Certificate Certificate

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSPHILOSOPHYOPHY ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY ALIGARH-202002 (U.P.), INDIA

Dated……………………

Certificate

This is to certify that Ms. Shagufta Parveen has done her research work on “Philosophy and Feminism: A Renegotiation With Special Reference to Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva” under my guidance and supervision. I am satisfied that her thesis is original and has not been submitted elsewhere for the award of any other degree. In my view, Shagufta Parveen’s present work is original and fit to be submitted for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh (India).

(Preeti Sayeed) Supervisor

ABSTRACT

This thesis is a study of philosophy from feminist perspectives. It seeks to search if there are final and complete solution to combat the problem of women’s oppressed situation. In its persual, it notes the ways in which feminist theorists analyze and renegotiate the traditonal philosophical enterprise. A special emphasis has been placed in the French feminist approaches.

Recent decades have witnessed intense debate among feminists, especially in France, the United Kingdom and the United States, about the exclusion of women from philosophy and the way they get represented in philosophical works. To be a woman associated with philosophy is to encounter a number of difficulties. At the very outset arises the problem about the location reserved for a woman within the discipline. Above all other academic disciplines, it is the history of philosophy that recounts the contribution of “Great Men of Ideas” and in the recall of ‘great’ philosophers from the past women seem to be strikingly amiss, at best confined to the role of a disciple, or simply a master’s assistant. Ways in which philosophy can be alien and inhospitable to women, is something that is problematic, and needs to be negotiated.

Women philosophers involved in theorizing the relationship between feminism and philosophy realized that issues concerning gender were largely invisible in mainstream philosophizing. In addition to this came the recognition that though the male philosophers had written a great deal about women much of it was infected with sexism and misogyny. Whereas the study of philosophy had seemed to be something to which gender was irrelevant, much of philosophy infact assumed and was addressed to a male subject. In the sixties, feminists began to question various images, representations, ideas and presumptions that traditional theories developed about women and the feminine. They directed their theoretical attention to patriarchal discourses- those which were openly hostile to and aggressive towards women and the feminine, and those which had nothing at all to say about women. Feminists of this category seemed largely preoccupied with the inclusion of women in those spheres from which they had been excluded, that is, with creating alternatives which would enable women to be regarded as men’s equals. Instead of being ignored by and excluded from theory, women were to be included as possible objects of investigation. Issues with direct relevance to women’s lives such as family, sexuality, ‘private’ or domestic sphere, interpersonal relations were to be included as worthy of intellectual concern. They begun by addressing issues of practical ethics and politics making use of existing philosophical tools and techniques. Later feminist theory on moved to investigating the overt and covert ways in which the devaluation of women was found to be inherent in the most enduring ideals, central concepts, and dominant theories of philosophy.

Feminists attempted to include women as equals of men in the sphere of theoretical analysis, putting to use various theories of (class or race) oppression by modifying and adjusting their details in order to account for women’s oppression. With these efforts women who had been neglected and denied of any value in patriarchal terms became focal points of empirical and theoretical investigation.

Feminist theorizing involves a recognition of the overt and covert forms of misogynous discourses inculcating the skills of unraveling the procedures

2 that make those discourses patriarchal. Feminists expose explicit patriarchal definitions of men and women, and their respective values, as well as the inclination of theories towards the interests of the masculine world. It also involves an ability to recognize patriarchal disclosures in terms of the absences, gaps, lacunae regarding the question of women and the feminine, giving voice to the silences that are included in the structuring of patriarchal discourses.

This approach however suffered criticism on the basis that while elements or components of patriarchal disclosure were brought into account, questions about their more basic framework and assumptions, whether ontological, epistemological or political remain unquestioned. Though feminist theory was critical toward the attitude of patriarchal disclosure to the position of women, it confined itself to the issues that directly affect women’s lives, leaving other broader or more public issues of relevance unquestioned.

However, within a short period it became clear that the aim of including women as men’s equals within patriarchal theory was faced with a number of problems. It became clear that it was not possible simply to include women in those theories where they had previously not been taken cognizance of. Many patriarchal discourses were incapable of being broadened or extended to include women without major revisions and transformations for it lacked the space within the confines of these discourses to accommodate women’s inclusion and equal participation. Moreover, even if women were incorporated into patriarchal discourses, at best they could only be regarded as variations of a basic humanity. Besides the project of women’s equal inclusion meant that only women’s sameness to men, only women’s humanity and not their womanness could be discussed. Further, while women could not be included as

3 the objects of theoretical speculation, their position as the subjects or producers of knowledge was not acknowledged. In adopting the role of the male subjects of knowledge, to borrow a term from Irigaray, women began to assume the role of surrogate men.

Because it is not simply the range and scope of objects that required transformation, but more profoundly the questions posed and the methods used to answer them. Basic assumptions about methodology, criteria of validity and merit, all needed to be seriously questioned. The political, ontological and epistemological commitments underlying patriarchal discourses (philosophy), as well as their theoretical contents required re-evaluation from feminist perspectives. As it became clear that women could only be included in patriarchal texts as deviant or duplicate men, with an assumption of sameness, sexual neutrality or indifference women’s specificities and differences could not be accommodated in traditional theoretical terms. Therefore the whole social, political, ethical and metaphysical underpinnings of patriarchal theoretical systems were in requirement of revision.

In abandoning any such attempts to include women where theory excluded them, many feminists came to realize that the project of women’s inclusion as men’s equals was problematic and ultimately Utopian. But the aspiration towards equality between men and women was nevertheless, historically necessary for without such attempts, women could not question the naturalness or apparently inevitable second-class status of woman as non citizens, objects, sexual beings etc. This aim of equality served as an experiential pre-requisite to the more far-reaching struggles directed towards 4 female autonomy, that is from women’s rights to political, social, economic and intellectual self-determination. Luce Irigaray has been a chief critic of this utopian ideal of equality.

The theoretical perpetuation of patriarchy involves the attribution of superiority to male subject and assigned complimentarity to female as an object as an opposite of subject, with a role to compliment the masculine purpose. In other words canonical philosophers develop models of human subjectivity

(which is universal) that represent all the variations of subjectivity only according to a singular male model. Feminity is always represented in some relation of dependence on this model, a lack or absence of the qualities characterizing masculinity. On Irigaray’s reading, this institutes a phallic economy, an economy based on sameness, oneness or identity with the masculine subject – an ‘apriori of the same’. Thus, in Irigaray’s view to include women in patriarchal theoretical machinery is to serve its purpose.

Phallocentrism, utilizes one model of subjectivity i.e. the male by which all others are positivity or negativity defined. Irigaray argued that women as ‘Others’ are constructed as variations of this singular type of subject.

They are thus reduced to or defined only by terms chosen by and appropriate for masculinity. The concern of Irigaray, among other things, is the recategorisation of women and feminity so that they are now capable of being autonomously defined according to women’s and not men’s interests. Irigaray suggests the creation of difference: sexual difference which we have discussed in Chapter four.

This seems probably the most striking shift in feminist theory since its revival in the sixties. Equality implied a measurement according to a given standard. Equality is the equivalence of two (or more) terms, where one takes the role of norm or model without questioning it. Irigaray’s approach implies the right to accept or reject a situation according to one’s will in accordance with the appropriateness of the situation to one’s self definition. This attempt clearly shows that feminist’s concerns have dramatically changed the feminist attitude towards the patriarchal discourses. The tools and frameworks used in discourses, methods and assumptions which treated woman as objects were now to become targets of critical feminist scrutiny. The intention was not to fit- in woman into pre-existing philosophic-patriarchal spaces, instead it is women’s lives and experiences which were accounted for to subvert and challenge them. Basic, unspoken assumptions of philosophical theories, the way in which they develop and gain precedence, their use of criteria and methods of inclusion and exclusion all came under the scanner.

While Irigaray’s approach to sexual difference was to provide an alternative Julia Kristeva moved beyond this in an attempt to dissolve the very problem of masculine/feminine debate. Kristeva suggested version of subjectivity i.e. A Subject-in-Process .

The thesis is, therefore designed to contribute to the process of cannon transformation, with a careful examination and analysis of the notions affecting women’s situation, by offering a reading of the feminist philosophers from the point of view of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Such a rereading converges our attention to the ways in which woman and the role of the feminine is constructed and reinforced.

In the First chapter of the thesis entitled “Feminisms: Initiation into

Transformational Politics”, we have explored the historical background of feminism, the causes responsible for the emergence of the various movements, and some recurrent themes like binary oppositions, justice and equality of the sexes.

In the Second chapter entitled “Tracing the Misogynous: An

Exploration into the Foundations of Philosophy” we have studied to highlight the endemic misogyny of male philosophers in noting the ways in which philosophy commonly assumed the exclusion of women as citizens, as rational subjects or as moral agents and in chartering the ways in which women were devalued or seen as inferior. This history of sexism and misogyny has largely been invisible to the academic philosophical mainstream and has often been dismissed as unimportant, a kind of ‘local accident’ whose recognition need not otherwise affect philosophical discussion and theorizing. A study of Aristotle,

Plato, Locke, Kant, Descartes and Spinoza has been made.

The Third chapter is entitled as “Rupturing Stereotypes: A Search for

Equality”. In this chapter we make a study of early feminists Mary

Wollstonecraft, J.S. Mill and Simone de-Beauvoir’s analysis and response to the misogyny or sexism inherent in philosophy. Presenting a critique of these three feminist philosophers we locate a pertinent question which they dealt with. Is there a sense, for example in which some ideals of reason and virtue might themselves be seen as ‘masculine’? We also noticed that the analysis of this kind of ‘masculinity’ reaches far deeper than merely detecting and cataloguing or analyzing overt instances of misogyny or sexism.

Feminist theory at this juncture sought to analyze the conditions which shape women’s lives and to expose cultural understanding of what it means to be a woman. It was initially guided by the political aims of women’s movement the need to understand women’s subordination and exclusion from or marginalization within a variety of cultural and social arenas. Feminists refuse to accept that inequalities between women and men are natural and inevitable and insist that they should be questioned.

The title of chapter Fourth is “Celebration of Difference: The Road to

Salvation” an attempt is made to renegotiate canonization within philosophy and feminist philosophy with reference to Irigaray’s concept of sexual difference. It is also to suggest that Irigaray’s idea of sexual difference works towards the feminist purpose of remaking attitudes towards differences, thus leading to philosophical, socio-cultural, psychological, linguistic and legal transformations. The recognition of sexual difference provided a conceptualization which brought to trial the disinterested discourse adopted by patriarchal and phallocentric inclinations.

In the Fifth chapter entitled as “Subject-in-Process: An Emergence of

Pluralities” we have studied Kristeva’s analysis of linguistics and psychoanalysis in the construction of subjectivity that shapes and is in turn shaped by gender and sexuality. Kristeva’s project of bringing subject in process has the consequence of exposing the sexism inherent in the philosophical practices. This will involve examining the relationship between language and the subject bringing into consideration three areas of enquiry:

Kristeva’s position on the claims of Western Philosophy that lead to fortifying patriarchy and sexist inclinations, the role played by language in the

8 constitution of subjectivity as an open-ended process and the exposure of the limitations of patriarchal discourse, especially by mainstream Western philosophy.

We conclude the thesis with concluding remarks that feminist investigations should always leave questions half answered or explored, awaiting contributions and debate from other thinkers. For example, the study of the condition of women is not a matter of concern of a particular group neither created by purely subjective concerns, instead it is an object of study that extends through history and across cultures. Therefore the truth of women’s oppression cannot be summed up in an abstract or general claim but pours out of plurality of voices that cannot be unified into coherent logos. And therefore no single solution could bring salvation and suffice to serve the purpose.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This is the best opportunity and pleasant duty to express the profound sense of gratitude that I have for my esteemed teacher and guide Dr. Preeti Sayeed who has been a source of inspiration to me. Without her able guidance and unfailing encouragement and inspiration this thesis could not be completed. Her fierce commitment to her profession and a ‘never say die’ attitude has been so striking. Her caring relationship with her students and her teaching that makes difficult topics seems so exciting have been greatly instructive to me. This work is a result of her constant support and, may I say very strict supervision. I feel very proud to be a student of an exceptional personality like her. It is my privilege to place on record my thanks to her from the depths of my heart.

I am deeply indebted to:

Prof. Jalalul Haq , Chairman Department of Philosophy for his kind concern and the cooperation he has always extended. His vast knowledge of the subject has been extremely inspiring.

I am immensely thankful to: Prof. Syed A. Sayeed , Dr. Sanaullah Mir , Dr. Roshan Ara , Mr . Mohd. Muqim , Mr. Zulfiquar Ahmad , Dr. Tariq Islam , Dr. Tasadduq Hussain , Dr. Latif Husain Kazmi and Dr. M. Hayat Amir for their valuable teaching and encouragement,

Dr. Naushaba Anjum , Dr. Abdul Shakeel , Dr. Diwan Taskheer Khan for their support.

My loving thanks to my friends Nayla Saboor , Shazia , Payal Agarwal , Iqra Rabbi , Humera Shakeel , Abdul Subhan , Suhail Ahmad , Sualeheen , Saba Iqbal and Shaiqua Jamal for making my years in AMU so joyous.

Thanks also due to our affectionate Mukhtar Aapa for her constant help and cooperation. I am also thankful to the office staff of the Department of Philosophy Dr. Anwar Saleem , Mr. Arif , Kafeel and Shakir . I sincerely thank the Indian Council of Philosophical Research for awarding Junior Research Fellowship for the academic year 2006 to 2008. This valuable assistance has been a great help. I am also thankful to the officials and staff for their kind support and cooperation and timely release of fellowship grant. Thanks are also due to the staff of ICPR Library, Lucknow for providing me with requisite materials for my work.

I would also like to thank Mr. H.K. Sharma for meticulously typing the manuscript.

Most of all I am extremely beholden to my parents, Mr. Abdul Qayyum and Mrs. Shakeela Qayyum sisters; Mrs. Qaiser Hannan , Gauher Riaz , Shazia Akbar , Sana , brothers Tanveer Ahmad and Sajid , brother-in-law Abdul Hannan Shekh , Alamgeer Ali and Shamshad Ali sister-in-law, Mrs. Rizwana Ali and little Liaba Ali for their love and encouragement. I sincerely ascribe my success to them. I am also grateful to my mother-in-law Mrs. Akhtari Begum for her affectionate concern.

And most of all to my fellow-traveller, my husband Mr. Muhammed Altaf Ali for the hope and trust he has placed in my abilities.

(SHAGUFTA PARVEEN)

CONTENTS

Page Nos.

Acknowledgement i – ii

Introduction 1 – 9

Chapter I Feminism : Initiation into Transformational Politics 10 – 63

Chapter II Tracing the Misogynous: An Exploration into the Foundations of Philosophy 64 – 101

Chapter III Rupturing Stereotypes : A Search for Equality 102 – 138

Chapter IV Celebration of Difference: The Road to Salvation 139 – 180

Chapter V Subject-in-Process : An Emergence of Pluralities 181-238

Concluding Remarks 239 – 246

Bibliography 247 - 265

Feminisms: Initiation into Transformational Politics

Given our historical position we have to learn to negotiate with structures of violence, rather than taking the impossible elitist position of turning our backs on everything. (Spivak 1990: 101)

Philosophy, as it claims to be, has never been a neutral enterprise. Proceeding in a direction which was seemingly objective in its approach a large body of work has been produced by philosophers. The fact that much of philosophy is both an assumption of and addressed to the male subject clearly indicates a continued and consistent preservation of a gender bias. Aristotle’s views are a re-affirmation of how philosophy happened to be alien and inhospitable to women. “The female is a female by virtue of certain lack of qualities; female is a mutilated male”, someone who does not have a soul. Women are born to be ruled. The courage of a man is shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying”. (Cited in Bhagwat 1992: 12)

Women have been either concealed in history of philosophy i.e. rendered invisible or quite literally abused or at best, appeared as less “human” than men. They have consistently been dismissed as unimportant or a kind of

‘local accident’ whose recognition need not otherwise affect philosophical discussion and theory. As a result of which issues concerning women and the philosophical contribution of women are both largely invisible in main stream academic philosophy. The recognized philosophers wrote for and to each other, discussing and responding to each others quarries. If at all there were women involved, they were confined to playing supporting roles as wives, friends and assistant. In addition to this the ‘great’ philosophers like Aristotle, Aquinas, Rousseau, Hobbes, Kant, Locke and Hegel made claims further detrimental to the concerns of women. Chapter I Feminisms: Initiation into Transformational Politics

Philosophy was therefore something spoken by men, to men and for men relegating the possible presence of women to the margins. Simone-de-

Beauvoir, Fillipa Foot, Mary Wornock were among those few women who could gain access to philosophy but not on account of the capability they possessed but due to their links with established philosophers. The fact that their access to philosophy was due to the men they were attached to, they fell short of the independent acknowledgement which should have rightfully belonged to them. Instead of being able to create a niche for themselves they had to remain contented in reflected glory. Sometimes their individual worth too would be attributed to the man which women were related to.

In several ways philosophical assumptions about women and gender were captured by the existing ‘dualism’ between man and woman. A dualism that lacks any symmetry. It is not an innocent way of dividing up the world into the duality of male and female. In such a dualism woman is always defined as that which is not man; she is a “ minus male ” (D. Spender 1980: 23) who is identified by the qualities that she lacks. Men, who are identified as the

“natural” occupants of the sphere of rationality, are contrasted to women who occupy the sphere of emotions and are thereby lacking in rationality. This dichotomy leaves women two unacceptable options: either they can talk like women and be “feminine” but irrational or they talk like man and be rational but “unfeminine” (B. Fried 1982: 49).

Dualism sets women in contrast and opposition to men. The dichotomies such as man / woman, reason / emotion represent fundamental polarities, embedded deep within western philosophy and reflected in the structures of

Chapter I Feminisms: Initiation into Transformational Politics

language. These contain a set of implicit assumptions that assign a prominently advantaged and a dominant value to the first term (man) clearly subduing and disadvantaging the second (woman) thus representing two hierarchical power relations governing social practices.

Modern European philosophy recognizes ‘reason’ as a male attribute.

The identification of reason with masculinity can be traced back to the Greeks initially responsible for shaping western thought as a masculine enterprise and by extension inculcating female subservience. In her analysis of the allegory of the cave, Luce Irigaray shows that the masculine definition of concepts of truth and rationality are central to Plato’s concept of knowledge. She observes that the feminine imagery is considered as negative where care represents a woman’s womb and breaking out of womb means breaking into truth and knowledge. Masculine images, on the contrary, are positive where light and knowledge are a representation of the masculine, earth and non-knowledge of the feminine (Irigaray 1985: 279).

The very definition of reason entailed not only the omission of women, but the expulsion, banishment and exile of women, to the realm identified with nature, emotions, body, disorder, formlessness, subordination, passivity, and otherness.

Descartes a French philosopher of Enlightenment was no exception. His dualism of mind and body contributed to the modern entrenchment of the dichotomy and association of reason with masculinity in a large way. His mind body dualism has reinforced the effects of the symbolic opposition between male and female. Thus, Cartesian dualism worked as a catalyst in the

Chapter I Feminisms: Initiation into Transformational Politics

development of the idea of a strict separation between ‘reason’ as the logical cognitive faculty of the mind, which gives rise to knowledge. As a result of the dynamics of duality, emotion along with embodiedness and passions was associated with the realm of irrationality, from which ‘knowledge’ could never accrue. This idea was furthered by the French Enlightenment writers, who took

French Revolution as the opportunity to sweep away not only the old feudal hierarchical political, social and economic order, but also all the authority based on tradition, prejudice and irrationality replacing it with an all powerful cognitive universal reason, divorced from the so called confusing context of body, and emotions only to establish yet again, another hierarchy.

In this context, Rousseau an Eighteenth century French philosopher is a crucial figure. He advocates the theory of ‘ social contract ’ where all would participate in the choice of a ruler and where the ‘general will’ would prevail.

But for all enlightened ideas regarding political and social issues, Rousseau’s ideal republic excludes women. For him the family is a ‘natural institution’ where the man is head of the family with unequivocal power of control over the wife, who is denied equal rights. Freedom and equality are for the patriarchal heads of families, and women are not part of the social contract or the ‘general will’. Further Rousseau proposed a fundamentally different education for boys and girls. In his famous discourse or education, the boy (Emile) had to be educated for liberation from oppressive structures, and had to be trained to be independent, strong, unselfish, able not only to assert his equal rights, but also to expose the corruption in society. Whereas the girl (Sophie) had to be educated in a totally opposite manner. According to Rousseau only man was

Chapter I Feminisms: Initiation into Transformational Politics

rational and capable of thinking rationally and abstractly, therefore women, lacking these qualities, could not be given freedom and equality. On the contrary, they had to be subjected and controlled as their passions were a source of danger. Therefore, Sophi’s education should be based on the view that ‘it is according to nature for the woman to obey the man’; a woman should be taught to be chaste, obedient, alluring and dependent, with qualities of shame and modesty and an ability (not to fight injustice, like Emile) but to put up with injustice. Woman’s obedience to man was necessary as a man’s authority was conducive to family life, since women had physical disabilities

(e.g. child birth) and because only by controlling woman could a man be sure of the paternity of his children. There was no more final argument against women than an appeal to nature (since the glorification of the ‘natural’ is a theme that is basic to Rousseau) and in this context he writes, ‘Nature herself has decreed that woman, both for herself and her children, should be at the mercy of man’s judgement’. ‘Rousseau’s view on ‘woman’s duties in all ages’ was that they had to please men, to be useful to them, to win their love and respect’ adding that ‘these are what they should be taught from childhood on’.

Such a role determination of women perpetuated a kind of a picture that not only subsumes all her unique qualities but forces itself on women and enslave (oppress) them in one way or the other.

Simone de Beauvoir in quoting Aristotle “the female is a female by virtue of certain lack of qualities….” remarks that humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; “she is not regarded as an autonomous being… she is simply what man decrees; woman is defined and

Chapter I Feminisms: Initiation into Transformational Politics

differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her. She is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the subject, he is the Absolute – she is the other” (Simone de Beauvoir: 1949).

Philosophy, claims de Beauvoir, maligned with inherent dualism represent man as both positive and neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general, whereas woman represents only the limiting and the negative without reciprocity. She writes: A man is in the right in being a man, it is the woman who is in the wrong. It amounts to this: just as for the ancients there was an absolute vertical with reference to which the oblique was defined, so there is an absolute human type, the masculine with reference to which the feminine is defined” (De Beauvoir : 1949).

It also follows that hierarchical ordering necessarily involves a form of oppression, through the necessary suppression of one term. And hence sets up inequalities of power through the hierarchical structure, which seeps into cultural social and intellectual practices thus sustaining an all pervasive hierarchical suppression of identities.

Feminism, owes its existence to the universality of misogyny, gynophobia, androcentrism, and heterosexism. Feminism exists because women are, and have been everywhere oppressed at every level of exchange from the simple social intercourse to the most elaborate discourses like philosophy. This oppression unleashes itself by acquiring forms that may be biological, economic, psychological, linguistic, ontological, political or some combination of these. A polarity of opposites based on sexual analogy organizes our language and through it directs our manner of perceiving the

Chapter I Feminisms: Initiation into Transformational Politics

model. Whether or not we can escape from the structuring imposed by language is one of the major challenges to be dealt with by feminist thinkers today. An emphasis on language and subjectivity was the main thrust of poststructuralist French feminist thought which will be the subject of discussion in the later chapters.

However in order to grasp the feminist ideology comprehensively an exploration into the forms and tentative definitions of feminism would perhaps be insightful. There is not one feminism but feminisms as are its definitions.

Feminism encapsulates all forms of opposition to each form of social, personal, political, philosophical discrimination or marginalization or exclusion or oppression which women suffer on account of their sex. It includes all forms of collective action against such discrimination from practice to theory. Thus the term “Feminism” has acquired a number of different meanings, indicative of various different approaches. The Webster’s Dictionary defines “feminism” as: the principle that women should have political rights equal to those of men; (b) the movement to win such rights for women, (c) Toril Moi says “the word

‘feminist’ or ‘feminism’ are political labels indicating support for the aims of the new woman’s movement which emerged in the late 1960s”.

Dictionaries usually define feminism as the advocacy of women’s rights based on a belief in the equality of the sexes, and in its broadest use it refers to everyone who is aware of and seeking to end women’s subordination, (d)

Charlotte Bunch (1981) has pointed out that feminism is not about “adding in” women’s rights, but about transforming society, so that feminism may be called

“transformational politics”. Feminism is a movement, writes Teresa Billington

Chapter I Feminisms: Initiation into Transformational Politics

Grieg which seeks “the reorganization of the world upon a basis of sex equality in all human relations’, a movement which rejects every differentiation between individuals upon the ground of sex, would abolish all sex privileges and sex burdens, and would strive to set up the recognition of the common humanity woman and man as the foundation of law and custom”.

Le Petit Robert defines feminism as a doctrine that aims to extend the rights, the role of women in society. This definition is clearly inadequate as it confines feminism to a reformist rather than a radical or revolutionary role.

Another definition suggested by Monique Rich is perhaps more comprehensive: the term feminist will be used to designate everything that is spoken or written about the condition of women in society, if they denounce that condition as the outcome of the domination of one sex (male) over the other (female).

However, feminism or feminist thought is not a static phenomenon rather a dynamic, constantly evolving endeavour including aspects that are personal, political and philosophical. Several distinct ideologies can be discerned within feminist thought that challenge the so called gender neutrality of traditional theorization and generate a new body of knowledge concerned with issues of identity and difference, diversity, inequality, class and gender etc. Feminism is both a movement and a theory, feminist theory shapes and has been shaped by feminist activism. Feminism as a ‘theory’ and feminism as an

‘activism’ do not operate as possessing two separate objectives, rather they constantly intersect each other repeatedly enriching each others possibilities.

Chapter I Feminisms: Initiation into Transformational Politics

Initially, feminist theory was guided by the political aims of women’s movement. Under the influence of the movement it sought to understand women’s subordination and exclusion from, or marginalization within, a variety of cultural, social and philosophical domains. Feminists questioned the inequalities between women and men refusing to accept the assumption that they are natural and inevitable. Theory for them was not an abstract intellectual activity separate from women’s activism and from the lived experiences of women. Theorizing was essentially an effort to grapple with the material actualities of women’s everyday experience and examine the ways in which women are represented and represent themselves within a range of cultural and academic practices, such as art and philosophy.

Feminist theory is a process constantly evolving and continually being developed and modified. With a purposeful determination and vigilance that questioned and requestioned any assumptions that contributed to the detriment of the life and days of women and an intelligent flexibility dismantling hardened stances feminist theory diversified in. Never stalling too long, once the goals were met feminist theory kept evolving, as an emancipatory and a self critical enterprise. Such were its ramifications that to capture it in a conclusive definition would be counterproductive.

Recent feminist scholarship proposes that the rich and evolving history of feminism can be characterized by three “waves”. The first wave of feminism, spanning the 17 th to 19 th centuries is said to have marked its beginning with the publication of Marry Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the

Rights of Women (1792). First wave involved contributions of feminists who

Chapter I Feminisms: Initiation into Transformational Politics

worked primarily within the confines of existing systems of rules and laws to achieve equality for women and the right to participate more exhaustively in society. The second wave feminism, spanning primarily the 1960s to 1980s

(Worell 2001: 470). This wave produced a variety of schools of thought that dealt with the nature of oppression (gender oppression), defined the goals of feminism and the outlined the means of reaching these goals. The second wave is sometimes said to have marked its beginning form the publication of

Simone-de-Beauvoir’s ‘ The Second Sex’ i.e. 1949. (Ann E. Cudd & Robin O.

Andreasen 2005: 7). It is characterized by its efforts to move beyond the concerns of the first wave moving beyond the political and legal sources of women’s inequality. Second wave feminists maintain that political and legal equality is not sufficient to end women’s oppression as sexist oppression is not singly on account of legal and political arrangements but is contained in causes that are all pervasive and are deeply embedded in every aspect of human social life. Those aspects may be economic, political and social, as well as unquestioned norms, habits, everyday interactions, and personal relationships.

The second wave feminist further criticized first wave feminism for not exploring the possible economic reforms meticulously. Complete economic equality for women was demanded rather than bare survival. The third wave feminism marked its beginning in the late 1980s converging on aspects of diversity amongst women and with the world at large. For instance, women of color maintained that their experiences, interests, and concerns were not fully represented by second wave feminism. One of the reason being that historically second wave feminism was largely represented by middle class white women who tended to focus on the commonalities among women and their experiences 19

Chapter I Feminisms: Initiation into Transformational Politics

of oppression without taking diverse social circumstances into account.

Feminists of color argued in response that women from different social groups

– racial, economic, sexual and so forth – experience different types of oppression. They also questioned the general tendency of considering “woman” as a single unified category or “women’s oppression” as single unified phenomenon. While other third wave feminists have also questioned the category “woman” they went on to challenge its basis i.e. the division of people into sexes and genders and proposed that we need a feminism that accepts diversity and allows for a multiplicity of feminist goals. Whereas the second- wave theories like liberal and radical were inspired by traditional theories, that were modified to accommodate issues of women, the third wave theories have highlighted women’s points of view and have sought to value diversity, flexibility, and multiple perspectives on gender relationships.

A comprehensive insight into various feminist ideologies and an exploration of the forms of feminism, negotiating not only oppressive patriarchal nature of discourses but each other as well, would open a window for renegotiation.

Liberal feminism has its roots in liberal enlightenment thought, rationalism, and natural rights philosophies. Early liberal feminist theorists, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, built their ideas on the foundation provided by liberal male theorists who proposed that men have the ability to exercise rational judgment and are therefore entitled to certain inherent rights, such as liberty, life, property, and dignity. Liberal theorists assumed that these rights are best secured through the

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medium of laws that allow for equal opportunity and ensure that individuals do not infringe on each other’s rights. Liberal feminists noted the ways in which women have been excluded from the liberal framework and argued that women should share the same inherent rights to make productive individual choice as men, participate in the opportunities and social contracts as men, and receive the treatment that men do. In other words, women deserve equality because they have capabilities which are no less than men.

As an extension of these values, liberal feminists have historically promoted the use of objective, critical rational thinking as the means of overcoming problems. The ideals of individual dignity, autonomy, equality, and the right to seek self-fulfillment are central to liberal feminist analysis.

Oppression is thought to be caused by misguided beliefs that women are less equipped and lack capability. Liberal feminists held that the seeds of gender discrimination were embedded in rigid or inflexible gender – role conditioning.

The solution to these problems could be achieved through logical argument, corrective educational experiences, and reforms and gender neutral policies that ensure that all individuals have access to equal opportunities to exercise their free choice and skills. In general, liberal feminists have focused on reforming existing systems or reallocations of power in existing power structures but have not challenged the basic structures or assumptions that support these institutions. Betty Friedan, Eleanor Smeal, Bella Abzug, and Zillah Einsenstein were the chief representatives of liberal feminism.

The fundamental value of liberalism is a belief in the intrinsic dignity and worth of each individual, a worth grounded in each individual’s capacity

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for reason. Liberals express this value in their political theory through the demand for equality. Since liberals view rationality as the essential human characteristic, they infer that a good society must allow maximum opportunity for the development and exercise of individual’s capacity to reason. Moreover, since each human being has at least a potential to reason this opportunity must be available to all. The position of liberal regarding individual rationality is expressed in their political theory through a demand for uniform liberty.

Liberty is thought to guarantee individual autonomy, the right of each individual to establish her or his own interpretation of truth and of morality, uncoerced by established authority.

As Engels has written, “Reason became the sole measure of everything. It was the time when, Hegel says, the world stood upon its head…. Every form of society and government then existing, every old traditional notion was flung into the lumber-room as irrational; the world had hitherto allowed itself to be led-solely by prejudices. Now, for the first time, appeared the light of day, the kingdom of reason; henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by eternal Truth, eternal Right, equality based on Nature and the inalienable rights of man (Engles 1970).

These were no doubt enlightened doctrines with revolutionary implications. However, inspite of their enlightenment, feminists recognized that the ideas put forward by the philosophers of this period were largely governed by racism and sexism and displayed an allegiance to the middle and upper classes. The exclusion of women, people of color, workers and the colonized from gaining democratic rights inevitably led to challenging the prevalent so called enlightened patriarchal domination.

Liberal feminists believe that the treatment of women in contemporary society violates, in one way or another, all of the liberalism’s political values;

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the values of equality, liberty and justice. They claim that women in contemporary society suffer discrimination on the basis of sex. By this they mean that certain restrictions are placed on women as a group disregarding their desires, interests, abilities or merits.

Liberal feminism finds its classic expression in John Stuart Mill’s ‘The Subjection of Women ’. This tradition has continued in various moderate groups like the National Organization for Women, which agitate for legal reform to improve the status of women.

Liberal feminism views liberation for women as the freedom to determine their own social roles and to compete with men on equal grounds where each individual be engaged in constant competition with every other in order to maximize her or his own self interest, and the function of the state be to ensure that such competition is fair enforcing ‘equality of opportunity’. The liberal does not believe that it is necessary to change the whole social structure in order to effect women’s liberation. Nor do they press for the possibility of liberation being achieved simultaneously for all women. Individual women may liberate themselves long before their status is achieved by others.

The goal of liberal feminists was to incorporate women fully into the mainstream of contemporary society. By ‘mainstream’ they mean the so-called public life of industry, commerce, education and political office. Liberal feminists believed that women’s conspicuous under representation in public life is less a result of choices made freely by women and more a result of women’s lack of equal opportunities to participate and distinguish themselves in public affairs. Liberal feminists struggled to eliminate sex-based discrimination in all areas of life and to guarantee women equal opportunities

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with men so as to define and pursue their own interests. They argued for a meritocracy within which jobs and offices would be awarded entirely on the basis of relevant qualifications, assuming that increased freedom of choice would issue in a sexually integrated or androgynous society where individuals’ occupations, sexual choices, etc. would be largely unrelated to their sex.

Precisely, liberal feminists believed that the treatment of women in contemporary society violates their rights to liberty, to equality and to justice as well as constituting an irrational and inefficient use of society’s human resources. In order to solve these problem’s and achieve a more just society, liberal feminists proposed several strategies. They emphasized reasoned argument. Considering human beings as essentially rational, liberal feminists take every opportunity to educate the public about the irrationality and injustice of discrimination against women. Liberal feminists wrote books, sought access to media and organized committees to investigate and involve in determining measures that may bring about an end to discrimination. Their engagement in public demonstrations was to draw public attention to the injustices that women suffer as also to challenge popular prejudices and to alter popular attitudes that did much harm.

The existence of sexist laws was perhaps the most basic injustice suffered by women in contemporary society. They sought the repeal of all laws that ascribe different rights, responsibilities and opportunities to women and to men. During the 1970s, a steady trend toward increasing the formal or legal equality of women occurred in most of the industrialized countries. For liberal feminist in USA the major achievement was Equal Rights Amendment to the

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Constitution which reads: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex”. It was latter approved by United States Congress in 1972.

Liberal feminists argue that sexual integration in legislatures, law courts and police forces is necessary not only to ensure equality of opportunity for female politicians, lawyers and police officers; it is also a precondition for the impartial administration of the laws.

Prior to this contemporary women’s liberation movement, formal equality was an adequate goal for liberal feminism. It was thought that, in the absence of legal constraints, women would quickly achieve substantive equality with men; lingering prejudice would be dispelled by rational arguments appealing both to justice and to efficiency. Contemporary liberal feminists, however, have discovered that customary discrimination against women was extremely pervasive and extremely difficult to uproot. After having realized that such discrimination is in no way rational, liberal feminists attempted to use the law to abolish discrimination against women.

