineages for Black women, replacing a legacy in which they are defined only by and for those who dominate and abuse them. Reclaiming the P . . . Word, on the other hand, employs theatrical performance to present women’s voices in a range of registers to call attention to the damaging effects of misogynistic terms in everyday discourse. At the same time, the play’s supple and radiant use of language reshapes the violent meanings of such words. As the title of a recent volume on the topic of hate crimes and homophobia in South Africa proclaims, such textual worlds have powerfully generative effects and hold the potential to create “the country we want to live in.” 7 Both of the texts treated here allude to the germinal figure of Sara Baartman, the nineteenth-century South African woman whose body was used in a taxonomy of racial difference that placed European men at its apex and Black women at its nadir, and asserted the inferiority and sexual deviancy of Black people. The public display of Baartman’s brain and genitals in the Musée de L’Homme for 159 years exemplifies the invasive access that colonial society claimed over Black women’s interior spaces. After long-stalled negotiations with the French government, Baartman’s remains were finally returned to South Africa in January 2002. On August 9 of that same year, in an official burial conducted by the South African government in Hankey in the Eastern Cape near the place where Baartman was born, she was written into new narratives of the nation through the creation of a monument to her memory, but subsequently also claimed in other, poetic registers for envisioning Black women’s bodies. I go on to trace a mode of speaking about Baartman that refuses knowledge gained by invasive methods of access and, instead, observes what I call a “preferred silence” about her. Any project that engages with Baartman’s life must deal with the risk of complicity with ways of knowing that continue the violating practices they set out to contest, a challenge addressed by Zine Magubane and Pumla Gqola in their analyses of writing on Baartman over the past 30 years. Such writing has once again made Baartman one of the most visible women in African history.8 Magubane points out that a “veritable theoretical industry” has grown up around her,9 while Gqola shows that Baartman once again has become a figure of “hypervisibility.”10 Both point to the way that many contemporary images of Baartman discomfortingly echo nineteenth-century representations.

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However, there is a different way of talking about Baartman, set in motion by a groundbreaking essay by the novelist and literary scholar Zoë Wicomb, who located Baartman for the first time in a feminist history of slavery in South Africa. Wicomb shows that Baartman came to “exemplif[y] the body as site of shame”11 through a formulation that linked the memory of slavery with an accusation of Black women’s complicity in the violation to which they were subjected. As a result, Wicomb argues, for descendents of enslaved people, the memory of surviving slavery is burdened by an almost ontological shame, symbolized by Baartman, who came to signify both violation and culpability, or, as Wicomb phrases it, “the shame of having had our bodies stared at, but also the shame invested in those (females) who have mated with the colonizer.”12 In a painful reversal, therefore, Black women’s bodies have been made the bearers of the mark of sexual violence during slavery, rendering invisible the systemic violations of slavery. Wicomb argues that this “shameful” burden is the reason for “the total erasure of slavery from the folk memory” among the descendents of enslaved people in South Africa.13 This erasure has an obverse side, however: South African popular language is strewn with swearwords based on derogatory terms for Black women’s bodies. These familiar and ubiquitous curses summon Black women’s bodies into public visibility, evoking slavery’s legacy of sexual violence without mentioning slavery. I argue that these erased histories are excavated and reimagined in “Tongues of their Mothers” and Reclaiming the P . . . Word.

Preferred Silence: “Tongues of their Mothers” In her compelling essay “(Not) Representing Sara Bartman,” Gqola proposes a limit on what can be known about Baartman’s life, to avoid creating representations that unwittingly echo the violations of the past.14 Gqola writes that Baartman is ultimately unknowable, and that to accept this unknowability is a way to accept her full humanity: “A tale that begins with [Baartman] . . . cannot be one with narrative certainty.”15 Xaba’s poem articulates this threshold. However, rather than having the effect of proscribing knowledge, the poem opens up different possibilities for envisioning Black women’s bodies in South Africa: I wish to write an epic poem about Sarah Baartman, one that will be silent on her capturers, torturers and demolishers.

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It will say nothing of the experiments, the laboratories and the displays or even the diplomatic dabbles that brought her remains home, eventually. This poem will sing of the Gamtoos Valley holding imprints of her baby steps. It will contain rhymes about the games she played as a child, stanzas will have names of her friends, her family, her community. It will borrow from every single poem ever written about her, conjuring up her wholeness: her voice, dreams, emotions and thoughts.16

As these stanzas show, “Tongues of their Mothers” refuses conventional terms for talking about Baartman. It will, in fact, “be silent on her capturers, torturers and demolishers” and “will say nothing” about the suffering they caused her. The insight conveyed in these lines is that to simply reproduce testimony about her capture and torture would, again, reduce Baartman’s life to acts of erasure and, in effect, threaten to erase her as a human subject. Instead of focusing on violation, the poem crafts new parameters for calling her into visibility. The speaker juxtaposes the genre of the epic poem, often used to invoke nationalist and masculine heroes, with the “wish” to write, thus articulating a desire that will be neither nationalist nor completely fulfilled. Importantly, the poem’s tone is not hesitant in its restraint. It announces that its incompleteness, its preferred silence, is strategic and intentional. It pauses before the imperative to follow those who have “captured” and “tortured” Baartman through language and, instead, emphasizes the wholeness and inviolability of the figure it invokes. The poem recalls Baartman’s childhood, and the “imprints” of her footsteps in the Gamtoos Valley. The line reads history in the signs left by the body. As a salve to the familiar image of a lonely, suffering Baartman in Europe, Xaba “conjur[es]” for her “stanzas [that hold the] names of her friends, her family, her community.” Further countering the abstracted figure conveyed even in recuperative accounts, Xaba reinvents Baartman’s genealogy, transforming her from a figure who had come to symbolize ontological shame for her descendents into a founder of new lineages of women. Through an epic poem, itself composed of “every single poem ever written about her,” Xaba names Baartman as the first in a series of heroic women— until now known only by their relation to men—whom she presents instead in their “wholeness.” This is a view of poetry as a collective memory that can counter erasure and fracture. Finally, language

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and voice are poetically embodied in the image of the “tongues of their mothers” in the poem’s title, where “tongue” refers both to the often-denigrated and forgotten languages of women and the part of the body that makes speech possible.

R ECL AIMING

P . . . WOR D : The History of a Painful Term

THE

In light of the history that can be recovered through proscribed words, I turn next to the possibilities to be found in radical forms of theater. In its themes, conception, writing, and mode of performance, Reclaiming the P . . . Word forms part of a tradition of radical theater-making in South Africa. The play was directed by Mary Hames and was first performed in 2006 in response to the prevalence of sexual violence in the contexts encountered by students and staff at the University of the Western Cape.17 Even more than this physical context, the play addresses the mental universe for Black women created by the constant pressure of sexualization and sexual violence, as a result of which, “sexual assault stalks the imagination of many South African women.”18 In responding to the high levels of gender-based violence in the country, Reclaiming the P . . . Word draws on collaborative, nonrealist modes of performance and “the use of private details as a means of public resistance”19 to the norms that sustain violence. Simultaneously attentive to history and intensely personal, the play’s themes include the impact of colonial settlement at the Cape, alluded to in the seventeenth-century figure of Krotoa and in Sara Baartman; the fact of sexual violence in contemporary South Africa; and assertions of sexual pleasure by Black women. The final scene reclaims the word symbolized by the ellipsis in its title: poes, the Afrikaans word for vagina. But what, we must ask, can the “p-word” tell us, and what does it say about ways of representing the Black female body in South Africa? As Hames suggests, it is the broader use of the “p . . . word” in the title that illustrates the regulation of public space in South Africa.20 This is because the word carries such derogatory connotations that it is a term of abuse and contempt, used against women as well as men as a means of disempowerment. The play takes this common practice and makes it the basis of a powerful reclamation of the word, which ultimately comes to include pleasurable meanings. Why does the title of the play use the ellipsis in “p . . . word” rather than spelling out poes? Partly because this opens up a productive ambiguity, for instance, posing the question, does the “p . . . word”

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stand for poes? We know from the rest of the play that the answer is mostly yes, but as one of the characters says, “I guess the P doesn’t stand for poetry,” while the next line asks, “And why not Poes poetry?” However, the larger answer is that the word poes is already in the public sphere, and that the play wishes to bring it to visibility in a different way. It seeks to “reclaim” the space that is already occupied by several uses of the word, almost all damaging to women. The title signals the ongoing nature of this attempt. As the play shows, the word poes has a remarkable degree of semantic dexterity; although it is a swearword, it can also act as a noun (poes), adjective (poeslik), and diminutive (poesie). Its meanings include the denotative “vagina,” but also range in the direction of ontology, as in, Jy is ’n poes (You are a poes), and the quality of being inherently poeslik or “poes-like.” Thus, to look at poes in this way offers the possibility of seeing the body differently, not by directly countering negative stereotypes, but by examining dominant meanings, exploring their power, uncovering the history to which they allude, attending to their strange and powerful currency, and listening carefully for meanings that hover on the edge of screaming.21 The common South African swearwords naai (both “to sew” and a crude term meaning “to have sex”), moer (“matrix” or “womb”), poes, and doos (literally “box” and figuratively “womb”) are ubiquitously heard on the streets of Cape Town and are associated with the very name of the city.22 When I look up the word poes in the multivolume Oxford English Dictionary, 23 I find nothing under that term, although there are several entries for “puss.” And indeed, in Dutch, the word poes means cat. English retains this sense in “puss” and “pussy.” However, where does the expletive force of poes come from, its abrupt intimacy, the intake of breath at the taboo of saying it? Like moer, the word asserts rage, disgust, rejection, and violence. The Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles shows that moer is slang for mother but “not in polite use.”24 To say jou moer (your moer) and jou ma se moer (your mother’s moer) is always an obscene and abusive mode of address. Similarly to poes, when used as an expletive, the word moer expresses rage, disgust, or aggression. Used in the verb form, to moer someone is to beat them or even to kill them, indicating the close association of the word with violence. While this is the entry in the Dictionary of South African English for the related word moer, as in the Oxford English Dictionary, there is nothing on poes. In engaging with the latter word, Reclaiming the P . . . Word enters a long-standing debate about how to respond to abusive but

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widely used terms for women and sexual minorities. Reclaiming the power of proscribed words is a venerable political strategy, but it continues to be a sensitive one, nonetheless. By eliding the word to which it refers in the title, the play signals that the project to reclaim a familiar term for a woman’s vagina is subversive and yet also potentially hurtful. Does using the word in new contexts, where its violent meanings are subsumed and disguised by humor, run the risk of erasing the painful histories to which it alludes? This is the position taken by Dale Choudree, a member of the 2009 Cape Town Pride Committee, in a debate set in motion by the theme of that year’s parade: “Pink Ubuntu: Jou ma se Pride ” (Your mother’s Pride). For Choudree, “Such a theme seems unconscious in its disrespect towards the position of women.”25 He noted that one of the justifications for the theme was that Jou ma se Pride would reclaim the term by charging it with positive connotations, thus echoing the appropriation of terms such as “queer” and moffie (Afrikaans for a gay or effeminate man). However, Choudree argued, since the phrase “Jou ma se poes is specific to an underprivileged socioeconomic group of people of color, it is my view that such reinterpretation, if any, should come from the group of people with whom the term is associated.”26 He eventually resigned from the Pride Committee as a result of the intense controversy that this issue provoked. In contrast to Choudree, Hames advocated a “politics of engagement and transgression” in which “naming, renaming and reclaiming and the appropriation of names (like queer, moffie, dyke, faggot, stabane, etc.)” are themselves part of a broader political debate that is not limited by ethnicity, class, or sexual orientation.27 She pointed to the fact that “the politics of naming and renaming takes different forms in queer and Black women’s struggles, since Black women have been objectified in several ways.”28 Her own approach, which is to reclaim words such as poes, is aimed at encouraging “those who have been insulted and abused to proudly reclaim their voice and bodies.”29 This act of reclamation is exemplified in a startling moment in the climactic last scene of Reclaiming the P . . . Word. In the performance I attended in Observatory, Cape Town, in August 2010, “Jou ma se poes!” was shouted loudly and slowly from behind the audience. At first, I could not see who was speaking and it was unclear if this was part of the play or if someone had walked in from the street and was shouting this far-from-uncommon interjection at the audience. Then I saw the speaker as she entered from behind the audience and walked among us, winding her way to the front of the

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room which acts as the stage, continuing to shout the phrase several times, in various registers. Does it grab your attention? Or are you one of those that pretend that you did not hear it? JOU MA SE POES! On the street, in the township. Oh and let’s not forget the taxi! Parow, Elsies, Cape Town! Hallo girl, ga jy saam! What, are you coming? No? Your Poes! Women, men, children, some can’t even speak yet. They all use it. Your Poes. You are a Poes. You look like a Poes. You act like a Poes. I mean really, come on listen to it. Poes. Women, men, children, some can’t even speak yet. They all use it. Your Poes! You are a Poes. You look like a Poes. You act like a Poes. I mean really, come on listen to it. Poes. One of the UWC managers said, when told about the name of this production, “So I guess the P is not for poetry.” And why not Poes poetry?30

