Mohanty and Academic Self-Criticism: A Fitting Conclusion

Chandra Mohanty's Feminism Without Borders represents a fitting conclusion to a semester of feminist theory, as it recapitulates (not without variation) many of the themes that dominate other pieces of third wave feminist writing. Mohanty celebrates difference with the vigor of bell hooks and Audre Lorde, but rather than situate it within a specifically American (and therefore race- and class-dominated) context, she frames it in global terms and emphasizes a postcolonial sensitivity toward the historical and cultural significance of difference. Her militant anti-capitalism also echoes hooks's and Lorde's critiques, and her insistence that feminism should be "without borders" rather than "borderless" echoes the strict writings of Marx himself when he outlines a specifically international (rather than cosmopolitan) model for global Communism in Das Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei. She develops her theory so as to maximize its actual applicability to real socio-political situations (much like Butler does when her theory embeds itself in the contemporary international debate on gender policy in Undoing Gender), providing postcolonial feminist analytics that safeguards against the types of dangerous generalization she outlines in the first chapter. Her book embodies the spirit of postcolonial and metacritical feminism, distilling the useful and applicable aspects of a larger body of scholarship into a single text that revolves around praxis.

One new strain of critique that Mohanty actively engages (which is not as evident in the other works I've mentioned thus far) is a constant an concerted reappraisal of the academy as an institution. Although Robyn Wiegman celebrates academic self-criticism in her essay "What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion", she does not actively engage in actual critique herself (which is perfectly fine, as her argument lies elsewhere); Mohanty foregrounds the problem of academic self-criticism, however, devoting quite a bit of thought to the tension between the validation afforded marginalized peoples' studies programs by their position within the academy and the constant pressure for them to de-radicalize. She argues that many women's or ethnic studies programs have become nothing more than token programs, protective facades that prove that an institution is not racist or sexist, and the "race industry" that has developed around the proliferation of such programs is invested in the "management" of racial or ethnic scholarship; in other words, the academy has developed an entire technology for the assimilation of dissenting scholarship and the maintenance of the existing institutional structure because "diversity is always and can only be added on" (Mohanty 211). The narrative of assimilation that Mohanty creates provides justification for her adamant anti-capitalism, as the this problem can only be resolved by revolution and not reform, by the complete restructuring of the institution rather than a change within the existing structure.

This critique of the academy is incredibly compelling, and it is quite likely that the only way for marginalized people's studies programs to avoid this program of forced complicity is a radical overhaul of the institution. Rather than functioning hierarchically and as a cohesive unit, the academy must foster critical dissent within itself, creating an environment of populist politics and knowledge production. The development of women's and ethnic studies (along with the accompanying blurring of disciplinary boundaries) was a good first step toward academic change, but they represented a change in academic focus rather than a methodological shift in scholarship. The work of critical theorists has been around for long enough now that the academy should have had time to change its pedagogical and administrative techniques in order to match such a dramatic shift in the philosophical paradigm. It has thus far failed to do so, however, and a radical revision of academic structure and praxis is long overdue.

Wide Sargasso Sea and Schizophrenia

Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism is a ridiculously obscure text with an extremely powerful argument about the nature of schizophrenia and its relationship to production and "madness." To drastically oversimplify their critique of psychoanalysis, they essentially argue that the psychoanalytic structure is based on lack--lack of the phallus, circumscription of life-flows, the privileging of absence over presence and the abstract over the concrete--and does violence to the true nature of desire, which is based on the production (not the representation or expression) of the unconscious within a system of flows that is constantly being disjointed and reconfigured. Schizophrenics refuse to be "Oedipalized," producing individuals within the psychoanalytic framework that seem to have lost touch with reality (either by removing themselves completely from it and becoming "autistic" or acting as if they existed on their own unique plane of reality). Thus schizophrenics become social revolutionaries, as their actions are based on the (innately radical) desiring-production of the unconscious rather than the (ex post facto) applied structure of the Oedipus complex.