Consequently, they reworked laws which not only require equal pay for equal work but which forbid discrimination in educating, hiring, promoting, housing or granting credit to women. In one respect, feminist resort to legal recourse is quite compatible with traditional liberalism, which views the state as the impartial protector of the rights of all its citizens. Yet in another respect feminist reliance on the law is contrary to the spirit of traditional liberalism, which views any growth in state power as a threat to individual liberty.

Anyhow, liberal feminist efforts to abolish discrimination against women resulted in abandoning their original requirement of “sex-blindness”;

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that laws should be written in sex-neutral language and applied without regard to sex. For example, liberal feminists have recognized that employee’s maternity leaves are a necessary part of women’s equality of opportunity. In arguing for the justice of these sex-specific practices, liberal feminists find themselves going far beyond traditional liberal conceptions of equality and the role of the state. They argue that, to achieve genuine equality of opportunity, the state should take positive steps to compensate for what they perceive as handicaps caused biologically and socially.

Liberal feminists believed that there are certain material preconditions for genuine equality of rights in determining who is eligible utilize those opportunities. Contemporary liberal feminist believe that if the function of the state is to enforce equal rights, it must make it economically possible for women to achieve those rights. The state should fund abortions for poor and fund temporary refugees for the victims of domestic abuse. Obviously, all these proposals move far beyond the original liberal feminist commitment to a formal, sex-neutral equality for women.

The fact that liberal feminists have found it necessary to pursue women’s equality through such an extensive use of the law is an admission that rational argument is insufficient, or at least too slow, to eradicate discrimination against women. The inefficacy of rational argument also hampers the passing and enforcement of feminist legislation. Having realized that legislators as well as law enforcement agencies are not particularly receptive to moral arguments, liberal feminists resorted to traditional lobbying techniques and other liberal democratic means of influencing legislation.

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Though contemporary liberal feminists were convinced of the importance of public law in bring about a shift in individual attitudes, not all their activity were directed solely at legal reform. They were also concerned with self improvement (generally understood to mean increasing one’s skills for survival or advancement within contemporary society) and with helping other extending support for improvement in needy women. Women’s assertiveness training, auto mechanics, self defense, preparing a resume, dealing with the health care system, financial management, writing a marriage contract or coping with a divorce were some activities that were initiated to provide help.

As Alison M. Jaggar (1983) notes that the liberal feminist vision of how women’s service agencies should function reflects the liberal feminist attitude toward society in general. Liberal feminists, as we have seen, support the right to each individual to pursue self-fulfilment as he or she defines it, but they believe that this fulfillment is most likely to be found in the competitive world of public life. Liberal feminist had the conviction that with the achievement of true equality, women will no more be eager than men to engage in unpaid work, whether in the home or as a public service volunteer. Liberal feminists recommend the professionalization of work i.e. people will be paid to perform hitherto unpaid work. Thus, women were no longer to be expected to take care at home of elderly, sick or handicapped member of their families. Instead, institutional care would be made available or a caretaker hired.

Liberal feminists believe that sex discrimination is unjust because it deprives women of equal rights to pursue their own self interest. Women as a

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group are not allowed the same freedoms or opportunities granted to men as a group. In a discriminatory situation, an individual woman does not receive the same consideration as an individual man. Whereas man is judged on his actual interests and abilities, a woman’s interest and abilities are assumed to be limited in certain ways because of her sex. In other words, a man is judged on his merits as an individual; a woman is judged on her assumed merits as a female. Liberal feminists believe that justice requires equal opportunities and equal consideration for every individual regardless of sex treating them as essentially rational agents. On this conception, sex is a purely “accidental” or non-essential feature of human nature. The sex of an individual should be considered only when it is relevant to the individual’s ability to perform a specific task or to take advantage of a certain opportunity.

The situation is worst for those women who do unpaid childcare, sexual and maintenance work in the home: economic dependence on their husbands makes it difficult or practically impossible for housewives to exercise their autonomy. More than a hundred years ago, John Stuart Mill wrote: “The power of earning is essential to the dignity of a woman, if she has not independent property” (Rosi, Alice 1970: 179). In contemporary society, women often lack equal opportunities for the more fulfilling types of work and are consigned instead to work that is degrading, menial and diminishes their liberty and autonomy. This is not only unjust; but also an inefficient use of society’s human resources. Mary Wollstonecraft argued that a more equal treatment of women would allow them to be more useful to society and J.S. Mill complained that the denial of equal opportunities to women deprived society of valuable contributions that women might otherwise make:

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“Is there so great a superfluity of men fit for high duties, that society can afford to reject the service of any competent person? Are we so certain of always finding a man made to our hands for any duty or function of social importance which falls vacant, that we lose nothing by putting a ban upon one half of mankind, and refusing before hand to make their faculties available, however distinguished they may be?.... To ordain that any kind of persons shall not be physicians, or shall not be advocates, or shall not be members of parliament, is to injure not them only, but all who emply physicians or advocates, or elect members of parliament, and who are deprived of the stimulating effect of greater competition on the exertions of the competitors, as well as restricted to a narrower range of individual choice” (Mill 1869: 183-84).

On Mill’s argument, the abolition of sex discrimination is not only required for justice but will also maximize each individual’s contribution to society as a whole.

Women’s lack of equality in public life is the major focus of liberal feminism. But liberal feminists also perceive women as oppressed in other ways. In particular, like all feminists, they believe that contemporary standards of sexuality are oppressive to women. Naturally, they formulate their critique of contemporary sexual norms in terms of their characteristic values of equality, liberty and justice.

Women have always had less sexual liberty than men, and even today liberal feminists see strong social and sometimes legal impediments to women’s freedom of sexual expression. Among these restraints are social and sometimes legal impediments to sex education, contraception, abortion and lesbianism. Besides there is a sexual double standard that requires women to be passive rather than active in sexual encounters. The contemporary perception of women as sexual objects imposes social penalties on women who do not express their sexuality in a way pleasing to men. The perception of women as

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sexual objects restricts more than their sexuality: it also encourages sexual harassment, makes it difficult for women to be taken seriously in non-sexual contexts, and provides a covert legitimization of rape. In these ways, it limits women’s freedom to travel safely alone and denies them equal opportunities in public life.

It is a characteristic of liberal feminism to express its critique of contemporary sexual norms only in terms of such “political” concepts as liberty and equality. Within the liberal framework, these concepts are construed as values that properly regulate the public realm; they are not seen as “moral” values which are thought of as regulating the private realm. Liberal feminists deliberately avoid characterizing contemporary sexual mores in such overtly moral terms as promiscuous, perverse, alienated, repressed or mechanical.

In sum, liberal feminists believe that the treatment of women in contemporary society violates their rights to liberty, to equality and to justice as well as constituting an irrational and inefficient use of society’s human resources. In order to solve these problems, liberal feminists propose several characteristic strategies.

Liberal feminists often state that their goal is to incorporate women fully into the mainstream of contemporary society. They want to eliminate sex based discrimination in all areas of life and to guarantee women equal opportunities with men to define and pursue their own interests. Because they believe that the effects of present discrimination permit no firm conclusions about the “natural” potentials of women and men.

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In order to achieve a more just society, liberal feminism’s first strategy is reasoned argument. Viewing human beings as essentially rational, liberal feminists take every opportunity to educate the public about the irrationality and injustice of discrimination against women.

The emergence of Women’s liberation out of the New Left shaped its largely theoretical tasks. The major political problem that early women liberationists faced was including others in the New Left, women as well as men, to recognize the importance of women’s oppression, its presence across large stretches of history and its fundamentality as a principle of social organization. This meant developing a theory that explained the origin of women’s oppression and the means through which it has been sustained over time. The theory had to account both for the pervasiveness of women’s oppression through out much of history, yet also allow for the different forms.

This oppression has assumed in different societies. Many of the early contributors of women’s liberation had been deeply affected by the insight of

Marxist theory. Marxism provided a metanarrative of the social whole that simultaneously explained all pre existing societies, allowed for historical change and diversity among these, and left open the possibility of a future society where its explanatory power would become irrelevant. Second wave theorists were aware that any theory they were to propose must have the capacity to accomplish all of these tasks as well.

But the emergence of women’s liberation out of the New Left meant that the second wave theorists not only had to produce an account of women’s oppression as theoretically compelling as Marx’s theory they also had to

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establish some relation between their theories and Marxism. Early radical feminist theorists argued that as women’s oppression was prior to and more basic than other forms of oppression, it demanded a theoretical explanation more encompassing than and different from Marxism. Other theorists, more influenced by Marxism, tried to work out ways of theorizing the specificity and seriousness of women’s oppression without discarding the insights of Marxism altogether. One common approach taken toward the latter task was to make a distinction between Marx’s method and his specific analysis. Feminists, they argued, should retain the idea of “historical materialism”; that in a method of analysis that begins with a focus on how human beings act to satisfy needs in the context of social structure that change over time. The problem was that traditional Marxist theorists, in their specific analysis, had interpreted the idea of activity as the satisfaction of needs too narrowly focusing on activities more traditionally associated with men than with women. This limitation of Marxism was expressed in the narrowness of many Marxists’ interpretation of the concept of “production”. Feminists argued that “production” needed to be understood as including not only work geared towards the creation of food and objects, but also work geared towards the creation and care of human beings.

While the initial tasks of second wave theorists were to generate explanations that accounted for the fundamentality of women’s oppression and to respond to Marxism, for many theorists, new tasks began to emerge in the early 1970. In the late 1960s and early 1970s two contradictory beliefs existed as a part of the general culture: (1) The differences between women and men were deeply rooted in nature and (2) Women and men were basically the same.

Second wave feminists initially drew heavily on the latter belief to press for

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changes in the given situation. While several feminists, in particular liberal feminists, continued in this direction, those feminists who saw their politics as more radical began to focus on the differences between women and men. This focus can, in part, be explained by the political limitations radial and socialist feminists saw as the sameness between women and men perspective. Such a politics seemed to consist in pushing society towards accepting women in the same positions as men in an otherwise unaltered social world. But as one of the popular slogans of the period claimed: “Women who strive to be equal to men lack ambition”. For radical and socialist feminists, a politics that merely strove towards placing women where men had previously been also lacked ambition.

If one were to build a politics which radically altered the status quo, there was a need to address and eliminate the deeply embedded differences between the life activities and psychies of women and men. What began to emerge can be described as“difference” feminism; because it often elaborated upon the unique and different situations that men and women were subject to and looked for ways out of the impasse.

The initial task facing second wave theorists has to document the gravity of women’s oppression and develop theories to account for it. Simone de

Beauvoir’s The Second Sex soon became viewed as a classic because of the potent case it made for the depth and pervasiveness of women’s oppression. De Beauvoir sees in certain physiological differences between women and men, most notably men’s freedom in reproductive activity, the potential for men to first define, themselves as subject and a woman becomes the “other” to man within a hierarchical relationship and gender is defined through biology.

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De Beauvoir was not alone in pointing out women’s reproductive differences from men as a potential cause of women’s oppression. Most notable in elaborating a full scale theory based on these differences was Shulamith

Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex . According to Firestone, women’s ties to childbearing and early childrearing caused a basic power imbalance between women and men that predated all other power imbalances. While this power imbalance has been present to some degree in all previous societies, it has been more accentuated in some depending on the specific organization of the family created. But biology need not be the determining factor.

Firestone’s account was extraordinarily powerful, but it also left many unsatisfied. As at least one strand of Marxism had convincingly demonstrated, biology must always be understood from within a cultural context. Although

Firestone acknowledges the historicity of the nuclear family, she also seemed to presuppose in her claim that women’s biology causes their dependence on men.

In agreement with Firestone’s observations, Gayle Rubin in ‘The Traffic in Women ’ pointed out the limitations of Marxism, that its focus on the economic was too confined. Rubin noted that the social matrix includes at least three domains, the political, the economic and the sexual. While Marx had developed a powerful theory of the economic, also needed was a comparable analysis of the domain of sexuality, or as Rubin called it “the sex/gender system”. Marx’s analysis was substantive enough to provide a convincing account of the moving force of economic change yet abstract enough to allow for diversity in economic forms. An analysis of the “sex/gender” system too

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needs to be substantive enough to be explanatory of women’s oppression across great stretches of history yet abstract enough to allow for diversity in the forms and degree of oppression. Rubin preferred the term “the sex/gender system” to “patriarchy” as the latter seemed limited not only to one form of

“the sex/gender system” but even to one form of women’s oppression.

Most of the second wave theory emerged out of the “women’s liberation” rather than the “women’s rights” movement. Consequently, much feminist theory of the second wave has been “radical” or “socialist” in orientation. Liberalism is built on the premise of equality. However, this premise has come into conflict with other existing conceptions of women’s relationships to men such as the principle of spousal unity and the doctrine of separate spheres. Wendy Williams in her essay: ‘the Equality Crisis: Some reflections of Culture, Courts, and Feminism” focuses on certain contemporary court cases that put into conflict the principle of equality with existing conceptions of women’s roles. This essay was written in 1982, and is therefore not, strictly speaking, representative of second wave’s early years. But it eloquently depicts challenges liberal feminism has had to deal with throughout its history. These cases pose a challenge not only to those who support the status quo but also to feminists. Are we truly committed to legal equality or do we support laws that presuppose differences between women and men? Williams argues for upholding equality in all cases for she claims that while there exist socially constructed differences between women and men, in defending laws that presuppose such differences, we ultimately undermine women’s best interests.

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Radical Feminism

The liberal and the traditional Marxist conceptions of feminism are rooted in philosophical traditions that are, respectively, 300 and 100 years old.

Radical Feminism, by contrast, is a contemporary phenomenon generated by the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s.

While utilizing some earlier feminist insights, radical feminism developed a perspective on women’s situation that in many ways happens to be statistically original, for it presents fundamental challenges both to the liberal and to the Marxist ways of conceptualizing human nature and social reality.

Radical feminism is a 20 th century phenomenon. Its emphasis on the importance of feelings and so-called personal relationships is characteristic of the 20 th century, and this emphasis was reflected in the ideals and documents of the New Left, which was where women first began articulating the ideas of radical feminism. In addition to this although reasonably effective means of contraception had been known for centuries most women could not be set themselves free from incessant child bearing and childrearing until infant mortality rates dropped. It was only in the 20 th century that the possibility of minimizing and perhaps even abolishing the burden of women’s traditional responsibility for childbearing and childrearing came to be recognized.

Radical feminism owes its origin to the concerted efforts of a relatively small group of predominantly white, middle-class, college-educated American women in the late 1960s. Some of them had been active in the recently formed

National Organization for Women, which they perceived as being too conservative in its demands; others had been involved in various New Left

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organizations is keen on civil rights. These women regularly met to share their individual experiences of oppression and injustice incurred upon them. They came to feel that their primary political task must be to explore, to explain and to combat the overwhelming oppression of women. Their self-designation as radical feminists originally signified their commitment to uncovering and eradicating the systemic root causes of women’s oppression. Later this label also came to indicate the radical feminist belief that the oppression of women was at the root of all other systems of oppression.

Since its inception, radical feminism has undergone much transformation. Most of the younger radical feminists do not possess previous political experience of left organizations hence their thinking is less influenced by Marxist categories and they no longer address themselves to a left audience.

Radical feminists are no more identified by adherence to an explicit and systematic political theory, instead they are part of a grass-root movement, a flourishing women’s culture concerned with providing feminist alternatives in literature, music, spirituality, health, services, sexuality etc.

The most important insights of radical feminism probably spring from women’s own experience of oppression and has generated a variety of theories about women’s oppression in general. Out of the political and intellectual ferment of radical feminism, many important insights have emerged targeting sexual oppression. It is formulated chiefly by Ti Grace Atkinson and Shulamith

Firestone. Radical feminists deny the liberal claim that the basis of women’s oppression consists in their lack of political or civil rights. Similarly, they reject the classical Marxist belief that basically women are oppressed because they live in a class society.

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The first systematic work in this direction was Shulamith Firestone’s

The Dialectic of Sex . The opening words of this book are “sex class is so deep as to be invisible”, and this expresses the most profound insight of radical feminism. In other words the distinction of gender, based on sex, structures virtually every aspect of women’s lives and indeed are so all pervasive that ordinarily they go quite unrecognized. Instead of appearing as an alterable feature of our social organizations, gender constitutes the unquestioned framework in terms of which we perceive and interpret the world. Gender constitutes the grid through which any perception is made. Radical feminism seeks to remove that grid. It makes visible distinctions between the sexes not only in the obvious areas of law and employment, but also in personal relationships and most pertinently in perceptions of one’s own being. Radical feminism analyses as to how in contemporary society, distinctions of gender structure the whole of life: men and women dress differently, eat differently, engage in different activities at work, at home and have different kinds of social relationships including sexual relationship. Earlier feminists articulation of construction of gender happened to be, “women are made rather than born”. Contemporary French feminists and few Americans carried this analysis further.

Radical feminism argues that gender is not only the way in which women are differentiated socially from men; they see it also as the way in which women are subordinated to men. Gender demarcation became an elaborate system of male domination. The theoretical task undertaken by radical feminist was to understand that system; and its political task to bring an end to it.

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Instead, in what appears to be a regression the radical feminists upheld that the roots of women’s oppression are biological. Radical feminists hold that the origin of women’s subjugation lies in the fact that as a result of the weakness caused by childbearing, women become dependent on men for physical survival. The origin of a family thus is a primarily biological factor. The radical feminists believe that the physical subjection of women by men was historically the basic form of oppression, prior to the institution of private property and its corollary, class oppression. Consequently the power relationships that develop within the biological family provide a model for understanding all other types of oppression such as racism and class society.

There was a group of feminists who believed that women’s liberation requires biological revolution. They believed that ultimately technology of artificial reproduction will liberate both sexes from the necessity involved.

Both the biological and economic basis of the family would be demolished by the advent of technology. The family’s consequent disappearance would abolish the prototype of the social ‘role system’; the most important factor, both historically and conceptually, determining oppressive and authoritarian relationships. They believed that role assignment must be abolished in its entirety most importantly in its biological aspects. This is the only feminist theory which states clearly that women’s liberation also has its bearing on children’s liberation. Firestone explains that this is because “the heart of woman’s oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles. And in turn children are defined in relation to this role and are psychologically formed by it; what they became as adults and the sort of relationships they are able to form determined the society they will ultimately build” (Singh 1990:37).

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Firestone argues that the sexual division of labour has a biological basis.

The most distinctive and original of these biologically based theories has been constructed by Shulamith Firestone. As is suggested by the title of her book

The Dialectic of Sex she claims that human reproductive biology has dictated a form of social organization that she calls ‘the biological family’. This family is characterized by a child dependent on the mother and a woman dependent on a man. In Firestone’s view, this ‘biological family’ is the basic reproductive unit that has persisted in every society. The persistence of this unit is the biological constitution that women are physically weaker than men as a result of their reproductive physiology and that infants are physically helpless relative to adults. These biological relationships necessitate certain social relationships if women and infants are to survive. Although Firestone recognizes that biological imperatives are overlaid by social institutions that reinforce male dominance, she believes that the ultimate foundation of male dominance is human reproductive biology. Consequently, she argues that women can be liberated only by conquering human biology. In her view, this requires the development of, on the one hand, extra-uterine gestation or what is popularly called test-tube babies. Only these will make possible: The freeing of women from the tyranny of their reproductive biology by every means available, and the diffusion of the childbearing and childrearing role to the society as a whole, men as well as women (Firestone 1970: 206).

In Firestone’s view, these technological developments would constitute the imposition of a set of consciously designed and deliberately chosen cultural practices onto a sphere of human life where the practices until now had been

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determined by human biology. Thus, they would be a victory over ‘the kingdom of Nature’. The ‘natural’ is not necessarily a ‘human’ value. Humanity has begun to outgrow nature: we can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on grounds of its origins in Nature (Firestone 1970: 9-10).

Inspite of the power and originality of Firestone’s theory, it was never taken up by grass-roots American radical feminists. One of the several reasons for this undoubtedly lies in the fact that Firestone does not hold men responsible for the system of male dominance. Instead, in her theory it is female biology that is at fault and men appear as being ultimately women’s protectors. Consequently,

Firestone does not stress the need for a political struggle against male power as her vision of good society contains a complete integration of women, men and children into all areas of life. This is clearly a version of the androgynous ideal that has been under increasing attack by contemporary radical feminists and is in no way compatible with the increasingly militant and separatist tendencies of the grass-roots radical feminist movement.

Since the early 1970s, radical feminists have become increasingly reluctant to locate the cause of women’s subordination in anything about women themselves. For radical feminism, accounts which see the problem as lying either in women’s psychology or in their biology are simply blaming the victim. They are a further expression of the misogyny that pervades contemporary society. In consequence, many recent radical feminist writings have tended to see the fault as lying in some flaw in male biology.

The belief that male biology is somehow to blame for women’s subordination has been strengthened by feminist research during the 1970s,

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which has revealed that physical force plays a far larger part in controlling women than previously had been acknowledged. The recognition that women live continually under the threat of physical violence from men has led many radical feminists to believe that men are dangerously different from women and that this difference is grounded in male biology.

For some radical feminists, the main problem with male biology s simply that it is not female. At its most obvious, this has meant that men lack the special life-giving power that women possess in virtue of their capacity to become mothers.

But as a matter of fact neither of these versions of radical feminism offers an optimistic prospect for women’s liberation. Firestone’s version requires a technological solution to alter the biological basis of women’s subordination setting aside other factors the control of technology as of now is firmly in male hands, and radical feminism can offer no reason to suppose that men will voluntarily use this control to abolish rather than to increase their own power over women. As for the view that women are superior biologically to men, this implies that if women are not to be dominated by men, they must either build societies entirely separate from those of man or else become the dominant sex themselves. These suggestions seem to be of no consequence for their translation into practice is quite impossible.

Rather than looking for usable solutions to the way radical feminist formulate the problem, it would perhaps be helpful to grapple with the problem anew. As defined by these radical feminists, the problem of women’s subordination lies in a biological incompatibility between the sexes that makes

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it impossible for them to live together without one sex dominating the other.

Obviously, radical feminists who accepted this definition were accepting a form of biological determinism.

Further around the late 1960s, feminist redefined women’s problems not as symptoms of individual failure but as symptoms of oppression by a system of male dominance. It was found that not only apparently “external” problems, such as sexual harassment and job discrimination, but even apparently

“internal” problems such as indecisiveness were the results of male gender privilege. Consequently radical feminists assumed that if the problem issued from gender, then gender must be eliminated: the goal of feminism should become androgyny. Kate Millett communicated a similar sentiment in the coining.

The word “ unisex ”, a term that gained wide currency among media and feminists. Radical feminists agreed that the solution was to eliminate radical distinctions between the sexes. With the idea that “there shall be no characteristic, behaviour or roles ascribed to any human being on the basis of sex”. An influential, New York based, radical feminists group, defined themselves as “A Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles” and stated: The sex roles themselves must be destroyed. If any part of these role definition is left, the disease of oppression remains and will reassert itself again in new, or the same old, variations through out society. We need new premise for society: that the most basic right of individual is to create the term of its own definition. (Quoted in Radical Feminism, Spring 1995)

The New York Radical Feminists declared that “the purpose of the male power group is to fulfill a psychological need which derives from the supremacist assumptions of male identity – namely, that the male identity must

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be sustained through its ability to have power over the female ego. Man establishes his “manhood” in direct proportion to his ability to have his ego override woman’s and derives his strength and self-esteem through this process” (Levine and Rapone 1995: 380).

However this does not explain why “manhood” has been defined in terms of dominance and “womanhood” as passivity and subservience. Neither does it explain why man should have won the postulated psychological struggle between the sexes. In general, even if one were to grant that individuals could modify or abandon their roles at will, to describe women’s oppression exclusively in terms of sex-roles would be to ignore questions about why the sex-role system developed and why did it sustain. The need to answer these questions has encouraged later radical feminists to seek a less “idealist” and more “materialist” account of women’s oppression in trying to identify the

“material interests” that are promoted by the systematic domination of women.

A commitment to abolishing sex roles was taken to imply a commitment to androgyny. Androgynous people would remain biologically male or female but, socially and psychologically, they would no longer be masculine or feminine. If “masculine” intelligence or efficiency is valuable, it is so for both sexes equally, and the same must be true for “feminine” tenderness or consideration (Radical Feminism: Spring 1975: 366-67).

Androgyny therefore became radical feminists ideal. But then androgyny appeared problematic. Although it was made to express a concept that will transcend the traditional conceptions of masculinity and feminity. Infact it is said to perpetuate those stereotypes by assuming them.

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“In an ‘androgynous’ ….. society, it would be senseless to speak of ‘androgyny … since people would have no idea of the sex stereotyped characteristics and/or roles referred to by the components of the term”. At best, therefore, “androgyny” should be seen only as a “traditional” or “self-liquidating” word (Radical Feminism: Spring 1975: 366-67).

However, one possible argument can be that to refer to sex stereotypes is not necessarily to endorse them. Radical feminist find deeper problems with the ideal of androgyny. Mary Daly has argued that the notion of androgyny suggests “two distorted halves of a human being stuck together as if two distorted ‘halves’ could make a whole”. Daly’s point is that it is wrong to conceive of women and men in contemporary society as having been encouraged to develop just “one side” of their personalities. Where men are supposed only to supplement their rationality with emotional expressiveness, and women need only to supplement their gentleness with assertiveness.

Within contemporary society, vices as well as virtues are associated with feminity and masculinity. Women are often passive, vain and subservient, while men are often reckless and domineering. To endorse an ideal that implies a conjunction of masculinity and feminity, as these are conceived ordinarily, is as absurd according to Janice Raymond as putting “master and slave language or imagery together to define a free person” (Quoted in Quest 11, no. 1,

Summer: 1975]. She further argues we need a new ideal of human nature, one not based on a “pseudo-organism” (ibid. p. 85).

Most notably, since being masculine carries more benefits than being feminine. So, for radical feminists, it is just not true that masculine and feminine persons can work harmoniously together to reach androgyny. Instead radical feminists argue that men derive concrete benefits from their oppression

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of women. They conclude that feminists must struggle against rather than with man in order to achieve liberation. Feminist activists have to challenge specific forms of women’s oppression; to take androgyny as an ideal could serve in practice only to distract them from their focus on these forms. As Adrienne

Rich puts it, androgyny “fails in the naming of difference”. Radical feminists argue that, because men oppress women, feminists must struggle against men and so must acknowledge the need for separatism and a polarization of the sexes.

Anti-feminists have always appealed to biology in their efforts to justify women’s subordination. Assuming that human biology is fixed, anti feminists have concluded that women’s subordination is inevitable, the argument being that subordination was designed by “nature” rather than by men, anti-feminists have argued that it does not even constitute a form of oppression.

Firestone is influenced by Marxism, and she consciously attempts to provide an account of women’s subordination that is both historical and materialist. Firestone believes that Marx’s and Engle’s interpretation of the historical materialist method was too narrow, since it focused primarily on the way in which the production of food, shelter, clothing etc. was organized and paid little attention to procreation. For Firestone however, the relations of procreation, rather than production, constitute the base of society. In ‘ The

Dialectic of Sex ’ she concludes that the primary class division is between women and men and produces a revision of the famous definition that Engles gives of historical materialism in his Socialism: Utopian or Scientific :

Historical materialism is that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all

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historic events in the dialectic of sex: the division of society into two distinct biological classes for procreative reproduction, and the struggle of these classes with one another; in the changes in the modes of marriage, reproduction and childcare created by these struggles; in the connected development of other physically - differentiated classes (castes); and in the first division of labour based on sex which developed into the (economic-cultural) class system. “All past history (note that we can now eliminate “with the exception of primitive stages”) was the history of class struggle. These warring classes of society are always the product of the modes of organization of the biological family unit for the reproduction of the species, as well as of the strictly economic modes of production and exchange of goods and services. The sexual reproductive organization of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of economic, juridical and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical and other ideas of a given historical period” (Firestone 1970: 12-13).

Firestone believed that technological developments make it possible to eliminate the basic and hitherto biologically determined sexual division of labour. Finally, there can be “ the freeing of women from the tyranny of their reproductive biology by every means available, and the diffusion of childbearing and childrearing role to the society as a whole, men as well as women ” (Firestone 1970: 206).

As Firestone describes her proposal, it goes beyond a challenge to gender or to the sexual division of labour. She views it as an attack on ‘ the sex distinction itself ’ (Firestone 1970: 11). Her goal is rather that there should be a transformation of procreation such that ‘ genital distinctions between the sexes would no longer matter culturally ’ (ibid: 11). Firestone’s understanding of the transformation would not involve merely the replacement of one set of cultural practices by another. Instead it would be the imposition of set of consciously designed and deliberately chosen cultural practices into a sphere of human life

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where the practices until now had been determined by human biology. Thus

Firestone sees it as a victory over the kingdom of Nature (ibid: 9). ‘ The

‘natural’ is not necessity a ‘human’ value. Humanity has begun to outgrow nature: we can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on grounds of its origins in nature ’ (ibid: 10).

In spite of the power and originality of Firestone’s theory, it was never taken up by grass-roots radical feminism. The reason for this was not its inaccessibility as a theoretical work; Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology is much less reliable but has been extra ordinarily popular with the grass-root feminist movement. One reason can be her belief that advanced technology is a prerequisite for women’s liberation. Women in general are not trained in technology, and they know that it is controlled by men. Radical feminists observe that technology has been used in the past against women and to reinforce male dominance; and for women to take control of advanced technology, and use it for their own ends seemed like a task they were not equipped for. Apart from this there exists an obverse side to technology which often fails to inspire confidence. The catastrophic effects of contemporary technology are well known. Nuclear fall-out, toxic wastes, hazardous industrial materials, pollution, etc. pose threats to human health which propels a general reaction against technology and stimulates a “back to nature” movement, which has influenced many radical feminists. For this reason, too, they are unlikely to be attracted by Firestone’s liberation strategy. The final problem with

Firestone’s theory, from the perspective of many radical feminists, lies perhaps in the fact that she does not hold man responsible for the system of male

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dominance. Instead it is female biology that is at fault, and men appear in her theory as being ultimately women’s protectors. Consequently, Firestone does not stress the need for political struggle against male power; and her vision of a good society, as the full integration of women, men, and children into all domains of life, is clearly a version of the androgynous ideal which fails to fit in the increasingly militant and separatist tendencies of the grass root radial feminist movement.

The contemporary radical feminist movement is characterized by a general celebration of womanhood, a striking contrast to the devalution of women that pervades the larger society. This celebration takes many forms.

Women’s achievements are honoured, lesbianism is accepted as an expression of sexuality, women’s spirituality is developed, women’s culture is enjoyed. In addition women’s bodies are celebrated, particularly those aspects that have been devalued in male-dominated society. In conscious opposition to the stereotyped models of female beauty that are acknowledge under patriarchy, radical feminism glorifies the physical variety of women’s bodies and respects those domains and processes that the dominant male culture has disregarded.

Women’s proximity with nature is believed to provide women special ways of knowing and conceiving the world. Radical feminists object to what they observe as the excessive masculine reliance on reason, and instead emphasize the uniqueness of feeling, emotion and non-verbal communication.

As Alison Jaggar notes in Feminist Politics and Human Nature: In the following passage, Susan Griffin shows how men have defined reason so as to exclude and oppress women. Italics are all in original.

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Reason they said that in order to discover truth, they must find ways to separate feeling from thought Because we were less That measurements and criteria must be established free from emotional bias Because they said our brains were smaller That these measurements can be computed Because we were built closer to the ground , according to universal laws Because according to their tests we think more slowly, because according to their criteria our bodies are more like the bodies of animals, because according to their calculations we can lift less weight, work longer hours, suffer more pain, because they have measured these differences and thus these calculations, they said, constitute objectivity because we are more emotional than they are and based they said only on what because our behaviour is observed to be like the behaviour of children is observably true because we lack the capacity to be reasonable and emotions they said must be distrusted because we are filled with rage that where emotions color thought because we cry out thought is no longer objective because we are shaking and therefore no longer describes what is real shaking in our rage, because we are shaking in our rage and we are no longer reasonable (Griffin 1980: 117-118).

Radical feminists believe that women’s ways of understanding the world contrasts with “patriarchal ways of knowing. According to radical feminism, patriarchal thinking imposes polarities on reality, conceptually separating aspects of reality which are infact inseparable. Patriarchy opposes mind to matter, self to other, reason to emotion. It posits dualisms within which one side of the dualism is superior to the other side and in this way imposes a hierarchy. In contrast to the dualism created by patriarchy, this version of radical feminism claims to be non-dualistic. Women are said to recognize that they are part of nature rather than separate from it; consequently they trust in their direct and intuitive mode of knowing, which perceives the wholeness and oneness of the universe, the way in which “everything is connected with everything else” (Daly 1978: 11). Many radical feminist believe that this reality is obscured by the artificial hierarchies imposed by patriarchal culture and

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hence it becomes obligatory for women to rectify the patriarchal distortions and reveal the underlying reality.

This tendency in radical feminist writing has an interesting relationship with conventional “patriarchal” views. The long western philosophical tradition equates women and “the feminine” with nature, men and “the masculine” with a culture and tradition that has been explicitly misogynistic. Women have been seen as closer to animals, both because they were seen as lacking in reason and because the functioning of their bodies has been thought to commit them to the repetitive biological reproduction. Men’s bodies, by contrast, have been thought to allow them to transcend biological repetition through the creation of

“culture”. De Beauvoir expresses the contrast in this way:

On the biological level a species is maintained only by creating itself anew; but this creation results only in repeating the same life in more individuals. But man assures the repetition of life while transcending Life through Existence (i.e., goal-oriented, meaningful action); by this transcendence he creates values that deprive pure repetition. In the serving the species, the human male also remodels the face of the earth, he creates new instruments, he invests, he shapes the future (Beauvoir 1949: 58- 59)

In response to male culture, most of the feminists claim that women’s subordination is a cultural or a social, phenomenon rather than biological and their close proximity to nature is more a means to a special strength, knowledge and power rather than a source for degradation. Culture does not transcend nature; instead, it disguises and mutilates it and hence it becomes crucial to straighten the distortion in perceptions laid out by the language of phallocracy with a view to impose hierarchies. In an effort to overcoming “patriarchal dualism” many radical feminists deny that the patriarchal polarities of mind-

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body, masculine-feminine and even male-female are ontologically basic which often goes unrecognized because of the long history of patriarchal oppression which hammered these polarities deeply into our perceptual practices. The human ideal, therefore, is that of a woman who has the courage to develop her full human potential which though suppressed could not be eliminated, by patriarchy.

The French radical feminists, a group of intellectuals were deeply influenced by Althusserian Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridian de-constructionist philosophy. Although they call their approach “feminist materialist”, French radical feminists distinguish themselves in trying to elaborate a theory of ecriture feminine (feminine writing). The group includes

Christine Delphy, Helen Cixous and Luce Irigaray. In United States its best known member is Monique Wittig. Childbirth, by American radical feminists had been conceived as “natural” and “biological”; the central cause for women’s subordination, Wittig rejects this view. She argues instead that giving birth is a historical process of “forced production”. To see birth as a biological given allows: Forgetting that in our societies births are planned (demography), forgetting that we ourselves are programmed to produce children, while this is the only social activity “short of war” that presents such a great danger of death. (Wittig, Monique 1971: 39).

Wittig denies that even women’s bodies are biologically given. In our case, ideology goes far since our bodies as well as our minds are the product of this manipulation. We have been compelled in our bodies and in our minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been established for us. Distorted to such an extent that our deformed body is what they call “natural”, is what is supposed to exist as such before oppression. Distorted to such an extent that at the end oppression 52

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seems to be a consequence of this “nature” in ourselves (a nature which is only an idea) (Wittig Monique 1971: 54).

