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.
Monday, February 13, 2012
Thursday, February 2, 2012
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Mina Loy: Totalitarian Feminist
While most brands of feminism aim to achieve gender equality by providing women with agency, freedom, and the ability to choose, the brand outlined by Mina Loy in "The Feminist Manifesto" is radical, violent, and dangerously totalitarian.
Loy samples a great deal from Marx (including the name of her essay.) Some of this is good: she calls for the radical and complete abolition of (gender) inequality, the questioning of existing social conceptions of "virtue," and the dissolution of gender--in Marx's term class--distinctions ("ample interpenetration of the male and female temeraments" (924 in the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry)). Some of this, however, is bad; the means by which she calls for the equalization of the genders is specifically violent (she believes in the "absolute destruction" of social institutions and denigrates "reform" (922)) and she universalizes oppressive tendencies to all forms of masculinity (as Marx villifies all non-Communists.)
Loy terms feminists a brand of "superior woman," which is dangerously eugenic. She deems non-feminists--or even feminists that don't subscribe to her specific brand of feminism (i.e. radical sex-positive feminism)--unworthy of perpetuating the human race. This constitutes ideological imperialism and totalitarianism, and despite her otherwise progressive aims, this aspect of her argument prevents me from subscribing to the argument as a whole.
Loy samples a great deal from Marx (including the name of her essay.) Some of this is good: she calls for the radical and complete abolition of (gender) inequality, the questioning of existing social conceptions of "virtue," and the dissolution of gender--in Marx's term class--distinctions ("ample interpenetration of the male and female temeraments" (924 in the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry)). Some of this, however, is bad; the means by which she calls for the equalization of the genders is specifically violent (she believes in the "absolute destruction" of social institutions and denigrates "reform" (922)) and she universalizes oppressive tendencies to all forms of masculinity (as Marx villifies all non-Communists.)
Loy terms feminists a brand of "superior woman," which is dangerously eugenic. She deems non-feminists--or even feminists that don't subscribe to her specific brand of feminism (i.e. radical sex-positive feminism)--unworthy of perpetuating the human race. This constitutes ideological imperialism and totalitarianism, and despite her otherwise progressive aims, this aspect of her argument prevents me from subscribing to the argument as a whole.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Feminism's Radical Fluidity
Although I've already voiced my dissenting opinion when it comes to "What Ails Feminist Criticism?", I would like to engage in this post Robyn Wiegman's much more eloquent response to Gubar's essay in her article "What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion."
While Gubar laments the alleged attacks on feminism by postcolonial and poststructuralist theory, Wiegman points out that this glorification of the earlier phases of feminism is really a glorification of the literary historical. Gubar's distrust of theoretical feminism comes from a distrust of the displacement of the text as the final authority in literary studies with the explosion of interdisciplinary cultural theory; it is in fact a fear of losing her authority as a "real" feminist--a label which she bases entirely on her position in the earlier phases of feminism. Her claim that poststructuralist theory is "obscurantist" is really an attack against the validity of literary theory that imposes a preexisting framework on literary texts, which is characteristic of the general move in academia toward theorization. She fears becoming obsolete, and her fears are well-grounded: if she continues to denigrate the liberal progression of feminism, she will become obsolete.
Wiegman, rather than suggest that metacriticism within the academy is destroying the feminist movement, celebrates such dissent as a sign of vitality. Gubar's conceptualization of feminism as a field of academic study is objectifying; she would have it confined to a single discipline, making it into an object of study rather than a way of thinking about the world. In a sense, she has forgotten the radical roots of feminism, and she would like to see the movement solidified and institutionalized, paradoxically integrating it into a preexisting patriarchal system it was originally meant to resist. Wiegman, however, conceptualizes feminism as an overarching worldview; it is not an object of study, but rather a way of studying other things (literature, culture, race, politics.) She sees Gubar's fourth stage of metacritical dissension as a positive sign that the object of "women's studies" has been subjectivated into the active process of "feminine studying." Such metacriticism allows for the constant fluidity of the movement, a sort of radical refusal to be objectified, which is in fact the sort of rejection upon which feminism was originally based. The continually evolving nature of interdisciplinary feminism maintains the movement's integrity, and the only constant in feminism becomes a radical rejection of oppression--even in the form of academic institutionalization.
