Topic outline
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Definitions
Semiotic—in general usage, the theory and study of signs and symbols, especially those with social relevance (The Macquarie Dictionary 1991).
Genotext—In Kristeva, semiotic, translinguistic layer of meaning (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 1999).
Chora—In Kristeva, the translinguistic, semiotic space where subjectivity is generated (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 1999:478).
Humanism—the understanding that human beings have a special place in the world and a unique set of capacities and abilities which cannot be understood by reference to nature or divinity (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 1999).
Abjection—'in the work of Julia Kristeva, the abject is that which challenges the subject's sense of fixity and stability (for example, flows that cross the perimeter of the body, such as blood, vomit, sweat and semen). Metaphorically, the abject extends to all transgression of boundaries, such as ambiguity and ambivalence' (Mansfield, 2000:181).
Essentialism—the view that objects have essences, and that there is a distinction between what is essential and what is non-essential or accidental (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 1999).
Symbolic order—systematic rules governing denotative and propositional speech (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 1999).
Introduction
In the earlier topic on feminist methodologies we found that feminist empiricism and standpoint feminisms have argued that existing scientific and social science knowledge reflects the point of view of the men who have written it, with accompanying negative political consequences for women. This insight informs what is often referred to as 'feminist epistemology' which aims to remedy this situation by offering a methodological approach that can provide a more accurate reflection of women's lives in order to facilitate the emancipation of women. Feminist epistemology aims to uncover the silenced or marginalised voices of women, or to critically interrogate the discourse of women in order to understand how it both reflects and disrupts the unequal social relations characteristic of capitalism and patriarchy.
In this topic we will consider feminist challenges to this point of view from structuralist and post structuralist feminisms. The influence of structuralist and post structuralist thought led feminists to question the idea that knowledge about women can be attained by investigating lived experience, and to place a greater emphasis upon understanding the language that shapes gendered subjectivity. French feminists, discussed here in relation to the thought of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, understand that language reflects and privileges masculinity and denigrates qualities and traits associated with the feminine, with consequences for both male and female subjectivity. The means by which this is or can be subverted by the feminine is the subject of French feminisms. The topics on structuralism, especially Lacan, and the post structuralist thinkers will be useful revision for understanding French feminism. The thought of Judith Butler, and her critique of Kristeva and Irigaray, will be taken up int he last part of the topic. Butler's work subverts the link between sex and identity, and between identity and politics altogether.
Psychoanalysis and French feminisms
The thought of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has had a profound impact on French psychoanalytic feminism. As discussed in the topic on structuralism, Lacan aimed to rework Freud, but with the added insights provided by Suassure. An important part of this reworking was an explanation of the formation of gendered subjectivity, a brief review of which will assist greatly in understanding the work of Kristeva and Irigaray.
- For Freud, the penis is the marker of sexual difference, and it is the marker of masculine power. Male subjectivity is governed by the understanding that ownership of the penis grants access to male power. For Freud, male subjectivity revolves around fear of the loss of the penis or castration, represented by the mother and by women in general.
- For Lacan, gendered subjectivity emerges not in relation to anatomy, but to language. It is the take up of an identity within the field of signification, and not the physical entry of the father into the mother-child relation, that, for Lacan, marks the critical moment in gendered subjectivity.
- The father then becomes the metaphor for the symbolic order in Lacan which intrudes into the space of oneness prior to the mirror phase. The mother is the metaphor for the space prior to subjectivation, and for the 'real', the realm of bodily desires and sensations which cannot be articulated in language.
- For Lacan, the privileged term within the symbolic order is the phallus which refers not to a physical organ as for Freud, but to a position and to an ideal within language. The phallus symbolises the preference within our language for unified, total, stable, and complete meaning and purpose. For Lacan, the phallus, also referred to as the 'Name-of-the-Father' or the law, is also reflected in the 'transcendental signifier', or the 'I' within language. For Lacan, the phallus is the overarching ideal upon which the symbolic order revolves; it constitutes the field of common sense, or the 'phallocentric order'.
- But Lacan, following Suassure, understands that the symbolic order is empty of essential meaning, meaning emerges only within the field of differences among signs within the sign system.