This schizoanalytic framework is extremely useful when discussing the question of Antoinette's "madness" in Wide Sargasso Sea. Antoinette's "madness"--as annoying as it may get, I'm going to continue to put "madness" in quotation marks--reads as a type of schizophrenia: her rapid change in mood,  her disbelief in that which she cannot empirically sense (D&G convincingly argue that not only is the scientific claim to "nonbelief" the last bastion of belief in contemporary society, belief is absurd and completely foreign to the schizophrenic), and her inability to temporally locate herself according to those around her (D&G argue in a very complex and confusing way that the schizophrenic is atemporal according to phallocentric conceptions of chronology but is supremely historical in that he experiences all of history by merit of his constantly shifting subject-position) all characterize her as a type of schizoanalytic heroine. Her alignment with desire (in a less nuanced sense than D&G suggest but desire nonetheless) associates her with revolutionary production, particularly when contrasted with Rochester's Oedipal fixation on order and restriction (demonstrated by his linguistic and bodily imprisoning of Antoinette on the basis of her "madness"). The roots of the conflict between Antoinette and Rochester become clear, then: Antoinette is schizophrenic and poses a radical challenge to the order of Rochester's Oedipal regime. The question still remains, however, as to whether schizophrenia is actually "madness."

D&G would suggest that Antoinette is not mad--she simply refuses Oedipalization. Her connection to desiring-production represents a radical threat that Rochester feels he must contain, but which he ultimately fails to do. In light of the work done by Anti-Oedipus, one can read the ending of Wide Sargasso Sea--Antoinette's arson--not as a destructive act but as a positive act of production-of-consummation. She performs a "disjunctive synthesis," a synthesis that seems destructive (in that it breaks a previously existing connection) but is productive in that it allows for the configuration of a new order of connections. D&G argue that all life is connected and that seeming disjunctions only cause new formations and structures; in fact, they argue that subjectivity resides in the shifting disconnects between desiring machines and that the Subject is always disjunctive. In the context of Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette performs a disjunctive act (the burning of Thornfield) in order to posit a new social situation and its accompanying Subject--a social situation that is anti-colonial and anti-phallocentric and a Subject that has freedom and agency.

Women, Madness, and Poetry

Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea revolves around Bertha Mason's (or Antoinette Cosway's, as she prefers to be called) upbringing in the West Indies--it's almost a sort of postcolonial Bildungsroman--and her eventual "descent into madness." This narrative is far more complicated than it appears, as much of what constitutes Antoinette's "madness" is a socially imposed pathologization of her identification with non-whites and non-Western culture, and Rhys's interesting narrative style and framing develops a complex system of social relations that makes it difficult to judge the relative sanity of Antoinette, her husband, her servants, etc. An exhaustive interpretation of this social system would not fit in this limited space, so I would like to focus on one small theme in the novel: the interrelatedness of femininity, madness, and poetry.

The association between women and madness might be obvious; being a political (postcolonial, feminist) text, the pathologization of femininity is foregrounded. The only characters presumed to be mad are Antoinette and her mother; despite her husband's alcoholism, his alterity in West Indian culture, and even a few bodily indicators (he is sick with fever for an extended period before he marries Antoinette, which can suggest madness [see  Heart of Darkness]), he is considered perfectly sane within the patriarchal logic of postcolonial white rule. This fits the long history of feminine hysterics in psychological discourse and the narrative terrain of Jane Eyre, the novel to which Wide Sargasso Sea responds. Women and madness are clearly linked.

The connection between women and madness and poetry might be slightly less obvious. While the novel is technically what it claims to be--prose--Antoinette's voice takes on a certain poetic quality the madder she becomes. While her husband's narrative voice is restrained and (chrono)logical, Antoinette's takes on the incoherence and the hyperspecificity of poetry once she is brought to England. When she loses a letter to her brother, she rants to Grace Poole about it: "Where did I hide it? The sole of my shoes? Underneath the mattress? On top of the press? In the pocket of my red dress? Where, where is this letter?" (108). This catalogue of specific possible hiding places is a technique of poetry, which revolves around precision and specificity, rather than prose, which relies more heavily on logical progression.

This engagement with poetry represents a type of structural resistance to patriarchy. While her husband's narrative is prosaic and phallogocentric, Antoinette's is feminine, mad, and poetic. The frame of her story complements its content and gestures toward a feminine language that is fundamentally different from masculine language. Thus the very writing of poetry becomes a resistant act, a medium for the expression of all things non-Western, non-masculine, non-logical.