Gubar's lamentation of the former glory of a unified feminism constitutes a mourning of the unity of meaning. This is framed for Gubar in the terms of feminism, but it really signifies a broader mourning of the literary-historical approach to literary criticism. I do not wish to minimize or denigrate her historical contributions to the field of feminism, but her desire for the institutionalization of an inherently radical and system-resistant movement is counterproductive to contemporary feminism, and Wiegman's re-subjectivation of the term "feminist" as a epistemological paradigm rather than an object of study through postcolonial and poststructuralist theory provides a much more pragmatic and productive definition than Gubar's consevative nostalgia.
While Gubar laments the alleged attacks on feminism by postcolonial and poststructuralist theory, Wiegman points out that this glorification of the earlier phases of feminism is really a glorification of the literary historical. Gubar's distrust of theoretical feminism comes from a distrust of the displacement of the text as the final authority in literary studies with the explosion of interdisciplinary cultural theory; it is in fact a fear of losing her authority as a "real" feminist--a label which she bases entirely on her position in the earlier phases of feminism. Her claim that poststructuralist theory is "obscurantist" is really an attack against the validity of literary theory that imposes a preexisting framework on literary texts, which is characteristic of the general move in academia toward theorization. She fears becoming obsolete, and her fears are well-grounded: if she continues to denigrate the liberal progression of feminism, she will become obsolete.
Wiegman, rather than suggest that metacriticism within the academy is destroying the feminist movement, celebrates such dissent as a sign of vitality. Gubar's conceptualization of feminism as a field of academic study is objectifying; she would have it confined to a single discipline, making it into an object of study rather than a way of thinking about the world. In a sense, she has forgotten the radical roots of feminism, and she would like to see the movement solidified and institutionalized, paradoxically integrating it into a preexisting patriarchal system it was originally meant to resist. Wiegman, however, conceptualizes feminism as an overarching worldview; it is not an object of study, but rather a way of studying other things (literature, culture, race, politics.) She sees Gubar's fourth stage of metacritical dissension as a positive sign that the object of "women's studies" has been subjectivated into the active process of "feminine studying." Such metacriticism allows for the constant fluidity of the movement, a sort of radical refusal to be objectified, which is in fact the sort of rejection upon which feminism was originally based. The continually evolving nature of interdisciplinary feminism maintains the movement's integrity, and the only constant in feminism becomes a radical rejection of oppression--even in the form of academic institutionalization.
Gubar's lamentation of the former glory of a unified feminism constitutes a mourning of the unity of meaning. This is framed for Gubar in the terms of feminism, but it really signifies a broader mourning of the literary-historical approach to literary criticism. I do not wish to minimize or denigrate her historical contributions to the field of feminism, but her desire for the institutionalization of an inherently radical and system-resistant movement is counterproductive to contemporary feminism, and Wiegman's re-subjectivation of the term "feminist" as a epistemological paradigm rather than an object of study through postcolonial and poststructuralist theory provides a much more pragmatic and productive definition than Gubar's consevative nostalgia.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Gothic Transgression: Jane Eyre and Boundaries
Jane Eyre is clearly a Gothic text, and the 2006 BBC miniseries adaptation of it foregrounds this genre categorization: much of the actions takes place in and around Thornfield Hall, a spooky castle of a home with sprawling, wild grounds; Jane is both literally and figuratively haunted by Rochester's living wife, Bertha; the question of insanity (both Bertha's and Jane's) pervades the narrative--the list goes on and on. While much can be (and has been) said about Jane's feminist asociality and unladylike passion, I would like briefly to comment in this post on the liberatory power offered by the very use of the Gothic genre itself--a genre that is characterized by radical transgression.
