Month: October 2013

The discourse of feminisms (in plural) is definitely an aspect that is many times overlooked when observing the way women have come to terms with their identity and establish their place in a political, private, public and intimate contexts. Questioning structures of power and inequality not always results in the simple elimination of the external force that install such structures, as Rubin says in her introduction (770), because our own perspective is also destabilized, renewed and redefined in the process. The emancipation and awareness is also painful for women who have lived with the belief of achieving happiness as long as the foundation of social relations, unequal or equal, remains intact.

Far from a unified, homogeneous movement, Western feminism reproduced the same structure of negligence to different determinations that affect women inside the movement. Lorde (856) looked into her own case when explaining all the layers that interact in her identity and its implications: African American (or Black to be more precise), lesbian, women and how not even African American literature is included in women’s literature or any literature course in general in her critique to the movement from the inside. Heng reveals in a similar way the dynamics and determinations that the State, society and the market play in the development of particular feminisms in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, usually judged by Western feminists for not following a confrontational, opposed-to-the-state activism or for having ground in the tradition or folklore as archaic ideas, ignoring the need for legitimation in the local context.

The complexity toward adopting and defending feminist ideals in the 3rd world also includes the “theoretical dependence” taboo that undermines any serious attempt to question ancient frames of thought and representation. When I lived in Colombia  in the 1990s and volunteered in an shelter for abused women, the executive board was always afraid of adopting a feminist approach as the organization would be seen as copying a foreign discourse that has no sustainable ground in Colombian society, and the same women in need might refuse to ask for help. Another fear was to be perceived as “too leftist”. Since the organization received funding from the government, they wanted to avoid being identified as a guerrilla-supporter- organization. In that case, we can observe how male oppression is not the only determinant in the emergence, development and survival of a movement that need to recognize all the variables (social stigma, economic and political conditions) at play in specific contexts.

Something interesting that I also observed while was there was the different attitudes and contradictions toward self-proclaimed “feminist”. The first reaction women and men had toward the feminist was that she was miserable, bitter, lesbian and that was raped once at least. Surprisingly, women in Colombia are encouraged to study and work although there is still inequality in a lot of areas (i.e. salary), but it is still expected that they carry out all domestic tasks if there are not female maids around. Usually, when this structure is questioned by a girl, is another woman (the mother) who corrects the deviant behavior. I always thought our emancipation in the public sphere (vote, representation) served to increase our burden as it was not accompanied by education and acceptance in the private/intimate sphere.  Of course, this does mean we have to go back in order to be the “angel of the house” and have an “easier” life, but to be aware about internal mindsets in both women and men about feminism.

It seems especially fitting that our feminism week of readings falls at a time when some of the main news headlines are the one year anniversary of sixteen year old Malala Yousafzai’s shooting at the hands of the Taliban in Swat Valley in Pakistan (She was targeted for going to school, something the Taliban does not believe girls should do and also because of her family’s outspoken opinions on the importance of girls’ education – her dad was the head of the school that she attended. Just this week, the Taliban issued a new threat saying they will kill her. More information and different links can be found on her Wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malala_Yousafzai) and Alice Munro being the first Canadian woman to win a Nobel prize in literature (she is the first Canadian citizen and only the 13^th woman to win the award; here is a link to her first post-award interview:  http://m.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/nobel-prize-win-was-totally-unexpected-alice-munro-says/article14850233/?service=mobile#!/

The line most pertinent of our readings this week is also my personal favourite line in the whole article: “[The local paper] called [Munro] a “shy housewife,” [her husband] recalled, and “boy was she ever mad”. It was also interesting that Mr. James Munro identified her as a “feminist before feminism was invented”).