The Paradox of Gendered Resistance to Gender

According to Judith Butler in Undoing Gender, resistance to the rigid restrictions of gender structures--or the social implications of sexual difference; Butler herself suggests the relationship between these different discursive terms is complex and unstable--is a bit of a paradox: "For many, I think, the structuring reality of sexual difference is not one that one can wish away or argue against, or even make claims about in any reasonable way. It is more like a necessary background to the possibility of thinking, of language, of being a body in the world. And those who seek to take issue with it are arguing with the very structure that makes their argument possible" (176). Resistance to gender is always already futile; in order to resist its restrictive structuring of the subject (a discrete agent capable of political or social action), one must already be constituted as a subject and thus must already be constructed by the very terms one attempts to resist. This Foucauldian train of thought--that the subject is always already embedded in various (inevitably political) fields of discourse--problematizes the nature of political resistance and sets Butler at odds with various other (post-Marxian) feminist theorists such as bell hooks and Audre Lorde.

While Butler is invested in maintaining but modifying the existing manifestation of the political sphere, hooks and Lorde propose a complete overthrow of politics as we know it. They believe (and I am inclined to agree) that the very structure of democratic capitalism relies on various hierarchies, some of them inevitably gendered and racialized. Thus the only way to achieve gender and racial equality is to circumvent these foundational hierarchies by instituting a new socio-politico-economic system in which difference does not function as a basis for the hierarchization of individuals and cultural groups but rather carries no foundational significance.

Butler's refusal of this vision for feminism and her assumption that sexual difference inevitably structures the subject relies on a certain division of the political sphere from the social sphere. By this I mean that the lived experiences of individuals in relation to others (their social interactions) are distinctly removed from the abtracted "political subject" (a theoretical individual that is governed and structured by political discourse.) A specific type of post-Marxist political paradigm perhaps sidesteps this axiomatic assumption and provides a solution to the "question" of sexual difference by eliminating it altogether. If political discourse were to become conflated with social discourse--this would involve the dissolution of the state as we know it in favor of a brand of non-political localist collectivism (a process I would gladly discuss in person but for which there is too little space here)--the political subject would in effect become the social (or empirically perceptible) body. At this point, discourse would have to be differentiated into such specificity to fully encapsulate the uniqueness of each individual body that it would essentially dissolve into a meaningless infinitude of signifiers that would essentially construct a unique gender for each body; this dissolution of universalist discourse into hyperspecificity would render gendered or racial terms effectively useless and obsolete.

In essence, while Butler is invested in the maintenance of political democracy and the constant evolution of the state, I--and hooks and Lorde as I engage them through my own interpretive process--are invested in a type of social democracy the necessitates the dissolution of the state as we know it. Thus Butler's Foucaldian preoccupation with political discourse is circumvented by the radical abolition of the political sphere, and although this version of feminism may seem impractical and fantastic, Butler herself writes: "Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home...Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread" (29). My fantasy is that of a world in which the individual has broken free of the restrictions of gendered, racial, and sexual violence in all its forms, both bodily and discursive.

Butler's Performative Interpretation

The work for which Judith Butler is perhaps most famous revolves around the idea of gender as a performance; according to Butler, gender is not immanent or fixed, but rather a fluid social construction that is both held up as a cultural idea toward which individuals should aspire and to which individuals contribute through their own inevitably incomplete performances of gender. This performativity does not simply describe the process of gender construction, however, but rather the construction of all social and political identities; thus while individuals appear to be just that--discrete, independent (and embodied) subjectivities--they are in fact always already radically dependent on others for their self-definition. In this way, Butler deconstructs the concept of the cohesive (gendered) subject in her book Undoing Gender and posits a postmodern community of humanity that is radically dependent on intersubjective relations.

If one were to read this deconstruction as a simple, uncomplicated truth, however, one might be a bit confused: if gender "undoes" the discrete subject, why is the commonly accepted perception of the human an individualistic one? Why has this radical sense of community not instituted itself in the world as we know it? And why do we still define ourselves in the rigid terms of ideal gender, sexuality, race, etc.?

The key to these questions relates to the mechanism by which Butler deconstructs gender, which in turn relates back to her famous work with gender performance because, in a sense, the way in which she deconstructs gender is itself performative. In "Conjuring--Marxism" (in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International), Jacques Derrida argues that the only way to properly inherit Marx's original ideas and apply them to a socio-political situation that is radically different from that in which Marx himself wrote, theorists must "performatively interpret" Marxism: they must alter Marxist dogma through the very act of interpreting it. This type of performative interpretation is precisely what Butler mobilizes in her deconstruction of gender. She performs this interpretation on two different levels simultaneously, invoking both Foucauldian though and gender in order to shape them into new versions of themselves.


