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.

Audre Lorde and Radical Ownership

Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider doesn't read like feminist theory for one big reason: it isn't feminist theory, or at least not in the sense that we're used to thinking about theory. Lorde is primarily a poet, and one of the guiding rules of writing contemporary poetry--or at least as far as I can discern from having taken a grand total of two poetry-writing classes at MSU--is to use concrete imagery rather than abstraction, to favor vivid example over general description; Lorde does this with her prose, drawing on personal (sometimes shocking) personal experience to discuss such broad issues as sexism, racism, and homophobia. Rather than get lost in theoretical speculation, she consistently grounds herself in first-person testimony; she forces herself as well as her audience to deal with the world as it is--not as it should be in theory--and in privileging the empirical over the theoretical, she radically takes ownership of ways of knowing (and creating) that are often discounted by more academic feminism.

The two most prominent and unconventional sources of knowledge, power, and creativity that Lorde radically owns are the concepts of anger--or more broadly emotion and affect--and the erotic. Her validation of anger as a creative force goes hand in hand with her (and many other black feminists') belief in the generative power of dialectics: like bell hooks, she believes that progress comes from the acknowledgment and celebration of difference, and angry responses to injustice or oppression or the refusal of difference should not be discounted. Lorde values emotion as an important source of power and knowledge, and although one might read this embrace of affect over logic as playing into traditional and oppressive views of gender as dichotomous--men are logical and women emotional, a distinction that Lorde herself sometimes owns--such a validation of emotion refuses to divide and compartmentalize aspects of the self and gestures toward a more holistic concept of knowledge. Lorde also owns and redefines the erotic as a source of power, but rather than create through dialectical opposition, the erotic is an entirely self-centered source of power. It is for Lorde a type of brutal honesty, a refusal to be circumscribed by external forces and to be true to oneself and one's capacity for joy.

Almost as important as what Lorde owns is what she refuses to own. She refuses guilt, as guilt is an unproductive feeling that takes the place of action as effected by anger. She refuses the pornographic as a perverted, objectifying manifestation of the erotic that stems from the shame and the cultural guilt--again, an unproductive feeling--surrounding sexuality.

To be completely honest, I don't see Lorde's ideas about feminism and racism and homophobia playing a huge role in my academic study of gender, but I have already seen their effect on my everyday life. Her writing has made me re-examine my own fear of difference and encouraged me to be more open to varied views and cultural customs and even ways of knowing. Her refusal of guilt and her assertion that silence (particularly suffering in silence) is counterproductive resonate deeply with me and have made me try to be more honest with myself. I think that Lorde provides a beautiful example of living feminism rather than practicing it; from what I can gather from her personal testimony as a black lesbian feminist mother, she was not simply politically active (fighting for black/gay/women's rights), she rather lived a life critical of oppression in all its forms and in all aspects of her life. This represents the practical realization of hooks's call to examine the interpenetrating nature of racial/sexual/gender/cass oppression, the true transition from the objectification of feminism as "women's studies" to the active "femininely studying", the practice rather than the theorization of an anti-oppression philosophical paradigm. Reading Lorde has helped me to do the same: to own my own difference, to be more respectful of others' difference, and to hold myself to a certain level of honesty about my own complicity in contemporary systems of oppression.

Looking back over this post, I realize that things got a bit awkwardly gushy and personal, so I apologize for that. I just really dig Audre Lorde.

Bell Hooks and Post-Marxism

In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, bell hooks proposes a very radical form of feminism--a brand of feminism that I read as the inevitable product of the belief that class, race, and gender are inextricably bound to one another. This brand is specifically Marxist, as it primarily consists of a critique of the current "racist, sexist, capitalist state"--one of hooks's favorite and frequently repeated phrases--and gestures toward the development of a new social order based not on artificial (gender, racial, economic, and political) dualism but on the respect for each individual as an individual, not a politically constructed identity. Hooks's prose is simple, straightforward, and accessible, so I will not spend much time on summarizing her argument here; I will rather briefly examine a couple of rhetorical effects produced by her prose, as well as compare her idea of political progress with that of another post-Marxist feminist, Wendy Brown, and that of a more conservative feminist, Susan Gubar.