I thought the readings that we were assigned provided a great overview of a complex and fluid phenomenon. As all of our readings underlined, ‘feminism’ is cannot be wholly encapsulated by a single definition or categorization. Hélène Cixous describes gender representation as an oppositional tradition in which women are portrayed as secondary to male rationalist principles and she argues that both men and women can take up the practice of what she calls ‘feminine writing’,  while Gayle Rubin provides what I find to be an extremely helpful explanation of the points of both connection and dissonance to the principles outlined by Marx, Engels and psychoanalytic theory, all the while arguing for us to push these theories further, define them more precisely, and pick up where they left off. Luce Irigaray focuses on the subordination of the feminine within the discourse of power by discussing the masculine idealizing tendency “that uses the feminine as a mirror for its own narcissistic speculations” (795), while Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar focus specifically on taking a look at the literary canon and argue that the majority of images of women in literature are really reflections of “negative energies and desires on the part of male writers” (812). Audre Lorde challenges the often cited homogeneity of women’s experience by stating the necessity of also taking into account “differences of race, sexual preferences, class and age” (855). She explains that it is not only a room of one’s own (in Virginia Woolf’s defense, financial independence for women and having the means to support yourself was a huge part of her argument as well) that a woman needs in order to produce fiction, but also “reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time” (855). Lorde also keenly underscores that differences between African-American women are being misnamed and used to separate the members of the community for one another, a practice that she identifies as a danger that must stop. Geraldine Heng provides a focus on the movement of liberation of women in Third World contexts, and she makes the poignant argument that feminist movements in the Third World have “almost always grown out of the same historical soil, and at a similar historical movement, as nationalism” (862). Heng also specifies that it is “a truism that nationalist movements have historically supported women’s issues as part of a process of social inclusion, in order to yoke the mass energy of as many community groups as possible to the nationalism cause (as cited in Anderson 1983). This wide variation speaks to me of the fluidity of the movement and of the need that it constantly has to adapt to political and social circumstances – and I don’t believe that this is a need that belongs only to feminism; I rather believe that this is the principal technique that a movement manages to stay relevant and useful; this grassroots connection to the ones it aims to empower is absolutely crucial in my opinion.

 

It seems especially fitting that our feminism week of readings falls at a time when some of the main news headlines are the one year anniversary of sixteen year old Malala Yousafzai’s shooting at the hands of the Taliban in Swat Valley in Pakistan (She was targeted for going to school, something the Taliban does not believe girls should do and also because of her family’s outspoken opinions on the importance of girls’ education – her dad was the head of the school that she attended. Just this week, the Taliban issued a new threat saying they will kill her. More information and different links can be found on her Wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malala_Yousafzai) and Alice Munro being the first Canadian woman to win a Nobel prize in literature (she is the first Canadian citizen and only the 13^th woman to win the award; here is a link to her first post-award interview:  http://m.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/nobel-prize-win-was-totally-unexpected-alice-munro-says/article14850233/?service=mobile#!/

The line most pertinent of our readings this week is also my personal favourite line in the whole article: “[The local paper] called [Munro] a “shy housewife,” [her husband] recalled, and “boy was she ever mad”. It was also interesting that Mr. James Munro identified her as a “feminist before feminism was invented”).

I thought the readings that we were assigned provided a great overview of a complex and fluid phenomenon. As all of our readings underlined, ‘feminism’ is cannot be wholly encapsulated by a single definition or categorization. Hélène Cixous describes gender representation as an oppositional tradition in which women are portrayed as secondary to male rationalist principles and she argues that both men and women can take up the practice of what she calls ‘feminine writing’,  while Gayle Rubin provides what I find to be an extremely helpful explanation of the points of both connection and dissonance to the principles outlined by Marx, Engels and psychoanalytic theory, all the while arguing for us to push these theories further, define them more precisely, and pick up where they left off. Luce Irigaray focuses on the subordination of the feminine within the discourse of power by discussing the masculine idealizing tendency “that uses the feminine as a mirror for its own narcissistic speculations” (795), while Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar focus specifically on taking a look at the literary canon and argue that the majority of images of women in literature are really reflections of “negative energies and desires on the part of male writers” (812). Audre Lorde challenges the often cited homogeneity of women’s experience by stating the necessity of also taking into account “differences of race, sexual preferences, class and age” (855). She explains that it is not only a room of one’s own (in Virginia Woolf’s defense, financial independence for women and having the means to support yourself was a huge part of her argument as well) that a woman needs in order to produce fiction, but also “reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time” (855). Lorde also keenly underscores that differences between African-American women are being misnamed and used to separate the members of the community for one another, a practice that she identifies as a danger that must stop. Geraldine Heng provides a focus on the movement of liberation of women in Third World contexts, and she makes the poignant argument that feminist movements in the Third World have “almost always grown out of the same historical soil, and at a similar historical movement, as nationalism” (862). Heng also specifies that it is “a truism that nationalist movements have historically supported women’s issues as part of a process of social inclusion, in order to yoke the mass energy of as many community groups as possible to the nationalism cause (as cited in Anderson 1983). This wide variation speaks to me of the fluidity of the movement and of the need that it constantly has to adapt to political and social circumstances – and I don’t believe that this is a need that belongs only to feminism; I rather believe that this is the principal technique that a movement manages to stay relevant and useful; this grassroots connection to the ones it aims to empower is absolutely crucial in my opinion.