In his History of Sexuality: Volume I, Foucault suggests (among myriad other things) that sexuality is a.) socially constructed as a positive means of controlling individuals (as opposed to the negative threat of death) and b.) in a sense an agent of its own (e.g. the West has a historical obsession of making it speak itself and speak for us). Butler draws on both of these ideas but frames her interpretation of them in terms of gender: as I previously mentioned, she sees gender as a social structure that is both produced by subjects and produces subjects (more of a reciprocal relationship or process between the individual and society than a rigid signifier of identity); and she argues that "gender is for and from another before it becomes [one's] own" (16), that it is in fact an independent technology of power that works on both the subject and the social system she inhabits. Thus she performatively interprets Foucault, mobilizing his philosophy in service of her own agenda.


Her interpretation of gender as deconstructive is performative in that the concept of "identity" does no political work itself until it is engaged with. Identity discourse can be engaged in various ways toward various political ends (see Wendy Brown's "Rights and Identity in Late Modernity: Revisiting 'The Jewish Question'" in Identities, Politics, and Rights, edited by Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns for an example of how special rights discourse can be variously interpreted), and Butler here engages gender as a fluid and changeable process. Her very claim that gender deconstructs the subject itself deconstructs the subject. Her performative interpretation is inherently a political action (it clearly does not have any effect on the anatomical or neurological configuration of individuals, but it has the ability to radically alter the political avatar of the social individual: the citizen),  and her very engagement with gender through a postmodern, phenomenalist paradigm articulates a new politico-discursive situation in which gender becomes de-essentialized.


Butler's performative interpretation of gender as subject-deconstructing is compelling and represents an important step toward the political recognition of abject individuals (e.g. intersexual individuals, transsexuals, homosexuals, transgendered individuals) as human, the formation of a democratic and radically intraconnected human community, and the development of constantly evolving perception of the species in the context of "a certain openness and unknowingness" (Butler 39). True political and social progress, however, will only be achieved when the majority of humanity (not just an single gender theorist or mode of gender discourse) engages with gender and sexual identity through the same performative framework in which Butler experiences and theorizes the world.

Intersexuality: The Power of the Governess

Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands:La Frontera is preoccupied with in-between spaces; as a queer Chicana, Anzaldua speaks a language that is neither Spanish nor English, she feels neither American nor Mexican, and her sexual identity is neither entirely masculine nor feminine but "two in one body" (41). Although she focuses a great deal on the lack of identity that stems from being situated in between categories and the oppressive practices both within and outside of her culture, what interests me more about Borderlands is its moments of empowerment--moments in which Anzaldua frames her unique position and history in a positive, self-assertive way. In fact, much of this empowerment mirrors the unique brand of power attributed to governesses by Esther Godfrey in her essay "Jane Eyre, from Governess to Girl Bride" and in this post, I'd like to explore this parallel.

Two moments of sexual ownership stand out to me most in Borderlands (both of which occur in chapter two): the description of an intersexual muchacha that used to live next door to Anzaldua and the description of Anzaldua's own sexual non-normativity. In describing the intersexual individual--one who "for six months...was a woman...and...for the other six months she was a man" (41)--Anzaldua brings up the paradoxical historical position of non-normative individuals; she writes, "abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his inborn extraordinary gift" (41), suggesting that although abnormality was (and is) feared, it is also linked to a sort of magical power. Thus what on the surface seems a marker of difference that could be exploited for oppressive purposes becomes also a mark of superiority.

Anzaldua describes her own type of sexual non-normativity in similar terms of empowerment: "I made the choice to be queer" (41). She also explicitly compares herself to the intersexual muchacha, stating that "I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female" (41). This comparison suggests that her non-normative sexuality--like that of intersexes--is not only a sign of difference but a sign of power. Her assertion that she chose to be queer is self-empowering, framing her sexuality in the terms of rebellion against an oppressive culture rather than a marker of difference and victimization. She uses her queerness to refuse oppression and claim a unique brand of power and identity for herself.