- Masculinity and phallocentric preferences do not therefore refer to essential qualities, but become meaningful only in relation to other terms within the sign system, and critically in relation to the feminine which stands in for everything the masculine is not.
- The signs for femininity, feminine qualities and for woman stand for absence, emptiness, and lack, woman is what man is not within the symbolic order.
- It was this understanding that led Lacan to famously conclude that 'woman does not exist'. Just as for masculinity, there is no essential referent in a real world expressed in the feminine and within the sign system; femininity is the undefined other of the masculine.
Kristeva and Irigaray then, in different ways, attempt to explain and understand the role of the feminine within the formation of subjectivty, within language and within human culture.
Julia Kristeva (b 1941)
From Mansfield, N 2000, Subjectivity: Theories of the self from Freud to Haraway, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, pp. 79-91.
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian born linguist, psychoanalyst and novelist. Her central contribution to social thought is her semiotic theory which draws on Lacan, Freud, Jakobson, Chomsky, Saussure, Pierce, Hjelmslev and Bhaktin.
Kristeva theorises a dangerous, destabilising, incomplete and discontinuous process for the development of subjectivity. Within this theorisation two concepts are central: the 'semiotic' and 'abjection'.
The 'semiotic' in Kristeva has a distinctive usage. For Kristeva, the semiotic:
- is a psychic place or space that exists before the symbolic;
- is undefined, unlike the rule-governed system of the symbolic order of language;
- contains unconscious drives;
- is pre-discursive, pre-Oedipal, pre-symbolic;
- preserves the flows that defy the boundaries of the symbolic;
- is a site of resistance to the symbolic continually threatening to undermine rational discourse;
- provides the conditions of possibility for the symbolic;
- is linked to the maternal and to the stage in psychic development the child experiences when it is in union with the mother's body;
- is not specific to women, but is a psychic position;
- however the semiotic mode is more dominant in the female psyche, than the male psyche;
- is expressed in infant babble, rhythm, melody, and gesture; or in adult word play.
Kristeva then theorises the feminine as a kind of subversive, subterranean sea underpinning the symbolic order and constantly challenging and upsetting the symbolic order.
Central tenets of Kristeva's thought on abjection:
- The unconscious represents a zone of repressed material that resurfaces in dreams, slips of the tongue and neurotic symptoms.
- The unconscious is not as repressed as Freud thought, but hovers at the edge of the subject's self-definition at all times.
- Subjectivity is in fact highly unstable; continually threatened by the unconscious.
- For example, the association of the self with a body that is clearly separated from the outside world by a clean, proper, contained skin is continually disrupted by the reality of our physicality.
- The body continually disrupts the boundaries of the self by leaking (tears, urine, sweat, blood, vomit, semen) into its apparent outside upsetting the sense of unity.
- The ability of bodily flows to disrupt or challenge the sense of a unified self explains the repulsion we feel towards them.
- We continually attempt to defend a fragile, provisional and unstable sense of subjectivity.
- This defensiveness or 'abjection' leads to anxiety about frontiers, boundaries and separations of all kinds.
- Whatever can be seen to cross lines, to belong to both sides, to blur or question demarcations, is unsettling to us.
- This is true at all levels including the abstract, physical, and metaphorical.
- The human corpse powerfully evokes abjection because it brings together life and death, presence and absence, love and repulsion, happiness and dismay.
- Abjection refers to the horror and phobia, the intense reactions provoked by the destabilisation of all forms of order, meaning, truth and law.
- Social order, the insistence on one truth, one law, one nation, one God, and one answer, are all attempts to deny or disguise abjection.
- At the same time that we abhor transgressing the lines, there is a simultaneous desire to break down defined borders and ordered processes.
- Subjectivity is always accompanied by an impulse towards fragmentation, ambiguity and ambivalence.
- Abjection offers freedom from oppression, from the logic that dominates us and keeps us contained, and operating within the lines.
- This flirtation with what is off-limits explains our fascination and pleasure in horror, violence, criminality, subterfuge, and social non-conformity in popular culture.
- However, abjection also explains why people could be manipulated by Fascism and Nazism.