Let's begin by examining hooks and Gubar's "What Ails Feminist Criticism?" together. In her article, Gubar laments the metacritical dissent of the feminist movement; she yearns for the golden days of the early contemporary feminist movement--the days when feminist discourse was dominated by bourgeois white women like herself--and cites hooks as one of the racially conscious theorists that is tearing her sisterhood apart. Hooks in a sense preempts this critique in the very type of work Gubar criticizes; hooks calls for solidarity among women rather than support, and she clearly distinguished them from one another. What Gubar misses is support: the type of blind assent to dominant feminist discourse that stifles discussion and solidifies the positions of power that those who dominate dominant discourse--white bourgeois women--hold. Hooks sees this as counterproductive; she calls for women to work in solidarity: rather than unconditionally agree with one another, she would have women constructively criticize one another and feminist ideology itself, as the solidification of feminism into an authoritative ideology simply works within the flawed system of oppression inherent to our existing political and social worldviews.

Gubar's complaint about what one might call the reverse-discrimination of feminists that "specialize" in particular brands of identity theory--racially-informed feminists, queer theorists, Marxist and socialist feminists--remains interesting, however, and perhaps provides a useful critical framework (or at least a very small part of one) with which to read hooks. Hooks attempts to augment her argument for the abolition of "sexist oppression"--which for her includes issues of race and class--with the particular type of language she uses. Her most apparent (explicitly explained, really,) rhetorical strategy consists of shifting away from the phrase "I am a feminist" in favor of the phrase "I advocate feminism." This strategy resists identity politics and thwarts the system of political subject formation that represents the root cause of dichotomous gender, race, and class oppression. Another strategy she deploys is her refusal to use articles before "feminist movement." This implies not an organized political party but a broader social agitation, a shift in our way of looking at the world that is not rooted in a specific social group or identity; one might compare it to Marx and Engel's description of Communism in the very first sentence of Das Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei: "Ein Gespenst geht  um in Europa--das Gespenst der Kommunismus" [trans.: "A ghost is going around in Europe--the ghost of Communism"]. Just as the ghost of Communism was for Marx everywhere and nowhere, the ghost of feminism is for hooks "movement," not "a movement."

This rhetoric of inclusivity is complicated by hooks's use of pronouns, however. Once she begins talking about women of color, she begins to use "we." Despite her insistence that individuals must overcome the political formation and subjugation of identity, she clearly develops a community of non-white feminists by appropriating a label for herself, a label which she assumes her audience shares. Throughout much of the first few chapters, hooks refers to women as "women," attempting to locate herself as an objective outsider (or at least as a sufficiently self-aware subjective insider.) Her sudden shift to "we" when she begins discussing women of color, however,--a we that directly addresses the reader and assumes the reader's complicity--suggests that despite the glaring problems with Gubar's article, there is perhaps a kernel of validity to her assertion that hooks, at least, develops her theory in the exclusionary, categorical way that she indites bourgeois white women for.

To conclude this post, I'd like to bring in Wendy Brown's essay "Rights and Identity in Late Modernity: Revisiting the 'Jewish Question'"--published in Identities, Politics, and Rights, ed. by Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns--which, rather than directly contradict hooks's brand of post-Marxist, metacritical feminism, informs and perhaps modifies hooks's proposed path for the revolution by closely reading Marx's "Zur Judenfrage" and two feminist legal theorists. Although much of contemporary feminism focuses on gaining "rights" for women--this comes dangerously close to a quest for equality men within the existing legal system, a quest that hooks herself warns against--Brown complicates the status of rights as a step along the route to a revolutionarily new society that exists independent of oppression. Marx differentiates between "political emancipation" and "human emancipation" in his essay "Zur Judenfrage", and she suggests that political emancipation (theoretical freedom bestowed by the state) means nothing if it is not accompanied by the institution of this theoretical freedom in the real lives of real individuals. Brown combines this analysis with Foucaultian concepts of the socially constructed subject (in gender-theoretical terms, the socially constructed identity) and suggests that by conferring rights on oppressed groups, the state simply mystifies its discursive and political hegemony over these individuals and reinforces the political identities that are the source of alterity-based oppression. Brown does not resolve this paradox, but her analytical framework complicates hooks's view (primarily lifted, according to her, from Sandra Harding's "Feminism: Reform or Revolution") that the slow political and legal reform of society constitutes the feminist revolution.

Hooks provides a much needed perspective on a traditionally white bourgeois feminist discourse, but it is important to keep in mind that her perspective is not unproblematic. Despite her compelling focus on oppression in all of its forms and her claim to a certain type of objectivity, her perspective also has its limitations, and although her politically broad (though not especially analytically sophisticated) overview of feminism functions as a useful starting point for the reconceptualization of the movement in undichotomous terms (essentially post-Marxist terms), much more sophisticated and in-depth theory must supplement and contextualize her thoughts.