Writing (and) Independence: Gaytri Spivak and the Dark Continet of Ecriture Feminine

by Theresa M. Senft

This essay originally appeared in Women & Performance , Vol. 7, No. 2, Issue 14-15, Spring 1995. pp 275-286. Please feel free to reproduce this, with appropriate acknowledgements.

Let’s begin at the ending. Let’s begin at independence, the liberatory move by which oppressed peoples free themselves from their oppressors. Feminism aspires to a brand of independence. So do nationalist uprisings, especially when they are thought of as the fair fights of indigenous peoples for self-determination. For U.S. Queers, the Stonewall Riots serve as a historical mark in the struggle for independence from what Monique Wittig has termed, “The Straight Mind.”

Let’s talk about writing and independence, about writing for independence, and writing from a position of independence. The most famous project of the continental feminists (which include writers like Wittig, Helene Cixous, and Gayatri Spivak) is called, “l’ecriture feminine.” Roughly, l’ecriture feminine translates to “writing the feminine body.” Continental feminists argue that the only way to move women from a position of objectified servitude to a position of full subjectivity is for women to write the truth of their bodies. Thus, the cry to produce embodied, personal, deeply felt “feminine” writing, in one’s true voice, serves as a call for independence. You are enslaved now, the argument runs, but write your truth and you will be free. In the last twenty years, many disenfranchised peoples have employed similar calls to “write the body.” The queer “coming out ” story, and the genre of writing known as “exile narrative” are examples of how Writing (to) Independence is still a call to arms in many communities.

Let’s begin at the ending, at writing, revolution, and independence, and work backward. Sigmund Freud was the first writer to suggest that women suffering from hysteria were in truth trying to communicate in a “lost language” fundamental, psychic truths about themselves. To cure these women, Freud went against conventional medical wisdom at the time and offered instead what he called “the talking cure”Ñencouraging women to tell their stories to him. Freud himself, however, proceeded on his own path to intellectual independence somewhat differently. From the beginnings of the history of women in psychoanalysis, writing has been a key issue, but writing was only prescribed for the doctor, not the (female) patient. In retaliation, many feminist practitioners and critics of psychoanalysis have literally written over the chronicles of male doctors who pondered from a distance the hysterical female body. Indeed, one of the critical accomplishments of feminism has been women’s’ reclaiming of the ‘power of the pen’ from male doctors, in order to write new and more inclusive descriptions of women’s psychic lives. Lesbians, in particular, have produced a large body of writing, arguing that female homosexual desire, definitionally unavailable to the male imaginary, is in particular need of a written history. Lesbian theorists like Teresa deLauretis call the invisibility of same-sex female desire within psychoanalytic doctrine, “lesbian indifference.” de Lauretis often cites the case of Dora, an hysteric Freud claimed he had “failed to cure” specifically because he was unable to read her lesbian desire for another woman, as the example par excellence of lesbian indifference in the history of psychoanalytic thought.

Power, Borders, Security, Wealth: Lessons of Violence and Desire From September 11

By Anna M. Agathangelou (University of Houston, Clear Lake and Global Change Institute, Nicosia) & L.H.M. Ling (New School University) 

 From International Studies Quarterly (June 2004).

 Author’s Note: For comments and advise, many thanks to:  Timothy J. Emmert, Rogan Kersh, Kyle D. Killian, Cynthia Weber, and our two anonymous reviewers.  An earlier version of this paper was presented at Seattle University through the sponsorship of the Wismer Chairs and the Center for Social Justice in Society.

 Abstract

America’s “war on terror” and al Qaeda’s “jihad” reflect mirror strategies of imperial politics.  Each camp transnationalizes violence and insecurity in the name of national or communal security.  Neoliberal globalization underpins this militarization of daily life.  Its desire industries motivate and legitimate elite arguments (whether from “infidels” or “terrorists”) that society must sacrifice for its hypermasculine leaders.  Such violence and desire draw on colonial identities of Self vs Other, patriotism vs treason, hunter vs prey, and masculinity vs femininity that are played out on the bodies of ordinary men and women.  We conclude with suggestions of a human security to displace the elite privilege that currently besets world politics.