 

As Bakhtin says in his Discourse in the Novel, ¨the novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types, sometimes even diversity of languages and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized.¨ From the dialogues between the characters in the novel, traces of the social status, mentality, beliefs, ideology… of those characters and their conflicts can be discovered by the subtile combination of their words. This combination may be thought as artificial for it is formed by the author, consciously or unconsciously, thus the tone of the author is difficult to be neutral.

I am always fascinated by those classics which present or invent a complete society which is quite similar to mine but with a distance. In these societies of the books, there are always numerous characters with different personalities and ambient which make those characters each a complete individual but indifferent as a whole; there are traditions, religions and standards, harmony on the surface, everybody is doing what they should do, but you can always find out some small fragments or words which reveal the latent inconsistency and many times even the character himself doesn’t realize. Those discourse in the novel present us a relatively multi-dimension observation, or a awaken, or a diversity of the others’s speech, and therefore we temporally get rid of the father’s word and question about our own monologue. Probably if we take time to think about our own monologues, we can somehow get the tolerance, just like in the dreams we get some kind of remedy for the inconsistency.

In all of our readings this week that discussed ideology, there was one example that I kept seeing over and over again: religion.  In Bakhtin’s Discourse in the Novel, religion was one of the main examples of what he calls authoritative discourse: a discourse that is given societal importance and prevails as a historical, significant form of discourse.  In the following two readings, religion is also named as a chief example of how ‘ideology’ works and how it can be so naive and narrow-minded.

As a person raised in the church, I found these examples a bit funny based on their context.  I promise that this isn’t coming from a self-righteous place – I haven’t been to church in years and wrestle with religion every day.  Allow me to tell you what it is like to go to church as a kid, for many people, and why these readings were interesting to me.

On the whole, kids don’t like church.   It’s long, it’s boring, and there is a lot of singing (sometimes in Latin, which kids also do not like).  They fidget and they whine the entire time.  I know, because I was this child, and my friends were these children.  Why, then, did I go to church?  Simple: because my parents told me to.  And I subsequently grew up believing in the lessons that were taught to me in church, because that’s the environment in which I was raised.  This is a gross generalization, but the way that I saw it was: you went to church because your family went to church, and you didn’t question it.

As many of my church friends have grown older, they have stopped going to church.  Many of them, however, still believe in God.  Their answer to why that is often falls in the category of “it’s just something that I believe in, and I can’t explain why.”  Authoritative discourse at work, ladies and gentlemen.

This term, ‘authoritative discourse’, continued to irk me throughout the week, and it’s only today that I’ve realized why that is.  I’ve been thinking back to the reading in which we discussed, to use my term, “super authors.”  Authors like Marx and Freud, as well as their texts, fall absolutely, without a doubt, into the realm of authoritative discourse.  After all, their “authority was already acknowledged in the past.  It is a prior discourse.  It is therefore not a question of choosing it from among other possible discourses” (Rivkin and Ryan 683).  Regardless of whether their writings are “internally persuasive” (and they very well may be), authors like Marx and Freud established the space for discourse to happen.  They aren’t just a prior discourse in many cases – they are the initial discourse, and therein lies their reputability.

Marx and Freud are recognized widely as two “parents” of discourse.  We’ve all been raised on their theories.  They provide us with a theoretical foundation, and help us to evaluate and attempt to make sense of the world around us.  What, then, makes them so different from the parents that kept us sitting calmly in our pews?