For Kristeva then, subjectivity involves a powerful impulse to accept the terms of the symbolic order, but this is constantly being undermined by the semiotic. The semiotic is the site of resistance of the symbolic. Kristeva recommends an avant-garde form of political writing that articulates a new discursive practice, upon which a new political practice can be built, one that takes the pre-symbolic realm into account.
Luce Irigaray (b 1932)
From Mansfield, N 2000, Subjectivity: Theories of the self from Freud to Haraway, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, pp. 69-72, and Lechte, J (ed) 2008, Fifty key contemporary thinkers: From structuralism post-humanism, second edition, Routledge, London.
Luce Irigaray, a Belgian born feminist, philosopher, linguist, and Lacanian psychoanalyst was not satisfied with simply observing the actions of a feminised, unconscious other, but aimed to articulate a new language with which to articulate a feminine imaginary.
Some key points of Irigaray's thought:
- The feminine as the opposite sign of the masculine is not defined on its own terms, but in terms of its lack of those terms associated with the masculine.
- The feminine is associated in language with instability, disorder, incoherence, irrationality and falsehood.
- There is really only one sex, the masculine, because it is the universal referent.
- Masculinity and masculine culture is obsessed with and anxious about the phallus (and the one truth), its erection, unity, strength and above all its visibility (women’s genitals represent horror as there is ‘nothing to see’).
- A phallomorphic economy values the visible, unity, stability, consistency and completion, and rejects what is incongruous, jarring, asymmetrical, arbitrary and unfinished.
- Lacan's symbolic order speaks to the imaginary of men.
- Because the symbolic order imagines women as lacking, egalitarian measures are destined to reproduce this representation at their origin.
- Alternatively, women are forced to be like men, or to 'speak like men'. Not to do so would risk psychosis.
- Women have a difficult status as non subjects, making it difficult for them to represent themselves to themselves on their own terms, and not in the terms given to them by the masculine order.
- It is necessary to subvert the hegemony of the masculine order which silences and oppresses women and the feminine.
- A 'feminine imaginary' can provide a positive counter system to the phallic order, and a positive identity for women.
- The metaphor of the female genitals can be used in this project (among other strategies). This does not refer to an essential femininity common to women, but to a specific gender identity within a specific historical context. The project aims to sybolise women and the feminine on its own terms.
- The feminine imaginary, unlike the unity of the masculine, is plural and dynamic. A woman ‘touches herself’ constantly without anyone being able to forbid her to do so, for her sex is composed of two lips which embrace continually. Thus, within herself she is 'already two − but not divisible into ones − who stimulate each other'.
- The cultural preference here is for tangible, continuous touching, forever open in terms of time and space. It does not seek division between the self and the outside, but incorporates the other within the self, exulting in endlessly renewable internal difference and ambiguity.
- The feminine celebrates multiplicity, becoming, flows, rhythms, difference and the body.
Irigaray is writing in a tradition that accepts and seeks to define content for the subject, and specifically to find a new imaginary with which to express feminine subjectivity. Irigaray's thought has been challenged by feminists who seek to decentre the subject.
Judith Butler (b 1956)
From Mansfield, N 2000, Subjectivity: Theories of the self from Freud to Haraway, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, Wikipedia
Butler's critique of Kristeva and Irigaray:
- Kristeva's conceptualisation of the maternal semiotic is pre cultural and essentialist because it is seen to exist prior to the symbolic.
- In fact, the semiotic and the conception of a maternal realm that precedes the subject is itself a product of discourse.
- In Kristeva we find the same oppositions of biological, maternal with symbolic, Law of the Father, and, since in Kristeva, the semiotic only finds expression in intelligible meaning in infancy, or after intelligible meaning in psychosis, the feminine is once again rendered unintelligible, natural, outside what is 'normal'.
- Kristeva's theorisation of the semiotic reproduces dominant associations of femininity with the maternal and with forces of chaos, and over generalises the theory of abjection to all cultures and eras.
- Irigaray's conceptualisation of a 'self-identical being' reifies existing gender culture.
For Butler, theorisations of subjectivity, like that offered by both Kristeva and Irigaray, deny the heterogenous ways in which sexed bodies are disciplined across different historical and cultural time periods.