In her performance, the woman intones the many inflections that the phrase can hold, from incipient violence to derisory laughter, part of its humor coming from its very familiarity. What if we took the word away from its usual associations? What if the audience were not cowed and despised, but women (and some men) holding the mirrors and female condoms handed out at the beginning of the performance and invited to look differently at themselves, to visit, to touch, to think and speak with pleasure about their bodies? The last scene commences with the repeated use of “Jou ma se poes!” and ends with the poetry of poes. The movement in the play from pain to pleasure is as difficult and formally challenging as highlighting the topic of violence and invisibility is. To reclaim the wholeness of Black female sexuality presents a profound political and artistic challenge. Desirée Lewis notes that within a broader history of visual representation, “Black women’s bodies have often been the subject of voyeuristic consumption, the consumption not only of Black women’s sexuality, but also of Black women’s trauma and pain.”31 A repeated focus on violation and trauma becomes a dangerous formula that entraps people in narratives of violence, rendering them vulnerable to further violation and distancing them from the possibility of empathy and exchange with others. Reclaiming the P . . . Word is acutely aware of this danger and interrupts a voyeuristic focus on trauma through humor

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and word play, for instance, through puns such as, “My vagina is gatvol ” (meaning “fed-up,” but also literally, “My arsehole is full”). This section of the play, “Vagina Dialogues,” refers to the precursor play by Eve Ensor, and to the multiple ways in which women view their own bodies. Even to say the list of transgressive words used to denote vagina—doos, cunt, poes—is to enunciate a litany of forbidden words that becomes funny when it is said in the usually polite space of the theater. To counter this list of insults, the speaker in this scene remembers a term for vagina learned from her mother: “Thank god I grew up with my mother telling me I had a honeypot . . . a honeypot mind you.” She reminds the audience that we have been trained into using certain words for the body, from the home, where she learned that she had a “honeypot,” to the reversal of tone at school where her mother’s language was overwritten and a new code for Black women’s bodies was scrawled on the “toilet doors, station walls [and] schoolboys’ desks” of the broader world. Clearly, the denotative meaning of this phrase, “your mother’s vagina,” is only part of its effect. What else does this powerful and intimate insult connote? The second-person address hails the person in a direct call to engagement. It invites reciprocity, followed by an open-ended, incomplete sentence, an eternal beginning. The rest of the sentence proclaims access to “your mother’s vagina”—everyone’s entry point into the world, and the history that it holds. Jou ma se poes. What comes before and after this? What histories does it point to? “The Vagina Dialogues” ends with a list that becomes a tool of reclamation. The speaker intones a series of words, renaming and reclaiming the vagina, and recasting it in the first-person possessive: “My pussy, my cunt, my poes, my doos.” And with this list, the speaker calls for “pleasure, my sisters.” With softly sequential alliterative plosives, the speaker arrives at a climactic reclamation: “My vagina . . . my honeypot . . . has reached a stage where she’s into pure, pristine, pussylike pleasure.” To say these various incarnations of the word poes out loud also means that, briefly, the vagina issues from the mouth. This recalls the division between the tongue and the womb charted by Meg Samuelson, who has shown that in postapartheid South Africa women could be domesticated by the womb through the role of motherhood and directed away from the tongue and the promise of speech.32 The connection between the vagina and the mouth shows what happens when the Black female body occupies a space hitherto unimagined, and owns both power and pleasure: the body becomes the site of desire, of words, of mouth, of vagina.

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Conclusion In their varied and dissident use of language, “Tongues of their Mothers” and Reclaiming the P . . . Word craft powerfully regenerative ways of representing Black women’s bodies. In these texts, poetic language enables a vision of Black female bodies that does not replicate the violating hypervisibility of many earlier representations, but instead makes visible a world of Black women’s realities that is complex, multilayered, and original. The subjectivities crafted through such language are many-faceted and sometimes contradictory, and articulate the fullness of women’s lives in hitherto unimagined ways. In “Tongues of their Mothers,” Xaba has written a text in which a refusal to speak about known violations and trauma is less important than the imagined past and future that it gives to Baartman, and from this vision of Baartman issues an incantatory list of heroic foremothers. Xaba’s narrator turns away from the story of the violence that Baartman experienced, declining to give it authority once again. Instead, she calls into consciousness what is impossible to know, redirecting our gaze toward a hitherto unattainable view of Baartman, the interior world of “her voice, dreams, emotions and thoughts.” Baartman’s transformation in “Tongues of their Mothers” is made possible through poetic form. In the subtlety and constant inventiveness of its language, Reclaiming the P . . . Word fashions new meanings for words that have been used to violently exclude women from public space. Like Xaba’s text, the play draws both on silence—suggested by the ellipsis in the title—and on words spoken too often and with violent intent. Reclaiming the P . . . Word excavates a history buried beneath the plethora of South African curse words based on women’s bodies, and gives them a complex set of meanings in the present. Both texts therefore construct a necessary and haunting silence, and then write into that fertile space a future that could not otherwise be envisioned. In so doing, “Tongues of their Mothers” and Reclaiming the P . . . Word form part of a provocative shift in recent South African literature that writes Black women’s bodies into alternative modes of visibility. Through a complex interplay of silence and reclamation, the works look unflinchingly at the topic of sexual violence, but do not confine themselves solely to themes that recount suffering. They also portray their characters’ resilience, wholeness, and sexual pleasure. Such writings have an important structural character; they craft holistic, original, and sometimes unsettling Black subjectivities, shaped not by resistance but by a sophisticated reclamation of

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language and history. Using poetic form, performance, and autobiography, these works chart a powerful new claim on public space by Black women. Notes A longer version of this chapter originally appeared as “ ‘This Is Our Speech’: Voice, Body and Poetic Form in Recent South African Writing,” in Social Dynamics 37:2 (2011). This abridged and modified version has been approved by the author and reprinted with the permission of the publisher. Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group 2011. 1. Reclaiming the P . . . Word, unpublished script written by students and staff at the Gender Equity Unit, University of the Western Cape (2006). 2. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 42. 3. Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 325. 4. Ibid., p. 324. 5. Pumla Dineo Gqola, “‘Crafting Epicentres of Agency’: Sarah Bartman and African Feminist Literary Imaginings,” Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy 20:1–2, special double issue on African Feminisms (2006), p. 45. 6. Makhosazana Xaba, Tongues of their Mothers (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008). 7. Nonhlanhla Mkhize, Jane Bennett, Vasu Reddy, and Relebohile Moletsane, The Country We Want to Live In: Hate Crimes and Homophobia in the Lives of Black Lesbian South Africans (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2010). 8. I write about alternative approaches to the “hypervisibility” of Baartman in the essay “Baartman and the Private,” in Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman, ed. Natasha Gordon-Chipembere (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 65–83. 9. Zine Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus’,” Gender and Society 15:6 (2001), p. 817. 10. Gqola, “Crafting Epicentres of Agency,” p. 45. 11. Zoë Wicomb, “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa,” in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 93. 12. Ibid., pp. 91–92. 13. Ibid., p. 100.

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14. The variation in spelling of Baartman’s name signals the loss of control by Africans over their names during the colonial period. For an illuminating discussion of this issue, see Natasha Gordon-Chipembere’s introduction to Representation and Black Womanhood. 15. Pumla Dineo Gqola, “(Not) Representing Sarah Bartman,” chap. 2 in What is Slavery to Me?: Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2010), p. 79. 16. Xaba, Tongues of their Mothers, p. 25. 17. See Mary Hames, “‘Reclaiming the P . . . Word ’: A Reflection on an Original Feminist Drama Production at the University of the Western Cape,” Feminist Africa 9 (2007), pp. 93–101. 18. Mkhize et al., The Country We Want to Live In, p. 4. 19. Jill Dolan, Theatre and Sexuality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 34. Dolan is here referring to Lois Weaver’s Diary of a Domestic Terrorist, which is a lecture-performance project that, precisely, makes use of private details as a means of public resistance. 20. See Hames, Reclaiming the P . . . Word. 21. I have previously used this approach in researching the historical meanings of another term of abuse that survived from the period of slavery to apartheid, namely kaffir, and showed through its etymology the specific ways in which race and sex are encoded in it. See Gabeba Baderoon, “A Language to Fit Africa: ‘Africanness’ and ‘Europeanness’ in the South African Imagination,” in Africa Writing Europe: Opposition, Juxtaposition, Entanglement, ed. Maria Olaussen and Christina Angelfors (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009). 22. The very name for the city implicates it in the history of sexual slavery to which slave women were subject under Dutch rule. The phrase “van de Kaap” (Afrikaans for “of the Cape”), when used as the last name of a slave, indicated a mixed-race parentage, as the novels The Slave Book (Cape Town: Kwela, 1998) and Unconfessed (Cape Town: Kwela, 2006) explore. 23. Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996). 24. Penny Silva, Wendy Dore, Dorothea Mantzel, Colin Muller, and Madeleine Wright, eds., A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1996). 25. Dale Choudree, personal communication, October 26, 2010. 26. Ibid. 27. Mary Hames, personal communication, October 28, 2010. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Reclaiming the P . . . Word, scene 8. 31. Desirée Lewis, “Against the Grain: Black Women and Sexuality,” Agenda 63 (2005), p. 15. 32. See Meg Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women?: Stories of the South African Transition (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007).

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CH A P T ER

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Going Gaga: Dissent, Refusal, and Feminism Jack Halberstam

As many feminist theorists over the years have pointed out, all too often the modalities and intensities of love, sex, and desire are seen as extraneous to the workings of the state, the processes of colonization, and the consolidation of state power. But, as we have seen in the recent riots, protests, and occupations happening around the world, we seem to have reached the end of a certain paradigm of political contestation and entered a new era of anticorporate and anticolonial struggle in which the form matters as much as the content. In an era of multiple screens and multimedia penetration of markets, subjects, and desire—in an age when war can be fought virtually and at a distance using unmanned drones and computer programs, protest must also shape itself around new social media formats that favor the remote over the immediate, spectacle over speech, form over content. The human body, in a sense, becomes another platform (like the computer, the iPad, the iPod, or the TV) for the streaming of messages, and as a platform, the human body becomes less of a vessel of speech and more of a medium for social connection. And so, in terms of the occupation movements, bodies have become forms of media; they are gadgets through which speech can pass (think of the human microphone). Bodies create volume, massification, and presence. In the context of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), the protesters are no longer content simply to march, to make a list of demands, or to request recognition. Instead, the new movements that OWS represents turned politics into performance and combined

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anarchist mistrust of structure with queer notions of bodily riot and antinormative disruption. The markers of this new form of politics, in addition to the lack of a clear agenda or list of demands and the strong presence of a clear belief in the rightness of the cause, have to do with the unusual mix of whimsy and fierce purposefulness, ludic improvisation and staying power, passive resistance and loud refusals. The occupation groups, as I have implied elsewhere,1 recognize that in an economy that engineers success for an elite few through the failure of the many, failure becomes a location for resisting, blocking, slowing, and jamming the economy and the social stability that depends on it. So, in a world where 1% of the population benefits from the ruin of the other 99%, we might want to think about failure as what James C. Scott has called one of the “weapons of the weak.”2 Scott draws attention to the multiple ways in which radically disempowered people have exerted their own forms of resistance through actions and inactions that can be overlooked or misread but that constitute an elaborate web of subversive gestures. Foot-dragging, feigned incompetence, stupidity, and laziness are all cast as the features of a people who cannot rule themselves and so must be ruled, but can actually be understood better as a commitment to refuse the logic of rule—be it colonial, capitalist, feudal, or neoliberal. And while there are clear and important differences between the forms of power in each system—be it power exercised bureaucratically or financially, violently or hegemonically—there are always places where the most dispersed systems of power manifest as unadulterated violence and where the most forceful modes of resistance become more creative, surreptitious, or cunning. The 99% use both the language of colonialism—occupation—and the techniques of anticolonial struggle—refusal and mimicry. They also circumvent certain logics of power that would dictate the terms of resistance and engage in activities that are hard to read as action at all. They do not want to present a manifesto; they actually are themselves the manifestation of discontent. The 99%ers simply show up, take up space, make noise, witness. This is a form of political response that does not announce itself in the conventional grammar of the political; instead of appearing as protest and action, it enters quietly into the public sphere, sits down, and refuses to leave. Some insightful commentators, such as Harsha Walia, have pointed out that to some indigenous peoples, the occupation movements use a rhetoric of territorialization that is all too familiar, and that the movements, in fact, need to acknowledge that they are occupying already occupied lands.3 Walia, however, goes on to acknowledge that the