When one hears--or at least when I hear--the term "Gothic novel," one of two works is immediately brought to mind: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or Bram Stoker's Dracula. Both of these books (and the genre of the Gothic in general) are deeply concerned with boundaries: defining them, transgressing them, dissolving them. Frankenstein challenges the boundaries between the living and the dead, between science an the occult, and between the discreet self and the Other (often read in racial terms.) Dracula--which is perhaps more relevant to a discussion of Jane Eyre (vampirism is even hinted at by Bertha's choice to attack her brother Mason not with a weapon but with her teeth)--challenges all of these boundaries as well, but it often frames the transgression of social boundaries and hierarchies in gendered terms. Jonathan Haker's encounter with the three vampiresses in Dracula's castle is often read as an inversion of sexual hierarchies (he becomes passive and powerless at the hands of these hypersexualized women); Mina Harker's centrality to the eventual demise of the count challenges socially bound gender rolls; and the one boundary generally held sacred even in the most radical romantic literature--rigid heterosexism--dissolves in the homoeroticism of a symbolic gangbang when the Band of Light plunges a stake into Lucy's lifeless body. The Romantic tendency to push boundaries comes to a head in the Gothic space of Dracula, where nearly all boundaries--both gendered and non-gendered--dissolve into a haze of psychological ambiguity.
The Gothic framework Stoker provides--which is primarily concerned with social and sexual transgression--can be laid onto Jane Eyre. Bronte's novel also questions gendered social roles (as numerous feminist critics have noted in Jane's outspokenness and refusal to compromise,) but its primary Gothic tool is its deployment of the uncanny. Freud essentially conceptualizes the uncanny as the familiarization of (or the discovery of the familiar within) something unfamiliar or the defamiliarization of something familiar (i.e. characteristics of the living being attributed to the dead.) This process of developing uncertainty pervades Jane Eyre: as a governess, Jane occupies an ambiguous space as part family, part servant, part bourgeois, part proletariat; Bertha--a rich and beautiful woman--is filled with violence and madness; Thornfield is burned down by a flaming wedding dress, a traditional sign of life and celebration. Such deployment of the uncanny destabilizes the socially systematized space in which Jane comes of age and allows for the dissolution of conservative boundaries concerning the proper behavior of women. This process of defamiliarization is tellingly a dissolution, not an inversion; seemingly contradictory terms consistently become united (i.e. Bertha's beauty and her madness) rather than trade places in the Victorian system of values.
Such a dissolution allows Jane to become a unique brand of feminist heroine. Her passion is not directed exclusively at the betterment of her own place in the world or even that of women in general; instead she uses her drive and her knowledge to attempt to better the position of those in need regardless of gender. She does not become a teacher while living with her family at Marsh End because she wants to educated little girls but because she wants to educate children. Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of this radical novel is Jane's radically ungendered humanism, her refusal of oppressive cultural mores that just happen to disadvantage women.
Bronte's deployment of the Gothic creates a space in which such a radical humanism is possible. Jane's refusal to see those around her in terms of gender characterizes her as incredibly progressive within her own Victorian culture, and in the relative terms required by postcolonial- and ethnic-theoretical cultural sensitivity--as David Damrosch points out in the introduction to his book What Is World Literature?, cultural imperialism is not only spatial but temporal as well--she could, in a sense, be understood as a type of deconstructive feminist heroine.
When one hears--or at least when I hear--the term "Gothic novel," one of two works is immediately brought to mind: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or Bram Stoker's Dracula. Both of these books (and the genre of the Gothic in general) are deeply concerned with boundaries: defining them, transgressing them, dissolving them. Frankenstein challenges the boundaries between the living and the dead, between science an the occult, and between the discreet self and the Other (often read in racial terms.) Dracula--which is perhaps more relevant to a discussion of Jane Eyre (vampirism is even hinted at by Bertha's choice to attack her brother Mason not with a weapon but with her teeth)--challenges all of these boundaries as well, but it often frames the transgression of social boundaries and hierarchies in gendered terms. Jonathan Haker's encounter with the three vampiresses in Dracula's castle is often read as an inversion of sexual hierarchies (he becomes passive and powerless at the hands of these hypersexualized women); Mina Harker's centrality to the eventual demise of the count challenges socially bound gender rolls; and the one boundary generally held sacred even in the most radical romantic literature--rigid heterosexism--dissolves in the homoeroticism of a symbolic gangbang when the Band of Light plunges a stake into Lucy's lifeless body. The Romantic tendency to push boundaries comes to a head in the Gothic space of Dracula, where nearly all boundaries--both gendered and non-gendered--dissolve into a haze of psychological ambiguity.