It is misleading to describe this situation as a patriarchal mutilation of women’s bodies by men. For Wittig it is more accurate to say that patriarchy has actually created women and men. She denies that women constitute a “natural group”, instead, she calls the category of woman an “artificial (social) fact”: Women appear as though they existed prior to reasoning, belonging to a natural order. But what we believe to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an imaginary formation which reinterprets physical features through the network of relationships in which they are perceived (they are seen black, therefore they are black, are seen women, therefore they are women. But before being seen that way, they first had to be made that way) (Wittig Monique 1973).

Andrea Dworkin (American radical feminist) made a similar point. She is concerned particularly with the way in which we have conceptualized human beings as necessarily either male or female, as falling into one or the other of

“two discrete biological sexes” (Dworkin 1974: 175). On Dworkin’s view, this ontology falsifies the reality that human individuals exhibit a wide variety of cross-sexed characteristics. She gives a number of arguments to support her conclusions that “ we are, clearly, a multisexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast fluid continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete ” (Ibid: 183). What stops us from recognizing this continuum is the fact that our gendered society is structured around the belief that “there are two polar distinct sexes” (Ibid: 175), a belief that it is obviously in most men’s interest to perpetuate.

Dworkin declares that our biological theory is a social construct whose categories reflect the interests of the socially dominant group, i.e. men and like

Wittig, she believes that human biological reality itself is socially constructed. 53

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Wittig held that, “women are a class, which is to say that the category ‘woman’ as well as “man”, is a political and economic category, not an eternal one”

(Dworkin 1974: 174).

If this view is correct, it makes no sense for feminists to fight for an ultimate matriarchy or a separatist society, for these ideals would leave the patriarchal categories of sex unchallenged. Dworkin advocates the traditional feminist androgyny, but her interpretation goes far beyond its usual psychological meaning to a reconceptualization and possibly a physical transformation of human biology. Wittig has much the same goal. It is literally, to use Firestone’s words, “the elimination of the sex distinction itself”. Wittig writes, “our fight aims to suppress men as a class, not through genocidal, but a political struggle. Once the class ‘men’ disappears, women as a class will disappear as well, for there are no slaves without masters” (Dworkin 1974:

174]. It is in this sense that the goal of these radical feminists is “a sexless society” (Ibid: 174).

Socialist Feminism

Like radical feminism, socialist feminism was born out of the contemporary women’s liberation movement. Originating during the 19 th century it was inspired by feminists who envisioned a world in which economic subjugation and exploitation would be replaced by utopian communities where men and women alike would willingly share domestic tasks, household chores, and child care. Socialist feminists in keeping with radical feminists view gender oppression as a central form of oppression, and consider social activism as essential to meet their goals. Their analysis of sexism was multipronged, comprehensive and a rigorous approach trying to examine the exploitation and

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subjugation women were subjected to on account of their economic status, nationality, race, and history. Socialist feminists attempted to integrate different perspectives: (i) the analysis of the structure of production, class and capitalism taken up by the Marxists, (ii) the control of women’s bodies, reproduction and sexuality and the manner in which this control is shaped by patriarchy which was an area dealt with by the radical feminists and (iii) the liberal feminists involvement with the impact of socialization of gender roles. Some of the recent prominent socialist feminists were, Alison Jaggar, Donna Haraway, Juliet Mitchell, Iris Young and Ferguson.

Socialist feminism shares with radical feminism the belief that traditional political theories were not adequate enough in dealing with issues regarding women’s oppression and that, in order to do so, it would become necessary to develop perspectives that could dismantle the structures of discrimination. In its analysis of contemporary society, socialist feminism goes beyond conventional definitions of ‘the economy’ to consider activities that does not involve the exchange of money. But the procreative and sexual work that is performed by women in the home. In analyzing all forms of productive activities, socialist feminism supplements the class with the additional category of gender. It regards human productive activity to be organized invariably around a sexual division of labour which has always been basic in determining the historically prevailing construction of human nature to oppress and to be oppressed. Socialist feminism borrowed several assumptions from socialism which assumed centrality in its ideology. One is that human beings are born in a given economic and social structure that substantially shapes their individual experience. Unlike liberal feminism which begins with assumption about individual rights, socialist feminists use social realities to explain individual

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experience. For this reason socialist feminist believe that the differences between women and men are not pre-social given but rather are socially constructed and therefore socially alterable.

Like radical feminists, socialist feminists too believe that new political and economic categories must reconceptualize not only the so-called public sphere, but also the hitherto private sphere of human life in order to create channels of understanding into sexuality, child rearing and bearing and personal maintenance in political and economic terms. A defining feature of socialist feminism is its attempts to interpret the historical materialist method of traditional Marxism so that it applies to the issues raised by radical feminists.

Besides, socialist feminist’s analysis reveals that male dominance, capitalism, racism and imperialism so inextricably tied up that they become inseparable. And therefore, the abolition of any of these systems of domination requires the end of all of them. Socialist feminists claim that a complete understanding of male dominance requires recognition of the way it is organized by the capitalist division of labour which create the roles that dictate how a person perceives oneself and is perceived by others thereby forging the masculine and feminine character types. Among the many socialist feminist theorists who have worked along these lines are Juliet Mitchell, Jane Flax, Gayle Rubin, Nancy Chodorow. They dealt with the question as to how early in life of an infact masculine and feminine character traits begin to form. In order to explain this they take recourse to psychoanalysis. They believed that psychoanalytic theory would be able to provide plausible and systematic accounts of how individual psyche gets structured by gender. But unlike Freud, socialist feminist theorists do not view psychological masculinity and feminity

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as the child’s inevitable response to a fixed and universal endowment. Instead, they view the acquisition of gendered character types as the result of specific social practices, particularly procreative practices, which are not determined by biology.

Whereas liberalism proposes that the outcomes of labour results in the expansion of one’s private property and satisfaction, socialists argue that work within capitalist systems results in worker alienation from both the product and process of their work. In contrast, communal ownership and cooperation will lead to personal satisfaction. Socialist feminists believe that individual opportunity alone will not lead to an egalitarian world, the realization of human potential will only be achieved through the restructuring of personal (e.g., family) and public (e.g., employment) experiences of men and women. Universal access to economic and work options, education, housing, birth control, and child care is essential.

Traditional socialist theory failed to include any analysis of how experiences and roles of men and women underwent demarcation within economic and family spheres and as a result contributed to women’s subordinate social status. Thus, feminist socialist theorists have examined alienation as it relates to women’s experiences of sexuality, motherhood, and education. Women have experienced (1) alienation from their own sexuality through commodities, (2) alienation from motherhood through the control of obstetric science and other “experts”, and (3) alienation form their intellectual strengths by being confined by definitions of intelligence and competence set forth primarily by men.

Socialist feminist theory examines how women are required through structural arrangements to play nurturing and caretaking roles in family

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contexts, educational settings, and other paid employment roles. The concentration of women in jobs of subservience, low-paying jobs, and care giving jobs and men in decision making roles reflects the division of labour within private households in which women are expected to be primary caregivers and man are given dominance. Like liberal feminists, socialist feminists pay astute attention to the impact of work, education and family roles on women. However, whereas liberal feminists focus on reforming systems and increasing individual opportunity, socialist feminists view these efforts as useful but inadequate and view the structural transformations as crucial.

Socialist feminists are especially concerned with the process in which sexism, classism and racism are reinforced through economic means. The purpose of redistributing power through the transformation of economic structures, including the educational and family systems that prepare individuals for work, is central for socialist feminists. Thus, those influenced by socialist feminist perspectives are acutely vigilant to the ways in which social policy and capitalism reproduce systems of domination.

More specifically, socialist feminist theory examines how educational, work and family systems prepare persons to willingly accept their assigned roles as paid and unpaid workers and to fulfill roles that are consistent with their gender, class and racial backgrounds.

The central project of socialist feminism is the development of a political theory and practice that will synthesize the best insights of radical feminism and Marxist tradition and simultaneously working out the problems associated with each. Though so far socialist feminist has made limited progress towards this goal. Alison Jagger in Feminist Politics and Human Nature expresses her conviction that socialist feminism constitutes a distinctive

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approach to political life, one that offers the most convincing promise of constructing an adequate theory and practice for women’s liberation.

Socialist feminists reinterpreted Freud with a historical materialist perspective. They claimed: that gender structures our inner lives, as well as our bodies and behaviour and this gender-structuring is not innate or natural but is socially imposed through the historically prevailing system of organizing social production. Gender structuring thus begins form a very impressionable age and is continually reinforced throughout our lives. The rigid feminine and masculine categorization plays a vital role in maintaining male dominance. With this in view the task that socialist feminists set for themselves is to provide a historical materialist account of the relationship between “inner” lives and social praxis. Thereafter it seeks to locate the interface between masculine and feminine psychology and division of labour based on sexual difference. Consequently, the socialist feminist account of the way in which women and men are socially constructed includes not only claims about human psychology and physiology but also claims about social institutions and ways of organizing social life.

As is well known, the most obvious manifestation of sexual division of labour is marked by the distinction between the so-called public and private spheres of human life. The private realm includes sexuality and procreation; viewed as more “natural” and therefore less “human” than the public realm, and has always been regarded as realm of women. Although women perform different kinds of work, they have been defined primarily by their sexual and procreative labour as “sex objects” and as mothers. This definition of women’s work led socialist feminists to focus on sexuality and procreation.

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Socialist feminists pointed out that the public/private distinction as postulated in almost all discourse including philosophy has been covertly normative. Inevitably functioning in several ways to rationalize the exploitation of women. The sexual division of labour forces women into childcare and other sexual services which limits their scope of functioning. Socialist feminists argue for abandoning the public/private distinction entirely. In their view, male dominance could be put on hold only through a transformation of the economic foundation of the society as a whole.

Socialist feminist conception of human nature along with its correlated conception of political economy, constitutes the most promising approach to an adequate understanding of the nature and root of women’s subordination. It provides a conceptual framework in terms of which we can understand how biological sex has been interpreted and shaped through human labour. It is through personal experience together with theoretical analysis, that socialist feminists conceived the importance of sex and gender in our lives.

For liberal feminists, freedom lies primarily in the private realm beyond the scope of state regulation (though it looks to the state to guarantee that freedom). This view of freedom has been challenged by the socialist feminist conception of human nature and of human productive activity. Socialist feminism conceives sexuality and procreation as human activities which are no more biologically determined than any other and so are equally capable of social development. Thus on the one hand socialist feminism denies the liberal belief that sexuality and procreation are matters purely of individual or “personal” concerns, on the other hand, socialist feminism denies the traditional Marxist assumption that sexuality and procreation are not possible arenas of human development and will vary relatively little from one society to

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the next. Instead, for socialist feminism, freedom consists in transcending the realm of necessity in every area of human life, including sexuality and procreation. Freedom is a social achievement and cannot be achieved by isolated individuals in the absence of a general reordering of society.

In its rejection of the public/private distinction the socialist feminist vision of the good society is closest to the vision of radical feminism. All earlier theories have devalued in one way or another, the daily work of bodily maintenance, particularly the care of children, and have seen human freedom and fulfillment as consisting in the transcendence of this work. Socialist feminism however studied how human nature and society are shaped by prevailing modes of organizing sexuality and procreation and have speculated on how human history may be reshaped by conscious political activity and theoretical practices directed towards transforming traditional modes of organizing those activities.

The socialist feminist contribution of the analysis of women’s oppression shows that women’s liberation requires totally new modes of organizing all forms of production and the final abolition of “feminity”. Infact, they make an explicit commitment to the abolition of both class and gender. Another important matter of concern for socialist feminists was reproductive freedom. Basically, for them reproductive freedom means control over whether and in what circumstances women bear and rear children.

In developing their conception of reproductive freedom, socialist feminists begin by identifying existing constraints on woman’s reproductive freedom. In identifying these constraints, they draw from the insights of other groups of feminists. From liberal feminism, they draw a recognition of some of the factors that force women into unwanted motherhood, including the legal

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and the economic unavailability of contraception and abortion, as well as the lack of opportunities for women to fulfill themselves through avenues other than motherhood. From traditional Marxism socialist feminists draw a recognition of the factors in contemporary society that deprive many poor women of the opportunity to be mothers. The factors include the involuntary sterilization of poor, black, Hispanic and Native American women in United States, and the lack of economic support for children who are born to such women. From radical feminists, they draw the recognition that women are often forced into motherhood by compulsory heterosexuality, that compulsory heterosexuality also deprives many lesbian mothers of custody of their children, and that no woman under patriarchy is really free to raise her child as she wishes.

Further, socialist feminists argues, quotes Alison Jaggar in Feminist Politics and Human Nature that women lack reproductive freedom as long as any of these constraints exist

Genuine control over one’s own reproductive life must mean, among other things, the universal availability of good, safe, cheap birth control; and adequate counseling for all women and men about all currently existing methods. It must mean adequate abortion services and an end to involuntary sterilization. It must mean the availability to all people of good public childcare centers and schools; decent housing, adequate welfare, and wages high enough to support a family, and of quality medical, pre and post-natal and maternal care. It must also mean freedom of sexual choice, which implies an end to the cultural norms that define women in terms of having children and living with a man; an affirmation of people’s right to raise children outside of conventional families; and, in the long run, a transformation of childcare arrangements so that they are shared among women and men. Finally, all these aspects of reproductive freedom must be available to all people – women, minorities, the disabled and handicapped, Medicaid and welfare recipients, teenagers, everyone.

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Women have never had reproductive freedom in this sense (CARASA 1979: 11).

The socialist feminist conception of reproductive freedom seeks to enlarge women’s options so that they are not forced to choose between childlessness and the alienation of contemporary motherhood. It calls for economic security for women, for paid maternity leaves and for the provision of publicly funded and community-controlled childcare. If these were established, women would have the real option of choosing motherhood without being forced to abandon or drastically limit their participation in other kinds of work or to become economically dependent on a man. These changes, particularly the assumption of public responsibility for childcare, would make visible the way in which childrearing is real work and would constitute an enormous step toward eliminating the public and private distinction.

The socialist feminist conception of reproductive freedom is directly linked with recognition of the necessity for sexual freedom. The announcement that reproductive freedom includes sexual freedom is a recognition that there exist not only biological but also social connections between sexuality and procreation. Limitation on women’s procreative freedom has been used to control their sexual freedom. Conversely, limitations on women’s sexual freedom have been used to control their procreative freedom; most obviously, forced heterosexuality has also forced women into motherhood.

Introduction

In the sixties, feminists began to question various images, representations, ideas and presumptions that traditional theories developed about women and the feminine. They directed their theoretical attention to patriarchal discourses- those which were openly hostile to and aggressive Introduction

towards women and the feminine, and those which had nothing at all to say about women. Feminists of this category seemed largely preoccupied with the inclusion of women in those spheres from which they had been excluded, that is, with creating alternatives which would enable women to be regarded as men’s equals. Instead of being ignored by and excluded from theory, women were to be included as possible objects of investigation. Issues with direct relevance to women’s lives such as family, sexuality, ‘private’ or domestic sphere, interpersonal relations were to be included as worthy of intellectual concern. They begun by addressing issues of practical ethics and politics making use of existing philosophical tools and techniques. Later feminist theory on moved to investigating the overt and covert ways in which the devaluation of women was found to be inherent in the most enduring ideals, central concepts, and dominant theories of philosophy.

Feminist theorizing involves a recognition of the overt and covert forms of misogynous discourses inculcating the skills of unraveling the procedures that make those discourses patriarchal. Feminists expose explicit patriarchal definitions of men and women, and their respective values, as well as the inclination of theories towards the interests of the masculine world. It also

Introduction

involves an ability to recognize patriarchal disclosures in terms of the absences, gaps, lacunae regarding the question of women and the feminine, giving voice to the silences that are included in the structuring of patriarchal discourses.

Introduction

of knowledge, to borrow a term from Irigaray, women began to assume the role of surrogate men.

In abandoning any such attempts to include women where theory excluded them, many feminists came to realize that the project of women’s inclusion as men’s equals was problematic and ultimately Utopian. But the aspiration towards equality between men and women was nevertheless, historically necessary for without such attempts, women could not question the naturalness or apparently inevitable second-class status of woman as non citizens, objects, sexual beings etc. This aim of equality served as an experiential pre-requisite to the more far-reaching struggles directed towards female autonomy, that is from women’s rights to political, social, economic and intellectual self-determination. Luce Irigaray has been a chief critic of this utopian ideal of equality.

Introduction

the right to accept or reject a situation according to one’s will in accordance with the appropriateness of the situation to one’s self definition. This attempt clearly shows that feminist’s concerns have dramatically changed the feminist attitude towards the patriarchal discourses. The tools and frameworks used in discourses, methods and assumptions which treated woman as objects were now to become targets of critical feminist scrutiny. The intention was not to fit- in woman into pre-existing philosophic-patriarchal spaces, instead it is women’s lives and experiences which were accounted for to subvert and challenge them. Basic, unspoken assumptions of philosophical theories, the way in which they develop and gain precedence, their use of criteria and methods of inclusion and exclusion all came under the scanner.

In the first chapter of the thesis entitled “Feminisms: Initiation into

Transformational Politics”, we have explored the historical background of feminism, the causes responsible for the emergence of the various movements,

Introduction

and some recurrent themes like binary oppositions, justice and equality of the sexes.

In the second chapter entitled “Tracing the Misogynous: An

Plato, Locke, Kant, Descartes and Spinoza has been made.

The third chapter is entitled as “Rupturing Stereotypes: A Search for

Equality”. In this chapter we make a study of early feminists Mary

Introduction

the need to understand women’s subordination and exclusion from or marginalization within a variety of cultural and social arenas. Feminists refuse to accept that inequalities between women and men are natural and inevitable and insist that they should be questioned.

The title of chapter fourth is “Celebration of Difference: The Road to

In the chapter fifth entitled as “Subject-in-Process: An Emergence of

Kristeva’s position on the claims of Western Philosophy that lead to fortifying patriarchy and sexist inclinations, the role played by language in the constitution of subjectivity as an open-ended process and the exposure of the

Introduction

limitations of patriarchal discourse, especially by mainstream Western philosophy.

Tracing the Misogynous: An Exploration into the Foundations of Philosophy

…the equity of practical judgements and the objectivity of theoretical knowledge…. all these categories are formally generically human, but are infact masculine in terms of their actual historical formation. If we call ideas that claims absolute validity objectivity binding, then it is a fact that in the historical life of our species there operates the equation: objective = male (Cited in Lewis 1977: 873)

In this chapter we propose to highlight the endemic misogyny inherent in male philosophers by noting the ways in which philosophy disregarded the inclusion of women in the category of rational subjects, citizens or as moral agent and characterized ways in which women were devalued by making them seem inferior. The history of sexism and misogyny has largely been ignored by the academic philosophical mainstream; often dismissed as unimportant, ‘a kind of local accident’ whose recognition does not affect philosophical discussion and theorizing.

Concerned with the apathy extended to issues relating to women, feminist found it crucial to make a critical analysis of philosophy moving on to investigate the overt and covert ways in which the devaluation of the women was found to be inherent in the most enduring ideals, the central concepts, and the dominant theories of philosophy. They begun by examining if there was any justification for the ideals of reason and virtue to be considered as ‘masculine’ whether there are any underlying motives which regard the content of philosophical theories as ‘masculine’; can philosophy be seen as ‘gendered’ even in cases where such things as the nature of women and men is not apparently under discussion? The analysis of this kind of ‘masculinity’ goes much deeper than merely cataloguing or analyzing overt instances of misogyny or sexism. Chapter II Tracing the Misogynous…… Foundations of Philosophy

In examining the history of philosophy, feminists make sure not to replicate that history. Their purpose was to understand its character and to listen to its ‘reason’ not in order to reproduce it but in order to challenge the undertones and the silences of philosophy. Both, the contents and its inevitable ramification were taken note of. In other words, they are studied, not always for what is said but also for what is deliberately not said or what cannot be openly stated. It examines why certain concepts and their contents are privileged and certain others treated with denigration. Feminists involved in such projects claim that philosophy may not be able to tell us a great deal about men and male desire. The desire, for example which underlies the work of Descartes, for a unified and universally appropriate truth, is itself in need of examination.

Women are clearly omitted from mainstream philosophizing, and if at all present, they inhabit the margins yet philosophical texts do inscribe the nature of woman. Sometimes the philosopher speaks directly about woman, prescribing her role, making claims about her abilities and inabilities, stating her desires. At other times the message is indirect – a passing remark hinting at the drawbacks, their emotionality, irrationality, unreliability etc. thus condemning them.

The process of delineation often occurs in far more subtle ways when the central concepts of philosophy – reason and justice; characteristics that are taken to chiefly define human beings – are associated with traits historically identified with masculinity leaving feminity empty.

Feminist philosophers critically examined canonized texts of philosophy concluding that the discourses of philosophy are not gender-neutral.

Philosophical narratives do not offer a universal perspective, but rather

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privilege some experiences and beliefs over others. These experiences and beliefs permeate entire philosophical discourse whether they be aesthetic, epistemological, moral or metaphysical. Yet this fact has mostly been neglected by male philosophers. Given the history of canon formation in western philosophy, the perspective most likely to be privileged is that of upper class white males. To be vigilant to the impact of this privilege it becomes imperative that feminists re-read the cannon with attention weeding out philosopher’s assumptions concerning gender deeply embedded in their theories.

G. Loloyd identifies a gendered reason/emotion dualism going back to the Greeks, though she also registers the particular contribution of Descartes to modern entrenchment of this dichotomy. However, she adds, ‘his influential dualism (mind and body) has interacted with and reinforced the effects of the symbolic opposition between male and female’ (Loloyd 1993: XIV).

There is no doubt about ways in which male philosophers have devalued women, believed them to be inferior or held them in contempt. The history of misogyny has been a dreary one. It is absolutely bewildering as to how such claims could be made and more pertinently sustained in the annals of philosophy. To quote a few representative philosophers:

“As between male and female, the former is by nature superior and ruler, the latter inferior and subject” (Aristotle ‘Politics ’). “Women are directly fitted for acting as the nurses and teachers of our early childhood by the fact that they are themselves childish, frivolous and short-sighted; in a word, they are big children all their lifelong” (Schopenhauer ‘ On Women ’). “Here at its origin we grasp one of the most fundamental tendencies of human reality – the tendency to fill … A good part of our life is passed in plugging in holes, in filling empty places, in realising and symbolically establishing a plenitude…. It is

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only from this standpoint that we can pass only to sexuality. The obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which ‘gapes open’” – (Sartre ‘ Being and Nothingness ’).

The most useful starting point, I think, is to consider the ways in which women have been excluded by many philosophers from philosophical ideal of such things as human nature and morality. And to look at the inconsistencies and problems this may generate in their theories.

Such apparent misogyny is said to have traces in Greek philosophy permeated deep into the systems of thought and in effect gendering the cannon.

One of its manifestations appears in the form of association between “male”: and “rational” and “female” and “emotional”. The idea that the rational is in one way or the other associated with masculinity goes back to the Greeks, the founding father of rationality Aristotle stated that woman was “as it were an impotent male, for it is through certain incapacity that the female is female”

(Aristotle 727a, 15). This intrinsic female incapacity was a lack in the

“principle of soul” (ibid: Book II, Ch. 3, 737a, 25) and hence associated with an incapacity for rationality. Aristotle claimed that women do have a rational faculty, but they have it in an inferior fainter way, just enough to distinguish them from at best animals. They are not equal to man, somehow lesser men, lesser in respect to all important things.

Before the eighteenth century it was acknowledged that men and women are unequal by nature and that women are designed naturally inferior to men.

Aristotle makes such a claim in his work, Politics :

“It is thus clear that there are by nature freemen and slaves, and that servitude is agreeable and just for the latter …. Equally, the relation of the male to the female is by nature such that one is superior and the other inferior, one dominates and the other is

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dominated …. With the barbarians, of course, the female and the dominated have the same rank. This is because they do not possess a naturally dominating element…. This is why the poets say, ‘it is just that Greeks rule over barbarians’ because the barbarians and slaves are by nature the same’ (Aristotle, 1959).

Aristotle equates women and slave and ascribe them quality ‘servitude’ as natural. This implies that inequality between men and women is precisely because of the inherent nature of two sexes. Thus declaring that by nature women deserve servitude and men mastery. Aristotle held that since men are superior to women, so they must dominate over women, thus allocating to women a position of inferiority.

Aristotle characterized women as barbarians, equated them with slaves aspiring or deserving no freedom, and condemned them to remain under the domination of man. Following this logic, Aristotle ordained that inequality between men and women being based on nature cannot be dispensed with.

Several other thinkers of antiquity the Christian Middle Ages and of modern times in acceptance with Aristotle’s position assumed the natural hierarchy between men and women.

Another instance of a similar kind is to be located in the Greek distinguishing between the different domains of life for men and women. In classical Athens, Greeks made a distinction between polis or political community and the Okios or household. This distinction between polis and okios followed by the Greeks was comparable to the contract between public and private spheres (Nicholson 1981: 85-95). The domain of household was concerned with what was necessary for physical survival and greatly similar to the existence of animals. Thus, within the realm of the household, slaves and

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women accordingly, laboured to satisfy the demands of natural existence. The polis, on the other hand, provided the space for the expression and exploration for that which was more distinctly human; a space reserved for men was confined under no boundaries, a man could discover and explore utilizing his creativity and achieve immortality. Hannah Arendt presents this view in the following words:

“For the polis was for the Greeks, as the res publica was for the Roman, first of all their guarantee against the futility of individual life, the space protected against this futility and reserved for the relative permanence, if not immortality of mortals (Arendt 1958: 56).

The polis of Greeks or res publica of Romans was the realm of specifically created for men and the okios was where slaves and women engaged in the critical physical production and reproduction of life. Writing about the transformation of the political from classical Greece to the modern era, Arendt points out that the Greek opposition between okios and polis has been replaced by the modern distinction between the private and public.

Much of Aristotle’s philosophy is based on the assumption that every existing thing can be seen as existing for a purpose. The function of a thing needs to be identified to make sense of the purpose. And since the function resides in its nature and since in turn nature distinguishes it from other things and makes it the sort of thing that it is Aristotle assumes that, just as the individual parts of the human body have a function, or just as the harp player has a function, so too the human beings have a function to perform, which is to develop their special talent or attribute.

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Other attributes and functions such as nurturing and growth, sensations and experiencing are shared by other living beings too but what distinguishes human beings is their faculty of reason. Hence, he concludes that the function of human beings is to exercise their non-corporeal faculties or ‘soul’ in accordance with a ‘principle of reason’. And central to the capacity for reason is the faculty of speech. So, he says, in the Politics:

“Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose, and she has endowed humans alone among animals with the power of speech. Speech is something different from voice, which is possessed by other animals also and used by them to express pain or pleasure, for their nature does indeed enable them not only to feel pleasure and pain but to communicate their feelings to each other. Speech, on the other hand, serves to indicate what is useful and what is harmful, and so also what is just and what is unjust. For the real difference between humans and animals is that humans alone have perceptions of good and evil, just and unjust” (Aristotle Politics: 60).

The distinguishing mark of human beings thus lies in their power of reasoning, which is related to the faculty of speech. It is ‘according to Nature’; that it is consonant with the function or special mark of humanness that the body should be ruled by the soul:

“The living creature consist in the first place of mind and body, and of these the former is ruled by nature, the latter … It is clear that it is both natural and expedient for the body to be ruled by the soul, and for the emotional part of our Nature to be ruled by the mind, the part which possesses Reason” (Aristotle Politics: 68).

Ironically enough there were according to Aristotle, certain classes of human beings who were excluded from the full exercise of human reason; namely, slaves and women for he regarded slaves as basically a form of property: ‘Any piece of property can be regarded as a tool enabling a man to live, and his property is an assemblage of such tools; a slave is a sort of living 70

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piece of property, and like any other servant is a tool in charge of other tools’

(Aristotle Politics: 64). The life of a slave is simply a means to an end that enables the master to pursue a life of freedom and virtue among other male citizens of a city state or polis. The life of a woman was similarly a collection of functions. The wife of a male citizen was required to produce heirs and, much like slaves, to be the means in providing the necessities of life to the man. Aristotle also held that the family or household (to which women and slaves were confined), existed ‘for the sake of’ the polis. It was an inferior though necessary form of association, whose rationale lay in its belief that it is

‘natural’ for the rational part of the soul to rule over the irrational. This generates an anomaly in Aristotle’s philosophy on account of the assumptions that lead to it. The anomaly has been discussed in detail by Elizabeth Spelman

(1983). Aristotle compared the rule of the mind over the body the rule of the master over the slave. He believed that there was a class of ‘natural rulers’

(those whom nature had intended to rule). But he did not believe that everyone who was born into this natural ruling class necessarily possessed the qualities of mind and character to equip them for this task. There were free males who did not possess the rational aspect of the soul and so could not rule. In this situation Aristotle found it in order that the rational should rule the irrational.

This however was not applicable to women and slaves who possessed rationality for it would blur the distinctions he had drawn. Spelman suggests, this would be tantamount, to saying that women are by nature unnatural. What

Aristotle does is to offer a general theory of human nature and then simply excluded certain classes of human beings from ‘human nature’ in ways which cannot be explained at all within the theory. 71

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Aristotle’s entire political philosophy rests on providing the means for free males to live a life devoted to intellectual and political pursuits. Now, here arises a question, to which Aristotle recognized and answered as well. Women and slaves are, after all, human beings. They do not lack speech, and the adequate performance of their functions will surely require capacities for reason, and perhaps certain virtues. Here is how he expresses the problem:

About slaves, the first question to be asked is whether, in addition to their virtues as tools or servants, they have another and more valuable one. Can they possess restraint, courage, justice and every other condition of that kind, or have they in fact nothing but the serviceable quality of their persons? The question may be answered in either of two ways, but both present a difficulty. If we say that slaves have these virtues, how then will they differ from free man? If we say that they have not, the position is anomalous, since they are human beings and share in reason. Roughly the same question can be put in relation to wife and child. (Aristotle Politics: 94).

Aristotle’s solution to this problem is to argue that the type of knowledge possessed by slaves (and presumably, women) was a special type.

The fully rational part of the soul, the ‘deliberately faculty’ was not present at all in slaves and was ineffective in females. The knowledge and virtue of slaves and women consisted in knowing how to be ruled and how to perform their allotted tasks, and this did not qualify as fully rational.

Now this view of women and slaves, combined with Aristotle’s assumption that one class of human beings – namely free males should lead a life of self-justification or as lived for its own sake, and others should lead a life that is merely a means to it. And he consistently regards women as defective, inferior beings, almost as a degenerate form of human life. This comes out very clearly in his understanding of biology. Aristotle believed that

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the female supplied the ‘matter’ in conception, and he thought this to consist of the menstrual fluid. The male, on the other hand, supplied the ‘form’ or ‘soul’, via the emission of semen. He believed the male to be superior in possessing more ‘vital heat’ than the female; semen, he thought, was a concoction of the blood which was superior in all respects. Females were inferior because of their inability to ‘concoct’ semen. Female embryos were inferior to males ones; if a girl child was born, it was an indication of the inferiority of the state of the uterus. Aristotle regarded the female state as being a sort of deformity, although one which occurred in the ordinary course of nature. Aristotle, of course, did not have access to modern biological knowledge about conception.

But the assumption of the inferiority of the female in no way follows from his purely biological assumptions.

In Book X of the Metaphysics , Aristotle stated that male and female mutual contraries. Further he claimed that in a pair of contraries, one must always be the privation of the other. Subsequently, the female was interpreted as the privation of the male.

“For every contrariety involves, as one of its term, a privation, but not all cases are alike” (Aristotle X 41055b:16)

Privation was an inability or incapacity that prevented one contrary from becoming its opposite. Aristotle used a Greek word ‘ steresis ’ for privation, which implied an emptiness, or total passivity.

Now we distinguish matter and privation, and hold that one of these, namely the matter, is not-being only in virtue of an attribute which it has, while the privation in its own nature is not being… but they make it one” (Aristotle 192a: 3-10).

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Aristotle in separating privation from matter suggested that while privation has no identity at all, matter had to have a specified nature; pure matter cannot exist independent of form.

For the one which persists is a joint cause, with the form, of what comes to be - a mother, as it were. But the negative part of the contrariety may often seem, if you concentrate your attention on it as an evil agent, not to exist at all (Aristotle 192a: 12-15).

Since the concept of privation involves a negative valuation, it follows that this description of the female as the privation of the male provided the metaphysical framework for sex polarity. Infact, Aristotle concluded, that the female is inferior to the male, the female became identified with the properties of matter, with passivity, and with the lowest of elements. The male, correspondingly, became identified with the properties of form, with activity, and with elements of higher order.

In Book X of the Metaphysics , Aristotle devoted an entire chapter to considering the way in which male and female were contraries. One of the central issues he discussed was how women and men are different. He argued that the difference in attributes like skin color do not lead to the difference in species because colour was contrariety in matter and not in form. Contrariety led to a difference in species only when the form of one thing was contrary to the form of another. He therefore concluded that the contrariety of male and female was a contrariety, not of form, but of matter: But male and female, while they are not modifications peculiar to “animal”, are not so in virtue of its essence but in the matter, i.e., the body. That is why the same seed becomes female or male by being acted on in a certain way. We have stated, then, what it is to be other in species, and why some things differ in species and others do not”. (Aristotle 1058b: 22-25).

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In Metaphysics , Aristotle further argued that whenever there is a pair of contraries, one is to be considered the privation of the other. Privation, then, determines the characteristics of the two contraries, since privation was complete non-being, with no identity of its own, it could only be found in something that had a nature. Therefore, matter was interpreted as the privation of form, and the female as the privation of male. Matter, privation and the female, were integrated into the foundation of Aristotle’s metaphysics of sex polarity.

It is also noteworthy that Aristotle believed that the sexes were differentiated precisely by their respective relation to matter and form in the process of generation:

The female always provides the material, the male that which fashions the material into shape; this, in our view, is the specific characteristic of each sex (Aristotle 738b: 20-25).

Aristotle believed that when the difference between the function of two things was stipulated, this difference constituted the basis for a distinction in nature, the presence of a rational faculty differentiated human beings from other kinds of animals, and the relation to matter and form differentiated women from man: We may safely set down as the chief principles of generation the male (factor) and the female (factor): the male as possessing the principle of movement and generation, the female as possessing that of matter” (Aristotle 1937: 761a: 6-10).

Just as form activated matter and gave it a certain shape, so the male becomes the source of movement and shape for the female. By a further process of association, man initiated a relationship with woman, and man attempted to develop the identity of the woman to conform to his own ideas. Just as matter

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itself was lifeless and unformed, so woman by herself needed a man to be awakened i.e. the matter (woman) needed to be shaped by form (man) to become what it had the potential to achieve.

One of the most far-reaching consequences of the Aristotelian thought regarding woman in relation to man was the association of the female with passivity and the male with activity. To interpret matter as passivity implied a separation between matter and form in which matter was in no way dynamic, while form was fully active. On the other hand, the concept of matter as potential implied an existent in motion, a dynamic energy in natural things.

Now of course the female, qua female, is passive, and the male, qua male, is active – it is that whence the principle of movement comes. Taking, then, the widest formulation of each of these two opposites, viz., regarding the male qua active and causing movement, and the female qua passive and being set in movement, we see that the one thing which is formed from them only in the sense in which a bedstead is formed form the carpenter and the wood, or a bull from the wax and the form. (Aristotle 729b: 15-20).