Judith Butler's work:
- is more influenced by Foucault than Lacan;
- does not attempt to understand the world beyond discourse;
- subverts the centrality of the category ‘woman’ and identity in general to feminist politics;
- emphasizes the incommensurability of different experiences to the category ‘women’;
- finds sympathy among many ‘difference’ and ‘third world’ scholars who equate the desire for sisterhood with white, middle class women;
- subverts the sex/gender distinction.
Key tenet's of Butler's thought:
- There is no 'real', 'true' or 'original' ground of sexual identity prior to culture.
- The body and its leakages do not come before the symbolic threatening to disrupt the symbolic. The discrete body is a product of discourse whose repulsions and prohibitions against its fluidity enables it to be imagined as bounded.
- Biological sex difference is not the determinant of masculinity and femininity.
- We can only think about biology within existing cultural rules which divide everything into two strict categories. (References to bodies as ‘it’ are unthinkable and, paradoxically, gender ambiguity at birth is deemed ‘unnatural’).
- Culture insists that there are two kinds of bodies and that these two 'types' of bodies pre-exist culture.
- The subject has no fixed content.
- Womanliness and manliness are cultural performances with no underlying structure or essence. Gender is continually open to re-signification.
- Discourse about what it is to be a ‘normal’ woman and man provide the basis upon which we regulate our appearance, gestures, and behaviour.
- Drag is not misogynistic as many feminists argue, but subversive because it demonstrates the performative nature of sexed identity.
- Nor is the performance of gender merely social conformism. The performance is strictly policed. Failure to adapt is met with social isolation, mockery, violence, rape, even death.
- Fixing the content of the subject always has disciplinary effects.
- Feminist attempts to represent 'women' and 'women's interests' is politically dangerous.
- The category 'women' and 'women's interests' presumes a universal experience and ignores cultural particularities.
- Essentialist politics need to be replaced with coalitional politics.
- Coalitional politics involves a critique of gender identity and the categories 'women'.
Queer theory
Queer theory is influenced by the thought of Foucault and Butler. Central tenets of queer theory:
- questions the relationship between sexuality and identity, and between identity and politics;
- seeks to transcend a politics based upon a common sexual identity;
- advocates a politics that embraces plurality and diversity, encompassing differences based on race, class, colour as well as sexual practice (bisexuality, sadomasochism, cross-dressing, transsexuality and transvestism);
- rejects the possibility of any essential ground for sexuality;
- allows for a discussion of (though not all sectors of queer condone) apparently ‘perverted’ practices such as sadomasochism, fetishism, coprophilia, and bestiality.
Conclusion
For modernist feminisms women's shared point of view is grounded in the specific social situation of women. This then becomes the basis for a feminist politics.
For psychoanalytic feminists, the symbolic order posits 'woman' as a traded object in opposition to a unified and bounded masculine subject, and associates the feminine with a series of negative terms in relation to the masculine. This necessitates a new politics of subjectivity to enable 'feminine' desires and ways of being to be expressed by both men and women, a politics in which unity and otherness based on separation and difference are displaced. French feminisms postulate an alternate feminine realm or language that disrupts or offers an unsettling alternative to the dominant phallic linguistic order.
Poststructuralist feminists like Judith Butler argue that even the postulation of an alternative feminine is itself discursive, and cannot represent anything 'real' or 'essential' about the world or the feminine, suggesting a purely context driven analysis of gender and gender relations. Feminist politics, indeed subversive politics of any kind, in this analysis, must emerge from coalitional politics in which different interests come together to achieve specific aims.
References
Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Second Edition, 1999. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Grosz, E 1990, ‘Contemporary theories of power and subjectivity’, in Feminist Knowledge: Critique and construct, edited by Sneja Gunew, Routledge, New York.
Lechte, J (ed) 2008, Fifty key contemporary thinkers: From structuralism t post-humanism, second edition, Routledge, London.
Mansfield, N 2000, Subjectivity: Theories of the self from Freud to Haraway, Allen and Unwin, Sydney.
This web resource was developed by Wendy Bastalich.