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power of these movements lies in their ability to be “transitional” and to eschew individual rights projects in favor of the broad goal of imagining another kind of world. Walia cites Slavoj Žižek who, in a speech to OWS on October 2011, highlighted the immanent danger of cooptation: “The problem is the system that pushes you to give up. Beware not only of the enemies. But also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process . . . They will try to make this into a harmless moral protest.”4 Here I want to depart from Walia and suggest that Žižek himself is a co-optor in that he always anticipates co-optation and often even helps it along. He denounced the London riots in an article that appeared in the London Review of Books titled “Shoplifters of the World Unite,” and made it seem as if the rioters were just mall rats on a consumer rampage.5 And when he addressed the OWS crowd a little over a month later, he commented, Carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like “Oh, we were young and it was beautiful.” Remember that our basic message is “We are allowed to think about alternatives.”6

True indeed that the basic message is that there are always alternatives, but the idea that “carnivals come cheap” misses the point of the entire movement. This is a carnival and carnivals are precisely protests, and they are protests that never envision a return to “normal life” but that know that normal life is one of the fictions of colonial and neocolonial power—a fiction used to bludgeon the unruly back into resignation. Like many anticolonial and anticapitalist movements, this current movement refuses to conjure an outcome, eschews utopian or pragmatic conjurings of what happens on the “morning after,” precisely because the outcome will be decided upon by the process of dissent, refusal, and carnivalesque failure. All we can know for sure is that the protests signal and announce a collective awareness of the end of “normal life.” This new political moment requires new conceptions of feminism, struggle, collectivity, protest, and resistance. The protests that we have witnessed around the world in response to the global collapse of capital rewrite the old scripts of revolt and transformation and help us to think about resistance in terms of anticapitalist practices of failure that stall the reproduction of capitalism and authoritarian forms of democracy, and that refuse futurity altogether where futurity has been established as the continuity of older forms of rule. The

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French anarchist group The Invisible Committee summarizes it most succinctly in their coauthored pamphlet The Coming Insurrection: “The future has no future.”7

Feminist Refusal There are many different political and activist traditions that meet in the contemporary art of protest. Such a very important tradition is the one of feminist refusal, a mode of dissent from femininity and conventional womanhood that often takes on an anticolonial spin. I will trace this concept first through the work of some postcolonial critics and novels and then turn to contemporary performers to think about how they carry on the work of refusal and resistance—in many ways, I am tracing a genealogy for contemporary revolt in order to make sure that as we historicize the origins of the OWS movements we now find so inspiring, we don’t fall back into the trap of only narrating those movements in terms of conventional lefty, white, male revolutionaries. This new form of carnivalesque politics bears the marks of a strain of feminism that I propose to call “shadow feminism.”8 Building on the work of feminists such as Saidiya V. Hartman9 and Saba Mahmood,10 and locating a queer femininity that revels in refusal and reshapes the meaning of the political in the process, I elaborate a queer theory of masochism and negative affect that builds its project around an antiheroic, disintegrating subject, and that in the process recasts the project of love, sex, and desire in a neocolonial frame. I also chart a genealogy of an antisocial or antihumanist or counterintuitive feminism that arises out of queer, postcolonial, and Black feminisms and that thinks in terms of the negation of the subject rather than her formation or stabilization. In this queer feminist genealogy—which could be said to stretch from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s meditations on female suicide in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”11 to Hartman’s ideas about slavery and freedom in Scenes of Subjection; from Toni Morrison’s ghosts12 to Jamaica Kincaid’s antiheroines,13 and which passes through the territories of silence, stubbornness, self-abnegation, and sacrifice—we find no stable and coherent feminist subject, but only subjects who cannot speak, who refuse to speak; subjects who unravel, who refuse to cohere; subjects who refuse “being” where being has already been defined in terms of a self-activating, self-knowing, liberal subject. In other words, these authors have thought of the feminist subject not in terms of some clearly defined active form of self-made woman—an agentic body, a doer, a mover, and a shaker—but in

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terms of a form of subjectivity that is subjected to power, that is constituted by religious practices, that is made and unmade, becoming and unbecoming, all at once. For Spivak, the postcolonial feminist subject takes form only in relation to and perhaps against a subaltern subject who does not speak; for Mahmood, the Western feminist subject understands her agency by dis-identifying with women who are formed by their religious practices and piety; for Hartman, the black woman becomes a site for the making and unmaking of notions of freedom and slavery. Liberal feminist subjects in Europe and the United States have, in other words, invested in a singular notion of agency but find themselves challenged by other modes of embodiment, resistance, and desire that run counter to this forceful and propulsive sense of agency. If that sounds too abstract, we can think about the range of feminist possibilities in relation to one of my favorite feminist texts of all time, the epic animated drama Chicken Run.14 This film tells the story of politically aware chickens who come to recognize the ways in which their labor, their production, and their physical mobility have been controlled and limited by the evil capitalist farmers, the Tweedys, and seek to organize themselves against exploitation while scheming about how to, literally, fly the coop. They are led in their efforts by the politically active and explicitly feminist bird, Ginger, who is opposed in her struggle to inspire the birds to rise up by two other “feminist subjects.” One is the cynic Bunty, a hard-nosed fighter who rejects utopian dreams out of hand. The other is Babs (voiced by Jane Horrocks), who sometimes gives voice to feminine naiveté but who, at other moments, points to the absurdity of the political terrain as it has been outlined by the activist Ginger. When Ginger states, for instance, “We either die free chickens, or we die trying,” Babs naively asks, “Are those the only choices?” Like Babs, we may want to refuse the choices offered—freedom in liberal terms or death—and think about a shadow archive of resistance, one that does not speak in the language of action and momentum but, instead, articulates itself in terms of evacuation, refusal, passivity, unbecoming, unbeing. This is a form of queer feminism preoccupied with negativity and negation. As Roderick A. Ferguson puts it in the chapter “The Negations of Black Lesbian Feminism” in his book Aberrations in Black, “Negation not only refers to the conditions of exploitation. It denotes the circumstances for critique and alternatives as well.”15 Ferguson, building on Hortense J. Spillers’s work,16 understands negation as an attempt to circumvent an “American” political grammar that insists on casting liberation

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struggles within the same logic as the normative regimes against which they struggle. For Spillers, American political identities are held in place by a logic, a grammar if you will, and within that grammatical structure only certain syntaxes make sense. And so, the articulation of black resistance can be cast as irrational, the anger of black women can be categorized as crazy, and the violence of white supremacy can be articulated as rational and sensible. In order to resist this kind of grammar, Spillers speaks in many different voices in this essay. She calls out and lists the violence committed against the black body in the context of slavery, and she channels the speech of both stereotyped female subjects and new subjects who struggle to be heard. The implication in her essay is that a different, anarchistic type of struggle requires a new grammar, possibly a new voice. In what follows, I want to explore passivity, refusal, and the passive voice as powerful instantiations of such new feminist grammar. Babs’s sense in Chicken Run that there must be more ways of thinking about political action or nonaction than doing or dying finds full theoretical confirmation in the work of theorists like Hartman, whose investigations in Scenes of Subjection into the contradictions of emancipation for the newly freed slaves proposes not only that “liberty” as defined by the white racial state enacts new modes of imprisonment but also that the very definitions of freedom and humanity within which abolitionists operated severely limited the ability of the former slaves to think of social transformation outside of the structure of racial terror. Hartman notes, “The longstanding and intimate affiliation of liberty and bondage made it impossible to envision freedom independent of constraint or personhood and autonomy separate from the sanctity of property and proprietal notions of self.”17 Accordingly, where freedom was offered in terms of being propertied, placed, and productive, the former slave might choose “moving about” or roaming in order to experience the meaning of freedom. Hartman writes, “As a practice, moving about accumulated nothing and it did not effect any reversals of power but indefatigably held onto the unrealizable—being free—by temporarily eluding the restraints of order.”18 She continues, “Like stealing away, it was more symbolically redolent than materially transformative.”19 There are no simple comparisons to be made between former slaves and sexual minorities. I want, however, to join Hartman’s deft revelations about the continuation of slavery by other means to various new forms of political protest that are better described in terms of masochism, pain, and failure rather than mastery, pleasure, and heroic liberation. Like

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Hartman’s model of a freedom, which imagines itself in terms of a not-yet-realized social order, so the maps of desire that render the subject incoherent, disorganized, and passive provide a better escape route than those that lead inexorably to fulfillment, recognition, and achievement. A few examples from literature might reveal the political stakes in a project like this, which sounds as if it would have no real material application. The texts I consider here briefly propose a radical form of masochistic passivity that offers up a critique, not only of the organizing logic of agency and subjectivity itself, but that also opts out of certain systems built around a dialectic between colonizer and colonized, master and slave. For example, in the work of Kincaid, the colonized subject literally refuses her role as colonized by refusing to be anything at all. In Autobiography of My Mother, the main character removes herself from a colonial order that makes sense of her only as a daughter, a wife, and a mother by refusing to be any of the above and even refusing the category of womanhood altogether. The character neither tells her own story of becoming nor does she tell her mother’s story, and by appropriating her mother’s nonstory as hers, she suggests that the colonized mind is passed down from generation to generation and must be resisted through a certain mode of evacuation. This way the novel accesses a Fanonian world of anticolonial struggle within which colonized people have to not only uproot the colonizers, but where they also have to break with the mentality of colonization that makes becoming equivalent to whiteness, being equivalent to Englishness or Frenchness, and Blackness into the symbolic terrain of absence, unbeing, and unbelonging. If we look at the other side of the equation of power, we find a similar tactic of unbecoming that can be extended to the perpetrator. And so, in a brilliant and incisive narrative, Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, 20 where a female protagonist literally unravels in order to untie her relation to power and domination, we find the former colonizer adapting to the postcolonial frame by undoing her own sense of being. In this novel by the Austrian Nobel prize-winner, the refusal is played at the other end of the scale of power: Erika Kohut, the main character, is an unmarried Austrian woman in her 30s who lives with her mother in post–World War II Vienna and gives piano lessons in her spare time while colluding with her mother in a certain fantasy about music, Austria, high culture, and cultural superiority. As the story progresses, Erika slowly pulls back from the complicity in an Austrian national mythology of greatness, and she begins to pulverize herself as if to destroy all that is Austrian within her. She gets

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involved with a young man, one of her students, and demands that he sexually abuse and mistreat her, that he break her down, starve her, and neglect her. She wants to be destroyed and she wants to destroy her own students in the process. While the narrator of Kincaid’s novel seeks to avoid and refuse the colonial narratives that would otherwise shape her subjectivity and that of her mother, Jelinek’s strategy of refusal amounts to exposing her mother/daughter duo to intense and violent scrutiny and locks them in a destructive and sterile incestuous dance that will only end with their own deaths. The novel ends with the protagonist first wounding a young student and then cutting into her own flesh, not to kill herself exactly, but to continue to slice away at the part of her that remains Austrian, complicit, fascist, and conforming. Here, Erika’s passivity is a way of refusing to be a channel for a persistent strain of fascist nationalism, and her masochism or self-violation indicates her desire to kill within herself the versions of fascism that are folded into her being—through taste, through emotional responses, through love of country and music, and through her love of her mother. Both texts thus provide failure—feminist and anticolonial struggle and refusal—as a frame for the models of political dissent that currently circulate through occupation movements grounded in the inactivity of refusal and obstruction.

Gaga Feminism In Gaga Feminism: Gender, Sex and the End of Normal, I squeeze a new form of feminist politics out of the star image of Lady Gaga by asking the following set of questions: Who is Lady Gaga? What do her performances mean? And, more importantly, what do her gender theatrics have to say to young people about identity, desire, and new forms of politics and celebrity? Is Lady Gaga an icon for a new kind of politics or a charlatan just living out her moment in the spotlight? In this last section of my chapter, I want to suggest that Lady Gaga can be seen as a symbol for a new kind of feminism. Recognizing her power as a maestro of media manipulation, a sign of a new world disorder, and a loud voice for different arrangements of gender, sexuality, visibility, and desire, we can use the world of Gaga to think about what has changed and what remains the same, what sounds different and what is all too familiar. I read Lady Gaga as a kind of kinetic avatar for feminism—a set of performances of excessive femininity that explode the meaning of womanhood from within and that push through to an anarchistic, cacophonous, dramatic soundscape of inchoate political affiliations.