Aristotle applying his metaphysical distinctions to the question of generation elaborates that women and men were characterized by their specific relation to the opposites hot and cold. The private opposite, cold was more present in female. While the superior opposite, hot was more present in the male. As a consequence, the mother provided only material to generation, while the father provided form. The lack of heat in the female made her unable to concoct the seed that contained the form of the child; Aristotle described woman as infertile, imperfect, deformed, and containing a basic inability:

The male and the female are distinguished by a certain ability and inability. Male is that which is able to concoct, to cause to take shape, and to discharge semen possessing the “principle” of the “form”… Female is that which receives the semen but is

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unable to cause semen to take shape or to discharge it” (Aristotle 765b: 10-18).

Aristotle continues by offering two examples of relationship. The female was compared to wood and wax, the male to carpenter and form. In both examples, the property of passivity in the female is emphasized. Wood and

Wax, as examples of specific matter awaiting the carpenter or the form to shape them; the male being the activating and shaping agent and the woman as passive in every aspect of her identity. In subsequent thought for centuries to come, this sense of female qua female, or male qua male, retained its meaning and application.

Another philosopher worth mentioning in this context is Plato . In

Symposium , Plato imagines the ‘ Eros ’ which is personified with the characteristics of both male and female; Eros being a figure that Plato adopted from traditional mythology, which regarded Eros as a masculine god of love. In

Plato’s text Eros is both a lover and a philosopher. But despite his male nature,

Eros also manifests female functions, such as pregnancy and giving birth. Thus he represents something ‘complete’, a being without the sexual limitations inherent in each man and woman. In other words, he is not entirely divine, but rather a being halfway between god and man. Eros transcends sexual difference, not because he lacks gender, but because he embraces both male and female sexuality.

This exposes a fundamental ambiguity in Plato’s notion of sexual difference. On the one hand, since sexual differences are purely bodily in nature and thus of no consequence in the realm of forms, they could be characterized as insignificant for Platonic philosophy. But in describing Eros as

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a masculine being of androgynous sexuality, Plato has effectively absorbed the feminine into the masculine, and thereby forfeited any position of neutrality with regard to gender. The apparent gender neutrality of Plato’s philosophy infact entails the negation of the feminine.

Furthermore, in the Republic (BK II + III) Plato’s ideal state consists of three distinct social groups: the workers, the guardians and the rulers. Strictly speaking, the discussion of usual equality in Book V of the Republic is concerned only with equality within the ruling class. Also, Socrates argument refers repeatedly to the functions of the guardians, and the way it does so is, noteworthy. Like the workers and the rulers, the guardians also have a special virtue i.e. courage, or rather manliness, which is a more literal translation of

Greek word andreia (from aner, meaning ‘man’). And therefore courage and manliness were regarded as masculine virtues, and when Plato has Socrates advocate that the ‘best of all the women’ ( Republic , 456e) should participate in governing the state, he is infact speaking of the most masculine of women.

As Vigdis Songe points out in yet another aspect worth noting is that in the very passage where he claims that women and men are fundamentally the same, Socrates indirectly betrays an assumption of their essential difference.

Whereas the male guardians are characterized as the best citizens (politai ), the female guardians are described quite simply as the best women (gynaikes). In other words, man belongs to a political community, which adds to his definition and his nature as a human being whereas a woman is quite simply her sex. In this context, ‘the best women’ means paradoxically the woman that have most successfully overcome their sex, a sex which is wrought with

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limitations. Thus, what Book V of The Republic does not proposes an equal empowerment of sexes, but rather is an attempt to cultivate masculine qualities within the ruling class.

Thus for Plato, the ideal person happens to be one who is guided in all activities by logos , or reason and is masculine in character. Since a woman and the feminine are seem to be representing the body that ideality becomes inaccessible. Also in Timaeus the relation between immaterial realm of forms and the material world is compared with the relation between the father and the mother (Timaeus, 50). Often in The Republic , women are mentioned in the same sense as children and slaves, which mean that they are equated with people whose capacity for reason is regarded as inferior.

Plato, in regarding man as the true representative of human nature and the woman as something of qualitatively inferior, was echoing the prevalent attitude of his times. Plato’s attempt to include women amongst the potential rulers was not to provide women an equal footing with men, for she would have to overcome her feminine attributes and become like a man to gain that status. Her entitlement to be called a human being was also on account of the resemblances she shared with men.

Augustine one of the most influential Christian theologian of the

Middle Ages. He was equally reluctant in privileging women with rationality.

As he writes in The Confessions:

And finally we see man, made in your image and likeness, ruling over all the irrational animals for the very reason that he was made in your image and resembles you, that is because he has the power of reason and understanding. And just as in man’s soul there are two forces: one which is dominant because it

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deliberates and one which obeys because it is subject to such guidance, in the same way in the physical sense, woman has been made for man. In her mind and her rational intelligence she has a nature the equal of man’s, but in sex she is physically subject to him in the same way as our natural impulses need to be subjected to the reasoning power of the mind, in order that the actions to which they lead may be inspired by the principles of good conduct. (Augustine: 344).

Yet another such observation reinforces the subjugation reflecting clear remarks of woman to man: Then you took man’s mind, which is subject to none but you and needs to imitate no human authority, and renewed it in your own image and likeness. You made rational action subject to the rule of the intellect, as woman is subject to man (Augustine: 345).

Being rational, woman ought to share a common nature with man and hence, to be equal to him. Augustine drew a hierarchy within rational faculty by differentiating between two different modes of rationality; a dominant and a passive mode. The relationships between the two modes are akin to the relationship between man and woman. These tensions surrounding woman’s status as a rational being surfaced during the Renaissance debating the question as to whether the term mankind include woman.

Further, great emphasis was laid on different virtues, especially chastity, which was to be for women the central virtue around which all others revolved.

The principal justification for bothering with the education of women at all was to focus on chastity as their highest ideal. The social and economic factors too contributed to the subordination of women. The fact that women were the property of someone who therefore had special rights over them, ensured that women remained subject to a different array of moral restraints, obligations and correlative virtues. It was by no means critically assumed at this time that the dignity of man meant the dignity of males only. But the prolonged debate on 80

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the nature and rationality of women was of little consequence for sexual equality. Much of the ‘sex’ debate during the Renaissance was conducted on theological grounds and therefore in accordance with theological interpretation woman’s status was made legitimate as man’s companion and helpmate and hence subject to his rule.

Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau were classical representative of this school of thought they assumed that before the existence of civil society lived in a sort of pre-social state, called the state of nature, and by virtue of a contract and consent among themselves, society came into existence. For example, John

Locke assumed that there were patriarchal families in the state of nature and argued that fathers of families entered the social contract; wives were concluded by their husbands. In Locke’s conjectural history of the state of nature, fathers became monarch with the ‘scarce avoidable’ and tacit consent of their adult sons. One thing of our concern here is that Locke does not mention mothers in this context, but tacit assumption is that the wife and mother also give their consent to their husbands. Locke agreed with Filmer that a wife’s subjection to her husband had ‘a Foundation in Nature’ and that the will of a husband should ‘take place before that of his wife in all things of their common concernment’ (Locke, 1967, II: 75-16, I: 47-48). This means that women are excluded from the status of ‘individual’. If a wife’s subjection to her husband has a natural foundation, she cannot also be seen as a naturally ‘free and equal individual’.

In chapter 7 of Second treatise of Government Locke clearly mentions that when disagreements arise between husband and wife, the man “as the abler

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and stronger is the ruler”. The ‘social contract’ and ‘consent’ theorists assumed that all individual are “naturally free and equal”, or are born free and equal to each other. It was imagined that in order to preserve their freedom and equality, free and equal individuals voluntarily consented to enter such relationship and their contract created the society. These consent theorists adopted two deliberate strategies to support their arguments: One, they turned to hypothetical voluntarism (Pateman 1972) and two, they excluded certain individuals i.e. women and social relationship (men-women relations) from the scope of consent.

In social consent and contract theory, women and relationship between the sexes are of no special relevance. The consent theorists declare that women are among the individuals who are incapable of consenting. And therefore, they excluded women from the category of individuals (man) who created the society through consent and contract. Also woman’s consent was always understood as given, even if they express their non-consent (or refuse to consent); it has been treated as irrelevant or has been interpreted as ‘consent’.

John Locke for example, used the metaphor of ‘ tacit consent ’: the consent of future generations can always be said to be given if individuals are going peacefully about their daily lives, even though there are “no Expressions of it at all” (Locke 1967: 119).

Another consent and contract theorist, Hobbes argues that all authority relations are based on consent, even between parent and infant. The parents’ domination over child derives not from procreation but from ‘consent, either expressed, or by other sufficient arguments declared’ (Hobbes, 1968: 253-254).

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For Hobbes, overwhelming power is sufficient argument. His concept of consent merely interprets the fact, of power and submission. What is noteworthy in all such assumptions is that the consent was his (man’s) consent, her (woman’s) consent was never placed on the same footing as men.

Rousseau advocated that women must be excluded from the participatory, voluntarist political order because of their ‘natural weak’ moral characters and their deleterious influence upon the morals and civic virtues of men. It was these assumptions which led Rousseau to divide women into the good and the dissolute or whore.

For Rousseau women can remain good only if they remain under men’s perpetual vigil and control and stay within the shelter of domestic life. He pleaded for sexual segregation; the sexes were allowed to come together only where it was proper for them to do so. This is the plan of nature, which gives different tastes to the two sexes, so that they live apart each in his way’

(Rousseau 1968: 107). Women, Rousseau declares, ‘must be trained to bear the yoke from the first…. And to submit themselves to the will of others’

(Rousseau 1911: 332), and that ‘will of others’, is the will of men. The influence of women, even good women, always corrupts men, because women are ‘naturally’ incapable of attaining the status of free and equal individuals or citizens. The successive transformation of human consciousness or ‘nature’, which Rousseau depicts in the Discourse on Inequality and the Social Contract are actually the transformation of male consciousness and not of female. Note that in Rousseau’s ‘true’ state of nature, the sexes are equal in their ability to protect themselves but in his conjectural state of nature, he suddenly asserts

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that in the ‘happy epoch’, the ‘first difference was established in the way of life of the two sexes’, a difference that demands the future subordination of women

(Rousseau 1964: 147).

Regarding sexual relationships, per se, Rousseau holds that ‘consent’ of women is all-important. However, their consent can always be assumed to be given - even though apparently it is being refused. According to Rousseau, men are ‘natural’ sexual aggressors and women are ‘destined to resist’, Rousseau

(Rousseau 1968: 847) first ask: ‘what would become of human species if the order of attack and defense were changed’? He then, answers: Modesty and chastity are the preeminent virtues, but because women are also creatures of passion, they must use their natural skills of duplicity and dissemblance to maintain their modesty. In particular, they must always say ‘no’ even when they desire to say ‘yes’. Apparent refusal of consent can never, in a woman, be taken at face value. A quote from Rousseau confirms this explanation: “Why do you consult their words when it is not their mouths that speak?.... the lips always say ‘No’ and rightly so; but the tone is not always the same, and that cannot lie… Must her modesty condemn her to misery? Does she not require a means of indicating her inclinations without open expression? (Rousseau 1968: 348)

Having so said, Rousseau proceeds to advise men to learn to interpret a woman’s ‘consent’ in civil society: To win this silent consent is to make use of all the violence permitted in love. To read it in the eyes, to see it in the ways inspite of the mouth’s denial …. If he then completes his happiness he is not brutal, he is decent. He does not insult chasteness; he respects it; he serves it. He leans it the honour of still defending what it would have perhaps abandoned’ (Rousseau 1968: 85).

Rousseau also appears to document rational incapability of woman:

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The quest for abstract and speculative truths, principles and axioms in the sciences for everything that tend to generalize ideas, is not within the competence of women… Nor do women have sufficient precision and attention to succeed at the exact sciences. Woman, who is weak and who sees nothing outside the house, estimates and judges the forces she can put to work to make up for her weakness, and those forces are men’s passions. (Rousseau 1979: 386-7).

Rousseau did not stop here; he even recommended that ‘the education of women should always be relative to that of men’, for they ‘are specially made to please men.

This was not enough, even noted philosopher Immanual Kant decreed that the dependents have ‘no civil personality’ and includes ‘women in general’ in this category. Independence, he observes, ‘is conventionally demonstrated by ownership of property and only independent individuals have a property of their person’. Being considered dependent and devoid of civil personality, women have rarely be seen as owning their persons (Kant 1971: 139).

In Anthropology Kant describes that understanding the human nature of man is the necessary foundation for ethics even if it is that very nature that moral man must transcend. The ability to deny passion and to act from rationality determined dispassionate will is not given by nature. But it must be acquired. With a resolve or decision a man can become a man of “character”, capable of resisting passion and objects that arouse passion. Although this change in man has minimal requirement of rationality and can be achieved by the “ordinary human mind” there are many for whom it is difficult or impossible, like poets, clergyman but women are completely disqualified.

Women, said Kant, have principle, but these principles are “hard to relate with character in the narrow sense of the word” (Kant 1978: 222). They 85

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have character, but in the sense that a natural kind has character. They have principles, but these are the result not of autonomous reasoning but of maxims like “what is generally believed is true” or what people generally do is good”.

Women have a character, a character given by nature, a character ordained by biology (Ibid.)

Kant held that the reason why clergymen and poets cannot achieve moral maturity is social. While the reason why women cannot achieve moral maturity is “nature’s design”. Nature requires, Kant explained, that the species propagate. For that purpose union between men and women is necessary. For such a union to be stable “one person must subject himself to the other, and, alternately one must be superior to the other in something so he can dominate or rule” (Kant 1978: 216). If man and woman are identical there will be conflict. Nature’s solution is to make men superior in reason, strength and courage, and to give women a compensatory power to say no to men’s sexual desires.

People make fun of a woman’s loquacity, timidity, quarrelsomeness, and childishness, but, said Kant, these traits are no joke. They are the key to a woman’s power. They allow her to attract and entice men and then hold out for marriage. In this way a woman ensures not only procreation but support for herself and her children. As he writes in Anthropology:

Feminine traits are called weaknesses. People joke about them; fools ridicule them; but reasonable person see very well that those traits are just tools for the management of men, and for the use of men for female designs. (Kant 1978: 227).

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Women, claims Kant are not suited to be intellectual companions. Here he echoed the educational policies of Rousseau. “As for scholarly women”, said

Kant, “they use their books somewhat like a watch, that is, they wear the watch so it can be noticed that they have it on, although it is usually broken or does not show the time” (Kant 1978: 221). After extended remarks on women’s nature, Kant go on to speak about women. For him, consorting with women is a necessary evil, at least for some men, so that the species continue. If possible, however, it is better to avoid close contact with women. By the final statement, of his ethics in the Metaphysis of Morals , notes Andrea Nye that sex has become a source of degradation.

Such misogynous remarks make Kant an obvious target for feminist critics. Feminist philosophers cited Kant’s contempt for women’s intelligence and ethical capability, his defense of a “patriarchal” law of marriage in which a woman has no legal rights. They condemned his relegation of women to a biological function.

This is a clear paradox. Although the individualistic idea is grounded in the conception of individual freedom and equality, it is only for male individuals. The social contract theorists, thus, denied women individuality and believed that they are naturally subordinate to, and dependent upon, father and husband. Here these ideas are in complete consonance with patriarchalists.

The political and productive spheres were then obviously identified as the natural sphere of men. Women were then allotted the separate or private sphere due to the assumption of their natural subordination. Although the eighteenth century and onwards regarded independence as the fundamental

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criterion for citizenship. While the dependents, claims Immanuel Kant have

“no civil personality” and in that he includes “women in general” (Kant 1971:

139) that is to say, according to Kant, women being dependent have no civil personality.

Thus, such theorists relegated women to slaves, for legally and socially a wife was seen as the property of her husband; she could be legally imprisoned in the matrimonial house and could be beaten. John Stuart Mill (1869) commenting, on such situation of woman writes:

That although he was “far from pretending that wives are in general no better treated than slaves …. no slave is a slave to the same lengths, in so full a sense of the word as a wife is … A husband can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations” (Mill 1970: 159-60).

And such tendency persists even today (though in different form).

In summary, woman is excluded from the category of ‘individual’. She is considered not worthy of consenting, her consent and her inclinations have no meaning. She has been accorded the lowest degradation as a human being, even worst than slaves. She was treated as property, a non-person, having none or considered not worthy for any civil rights. The custom and social practices conspire together to deny her whatever and wherever freedom and individuality are given to her in law.

Later during the 17 th century the predominance of the category of reason and associated with it the Man of Reason as a character ideal came to the fore.

The development of a rather different situation in the relationship between philosophical thought and the socio-political was witnessed.

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Another striking change that 17 th century brought to ‘reason’ was the attempt to encapsulate it within the confines of a systematic method for attaining certainty. Cartesian Regulae, the Rule for the Direction of the Mind

(1628) is paradigmatic to this approach to reason. Much of what makes modern philosophy unwelcoming to women has been the dualist-metaphysics, worked out by Descartes, that became instrumental in handing over the mastering and control of the natural world to man. He drove a wedge between feeling and knowing, creating a masculinist illusion of absolute truth. Cartesian ideals of objectivity, rationality, mechanistic approach and control became the hallmark of philosophy’s masculinist identity. The acquisition of knowledge became a matter of a systematic pursuit of an orderly method. The essence of the method was to break down the complex operations involved in reasoning into their most basic constituents and to render the mind adept in performing the simple operations of intuition and deduction ; intuition being the undoubting conception of an unclouded and attentive mind produced through the light of reason alone and deduction the process by which we extend knowledge beyond intuitions by connecting them logically. These are the only mental operations that Descartes admit into his method. A proper understanding and use of these two yield all that lies within the province of knowledge and anything beyond else that would be an impediment to knowledge. He writes: Nothing can be added to the pure light of reason which does not in some way obscure it (Descartes 1968a: 10).

His method was to be universally applicable, regardless of any difference in subject matter:

We must not fancy that one kind of knowledge is more obscure than another, since all knowledge is of the same nature

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throughout, and consists solely in combining what is self evident. (Descartes 1968a, Rule XIII: 47).

This universality of Cartesian method was emphasized in the Discourse on

Method published in 1637:

Provided only that we abstain from receiving anything as true which is not so, and always retain the order which is necessary in order to deduce the one conclusion from the other, there can be nothing so remote that we cannot reach to it, nor so recondite that we cannot discover it. (Descartes 1637: Part II: 92).

All knowledge for Descartes consists in self evident intuition and necessary deduction. Therefore the right method would be for him to break down the complex and obscure into what is simple and self evident then combine the resultant units in an orderly manner. In order to know he must isolate the

“simple natures”, the objects of intuition; and “scrutinize them separately with steadfast mental gaze”. This is then combined in chains of deductions. And thus, the whole of human knowledge consists in a distinct perception of the way in which these simple natures combine in order to build up other objects

(Rules for the Direction of Mind, Rule XII: 47).

Descartes developed an isomorphism between reason and reality which he based on a veracious God. This isomorphism according to Descartes made reason into a quasi divine character where reason is God imbued; the divine spark in man. The 17 th century version of the treatment of man’s rational faculty now became the godhead, as that in virtue of which man is made in

God’s image.

Another crucial feature of Cartesian reason is its connection with his antithesis between mind and matter. The basic units of Descartes’ method are

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sharp edged and self contained mental items. The vehicles of knowledge are clear, precise, mental states, sharply separated from one another:

The distinct is that which is so precise and different from all other objects that it contains within itself nothing but what is clear (Descartes 1637 vol. II: 32).

The delineated character of the units of knowledge is grounded in Descartes’ distinction between mind and matter. His method is therefore, essentially a matter of forming the “habit of distinguishing intellectual from corporeal matters” i.e. mind from body.

This search for the “clear and distinct”, not only separates the emotional.

The sensuous, the imaginative but also functions as a catalyst in the polarization of previously existing contrasts. The contrasts like intellect versus the emotions, reason versus imagination; mind versus matter. The historically preserved fact that women are somehow lacking in rationality, that they are more impulsive, more emotional, than men found reinforcement in Cartesian treatment of reason. The association of Cartesian downgrading of the sensuous with the use of the mind-matter (body) distinction sets in the polarization that previously did not exist.

As a consequence of the separation between that which pertains to the intellect and that which is not, a separate education for women was justified.

Women were excluded from training which required reason and thereby from the acquisition of a rational method. And since this training of learning to exclude one’s emotions, imagination, etc. in the acquisition of true knowledge, there emerged a new dimension to the idea that women who are essentially more emotional or more impulsive lack the ability to handle rationality.

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Woman was confined to the areas of sensuousness, matter, body etc. thus restricted from any intellectual activity.

A very clear resonance of Cartesian views was noticeable in Rousseau’s ideas on the education of women in Emile ,

To be pleasing in his sight, to win his respect and love, to train him in childhood, to tend him in manhood, to council and console, to make his life pleasant and happy, these are the duties of woman for all time, and this is what she should be taught while she is young. (Rousseau 1911: 328).

Seventeenth century thus culminated into separation of functions supported by

Descartes theory of mind. Given an already existing situation of sexual inequality, reason – the god like, the spark of the divine in man was assigned to the male and emotions, imagination and the sensuous assigned to women. This bifurcation existed before the onset of Cartesianism but now a different training was imparted to men and to women fixing different life styles for them.

Descartes and later Kant became instrumental in the highlighting of

‘reason’ as the logical cognitive faculty of the mind, which gives rise to knowledge. As a consequence emotion, along with embodiedness and the passions, was pushed into the realm of irrationality, from which ‘knowledge’ could never accrue. This development was carried on by the French

Enlightenment writers in particular who used the French Revolution as an opportunity to sweep away not only the old Feudal hierarchical political, social and economic order, but also all authority based on tradition, prejudice and irrationality, and to replace all such ‘prejudice’ with an all powerful cognitive universal reason, divorced from the context of body and emotional ties.

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Hobbes and other contract theorists too represent a threshold, with which reason and emotion were regarded as radically divorced. The split between reason and emotion persisted throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. The basic oppositions of mind/body and nature/culture provided fundamental philosophical and social evaluation for man/woman, reason/ emotion, sex/gender, self/other, subject/object, justice/care and so on.

Further too in Spinoza ’s Ethics the attainment of rational control over passions has the purpose of freeing oneself from the bondage of inadequate ideas (emotions) to become a Man of Reason which has its goal in the attainment of eternity of the mind:

The ignorant man is not only distracted in various ways by external causes without ever gaining the true acquiescence of his spirit, but moreover lives, as it were unwilling of himself, and of God, and of things, and as soon as he ceases to suffer ceases also to be. Whereas the wise man, in so far as he is regarded as such, is scarcely at all disturbed in spirit, but, being conscious of himself, and of God, and of things, by a certain eternal necessity, never ceases to be, but always possesses true acquiescence of his spirit. (Spinoza 1955: 270).

A detailed study of Spinoza’s reason lies beyond the subject of this chapter so the focus will be rather on his treatment of the relationship between reason and emotion. Spinoza’s Man of Reason is subjected to the task of understanding emotions (not to ignore them) thereby treating its passivities as active rational emotions. He writes in his ‘ the Ethics ’:

An emotion, which is a passion, ceases to be a passion, as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea thereof (Spinoza 1955 Part V, prop. III: 248).

Also he clarifies:

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An emotion therefore becomes more under our control, and the mind is less passive in respect of it, in proportion as it is more known to us (Spinoza 1955 : Part V, prop. III: 248).

According to Spinoza emotions in their original state (passions) are confused modes of perception of reality which tend to blur the reality. And when this confusion is replaced by clear and distinct perception the emotion cease to be passions. This process is tied up with the understanding of the causality of our passions and hence, for Spinoza, with the recognition of necessities. And this recognition of necessity is at the same time the means of attaining freedom.

The transition from passion to active, intellectual emotion through the understanding of necessities is the transition to individual autonomy. This achievement of individuality is at the cost of a detachment form the particular, the specific, the transient, in order to turn one’s attention to the general, the universal, the unchanging, to what is common to all:

An emotion which springs from season is necessarily referred to the common properties of things, … which we always regard as present (for there can be nothing to exclude their present existence) and which we always conceive in the same manner. Wherefore an emotion of this kind always remains the same. (Spinoza 1955, Part V, Prop. VII : 251).

Spinoza’s ‘Man of Reason’ endeavours to transcend the distortion of his own self centered perceptions to perceive things as they really are. But if

Spinoza’s “strong man” recognizes the particular objects of his hate as seeming hateful only because of his own inadequate ideas, the same goes for the objects of his love. As Reason acquires dominance, changeable transient objects of affection are gradually set aside:

Spiritual unhealthiness and misfortunes can generally be traced to excessive love for something which is subject to many variations, and which we never become masters of. For none is solicitous or anxious about anything, unless he loves it; neither 94

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do wrongs, suspicious, enmities, etc. arise, except in regard to things whereof no one can be really master. (Spinoza 1955, Part V, Prop. XX, p. 258).

Spinoza goes on to write: Something else the Man of Reason sheds along the way is pity. Pity in a man who lives under the guidance of season is in itself bad and useless. (Spinoza 1955: Part IV, Prop.).

In another section Spinoza described pity as “womanish” (Spinoza 1955: 213).

The ideal, again is masculine. The ultimate horror for Spinoza’s Man of Reason is to be “womanish”, which is equated with being under the sway of passions, untransformed by reason.

Although the cultivation of reason is the means by which we attain freedom; the motivating force for this effort is self interest, the desire to persist in one’s being. According to Spinoza, the essence of man resides in his endeavour to persist in his being. And, as a thinking being, his overriding self- interest is in preserving the coherence and continuity of his own thought against the flow of unconnected (fragmentary) ideas that result from his limited individual standpoint within the order of things. The more active his thought processes the less he is at the mercy of the impingement of what is not himself, including, as we have seen, the demands of pity and the ravages of

“meretricious” love.

Spinoza’s view no doubt gives to the Ethics a life affirming character and an emphasis on individuality which cannot be underestimated but it is achieved at the cost of a detachment form changeable, from passions from emotions, from pity that are womanish. In other words, what remains with us as the character ideal expressed in his Man of Reason is mainly the negative detachment from all that gives warmth and compassion to human existence, i.e.

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his ultimate detachment from the impingement of all that is not himself, that which is womanly.

Thus, Spinoza’s Man of Reason, as we have seen, sheds not merely selfish, obsessive love, but also individuals as proper object’s of live along with his repudiation of “womanish” pity, passion, emotion. Given that a woman is lacking in rationality. Spinoza’s account of ethics not only reaffirms exclusion but also degrades her as a hurdle in the way of acquisition of knowledge (which is acquired only by liberating oneself form the bondage of passion). The dangerous consequence of Spinoza’s ethical view is that a man must do away with woman, who as a passion is a bondage a Man of Reason needs to overcome in order to acquire right, unalluded knowledge.

The eighteenth century also brought revaluation of the emotions. In the seventeenth century the passions were characteristically seen as a source of disorder and falsehood. Thought was the essence of the mind and passions were seen as intruding distractions and disturbances resulting from the mind’s union with the body. They were seen as threats to the purity and clarity of thought and at best, as confused modes of thought itself. They were to be either transcended and kept in subjugation by reason or else transformed by reason into higher modes of thought. During eighteenth century, passions and the non- rational in general became assured of their own reality. By the nineteenth century, with the Romantic Movement, the reevaluation of passions and exaltation of imagination and feeling lead to a renewed evaluation of women along with the qualities associated with women. The Man of Reason, stayed intact surviving the challenge of Romanticism, however now in search of his

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opposite to complete or complements his own existence. The dichotomy between reason and emotion was preserved and infact endorsed by the challenge of Romanticism.

In tracing the historical development by which patriarchy emerged as the dominant form of societal order, it becomes more than apparent the ways in which it gradually institutionalized the power and rights of men to control and appropriate the sexual and reproductive services of women. This form of dominance made way for other forms of dominance such as slavery. Once established as a complex of hierarchical relationships, patriarchy transformed sexual, social, economic relations and ruled them all. The establishment of patriarchy majority influenced thought systems which explain and order

Western civilization. The structure of these systems incorporated unstated assumption about gender which in turn became the instruments of forging gender bias. When these thought systems were put to use the trickle down effect was evident.

Even the metaphors of gender constructed the male as the norm and the female as deviant; the male as whole and powerful; the female as deviant; the male as whole and powerful; the female as unfinished, physically mutilated and emotionally dependent.

General assumptions of the dominant thought system can be summarized as follows:

Men and women are essentially different creatures, not only in their biological equipment, but in their needs, capacities and functions. Men and

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women also differ in the way they were created and in the social function assigned to them by God.

Men are “naturally” superior, stronger and more rational therefore designed to be dominant. From this follows that men are political citizens and responsible for and representing the polity. Women are “naturally” weaker, inferior in intellect and rational capacities, unstable emotionally and therefore incapable of political participation, their position being outside the polity.

Men, by the use of their rationality, explain and order the world. Women by their nurturant function sustain daily life and the continuity of the species.

While both functions are essential, that of men is superior to that of women.

Another way of saying this is that men are engaged in “transcendent” activities and women are engaged in “immanent” activities.

Men have an inherent right to control the sexuality and the reproductive functions of women, while women have no such right over men.

Men mediate between humans and God. Women reach God through the mediation of men.

These unproven, unprovable assumptions are not laws of either nature or society, although they have often been so regarded and have been operative at different levels, in different forms and with different intensity during various periods of history.

From feminist’s perspectives a critical reading of philosophy has been approached in two ways. One, which sees both the method of framework of philosophy and its concrete content as antithetical to feminist aims and the

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second as characterized by seeing the content only as oppressive to women.

Since, it is generally claimed that philosophy as a discipline and as a method of inquiry is entirely neutral with regard to sex, this neutrality had to be put under rigorous examination. Feminists, concluded that the history of philosophy is an evidence of male domination and sought to transform philosophy from a male- dominated enterprise into a human enterprise.

The early feminists critical assessment of philosophy concerning the neutrality of philosophical frameworks, the invisibility of women both as the objects of philosophical discourse and as the subjects of philosophical discourse, and the process by which philosophy legitimates itself creates the understanding of the situation where one can raise meaningful response questioning the philosophical paradigms and their affects on women question.

And it is this approach which by demonstrating the lacunae in philosophical concepts made themselves visible both as philosophers and as women and provided alternate to the situation. By making themselves visible feminists in turn throw into question the legitimacy of claims and assumptions in philosophy that have been taken as axiomatic. In doing so (questioning the very foundation and status of philosophy) it also reveals the deeply rooted bias and misogyny in the nodal concepts of philosophy. It does this by demonstrating not only what is excluded from philosophy but also why it is crucial for the very existence of the philosophy to exclude it.

Furthermore, women have not only been excluded through educational deprivation from the process of making mental constructs, it has also been the case that the mental constructs explaining the world have been andocentric,

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partial and distorted. Women have been defined out and marginalized in every philosophical system and have therefore had to struggle not only against exclusion but against a content which defines them as subhuman and deviant. It was argued that the deprivation has formed the female psyche over the centuries in such a way as to make women tool in creating and recreating the system which oppressed them.

Besides, very obvious questions were raised as to why should one man rule over another? Why should one man be a master and another be a slave?

Aristotle reasoned that some men are born to rule, others to be ruled. He illustrated this principle by drawing an analogy between soul and body – the soul is superior to the body and therefore must rule it. Similarly, rational mind is superior to passion and so must rule it. And “the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior, and the one rules and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity extends to all mankind. The subordination of women is assumed as a given, likened to a natural condition, and so the philosopher uses the marital relationship as an explanatory metaphor to justify slavery.

By denying and ignoring the need to explain the subordination of women, as well as by the kind of biological explanation Aristotle offered he had fixed status of women as a being who is less than human. The remarkable fact about Aristotelian misogynist construction is that his assumptions remained virtually unchallenged and endlessly repeated for nearly two thousand years. They were reinforced by Old Testament restrictions on women and their exclusion from the covenant community, by the misogynist teachings of the church fathers and by the continuing emphasis in the church era on

100

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charging Eve and with all women, with moral guilt for the Fall of humankind.

Oppression therefore brought with it the hegemony of the thought and ideas of the dominant, thus women’s oppression has meant that much of their mental product and creation has been lost forever.

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Rupturing Stereotypes: A Search for Equality

It is said, in philosophical texts, that women’s weapon is the word, because they talk, talk endlessly, chatter, overflow with sound, mouthsound: but they don’t actually speak, they have nothing to say. They always inhabit the place of silence, or at most make it echo with their singing. And neither is to their benefit, for they remain outside knowledge (Cixous (1981) 2000: 283-4)

Certain aspects that were once viewed as natural necessities have been renegotiated by the rising current of feminism and were found to be instances of oppression, simultaneously been extended. Liberation is seen no longer as the attainment of a fixed ideal but is instead a process of eliminating varied forms of oppression as long as they continue to arise.

The focus of this chapter will be on issues that feminist theorists explored and found wanting such as the domain of personal (home/woman) that hitherto has been considered to lie beyond the sphere of politics (public /man). Feminists were no longer interested in achieving an empty equality with men. They showed the inadequacy of the prevailing social and political theories in addressing problems that were unique to women and so rather than simply providing new answers to old problems, they demonstrated that the problems themselves have been conceived too narrowly and needed to be reconceptualized. Feminism challenged both existing political theories and the patriarchal conception of political philosophy itself and urged for a redressal and alternative measures to tide over the suppression imposed on the lot of women.

Most feminists who discuss the male orientation of philosophy converge on enlightenment thought and its fall out for contemporary deliberations. But as we have discussed in chapter two several writers have traced this back to the Chapter III Rupturing Stereotypes: A Search for Equality

Greeks and consequently, claim that western thought as a whole and not just enlightenment in particular contributes to female oppression. The denial of women as rational agents has since long been evidenced in philosophical writings. Aristotle believed that “the woman has (a deliberative faculty) but it is without authority” (Aristotle, Politics 1260a:13). Consequently, “the male is by nature superior and the female inferior; the one rules and the other is ruled”

(Ibid. 1254 b: 14). Thinkers of the Middle Ages agreed with the Greeks that God made woman to be a helper in procreation for man because “woman’s power of reasoning is less than a man’s”(Aquinas 1973: 487). Modern philosophers, including many liberals, have held a substantially similar view. Hume,

Rousseau, Kant and Hegel had doubts about women being rational agents.

Hegel, for instance, believed that women’s deficiency in the “universal faculty” was such as to render women as different from men as plants were different from animals (Hegel 1967:263). This tendency had to be challenged by feminists who shared the characteristic liberal belief that individuals are entitled to political rights only in virtue of their capacity for reason.

Luce Irigaray shows that the masculine definition of the concept of truth and rationality are central to Plato’s concept of knowledge. In her analysis she carefully dissects the elements of the allegory and draws out their significance.

She begins by observing that the prisoner is brought out of the cave as a child is brought out of the womb in a difficult delivery (Irigaray 1985a: 279). This statement sets up the basic interpretive elements she employs in her analysis.

The feminine imagery is negative: the cave represents woman’s womb; breaking out of the womb means breaking into truth and knowledge. Masculine images,

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on the contrary, are positive: throughout the allegory light and knowledge are associated with the masculine, earth and non-knowledge with the feminine. This dichotomy becomes clear in Irigaray’s statement that the earth is defined as

“dark holes in which lucid season risks drowning” (Irigaray 1985a: 302). The connection between light and knowledge establishes an association that came to dominate western thought: vision is a “masculine” sense, while touch, on the other hand, is a feminine one. The certainty of knowledge is always associated with “seeing”, a masculine way of knowing from which the feminine is excluded (Keller and Gront Kowski 1983: 213).