Hegel’s philosophy seems to be mainly a method for thinking. The question regarding knowledge has an enormous tradition. For Aquinas for instance the only method of knowledge was analogy. From the analogy of Being of Aquinas, which states that we can only know, God for example,through a system of comparables, or through proportions in Kant’s philosophy, we pass towards Hegel’ dialects which generally speaking does not imply anymore a system of oppositions, but rather one of inclusion where the universal includes the particular. In other words, in Hegel’s view he negation itself contains the positive that has been negated. For him there isn’t contrariety, there is one and the multiple, there isn’t universal and particular, but rather the universal of the particular. Between the two concepts there is a relation, a mediation. There is positive in the negative, because for instance, the non a contains already a. We can no longer talk about an opposition, the finite is not the opposite of the infinite (the finite is already a reference system for the infinite right because the finite is contained in the word infinite). Consequently the relation between the two concepts is rather a transition, which can no longer be finite or infinite, it is rather the very movement between them. In the case of the double negation : the finite is not nonfinite, what surfaces is the positive, because copula to be is transitive. In other words “is” does not have a meaning in itself, it is right the transitivity between finite and infinite. But if what surfaces is the positive (the negation of a negation) we could say that the finite is the infinite, or that the argument is an infinite with a finite in itself. But this transition is not a backwards perspective, it is rather the synthesis of those two positions. The two concepts become circular and the result obtained is an elevated one. So if the infinite has already the finite in itself and if the first one is preserved in the second one in its very negation what we obtain is a third, elevated term : the finite is the infinite. This synthesis, this third element was missing in Aquinas analogy or in Kant’s proportion. For example the goodness of God could be problematized only as the relation between two terms, human goodness and God’s goodness. In Heidegger’s view the infinite is already present in the finite right because it made it (and here apparently all ontological difference seems to be abolished) and in that respect Hegel’s dialectics could be considered pure immanentism. But that not what Hegel says. The distance ontic-ontological is only a formal one, because two concepts does not exist in themselves, what exists is the mediation between them. For Heidegger being is its negation, but that means it is the very Being because it contains it. Or in other words the being is the phenomenalisation of the Being. So the consciousness goes through different reductions and it gets to the last reduction which is the ethics of the spirit, but when it gets to the very limit of the consciousness that very limit is the Sipirit in its manifestation or phenomenalisation. Consequently if we analyze the dialectic method to the consciousness and we infer that consciousness is its negation what we get to is one more time a third element, elevated, the synthesis : consciousness is the Spirit. This sounds pretty cool to me. So what is beyond consciousness, its negation can not be still consciousness but the very Spirit. Or to use Kant’s terminology we move from the sensibil aperceptiv through the aperceptiv to the pure consciousness, or the transcendental ego, which is similar with Husserl’s phenomenological reduction. In Marx philosophy this Spirit becomes the spirit of classes, something that is above individual consciousness. But in order to be accepted as a philosophical reduction that spirit of the classes should be indeterminate, and in that respect Marx is later going to be criticized by Agamben.

Hegel’s philosophy seems to be mainly a method for thinking. The question regarding knowledge has an enormous tradition. For Aquinas for instance the only method of knowledge was analogy. From the analogy of Being of Aquinas, which states that we can only know, God for example,through a system of comparables, or through proportions in Kant’s philosophy, we pass towards Hegel’ dialects which generally speaking does not imply anymore a system of oppositions, but rather one of inclusion where the universal includes the particular. In other words, in Hegel’s view he negation itself contains the positive that has been negated. For him there isn’t contrariety, there is one and the multiple, there isn’t universal and particular, but rather the universal of the particular. Between the two concepts there is a relation, a mediation. There is positive in the negative, because for instance, the non a contains already a. We can no longer talk about an opposition, the finite is not the opposite of the infinite (the finite is already a reference system for the infinite right because the finite is contained in the word infinite). Consequently the relation between the two concepts is rather a transition, which can no longer be finite or infinite, it is rather the very movement between them. In the case of the double negation : the finite is not nonfinite, what surfaces is the positive, because copula to be is transitive. In other words “is” does not have a meaning in itself, it is right the transitivity between finite and infinite. But if what surfaces is the positive (the negation of a negation) we could say that the finite is the infinite, or that the argument is an infinite with a finite in itself. But this transition is not a backwards perspective, it is rather the synthesis of those two positions. The two concepts become circular and the result obtained is an elevated one. So if the infinite has already the finite in itself and if the first one is preserved in the second one in its very negation what we obtain is a third, elevated term : the finite is the infinite. This synthesis, this third element was missing in Aquinas analogy or in Kant’s proportion. For example the goodness of God could be problematized only as the relation between two terms, human goodness and God’s goodness. In Heidegger’s view the infinite is already present in the finite right because it made it (and here apparently all ontological difference seems to be abolished) and in that respect Hegel’s dialectics could be considered pure immanentism. But that not what Hegel says. The distance ontic-ontological is only a formal one, because two concepts does not exist in themselves, what exists is the mediation between them. For Heidegger being is its negation, but that means it is the very Being because it contains it. Or in other words the being is the phenomenalisation of the Being. So the consciousness goes through different reductions and it gets to the last reduction which is the ethics of the spirit, but when it gets to the very limit of the consciousness that very limit is the Sipirit in its manifestation or phenomenalisation. Consequently if we analyze the dialectic method to the consciousness and we infer that consciousness is its negation what we get to is one more time a third element, elevated, the synthesis : consciousness is the Spirit. This sounds pretty cool to me. So what is beyond consciousness, its negation can not be still consciousness but the very Spirit. Or to use Kant’s terminology we move from the sensibil aperceptiv through the aperceptiv to the pure consciousness, or the transcendental ego, which is similar with Husserl’s phenomenological reduction. In Marx philosophy this Spirit becomes the spirit of classes, something that is above individual consciousness. But in order to be accepted as a philosophical reduction that spirit of the classes should be indeterminate, and in that respect Marx is later going to be criticized by Agamben.