The Gothic framework Stoker provides--which is primarily concerned with social and sexual transgression--can be laid onto Jane Eyre. Bronte's novel also questions gendered social roles (as numerous feminist critics have noted in Jane's outspokenness and refusal to compromise,) but its primary Gothic tool is its deployment of the uncanny. Freud essentially conceptualizes the uncanny as the familiarization of (or the discovery of the familiar within) something unfamiliar or the defamiliarization of something familiar (i.e. characteristics of the living being attributed to the dead.) This process of developing uncertainty pervades Jane Eyre: as a governess, Jane occupies an ambiguous space as part family, part servant, part bourgeois, part proletariat; Bertha--a rich and beautiful woman--is filled with violence and madness; Thornfield is burned down by a flaming wedding dress, a traditional sign of life and celebration. Such deployment of the uncanny destabilizes the socially systematized space in which Jane comes of age and allows for the dissolution of conservative boundaries concerning the proper behavior of women. This process of defamiliarization is tellingly a dissolution, not an inversion; seemingly contradictory terms consistently become united (i.e. Bertha's beauty and her madness) rather than trade places in the Victorian system of values.
Such a dissolution allows Jane to become a unique brand of feminist heroine. Her passion is not directed exclusively at the betterment of her own place in the world or even that of women in general; instead she uses her drive and her knowledge to attempt to better the position of those in need regardless of gender. She does not become a teacher while living with her family at Marsh End because she wants to educated little girls but because she wants to educate children. Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of this radical novel is Jane's radically ungendered humanism, her refusal of oppressive cultural mores that just happen to disadvantage women.
Bronte's deployment of the Gothic creates a space in which such a radical humanism is possible. Jane's refusal to see those around her in terms of gender characterizes her as incredibly progressive within her own Victorian culture, and in the relative terms required by postcolonial- and ethnic-theoretical cultural sensitivity--as David Damrosch points out in the introduction to his book What Is World Literature?, cultural imperialism is not only spatial but temporal as well--she could, in a sense, be understood as a type of deconstructive feminist heroine.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Obscurantism vs. Skepticism: A Critique of Susan Gubar's "What Ails Feminist Criticism?"
Susan Gubar does a fantastic job of outlining the recent history of feminist discourse in her essay "What Ails Feminist Criticism?", and I agree with many of her critiques of what she labels the first three phases of feminist criticism. Her narration of the evolution of feminism draws clear connections of what appears to be historical necessity between each succeeding phase, and her essay acts as an excellent point of access to contemporary theory. Its conclusion, however, is somewhat lacking; Gubar's attempt at a critique of poststructuralist feminism as undermined by its own obscurantism--particularly when compared to her very persuasive criticism of other brands of feminism--is unconvincing, and the essay in its entirety simply cements my personal belief that deconstructive gender theory (in the vein of Butler) provides the most useful framework for understanding sexual politics in contemporary society. In this post, I will briefly provide my own interpretation of Gubar's critiques of the first three phases of feminist discourse, and then I will argue that the poststructuralist school of feminism provides the most valid solution both to gender inequality and to "what ails feminist criticism" in this fourth phase of infighting.
Gubar's primary problem with the "critique" phase of feminism is its negative nature; it lamented the cultural dominance of the masculine and the exclusion of the feminine, but it did not have its own discourse. Its identity was entirely negative and therefore wholly defined and restricted by--as well as dependent on--the discourse of the masculine. (If you're interested in the paradoxically dependent nature of political and representational resistance in general, I'd recommend Eva Geulen's extremely sophisticated essay "Resistance and Representation: A Case Study of Thomas Mann's 'Mario and the Magician'" (New German Critique 68 (1996): 3-29).)