The association of the masculinity with rationality, the feminine with irrationality in the history of western thought has been extensively documented in contemporary feminist scholarship. Okin’s Women in Western Political thought (1972) and Elshlain’s Public Man, Private Woman (1981) argue that the exclusion of women from the sphere of rationality is the cause of their exclusion from the political sphere. Since women are not rational they cannot be allowed to participate in the realm that is the highest expression of man’s rationality: politics.

Liberalism, as a product of the rationalism of Enlightenment thought, defines man as rational, autonomous, equal, and free of the bias of subjectivity.

On the face of it liberalism appeared to include women in its programme but the founding fathers of liberalism, among them John Locke and Rousseau excluded women from the sphere of rationality and politics. Liberalism derives its definition of self from the Enlightenment dualism between the rational and the irrational. In its original formulation liberalism explicitly excluded women from

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the sphere of rationality and politics. This exclusion was effected by building on the dualism between the public and the private, placing men in the former category and relegating women to the latter. The postmodern feminist critique argues that liberalism despite its emancipatory emphasis, is rooted in an epistemology that bars entry of women from the liberating realm of politics by defining them as irrational. They argue, furthermore, that the rational/ irrational, public/private dichotomies are fundamental to liberalism’s epistemology; they cannot be “opened up”, eliminated or reversed without altering that epistemology beyond recognition. Their argument differs from that of the radical feminist, however, in that they want to displace rather than reverse these dichotomies.

Although Locke excluded women from the sphere of rationality and politics by arguing that they “cannot know and therefore must believe”, liberal feminists have attempted to alter Locke’s verdict on women. In “ A Vindicatin of the Right of Woman ’ (1967) Mary Wollstonocraft attempts to open up the sphere of rationality in order to establish woman’s status as a “rational creature” (1967:

1950; Donovan, 1986: 9). She argues that if men and women were educated similarly all but the physical differences between them would disappear.

As Foucault has shown, this basic dualism of subject/object can be traced to the Greeks, it is most fully realized in Enlightenment thought and its offshoot, humanism. Like the rational irrational dualism, the dichotomy between subject and object is central to Enlightenment epistemology which defines knowledge in terms of absolute truths that are acquired by individual autonomous subjects.

The two dualisms are related not only because the privileged element is

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associated with the male, the disprivileged with the female. They are also linked because the definition of rationality posited by the Enlightenment is dependent on the acquisition of knowledge by an abstract subject of a distinct and separate object.

The feminist critique of subjects and objects is wide-ranging. The first clear statement of the implications of this dualism for the status of women is that presented by Simone de Beauvoir in the Second Sex. In the Second Sex de

Beauvoir is attempting the solution to the problem of the exclusion of women from the realm of the subject: bringing women into the realm of the subject. De Beauvoir begins her analysis with the statement: Woman is always the “ other ” to man’s “Absolute”. Her first point is that this fundamental distinction between self and other is not symmetrical. The absolute human type is man; he is both positive and neutral. Thus woman is always defined as peculiarity; she is “not man”. Simon de Beauvoir goes on to assert that woman is compelled to assume the status of Other in man’s world (De Beauvoir 1972: 29). For her the fundamental condition of woman is that she is locked into an Otherness that is central to human life.

Further, de Beauvoir asserts that women are incapable of action and are thus condemned to passivity. What are commonly defined as the primary

‘activities of women, giving birth and sucktions (De Beauvoir 1972:94).

Women’s incapacity to act and her inherent passivity are rooted in what de Beauvoir sees to be the fundamental difference between men and women: men are capable of transcendence while women are mired in immanence.

Owing to the weightage given to rationality feminists were forced to recognize the indisputable physical differences between women and men. We

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have seen already, however, that liberals view human beings as essentially rational agents and deny the physical basis of the capacity of reason, and if there is any it is a part of human essence. Feminists argued that since, physical structures, height, weight of an individual are irrelevant to his rational capability therefore the physical characteristics such as race and sex should also be irrelevant. Thus generating another view that male and female are identical in their nature, or to put it more accurately, there is no such thing as male and female nature: there is only human nature and that has no sex. Mary

Wollstonecraft therefore campaigned consistently for educational opportunities for women, arguing that it is the lack of such opportunities which account for women’s failure to develop fully their capacity for rationality.

The existence of this philosophical tradition, coupled with the growing acceptance of liberal political theory in the 18 th and 19 th centuries, determined the focus on women’s rationality that we find in such thinkers as Mary

Wollstonecraft in the 18 th century and J.S. Mill in the 19 th . In A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft argues for women emancipation.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was the best known of the early feminist writers in Europe. She is seen as pre-eminent among thinkers who not only articulated what women deserved, but also exposed the costs that society had paid because of its failure to give women what they deserved.

Wollstonecraft was the first to articulate women’s issue clearly in terms that were universal and radical. In the atmosphere of French Revolution,

Wollstonecraft, with the assistance of a circle of friends including many radical

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thinkers of England wrote ‘ A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) . Mary

Wollstonecraft’s personal background, with its poverty and misfortunes made her aware of the trials and misfortunes of others. In addition, her own acquaintance with male radicals who were concerned to see women in a light different from that of most contemporary Englishmen helped her to build a solid foundation upon which to base her thoughts. In ‘ Vindication ’ she challenged all the prevailing notions about women’s nature, rationality and women’s place in society during her time.

Wollstonecraft was simply writing within the framework of her time, and responding to the thinkers around her. She was of the conviction that women are rendered weak and wretched, specially on account of a false system of education which was gathered from books written by men who were more anxious to make of women alluring, mistresses than rational wives. She devoted a book-length essay on women’s rights and specially on her education. Wollstonecraft argues, notes Carolyn in her essay on ‘ Reason and Morals in the Early Feminist

Movement: Mary Wollstonecraft ’ (in the Philosophical Forum 5 nos. 1-2) that women had the potential for full rationality and consequently were as capable as men of complete moral responsibility (Carolyn 1973, Fall Winter: 74). The fact that women did not always realize this potentiality was due to the fact that they were deprived of education and confined to the domestic sphere:

Educated in worse than Egyptian bondage, it is unreasonable, as well as cruel, to upbraid them with faults that can scarcely be avoided, unless a degree of native vigour be supposed that falls to the lot of very few amongst mankind (Carolyn 1973:104).

Though Wollstonecraft accepts that women’s sphere is the home, she does not isolate home from public life as many others did. For her the public life

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and domestic life are not separate, but connected. The home is important to

Wollstonecraft because it forms a foundation for the social life, the public life.

The state, the public life enhances and serves both individuals and the family.

Men have duties in the family too and women have duties to the state. She argued that poorly educated women cannot be good mothers or adequate homemakers or even adequate superiors of servants. She is very specific about the ways in which a number of women of the upper and upper middle classes fall short, through lack of adequate education and insufficient exposure. While attacking Rousseau’s notion that civilization itself is at fault, Wollstonecraft notes ways in which the general culture could be improved with attention to the lot of women: “Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience; but, as blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavour to keep women in the dark, because the former only want slaves, and the latter a play thing. The sensualist, indeed, has been the most dangerous of tyrants, and women have been duped by their lovers, as princes by their ministers, whilst dreaming that they reigned over them” (Wollstonecraft 1792: 24).

Also Jane Duran notes in Eight Women Philosophers , that Wollstonecraft is acutely aware of the roles into which women are usually cast – wife, mothering, caring relation and is determined to make the case that, given the ubiquitousness of these roles, the well-educated woman with a formed mind is a better companion and parent than one who has never been allowed to learn.

Wollstonecraft recognized that the problem lies in women themselves not being aware of the difficulties that surrounded them, because their lack of education keeps them from realizing how they are being misused. She held that surely God would not have granted women the rationality that had been granted

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to men unless it was intended to be used. Common sense and justice, not to mention the demands of society, require that women be allowed to pursue educations worthy of their spirit and intellect.

For Wollstonecraft equalized opportunities for education would make way for women to actualize their potentiality which would lead to diminishing and a possible disappearance of the gaps between the achievements of men and women. As Juliet Mitchell quotes Wollstonecraft in “ Women and Equality ”:

A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head, and I will not stifle it, though it may excite a horse-laugh. I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour (Wollstonecraft 1792: 79).

Wollstonecraft attempted an application of liberal enlightenment theories and for inclusion of women as rational and independent agents. She was of the view that the divine rights of husband in the family, like the divine rights of kings should be challenged and contested for reason was a distinguishing quality of all humans and not confined to man alone. Wollstonecraft made reason her starting point. For her rationality or reason formed the basis of human rights as it was the ability to grasp truth and therefore acquire knowledge of right and wrong that separates human beings from the non human world and the exercise of reason makes moral and political agents. This world-view was acknowledged by all progressive thinkers of the time and Mary Wollstonecraft went on to extend the basic ideas of enlightenment to women. There is, she claimed, only one moral standard based on rationality, ‘one measuring stick for both sexes’.

Denying the existence of separate male and female virtues she stated that what were called ‘female virtues’ were really not virtues at all: The most perfect education… is such an exercise of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and

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form the heart. Or, in other words, to enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render it independent. In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason. This was Rousseau’s opinion respecting men: I extend it to women… (Wollstonecraft 1791: 52).

Claiming that women had been conditioned over centuries by their faulty upbringing and lack of proper education, Wollstonecraft stressed the need for proper education. She advocated similar education for both boys and girls and severely criticized Rousseau for his biased views on women’s education.

Wollstonecraft held that women are ‘educated in worse than Egyptian bondage’, she remarked that this type of education wraps a woman’s character and damages her entire personality, giving rise to the stereotype woman.

“Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, everything else is needless, for at least twenty years of their lives” (Wollstonecraft 1791: 72).

For Wollstonecraft the choice that women were left with was either to shut women up from infancy or else to educate them in such a manner as to be able to think and act for themselves .Wollstonecraft also argues for the right of woman to be educated, because she is primarily responsible for the education of the young. Before 1789 and her Vindication of the Rights of Man , she was known primarily as a writer about education of children, and she still accepts this role as a primary role for woman as distinct from man. Mary Wollstonecraft goes on to argue that educating women would lead to strengthening the marriage relationship. Her concept of marriage underlies this argument. A stable marriage, she believes, is a partnership between a husband and a wife—a marriage is a

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social contract between two individuals. A woman thus needs to have equal knowledge and sense, to maintain the partnership. A stable marriage also provides for the proper education of children.

In her view, it would better to allow Rousseau’s Sophia (wife-to-be of his

Emile) to ‘run wild’ than be corrupted by the kind of training that was an offer to girls , and which left them so helpless if married and subsequently widowed

(Wollstonecraft 1995:117).Mary asks :

“Granting that woman ought to be beautiful, innocent and silly, to render her a more alluring and indulgent companion;-what is her understanding sacrificed for? And why is all this preparation necessary only, according to Rousseau‘s own account, to make her the mistress of her husband, a very short time? For no man ever insisted more on the transient nature of love”. (Wollstonecraft 1995:169)

Mary Wollstonecraft acknowledges that women are sexual beings—but so are men. Thus female chastity and fidelity, necessary for a stable marriage, require male chastity and fidelity too. She argues that since men exercised their understandings more than women more modesty should be expected from them in comparison to women (Wollstonecraft 1995:211). Men are required, as much as women, to put duty over sexual pleasure. As one of her commentator Diana

Coole notes that Wollstonecraft’s demand was that the female half of human species should be “treated first as human rather than as sexed beings.”(Coole

1993:94) .While Catriona Mackenzie observes that:

“The overriding preoccupations of Wollstonecraft’s work, as well as of her life, were to articulate what it means for women to think and act as autonomous moral agents, and to envisage the kind of moral and political organization required for them to do so. Although at times she seemed to identify autonomy with reason , defining it in opposition to passion…Wollstonecraft also struggled to develop an account of women’s moral agency that would incorporate not only a

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recognition of women’s capacity to reason but also of their right to experience and give expression to passion including sexual desire” ( Mackenzie :181-203).

However, the goal for Wollstonecraft’s ethics is to harmonize feeling and thought which she calls reason . Reason was of primary importance to the

Enlightenment philosophers, a company to which Mary Wollstonecraft belongs.

In bringing together feeling and thought, rather than separating them and dividing one for woman and the other for man, Mary Wollstonecraft was also providing a critique of Rousseau, who defended personal rights but did not believe that such individual liberty was for women too. Woman, for Rousseau, was incapable of reason, and only man could be trusted to exercise thought and reason. Thus, for Rousseau, women could not be citizens, only men could.

But Mary Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication , makes her position clear.

She holds that only when woman and man are equally free, and woman and man are equally dutiful in the exercise of their responsibilities to family and state, can there be true freedom. The essential reform necessary for such equality is equal and quality education for woman—an education which recognizes her duty to educate her own children, to be an equal partner with her husband in the family, and which recognizes that woman, like man, is a creature of both thought and feeling: a creature of reason.

Wollstonecraft opposed the assumption that women were simply slaves to their passions. She described the process by which parents bring up their daughters to be docile and domesticated. She maintained that if girls were encouraged from an early age to develop their minds, it would be seen that they were rational creatures and there was no reason whatsoever for them not to be given the same opportunities as boys with regard to education and training. 113

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Women could enter the professions and have careers just the same as men. In proposing the same type of education for girls as that proposed for boys, Mary

Wollstonecraft went a step further and proposed that they be educated together which was even more radical than anything proposed before. The idea of co- educational schooling was discarded by many educational thinkers of the time.

It was fashionable to contend that if women were educated and not docile creatures, they would lose any power they had over their husbands. Mary

Wollstonecraft was totally opposed to this and maintained that ‘This is the very point I aim at. I do not wish women to have power over men but over themselves’. (Wollstonecraft 1792: 123). Mary Wollstonecraft favoured co- educational day schools, lessons given by informal conversational methods, with lots of physical exercise both free and organised. She had a picture of an ideal family where the children were nourished by an intelligent mother and not sent away to nurses and then to boarding schools and fathers as friends to their children rather than tyrants. Essentially family members should all be regarded as rational beings and children should be able to judge their parents like anyone else. Family relationships should therefore become educational ones. She writes:

Nature has given woman a weaker frame than man; but, the woman who strengthens her body and exercises her mind will, by managing her family and practicing virtues, becomes the friend, and not the humble dependent of her husband (Wollstonecraft 1792: ch.2)

Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman covered a wide range of topics relating to the condition of women. Not only did she argue for women’s equality with men in education but also within the law as well as their right to parliamentary representation. As regardes coeducation Jane Roland Martin has

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commented that 'this great historical development turned out to be a carrier of old inequities and the creator of new problems for women' (Martin, Roland

2001: 71-2). It became necessary to ensure that coeducation is 'girl and women friendly' it is also necessary to design education for both sexes that 'incorporates the virtues of rationality and self-governance that Rousseau attributed to men and also the virtue of patience and gentleness, zeal and affection, tenderness and care that he attributed to women' (ibid.)

It has been argued that Wollstonecraft was caught in some contradictions and tensions. Moira Gatens analyzes some of these rough areas for

Wollstonecraft as follows:

In her attempt to stretch liberal principles of equality to women she neglects to note that these principles were developed and formulated with men as their object. Her attempts to stretch these principles to include women results in both practical and conceptual difficulties. These principles were developed with (implicitly) a male person in mind, who is assumed to be a head of household (a husband / father) and whose domestic need are catered for (by his wife)….. No matter how strong the reason, it cannot alter the fact that male and female embodiment… involved vastly different social and political consequences. (Gatens 1991:113)

Responding to Gatens’s critique, Jane Duran observed in ‘ Eight Women

Philosophers’ that because what Wollstonecraft implicitly demands for women is so close to the male role, it tends to overlook a deeper and more profound feminism that might, infact, use some of the notions tied to maternity and the

“roles” of women for a purpose completely contrary to that of Rousseau. As

Wollstonecraft is aiming at some greater good that is defined inherently in terms of its relationship to the social whole, she is also tied to those views that are allied to some concept of property rights, liberty for the individual, and free

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thought, almost all of which (as Gatens claims) were originally developed for men.

While inheriting the liberal tradition John Stuart Mill sought to refine and revise some of its core tenets, for he claimed that they are partial and excludes women from liberation. Speaking to the English House of Commons on

May 20, 1867, he pointed out “we talk of the political revolutions of the world, but we do not pay sufficient attention to the fact that there has taken place among us a silent domestic revolution….. that men and women for the first time in history are really companions”. In the past, “their lives were apart…. separate both in their amusement and in their serious occupations. The man spent his hours of leisure among men – with men along did he converse on any serious subject; the wife was either a play thing or an upper servant. All this among the educated classes is changing”. Mill saw this change as a stepping stone for progress of human civilization. As he says:

“The equal advent of both sexes to intellectual culture is important not only to women, which is assuredly a sufficient recommendation, but also to universal civilization. I am profoundly convinced that the moral and intellectual progress of the male sex runs a great risk of stopping, if not receding, as long as that of the woman remains behind, and that, not only because nothing can replace the mother for the education of the child, but also, because the influences upon man himself of the character and ideas of the companion of his life cannot be insignificant; women must either push him forward or hold him back” (Mill 1924: 140).

Thus, Mill saw women’s problem as a matter of concern for the entire humankind. He claimed women’s equal status in three areas: women’s right to vote, right to equal opportunities in education and employment. He sees women

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as the subjugated sex denied access to their own potential and subjected to the unquestioned prejudices and biases of society.

Marriage was the institution that was used to deny women’s potential.

Mill pointed out that women’s capacities were spent seeking happiness not in their own lives, but exclusively in favour and affection of the other sex, which is only given to them on the condition of their dependence on man. The parallel between women and slaves was used to depict the reality of nineteenth century

England where in marriage the woman becomes subservient to her husband both in physical being and property. For women she had no choice, either marry and face the abuses and loss of dignity that subjugation and subservience brings about or remain single and get deprived of total educational and professional opportunities. A woman was thus, not free within marriage nor was she free to remain unmarried. Mill therefore claimed that women should be given a freedom of choice and equality should be the ordering principles of societal and personal relationships.

Mill believed that subordination of women is due to the fact that they may not be physically as strong as men. While this bodily strength became a characteristic of man, woman in opposition was self-abnegating patience, submissive, gentle and graceful. Besides, women are also partially responsible for their situation for accepting it voluntarily with questioning and become subsequently consenting parties to it. Men on their part not only expect obedience but even affection from women. This is ensured through education, training and socialization process. Women from childhood were taught to be submissive, yielding and accommodating rather than to become independent

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with self-will and self-control. They were taught to live for others, their husbands and children. Selfless devotion was considered to be the best feminine trait, the glory of womanhood:

When we put together three things – first, the natural attraction between opposite sexes, secondly, the wife’s entire dependence on the husband, every privilege or pleasure she has being either his gift, or depending entirely n his will; and lastly, that the principal object of human pursuit, consideration and all objects of human pursuit, consideration, and all objects of social ambition, can in general be sought or obtained by her only through him, it would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the polar star of feminine education and formation of character” (Mill 1985: 241).

For Mill in denying women an equal position only demeans men. He writes: A most beneficial change, if the companionship were between equals; but being unequals it produces … a progressive deterioration among men in what had hitherto been considered the masculine excellences. Those who are so careful that women should not become men, do not see that men are becoming, what they have decided that women should be, are falling into the feebleness which they have so long cultivated in their companions. Those who are associated in their lives, tend to become assimilated in character. In the present closeness of association between the sexes, men cannot retain manliness unless women acquired it”. (Mill 1985: 301).

Mill believed that men would be debased if they exercise dominance and power over their women. For him the ideal was a compassionate marriage between a ‘strong minded man and a strong minded woman’. Like

Wollstonecraft he believed that women can earn their liberation with the support of men. Both present a reasonable critique of male domination within marriage.

Mill extends it further by pleading for a relationship based on mutual friendship and respect. Like Wollstonecraft he did believe that women were as rational as

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men and once granted the same “eagerness for fame” will achieve the same success. Moreover, a judgement regarding capacities and talent in women can be made only after generations of women benefit form equal opportunities for education and employment. He rejected the idea that it was natural for a woman to be a mother and a wife and feels that it was the woman who should be able to decide whether to marry and manage a house or pursue a career. He contends that it was society however that has decided marriage to be ultimate aim for a woman. He writes:

Marriage being the destination appointed by society for women, the prospect they are brought up to, and the object which it intended should be sought by all of them, except those who are too little attractive to be chosen by any man as his companion; one might have supposed that everything would have been done to make this condition as eligible to them as possible, that they might have no cause to regret being denied the option of any other. Society, however, both in this, and, at first, in all other cases has preferred to attain its object by foul rather than fair means” (Mill 1985:315).

Mill argued that, the reason why men shy away from granting an equal status to woman is because they are afraid of marriage on equal terms. He further pointed out that marriage does not give the woman the dignity and equal status that she ought to get and once married she is totally under the control of her husband. She is denied by law right to her children and property. Also if a woman decides to leave her husband, she cannot claim anything including her children, as her own. Mill pleads therefore for equality of sexes before the law as crucial to ensuring a just arrangement. This, he felt would be beneficial to all.

The need was felt that the law should take into account domestic oppression and personal violence considering the high incidences of such crimes. The only option was “the equality of married persons before the law, is not only the role

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made in which that particular relation can be made consistent with justice to both sides, and conducive to the happiness of both, but it is the only means of rendering the daily life of mankind, in any high sense a school of moral cultivation” (Mill 1985: 280). A marriage contract based on equality of married persons before law was not only a sufficient but a necessary condition for a full and just equality between the sexes.

Mill considers equality as a genuine moral sentiment that should govern all relationships including the martial one. Such a sentiment can be instilled and nurtured within a family that has been justly constituted. Mill acknowledged the family as the real school for learning virtues of freedom and liberation yet it was here that sentiments of injustices, inequalities are taught. The boy by virtue of being a male is treated and reared as if he is superior and better thus dismissing the needs and interests of one half of humankind to bear the consequences of subordination and inhumanness. A just family would nurture feelings of sympathy in equality and love rather than subordination and command. Mill desires a transformation of the family to suit the temperament and spirit of the modern age, namely, the spirit of equality and justice and in the process bring about a moral regeneration of humankind. The relationship between a man and a woman in marriage should be based on mutual respect and mutual love, giving due regard to one another’s rights. This would make them self-reliant and self- sufficient.

Furthermore, regarding the relationship between the sexes Mill argues that men should not be given absolute power. Such an absolute power within the family and marriage only leads to brutalization of women. He denies the need

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for one having the power of decision-making within the voluntary association between two persons and cities the example of commercial partnerships. In matters where quick decision are needed it would make sense to have division of powers but one that would involve changes in the system of principles the consent of both the parties would be required. The division of affairs for practical purposes would depend on the comparative qualifications of the couple.

Here the man has a better advantage for he is the older of the two, the bread winner and provider for the family.

Here Mill continues to perceive the family where the man earns the family income and the woman takes care of domestic affairs. He carries conventional assumptions about woman’s role in a patriarchal family. In bearing an rearing children the women contribute more to the household and its common life. In addition to these chores if she goes out and works it may impair the discharge of these functions properly.

In The Subjection Mill asserts that in the absence of servants at home the women would have to do all the work that a servant would have done and at the same time be a mother and natural teacher to her children. Moreover, if the woman is well protected and enjoys an equal status within marriage she may not feel the need to labour outside her home for when she marries she chooses a profession, that of managing her home and bringing up her children.

Like a man when he chooses a profession, so, when a woman marries, it may in general be understood that she makes choice of the management of a household and the bringing up of a family, as the first call upon her exertions, during as many years of her life as may be required for the purpose; and that she renounces, not all other objects and occupations, but all which are not consistent with the requirements of this. (Mill 1985: 289). 121

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Mill was convinced that such work does not restrict women, in particular, talented and exceptional ones from taking up a profession or a vocation provided due arrangements are made for taking care of household chores. Like

Wollstonecraft he argues that the dignity of a woman is guaranteed if she has the power of earning her own living. A married woman must have full rights to enter a profession or take up a career. Women, he points out, are fully capable of becoming business partners, philosophers and politicians.

Undoubtedly Mill’s approaches of freedom and equality, was naïve to the liberal ideology. He went step ahead of Wollstonecraft in revising the relationship between the sexes. But his feminism falls inappropriate “in advocating true equality and freedom for married woman. He favours the traditional division of labour within the family where he asserts that women should have a real choice of career or marriage, he assumes that the majority of women are likely to continue to prefer marriage and that this choice is equivalent to choosing a career” (Okin 1979: 226). Krammick also makes a similar charge that Mill has been unable to reconcile marriage and career for women. The character of a married woman’s life must still be primarily domestic, her education is a source of spiritual enrichment rather than the means by which she gains economic independence” (Kramnick 1972: 68). Furthermore, Mill never challenged the sexual division of labour which reflect’s wide inequality.

Division of labour into two separate and opposite sphere is an expression of dualistic/binary mode of thinking. Simone-de-Beauvoir however acknowledges the role of binary’s hidden yet powerful and all pervasive, to dynamise women’s oppression.

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The institutional care proposed by liberal ideologist (Wollstonecraft and

Mill) is geared towards satisfying needs concerned with the physical well-being and educational reform. It rarely provides the vital emotional continuity in which essential moral and emotional development can take place, nor the ‘mental work’ women who face the oppression is owing to continuing entrenchment of the public/private split in our society. Where work is identified primarily with mind and the public realm while children and child-care are associated with reproduction and body and women, all located in the private sphere. Until the imbalances between men and women are made visible and recognized as a form of inequality it is impossible to think of any change in women’s situation. The mind/body split encourages us to identify women’s bodies as sexed and men’s as neutral. In other words, the public/private or mind/body split provides a mind-set which establish normatives and values of our thinking and thus reinforces women’s oppression.

Simone-de-Beauvoir , a French feminist philosopher went far beyond the liberal feminists. Beauvoir argued that women have historically been considered deviant, abnormal and always negative of man. She said that even Mary

Wollstonecraft considered men to be the ideal toward which women should aspire. Beauvoir believed that this attitude limited women’s success by maintaining the perception that they were a deviation from the normal, and were always outsiders attempting to emulate “normality”. She believed that for feminism to move forward, this assumption must be set aside.

The publication of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in 1949 brought a major turning-point in the history of twentieth century French feminist theory.

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However, as Toril Moi points out, notes Dani Cavallaro in French Feminist

Theory : when this work made its appearance, Beauvoir ‘was convinced that the advent of socialism alone would put an end to the oppression of women and consequently considered herself a socialist, not a feminist’ (Moi 1985: 91). Later in 1972 Beauvoir joined the Mouvement de Liberation des Femmes and claimed that ‘we must fight for the situation of women, here and now, before our dreams of socialism come true’ (Beauvoir 1984: 32).

She begins with the question: ‘What is woman?’ She denies that woman can be understood either in terms of her biological function or in terms of the idea of the eternal feminine, that is to say of woman’s essentially feminine nature. This latter conception is the traditional one, she admits. It involves seeing woman as defined by her sex, and hence defined relatively to man. This is to be contrasted with the traditional definition of man. Man is not essentially masculine, but a free or autonomous being. He is thus defined independently of his relation to woman. The result is the imbalance and inequality between man and woman.

In the introduction to the Second Sex , Beauvoir quotes Claude Levi

Strauss’s Les Structures elementaires de la parente : ‘Passage from the state of

Nature to the state of culture is marked by man’s ability to view biological relations as a series of contracts; alteration, opposition, and symmetry whether under definite or vague forms, constitute not so much phenomena to be explained as fundamental and immediately given data of social reality’ (Simone

1949: 17). As de-Beauvoir claims that so far we know there are two dualities or contrasts, to be noted in social reality. First is the duality of the Subject and the

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Other, then there is the duality of Man and Woman these pairs of opposites are related to each other in a relationship of dependence. Moreover in this relation man always appears as the subject, while woman always appears as Other.

In The Second Sex Beauvoir offers a social constructivist depiction of gender: ‘One is not born a woman’, one becomes one’ (Beauvoir 1973: 301).

This perspective is based on the notion that human beings are transformed into specifically gendered entities as a result of patriarchal requirements that in particular, are categorized as deficient creatures incapable of matching the norm embodied by masculinity: humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as autonomous being (Beauvoir

2000a: 08).

Beauvoir, in her rejection of this traditional conception, expresses once again the essential feminist idea that woman has the same nature as man, and is like him a free and creative being. Each should be defined independently of the other, and being of equal worth should have equal rights. The individualist’s formally equal rights, however, are necessary but not sufficient. Beauvoir accepts the socialist critique of such rights, but her account of woman’s subjection is very far from being a socialist one. It is rather an existentialist one derived from the thought of Jean Paul Sartre. The essentially free individual, in seeking to realize his freedom, comes up against the consciousness of other human beings. He has an existence in their consciousness, and as such is an object for them, a being with a determinate character rather than a free subject.

To that extent the other imposes an identity on the individual and denies his character as a free subject. As a free subject he and he alone determine what he

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is. At the same time he maintains his independence of that determinate character by never identifying himself wholly with it, but always goes beyond it by seeking some future condition. There appears to be, then, an inherent antagonism between each free subject. Each sees the other as a threat to his freedom, and in order to overcome this he attempts to subordinate the other, to deny the other’s freedom, and make the other exist solely as a particular determinate being relative to him. Beauvoir’s work is the application of this idea to the understanding of woman in her relations with man.

The Other in the Second Sex, has three defining characteristics: it is a separate existence, it is hostile, and it is ‘the inessential’. Following G.W.F.

Hegel’s theorization of master-slave relationship, Beauvoir emphasizes, however, that masculinity cannot convincingly assert itself as an absolute norm as long as it defines itself in relation to an Other: ‘the subject can be posed only in being opposed – he sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the … inessential’, the object (Beauvoir 2000a: 09).

Simone claims that throughout the history of western thought from

Aristotle to the contemporaries like Levinas, woman has consistently been consigned to the category of the Other (Beauvoir 1997: 15-16). ‘She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, He is the Absolute – she is the Other’ (Beauvoir 2000a:16).

Because women have never overcome this defeat, it appears an unavoidable necessity beyond possibility of change. But Beauvoir denies that the

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nature of woman is given. As inherently free subject woman is to define her own content.

It was only during the eighteenth century that some challenges were made against such definition of woman: Diderot, among other’s, strove to show that woman is, like man, a human being. Later John Stuart Mill came fervently to her defence’ (Beauvoir 1997: 23). However, with the intensification of French

Revolution the denigration of women resumed with added ferocity: ‘Even within the working class the men endeavored to restrain women’s liberation, because they began to see the women as dangerous competitors – the more so because they were accustomed to work for lower wages (ibid.).

Even the women’s movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries does not appear to Beauvoir as an exercise of freedom. Women have gained only what men have been willing to grant. They have taken nothing, but have been content to receive, and hence have remained passive recipients defined by men.

The reason for this lies in women’s lack of the concrete means of organizing themselves in a unit which could stand face to face with a correlative unit. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own, no solidarity. They live dispersed among males. Their solidarity is with the interests of their husbands.

Here is the basic trait of woman as defined by man, according to Beauvoir. She is the dependent other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to one another. Thus Beauvoir call woman to assert her autonomy in defining herself against man. The goal is not so much to claim what man has, his rights, nor to participate with men in a common socialist liberation, but to win her existence as free subject by defining her own identity, giving herself a past and creating for herself solidarity with other women.

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Adapting existentialist framework to the condition of worker, Beauvoir argues in the Second Sex that ‘patriarchal ideology presents woman as immanence, man as transcendence (Moi 1985: 92). Deprived of the rights to an independent subjectivity, woman has been insistently objectified and, more alarmingly still, led to internalize this disabling world-view and to exist in a state of bad faith. Women are therefore ‘relegated to the status of nebulous items incapable of transcending the sphere of brute matter, women are often responsible for perpetuating their objectification and victimization by patriarchy: for example, by introjecting stereotypical versions of feminity that reduce them to caprecious and frivolous playthings (Dani Cavallaro 2003: 13).

Analysing women’s situation Beauvoir writes: A free and autonomous being like all human creatures, nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the other. They propose to stabilize her as object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and forever transcended by another ego (conscience) which is essential and sovereign (Beauvoir 1997: 29).

Having identified women’s situation, de Beauvoir sets for herself a target of dealing with question in the Second Sex :

How can a human being in woman’s situation attain fulfillment? What roads are open to her? Which are blocked? How can independence be recovered in a state of dependency? What circumstances limit woman’s liberty and how can they be overcome? These are the fundamental question on which I would fain throw some light (Beauvoir 1997: 29).

This does not imply, according to Beauvoir, that unity with man is impossible. But this unity is always problematic. It requires recognition of reciprocity, a mitsein or being together. But here Beauvoir skates over the inherent difficulty in the Sartrean existentialist project for a common freedom.

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Since the free subject defines himself as free over and against the other, the mitsein with the other requires their mutual opposition to a third. This is no true unity but a temporary alliance of some against the freedom of others. In

Beauvoir’s view, man developed his freedom over and against woman by treating her as the other and subjecting her. Woman failed to develop her subjectivity, not because she literally fought and lost, but for reasons of a biological and historical nature. But an inherently free being, the existentialist argues, in responsible for its failure to develop that freedom, and hence woman is responsible for her own subjection. It is her own project to be the other for man. To become free, she must alter he project. The fundamental difference between male and female in mammalian species is that after coition the male is free to resume his individuality or separateness, while the female has new life attached to her. The female renounces her separateness for the benefit of the species. She maintains life, while the male creates.

The biological considerations are essential elements in woman’s situation.

But she denies its crucial role in ‘that they establish for her a fixed and inevitable destinity. They are insufficient for setting up a hierarchy of the sexes; they fail to explain why woman is the Other; they do not condemn her to remain in this subordinate sole forever’ (Beauvoir 1997: 29).

Biology depicts that males and females are two types of individuals which are differentiated with a species for the purpose of reproduction. In higher forms of life reproduction has a dual function: maintenance of the species and the creation of new individuals. Among human beings there is a socially enforced division of the two vital components – maintenance of species and

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creation of new individuals which is realized definitely in the separation of the sexes. Beauvoir argues that the mother sustains the closest relations with her offspring and the father shows less interest in them. ‘The female is wholly adapted for and subservient to maternity, while sexual initiative is the prerogative of the male’ (Beauvoir 1997: 52).

The bearing of maternity on individual life is governed by social conditions, by the number of births required of women, by the degree of hygienic care, by the existence of contraception. Woman is thus not this biological destiny, but what humanity has made of the biological female in the course of its history. But the Freudian theory involves the denial of freedom. It rejects the idea of the self-defining choice, and substitutes in its place emotional compulsions and prohibitions deriving from the girl’s attitudes to her own body in the social situation of the family. Women, as free being, can succeed in establishing her subjectivity, and hence in rejecting the project whereby she exists primarily as a sexual object for man. It is impossible to treat maternity as a task or service, which can be seen as part of socialized labour. In maternity,

Beauvoir claims, essential values are involved for the woman. By this she means that maternity is woman’s physiological destiny or natural calling. It cannot be transformed into a purely social function, although it can be subject to human control and be made compatible with woman’s freedom.

The fundamental difference between male and female lies in: the male gamete ‘through which the life of the male is transcended in another, at the same instant becomes a stranger to him and separates from his body; so that the male recovers his individuality intact at the moment when he transcends it’ (Beauvoir

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1997:54). The egg, on the other hand, begins to separate from the female body when, fully matured, it emerges from the follicle and falls into the oviduct; but if fertilized by a gamete from outside, it becomes attached again, through implantation, in the uterus. So, ‘First violated, the female is then alienated – she becomes, in part, another than herself. She carries the foetus inside her abdomen until it reaches a stage of development that varies according to the species’

(Beauvoir 1997:54). The specific difference between men and women is that the female has been the victim, or prey of species, destined to reproduce but not to create, to repeat but not to invent, to suffer and not to subdue. And it is because humanity values creation and invention for more than reproduction and suffering that men have been able to mastery.