 Introduction

…Today is a week, and seven is of heavens, gods, science.

evident out my kitchen window is an abstract reality.

sky where once was steel.

smoke where once was flesh…

– Suheir Hammad, “first writing since”[1]

 On September 11, 2001, terrorists struck at the heart of the capitalist world-order. The attack and its targets demonstrated with horrendous efficiency that neither global wealth (World Trade Center) nor military might (the Pentagon) could defend against low-tech, human sacrifices when mobilized. For this reason, September 11 has generalized a sense of insecurity that transcends the American state.  Three conventions established since the end of the Cold War now seem suspect: e.g., “US power reigns supreme,” “borders dissolve in a globalized world,” and “liberal capitalism secures prosperity, democracy, and stability for all.”  All ask now: “Whom can we trust?”

We need to broaden these understandings of power, borders, security, and wealth.   Charred remains from the World Trade Center (WTC) and Pentagon compel us to review power as more than just economic or military superiority.   Had the terrorists restricted themselves to this traditional, realist notion, they would have needed the backing of a state[2] or access to huge arsenals of military hardware to execute their plan.  They relied, instead, on box-cutters and a suicidal guerrilla tactic. Their comrades in the caves of Afghanistan brandished little more than outdated American and Soviet firepower.  Similarly, we need to adjust our definition of borders.  Many declare geographical demarcations obsolete under the state-straddling, market-binding strategies of neoliberal globalization.   Yet September 11 dramatizes the sovereignty of borders in our minds.  The terrorists attacked US hegemony to “protect” but really enclose Islamic culture and religion; likewise, the tragedies in New York and Washington, D.C., have reinscribed borders in the popular American imaginary, now translated into a war against terrorism.   Assumptions about  “national security” and “national wealth” also crumble in light of September 11. How could the world’s richest, most heavily-armed state have been so vulnerable?

We offer a postcolonial-feminist framework for understanding these events. It places power relations and identities within historical constructions of race, gender, class, and culture – most recently attenuated by Western colonialism and imperialism – to demonstrate how world politics reflects and sustains the global inequalities that signify daily life. Put differently, postcolonial-feminism theorizes about the material and ideological struggles of historically-situated agents in a neoliberal world economy.  Categories such as “Third World,” “the West,” “race,” “gender,” and so on are disassembled to promote an understanding and transformation of the transnational forces that shape social relations of power. 

Identity and its Discontents: Women and the Nation

By Deniz Kandiyoti

This paper was first published in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, (London: London School of Economics) 1991, Vol.20, No.3,  pp. 429-43 and is reprinted with permission from the author and publishers.

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to explore some contradictory implications of nationalist projects in post-colonial societies. It examines the extent to which elements of national identity and cultural difference are articulated as forms of control over women and which infringe upon their rights as enfranchised citizens.

Despite the extensive literature on nationalism, there are relatively few systematic attempts to analyse women’s integration into nationalist projects. The little there is conveys seemingly contradictory messages. Like Jayawardena, those who link the rise of feminist movements to anti-colonial and nationalist struggles note its coincidence with a move towards secularism and a broader concern with social reform.[1] Nationalist aspirations for popular sovereignty stimulate an extension of citizenship rights, clearly benefiting women. Since the emergence of women as citizens is also predicated upon the transformation of institutions and customs that keep them bound to the particularistic traditions of their ethnic and religious communities, the modern state is assumed to intervene as a homogenising agent which acts as a possible resource for more progressive gender politics.