This inevitably led to the second phase--that of "recovery"--which had a positive identity; it developed a unique canon of woman writers and attempted to universalize the plight of women everywhere.
The recovery phase was immediately followed by the third phase--the "engendering of difference" phase--in which the feminist infighting began. Feminists quickly realized that the feminine experience of oppression could not be universalized, and the (in many ways unanswerable) question of race immediately complicated the field. White critics that excluded the literature of other races and ethnicities from their work were considered racist, and white critics that attempted to appropriate such literature were labeled colonialists. (This strikes me as excessively Marxist; in this logic, white feminists are analogous to the bourgeoisie, and all other races--here analogous to the proletariat--must act as their own saviors. This mindset is dangerously linked with violent revolution rather than peaceful political change, and its reliance on dichotomous racial hierarchies gestures toward an eventual inversion of the existing social structure--subjugating the hegemonic class of white feminists through the subjectivation of oppressed, racially other women--rather than the achievement of racial and gender equality.)
This lose-lose situation for white feminists was then reframed with the development of poststructuralist "identity" theory, which dislocated the concept of self and resisted the process of categorization altogether. Poststructuralist theory is appealing for many reasons: its refusal to define "woman" escapes the problems of the third phase and defeats racial hierarchies within the feminist movement, as it does not privilege any particular class, race, or ethnicity with being "more feminine" than any other; it acknowledges differences within and between genders while, through the logic of gender performativity and social construction, allowing for change within and exchange between constructed identities; and rather than subjugating or subjectivating a given race or gender, it moves outside of the logic of hierarchical power systems and avoids the danger of simply inverting the existing sexual-political situation.
Gubar's critique of this school of thought--primarily as voiced by Butler--is somewhat superficial. She questions the validity of the syntax of Butler's prose; this attack is overly (and ironically) formalist, and although Gubar claims that it has bearing on the realm of feminist linguistics, I read Butler's linguistic project as simply accessory, a little interdisciplinary treat to go along with her more substantial work on embodied sex and gender.
Gubar's primary critique of poststructuralist feminism, however, is that it is obscurant. I believe that she confuses "obscurantism"--her favorite thing to associate with poststructuralism--with "skepticism." Poststructuralism works against a unity of meaning and refuses to believe in essential sex or gender; this is analogous to Descartes' radical skepticism of the existence of the human body. Gubar is firmly entrenched in the discourse of sexual difference, and she seems to read gender like a Freudian analyst reads psychological symptoms: although she may acknowledge the social construction of gender, she believes that gender is a symptom--a manifestation--of the sort of platonic truth of biological sex. This reasoning assumes a real connection between gender and sex and between sex and the body. Butler's skepticism rejects this; rather than draw a conclusion that is likely to be correct--that gender and sex are connected in a specific way--she acknowledges the impossibility of knowing the nature of this connection for certain. She is not obscurant; she is radically skeptical and therefore logically realistic--like the school of epistemological phenomenalism--past the point of traditional (and conservative) common sense. The poststructuralist deconstruction of intra- and interracial (as well as intra- and intergender) relationships eliminates the problems of what Gubar calls "critical election" and "critical abjection," placing all forms of identity on an equal level of academic and practical validity.
While all of these schools and phases of feminism are valuable for their historical place in the narrative of feminist theory and their work in the blending of various academic discourses, I am convinced that the most useful mode of feminist criticism is the poststructuralist mode. It locates itself outside the logic of dichotomous hierarchization and allows the individual experiences of women (and groups of women) to coexist under the broad umbrella of "feminism." Although Gubar treats Friedman's suggestion that "gender studies" as a discipline be abolished in favor of a more comprehensive field of "identity studies" as radical, such a move is perhaps the only feasible way of reconciling the diverse and often antagonistic theorists of gender, sexuality, race, and class, as well as the incredibly nuanced intersections of these various factors.
Gubar's primary problem with the "critique" phase of feminism is its negative nature; it lamented the cultural dominance of the masculine and the exclusion of the feminine, but it did not have its own discourse. Its identity was entirely negative and therefore wholly defined and restricted by--as well as dependent on--the discourse of the masculine. (If you're interested in the paradoxically dependent nature of political and representational resistance in general, I'd recommend Eva Geulen's extremely sophisticated essay "Resistance and Representation: A Case Study of Thomas Mann's 'Mario and the Magician'" (New German Critique 68 (1996): 3-29).)