Precisely, Beauvoir analyses that the key to the whole mystery of woman’s subordination lies in the fact that while man realizes himself in projects towards a different future through which he transcends his given existence and actualizes his freedom, woman is, through her biological destiny, directed towards the repetition of life. The domestic labours that fell to her lot, because they were compatible with the cares of maternity, imprisoned her in repetition and immanence. Man, on the other hand, has from the beginning of time been an inventor. He sets up goals and opens up the roads to them. He bursts out of the present towards a new future.

In respect of her traditional function as mother, woman fulfils her physiological destiny, Beauvoir says. It is her natural calling. But human society is not wholly abandoned to nature, and the reproductive function is no longer at the mercy of biological chance. It has come under the control of human beings.

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Contraception together with legalized abortion would permit woman to undertake her maternity in freedom. Yet Beauvoir admits that in most cases the woman needs masculine support in accepting her responsibilities. She will gladly devote herself to her newborn child only if a man devotes himself to her.

At which point Beauvoir does not tell us how the holy family is to be avoided.

Maternity, however, is not a human transcendent act. The mother does not humanly create the baby, but it is made in her. As mother, woman is immanent and not free. It is then quite false to say that maternity is enough to define a woman’s life. The contemporary mother in particular is unhappy, dissatisfied and embittered. The great danger to which infants in our culture are exposed is subjection to a mother dissatisfied both sexually and socially. For maternity to be successful it must be freely assumed and sincerely wanted, and the woman must be in a position to bear the effort involved. It is desirable for the child that its mother be fulfilled in her relation to society, and it can only gain from being left less to the care of its parents and more to that of adults whose relation to it is impersonal and hence pure. In a properly organized community, then, children would be taken in charge for the most pat by the community, the mother would be cared for and helped, and maternity would cease to be incompatible with careers for women.

De Beauvoir further argues that woman should be understood or the basis of her possibilities rather than on the basis of her limitations (biological factors).

‘Woman is not a completed reality, but rather a becoming and it is in her becoming that she should be compared with man; that is to say her possibilities should be defined (Beauvoir 1997: 66).

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Regarding psychoanalysis, Beauvoir argues that a study of psychoanalysis reveals its gender bias: ‘Freud never showed much concern with the destiny of woman; it is clear that he simply adapted his account from that of the destiny of man, with slight modification’ (Beauvoir 1997: 70, 71). Beauvoir criticizing Freud claims that in describing the sexual development of the boy, who is mother-fixated (the Oedipus complex), and dreads mutilation at the hands of his father (the castration complex), he ‘at first described the little girl’s history in a completely corresponding fashion, later calling the feminine form of the process the Electra complex; but it is clear that he defined it less in itself than upon the basis of his masculine pattern’. (Ibid. 72).

Furthermore, regarding Freud’s account of the Electra complex she writes: The little girl has at first a mother fixation, but the boy is at no time sexually attracted to the father. This fixation of the girl represents a survival of the oral phase. Then the child identifies herself with the father; but towards the age of five she discovers the anatomical difference between the sexes, and she reacts to the absence of the penis by acquiring a castration complex – she imagines that she has been mutilated and is pained at the thought. Having then to renounce her virile pretensions, she identifies herself with their mother and seeks to reduce the father. The castration complex and the electra complex thus reinforce each other… the little girl entertains a feeling of rivalry and hostility towards her mother. Then the super-ego is built up also in her, and the incestuous tendencies are repressed; but her super-ego is not so strong, for the Electra complex is less sharply defined than the Oedipus because the first fixation was upon the mother, and since the father himself is the object of the love that he condemns his prohabitations are weaker than in the case of his son-rival. It can be seen that like her genital development the whole sexual drama is more complex for the girl than for her brothers. (Beauvoir 1997: 72).

Beauvoir addresses ‘two essential objections’ to the Freudian theory of female sexual development: (i) Freud assumes that woman feels that she is a

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mutilated man. But, retorts de Beauvoir, this feeling is not experienced at all in many cases, while the lack of male sexual attributes occasions, not so much regret as indifference, or even disgust. (ii) The concept of the Electra complex is still very vague ‘because it is not supported by a basic description of the feminine libido’ (Beauvoir 1997: 73).

Beauvoir criticizes that the very language of psychoanalysis (‘drives’,

‘complexes’, ‘tendencies’, and so on) suggests that the drama of the individual unfolds within that individual. But a life is a relation to the world, and the individual defines himself by making his own choices in and through the world around him:

We must therefore turn toward the world to find answers for the questions we are connected with. IN particular psychoanalysis fails to explain why woman is the Other . Freud himself admits that the prestige of the penis is explained by the sovereignty of the father, and, as we have seen, he confuses that he is ignorant regarding the origin of male supremacy. (Beauvoir 1997: 80, 8 1).

But since, women are not merely a mammalian organism, nor can she be seen exclusively in terms of her sexual nature: ‘woman’s awareness of herself is not defined exclusively by her sexuality: It reflects a situation that depends upon the economic organization of society; which in turn indicates what stage of technical evolution mankind has attained’ (Beauvoir 1997: 58).

The economic and social conditions are crucial to women situation, they can either favour or burden the women. The burdens of maternity, for instance, assume widely varying importance according to the customs: ‘they are crushing if the woman is obliged to undergo frequent pregnancies and if she is compelled to nurse and raise the children without assistance) but if she procreates

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voluntarily and if society comes to her aid during pregnancy and is concerned with child welfare, the burden of maternity are light and can be easily offset by suitable adjustments in working conditions’ (Beauvoir 1997: 85).

Beauvoir claims that women’s oppression is steady outcome of male supremacy. She gives three reasons for male supremacy in pre-history: (1)

Burden of reproduction made women heavily dependent on men for protection and food. (2) Domestic labours are merely functions, not activities; such functions traditionally and still largely carried out by women imprisoning women in the sphere of repetition and immanence, (3) Early man’s activity was often dangerous; it was connected, not with giving life but with risking life, and it was this features which gave it ‘supreme dignity’.

For Beauvoir reproduction was a burden thus she writes:

Pregnancy, childbirth and menstruation reduced their capacity for work and made them at times wholly dependent upon the men for protection and food. As there was obviously no birth control, and as nature failed to provide women with sterile periods like other mammalian females, closely spaced maternities must have absorbed most of their strength and time, so that they were incapable of providing for the children they brought into the world (Beauvoir 1997: 94).

The burden of reproduction accompanies the burden of domesticity.

These two combined to imprison ‘woman’ in a realm of repetition and immanence. As Beauvoir puts it, the domestic labours that fell to her lot because they were reconcilable with the cares of maternity imprisoned her in repetitions and immanence; they were repeated from day to day in an identical forms, which was perpetuated almost without change from century to century; they produced nothing new (Beauvoir 1997: 16).

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On the other hand it was very different for the adult male, says Beauvoir.

He did not worked in accordance with natural instinct or biological behaviour like worker bees, but by means of acts that transcended his animal behaviour.

Beauvoir develops this distinctively male activity as follows:

If blood were but a nourishing fluid, it would be valued no higher than milk, but the hunter was no butcher, for in the struggle against wild animals her ran gave risks. The warrior put his life in jeopardy to elevate the prestige of the horde, the clan to which he belonged. And in this he procol dramatically that life is not the supreme value for man, but on the contrary that it should be made to serve ends more important than itself. For it was not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal, that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills (Beauvoir 1997: 95, 96).

Beauvoir ends her work with an account of her idea of the independent and autonomous woman. In the first place she reiterates the criticism of civil liberties as insufficient without economic freedom. Nothing less than gainful employment can guarantee her liberty. But in the second place the mere combination of a vote and job is not sufficient for woman’s emancipation, since on account of the socio-economic structure work today is not liberty. Even socialized labour is not sufficient. For the successful professional woman still has problems arising from the duality of her destiny as woman and as human being. As woman she is required to realize the ideal of femininity, and be passive object to man as active subject. She cannot renounce her sexual nature without mutilation and cannot fulfill it without conforming to the sexual values of man. Hence a further condition of woman’s liberation is the transformation of these values.

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promised. Women reared and trained exactly like men to work under the same conditions and for the same rewards; marriage based on free agreement; maternity made voluntary through free contraception and abortion; state care of children, not in the sense of removing them from, but of not abandoning them to, their parents. Such a world, Beauvoir concludes, would not be an androgynous one. There would always remain certain differences between men and women. In particular woman’s eroticism and her sexual world have a special form of their own.

Beauvoir’s work is an analysis of all the difficulties that prevent woman from achieving her nature as a fully free and creative being. A major element in her analysis is the idea that woman’s feminine nature as passive object is the creation of man in his project to realize his freedom. But at the same time we find in Beauvoir’s work evidence against such a view. Beauvoir constantly emphasizes that it is woman’s biological function as mother ad consequent role as child-rearer and home-minder which imposes a passivity on her, because it is an existence concerned with the continuity and renewal of life, and not with active freedom. In these respects it is not man’s project that defines woman’s passivity; at most one could say that man builds up the passive elements in woman’s existence into fixed conception of her nature and that it is this image that is imposed on her. Indeed Beauvoir acknowledges in the end that there is an opposition in woman between her sexual nature and her human nature, an opposition that is not present in man. But her paradoxical conclusion is that woman’s sexual nature can be changed. Woman can be liberated from the prison

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of traditional marriage and the family home, and by becoming, like man, active in her sexual nature can fulfill herself as human and sexual being.

Feminist response in this category appears to be a logical extention of traditional ideology. They accepted the traditional conception of human nature and the characteristic liberal values of individual dignity, equality, autonomy and self-fulfilment. Along with these, they accepted the liberal ideal of creating a society which maximizes individual autonomy and in which all individuals have an equal opportunity to pursue their own interests as they perceive them. In applying this ideal to women, however, difficulties emerge. But this according to Irigaray attempt of assimilating women in male domain cannot constitute the philosophical foundation for an adequate theory of women’s liberation. Because the liberal paradigm is male-biased and to extend them to include women amount to the reinforcement of phallocentric theories.

As Kristeva notes that these feminists identified with and upheld the existing order, but did not intend to overturn the system. They wanted to join it instead of criticizing it. Women sought all the same rights and prerogatives that men had. This was the movement that called for equal rights and equal treatment. Its central tenet was that women deserved such things because really they were “just like” men. There were no truly important differences between the sexes, so they should be treated the same. These feminists argued that women “must appropriate the logical, mastering scientific, theoretical approaches” (Guberman 1996: 117). Previously, culture’s public, linear time had only been available to men. Women inhabited the household, for cooking, cleaning, birthing and sleeping. In the realm of the household nothing now is created, time moves in circle, there would be production the old is reproduced.

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Sexual difference probably represents the most universal question we can address. Our era is faced with the task of dealing with this issue, because, across the whole world, there are, there are only, Men and women (Irigaray 1996: 47)

The purpose of this chapter is not one to denounce or criticize. The attempt rather is to renegotiate canonical philosophy and feminist philosophy with reference to Irigaray. It is also to suggest that Irigaray’s ideas of sexual difference work towards the feminist purpose of remaking attitudes towards

‘difference ’ thus leading to philosophical, sociocultural, psychological, linguistic and legal transformations. The recognition of sexual difference provided a conceptual understanding which brought to trial the disinterested universalist discourse adopted by patriarchal and phallocentric inclinations.

In the opening lines of An Ethics of Sexual Difference , originally published in 1984, Irigaray suggests that “sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our ‘salvation’ if we thought it through”. She suggests that sexual difference is the fundamental ethical issue faced by the contemporary world :

“Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age. According to Heidegger, each age has one issue to think through, and one only. Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our “salvation” if we thought it through. But, whether I turn to philosophy, to science, or to religion, I find this underlying issue still cries out in vain for our attention” (Luce Irigaray 1993: 5).

In subsequent texts, Irigaray has not only reaffirmed this initial suggestion but goes on to make an even more controversial claim that other forms of difference are only secondary to sexual difference. In I Love to You:

Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History , Irigaray argues that Chapter IV Celebration of Difference: The Road to Salvation

“Without doubt, the most appropriate content for the universal is sexual difference …. Sexual difference is an immediate natural given and it is a real and irreducible component of the universal. The whole of humankind is composed of women and men and of nothing else. The problem of race is, in fact, a secondary problem – except from a geographical point of view … and the same goes for other cultural diversities – religious, economic and political ones. Sexual difference probably represents the most universal question we can address. Our era is faced with the task of dealing with this issue, because, across the whole world, there are, there are only, men and women (Irigaray 1996: 47).

She therefore sought to analyse philosophical universalism through the grid of sexual difference. Toril Moi was of the view that Irigaray’s sexual difference was poised to represent the horizon of worlds of a fertility that was unknown to the west thus far. It would also involve the production of new age of thought, art, poetry and language; the creation of a new poetics Irigaray held that for the work of sexual difference to take place, a revolution in thought and ethics is needed. A reinterpretation of the entire subject and object discourse was required. The subject and the world, the subject and the cosmic, the microcosmic and the macrocosmic needed to be reworked.

In The Forgetting of Air she addresses the irreducibility of difference by arguing that women and men constitute ‘horizons and bodies that cannot inter- belong to one another in the sameness of the one’ (Irigaray 1999: 135). And further goes on to say that : Man ‘sets’ himself forth, and sets forth the whole, by surrounding himself, by surrounding it, with borders’ (Irigaray 1999: 47), whereas women remain neither intact and safe in herself nor a gaping opening

(Ibid: 105) and is therefore ‘indefinitely open and closed’ (Ibid: 106). It would be erroneous to assume that Irigaray is here naively accusing masculinity of being overprotective of its dominion. In fact, while stressing man’s dependence

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on the clear demarcation of zones and limits, she also draws attention to the fate of dispossession that inevitably ensues from self-confinement:

[man is] so localized within his territory that he speaks with himself alone or at most with his brothers and fellow men, who share the same tone…. The proprietor, certainly, but one who is shut up in his house. Cordoned in a knot work that protects his place but that in the end deprives him of free space (Irigaray 1999: 131).

Irigaray’s critique of phallogocentrism involves, a Platonic monologic that reduces the other to a pale copy or deficient version of the same. She regards this logic of sameness as the theoretical underpinning of a variety of historical philosophical patriarchal social and cultural structures as well as phallocentric discourse on feminity. She seeks to undermine the approach that posits a

‘solitary and historically masculine’ subjective examplar as the ruling referent

(Irigaray 1999: 122). In her earlier work “ I Love To You ” she does so by showing that the West has traditionally entertained a reductive notion of alterity, where ‘the other is not really any other, but rather only the same: smaller, greater, equal to me’ (Irigaray 1992: 61).

In Democracy , Irigaray asserts that she wants woman ‘to be recognized as really an other; irreducible to the masculine subject’ (Irigaray 2000a: 125) and maintains that this will only become possible when we move away from the ‘model of the one… on to the two’ . Sexual difference encapsulates

Irigaray’s own paradigm insofar as ‘it implies two subjects who should not be situated in either a hierarchical or a genealogical relationship, and that these two subjects have the duty of preserving the human species and of developing its culture, while respecting their differences’ (Ibid: 129).

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The self has always been presumed masculine: sexually neutral. In other words this self is modelled on what men consider are ‘neutral’ characteristics.

This does not mean that women are automatically or always equated with otherness; rather, the other, whether male or female, is always understood as a variation of the sameness of self. Irigaray wishes to explore the conditions needed for and the space occupied by a subject considered as female and the kind of alterity a feminine subject would presume. This, for Irigaray is the fundamental question of ethics, a consequence of the self’s necessary confrontation with the other. The other is a necessary condition of subjectivity.

The other makes possible the subject’s relations to others in a social world; ethics is the result of the need to negotiate between one existence and another.

Ethics is thus framed by and in its turn frames the subject’s confrontation with the other.

The otherness of the other can not be understood on the model of the self: the other is irreducibly other, different, and independent. Yet ethics has hitherto recognized only one sort of subject, the male, formulating its principles on the presumption of the singularity and primacy of the subject. For Irigaray, the ethico-philosophical importance of sexual difference lies in the fact that it is the only concrete or sensuous example of being – two , available to us that is inscribed with the capacity for ethical universality. As she explains,

“The paradigm of the two lies in sexual difference. Because it is there that two subjects exist who should not be placed in a hierarchical relationship, and because these two subjects share the common goal of preserving the human species and developing its culture, while granting respect to their differences” (Irigaray 2000a: 5).

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To grasp why sexual difference can be an efficient tool for ethical, philosophical, radical sociocultural, legal and political transformation, we need to first understand Irigaray’s historical narrative.

Irigaray argues that, since ancient times, mothers have been associated with nature and unthinking matter. They have also been historically linked to the role of “mother” such that, whether or not a woman is a mother, her identity is tied up with that role. This is in contrast to men whose identity is culture oriented. Irigaray is of the view that Western culture itself is founded upon a primary sacrifice of the mother, and all women through her for it is through the function performed by them that the society is sustained and yet they are in complete exclusion as meaningful subjects.

In ‘the bodily encounter with the mother’, Irigaray put forward the idea; the cornerstone of her work that western culture is founded not on parricide but on matricide. Irigaray reinterprets the myth of Clytemnestra as an account of the installation of patriarchy, built over the sacrifice of the mother and her daughters; Iphigenia, sacrificed by Agamenon, and Electra, abandoned to madness, while Orestes the matricidal son, is designated to found the new order. The major cultural taboo is applied to the relationship with the mother.

The stress on Oedipus, on castration, serves to conceal another severance, the cutting of the umbilical cord. This relationship with the mother needs to be brought out of silence into representation. The silence perpetuates the most atrocious and primitive phantasies. When a woman is projected as a devouring monster threatening madness and death it is an indication of an unanalyzed hatred mounted on women as a group. The projections belong to the male

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imaginary which are bound into the archaic. Perhaps because contraception and the legalization of abortion have enabled women to control their reproductivity to a certain extent, it is now possible for women that they have been able to forge an identity distinct from and independent of the role of a ‘reproducer of children, as nurse, as reproducer of labour power’. Irigaray warns the daughters against letting the murder of the mother repeat itself. It is necessary, she argues, to move out of the role of ‘guardians of the body’ for men, and to articulate into words and symbolic representations of the primitive relation with the mother’s body. A creation of new ways of articulating about relationships between women is essential if women are to create a new identity for themselves within the symbolic order.

The dominant fantasy of the mother, Irigaray suggests, is as a volume, a

‘receptacle for the production and reproduction of sameness’ and ‘the support of re-production (particularly discourse) in all its forms’. But man needs to represent her as a closed volume a container; his desire is to immobilize her and keep her in his control and within his possession, even in his house. His need is to believe that the container belongs to him. The fear is of an open container and incontournable volume which would mean volume without contours ( sans contours ), the volume which he cannot get round ( contourner ) or enclose, possess and capture in his mesh, or master and appropriate completely. Irigaray opposes the Lacanian image of a woman as a hole suggesting instead the contiguity of the two lips touching, which elsewhere in speculum stands for the contiguity of mother and daughter, or the contiguity of intercourse between mother and father, maternal and paternal genealogies, and

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the possibility that man’s desire could be represented for itself, other than as it appears in male representations – a possibility which she describes variously as a volume no longer thought of as a closed or measurable container, as a multiplicity which is not just dispersed fragments, or as the possibility of the divine on the side of women.

In other words, according to Irigaray, the violent logic of the one that leads to the establishment of patriarchy and the repression of sexual difference is historically coextensive with the human subject’s disavowal of his indebtedness to nature and his loss of respect for the nature in himself. She argues that the identification of the mother with nature; the reduction of child bearing to a function of the genealogy of the husband/father, and the alienation of the daughter from her mother as a result of the sundering of woman’s genealogy occur alongside the replacement of a cosmological view of nature as fertile, as a life-giving earth with the instrumentalist view of nature as brute matter to be conquered and manipulated by the human subject, to be shaped or disfigured in keeping with the human will. She suggests that the crisis of the contemporary era marked by wars, starvation, destruction – is the logical historical destiny of all sacrificial, technocratic societies which have been “set up and managed by men alone”.

But how can the crisis of our age be overcome? For a way out Irigaray suggests that the fecund couple honoring sexual difference can open up a future beyond the destruction we now face because it is the site for the inception, cultivation, and dissemination of values that respect the generic differences of living nature for as finite beings, the present and continuing existence to this generative principle within nature.

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With sexual difference what Irigaray wishes to attain is an ability to practice respect for the other as other. Therefore, the alternative model she offers is the paradigm of the two , a mode of original relationality or being-with- other in which the otherness of the other is respected. In her own words,

Even in the reversal constituted by the privilege of the many over the one, a very current reversal often called democracy, even in the privilege of the other over the subject, of the you over the I (I am thinking … of … a certain part of Levinas’s work…), we just end up with a stand-in for the model of the one and the many, of the one and the same, in which a singular subject inflects one meaning rather than another. In the same way, privileging concrete singularity over ideal singularity cannot decree an ideal valid for all men and all women, and, to ensure cohabitation between subjects, notably within the republic, only a minimum of universality is required. To get out from under this all-powerful model of the one and the many, we must move on to the model of the two, two which is not a replication of the same, nor one large and the other small, but made up of two which are truly different. My first theoretical gesture was thus to extricate the two from the one, the two from the many, the other from the same, and to do so horizontally, suspending the authority of the One: of man, the father, the leader, the one god, the singular truth, etc. It involved making the other stand out from the same, refusing to be reduced to the other of the same, to the other… of the one, not by becoming him or becoming like him, but by inventing myself as an autonomous and different subject. Clearly this gesture calls into question our entire theoretical and practical tradition, particularly Platonism, but without such a gesture we cannot speak of women’s liberation, nor of an ethical behaviour with respect to the other, nor of democracy (Luce Irigaray 1995: 11-12).

She further argues that far from constituting a curse, the distance

between the sexes and its frank acknowledgement are the precondition of a

genuine relationship based on mutual recognition: I am sensible to you, leaving

you to be you. I am sensible with you, each of us remaining ourselves… But is

my existence not protected by your irreducibility? Is the total other that you are

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not my guardian? (Irigaray 2000b: 9). Difference is what allows identity to be retained rather than engulfed and suffocated. Drastically reversing the conventional notion that the distance between two people decreases in proportion to the intensity of their love for each other, Irigaray contends that

‘we need to love much to be capable of such a dialectic’, that is, to be able to love the life of another person ‘without giving him one’s own” (Ibid: 12) and to shield the other’s alterity without seeking either to incorporate it or to be absorbed by it. From this radical inversion, a comprehensive reassessment of sexual relationality follows ‘Where we are constrained to fusion, to discover gap. Where language unites us fictitiously to return to our difference. Where others assimilate us, to safeguard our autonomy where some desire to consume us to preserve a distance’ (Ibid: 15).

Irigaray suggests that the recognition of the alterity of the other across sexual difference can offer a concrete model and a substantive practical logic for respecting all other forms of alterity:

To succeed in this revolutionary move from affirmation of self as other to the recognition of man as other is a gesture that also allows us to promote the recognition of all forms of others without hierarchy, privilege or authority over them: whether it be differences in race; age, culture, religion. Replacing the one by the two of sexual difference thus constitutes a decisive philosophical and political gesture, one which gives up a singular or plural being [ l’etre un ou pluriel] in order to become a dual being [ l’etre deux ]. This is the necessary foundation for a new ontology, a new ethics, and a new politics, in which the other is recognized as other and not as the same: bigger or smaller than I, or at best, my equal (Luce Irigaray 1995: 19)

Irigaray was of the view that we build with an eye to the satisfaction of sexual and biological needs, but our vision does not extend beyond immediate

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goals. If, however, we begin to revision nature and sexual difference in terms of rich possibilities and source of creative energy a new stage of human development might be visible. This new stage requires transforming our attitudes toward difference: in acknowledging differences as empowering.

Irigaray suggests that one concrete way in which we can achieve a new culture of sexual difference is through the revision of our legal code. Social injustice is not only on account of economic inequalities as needs are not just restricted to housing, clothing, and feeding ourselves. She said that the first and foremost human need is for a right to human dignity for everyone which means that laws that recognize difference are required. Since all subject are neither same nor equal it becomes important to understand and modify the instruments of society and culture that regulate subjective and objective rights. Social justice, and especially sexual justice cannot be achieved without changing the laws of language and the conceptions of truths and values structuring the social order. Therefore for Irigaray, casting the instruments of philosophy and culture anew are very crucial in serving the purpose.

First, argues Irigaray, the legal code operates with the masculine sex as its norm, insidiously protecting male bodies and desires while ignoring the need and contribution of the other sex. The legal code works only to ensure that one’s property and right to satisfaction are not infringed upon by the state.

Laws should function as positive rights, empowering men and women to achieve their fullest capacities and to recognize the unique abilities of the different sexes rather than treating them homogeneously.

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In her later works such as ‘I Love to You’, Irigaray offers examples of how these law could be worded. Irigaray’s legal suggestions are a reaction to the civil code legal system of France Irigaray claims that the civil code takes the masculine sex as the genetic civil subject. Irigaray maintains that to combat these assumptions the code must acknowledge at the very minimum the existence of sexual difference.

However, the dominant group would not agree to the ‘right to be different’ for their way of life practically becomes the norm of the society.

Having acquired a centrality whatever the dominator (man) does is accepted without questioning. The man exercises this distinction by right without ever having asked for any authorization thus acquiring an individuality which is a practical effect of the position of the dominator. In such a system there is, no choice for women since their situation is pre determined. The biologically or culturally legalized distinctions and dichotomies inscribe a role which makes women to accept being the instruments of survival and luxury for the dominant class of men. In this dichotomous relationship there is no space for choice.

Thus, according to Irigaray, the possibility of any alternative like

‘Different/same’ pressed by earlier feminists goes lacking. The one and the other happen to be the two faces of a power relationship. In addition to this accepting the Different/Same approach as a real alternative hinders an analysis of the power relationships which operate to dispossess the other by turning attention away from it. This also prevents us from finding about what is destroyed by power relationships, which probably includes diversity and through that an infinity of possibilities. For in a determined society there is a

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deprivation of those concrete elements which create the conditions for personal determination.

In Democracy , Irigaray extends this view to civil relations and maintains that it is vital for the putatively democratic basis of western culture to acknowledge the needs of both men and women in their distinctiveness and specificity. Women in particular, must be granted civil rights that correspond to their separate civil identity and that are equivalent, rather than equal, to those accorded to men. The ideal of equality is inadequate since, while claiming that men and women can be subjected to the same laws, it almost invariably benefits patriarchal priorities and neglects gender specific requirements and aspirations. As Jennifer Hansen observes, Irigaray works on the assumption that ‘the legal code operates with the masculine sex as its norm, insidiously protecting male bodies and desires while ignoring the needs and contributions of the other sex’. At the same time, in endeavouring to make sure that masculine rights are advocated and conquered without their beneficiaries being interfered with by wider political apparatuses such as the state, it functions according to an ethos of negativity” namely, through exclusions and limitations

(Hansen 2000: 204).

In this line the most obvious and important issue is the right to life; a right which is always sexed for life is not a neuter as also there is no universal.

Besides, women are more often considered nothing more than hostages of the reproduction of the species. Their right to life requires, to have legal authority over their body and their subjectivity. To have the right is to be in a position central to itself as the decision-making authority. Irigaray suggested that the

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issues of women’s lives require consensus and ought to be included into the civil law. For example issues like : concessions on contraception and abortion; protection from public and domestic violence; stopping abuse of female bodies for the purpose of pornography or advertising, discrimination in the sexist definition and use of the body, of images, of language, rape, kidnapping. These are only few examples of what has to be legally specified in order to define women’s life as citizens. In Je Tu Nous Irigaray writes:

Women, it’s said, have joined men in enjoying civil rights. Who considers the fact that they have no identity in public life? their identity was defined only in relation to the family. It has to be rethought as the identity of half of humankind: the female gender. Humankind, infact doesn’t only reproduce the species. It’s comprised of two equally creative genders, one of which is, additionally, a procreator in itself, in its body. That doesn’t stop it from having the right to freedom, identity, and spirit. Before (re)producing again and without yet knowing where it’s going, humankind should consider its double-poled identity and inscribe the richness of its life properties into culture” (Irigaray 1993: 72).

It is to be recognized that life is sexuate, that gender neutralization puts us, individually and collectively in danger. In order to mark this as historical progress, it is important to create as yet nonexistent sexual culture that respects the two genders in their uniqueness. Irigaray elaborates on what needs to be understood as women’s rights. It is the right to human dignity, which would involve the stopping of commercial use of women’s bodies and images, valid representation of women in action, words, and images in public places and stopping exploitation of motherhood; a functional part of women, by civil and religious powers. The right to human dignity would further involve the legal encodification of virginity as a component of female identity that is not reducible to money, and not cash convertible by the family, the state, or

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religious bodies in any way. This component of female identity enables the girl to be accorded civil status and gives her a right to keep her virginity in accordance with her will as well as to lodge a complaint, with the support of the law, against anyone who violates this right from within or outside the family. It is true that girls not treated as objects of exchange between men in most cultures but there are still plenty of places where their virginity and by implication their identity is reduced as a cash convertible body between men.

This issue requires reformulation for girls to possess a positive identity and to be treated as individuals and social civil persons. An autonomous identity for girls is also essential for consent to sexual relationships and marriage if women are not to be alienated by male power.

These rights would enable women to escape societal sanctions and enjoy civil legality. The right to motherhood as a component (not a priority of) female identity. If the body is a legal concern, and it is then the female body must be civilly identified as a virgin and potential mother. Which means the mother will have the right to choose whether to be pregnant and the number of pregnancies. The mother herself, or her legal representative, will be the one to register the child’s birth with the civil authorities (Irigaray 1993: 82). Therefore

Reformulated civil laws can play a crucial role in sustaining a civil and individual subject who is not sexually neutral. Irigaray writes, What is needed is a full-scale rethinking of the law’s duty to offer justice to two genders that differ in their needs, their desires, their properties…. If the rights of the couple were indeed written into the legal code, this would serve to convert individual morality into collective ethics, to transform the relations of the genders within the family or its substitute into rights and duties that involve the culture as a whole (Luce Irigaray 1993: 5).

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This aspect of Irigaray’s recent work which lays the emphasis on the necessity of various objective mediating devices that connect the individual and the collective in a manner conducive to the sexual identity of all women and relations between men and women holds the most promise for philosophical, social and political transformation that is both radical and feasible in a world that consists of both men and women. Her proposal of sexuate rights, which are the cornerstone of a new civil law, is an attempt to provide the necessary institutional framework within which women can affirm and protect their identity as women civil subjects such that they can then participate fully in civil life.

One of her main concerns lies with the exposure of those mechanisms through which sexual and gendered identities are regulated by recourse to binary oppositions, such as male/female and activity/passivity, which serve to hierarchize meaning and subordinate feminity to a phallogocentric order. As

Moi observes, ‘against any binary scheme of thought, Cixious sets multiple, heterogeneous difference’ (Moi 1985: 105). Even the term “masculine” and

“feminine” are suspect for they trap both thought and praxis in an adversarial logic concordant with the ‘classical vision of sexual analysis of sexual difference revolves around four main themes: the distinctiveness of female libido; their association of feminity with darkness; the domination of the symbolic order by the principle of the “selfsame”; the problematization of bisexuality. These themes play a particularly prominent part.

Further, Irigaray succeeds in her readings in undermining the neutrality of philosophical discourse, revealing the process by which the philosopher

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talks about himself from the security of the subject position. Irigaray in an interview with the editors of Woman Writers Talking suggests that in order to attempt to access the primordial experience of feminity, she suggests it is necessary to work to disrupt the simple oppositions on which theoretical systems are founded:

We have to reject all the great systems of opposition on which our culture is constructed. Reject, for instance, the oppositions, fiction/truth, Sensible/intelligible, empirical / transcendental, materialist /idealist. All these opposing pairs function as an exploitation and negation at the beginning and of a certain mode of connection between the body and the word for which we have paid everything (Women Writer’s Talking 1987: 238-9).

In the late 1960s Derrida demonstrated how primary-binary oppositions structure our language in ways that privilege one term at the expense of the other term. Irigaray argues that man is privileged at the expense of woman. The opposites man and woman are not symmetrical, but clearly hierarchical. For example, woman is not the opposite of man, but the negation of man. Man alone is the paradigmatic metaphysical concept of human beings and women are merely deviants or inferior instances of this concept. As Jennifer Hansen observes in her evaluation of Irigaray’s writings:

The opposites man and woman are not symmetrical, but clearly hierarchical…. Man alone is the paradigmatic metaphysical concept. The operation of binary oppositions in culture works insidiously to shape our psyches so that we learn that man is the Universal, while woman is contingent, particular, and deficient (Hansen 2000: 20).

Irigaray attempted a method reproducing the discourse of other, in such a way as to undermine the authority of original. She sees it as an interim

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strategy for dealing with patriarchal discourses in which the woman deliberately reveals the mechanisms which are responsible for her exploitation.

In philosophical discourses, the image of woman is eternally the model, her role is to be the passive, reflecting other of the male. This is represented in

Irigaray’s writing as a protean ability to shape shift:

Woman is neither open nor closed. She is indefinite, in-finite, form is never complete in her. She is not infinite but neither is she a unity, such as letter, number, figure in series, proper noun, unique object (in a ) world of the senses, simple ideality in an intelligible whole, entity of a foundation etc. This incompleteness in her form, allows her continually to become something else, though this is not to say that she is ever univocally nothing. No metaphor complete her (Irigaray 1985: 229).

Analysing Hegelian philosophy Irigaray argues that the Greek divorce of nature and spirit is replicated in Hegel’s exemplary account of the family in a hierarchical organization of gender roles that consigns women to the realm of natural immediacy without the possibility of entry into the spiritual realm of culture as a woman . For Hegel, the patriarchal family is an intermediate institution, the elementary social community that links each person to civil society. Civil society is formed by the aggregation of families represented by their heads (Hegel GWF, 1967: 181-122). Within the patriarchal family, the generic woman’s ethical duty is that of wife (of the man) and mother (of his children) in the abstract. This generic definition of woman, Irigaray points out, deprives her of universality, which is seen as the privilege of man qua representative of the human species, as well as her singularity:

The woman is wife and mother. But for her, this role is a function of an abstract duty. So she is not this woman, irreducible in her singularity, wife of this man, who is himself also irreducible, any more than she is this mother of this child or

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these children…. She must love man and child as generic representatives of the human species dominated by the male gender. She must love them as those who are able to realize the infinity of humankind (unconsciously assimilated to the masculine), at the expense of her own gender and her own relationship to infinity. In other words, a woman’s love is defined as familial and civil duty. She has no right to singular love nor to love for herself. She is thus unable to love but is to be subjugated to love and reproduction. She has to be sacrificed and to sacrifice herself to this task, at the same time disappearing as this or that woman who is alive at the present time. And she must disappear as desire, too, unless it is abstract; the desire to be wife and mother. This self-effacement in a family-related role is her civil task (Irigaray 1996: 21-22). Now, because spirit is the unity or reconciliation of singularity and universality, any form of gendering that deprives women of singularity and universality turns them a priori into unspiritual beings who are imprisoned within the realm of nature and denied any entry into the spiritual realm of culture. The division between the realm of nature and the spiritual world subtends the related sociological distinctions between private and public spheres, the life of the individual and social-collective existence. Hence, from this point of view as well women are denied a civil or public identity. It is important to stress that Irigaray’s point here is not that the institution of the patriarchal family (both in Hegel’s exemplary philosophical account and in general) completely denies women access to civic life or the public sphere but that this institution denies women access to public realm as women . The issue is therefore not that of equal access of both sexes to civil rights that are considered sexually neutral in substance but the sexually different access of each sex to civil rights that express and enable each person to fulfill his or her existence as a sexuate being.