In contrast, others expose state interventions as a sham by drawing attention to the purely instrumental agenda of nationalist policies that mobilise women when they are needed in the labour force or even at the front, only to return them to domesticity or to subordinate roles in the public sphere when the national emergency is over. The apparent convergence between the interests of men and the definition of national priorities leads some feminists to suggest that the state itself is a direct expression of men’s interests.[2]

Further, Yuval-Davis and Anthias convincingly argue that the control of women and their sexuality is central to national and ethnic processes.[3] Women bear the burden of being ‘mothers of the nation’ (a duty that gets ideologically defined to suit official priorities), as well as being those who reproduce the boundaries of ethnic/national groups, who transmit the culture and who are the privileged signifiers of national difference. The demands of the ‘nation’ may thus appear just as constraining as the tyranny of more primordial loyalties to lineage, tribe or kin, the difference being that such demands are enforced by the state and its legal administrative apparatus rather than by individual patriarchs.

These superficially divergent points of view share an important commonality: a recognition that the integration of women into modern ‘nationhood’, epitomised by citizenship in a sovereign nation-state, somehow follows a different trajectory from that of men. Where do the sources of this difference reside?

Reflections on the Gendering of States, Sovereignty and Security in the Study of International Relations

By Jan Jindy Pettman

 

1. In this article, I reflect upon struggles to ‘gender’ International Relations (IR), especially in relation to issues of states, sovereignty and security, using my own experiences in and around the discipline over the last forty years. I trace the long apparent absence of gender in IR, and the late coming of feminist scholarship to IR from the early 1990s.[1] I argue that feminist IR was well placed to respond to the crisis in scholarship, and in politics, generated by 9/11 and the ‘war on terror.’ I then identify some of the current challenges facing feminists researching security issues in Australia and ‘our region.’

2. As an undergraduate at the University of Adelaide in the early 1960s, International Relations drew me in, in part because its core problem appeared to be the problem of war, and war was always a problem for me. IR was founded as a separate discipline in the aftermath of the First World War, charged with analysing the causes of war and conditions for peace, so that such a war would not happen again. This normative strain and the centrality of war as a human and ethical issue was to become a minority issue, however, especially during the Cold War. When I began as a lecturer in IR in the mid-1960s, my favourite and hardest lectures were on war—beginning with the famous Waltz tome, Man, the State and War.[2] In contradistinction to the ‘scientific’ study of war—and ‘objective’ scholarship—dominant in IR, I worried through these lectures alongside my then-identification as a pacifist. War, the ultimate option for states seeking their own security and national interest (as their governments and elites saw them), seemed unjustifiable on moral grounds and dangerous or counter-productive on practical or political ones.

3. A rather different impulse, for me, and one even less evident in IR then, had to do with cultural difference, and whether and how that mattered in terms of the construction of states, nations and wars. This concern deepened as I lectured on African politics, in the midst of successive waves of decolonisation, in legal terms at least. I grew increasingly puzzled as to why the IR writings I was using either ignored ‘third world’ politics (except as an arena for US or UK or Australian foreign policy) and relegated them to development studies or area studies; or else, on rare occasions of attention, assumed that state building and international relations involving African states should replicate western ways of doing and being, when their cultural bases and political economies were so different. War, violence and peace, and identity, security and morality, seemed to me somehow intrinsically connected, even though IR scholars showed little interest in identity beyond states-and-citizens, or security in other than statist and military terms.  

4. At the same time my proto-feminist self was engaged in various protest movements, including those against the war in Vietnam, and against racism and colonialism. I was struggling to find ways to argue the rights, and obligations, of the scholar-activist, assuming a normative position and asserting the responsibility of all of us to acknowledge our own investments and interests in the work we do. For my part, my personal and political beliefs clearly directed my studies and choice of teaching and research areas. My learning about the history, contexts and politics of my chosen causes complicated my activism and increased my unease in the face of the simple truths of some local campaigning. My contact with international and indigenous activists in particular tested my academic knowledge-making and made me think more about everyday life and struggles, and the difficult business of alliance building.