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To be clear, what I am calling Gaga here certainly derives from Lady Gaga and has everything to do with Lady Gaga, but is nevertheless not limited to Lady Gaga. In other words, just as Andy Warhol was a channel for a set of new relations between culture, visibility, marketability, and queerness, so the genius of Gaga allows Lady Gaga to become the vehicle for performing the very particular arrangement of bodies, genders, desires, communication, race, affect, and flow that we might now want to call Gaga Feminism. Gaga Feminism is simultaneously a monstrous outgrowth of the unstable concept of “woman” in feminist theory, a celebration of the joining of femininity to artifice, and a refusal of the mushy sentimentalism that has been siphoned into the category of womanhood. It is also about the unreadable, the indecipherable, the monstrosity of the new that arrives in shapes that are not immediately discernible. Gaga Feminism leads the way to an anarchic project of cultural riot and reciprocation—a project that Peter Harry Kropotkin has called “mutual aid.”21 By drawing a theory of economics from the tendency of animals to cooperate rather than compete (contrary to the way that Charles Darwin presumed that all species compete for survival), anarchist theorist Kropotkin turns cooperation into a model for human interaction that privileges the sharing of resources and that becomes a newly vital model for human interaction. Mutual aid, mutual protection, or new notions of exchange actually flourish already in the worlds we inhabit and those we are making as we go—open source exchange on the web, cooperative food collectives, subcultures, new modes of kinship, and so on. Different understandings of our mutual responsibilities exist already for the purpose of exchange, and not profit, and this notion of working with others rather than in competition is probably the only thing that will save us from the greed of free market economies. And it is this Gaga spirit of anarchy that I believe courses through Lady Gaga’s music and forms the spine of a liberatory anthem. Forget about “Born This Way,” and focus on the rhythmic freefall accomplished by Lady Gaga, especially in her live performances. Her music may not itself stray far from pop, but when she performs it in crazy costumes and with wild abandon, we sense the new world that she opens up for young people in particular. In recent years, she has performed with a number of different artists who make up a kind of compressed history of Gaga Feminism. One such collaborator is, perhaps surprisingly, Yoko Ono, whose 2009 album, Between My Head and the Sky, features a collection of rather spunky songs with dark themes but a bouncy, new wave

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treatment. From the track “The Sun Is Down” to the final cut, a short statement set to a sparse percussion—“It’s Me, I’m Alive”— the 76-year-old icon yelps, howls, and chants her way through a multigenre journey to the dark side. But, in a wild duet with Lady Gaga, captured by a fan and posted to YouTube from their live show together at the Orpheum in Los Angeles in 2010, the point is not to mourn a life passed or an opportunity missed or the end of light. Ono and Gaga instead ride a cacophonous tide into a funky frenzy when they howl their way through Ono’s “The Sun Is Down.” The two join forces for this dark duet—dark both in terms of its theme and its refusal of the forward momentum of the pop song— and they push each other to new levels of going gaga. The short video clip on YouTube presents both a very different Gaga and a very different Ono. But the duet also crafts a family resemblance between Gaga and Ono and emphasizes the dark streak that resonates through Ono’s own performance history. Ono’s work with Gaga also sits comfortably alongside Ono’s early jazz work with Ornette Coleman and John Cage, which is filled with screaming and vocal noise. But in performing this piece as a duet with Lady Gaga, Ono’s corpus, filled as it is with dark noise, circles of repetition, and a resistance to sense making, speaks anew, and Lady Gaga’s media friendly, pop heavy orientation is quickly contaminated by the noisy riot of going gaga. Lady Gaga does not emerge from a vacuum, nor does she spring fully formed in the space vacated by Madonna, Gwen Stefani, and Britney Spears. She is in fact the latest manifestation of a long line of feminine, feminist, and queer performers who have used their time in the spotlight to produce funky forms of anarchy; to demonstrate an antisentimental fascination with loss, lack, darkness, and wild performance; and to dig into the intersections of punk and glamour to find songs of madness and mayhem. While most commentators on the Gaga phenomenon are content to trace Lady Gaga’s lineage back through her time at New York University and her connections to other blond performers, we want to connect her to a different group of performers. Instead of tethering her to pop hopefuls who came before her, we need to make the connections to a long line of cultural anarchists, musicians, and writers—people such as Emma Goldman or Grace Jones, Yoko Ono and Marina Abramović, but also Ari Up of The Slits and Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex. Think of Grace Jones in 1979 channeling Joy Division in her amazing cover version of “I’ve Lost Control”—this is what I am calling gaga politics: a form of politics where the governed refuse government, where the ruled refuse rule, and where we literally lose control or give up our desire for mastery.

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Lady Gaga might be engaged in the same kind of project as the group that coauthored The Coming Insurrection, The Invisible Committee. While they encourage people to “find each other” and to exploit this crisis of capitalism and to start making different forms of connection, Lady Gaga coolly dissects the pop market and finds new sounds, new messages, and new forms of political engagement. She tweets, she texts, she uses every medium available; she sings about the phone and indeed becomes a phone! She knows about The Coming Insurrection because it partly takes the form of Gaga herself. A Gaga Feminism does not need to know and name the political outcome of its efforts. More important is to identify the form that transformative struggle should take. In this chapter, I have named these forms variously as carnivalesque politics, anticolonial refusal, and the quest to find creative spaces within which to go gaga and in the process catching a glimpse of the something else that we call the (queer) future. The queer future, as queer visionaries from Kincaid to Babs from Chicken Run to Lady Gaga have suggested, is better understood as a horizon beyond which we cannot see, as a distant dream whose form appears now only as a vague shape of what is to come. This is not no future, not the future; it is one future we can make by going gaga here and now. Notes 1. See Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). The present chapter draws heavily from the thoughts developed in that book. 2. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). 3. Harsha Walia, “Letter to Occupy Together Movement,” rabble.ca, October 14, 2011, http://rabble.ca/news/2011/10/acknowledge ment-occupations-occupied-land-essential, accessed on January 29, 2012. 4. Slavoj Žižek, speech to OWS on October 9, 2011. Quoted by Walia in ibid. 5. Slavoj Žižek, “Shoplifters of the World Unite,” London Review of Books, August 19, 2011, http://www.lrb.co.uk/2011/08/19/slavoj -zizek/shoplifters-of-the-world-unite, accessed on January 29, 2012. 6. Slavoj Žižek, speech to OWS on October 9, 2011. Quoted from “Slavoj Žižek speaks at Occupy Wall Street: Transcript,” The Parallax: Philosophy, Cinema and Science, October 10, 2011, http://www .imposemagazine.com/bytes/slavoj-zizek-at-occupy-wall-street -transcript, accessed on January 29, 2012.

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7. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2009), p. 23. 8. For a more developed discussion of this concept, see Judith Halberstam, Gaga Feminism: Gender, Sex and the End of Normal (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012). 9. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and SelfMaking in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 10. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 11. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can The Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–313. 12. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987). 13. Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (New York: Plume, 1997). 14. Peter Lord and Nick Park, Chicken Run (Dreamworks Animated, 2000), film. 15. Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), pp. 136–137. 16. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 17. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, p. 115. 18. Ibid., p. 128. 19. Ibid. 20. Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Grove Press, 2009). 21. Peter Harry Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (New York: Forgotten Books, 2010).

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C H A P T ER

1 3

(Un)naming the Third Sex After Beauvoir: Toward a Third-Dimensional Feminism Kyoo Lee

Your Problem? “How does it feel to be a problem?”1 Perhaps this is one marker of a minority on the move: to be stopped for such a question every now and then, literally or not. W.E.B. Du Bois may not have an answer to it, but did, famously, in 1903, restage the question in a piece called “Of Our Spiritual Strivings”: Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question . . . They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? . . . To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.2

With “the question” (un)masked here, a few other names, all American, all colorful, circle around my mind: Zora Neale Hurston, Rey Chow, Elaine Kim, and Moustafa Bayoumi—all of whom repeated it, each in his or her own way. Back to the South in the early 1900s, to the ever-so theatrical Zora Neale Hurston, who, as a kid, used the front porch of her house as a gallery seat from which to watch, and entertain, a slew of white folks flocking to Orlando, Florida, for the summer. Hurston, less

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depressed than the young Du Bois, still finds herself surrounded by that “unasked,” “real” question: Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past . . . I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background . . . For instance at Barnard. “Beside the waters of the Hudson” I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.3

The literal racial segregation is gone, and yet the ghost of the past will not separate itself from Hurston’s body: “Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt . . . He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.”4 It is as if, as Toni Morrison has noted, the colored body existed so that whiteness (too) could be felt, played out in the dark.5 Such problems of “color” so-contrasted, so-gendered, are “felt,” registered feelingly first. As a Unique Minority of One (UMO) at Barnard, although not one for “the sobbing school of Negrohood,”6 that (colored) woman (Hurston) must have faced just that on a daily basis: that striking contrast washing her all over, which would produce a “colored me” time and again. Surely, a son and a daughter, even if schooled together, do not always share the same problems, but they stand close enough in the department of problematics, especially if they come from the same (sort of) “families.”7 The “colored me” that “would still be me” à la Anthony Appiah (who thinks gender might ultimately disappear) is revealingly caught in the “ebb” and web of identities that carries the usual and unusual, intercutting marks of gender, race, class, and so on, all vibrantly compressed into the ethico-existential singularity and narrativity of a person—dead or alive—or even a thing. Now this time, replace “colored me over here” with “China over there”: I heard a feminist ask: “How should we read what is going on in China in terms of gender?” My immediate response to that question was, and is: “We do not, because at the moment of shock Chinese people are degendered and become simply ‘Chinese’” The problem is not how we should read what is going on in China in terms of gender, but rather: what do the events in China tell us about gender as a category, especially as it relates to the so-called Third World?8

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The “unasked, real” question Rey Chow is reframing is, how does it feel to be a Chinese-woman problem? What is it like to live in or come from “the Third World” perceived and named as such? When and where does one feel caught, “so-called”? Could there, in fact, be anybody, anything, that is not a “so-called” something? Why do such social categories and labels seem limiting rather than informing, often demoralizing “folks” rather than enabling or invigorating them? And who, of all those problem cases, embodies such transactional crises and cries within and outside codified systems of significations? “At least you are not black,” 9 says someone to Elaine Kim, a woman nonetheless. Again, “How does it feel to be a problem?,” asks Moustafa Bayoumi through stories of Muslim youths in Brooklyn, New York, who, facing the rising tides of Islamophobia, fear for their, and our, lives and livelihood.10 Why is that still a problem? Gender, race, ethnicity, class, religion, culture . . . How are we to rearticulate and retool these kaleidoscopic, endlessly serialized “problems” of social categories and identities, each time differently, with different productivity, even as different “products,” this capital, frontal problema, this “sufficient” bodily evidence in and of reality, “in front of you” and me?11 Such is the broad philosophical force of the questions I wish to dwell on here, if only briefly. Of particular interest to me is Chow’s focus on “gender as a category, especially as it relates to the so-called Third World,” perhaps an old topic for some in this early twenty-first century of third wave feminisms, Transnational Studies, Global This and Global That, where those very intermeshed categories of identification themselves provide not only the analytical ground but, rightly, propel synthetic reflections. As Chow stressed already in the 1990s, when such categorical complications and multiplications almost defined the “deconstructive,” “genealogical,” or “new historical” character of much of the critical theoretical scenes of the time, the guiding question we should keep asking is not so much what gender or sex or sexuality is but rather what it “relates to,” or, more specifically, what it melts into: how, where, and when it co-originates from and co-operates with other categories in any specific and evolving contexts. Further, I am interested in those invisibly generative, discursive grids at work, yet I hope to assess them in terms of gendering rather than gender per se: what animates, dictates, and validates such spatio-temporal protocols, categorical imperatives, and grouping habits that materialize, for instance, in ethno-gendered, geopolitical discourses on the “third” pressed or positioned as such, be it the “third

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world” or “third wave” feminisms. I am asking what motivates all this “third” talk and “third” kind, as in “third way,” “third space,” “third cinema,” and so on. I am not interested, however, in what transcends or unifies such telos-driven, ordinal thinking toward and away from the spatiotemporal other, the late-comers and developers of a better world: what the “first” is, with respect to which the second or third remain secondary, less important, “second”-best alternatives. Rather, my focus is on what problematizes the auto-constitution of the first as such, what deconstructs the first in the first place, as it were: I want to know, and follow, what compels, and sustains, the centrifugal cultivation or disorientation of the first. So my question is irreducibly twofold: what remains structurally problematic as well as productive, critically pressing as well as repressive, in the very conception, in the typical configuration, of the “third world woman” problem or “third wave” questions? In short, here is my problem, shared by many, à la and contra the Simone de Beauvoir of The Second Sex : how and why does, or should, the second sex of the third world—the secondary second sex—become an issue for every feminist, regardless of her or his generational or geographical belonging?

Thinking (Toward) a Third Dimension Let’s start with a snapshot, at the risk of repeating the epistemic violence of chronological clustering: as the usual story goes, the tidal spirit of third wave feminisms that emerged roughly in the 1980s and continues to this day is traceable to the civil rights movement of the 1960s as a pointed yet vocally diverse response to the perceived failures or weaknesses of the “second wave” movements. The latter were more directly and systematically nurtured by the 1960s and 1970s ideals of legal recognition and liberation of the oppressed. Third wave feminist movements highlight and mobilize what was not fully registered or even completely ignored by the first and second wave feminists, namely that women are diverse, all different in aesthetic taste, age, biological makeup, class, culture, ethnicity, environmental background, familial situation, gender identity, geohistorical experience, linguistic origin or affiliation, marital status, mental orientation or capacity, nationality, physical capability, political inclination, profession, race, religion, sexuality, size, and so on, with each of these categories remaining malleable, self-decomposable, and interbreedable, often to the point of metamorphic self-transformation. What does Lady Gaga have in common with de Beauvoir, for instance, and who of the two would you date? Perhaps both? Or neither?

