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. 

Saidism Without Said: Orientalism and U.S. Diplomatic History

By Andrew J. Rotter

 

American diplomatic historians may not be interested in Edward Said, but he is interested in them. While Orientalism was primarily a study of British and French representations of Middle Eastern Others in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Said nevertheless devoted a good deal of space to the period after 1945, when American power supplanted that of Great Britain and France, and Americans, he argued, inherited the Western Orientalist apparatus. American Orientalism went well beyond vaguely populist stereotypes that Arabs or Muslims were prone to violence, incapable of rational thought, untrustworthy, devious, and unclean. Instead, “the Middle East experts who advise [U.S.] policymakers are imbued with Orientalism, almost to a person.” Since 1978, as Said has refined his thinking about imperialism and paid increasing attention to its American version, he has read broadly in the field of U.S. foreign relations. Footnotes in his Culture and Imperialism (1993) include works by William Appleman Williams, Richard Van Alstyne, Walter LaFeber, Michael Hunt, and Paul Kennedy, all of them scholars of American foreign relations.¹

Said’s interest in the history of U.S. foreign policy has apparently not been reciprocated. Articles published over the past twenty years in the journal Diplomatic History, house organ for the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), contain only a few references to Orientalism, most of them charitable but cursory. Akira Iriye, who has studied the influence of culture on United States–Japan relations in the twentieth century, made a glancing reference to Orientalism in his 1979 SHAFR presidential address. Diplomatic History frequently publishes pleas by senior historians for greater conceptual scope in the field. In one of these essays, John Lewis Gaddis managed to invoke Stephen Jay Gould, Freeman Dyson, and Douglas Adams—author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—but not Said. Michael Hunt called for “Internationalizing U.S. Diplomatic History” in 1991—without Said. In a 1994 essay, Emily S. Rosenberg used cultural analysis, in a manner reminiscent of Said, to connect two post–World War II films to international relations. Responding, Bruce Kuklick referred to a passage in Rosenberg’s article as “intellectual junk, the mental equivalent to eating at McDonald’s.” “Cultural studies,” he concluded, “needs to do serious research to be more than a trick.” In the spring of 1998, the published version of Rosenberg’s SHAFR presidential address included the single most useful footnote (n. 2) in the brief history of “culturalist” U.S. foreign relations. But it did not mention Said.²

Extend the boundaries a bit, and the story is much the same. Of roughly thirty recent books on U.S.–Middle East relations since 1945, only three refer to Orientalism, and two of these concern U.S. relations with Iran, hardly the centerpiece of Said’s analysis. Over the past six years, the Journal of American History has published several articles on diplomacy; only one referred to Orientalism. Nor are diplomatic historians alone in the profession in their apparent neglect of Said. Outside of professional journals, few historians reviewed Orientalism. Said has been highly influential on the Subaltern Studies group, and Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman have credited Orientalism with inaugurating “colonial discourse theory,” or postcolonial studies. While some practitioners in this field are trained in history, most mainstream historians would regard the definition of the postcolonial—”a specifically anti- or post-colonial discursive purchase in culture, one which begins in the moment that the colonising power inscribes itself onto the body and space of its Others and which continues as an often occluded tradition into the modern theatre of neo-colonialist international relations”—with a bafflement they normally reserve for descriptions of highway engineering or haute couture. Said’s influence on cultural studies and anthropology has not seemingly been matched by any obvious comparable impact on history.³

Liberalism, Imperialism, And Empire1

By David Long

 

In a series of books and articles in newspapers and magazines, Michael Ignatieff has embraced the concept of empire as a way of understanding, contextualizing, and justifying Western intervention in less developed countries in terms of liberal ideas of democracy, human rights, and good governance. More precisely, empire is a means to end genocide and ethnic cleansing as well as removing the challenge of certain rogue states such as Iraq.

To some, Ignatieffs assertive, interventionist discourse seems like an outlier to liberal discourse on international relations. Liberalism is commonly accused of avoiding discussions, let alone justifications, of the use of force in international relations. Liberals generally focus on peace, interdependence, and the importance of commerce to international relations. Ignatieff has not only criticized the use of force in international relations as a means of repression, marginalization, or elimination of populations, but he has also supported its use in order to address international maladies through peace enforcement and humanitarian intervention. Is Ignatieff just an anomaly, to use social scientific terminology, or is his approach more representative of a tendency within liberal thinking on international relations? And if he is representative of a liberal tendency, what does this mean for our understanding of liberalism in international relations, especially liberal international theory today and its approach to global order and justice?

Ignatieffs liberal imperialism is intriguing for a variety of reasons. First of all, for many liberals, liberal imperialism is an oxymoron because liberalism and imperialism are opposed to one another. Liberalism as a political doctrine is thought by its advocates to be associated with freedom, peace, and democracy. Imperialism, by contrast, is generally considered by these same liberals to be associated with the very opposite: oppression, war, and tyranny. In this paper, I consider the roots of the phrase liberal imperialism and whether this opposition is really as axiomatic as liberals consider it today. I do so by comparing the relationship between liberalism and imperialism, especially the justification of liberal imperialism, in the writings of Ignatieff with those of another prominent liberal, J.A. Hobson. Hobson, an English liberal publicist, wrote a series of books and articles over a period of more than fifty years, from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.

The purpose of comparing Hobson and Ignatieffs discussions of imperialism and empire is to look at the approach of two important liberal intellectuals and publicists, each of whom has had a significant influence on liberal discourse on international issues, and the theory and practice of international relations more generally. This paper does not purport to be a comprehensive overview of either authors political or economic thought, let alone a more general history of the development of liberal thinking on international affairs. It is more in the style of comparative statics than of a longitudinal study. The aim of the comparison is to highlight important features in these liberals approaches to imperialism and empire in order to indicate common themes and point out contrasts.