This inevitably led to the second phase--that of "recovery"--which had a positive identity; it developed a unique canon of woman writers and attempted to universalize the plight of women everywhere.
The recovery phase was immediately followed by the third phase--the "engendering of difference" phase--in which the feminist infighting began. Feminists quickly realized that the feminine experience of oppression could not be universalized, and the (in many ways unanswerable) question of race immediately complicated the field. White critics that excluded the literature of other races and ethnicities from their work were considered racist, and white critics that attempted to appropriate such literature were labeled colonialists. (This strikes me as excessively Marxist; in this logic, white feminists are analogous to the bourgeoisie, and all other races--here analogous to the proletariat--must act as their own saviors. This mindset is dangerously linked with violent revolution rather than peaceful political change, and its reliance on dichotomous racial hierarchies gestures toward an eventual inversion of the existing social structure--subjugating the hegemonic class of white feminists through the subjectivation of oppressed, racially other women--rather than the achievement of racial and gender equality.)
This lose-lose situation for white feminists was then reframed with the development of poststructuralist "identity" theory, which dislocated the concept of self and resisted the process of categorization altogether. Poststructuralist theory is appealing for many reasons: its refusal to define "woman" escapes the problems of the third phase and defeats racial hierarchies within the feminist movement, as it does not privilege any particular class, race, or ethnicity with being "more feminine" than any other; it acknowledges differences within and between genders while, through the logic of gender performativity and social construction, allowing for change within and exchange between constructed identities; and rather than subjugating or subjectivating a given race or gender, it moves outside of the logic of hierarchical power systems and avoids the danger of simply inverting the existing sexual-political situation.
Gubar's critique of this school of thought--primarily as voiced by Butler--is somewhat superficial. She questions the validity of the syntax of Butler's prose; this attack is overly (and ironically) formalist, and although Gubar claims that it has bearing on the realm of feminist linguistics, I read Butler's linguistic project as simply accessory, a little interdisciplinary treat to go along with her more substantial work on embodied sex and gender.
Gubar's primary critique of poststructuralist feminism, however, is that it is obscurant. I believe that she confuses "obscurantism"--her favorite thing to associate with poststructuralism--with "skepticism." Poststructuralism works against a unity of meaning and refuses to believe in essential sex or gender; this is analogous to Descartes' radical skepticism of the existence of the human body. Gubar is firmly entrenched in the discourse of sexual difference, and she seems to read gender like a Freudian analyst reads psychological symptoms: although she may acknowledge the social construction of gender, she believes that gender is a symptom--a manifestation--of the sort of platonic truth of biological sex. This reasoning assumes a real connection between gender and sex and between sex and the body. Butler's skepticism rejects this; rather than draw a conclusion that is likely to be correct--that gender and sex are connected in a specific way--she acknowledges the impossibility of knowing the nature of this connection for certain. She is not obscurant; she is radically skeptical and therefore logically realistic--like the school of epistemological phenomenalism--past the point of traditional (and conservative) common sense. The poststructuralist deconstruction of intra- and interracial (as well as intra- and intergender) relationships eliminates the problems of what Gubar calls "critical election" and "critical abjection," placing all forms of identity on an equal level of academic and practical validity.
While all of these schools and phases of feminism are valuable for their historical place in the narrative of feminist theory and their work in the blending of various academic discourses, I am convinced that the most useful mode of feminist criticism is the poststructuralist mode. It locates itself outside the logic of dichotomous hierarchization and allows the individual experiences of women (and groups of women) to coexist under the broad umbrella of "feminism." Although Gubar treats Friedman's suggestion that "gender studies" as a discipline be abolished in favor of a more comprehensive field of "identity studies" as radical, such a move is perhaps the only feasible way of reconciling the diverse and often antagonistic theorists of gender, sexuality, race, and class, as well as the incredibly nuanced intersections of these various factors.
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