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Ironically enough, “third world” feminism, very much informed by and also influencing “third wave” feminism, is much less colorful: quite simply, why is this discourse for and by women of “color” rather than colors? Could this binarized, racial abstraction (coloreduncolored) have something to do with it being seemingly less fun and fantastical than third wave feminism? Lady Gaga, a woman of white color, for instance, might epitomize the third wave but not third world. The problem lies in that tendency toward one-way traffic. Situated at the bottom of the world developmental model that charts countries and geopolitical zones in terms of the developed (coded Anglo-European white), developing (aspirationally white or white assimilated), and underdeveloped (doubly colored), third world feminism is still rhetorically locked into the political topology of the 1950s Anglo-European Cold War ideology that first engendered the very idea, the Third World, denoting the countries that belonged neither to the capitalist NATO nor to the communist Soviet Union. Inheriting such a binary double-knot of coupled us-and-them, third world feminism, singularly clustered as such, remains the structural grammar of third world feminisms. Also, such different origins notwithstanding, third wave and third world both come in third, not second; they come “after” the second, which battled with the first, as in the “battle” of the sexes. The “third” here, given its narrative orientations and indexical parameters, does not quite embody dialectical subjectivity or elevated positionality. It remains more of a supplementary misfit or outfit, the disenfranchised rest or capitalized niche. Rather than volumizing, complicating, and cross-fertilizing the ongoing world-historical stories of territorial struggles between those polarized parties—for example, men versus women, advanced capitalism versus failed communism/emerging capitalism, the G7 versus the G20—those “third” nonplayers or minor extras, along with the “monolithically”12 subjectified, and mytho-culturally essentialized assumptions about them, still tend to get colonially “replicated,”13 flattened and inserted into the AngloEuro-centric master narrative of the post-Enlightenment progress, of ascent and descent, of success and failure. Again then, “thirdwave-world” feminism, thus monolingualized even when seemingly internally multiple, remains of secondary significance, caught up in the logic of discursive (self-)reproduction foreclosed by the seminal/ ontological order of the original/copy. Some kind of paradigmatic change, even just a change of the name, seems in order. Third “dimensionally” then, instead, I am trying to imagine what it means to think across the board with and after de Beauvoir, the

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thinker of the second(ary). What remains fertile is her insight into the centrifugal ordering and positioning, that is, gendering, by the man of the woman as a constitutively marginalized “other,” as a secondary socio-bio-ontological category, what comes after or follows the first: Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being . . . For him she is sex—absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other. The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the expression of a duality—that of the Self and the Other.14

What I am entertaining while thinking, with de Beauvoir, about the gendered dialectic of “Self-Other” is a possibility of inscriptively infusing the cardinal and singular into the ordinal or additive, a second birth that is a birth nonetheless, biological or otherwise: this one, that one, another one—one, two, three, four . . . every single one. To begin with the very concept of the “second” sex—strictly speaking, the absolute “other” is by definition just the other, not the second, but de Beauvoir proceeds to name woman the other of man, the second sex, rather than just the other sex. This seems a cunningly prophetic move worthy of revitalizing re-cognition. In this positioned gesture within de Beauvoir’s dialectical abstraction, I detect a profoundly enduring logic of serial subversion and subversive selfdifferentiation at work: the woman named—linguistically marked— as a sexed being, the “second” sex, in turn, reveals the man, the first sex, as an irreducible problem post-marked as such—the sexless sex, as it were. By defining the female sex as the sexed sex, she is also, in fact, debunking the myth of the other sex, the kind of (hu)man being that supposedly does or can or will or should transcend (like his God) such a biological condition and destiny of sexuation. De Beauvoir is ironizing the formative logic of man(hood), key to which is the strategy of serialized self-subordination: must we, every one of us, come after you, Sir? (I am hearing an echo: must we, every one of us, come after you, first wave feminists?) Her philosophical genius here is to point to that pattern of discursive ordering—dictating, positioning, calling forth—in terms of gendering. This is how a discursive preoccupation with gender identity becomes a necessary supplement to man’s identity. Read this way, the story of the second sex becomes that of the first sex which, as de Beauvoir indirectly highlights, is

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not there in the “first” place except in an asexually gendered figure of Him, God, that completes his identity: “Some say that, having been created after Adam, she is evidently a secondary being; others say on the contrary that Adam was only a rough draft and that God succeeded in producing the human being in perfection when He created Eve.”15 Evidently indeed, this vexing “woman question,” which “masculine arrogance,” so blindly gendered, turned into a “quarrel,” would require the impartial judge, “an angel—neither man nor woman—but where shall we find one?”16 De Beauvoir holds onto that “second line” and holds it open for other possible inscriptions, unlike Luce Irigaray, for instance, who, instead of diffusing the problem into a quasi-angelic allegory, just corrects that confusing “second” into two, into a recuperated hetero-pair. For the de Beauvoirean storyteller and listener, it is as if there were still only one sex, the female sex, despite the other sex, the situation of which “evidently” is absurd, existentially or otherwise; what the “second” points to, dialectically, is just that incoherent social facticity and oddly stratified vicissitude of “to have become”17; X has become this or that, caught in acts of naming by the unnamed center(s) from day one of its appearance in and to the world. De Beauvoir’s formulation, not simply a formulaic abstraction, remains incisively productive to the extent that it carries this recursive capacity for the retrospective debunking of the mythical center of the “first.” What comes in second, as one might also think of the senior/ junior hierarchy, will produce its own second, its secondary subcategories or subordinates in its material diversity, while the first gets decentered, displaced, or diffused along the way; this is also how de Beauvoir gestures toward some “deep similarities between the situation of woman and that of the Negro,”18 their secondariness in relation to their respective first. White women as the first women, as it were, will then have remained raceless/colorless, until challenged by their “second,” such as the woman “of color.” This is not to draw a material analogy between race and sex, which de Beauvoir does not do. I do not mean to inscribe the categorical priority of gender over race, either, which de Beauvoir does not do. Without denying, however, that de Beauvoir’s intention was to get (closer) to that un-bodied center (for transcendence), what I am trying to do is simply to register the uncanny formalistic force of the logic of seconding, of gendering, despite de Beauvoir, who was mainly focused on “woman,” and specifically the woman who looks like her—hence, with and against her. So this is what I am at: What if we rethink the second not just as “secondary,” as derivative, additive, or subtractive, as de Beauvoir did

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(albeit ironically), but as, more specifically, accumulative? What if we rethink it as logically, choreographically, and chemically momentous? Can “the second sex” be continuously built on and networked with itself in various modalities and colors, without becoming imposingly monumental? For example, third world feminism as a discursive framework, arising from the postwar construction of “underdeveloped” or “other” zones in the world, involves at least two narrative agents in a dialogical transaction or transfer, literal or figurative, with one occupying the symbolic, ideological position of the first world woman, typically that of North Atlantic upper-middle-class Caucasian women cartographically codified as “Western.” The typical(ly colored) scenario, for instance, of the-(colored-)minority-woman-rescued-fromthe-(colored-)minority-man-by-the-(white-)majority-man would put the colonial (white-)super-heroes in the (proxy-)position of the first second sex, and vice versa. This usual way in which Western feminisms come to identify non-Western feminist discourses and sometimes identify with them is ironically developmental: a highly prescripted network of developmental language, that is, the West getting and wanting to know the “rest” by learning how to save it from degrading itself further, becomes the invisible grammar of sexuated thinking. Master categories of sex, gender, and sexuality as well as race and class, developed and emerging from the West and then remapped onto the feminist logos of the rest, get to scaffold the normativizing convention of one-way top-down discourses of liberation, part and parcel of the intellectual and ideological legitimation of third world/wave feminism(s). Such a collateral sequence of discursive transposition becomes natural, as natural as the first followed by the second followed—but not superseded—by the third, and so on. One model becomes central and original while another becomes marginal and mimetic. But does it have to? Will that be the only way? Of course not. Tamsin Lorraine, for instance, writes, in 1990: Gender identity is one way of representing ourselves. By labeling myself a “man” or a “woman” I am also conjuring up a range of possibilities presented to me in my culture and language . . . I will push beyond conventional bounds, thus adding to my culture or language new possibilities of what a man or woman could be.19

Well over two decades into the world of third wave feminisms in the plural, this passage, a snapshot of its movement at its inception, comes

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across as incisive but also preclusionary. The critical acumen with which Lorraine acknowledges and individuates her own discursive positionality and particularity remains refreshing, and yet I expect that Lorraine herself would today problematize that very taxonomic impulse with which new possibilities back then were seen as “additional” rather than, say, transformative; for the latter possibility, for more trans-paradigmatic inter-feminists dialogues, might we have to wait for the emergence of radically new sorts of feminism, whatever they may be? I am, again, reminded of the absence of perspectives of or on non– de Beauvoir look-alikes in The Second Sex, “the ethnocentrism of de Beauvoir’s perspective” that Margaret Simons for instance articulated as early as in the late 1970s: “The result is a lack of sensitivity to the situations of minority women and a failure to understand their reluctance to identify with a predominantly white organization.”20 True, why can’t we find a word about, say, Algerian or Vietnamese women in The Second Sex, not to mention “Black” women—if, again, we are to temporarily employ the now customary, cataloguing language of third world feminism? Unlike Kate Millet, however, who will not acknowledge “the differences in the situations of minority and white women,”21 de Beauvoir is quite cautiously aware of her own privileges and particularities. I wonder whether there is a reasonable way to reason this absence of the other “others” in de Beauvoir’s otherwise fertile philosophical text: seen even developmentally, such seems a function of the self-identified (French, or Parisian, or Latin-Quartered, nonJewish, non-Black) lady philosopher of existentialist persuasions in the mid-twentieth century starting to speak from her own standpoint as if for the first time. This sardonic thinker’s prefatorial lingering, as I smell it, is perfumed with just such intellectual conscientiousness that constantly registers its own “secondary” specificities: For a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially to women; and it is not new. Enough ink has been spilled in the quarrelling over feminism . . . and perhaps we should say no more about it. It is still talked about, however, for the voluminous nonsense uttered during the last century seems to have done little to illuminate the problem. After all, is there a problem? And if so, what is it? Are there women, really?22

With Critical Intimacy As I “have become,” à la de Beauvoir, an Asian woman, I find myself drawn to these passages of embodied philosophical self-reflections, hearing them speaking to me in certain ways, or hearing myself

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hearing them hearing some other textual whispers from both the past and the future. To me, the above are not just “white” feminist philosophers speaking, but all of us in the imaginary domain of feminism, however naïve and contestable that collective identity may be, speaking in the irreducible language of a self-analytic vulnerability that almost immunizes itself by immediately attracting “critical intimacy”23 from the listener-reader. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes, such “a critical intimacy . . . might help metropolitan feminist celebration of the female to acknowledge a responsibility toward the trace of the other, not to mention toward other struggles,”24 and it is from such a very complicated attraction to the canonized “metropolitan” feminist classics too that I draw part of my theoretical blood line(s). By “‘looking into’” the text while “developing critical intimacy with (the situation of) these women,”25 by reconfiguring earlier texts with critical intimacy, 26 and by embracing while dismantling them, 27 we can begin to see how “the concept of ‘other’ loses its innocence and can make its home wherever it wishes.”28 As Mieke Bal professes at the start of her embodied reflection on this “concept-as-method”29 as used in Postcolonial Studies for instance, “A teacher needs to know how not to know. I am a teacher.”30 As a perpetual disciple in the interdiscipline of feminism who returns to The Second Sex as one allegorical anchor among many, I am interested to see that “third” voice traveling, to keep the second voice of the second proliferating itself, so as to prevent the critically minoritarian force of the other from becoming regressively “white-washed,” as the idiom goes. What I envisage broadly in terms of what I have simply refiled and recast as third-dimensional feminism in place of the much paraded and contested paradigm of third world/wave feminism is a serialized theoretical labor that is radically receptive to its own evolutionary, but not narrowly developmental, alterity, while vigilant toward its own centrist or expansive tendencies. Already, a number of feminist thinkers today, whom I would even dare to recall here in the imaginary noncategory of third-dimensional thinkers, are engaged in responding to such calls for trans-categorical thinking. Here is a list of a few of their most thought-provoking concepts, presented randomly: • “epistemic violence” or economized desires (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)31 • heterosexist normativity in the discursive formation of gender (Judith Butler)32 • the multiple obscuration of the “intersectional” gender oppressions (Patricia Hill Collins)33

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• the double folly of overdetermination/under-specification of interlaced identities (Linda Alcoff)34 • the unbridled expressions of racialized love (Mariana Ortega)35 • the regressively systematic monolithicization of the other (Chandra Talpade Monhanty)36 • the neoliberal construction and securitization of the American homo(friendly)nationalism (Jasbir K. Puar)37 • the normative sexualization of gender categories as culturally given or self-evident (Rey Chow)38 The list could—and should—go on. Surely, given those singular voices of focused disorientations pitched against the discursive monolingualism of gendered binaries, I am not alone in this three-dimensional, constantly rotating global village that should truly become “global” rather than trying to find itself on the latest HDTV. Perhaps not unlike one who, in the words of Judith Butler, would stand “as a latecomer to the second wave,”39 pondering forwardly on “the irrepressible democratic cacophony of its [feminism’s] identity,”40 now including its third wave manifestations, I have tried to follow the pulse of this question that also came to me as a sort of hypothetical vision in an era of post-everything, including post-feminism: might we not be able to “post” forward (to insert a postal image) a less hierarchical, less historicized, less truncated, more dynamic, more alchemistic, more voluminous way of articulating and mobilizing this “third” sex, as ephemeral as it may seem? Finally, as some might have been wondering, why not approach this third kind from a thirddimensional feminism rather than three? The guiding idea is again rather axiomatically cast: this “third,” the (post–)de Beauvoirean second, could function as a kind of formal metonym for another dimension yet to be discovered from within and built back into any gendered thoughts; so, let there be the fourth dimension in a threedimensional world, the fifth in one with four dimensions, and so on. We could then all go, at least, beyond the One-dimensional Man,41 placated by the techno-mutation of oppositional dialectic, and away from the One-dimensional Woman,42 consumed by self-deceptive positivism and utopian fantasy today. Notes 1. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (an African American Heritage Book) (Radford, VA: Wilder Publications, 2008), p. 5; Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).