Sexual difference therefore, according to Irigaray undoes the binary opposition between nature and spirit because it is nothing other than the means by which nature becomes spiritualized.

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Before the question of the need to surpass nature arises, it has to be made apparent that it is two. This two inscribes finitude in the natural itself. No one nature can claim to correspond to the whole of the natural. There is no “Nature” as a singular entity. In this sense, a kind of negative does exist in the natural. The negative is not a process of consciousness of which only man is capable. More to the point, if man does not take account of the limit inscribed in nature, his opposition to the natural does not accomplish the labor of the negative. (Irigaray 1996: 35-36) The natural, aside from the diversity of its incarnations or ways of appearing, is at least two ; male and female. This division is not secondary nor unique to humankind. It cuts across all realms of the living which, without it, would not exist. Without sexual difference, there would be no life on earth. It is the manifestation of and the condition for the production and reproduction of life. Air and sexual difference may be the two dimensions vital for/to life. Not taking them into account would be deadly business (Irigaray 1996: 37).

Irigaray argues that any spiritual world, that is to say, any culture, society, or political community built on the negation/disavowal of nature, inevitably becomes totalitarian and sacrificial. It leads to totalitarianism because any project of the subject that denies its debt to nature also denies the fact that existence is necessarily two . The subject thereby sets himself up as an exhaustive whole or totality, repressing all that is different from himself. The neutral subject who possesses abstract individual rights is the most pervasive example of monological totality in modern political life. But more importantly, such spiritual projects can only establish societies of death and destruction because they are cut off from the generativity of nature. Instead of spiritualizing the body and incarnating itself, universal spirit is turn apart sundered from the earth, corporeality, and flesh. Irigaray offers many historical examples to support her claim: the symbolic, psychological, and physical forms of violence suffered by women in patriarchal society, alienation from nature, enslavement to property and to the money-form in global capitalism, and so on.

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For present purposes, the important point is that for Irigaray, the recognition of sexual difference in the spiritual world becomes the effective mechanism that can bring an end to the domination characterizing philosophy contemporary culture and politics because it can rejoin spirit and flesh. As

Irigaray puts it, sexual difference

constitutes a living universal. It is a universal related to our real person, to his or her needs, abilities and desires…. Thus, respecting the difference between woman and man is itself culture. It goes beyond natural immediacy…. If man and woman respect each other as those two halves of the universe that they represent, then by recognizing the other they overcome their immediate instincts and drives. They are spiritual humans form the fact of recognizing that they do not represent the whole of the person and that the other cannot belong to them as their own property. In sexual difference, the negative as limit is present form the very fact of respecting natural reality as constitutive of the subject. Sexual difference is, as it were, the most powerful motor of a dialectic without masters or slaves (Irigaray 1996: 50-51).

It is important to stress here that sexual difference is not a metaphysical principle of causality and creation. It supplies the basis for a practical ethics the agent of which is a concrete subject who inhabits a specific social location.

Irigaray argues that we can affirm sexual difference as the condition of becoming only if the couple and not the patriarchal family is taken as the elementary social community that mediates between individual needs and desires and universal culture. In other words, the couple is the only collective agent that can enable individuals to make the transition form nature to culture without sacrificing their sexuate nature. This makes the couple the operative site for the diffusion of ethical responsibility in the face of otherness and difference in general throughout a given society and indeed, the entire world.

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One’s sex is a fact of nature. To be natural is to be sexuate, and to be sexuate means to be of two . For Irigaray, sexual identity, which is cultural and also related to linguistic-grammatical genre , is based on biological sex.

However, sexual identity is neither an immutable facticity nor the artificial sociological construct that Gayle Rubin has described as “the straightjacket of gender”. Irigaray suggests that although one’s sex is naturally given, apart form the minimal natural determination that sex is two, sexual identity is paradoxically without content because it is also formed by the spiritual work that occurs through one’s respect for the other sex and the collective nurturing of cultural values that are faithful to one’s own set (Irigaray 1996: 144-45).

Neither respect for the other sex nor fidelity to one’s own sex necessarily implies an obligatory desire for the other sex.

Irigaray’s critique of Simone de Beauvoir is pertinent here, because, unlike Beauvoir, Irigaray argues that although sex is natural, sexual identity is not grasped in the same way that one grasps a factual truth, by standing outside one’s sex as an objective fact. Instead, one’s natural sex needs to be actualized and spiritualized through the development of sexual identity of the other than those promulgated by western philosophy. The liberal objective pursued by

Beauvoir and her followers, namely women’s achievement of equality with men, is rejected in favour of an assertion of specifically female traits, rights and demands, in the belief that so-called equality is merely a ploy designed to induce women to emulate men. Irigaray maintains that in taking ‘a singular subject’ as its fundamental prefix, western philosophy has failed to conceive that man and woman might be different subjects’ (Ibid: 121).

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I am a sexed ontological or ontic being, hence assigned to a gender, to a generic identity, one which I am not necessarily in/through my sensible immediacy. And so to be born a girl in a male-dominated culture is not necessarily to be born with a sensibility appropriate to my gender. No doubt female physiology is present but not identity, which remains to be constructed. Of course, there is no question of its being constructed in repudiation of one’s physiology. It is a matter of demanding a culture, of wanting and elaborating a spirituality, a subjectivity and an alterity appropriate to this gender: the female. It’s not as Simone de Beauvoir said: one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman (through culture), but rather: I am born a woman, but I must still become this woman that I am by nature (Irigaray 1996: 107).

This minimal definition of sexual identity does not militate against queer

forms of desire because it is contentless and permits enough room for

singularity and variability. Thus, the couple is “where sensible desire must

become potentially universal culture, where the gender of the man and of the

woman may become the model of male humankind or of female humankind

while keeping to the singular task of being this man or this woman ” (Irigaray

1996: 28).Same-sex desire is part of “the singular task of the being of this man or this woman”. The question that Irigaray implicitly poses is, What would same-sex desire be like if it were based on the ethical acknowledgement of sexual difference? More generally, her definition of sexual identity is critical of the tendency to obliterate sexual difference in extreme theoretical uses of the psychoanalytical concept of identification. She regards any disavowal of the facts that nature is at least two and that, by and large, society consists of both men an women, as a form of monological transcendence: the transcendence of the natural finitude of sexuate bodily existence. Thus, she writes, Between man and woman, there really is otherness: biological, morphological, relational. To be able to have a child constitutes a difference, but also being born a girl or a boy of a woman, who is of the same or the other gender as oneself, as well as to be or to

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appear corporeally with differing properties and qualities. Some of our prosperous or naïve contemporaries, women and men, would like to wipe out this difference by resorting to monosexuality, to the unisex and to what is called identification: even if I am bodily a man or woman, I can identify with, and so be, the other sex. This new opium of the people annihilates the other in the illusion of a reduction to identity, equality and sameness, especially between man and woman, the ultimate anchorage of real alterity. The dream of dissolving material, corporeal or social identity leads to a whole set of delusions, to endless and unresolvable conflicts, to a war of images or reflections and to powers being accredited to somebody or other more for imaginary or narcissistic reasons than for their actual abilities (Irigaray 1996: 61-62).

One can see why the disavowal of sexual difference constitutes such a grave danger for Irigaray. Insofar as we exist in a world where two sexes are the necessary condition of human existence, it is difficult to see how attempts to develop nonviolent and universal forms of political community, as opposed to particularistic, sectarian, or divisive political projects, can be concretely feasible or practicable if they are not based on the acknowledgement of being- two. This is why Irigaray is also wary of celebrating preoedipal sexuality as a liberation from the norm of genital sexuality, for this “entails all the caprice and immaturity of desire exercised to the detriment of becoming human as a genus, as two genders” (Irigaray 1996: 27). Indeed, she suggests that a critique of patriarchy can be saved from nihilism only if it is grounded in the universality of sexual difference (Ibid: 39).

Irigaray’s analysis shows that it is impossible to articulate feminism in the existing structure of language. She suggests that women’s writings will create that which as yet is inexpressible, a female subject with the potential to create its own meanings rather than be caught in the ‘masquerade’ of feminity.

This is, of course, a utopian quest, Because women are both inside and outside

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a discourse that gives no space to the feminine, Irigaray suggests the primary task would be to disrupt the settled order rather than to define what an other might in fact be or become. Irigaray’s central concern was for women to create an order that would be independent of any reference to the masculine: Woman remains that nothing, at all, or this all at nothing in which each (male) one seeks to find the means to replenish the resemblance to self(as) to same. Thus she moves from place to place, yet, up to the present it was never she that was displaced. She must continue to hold the place she constitutes for the subject, a place to which no eternal value can be assigned lest the subject remain paralysed forever by the irreplaceableness of his cathected investments. Therefore she has to wait for him to move her in accordance with his needs and desires (Irigaray 1985: 227).

To write the body or ‘ parler femine ’ is to confront and displace the masculine ‘movement’, to escape its definitions and confines, to attempt a reformation of the symbolic. Irigaray does not claim that either to write or

‘parler femine’ is easily defineable or achievable. In ‘This Sex Which is not

One’, Irigaray deals with the problem of female sexuality and subjectivity through a continuing process of interrogation rather than providing answers.

Irigaray is concerned with an alternative concept of feminity, which would be entirely other and not the converse. She argues that it is necessary to ‘become’ a woman for whereas a man is a man from the outset, women can only rely on mimicry of the roles assigned to her. One strategy is to take this mimicry to its extremes, undermining the masculine rhetoric. A second strategy, demonstrated most forcibly in the style and metaphor of ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’, is to pursue the relationship between female sexuality and language to create a different symbolic Order (Irigaray 2000c: 205-19). Irigaray also makes use of metaphors of fluidity with the purpose of decentering and putting all fixed

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meaning into question. An ecriture feminine then, implies a text that disrupts expectations of form and genre.

Irigaray observes that language itself embodies this masculine bias, even in such simple and relatively trivial ways as the use of the masculine pronouns in cases where no specific gender is intended. This feature of grammar reflects something much deeper, which runs through the entire history of philosophy.

She says: ‘the subject has always been written in masculine form …. Even when it claimed to be universal or neutral’.

‘Subject’ is the centre of Irigaray’s critique of patriarchal philosophy.

The ‘subject’ discussed in philosophy as the ‘subject of knowledge’ is considered to be gender-neutral. It is rather, claimed to be a ‘transcendental subject’, distinguished from any individual’s subjectivity, and certainly distinct from anything bodily. A deconstructive reading of the great works of philosophy will show that the subject of philosophy is in fact always masculine and women have been denied any subjectivity being reduced to the status of objects of a male gaze.

The deconstruction which Irigaray practices makes use of psychoanalytic concepts derived from both Freud and Lacan, she psychoanalyses the great western philosophers in order to show the male fears and anxieties which underlie the apparently rational and neutral surface of their arguments. For her the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan and Freud it itself a part of the patriarchal culture. She claims that in Freudian and Lacanian theory women are treated simply as defective men, lacking a penis rather than having positive attributes of their own. The emphasis is on problems concerning men;

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on the relations between mothers and their sons, in which the sons have to establish their male identity by rejecting their mother and identifying with their father. The balance needs to be restored by a greater emphasis on the mother- daughter relationship and the problems of forging a female identity.

Nevertheless, Irigaray still sees the psychoanalytic method, with its attention to the ‘imaginary’, the repressed wishes, that which is unspeakable, as a useful instrument in her own consideration of patriarchal culture.

Irigaray also offered psychoanalytic reading of Plato’s myth of the Cave in the Republic . In which philosophers ascend from a cave, in which they see only shadows into the upper world where they see real objects illuminated by the sun. The ‘logocentric’ reading of the myth is that the ascent from the cave into the sunlight is the move which must be made if one is to become a true philosopher, to see things as they really are, in the light of the form of the

Good, rather than as the mere appearance of an underlying reality. In Irigaray’s reading the cave is seen as an image of the womb, and the ascent from the cave into the sunlight as the (male) child’s assumptions of an identity by escaping form identification with his mother, and by identifying with the father (the

Form of the Good). In the light of this reading Plato’s cave myth is construed to mean that truth and rationality are to be found only by repudiating the mother, the female. The ability to apprehend the truth and so to be a philosopher, a rational being, a subject, is thereby defined as an exclusively male characteristic, while the female is identified with all those forces which seek to prevent rationality and the pursuit of truth.

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Since the subject of philosophy is a construction of human beings, the subject will be seen as constructed inconformity with male identity. And that male identity will be based on a fear of the female, which it seeks to overcome by achieving both physical and intellectual mastery over the female principle

(and hence actual women). What is female will be denied subjectivity: it will be reduced to an object over which the subject asserts his mastery. Only abstractions, apprehended by the pure intellect, will be really real: the concrete, bodily, sensuous world will be lacking.

Given that philosophy is the ‘master discourse’, the consequences of the neglect of sexual difference in western philosophy will be culturally all pervasive. The idea is not to replace domination by men with the domination of men by women; but to get rid of the domination of one group of human beings by another. Irigaray follows Lacan’s view that language is primary: that the construction of an identity is the construction of a language of one’s own. She contends that women are denied identity in patriarchal society, because the language of that society does not accommodate them. Thus, a major task for women is to create a language of their own; a language which is true to female subjectivity and recognizes the existence of sexual difference between subjects.

Such a language will be capable of recognizing and expressing specifically female experiences. The myth that the subject of philosophy is gender-neutral and that the criteria of rationality are genuinely universal needs to be exposed.

Irigaray holds that the need is to: “reopen” the figures of philosophical discourse – idea, substance, transcendental subjectivity, absolute knowledge in order to prey out of them what they have borrowed that is feminine, from the

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feminine, to make them “render up” and give back what they owe to the feminine’ (Irigaray 2000c: 74).

Yet the whole framework of women’s identity has to be constructed, or reconstructed. Irigaray suggests a few simple examples of the way identity relations between mothers and daughters might be improved, as this is the least cultured space of our societies. Indeed, such relations are subject to a double exclusion for patriarchal cultures because the woman is rejected from them as woman subject and the daughter is not given equal recognition as a girl subject.

The values dominating civilizations are those that are clearly they a portrayal of a leaning towards the male.

To break out of the vicious circle Irigaray proposes that it can be done through subjective relations between mothers and daughters. In Je Tu, Nous

Irigaray proposes some practical means for developing the mother daughter relationship in saying that it would be of importance to once again learn to respect life and nourishment. This means regaining respect for the mother and nature for we often forget that not all debts can be paid by money alone and that all nourishment can not be bought. This obviously concerns the male child as well but it’s vital for the rediscovery of a female identity. It would be of immense importance for mothers and daughters to find or make objects they can exchange between themselves so that they can be defined as female I – you

(je-tu). It would simplify issues to a large extent if mothers could help their daughters to understand non-hierarchical difference of the sexes where he means he and she means she. Following this he and she cannot be reduced to complementary functions but correspond to different identities within which

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women and men, mothers and fathers, girls and boys would have different forms and qualities and should not be identified solely through actions or roles alone.

Irigaray held that to establish and maintain relations with oneself and with the other, space is essential. Often women’s identity is restricted to the inner spaces of their womb or their sex insofar as they serve procreation and cater to male desire. It’s important for them to have their own outer space, enabling them to venture from the inside to the outside of themselves, to experience themselves as autonomous and free subjects. For the creation of this space between mothers and daughters an opportunity needs to be created.

Irigaray suggests that as often as possible human values should be substituted for artificial values. Further one has to avoid being exiled from natural and cosmic space and learn to not always to follow the same path, which doesn’t mean to dissipate your energies, but rather to know how to circulate from outside to inside, from inside to outside on ones own.

In verbal exchanges, sentences should be created in which I - woman

(je-femme) talks to you-women (tu-femme), particularly of their own selves or of a third woman. The fact that this sort of language barely exists greatly restricts women’s space for subjective freedom which becomes possible if created in everyday language.

Irigaray notes that neutralizing grammatical gender amounts to an abolition of the difference between sexed subjectivities and would lead to an increasing exclusion of a culture’s sexuality. Abolishing grammatical gender would amount to a great loss that our civilization can ill afford. What is

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essential, is for men and women to have equal subjective rights; where would mean equal different but of equal value and subjective implying equivalent rights in exchange systems.

Subjectivity can not be understood through the lens of a one-sex model. In other words, negative views of women exist because of theoretical bias-not because of nature. Through her critiques of both philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, Irigaray argues that women need to attain a social existence separate and not only confined to role of mother. However, this alone will not change the current state of affairs. Irigaray is not suggesting that the social role of women will change if they merely step over the line of nature into culture. She believes that true social change will occur only if society redefines its perception of nature as unthinking matter to be dominated and controlled.

Thus, while women must attain subjectivity, men must become more embodied. Irigaray argues that both men and women have to reconfigure their subjectivity so that they both understand themselves as belonging equally to nature and culture. Irigaray’s discussions of mimesis, novel language and utopian ideals, reconfiguring the mother/daughter relationship, altering language itself, ethics, and politics are all central to achieving this end.

The decline of sexual culture goes hand in hand with the establishment of different values which are supposedly universal but turn out to entail one part of humanity having a hold over the other; the world of men over that of women. This social and cultural injustice, which goes unrecognized, must be interpreted and modified so as to liberate our subjective potential in systems of exchange, in the mean of communication and creation. IN particular, it must be

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made apparent that we live in accordance with exclusively male genealogical systems.

Irigaray defines patriarch as ‘an exclusive respect for the geneology of sons and fathers, and the competition between brothers’ (Sexes et Parentes, p.

202). What has been absent in western thought and institutions until very recently, claims Irigaray, is any attempt to consider the possibility of a maternal geneology and the symbolic and institutional forms it might late. This would not be a several, the simple replacement of patriarchy with matriarchy, but rather the coexistence of two genealogies.

Irigaray holds that our societies made up half by men, half by women, stem from two genealogies and not one: mothers – daughters and fathers – sons

(not to mention crossed genealogies: mothers – sons, fathers – daughters).

Patriarchal power is organized by submitting one geneology to the other (Luce

Irigaray 1993: 8). Thus, what is termed as the oedipal structure as access to the cultural order is always structured within a single, masculine live of filiation which doesn’t symbolize the woman’s relation to her mother. Mother-daughter relationships in patrilinear societies are subordinated to relations between men.

SEXUAL DIFFERENCE

If we continue to speak this sameness, if we speak to each other as men have spoken for centuries, as they have taught us to speak, we will fail each other. Again …. words will pass through our bodies, above our heads, disappear, make us disappear (Irigaray 1980: 69).

There were strong voices amongst feminists that made stringent demands for equality on the basis of the similarity of the two sexes. This

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equality balanced on sameness presumed the neutralization of sex, which

Irigaray resisted. Irigaray rejected the ‘equality’ claims of the feminists and argued, that since, claims to equality presuppose a comparison along the same axis thus, highlighting only sameness, the focus on women’s specificity is completely diffused.

In other words, equality as Irigaray recognize may lead to two dangerous consequences: the women who wish to have a say or have access to male world had to fall back on either what they believe to be neutral or masculine position. In both the cases a woman denies her sex and gender, as this seemed to be the only way out of the loss of sexed subjective identity. The difficulties, writes Irigaray that they (women) force in order to enter the between – men cultural world lead almost all of them, including those who call themselves feminists, to renounce their female identity and relationships with other women” (Irigaray 1993: 13).

The feminism of the 19 th century that culminated in women’s gaining the vote and what resurfaced in the following century was a manifestation of two contrasting tendencies. On the one hand, there was a tendency to minimize gender difference emphasizing traits and shared by the two sexes and capacities. On the other, there was a recognition of the need to provide value to what was more specifically female.

The most widespread tendency among feminists during the 1960s and early 1970s was to focus on women’s similarity to men ignoring what was different. The effort clearly was targeted on women’s rights and not on women’s culture. The increasing number of women working outside the home

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supported the feminists demand for equal rights in employment urging for the application of common criterion for the treatment extended to both men and women. Women’s exclusion from responsible decision making domains was yet another issue. Liberals such as Betty Friedan pointed out that housewives who are usually as competent and educated as their husbands cannot be expected to live parasitic lives. Alice Rossi’s “ in modest proposal ” also emphasized the goal of letting women into the world of work on an equal footing with men. Socialist feminist explained women’s problem as relating to the exclusion of women and their work from the public world of production and exchange. Shulamith Firestone, saw equality explicitly as being attainable if we could eliminate women’s physical childbearing, thus making it possible for women to be fully assimilated into the world of work and sexuality.

In contrast to the predominant tendencies towards assimilation, radical feminists from the very beginning resisted any absorption into the male world arguing for varying degrees of separatism instead. Ti Grace Atkinson, urged women to end their identification with all heterosexual institutions, especially marriage, that give women a stake in the male world and yet oppress them. The rejection of males and the male world is indicative of their awareness of the difference and yet no effort to grapple with it was made for they were convinced that difference happened to be the root cause of oppression. To embrace women’s “virtues” seemed dangerous because they were presumed to have been developed in the ambience of oppression thus holding both inclusion and difference as suspect.

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The effort generated for inclusion on an equal basis in the public world soon became the subject matter of several disciplines. The feminists’ stress on similarity was born out of an acute awareness that difference had almost always been used against women relegating them as inferior and incapable. If a woman admitted to difference from a man, she was immediately in danger of admitting to a deficient secondary status and agreeing to give up emancipatory possibilities. Simone-de-Beauvoir, a French philosopher shows how gender differences became instrumental in sketching the hierarchy involved in a man- woman relationship. A related anxiety of feminists in the 1970s had to do with biology, for biology continued to be used to “explain” and justify the status quo, so much so that Steven Goldberg reached the extent of attributing male superiority to male hormones that are instrumental in gaining success for the man. This led him to conclude that nature has made male superiority inevitable.

However much women may have been discriminated against and subordinated on account of the difference they had from men, to ignore minimize or to eliminate that difference would have been much to fatal for their emancipatory purposes. It would amount to a willful acceptance and reinforcement of masculine values as the norm. This would include accepting a masculine analysis of women’s deficiencies which make women’s exclusion and secondary status justifiable. The emphasis on difference is essential to feminism if women are not to be usurped by ‘ masculinism’ . Ironically enough even Simone de Beauvoir one of the most fearless and committed exponents of feminist philosophy gave in to the valorization of masculine ideals. It was Luce

Irigaray who was responsible in positing a shift in perspective that strongly

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advocated the recognition and preservation of the difference was unique to women. Irigaray declared “to demand equality as a woman is a mistaken expression of the real objective. The demand to be equal presupposes a point of comparison. To whom or to what do women want to be equalized? Asks

Irigaray : To men ? To a salary ? To a public office? To what standard? Why not to themselves ?” (Irigaray 1993: 4).

A superficial cultural critique may treat the claims to equality as desirable but it becomes counterproductive when applied to emancipatory endeavour. Since women’s exploitation is primarily on account of sexual difference, its solution will become possible only through the recognition of that difference, and not through its reduction to nihilism. Such a reduction would only lead to the neutralization of sexes. As Irigaray says “to wish to get rid of sexual difference is to call for a genocide more radical than any form of destruction there has ever been in history (Irigaray 1993: 4). Instead it is important to define the values specific to each gender, such that a nonsexist culture of sexual difference be sustained for each sex to be given its due share.

Further Irigaray holds that history is an evidence that during the gynocratic, matriarchal, patriarchal and phallocratic eras, the sexual positioning was determined by the norms adopted and practical by a particular generation.

Which means that, within the family, the role of a woman and a man was strictly assigned and was lacking in the positive ethical values that may enable the two sexes of a given generation to form creative and not merely procreative, couples. One of the main obstacles to the creation and recognition of such emancipatory values is the more or less inescapable hold patriarchal

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and phallocratic models have had for centuries over the whole of our civilization. It is quite simply a matter of social justice to balance out the power of one sex over the other by restoring values to female sexuality its value.

In ignoring this requirement, feminism might well work towards the detriment and isolation of women in general. In fact, egalitarianism sometimes spends a fair amount of energy denying certain positive values and getting nowhere. Which leads to the crisis, disappointments, and periodic setbacks in women’s liberation movements. Forging through this impasse it was Luce

Irigaray who announced that a true equality between men and women cannot be achieved without a theory of gender as sexed and a rewriting of the rights and obligations of each sex, qua different, in social rights and obligations.

Irigaray considered the question of sexed identity as crucial. She held that sexual difference is necessary for the continuation of our species, not only because it constitutes the locus of procreation, but is also responsible for the regeneration of life. The sexes regenerate one another apart from any question of reproduction. Some cultures have realized and acted upon this truth but more often than not it has been overlooked which has resulted in impoverishing sexuality, making it mechanistic, at times more regressive and depraved than animal sexuality, inspite of all moral checks and balances.

Luce Irigaray was born in the 1930s in Belgium. She holds numerous advanced degrees: doctorates in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and linguistics and advanced degrees in psychology, psychopathology and literature. She attended the University of Louvain where she received a master’s degree in philosophy and literature ( Maitrise en philosophie et letters ) in 1955. She then

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taught high school in Brussels until 1959, after which she moved to Paris to study psychology.

She attended the University of Paris from 1959 to 1962, receiving first a master’s degree in psychology in 1961 and then a diploma in psychopathology in 1962. After completing her work in psychology, Irigaray returned to

Belgium where she worked at the Foundation Nationale de la Recherche

Scientifique from 1962 to 1964. In 1964 she returned to Paris to begin work at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) as an assistant researcher working with an interdisciplinary team of linguists, neurologists, logicians, psychiatrists, and philosophers in the Psychology Commission . In

1986 she took a transfer to the Philosophy Commission, where she currently works and has earned herself the prestigious position of director of research.

Upon her return to Paris in 1964, Irigaray also began her two doctorates.

She was awarded her doctorate in linguistics in 1968 upon completing her dissertation, Le Langage des Dements (the language of the Demented) at the

University of Paris X, Nanterre. In her dissertation, she studied how patients with senile dementia made use of grammar and language, which generated her interest in the differences in language use by men and women. Apart from this she became deeply interested in the language of female hysteria. She was trained as a psychoanalyst at the Ecole Freudienne and from 1970 to 1974 she taught in the Department of Psychoanalysis at Vincennes as part of her training. Though Irigaray received the highest honors for her book Speculum of the Other Woman she alienated herself from both the more traditional academics in France and from the Lacanians, who perceived her work to be an

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attack on Lacan himself. She was relieved of her teaching position at

Vincennes and could gain no access to teaching in Parisian universities. She gained no scholarly attention in Paris but was held in great esteem internationally. Despite the controversy surrounding her early work, Irigaray succeeded in wining teaching positions both in Paris and internationally including positions at the University of Rotterdam and the University of

Toronto.

In addition to her work at the CMRS and her academic posts, Irigaray has been a grassroot activist. She participated in the feminist movement of the 1970s in Paris, never allying herself with either of the main feminist groups,

Psychoanalyse et Politique (Psych et Po) or Mouvement de Liberation des

Femmes (MLF). She demonstrated for the legalization of abortion and contraceptives. Irigaray also participated in women’s movement internationally, notably in Italy, where her work profoundly influenced Italian feminism. She also made contribution to the communist party paper ‘ Unita ’, in Italy.

The influences on Irigaray’s work are wide ranging and responsible for her interdisciplinary inclinations. The post 1968 women’s movement in France; avant-garde writers: French philosophers such as Jacques Lacan, Jacques

Derrida, and Emmannuel Levinas: and the German philosophers G.W.F. Hegel,

Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger made a deep impression on Irigaray. She also credits the work of Simone de Beauvoir as particularly inspirational to her own work. Also her analysis of how Western culture produces ‘Woman’ as

Other is in some ways a re-working and augmentation of Beauvoir’s own work The Second Sex .

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Since about 1985, Irigaray has become more concerned with having an effect on society and changing existing social forms. The books published since

1985, Sexes et parentes (1987), Le Temps dela difflrence (1989) and Je, Tu,

Nous (1990), are all collections, including papers presented at conferences, interviews with other feminists, or occasional publications primarily in feminist journals. Throughout the 1980s, Irigaray was involved with political groups in

Italy, first the women of the affidamento , and later with the women of the

Italian Communist Party . The direction her work has taken involved a more direct focus on women’s civil status, their position as a sex before the law, the need for womankind to be recognized as a genre distinct form mankind, and the importance of translating sexual difference into specific social forms, both to mediate relations between women themselves, and also to lay claim to an existence embodied in distinct and concrete instances as a basis for relationships with and negotiation with the world of men. One can discern certain shifts in emphasis resulting from this new preoccupation. The stress on the mother-daughter relationship and relationships between women has to a certain extent made way for having an effect on and in the world of men.

In ‘ Speculum ’, Irigaray challenged the philosophical canon ‘going back through the masculine imaginary’ (Irigaray 2000c: 164) with Plato, Aristotle,

Plotinus, Freud and implicitly Jacques Lacan, as solely privileging and elaborating the masculine subject. She shows that the Western canon functions like a mirror (‘speculum mundi’ in Latin) which reflects back man as the master of the universe, and the universe and God in the image of man, while distorting the image of woman as imperfect, lacking or a hysterical subject.

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Irigaray also plays upon another meaning of speculum in her text namely the instrument used by the gynaecologist to reveal the interior sex of woman.

Using such a metaphor, she attempts to use this tool or mirror to open or reflect upon sexual difference and the feminine so as to interrupt the disfiguring images of women in western culture.

In a close reading of the western canons, Irigaray reveals that at the core of each thinker’s text is a fundamental matricide continued repression of sexual difference. Speculum which was worked out under the influence of Derridean ideals set out to show the repressed and hidden underside of metaphysical construction what they conceal and yet depend on for their existence – what

Irigaray refers to as the unacknowledged mother: ‘All western culture rests on the murder of the mother’ ( Le Corps – a corps avec la mere , p. 81). For example, in the myths of origin, it is not the mother who brings forward life, but rather a self-originating male principle, or life force. Woman, in this scenario, is derived from man and then serves merely to reproduce the species.

She is the ‘envelope’ as Irigaray often calls her; she is merely a womb in which male subjects gestate. And finally, woman’s purpose is to nurture men, both nutritionally and spiritually to enable them to eventually move on to participate in the social realm leaving her behind.

Irigaray’s own philosophical work makes use of different strategies of writing notably a mimetic voice in order to open up a space within patriarchy to enable the representation of sexual difference outside of it. Irigaray explains how she ‘mimes’ the texts she reads as a mode of deconstructing its authority.

This strategy of mimesis has been used to avoid recapture within the

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parameters of a metaphysical system in which the place of / for the feminine is chalked out in advance. She plays on the double meaning of miming as an act of poking fun at something and as a symptom of hysteria (a disease patriarchy diagnoses women with) to reveal the patriarchal operation of western thought to create the whole world including women, in the image of men. She often repeats verbatum the works of philosophers though supplying some critique between their lines in order to compel the reader to recognize the absurdity of their presumptions concerning ‘woman’, ‘nature’ and feminity. By miming sections of these texts and placing them in a feminist context, she calls reader’s attention to recognize how expansively patriarchal repression of women and female sexuality exists in the western culture.

Repression of women leads not only to their madness, as she points out in “Body against Body: In Relation to the Mother”, but to the phobia disgust and fear that men associate with female sexuality. Likewise Irigaray shows that by turning women and nature into the raw materials that fuel men’s projects, patriarchy treats women and nature as slavish to man’s desires and sexual needs. In “Each Sex Must Have Its Own Rights” Irigaray argues that until a truly ethical relationship between the sexes is established and the sexual differences become productive units of culture, humanity will be plagued by illness, madness, wars and technological disasters. If sexual difference only represents the dichotomy between nature and culture, where women’s bodies reproduce the future leaders of society, nurturing and satisfying the needs of male others.

Irigaray argues that this destructive attitude toward nature and women’s bodies emanates from male sexuality that follows a model of tension and 179

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release. The tempo of male sexuality structures the technology that we build in our projects of taming the unruliness of nature. It forces our bodies to endure the stress of endless workdays, high speed transportation, noise pollution and so on with the reward of orgasmic release once work is over.

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…..the subject is committed to trial, because our identities in life are cosntantly called into question, brought to trial, over- ruled (Kristeva 1989a: 19)

In this chapter we propose to study Kristeva’s analysis of the role of linguistics and psychoanalysis in the construction of a subjectivity that shapes and is in turn shaped by gender and sexuality. Kristeva’s project of bringing subject in process has the consequence of exposing sexism inherent in philosophical practices. This will involve examining the relationship between language and the subject. Bringing into consideration three areas of enquiry: Kristeva’s position on the claims of Western Philosophy that lead to fortifying patriarchy and sexist inclinations, the role played by language in the constitution of subjectivity as an open-ended process, the exposure of the limitations of patriarchal discourse, especially by mainstream Western philosophy.

Julia Kristeva was born in Bulgaria on 24 June, 1941 to a middle class family. She received her early schooling from French nuns. As a child she joined Communist Party children’s groups, and later, the party youth organizations. As she says in an interview: “I learned [Lenin’s] Materialism and Empiriocriticism at the same time as I did the square of the hypotenuse”.

Though Kristeva wanted to pursue a career in physics or astronomy, but since the children of party cadres were not allowed admission in the main research and training center she moved to other options that she was left with, and chose journalism. As a journalist she worked with a newspaper for communist youth while pursuing literary studies. She met newspaper correspondents from many countries, received books from abroad, opening up to ideas that came from the Chapter V Subject-in-Process: An Emergence of Pluralities

West. This exposure to diverse areas of knowledge enriched her perspective.

Later in 1966, as a doctorate fellowship holder, Kristeva went to Paris.

In Paris Kristeva met Tzvetan Todorov, an emigrant from Bulgaria. He brought her to Lucian Goldmanna’s seminar, where a process of research and writing began for Kristeva. Soon with the publication of her writings including her book ‘ Semiotike’ (1969) she became well known as a critical analyst and cultural theorist. Her immense body of work includes books and essays which address intertextuality, literary theory and criticism, psychoanalysis, political and cultural analysis. She joined the ‘ Tel Quel group ’ in 1965 and became an active member focusing on the politics of language. This group worked with the notion of history as a text for interpretation and its writing as an act of politicized production rather than an attempt to make an objective reproduction. Kristeva’s articles were published by Tel Quel and the journal

‘Critique’ in 1967, and in 1970 she joined the editorial board. Her research in linguistics, including her interest in Lacan’s seminars during the same year became known through the publication of Le Texte Du Roman (1970),

Semeiotike: Researches pour une semanalyse (1969) and subsequently, La Revolution du Language poetique (her doctoral thesis) in 1974. Few more publications earned her a chair of linguistics at the University of Paris. Later she was assigned a series of guest appointments at Columbia University in New York.

In France, Kristeva experienced the waning influence of structuralism, which was in decline after the challenges from Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida among others. Like these philosophers and analysts, Kristeva began with criticizing and subsequently rejecting structuralist and pre-structuralist

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ideology. She became a part of a ‘philosophic tradition’ that picked the traditional notion of subjectivity as a starting point and provided the term subjectivity as an alternative to the conventional understanding of self . The term self was used to designate a being who is fully aware of her/his own intentions, fully able to act as an autonomous being in the world guided by her/his intellect and reason and made use of language as a tool to convey ideas.

This self was considered ideally master of his/her own being subject to no one.

Kristeva resisted and criticized such definitions of the self , and tried to accomplish that subjectivity is always a tenuous accomplishment, a dynamic process that is never completed. To combat with the traditional ideology of the self she developed a notion of subject-in-process . With this notion she conveys that subject is a dynamic and open ended which is never static.