According to Godfrey, governesses shared this sexual ambiguity and alterity: "They were feminine and yet they were not feminine; they were sexual objects and gender subjects" (859).  She also attributes to them a great deal of potential power in the shaping of Victorian social norms and individuals: "As keepers of middle-class children and thereby keepers of the future, governesses exhibited important influence and power upon the middle class" (857). The combination of this sexual ambiguity with a position of potential power made governesses figures of potential sexual subversion. This sexual subversion, though perhaps not intentional on the parts of the governesses, mirrors Anzaldua's own act of sexual subversion, her assertion that she is "both male and female." And as we can see from Nelly Wheeton's story in Ruth Brandon's Governess, some women made the choice--limited and influenced by certain factors like a need for social interaction or occupation--to become governesses, much like Anzaldua made the choice to be queer. In a sense, then, the subversive position of governesses in Victorian society deals in the same logic as that of the subversiveness of intersexual or queer individuals in Mexican and Chicano culture.

Nelly Weeton, Ruth Brandon, and Metahistory

Joan W. Scott's essay "The Evidence of Experience" throws into question the foundational nature of experience in the context of history. She argues that what may at first seem a straightforward cause-and-effect type relationship between evidence and history--a pre-constructed historical subject experiences an event and documents it, then a historian collects a broad body of these experiences into an overarching historical narrative--is really more complex; the experience of a historical subject is actually constructed by the subject just as the subject is constructed by his or her experience as well as a broader social discourse. Subjects are created when they are defined and restricted by social categories, and thus a woman's (substitute any social category you'd like here: working class mother, gay black man, etc.) experience is always already affected by the social discourse through which she defines herself and at the same time contributes to and redefines the discourse by which it is affected.  Scott suggests that the traditional concept of history--a series of empirical facts linked together in a causal narrative--can never be empirical, then, as it assumes experience is objective (which it isn't); she argues then for the study of a type of metahistory, or the history of the construction and interpretation of the relationship between identity, experience, and social discourse: she argues that "historians [should] take as their project not the reproduction and transmission of knowledge said to be arrived at through experience, but the analysis of the production of that knowledge itself. Such an analysis would constitute a genuinely nonfoundational history" (412).

This mode of historiography--analyzing the production of knowledge and identity rather than seemingly empirical facts themselves--provides an interesting lens through which to read Ruth Brandon's Governess. Brandon presents the stories of her chosen governesses through a combination of primary sources (direct transcriptions of letters, diaries, etc.) and her own paraphrased narration of these sources. This style of writing presents a unique juxtaposition of both historical and contemporary conceptions of class, femininity, and proper social relations in general.

For example, Brandon directly quotes Caroline Norton, a feminist legal activist of sorts who was still strongly indoctrinated in the idea of male superiority: "'The wild and stupid theories advanced by a few women of "equal rights" and "equal intelligence", are not the opinions of their sex. I for one (I, with millions more), beliece in the natural superiority of man as I do in the existence of God'" (183). This is prefaced by Brandon's own emotionally loaded narration--"women had trule to believe that they could never be men's equal. Even that doughty political operator Caroline Norton, whose suffering at the hands of her vindictive husband was known to all the world..." (183, emphasis mine)--that clearly suggests she 1.) believes in the possible equality of men and women and 2.) looks down on Norton in a sense for her masochistic complicity in patriarchal oppression. We can see a clear progression in conceptions of femininity and "proper" gender politics from Norton to Brandon in the space of a few lines; this, I think, represents the metahistorical analysis of identity formation for which Scott argues to an extent.

To conclude this post, I'd just like to bring up one issue that I have with Scott's argument. Although metahistory may very well represent the only form of objective historical narrative, how could a history of history (here I mean the general social and ideological structures and convictions of a given time period) exist without some sort of foundational assumption? To create a system of ideological assumptions about identity to begin with, one must base categories of identity on an empirical (or seemingly empirical) foundation (i.e. social categories can only be generated on the basis of something, traditionally experience); the analysis of the progression of these systems is all well and good, but it presupposes the existence of these systems, which have to come from somewhere. Scott's call for the creation of an objective history in this sense is like calling for the creation of an objective brand of literary theory without acknowledging the existence of literary texts. Thus Scott's super-abstraction of history--the history of a history based on experience--still relies on subjective experience, and therefore any logical abstractions based on subjective experience (even an interpretation of an interpretation of experience) must still be subjective.