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2. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 5. 3. Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” in The Florida Reader: Visions of Paradise from 1530 to the Present, ed. Jack C. Lane and Maurice O’Sullivan (Sarasota, FL: Pineapple Press, 1991), p. 120. 4. Ibid., p. 121. 5. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 6. Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” p. 120. 7. Anthony Appiah, “‘But Would That Still Be Me?’ Notes on Gender, ‘Race,’ Ethnicity, as Sources of ‘Identity’,” The Journal of Philosophy 87:10 (1990), pp. 493–499. 8. Rey Chow, “Violence in the Other Country: China as Crisis, Spectacle, and Woman,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 82, emphasis mine. 9. Elaine H. Kim, “‘At Least You’re Not Black’: Asian Americans in U.S. Race Relations,” Social Justice 25:3 (1998), pp. 3–12. 10. See Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?. 11. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr., and Ian McLeod (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 10. 12. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Boundary 2 12:3 (1984), pp. 333–358. 13. Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and ThirdWorld Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 43; Uma Narayan, “Essence of Culture and a Sense of History: A Feminist Critique of Cultural Essentialism,” Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World, ed. Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 84, 86. 14. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Howard M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1953), pp. xviii–xix. 15. Ibid., p. xxxi, emphasis mine. 16. Ibid., p. xxxi. 17. Ibid., p. xxviii. 18. Ibid., p. xxvii. 19. Tamsin E. Lorraine, Gender, Identity, and the Production of Meaning (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), p. 17, emphasis mine. 20. Margaret A. Simons, “Racism and Feminism: A Schism in the Sisterhood (1979),” chap. 2 in Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. 27. 21. Ibid., p. 31. 22. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. xv.

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23. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 114, 198, 242n. 70, 425; and Mieke Bal, “Critical Intimacy,” chap. 8 in Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). 24. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 198. 25. Ibid., p. 242n. 70. 26. Ibid., p. 114. 27. Ibid., p. 425. 28. Bal, “Critical Intimacy,” p. 289. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., p. 286. 31. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 269. 32. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999). 33. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004). 34. Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” Signs 13:3 (1988), pp. 405–436. 35. Mariana Ortega, “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and Women of Color,” Hypatia 21:3 (2006), pp. 56–74. 36. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 37. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 38. Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 39. Judith Butler, “The End of Sexual Difference?,” chap. 9 in Undoing Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), p. 176. 40. Ibid., p. 175. 41. Herbert Marcuse, One-dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). 42. Nina Power, One-dimensional Woman (Winchester, UK: 0 [Zero] Books, 2009).

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Gabeba Baderoon is an assistant professor of Women’s Studies and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She writes on representations of race, sexuality, and religion, and her essays have appeared in Feminist Studies, Social Dynamics, and Research in African Literatures. In 2010–11, she held a research fellowship in the Islam, African Publics and Religious Values Project at the University of Cape Town, where she wrote on “Public Privacies,” a project about autobiography, religion, and sexuality. Baderoon is also a poet, and the author of the collections The Dream in the Next Body (Kwela Books, 2005) and A Hundred Silences (Kwela Books, 2006). Emanuela Bianchi is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. She works at the intersection of contemporary continental philosophy, feminist/queer theory, and ancient philosophy, and is the editor of a collection of feminist philosophy essays, Is Feminist Philosophy Philosophy? (Northwestern University Press, 1999). Her articles have appeared in Hypatia, Continental Philosophy Review, Philosophy Today, Epochê, and The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, and she is completing a manuscript entitled The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos. Her recent research engages the thought of Reiner Schürmann to help think through the complex inceptions and destructions of patriarchal kinship in Greek antiquity and the present day. Rosi Braidotti is a distinguished university professor in the Humanities at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and founding director of the Centre for the Humanities. Her books include Patterns of Dissonance (Polity Press, 1991); Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (Columbia University Press, 1994; renewed and revised edition: Columbia University Press, 2011); Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Polity Press, 2002); and Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Polity Press, 2006).

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Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and Visiting Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of numerous books, including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990); Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (Routledge, 1993); Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000); Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (Verso Press, 2004); Undoing Gender (Routledge, 2004); Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (Verso Press, 2009); and, most recently, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (Columbia University Press, 2012). Red Chidgey is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Media and Culture Research at London South Bank University, United Kingdom. Her thesis looks at feminist memory assemblages and the politics of what is remembered, secured, or erased within feminist activist networks. Her essays have been published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Feminist Media Studies, and n.paradoxa. She has been involved in digital archive projects such as Fragen: Sharing Core European Feminist Texts Online (www.fragen.nu) and Grassroots Feminism: Transnational Archives, Resources and Communities (www. grassrootsfeminism.net). She blogs about her research interests at Feminist Memory (www.feministmemory.wordpress.com). Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Penn State University. She has published on Gilles Deleuze, feminist theory, and literary theory. Her two most recent publications are Theory and the Disappearing Future: On de Man, On Benjamin (Routledge, 2010, with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller) and Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics and the Digital (Continuum, 2011). She is currently completing a book on human extinction. Elizabeth Grosz is a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She has edited many anthologies on feminist theory and is the author of numerous books, including The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Duke University Press, 2004); Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Duke University Press, 2005); and Chaos, Territory, Art (Columbia University Press, 2008). Jack Halberstam is a professor of English, Gender Studies, and American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California. Halberstam is the author of several books, including Female Masculinity (Duke University Press, 1998); In a Queer Time and

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Place (NYU Press, 2005); The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2011); and, most recently, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012). Halberstam works and writes on popular culture, subcultures, and queer theory and can be found blogging at www.bullybloggers.wordpress.com. Kyoo Lee is an assistant professor of Philosophy at John Jay College, CUNY, where she is also affiliated with the Justice Studies and Gender Studies Programs. She teaches courses and leads faculty seminars in feminist theory and critical theory at the CUNY Graduate Center. Dually trained in European philosophy and literary theory, Lee works widely in the intersecting fields of the theoretical Humanities such as Aesthetics, Asian American Studies, Comparative Literature, Continental and Feminist Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Cultural Studies, Deconstruction, Gender Studies, Poetics, PostPhenomenology, and Translation. Her first book is entitled Reading Descartes Otherwise (Fordham University Press, 2012). Katie Lloyd Thomas is a lecturer in architecture at Newcastle University and completed her PhD on concepts of materials and the architectural specification at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University. She is a founding member of taking place, a group of artists and architects concerned with feminist spatial practice, whose most recent project is a series of art installations for the new prenatal center at Homerton Hospital, East London, funded by the Arts Council England. Lloyd Thomas’s work explores materials, representation, and production in architecture, the philosophy of technology, and feminist theory and practice. Her publications include an edited book entitled Material Matters: Architecture and Material Practice (Routledge, 2007) and “The Excessive Materiality of Stock Orchard Street: Towards a Feminist Material Practice,” in Around and About Stock Orchard Street, ed. Sarah Wigglesworth (Routledge, 2011). Astrida Neimanis is a feminist scholar and writer who thinks a lot with water, and is interested in exploring the porous border between academic and artistic expression. Her work has been published in both scholarly and literary journals, and she has worked in collaboration with poets, playwrights, artists, and graphic designers to find alternative ways of presenting feminist theory to diverse publics. She is an editor of the interdisciplinary theory and culture journal PhaenEx (www.phaenex.uwindsor.ca) and co-organizer of the Thinking with Water project (www.thinkingwithwater.net).

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Davina Quinlivan is a part-time lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College, London, and at Kingston University. She holds a PhD in Film Studies from King’s College, and her book The Place of Breath in Cinema came out with Edinburgh University Press in 2012. Her article “Material Hauntings: the Kinaesthesia of Sound in Innocence” (Hadzihalilovic, 2004) received the 2009 Studies in French Cinema prize for best PhD article. She is currently working on her second monograph, entitled The Film’s Body Heals Itself, which examines the intertwinement of the healing body and notions of hope in contemporary moving image media. M. F. Simone Roberts is a poet and independent scholar of comparative poetics and feminist philosophy. She is an assistant editor for the humanities journals Common Knowledge and Thirdspace. With Alison Scott-Baumann, she is coeditor of Iris Murdoch and the Moral Imagination: Essays (McFarland, 2010), and is the author of A Poetics of Being-Two: Irigaray’s Ethics and Post-Symbolist Poetry (Lexington Books, 2010). She is currently at work on a study of and critical response to the yogic and tantric influences on Luce Irigaray’s later work. Jami Weinstein is a university research associate and assistant professor of Gender Studies, and director of The Zoontology Research Team at Linköping University’s Tema Genus, Sweden. She coedited the volume Deleuze and Gender (Edinburgh University Press, 2008) with Claire Colebrook, and they are at work on another volume entitled Inhuman Rites and Posthumous Life. She has also published a number of articles, such as “A Requiem to Sexual Difference: A Response to Luciana Parisi’s ‘Event and Evolution’”; “Transgenres and the Plane of Language, Species, and Evolution”; “Reality TV: Social Life as Laboratory Experiment”; and “Traces of the Beast: BecomingNietzsche, Becoming-Animal, and the Figure of the Trans-Human.” She is currently working on a large-scale international project entitled Conflict Zones: Genocide, Extinction, and the Inhuman, and on a monograph tentatively entitled Returning to the Level of the Skin and Beyond: A Microzoontology.

Editors Henriette Gunkel received her PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of East London, United Kingdom, and is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies, University of Bayreuth, Germany. She is the author of the book The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality in South Africa

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(Routledge, 2010), coeditor of darkmatter ’s third themed issue on the subject of postcolonial sexuality (www.darkmatter101.org/ site/category/issues/3-post-colonial-sexuality), and coeditor of the anthology What Can a Body Do? Praktiken und Figurationen des Körpers in den Kulturwissenschaften (Campus, 2012). She is also the cocurator of the annual African Film Festival Cinemameu in Inhambane, Mozambique. Chrysanthi Nigianni holds a PhD from the University of East London, and has recently joined the thinking machine of a neomaterialist feminism. Educated in the social sciences—she has a Sociology degree from Panteion University (Athens), and an MSc in Sociology from the London School of Economics (LSE)—she then took the turn to philosophy and feminism with the focus being on queer theory, theories of sexuality, and continental philosophy. She has taught at the University of East London and at Anglia Ruskin University, United Kingdom. She is coeditor of the book Deleuze and Queer Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), and of the New Formations issue on Deleuze and politics (2009). She is currently a visiting scholar at CUNY GLAGS, where she is working on a manuscript on film as philosophy. Fanny Söderbäck is an assistant professor of Philosophy at Siena College. She received her PhD in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research in 2010. She is the editor of Feminist Readings of Antigone (SUNY Press, 2010), and her work has been published in journals such as Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism, and in French in l’Infini. She is the cofounder and director of the Kristeva Circle. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled Time for Change: On Time and Difference in the Work of Kristeva and Irigaray.

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Inde x

Abramović, Marina, 192 activism, 7–8, 22, 23–32, 32–4n, 131, 132, 136, 186 Adorno, Theodor W., 82n aesthetic, 6, 29, 49, 51, 54, 56, 59, 80–1, 102–3, 105–6, 135, 156–7, 159, 162, 164–5, 198 affect, xii, xiii, 14, 15, 17, 66, 67, 74, 75, 82, 130, 134, 156, 159, 163, 165, 186, 191 Afrofuturism, 138, 140n agency, ix, xvii, 17, 18, 21, 52, 98, 129, 167, 180, 187, 189 air, 55, 57, 81, 101–3, 105–10, 116, 118, 120 Alaimo, Stacy, 69n, 94, 98n, 125n Alcoff, Linda Martín, i, viii, xxi, 205, 207n aleatory, 7, 9, 10, 32n, 35, 37–9, 41–4, 46–7n, 49, 54, 57, 59 alliance, xiv, 6, 32, 131–2, 139n, 151 alterity, xvi, 50, 54, 56, 90, 96 Althusser, Louis, 47n amnesia, 30–1 anachronism, xv, 7, 23–5, 32, 34n anarchism, 4, 184, 186, 188, 190–2 anarchy, 137, 191–2 animal, xiii, xiv, xv, xviii, 16, 20, 35, 37, 45–7n, 66–7, 69n, 72, 76–7, 83n, 92, 95–6, 98n, 155, 165–6n, 191 animality, 77 anthropocentric, xiii, xiv, 73 post-anthropocentric, xiii anthropomorphism, xiii

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antichrist, 68, 69–70n apartheid, 136, 180n post-apartheid, 131, 178, 181n apocalyptic, 80, 130 post-apocalyptic, 78–81 Appiah, Anthony, 196, 206n Arab Spring, 44, 129–33 Arendt, Hannah, 139 Aristotle, 9, 12n, 36–8, 45–6n, 125n art, 14, 16, 25, 26, 30, 34, 50, 54, 55, 59, 61, 79–81, 83, 101–8, 110, 113–14, 121, 125, 133, 140, 167, 186, 193 assemblages, xiii, 24, 39, 46n, 138, 156, 159, 207n Atwood, Margaret, 78–81, 83n Baartman, Sara, 135–6, 171–4, 179, 180–1n Bachelard, Gaston, 97n Baderoon, Gabeba, 132, 135, 136, 169, 181n Baker, Jeffrey P., 116, 122, 124n Barad, Karen, 123, 125 Baraitser, Lisa, 46n Barthes, Roland, 56 Bataille, Georges, 65, 69n Baudelaire, Charles, 51, 103–4, 108, 163–4, 167n Bayoumi, Moustafa, 195, 197, 205–6n Beauvoir, Simone de, 35, 45n, 137, 138, 198–201, 203, 205, 206n

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216

INDEX

becoming, x, xi, xiii, xiv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xviii n, 12n, 15, 18, 20, 32n, 39, 44, 47n, 66–7, 74–7, 85, 87, 89, 93, 95–6, 99n, 114, 119, 133–5, 138, 151, 155–6, 160, 162–4, 187, 189, 202, 204 becoming-imperceptible, xiii, 66–7, 134, 155–6 becoming-woman, xvi, 67, 76, 156 Berlant, Laurent, 156–7, 159, 165–7n Bersani, Leo, 47n Bianchi, Emanuela, 9, 32n binary, ix, xviii, 44, 103, 162, 199 body, xiv, xv, 4, 6–7, 9–10, 12n, 15, 20, 22n, 26, 36, 39, 40, 43, 45–7n, 50, 55, 58, 63, 66–7, 72, 75, 78–9, 85–6, 95–6, 97–8n, 101–9, 113–14, 117, 119–23, 123–4n, 129–30, 132, 135–7, 139–40n, 153n, 155–6, 159–63, 165, 169–80, 180n, 183, 186, 188, 191, 196 BwO (body without organs), 161–2 Braidotti, Rosi, xviii, xviii n, xix n, xxi, 3, 5, 11–12n, 46n, 82n, 91, 95, 98–9n, 130 breath, 55, 57, 65, 66, 68, 91, 101–10, 110–11n, 116, 120–1, 175 Bruno, Giuliana, 101, 103–9, 110n, 111n Butler, Judith, xxi, 4, 45n, 65, 69n, 97n, 133–4, 139n, 153n, 162–3, 167n, 204–5, 207n canon, 25, 52, 54, 204 capitalism, 17, 31, 98n, 185, 193, 199 carnivalesque (politics of), 185–6, 193 Cartesianism, 74, 76 anti-Cartesianism, 76 hyper-Cartesianism, 76

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cartography, xiv, 6 Channing, Barbara H., 104, 106, 111n Chanter, Tina, 8, 12n Cheah, Pheng, 93, 98n Chidgey, Red, 7–8, 23, 32n Choudree, Dale, 176, 181n Chow, Rey, 195, 197, 205, 206–7n cinema, 110n, 193n, 198 Cixous, Hélène, xvii, 10, 88–9, 97n coalition, 3, 8, 26–7, 33–4n Colebrook, Claire, 46n, 66–8, 71 collective, xv, xvii, 4, 8, 18, 20–1, 26, 31, 53, 82n, 113, 185, 191, 204 collective imagining, xiii, xix n Collins, Patricia Hill, 204, 207n colonial, 31, 136–7, 169–71, 174, 180–1n, 184–5, 189–90, 202, 206n anticolonial, 183–6, 189–90, 193 neocolonial, 185–6 post-colonial, 136, 139n, 181, 186–7, 189, 204, 206–7n colonialism, 95, 184 commonality, 90 community, xvii, 4, 30, 79, 82n, 92, 94, 96, 109, 110n, 121, 123, 173 concept, vii, 7, 13–17, 22n, 46n, 89, 132, 156–7, 159, 161, 204, 207n corporeal, xi, 41, 88, 120, 134, 156 incorporeal, 7, 15, 22n, 35 corporeality, 39, 41, 43–4, 90, 93 incorporeality, 15 culture, xv, xviii n, xix n, 7, 10, 12n, 18, 20, 45n, 50, 52, 54, 56, 58–9, 67, 69n, 72, 82n, 87, 91, 94, 96, 97n, 104, 107, 109, 111n, 124n, 141, 165n, 189, 191, 194n, 197–8, 202, 206n cyborg, xvii, 45n Damasio, Antonio R., 74, 82n dandy, 135, 157, 162–4 dandyism, 7, 164

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INDEX

Darwin, Charles, 162, 191 daughter, xi, xv, 32n, 121, 130, 189, 190, 196 granddaughter, 196 undutiful daughter, ix-xviii, 3, 4, 129–30, 133, 138 (see also undutiful) death, 12n, 35–6, 38, 42, 47n, 57, 66, 68–9, 75–6, 91, 94–5, 97n, 115, 117–18, 187, 190 deconstruction, 28, 83n, 104 De Lauretis, Teresa, xviii n Deleuze, Gilles, x, xii, xiv, xvii, 13–14, 19, 22n, 69–70n, 93, 98–9n, 134, 155–6, 160, 162, 165, 165–7n democracy, 129, 181n, 185, 205 Derrida, Jacques, 24, 82n, 157–8, 164, 166–7n, 206n Descartes, René, 74, 82–3n, 166n desire, xiii, xvi, xvii, 8, 10, 12n, 37–8, 47n, 57, 60n, 69, 78, 80, 89, 104, 129–30, 133–4, 146, 148–51, 162–3, 173, 178, 183, 186–7, 189–92, 204 deterritorialization, x, 156–7, 160–2, 164, 167n dialectic, ix, x, 82n, 117–18, 124n, 189, 200–1 difference, vii, viii, ix, x, xi, xvi, xvii, xviii n, 8–9, 13, 16, 18–22, 22n, 41, 44, 54, 58, 61n, 67, 78, 82n, 89–90, 96, 99n, 102, 111n, 115, 117, 124–5n, 129, 132–4, 137–8, 141–5, 147–53, 153n, 156, 158, 160, 162, 170–1, 184, 203, 207n (see also sexual difference) dimension, xiii, 7, 35–6, 39–40, 43, 45n, 50, 103, 106, 109, 123, 134, 138, 142, 145, 198, 205 dimensional, 132, 137–8, 195, 204–5, 207n Dionysus, 39 Diprose, Rosalyn, 47n

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217

discourse, xiii, 3–8, 10, 11n, 14, 19, 23, 25–7, 29, 31, 34n, 53, 55, 78, 89, 102–5, 108–9, 123n, 136, 171, 199, 202, 206n dissonance, 158, 165 drag, 27, 34n, 42 dualism, 7, 39, 165 Du Bois, W.E.B., 138, 195–6, 205–6n DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 51, 55–6, 58, 59, 60n duration, 39, 75, 90 écriture, 7, 10, 49–53, 55–7, 59, 88 écriture feminine, 49, 50, 55, 57, 88 écriture futuriste, 7, 10, 52, 56, 59 Edelman, Lee, 12n, 42, 47n Elmahdy, Aliaa, 129–30, 132–3, 138, 139–40n embodiment, viii, xviii n, 18, 33n, 40–1, 44, 46n, 58, 75, 85, 88–90, 95, 102–3, 109, 111n, 187 emotion, 26, 74, 82n, 104, 110n, 173, 179, 196 Enlightenment, 75, 82n, 88, 107 post-Enlightenment, 199 environment, 72–3, 77–8, 82n, 98n, 113, 115, 117, 133–4, 150 environmentalism, 72, 74, 76 epistemology, 19, 45n, 51, 57 equality, 4, 26 Eros, 57 eroticism, 57 essentialism, 28, 42, 89, 163, 206n ethics, xii, xiv, xvi, xviii n, 43, 46n, 63, 66, 69n, 72, 74, 90, 95–6, 97–9n, 125n, 132 bioethics, 109 ethnicity, 176, 197–8, 206n ethnocentric, 15, 17 ethnocentrism, 21, 203 Ettinger, Bracha L., 114, 118–20, 122, 124–5n

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218

INDEX

evolution, 12n, 56, 83n, 165n, 167n, 194n existentialism, 35, 206n expression, xiv, xvi, xvii, 4, 46n, 50, 58, 76, 91, 105, 200, 205 Faludi, Susan, 32n femininity, xiii, 7, 16, 27, 41, 125n, 137, 143, 186, 190–1 interruptive feminine, 9, 35, 38 feminism, vii, viii, xii, xiii, xvi, 4–8, 11, 11–12n, 16, 18, 20–1, 23–8, 30, 32–4n, 37, 39, 44, 45–6n, 49–50, 52, 54, 59, 67, 69n, 71–4, 77, 85, 88, 90, 92, 95–6, 97–8n, 111n, 117–18, 124–5n, 130, 133, 136–7, 138n, 141–3, 147, 153n, 167n, 180n, 183, 185–7, 190–1, 193, 194n, 195, 197–9, 202–5, 206–7n anti-oedipal feminism, 137 Chicana feminism, 69n, 125n ecofeminism, 72, 82n fi rst/second/third wave feminism; see wave Gaga feminism, 7, 137, 190–1, 193, 194n hydrofeminism, 7, 85, 95–6 Marxist feminism, 16 queerfeminist, 134, 157 shadow feminism, 7, 186 Ferguson, Roderick A., 187, 194n Firestone, Shulamith, 114–15, 117–18, 122, 124n flâneur, 101, 103–4, 108 Foucault, Michel, xii, 156, 165n Freeman, Elizabeth, 12, 41–2, 47n Freud, Sigmund, 24, 60n, 70n, 124n, 145–6, 148, 153n Frye, Marilyn, x, xviii n futurity, 6, 7, 8, 12n, 13–22, 43, 52, 59, 66, 67, 75, 78, 79, 81, 91, 94, 145, 185–6, 193 Gaga, Lady, xvi, 137, 190–3, 198–9 Gass, William H., 57–8, 59, 61n

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Gatens, Moira, xiii, xix gay, 60n, 134, 148–52, 155, 158, 176 gender, x, xiii, xv, xviii n, 18, 22, 26–8, 33n, 35, 39, 43–4, 50–1, 54, 56, 58, 70n, 78, 134–5, 140n, 142, 144–5, 148, 155–62, 164–5, 170, 174, 180, 190–1, 194n, 196–8, 200–2, 204–5, 206–7n cisgender, 33 gender equity, 142, 144–5, 170, 180n gender imperceptibility, 134, 155 genealogy, 7, 34n, 68, 72, 106, 124n, 136, 162, 167n, 173, 186 generation, 4, 7, 23–4, 30, 34n, 35, 37, 107, 123n, 134, 141–3, 147–8, 152–3, 153n, 157–8, 189 generational, vii, 4, 11n, 27–8, 32, 33n, 41, 134, 137, 141, 144, 152, 198 Gormley, Antony, 108, 111n Gqola, Pumla Dineo, 171–2, 180–1n Grosz, Elizabeth, xi, xviii n, 3, 6–7, 11–12n, 13, 46–7n, 83n, 162, 167n Guattari, Félix, xiv, 13, 22n, 98n, 134, 156, 160, 162, 165, 165–7n Gunkel, Henriette, 5, 129 Halberstam, Jack/Judith, 3, 5, 11–12n, 41, 47n, 129–30, 133, 136–8, 138n, 183, 193–4n Haraway, Donna, xiii, xvii, 36, 45n, 82n, 97n Hartman, Saidiya V., 186–9, 194n Heidegger, Martin, 12n, 45n, 82n, 102, 110n Hekman, Susan, 69n, 98n, 125n heterosexuality, x, xi, 67, 122, 147–53 (see also sexuality)

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INDEX

homophobia, 139n, 171, 180n homosexuality, xi, 144, 148–9, 155–6, 169 (see also sexuality) Horkheimer, Max, 82n Howie, Gillian, viii, xxi humanism, xiv, 66 antihumanist, 186 posthumanism, 67, 77–8, 98n ultra-humanism, 71 Hurston, Zora Neale, 195–6, 206n hysterical, 52, 88 identity, x, xi, xii, xiv, xvi, 17–20, 22–3, 30–1, 39, 69n, 71, 83n, 120, 155–6, 158–9, 162, 164, 167n, 169–70, 181n, 188, 190, 196–8, 200–1, 204–5, 206–7n feminist identity, 25, 27 gender identity, 33n, 200, 202 homosexual identity, xi immanence, 35, 40 Irigaray, Luce, x, xi, xvii, xviii n, 10, 45n, 50–1, 53, 56, 59, 60–1n, 83n, 88–90, 97n, 101–7, 109, 110–11n, 114, 118–20, 122, 124–5n, 201 jouissance, 35 Kandel, Robert, 70, 86, 97n Kimsooja, 101–2, 105–9, 111n Klein, Melanie, 146–7, 154n Krapp, Peter, 30–1, 34n Kristeva, Julia, 35, 40, 42, 45–6n, 70n Lacan, Jacques, 119, 145 law, xii, 9, 43, 47n, 55, 59, 68, 141, 151–3, 157–9, 163–4, 166–7n Lee, Kyoo, 132, 137–8, 195 lesbian, xi, 22, 42, 60n, 125n, 131, 139–40n, 149–51, 158, 180n, 187 Levinas, Emmanuel, 12n Levine, Philippa, 169, 180n Lloyd, Genevieve, xiii, xviii n, xix n

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logos, 37, 202 Lorraine, Tamsin, 202–3, 206n Lovelock, James, 75, 79, 82n Lucretius, 38 MacKinnon, Catharine, 36–7, 45n Mahmood, Saba, 186–7, 194n Marcuse, Herbert, 207n masculinity, xiii, 7, 16, 36, 143, 164 Maso, Carole, 49, 51–4, 59, 60n Massumi, Brian, 98n, 124n, 165n materialism, xiv, 23, 45n, 47n, 72, 98n maternal, xi, 11n, 40–1, 46–7n, 80, 114, 116–22, 123–5n (see also mother) matter, xvi, 7, 10–11, 14–15, 18–20, 28, 32–3n, 37–8, 43–4, 46n, 52, 56, 74–6, 79, 85–7, 89, 91, 93, 97–8n, 102, 106, 109, 110n, 117, 125n, 138, 170, 180n Medusa, xvii, 88, 97n melancholia, 57, 65–9, 69–70n memory, 6, 8, 23, 25–7, 29, 31, 32n, 34n, 47n, 97–8n, 171–3, 181n Millet, Kate, 203 Minh-ha, Trinh T., 88–9, 97n Mitchell, Juliet, 118, 124n, 133–4, 141–7, 150, 152, 153–4 modernism, 49, 61n Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 95, 99n, 205–7n Moraga, Cherrie, 122–3, 125n Morrison, Toni, 132, 186, 194n, 196, 206n mother, xv, 4, 11n, 22, 40, 57, 67, 88–90, 92, 102, 106, 109, 113–23, 123n, 124n, 150–2, 175, 178, 189–90, 194n (see also maternal) grandmother, 4, 11n, 106–7 mother-daughter relation, xi, 4, 9, 11n, 130, 190

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220

INDEX

mother—Continued motherhood, xviii n, 4, 42, 122, 125n, 178 mourning, 36, 66, 68, 69n, 125n multiplicity, ix, x, 4–6, 21, 130, 132–3, 138 nationalism, 29, 190, 205 homonationalism, 207n nature, xvi, xviii n, 4, 9, 11–12n, 18–20, 29, 36–9, 45–6n, 66, 68, 72–3, 79, 81, 82n, 88, 94, 102, 116, 136, 155, 175 Nehamas, Alexander, 159, 166n Neimanis, Astrida, 66–8, 70n, 85, 97–8n Nietzsche, Friedrich, xix n, 49, 56, 60, 69n, 88, 91, 97n, 159, 162–3, 167n Nigianni, Chrysanthi, 65, 136 nomadism, x-xviii normative, xiv, 41, 45n, 132–3, 147, 156, 161, 188, 205 heteronormative, 41–2, 134, 156 Occupy Wall Street (OWS), 3–6, 130–3, 136–7, 183–6, 193n Oedipus, 147, 149 anti-oedipal, xv, 137 de-oedipalization, xiv, 156 oedipal, xi, 68, 135, 155–7, 165 pre-oedipal, xi re-oedipalization, 134 Ortega, Mariana, 205, 207n otherness, 22, 72, 76, 82–3n, 97n Parisi, Luciana, 46n Parmenides, 56 patriarchal, 7–8, 10, 15–17, 35–6, 39, 42, 54, 73, 103–4 heteropatriarchal, 44 patriarchy, xi, 16, 21, 36–7, 44, 51 Pearson, Keith Ansell, xix n perception, 66, 101–5, 107, 109, 134 phallogocentrism, xi, 54, 88 phenomenology, 12n, 41, 82n

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Piercy, Marge, 114–15, 117–18, 122, 124n politics, x, xii, xiii, xvii, xix n, 3, 5, 8–9, 12n, 15, 19, 24–5, 27, 29–30, 34n, 36–9, 50, 67, 69n, 83n, 90, 96, 98n, 132–8, 139n, 141, 155, 162, 164, 166–7n, 176, 180n, 183–4, 190, 192–3, 194n, 206–7n bio-politics, 79 feminist politics, 9, 35, 38, 43, 118, 132–3, 190 identity politics, 17, 155, 164 politics of failure, 137 queer politics, 137 radical politics, 15, 129–30 Pollock, Griselda, 119, 125n potestas, xi, xvi psychoanalysis, ix, xii, 118, 124n, 133–4, 141, 143, 147, 149, 153n Freudian psychoanalysis, 124n, 153n Puar, Jasbir K., 205, 207n queer, ix, 4, 6, 12n, 24, 27–8, 30, 34n, 35–6, 39, 41–4, 47n, 122, 125n, 131–2, 134–7, 151–3, 167n, 176, 184, 186–7, 192–3, 193n, 207n Quinlivan, Davina, 66, 68, 101 race, xiii, xix n, 6, 18, 22, 24, 25, 30–1, 32n, 34n, 69n, 125n, 169–71, 180n, 181n, 188, 191, 196–9, 201–2, 205, 206n racism, xix n, 12n, 15, 16, 17, 21, 27, 30–1, 135, 206n, 207n realism, 58–9 reason, 10, 54, 56, 58–9, 72–5, 77, 80, 82–3n, 146, 152–3, 161, 165, 172, 203 man of reason, 82n refusal, 52, 80, 135–7, 138–9n, 170, 179, 183–93 future of refusal, 79 politics of refusal, 11n

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INDEX

religion, xi, 197–8 representation, viii, xii, 5, 15, 19–20, 25, 68, 80, 89, 129, 132–3, 135–6, 171–2, 177, 179 reproduction, xv, 20, 36–8, 42, 45–6n, 67, 78–9, 89, 122, 125n, 150, 160–1, 185, 199 Retallack, Joan, 49, 51, 56, 58, 59, 60n, 61n reterritorialization, 135, 160, 162, 167n rhizome, 160 rhizomatic, xvi, 96, 132 Rich, Adrienne, xii, xviii n science, xv, 14, 45–6n, 60n, 78, 80, 98n, 110n, 115, 116, 193n gay science, 69n, 167n new science, 82n technoscience, 125n sensation, 44, 47n, 103–4 sex, x, xi, xv, 27, 33n, 37, 39, 41, 44, 46–7n, 50, 55, 57–8, 61n, 67, 69–70n, 76, 97n, 102, 117–18, 122, 123–5n, 135, 147–8, 150, 156–7, 160–2, 164–5, 175, 181n, 183, 186, 190, 194n, 197, 199–200, 201–2 the fi rst sex, 200 intersex, 44 the second sex, x, 35, 45n, 138, 198, 200, 202–4, 206n the third sex, 7, 137 sexism, 54 heterosexist, xi, 204 (see also homophobia) sexual difference, x, xvi, 16, 20, 67, 78, 96, 102, 114–15, 133–4, 137, 141–53, 158, 162 (see also difference) sexuality, 20, 22, 32n, 35, 47n, 79, 118, 134–5, 140n, 147–53, 156, 160, 165n, 169–70, 177, 181–2n, 190, 197–8, 202 cissexual, 33n

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221

heterosexuality, x, xi, 67, 122, 147–53 homosexuality, xi, 144, 148–9, 155–6, 169 Silliman, Ron, 51 singularity, 5, 110n, 196 slavery, 132, 172, 181n, 186–8, 194n, 196 social media, 136, 183 YouTube, 130, 192 Facebook, 129, 130, 139n, 140n Twitter, 44, 130 Söderbäck, Fanny, 12n, 131, 137 space, x, xvii, 4, 6, 10, 12n, 15, 30–1, 40–1, 45n, 47n, 54–5, 57, 66, 73, 82n, 85, 87, 91, 93, 96, 101–9, 115–16, 119, 121, 123n, 132, 134–6, 139n, 143–4, 149, 170–1, 174–5, 178–80, 184, 192–3, 198 borderspace, 119, 124–5n cyberspace, 82n imaginary space, 36 time-space, 59 Spillers, Hortense J., 187–8, 194n Spinoza, Baruch, xviii, xix Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 90, 97n, 133, 186, 194n, 204, 207n Stein, Gertrude, 51, 54 subaltern, 4, 35, 186–7, 194n suffragette, 24, 26, 29, 32n swerve, 49–50, 52–3, 57–8 temporality, xiv, 12n, 31, 32n, 35–6, 39, 40–4, 45n, 47n, 143–4 time, x, xii, xv, xvii, 7, 9, 10, 12n, 15, 23–5, 29, 31, 41, 45n, 59, 87, 91, 96, 115, 117, 124n, 134, 142–4, 149, 170 aleatory time, 7, 9, 32n cyclical time, 8, 35, 38 interruptive time, 7, 9, 36, 38, 43 linear time, 8, 9, 37 matrixial time, 119

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222

INDEX

time—Continued queer time, 12n, 47n, 207n revolutionary time, 12n transcendence, ix, x, 35, 41, 54, 201 transgenre, 7, 134–5, 156–8, 160–5, 165n Trier, Lars von, 65–9, 69–70n unconscious, 118, 134, 142–50, 152, 153n, 176 undutiful, ix-xviii, 3–5, 9–11, 130, 133, 138 (see also daughter) universality, 107, 133 utopia, xvii, 118 utopianism, 45n, 109, 114–15 virtuality, 14–15, 93 vitalism, xvii, 74, 76–7 Walia, Harsha, 184–5, 193n Walker, Alice, 32n Walker, Rebecca, 32n Wallace, David Foster, 56 Warhol, Andy, 191 wave, vii, ix, 11n, 28, 31, 32, 88, 95, 108 fi rst wave feminism, 4, 26, 200

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second wave feminism, ix, 4, 12n, 24, 27–8, 32n, 33n, 36, 40, 42, 72, 198, 205 third wave feminism, 4, 11n, 12n, 23–4, 27–8, 30, 32n, 33n, 34n, 197–9, 202, 204, 205 Weinstein, Jami, 131, 134–5, 137–8 Whitford, Margaret, 97n Wicomb, Zoë, 172, 181n Wolf, Maryanne, 50, 60n Wollstonecraft, Mary, 71, 82n woman, xi, xviii n, 9, 12n, 22, 28, 36, 38–9, 45n, 52, 56, 66–8, 73, 77–9, 81, 82–3n, 88–90, 95, 97n, 102, 106, 115, 117, 119, 124n, 135, 151, 164, 171, 176–7, 186–7, 189, 191, 196–203, 205, 206–7n womb, 40, 88, 114, 118–21, 123n, 164, 175, 178 Woolf, Virginia, 51, 80–1, 83n, 87, 97n Xaba, Makhosazana, 135, 170–4, 179, 180n, 181n Žižek, Slavoj, 4, 185, 193n

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