We have discussed in earlier chapters that within a short period the feminist goal of including issues concerning women in the theoretical edifice where it had previously been neglected manifested a number of problems, for an equal inclusion would mean that only women’s sameness to men; only her humanity and not her uniqueness as a woman could be considered. As Irigaray would say: in adopting the role of (male) subject of knowledge, women began to assume the role of surrogate men.

Since, it was clear then, that women could only be included in patriarchal texts as deviant or duplicate men the need was felt that the entire social, political scientific and metaphysical underpinnings of patriarchal theoretical systems required to be reviewed and questioned anew. However, all attempts to equality served as an experiential pre-requisite to a far reaching struggle directed towards female autonomy.

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Kristeva notes that if feminist theory remains simply reactive merely a critique, paradoxically it acts in consonance with the very motive it seeks to contest. It remains to be rooted on the very grounds it wishes to question and transform. To criticize prevailing theoretical systems without providing viable alternatives is to accept such systems as necessary with perhaps a possibility of surface modifications. Not only do the concepts and theories require radical transformations but the substance and frame of questions posed and the methods used to answer them ask for a renewed effort. Basic assumptions about methodology, criteria of validity and merit, all need to be seriously envisioned.

Kristeva’s analysis facilitates an understanding of the process and structures that were instrumental in constructing and legitimizing the oppression of women and the role of philosophical and psychological theories in shaping them.

. The proposition that sexual and gendered identities are eminently cultural constructs has been dealt with a purpose to clarify that the debate about language and the debate about the construction of sexual and gendered identities converge in the recognizing that language itself is instrumental in the fashioning of subjectivity.

Kristeva examined the relationship between language and the subject to analyze the role played by language in the constitution of subjectivity as an open ended process. For Kristeva the term subjectivity means something entirely different. Those who proffer this term think that the western philosophic tradition is deeply mistaken about how human beings come to be who they are. First, individuals are subject to all kinds of phenomena: their

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culture, history and language etc. These phenomena profoundly shape how people come to be. Thus, individuals are better understood as subjects not selves. Individuals are also not fully aware of all the phenomena that shape them for there remains a dimension of their own being that is inaccessible, known as “the unconscious”. This is the domain of desires, tensions, energy and repressions that is not present in consciousness. Therefore, the experience of subjectivity is not that of coming to awareness as a self , but of having an identity shaped in ways often not known to the subject itself. This dimension of unconscious reveals itself in the language, the bodily drives and energy and is discharged through the use of language consequently shaping subjectivity and experience, Kristeva writes “linguistic changes constitute changes in the status of the subject – his relation to the body, to others, and to objects” (Kristeva

1984:15)

Kristeva’s critical analysis of subjectivity and language and the relation between the two serves the feminist’s purpose of freeing woman’s subjectivity from the constrains of patriarchy.

Kristeva proposes a model premised on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. She draws attention, in particular to Lacan’s redefinition of Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of the fear of castration as a sociosymbolic phenomenon. Where castration is a dread of the demise of totality and presence occasioned by the entry into language and by the budding subjects’ reverence from nature. For

Kristeva it ‘would be the advent of sign and of syntax, that is, of language, as a separation from a fusion state of pleasure’ (Kristeva, Women’s time, p. 189). Hence, Castration does not refer to a physical act or experience of mutilation but rather to the ‘loss of wholeness and completeness’ which inevitably

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accompanies socialization and the figurative ‘ensemble of “cuts” that are indispensable to the advent of the symbolic’. She notes that although this fate of separation and loss befalls women and men alike, it has different psychological and cultural implications for female and male subjects. Women are commonly assigned an inferior standing in the symbolic order and considered merely capable of perpetuating a social obligation to the enculturement of the young, and to the assistance of their partners and of their charges. Accordingly ‘their role consists in maintaining, developing and preserving this socio-symbolic contract as mothers, wives, nurses, doctors, teachers’ (Kristeva Women’s Time p. 190). It would be futile to aim at subverting the existing ruling power by merely pursuing the utopia of ‘countersociety’ (Ibid: 192), for it would be dangerous (with little gains) when power changes hands without altering its fundamental nature. Kristeva argues, idealization of motherhood, for example is another easy way to create yet another form of mythology, which is nothing but a refusal to grapple with the realities of feminity in the name of unifying icon of woman-as-procreator .

Kristeva’s theoretical and pragmatic alternative consists of examining and foregrounding not merely the difference between men and women as such but the sociosymbolic internalization of difference as the basis of identity. She examines psychoanalysis by showing precisely that the key events in our psychosexual development, as argued in relation to castration anxiety, are always already invested with multiple layers of socio-symbolic significance.

Moreover, Kristeva contends, psychoanalytic theory emphasizes the divided status of human subjectivity, the idea that every person is simultaneously ‘the same and the other, identical and foreign’, and can therefore help us both to

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recognize and allow scope for the expression of the multiplicity and diversity of each being’s potential selves: ‘I simply have to analyze incessantly the fundamental separation of my own untenable identity’ (Kristeva, Women’s

Time, p. 198). The distinctiveness of each subject and of diversity within each subject leads Kristeva to propose a shift from a feminism of difference that encourages us to ‘think only of two’, namely men and women as distinct entities, towards an ethos of ‘singularity’ that hinges on the recognition of ‘the irreducibility of individuals – whether they be men or women’ (Kristeva: 1996).

Le Sujet-en-proces , translated as subject-in-process is the outcome of a two-fold enquiry into the ‘ psychosexual development of subjectivity ’ and ‘language’ (signification). Kristeva examined the simultaneous process of language acquisition and self development to project her own idea of subject .

For her subject is not a composition of certain attributes, culture, history and context but instead an open system on account of yet another dimension of subject’s own being called unconscious which Kristeva insisted was responsible for the subject’s dynamism. The manifold drives that exist unconsciously are central to the speaking for Kristeva. They provide energy and motivation for speech but also threaten to overwhelm the speaker through shattering the rules of discursive coherence. She calls this embodied source of speech the semiotic . The semiotic includes energy’s flow and rhythms, drives and residues, which exist prior to the development of self and even prior to birth. It is formless, chaotic and disordered. It is Kristeva’s interpretation of Freud’s unconscious and primary process thinking which is expressed in giggles, baby talk, burbles, gestures sighs and sensations. The source of

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semiotic lies in the infant’s primordial relation to the mother’s body prior to birth, which Kristeva calls the chora. The foetus responds to the mother’s moods, dreams, physiological changes and after birth it acts to dispel the myth of the self sufficient subject, which conceals humanity’s dependence on the body (mother) and the unconscious. For this reason, she has been particularly of great interest to feminist philosophers.

Kristeva defends her distance from feminism by distinguishing three stages that she notes in Women’s Time (three generations of European feminism). By generation she means “less a chronology than a signifying space, a mental space that is at once corporeal and desirous” (Kristeva 1995:

222) or in other words, a particular approach or attitude. The purpose of the first stage (generation), which she primarily locates prior to 1968, was to achieve equal rights based on the similarities between the sexes. It was a movement in which women sought all the same rights and prerogatives that men were equipped with. It called for equal rights and equal treatment the argument being that women deserved equality with men, because they were just like men in that there were no truly important differences between the sexes. This generation of women activists sought to inhabit the same time that men had inhabited i.e. the time of linear history so that women’s accomplishments could be recorded in the linear timeline of human history. These activists urged that women “must appropriate the logical, mastering scientific, theoretical apparatus” and they “consider it extremely gratifying that there are women physicists, theorists, and philosophers for it will “preserve for women an extremely important place in the domain of culture” (Guberman

1996: 117). Earlier, public realm and linear time was available only to men and

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women were supposed to inhabit the household, where time was cylical , as in the time-again for cooking or cleaning or birthing or sleeping. In this realm (household), moved in circles repeating itself endlessly where nothing new would be created or produced, only the old would be reproduced.

Feminists of this generation discarded anything that made them different from men and instead tried to identify with the male symbolic order. Kristeva’s main objection was against the overvaluation and acceptance of the

“masculine” goal of autonomy by the first generation feminists. In one way or the other they accepted the status quo:

When the women’s movement began as the struggle of suffragists and existential feminists, it sought to stake out its place in the linear time of planning and history. As a result, although the movement was universalist from the start, it was deeply rooted in the sociopolitical life of nations. The political demands of women, their struggles for equal pay for equal work and for the right to the same opportunities as men have, as well as the rejection of feminine or maternal traits considered incompatible with participation in such a history all stem from the logic of identification with values that are not ideological (such values have been rightly criticized as too reactionary) but logical and ontological with regard to the dominant rationality of the nation and the state (Kristeva 1995: 207).

First generation feminism in making a demand for rights accorded to men did nothing to question the prevalent system responsible for the imbalances but geared towards becoming a part of it. This not to deny the achievements and Kristeva did not fall short in recognizing this but qualifies that all the effort still could not grapple with the uniqueness possessed by woman. Sexual freedom according to Kristeva would mean the recognition of women’s unique desires and needs which would be unachievable by identifying with the existing order designed by men, for men.

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In one of her interviews in 1980, Kristeva says that women’s protest must be more than a fight for recognition of rights. She said women’s protest:

…is a protest that consists in demanding that attention be paid to the subjective particularity that an individual represents in the social order, of course, but also and above all in relation to what essentially differentiates that individual, which is the individual’s sexual difference. How can one define this sexual difference? It is not solely biological; it is above all, given in the representations that we ourselves make of this difference. We have no other means of constructing this representation than through language, through tools for symbolizing (Guberman 1996).

What Kristeva argues here is that not only biological differences differentiate women from men it is the symbolic realm that differentiates the sexes. Seeing the social order and the symbolic order as two dimensions of a large system (the psychosymbolic structure), Kristeva argues that women’s demands cannot be met by identifying with the system.

The second generation feminism came after 1968 which concerned itself with highlighting feminine difference, defining a distinctively feminine identity and defending its value. Whereas the first generation minimized difference, the second generation of European feminists began to dwell on it intently, often simply by revaluing what the old system devalued as all that was feminine

(womanly). Turning away form the first generation’s interest in linear time, the second generation sought to return to women’s archaic, cyclical time, as well as to the “monumental” time of the species. Instead of seeking to be producers in a linear history, they created ways to retrieve value in the lives of women as upholders of the species.

Kristeva notes that, where the first generation spurned the activity of mothering which had historically relegated women to the household in favour

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of activity in the linear time of the public sphere, the second generation re- embraced mothering. She writes:

“The majority of women today feel that they have a mission to put a child into the world. This brings up a question for the new generation that the preceding one repudiated: what lies behind this desire to be a mother? Unable to answer this question, feminist ideology opens the door to a return of religion, which may serve to pacify anxiety, suffering, and maternal expectations” (Kristeva 1995: 219).

Here Kristeva claims that the second generation in embracing the role of motherhood, risks becoming yet another religion. In place of God, it has

“woman” and “Her power” (McAfee 2004: 99). The second generation’s return to mothering becomes problematic when it provides a way to recuperate women’s archaic and mythic memory. Kristeva notes that there is a tendency in the second generation to equate “good substance” with the myth of the archaic mother. She claims that under this monolith of woman, the actual woman in her uniqueness, individuality and particularity is lost for yet another reference ideal is created. She links this strategy to Irigaray’s valorization of difference, and argues that it creates a new, restrictive, essentialist identity for women, even if it differs from masculine autonomy. This new feminity is parasitic on masculinity because they are mirror images of each other.

The second generation’s revolt against the established order according to

Kristeva, is purposeful yet it is dangerous and potentially lethal. In her words: by fighting against evil, we reproduce it, this time at the core of the social bond – the bond between men and women. She notes further that:

Various feminist currents….. reject the powers that be and make the second sex into a countersociety, a sort of alter ego of official society that harbors hopes for pleasure. This female society can be opposed to the sacrificial and frustrating sociosymbolic contract: a

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countersociety imagined to be harmonious, permissive, free, and blissful (Kristeva 1995: 215).

This imagined countersocietry preserves itself as such by expelling what it feels to be responsible for evil. It presents some “good substance” in opposition to a “guilty party” which could be “the foreigner, money, another religion, or the other sex” (Kristeva 1995: 216). Criticizing the second generation’s pursuit for a countersociety, Kristeva questions its utopian pursuit. She asks: Doesn’t this logic lead to a kind of reverse sexism?

The third generation feminism anticipates Kristeva’s own position, which challenges and even dissolves all identities in demolishing the reign of the autonomous subject altogether by putting an end to romanticizing

“woman”. Kristeva says “there is no such thing as woman”. She further adds,

“she does not exist with a capital ‘W’, as a holder of a mythical plentitude, a supreme power upon which the terror of power as well as terrorism as the desire for power base themselves” (Kristeva 1995: 218). Since the second generation’s monolithic conception of woman erringly ignored and erased actual women’s individuality, uniqueness and specificity the third generation would set itself to the task of attending to the singularity of each woman.

Kristeva writes: “the most subtle aspects of the new generation’s feminist subversion will be directed toward this issue in the future”. She also outlines what she feels the third generations aim would be: “this focus will combine the sexual with the symbolic in order to discover first, the specificity of the feminine and then the specificity of each woman” (Ibid: 210).

Kristeva hopes that this generation will also look for ways to reconcile women’s multiple desires. It will take up women’s desire both to have children and to enter the male world of linear-time that is, to have both children and

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careers. Thus while the earlier generations of women saw themselves either as reproducers of the species or producers of culture, the third generation would include both. Where earlier generations always set a choice between the self- abnegating activity of mothering and the self-affirming activity of culture, in this generation, notes Kristeva:

If maternity is to be guilt-free, this journey needs to be undertaken without masochism and without annihilating one’s affective, intellectual, and professional personality, either. In this way, maternity becomes a true creative act, something that we have not yet been able to imagine (Kristeva 1995: 220).

Kristeva resists the notion of stable identities that other feminists were trying to establish for she also believes that they presuppose a conception of a feminine essence supposedly embodied in all women. For the third generation, writes Kristeva:

Third generation, which I strongly support (which I am imagining?), the dichotomy between man and women as an opposition between two rival entities is a problem for metaphysics. What does “identity” and even “sexual identity” mean in a theoretical and scientific space in which the notion of identity itself is challenged? I am not simply attending to bisexuality, which most often reveals a desire for totality, a desire for the eradication of difference. I am thinking more specifically, of subduing the “fight to the finish” between rival groups, not in hopes of reconciliation – since at the very least, feminism can be lauded for bringing to light that which is irreducible and even lethal in the social contract – but in the hopes that the violence occurs with the utmost mobility within individual and sexual identity, and not through a rejection of the other” (Kristeva 1995: 223).

Most significantly she proposes that the third generation should be able to recognize the dynamics of psychosymbolic structure, which is based upon metaphysics of identity and difference, where one sex or class or race or nation is seen as a rival of another.

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Unlike second generations inclination towards polarization Kristeva’s emphasis is to internalize it, to observe within ourselves the “fundamental separation of the sociosymbolic contract” (Kristeva 1995: 223). Further she goes or to explain. “From that point on, the other is neither an evil being foreign to me nor a scapegoat from the outside, that is, of another sex, class, or notion”. “I am at once the attacker and the victim, the same and the other, identical and foreign” (ibid).

In other words, what Kristeva is trying to emphasize is the idea that masculine and feminine represent poles within each person and she aims for a better balance in which the feminine pole is less repressed – in everyone. But then the question arises as to how would the internalizing of the rivalries present within the structure help transform the structure? Kristeva explains that in this process of internalizing rivalries, a subject would first recall that each person’s identity is a composite of a diversity of ethnic, regional, sexual, professional, and political identifications. Second , the process will hold each person accountable: “I simply have to analyze incessantly the fundamental separation of my own untenable identity” (Kristeva 1995: 223)

Observing Kristeva’s account of “identity in diversity” McAfee writes:

“Kristeva’s discussion of a third generation of feminism is less about the gains that could be made for women and more about the gains that can be made for human beings. Instead of positioning “patriarchy” and men as the culprits who have oppressed women, it argues that all people are equally guilty – and equally capable of bringing about a new ethical vision. Rather than reinstate or revalue the previous hierarchies of male versus female, it calls on us to

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recognize the many rivalries we have within us. It calls on us to put our own house in order first”. (McAfee2004:102).

Kristeva’s work can be seen as trying to adapt a psychoanalytic, linguistic, philosophical and literary theoretical approach to the post structuralist criticism. Her view of the subject, and its construction, shares similarities with Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. However, Kristeva rejects any understanding of the subject in a structuralist sense, instead she favors a subject always in process or in crisis. In this way she contributed to the poststructuralist critique. Though Kristeva’s psychoanalysis was inspired by

Jacques Lacan’s structuralist re-interpretation of Freud, she carefully distinguishes and develops her own ideas from those of Lacan. Kristeva was critical of what she saw as inherent misogyny in Lacan’s and Freud’s theories.

Kristeva, therefore attempts to rethink sexual development in such a way as to value the importance of the feminine. For this reason she has been extremely influential. Kristeva offers a more central place for the maternal and the feminine in the subject’s psychosexual development in forging a less sexist and phallocentric model for the subject.

Kristeva examines the simultaneous process of language acquisition and psychosexual development. With her new idea of subjectivity she poses a challenge to the philosophical and psychoanalytic theories of misogyny. With her study of subjectivity, she can be seen as a part of a philosophical tradition that takes the notion of subjectivity as a starting point. During the 19 th century it was G.W.Hegel who argued against the notion of self conscious, autonomous individual while F.W.Neitzsche advanced this critique. Kristeva offers a new insight into subjectivity, elaborating how language produces the subject

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(speaking being). The subject, who is a speaking being, emerges between the folds of language and culture. Kristeva, while offering a sustained and nuanced understanding of how subjectivity is produced, how language actually operates when people speak, write and create, criticizes both linguistic and psychoanalytic approaches for suppressing the feminine.

She rejected the conventional term ‘ self’ which designates a being who is fully aware of her/his own intentions, who is fully able to act as an autonomous being in the world and guided by her/his reason and intellect. As opposed to it Kristeva suggests that subjects are not fully aware of all the phenomena that shape them. There are energies discharged in language which are vital in the making of subject. This energy, which is infact a hidden dimension gets infused into the language to produce a tenuous subject, who is always in the process of making itself. This element of language (hidden dimension), Kristeva calls a semiotic . With this, subjectivity becomes a dynamic process never completed and always open. In her theory speaking bring becomes crucial for understanding identity, sexuality, culture and nature.

Most of the non-poststructuralist theories of language treat language as a dead artifact, something that can be catalogued, archived that is to say a formal object of study. And this is largely an influential consequence of the socio- economic forces, which treat people and their languages as insoluble and static entities. Such treatment of language as merely a tool, according to Kristeva, denies the dynamic processes in which people generate meaning and experience. The denial of the dynamic process inevitably constructs and reinforces the fixed identities of both men and women. Where one (man) is always defined in opposition to the other.

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Instead of treating language as a separate entity, Kristeva saw it as part of dynamic signifying process. In order to dynamise the signifying process these are our bodily derives and energy which are expressed and infused into it.

Kristeva, while making the signification a ‘process’, a dynamic process is concerned with the ‘making of subjectivity’ as an intertwined process. Thus she says in “ Revolution in Poetic Language”, “linguistic changes, constitute a combined effect of symbolic and semiotic in the process of signification changes in the status of the subject – his relation to the body, to others, and to objects” (Kristeva 1984: 15). As Noell McAfee in her book Julia Kristeva quotes Kelly Oliver description of Kristeva’s view of signifying practice:

“Instead of lamenting what is lost, absent, or impossible in language, Kristeva marvels at the other realm of bodily experience that makes its way into language. The force of language is a living driving force (of a body) transferred into language. Signification is like a transfusion of the living body into language” (McAfee 2004).

To put it in other words, it is the speaking being’s own living energy which infuses meaning into language. And therefore the study of language apart from the subject, a subject who talks or writes would be meaningless.

Also, the study of a subject (being-in-process) without language (as a dynamic process) is meaningless. Kristeva notes in Revolution in Poetic Language that our everyday uses of language in social settings generally operate by trying to contain the excesses of language that is, the potentially explosive ways in which signifying practices exceed the subject and his or her communicative structures (Kristeva1984:16).Glimpses of such excesses appear in the arts, religion, and poetry for these are the realms in which passions that might disrupt the social order are expressed.

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In order to discuss and elaborate her notion of speaking subject or subject-in-process , her analysis of language needs to be discussed first. Unlike other linguists and philosophers (structuralists) who have studied language as a separate, static entity, Kristeva argues that the study of language is inseparable from the study of the speaking being. This she showed through the signifying process of language in which the speaking being discharges its energies and affects into its symbolic mode of signification. Thus, for her speaking subject is one which not only use language but is constituted through its use of language. Kristeva describes language as a discursive or signifying system in which “the speaking subject makes and unmakes himself” (Kristeva 1984: 265, 272).

In Revolution in Poetic Language , Kristeva suggests that a dialectical notion of the signifying process would show how “significance puts the subject in process/ on trial [en process]” (Kristeva 1984: 22). (Le sujet en process, translated as subject-in-process or the subject-on-trial). The semiotic which make signifying process a transgressive descriptive and even revolutionary puts le sujet en process . According to Kristeva there are two modes in which the signifying process operates, namely symbolic and semiotic . Symbolic is that mode of signifying in which clear and orderly meaning are expressed. In this mode the speaking beings attempt to express meaning with as little ambiguity as possible because of the symbolic signification depends on language as a sign system complete with its grammar and syntax (Kristeva 1984: 27). Semiotic is that process of signification which is expressed as an evocation, of feeling or more specifically, a discharge of the subject’s energy and drives or unconscious drives. This mode of signification is more emotive than logical.

In Revolution , Kristeva expresses the semiotic: “we understand the term

‘semiotic’ in its Greek sense, which is a distinctive mark, trace, index

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precursory sign, proof, engraved or written sign, imprint trace, figuration”

(Kristeva 1984: 25). The semiotic aspect of signification signifies what is “below the surface of the speaking being”.

Discrete quantity of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed on this body – always already involved in a semiotic process – by family and social structures. In this way the drives, which are “energy” charges as well as “psychical” marks, articulate what we call a chora: a non expressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated”. (Kristeva 1984: 25).

Moreover, for Kristeva the symbolic is not always the most powerful mode:

“On the contrary, the signifying economy of poetic language is specific in that the semiotic is not only a constraint as is the symbolic , but it tends to gain the upper hand at the expense of the thetic and predicative constraints of the ego’s judging consciousness” (Kristeva1980: 134). This suggests that the speaking being with the semiotic mode of signification is not a stable subject. He or she is something else altogether: a subject-in-process .

In this mode bodily energy makes its way into language, it includes both the subject’s drives and articulations. Though this element of signification is expressed in language (verbally) it is not subject to regular rules of syntax and grammer. Its expressions originate in the unconscious, while symbolic is to seen as the conscious way a person tries to express using a stable sign system

(whether written, spoken, or gestured with sign language). In other words, the symbolic “law of the father” that is, the orderly aspects of our signifying practices, never triumphs over what she calls the semiotic (the more fluid, playful, instinctual aspects of our signifying practices). This clearly suggests that speaking being are always works in progress and our subjectivity is never

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constituted once and for all. The two modes, however, are not completely separate: symbolic modes of signifying are made use of to state a position, but this position can be destabilized or unsettled by semiotic drives and articulations. Thus, the two terms are different yet inextricably linked with each other. By symbolic Kristeva means “orderly communication” or in other words, discourse that uses the normal rules of syntax and semantics to convey meaning, for example the language of science and logic i.e. a language with as little ambiguity as possible.

Kristeva offers child’s psychic development: first in the embrace of the chora, where it’s first sounds and gestures express and discharge feelings and energy; then with the end of mirror stage, through creative events it comes to see itself as separate from its surroundings and thus begins to use language symbolically. With the symbolic disposition, contends Kristeva, it does not leave the semiotic behind. The semiotic remains so interwoven with the symbolic that it will remain a constant companion to the symbolic in all its communications. Semiotic being ambiguous seems to be at odds with what is usually understood to be the purpose of signification: to transmit an intended meaning form one person to another. Kristeva says, the semiotic is “definitely heterogeneous to meaning” (Kristeva 1980: 133). Rather semiotic is “always in sight of it or in either a negative or surplus relationship to it” (ibid.: 134). Further explaining this relationship she writes:

It goes without saying that, concerning a signifying practice that is, a socially communicable discourse like poetic language, this semiotic heterogeneity posited by theory is inseparable from what I call, to distinguish it from the latter, the symbolic function of significance. The symbolic, as opposed to the semiotic, is this inevitable attribute of meaning, sign, and the signified object…. Language as social practice necessarily presupposes these two dispositions [the semiotic and the symbolic], though combined in 200

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different ways to constitute types of discourse, types of signifying practices (Kristeva 1980:134).

Making a distinction between semiotic and symbolic , Kristeva writes that the semiotic, consists of drive-related and affective meanings organized according to primary proceses whose sensory aspects are often non verbal

(sound and melody, rhythm, color, colors and so forth,) on the one hand, and the symbolic that is manifested in linguistic signs and their logico-syntactic organization, on the other. (Kristeva 1995: 104).Both are different in their content and ways of expression, yet are not in contrast with each other. And therefore in order to have a clear understanding of the mutual expression of the two modes of signification, it is important to first understand the difference between the two. To help understand distinction between semiotic and symbolic, McAfee writes “the reader could imagine mapping that dichotomy onto more familiar dichotomies: such as the distinctions between nature and culture, between body and mind, between the unconscious and conscious, and between feeling and reason” (McAfee 2004). But Kristeva’s concept of semiotic and symbolic is not like the dichotomies prevailing in the history of

Western thought which were usually taken to be extreme opposites. The difference with Kristeva’s use of these kinds of polarities is that the former pole i.e. semiotic/nature/body/unconscious etc.) always makes itself felt – is discharged into the latter (symbolic/culture/mind/ consciousness). Instead of reinforcing the dualistic thinking of the West, Kristeva shows how the poles of these dichotomies are interlinked.

Signification, therefore includes symbolic mode of signification as a semantic order which is energized by a semiotic dimension. Kristeva holds that the symbolic mode of signification is meaningful because of the way the

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semiotic energizes it. McAfee explains “If it weren’t for the bodily energy that speaking beings bring to (and put into) language, language would have little if any meaning for us” (McAfee 2004: 18).

The Semiotic element of signifying is unconsciously driven, which when it seeps out in signification (as it does in avant-garde poetry), it disrupts the more orderly, symbolic effort at communication and in doing so it displays and amplifies the subject’s lack of unity. In Revolution , this disruptive aspect of signification seems limited to poetic language, but in her later works, Kristeva extends semiosis to other texts and signifying practices where she shows that no living, speaking being or a speaking subject is immune from semiotic disruptions. Moreover, “no speaking being could function sanely unless it expresses the semiotic in some way” writes McAfee in Julia Kristeva (2004).

Kristeva felt that the oppression of the other by one is a consequence of the misconception like the self contained universal subject , (the subject which is fixed and essentially universal) and most pertinently gendered identities leading to the hierarchical ordering of the sexes. Such ramifications of philosophical and psychological theories in turn become instrumental in orchestrating a social and political scenario which reinforces oppression through hierarchy.

Taking a psychoanalytic instance, Kristeva describes the threshold of an infant’s linguistic ability with its psychic environment. She uses a term ‘ chora to represent early psychic space where infant experiences the drives of feeling and instincts. At this stage the mother’s body provides an orientation for the infants drives, and stimulate chora , a term Kristeva borrowed from Plato’s

Timaeus , but her concept of chora is more embracing than the Platonic notion,

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which is often translated as womb or receptacle. For Kristeva it is not just a space but an articulation or a rhythm, one that precedes language. Platonic chora describes a space in which the universe comes to reside. Thus, it means both receptacle and nurse which is like a container and the producer, of what the universe is before anything exists. Precisely, what Plato meant by the term is the original space or receptacle of the universe. Kristeva takes it to describe how an infant’s psychic environment is oriented to its mother’s body and thus chora is something in the mind that belongs to each person in particular before he or she develops clear borders of his or her own personal identity. In this early psychic space, the infant experiences a wealth of drives (feelings, instincts, etc.). An infant’s tactile relation with its mother’s body provides an orientation for the infant’s drives. Kristeva also uses the term semiotic chora which would denote the space in which the meaning that is produced is semiotic in nature: the rhythms and intonations of an infant who does not yet know how to use language to refer to objects.

Kristeva describes chora as capable of generating (not just receiving as merely a passive space) energy – the energy which helps fuel the signifying process. For her chora is capable of motility i.e. a capacity of spontaneous movements in as much as the mother is the child’s primary caregiver and the chora is the maternal space.

According to Kristeva a child is immersed in the semiotic chora. It expresses itself in the baby talk of coos and babbles. To express and to discharge energy the child uses sounds and gestures. At this stage it does not know that there is any difference between various things and itself, and that an utterance can express something. But when awareness comes to the child

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everything changes. It begins to realize that language can be used to point out objects and events and at the same time, the child begins to realize its own difference from its surroundings becoming aware of the difference between the self (subject) and other (object). It comprehends that language can point to things outside itself, that it is potentially referential. Kristeva calls this the thetic break . At this juncture the child takes its first steps into symbolic. The sounds that at first seem semiotic, like imitating the “woof woof” of a dog – are first steps into the act of making propositions, thus the first step into the symbolic, having identified a dog as something separate from itself. This act

“constitutes an attribution which is to say, a positing of identity or difference”.

It “represents the nucleus of judgement or proposition” (Kristeva 1984: 43).

For Kristeva this thetic phase is not only the starting point for signification, it is a stage in the development of the child’s subjectivity. She borrowed the notion of thetic from Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), the German philosopher, the founder of phenomenology. But she developed it further using the work of psychoanalytic thinkers, Sigmund Freud and his French successor,

Jacques Lacan, who was very influential in the 1950s and 1960s. She writes:

In our view, the Freudian theory of the unconscious and its Lacanian development show, precisely, that thetic signification is a stage attained under certain precise conditions during the signifying process, and that it constitutes the subject without being reduced to process precisely because it is the threshold of language (Kristeva 1984: 44-45).

The threshold for thetic are: (1) The Oedipal stage when child realizes that the mother is not almighty because she lacks penis, (2) And the other is the mirror stage of development. At the age between six and eighteen months the child recognizes and identifies with its image in a mirror or something

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equivalent to mirror. In the Oedipal stage the child (male) feels the fear of castration that it might also come to lack a penis and this perpetuates in it the transfer of his maternal attachment towards its father. Just as boy child fears castration, girls suffer from penis envy and thus will also turn their focus onto the realm of language. In this mirror stage, arises a need for a child to identify with alien image in order to have a primordial notion of being an “I”; since the child is no longer in the warm cocoon of the chora, it becomes dimly aware of its distinctness from its surroundings for that what surrounds it is other than itself. Kristeva writes:

…we view the thetic phase – the positing of the imago , castration, and the positing of semiotic motility – as the place of the Other, as the precondition for signification, i.e., the precondition for the positing of language. The thetic phase marks a threshold between two heterogeneous realms: the semiotic and symbolic (Kristeva 1984: 48).

At this stage the child is at the threshold of using language as a means of orderly communication and of beginning to be able to learn the rules of grammar and syntax, of knowing that things have names and can be named and of beginning its command of language as a system of signs. More precisely, the child is at the brink of the symbolic, an orderly communication that uses the normal rules of syntax and semantics to convey meaning.

The awareness of the child’s distinctness from its surrounding, the fact that its surrounding is other than itself comes through what Kristeva calls abjection . Abjection is the key step towards the forming of one’s (child’s) identity. Understanding abjection involves examining the ways in which the inside and the outside of the body are constituted, the space between the self and the other, and the means by which the child’s body becomes a bounded,

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unified whole – the conditions under which the child is able to claim the body as its own and through its ‘clean and proper’ body, gain access to symbolization forging its own subjectivity which is process.

In Powers of Horror Kristeva analyses the ways in which proper subjectivity and sociality require the expulsion of the improper, the unclean and the disorderly. Kristeva claimed that what is excluded can never be fully obliterated but hovers at that borders of our existence, threatening the apparently settled unity of the subject with disruption and possible dissolution. It is impossible to exclude these psychically and socially threatening elements with any finality. The subject’s recognition of this impossibility provokes the sensation Kristeva describes as abjection .

Abjection is a condition of symbolic subjection and is also its unpredictable, sporadic accompaniment. It is the underside of a stable subjective identity, an abyss at the borders of the subject’s existence, a hole into which the subject may fall when its identity is put into question, for example, in psychosis. The subject needs a certain level of mastery over the abject to keep it in check, at a distance, to distinguish itself from its repressed or unspeakable condition.

The abject is neither the subject nor the object but recognition of the impossible, untenable identity the subject projects into and derives from the other. The abject is that part of the subject it attempts to expel, but which is refused the status of object. It is the symptom of the object’s failure to fill and define the subject. Abjection involves the paradoxically necessary but impossible desire to transcend corporeality for it is a refusal of the defiling, impure, uncontrollable materiality of a subject’s embodied existence. It is a

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response to the various bodily cycles – incorporation, absorption, depletion, expulsion – a cyclic movement of rejuvenation and consumption. Abjection is the result of the child’s bodily boundaries being structured by the circulation of drive energies, themselves based on the cycles of incorporation and evacuation processes that are indistinguishably psychical and physiological.

Kristeva distinguishes three broad forms of abjection against which social taboos and individual defenses are erected: abjection in relation to food, to waste and to sexual difference (roughly corresponding to oral, anal and genital forms of sexuality). The individual’s defensive reaction to these abjects is visceral and psychical. Usually expressed in retching, vomiting, spasms, choking, that is, in disgust, they demonstrate and produce bodily processes and zones which ‘rational’ consciousness is unable to accept or deny. They represent a body in revolt, the body as a disavowed condition of consciousness.

The abject cannot be readily classified, for it is necessarily ambiguous, undecidably inside and outside, dead and alive autonomous and engulfing (like infection and pollution). It disturbs identity, system and order, respecting no definite positions, rules, boundaries or limits. It is the body’s acknowledgement that its boundaries and limits are the effects of desire not nature. It demonstrates the precariousness of the subjects’ grasp of its own identity.

The third category of abject, disgust as the signs of sexual difference, is probably the most widespread of all abjects of social taboo. Where the corpse threatens the ego from outside, sexual difference challenges the ego from within:

“Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without; the ego is threatened by the non-ego, society threatened from its

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outside, life by death. Menstrual blood, or the contrary, stands for the danger issuing from within identity (social or sexual); it threatens the relationship between the sexes within a social aggregate and through internalization, the identity of each sex in the face of sexual difference” (Kristeva 1982: 71).

The horror of Menstruation, Kristeva acknowledges is not directly connected to the sexual difference. It infact, does not differentiate female from male. Rather, it marks the difference between men and mothers. The horror of menstruation serves to tie women into a (presumedly natural) maternity without acknowledging women’s sexual specificity, a residual feminity unrepresented by maternity.

The horror or danger of menstrual blood, which is the living matter that helps to produce and sustain life, is actually a refusal of the expelled link between the mother and the foetus, a border, as it were, between one existence and another that is not the same as, nor yet separate from it. For Kristeva, it is not a threatening boundary or threshold between life and non-life, between male and female as explained in psychoanalytic theory of women’s castration.

Instead, it marks the site of an unspeakable debt of life (an ‘umbilical’ debt) that both the subject and culture owe to the mother but can never repay.

The semiotic, the maternal chora and the abject are placed on the side of the feminine and the maternal, in opposition to a paternal, rule-governed symbolic. And, as in her earlier works, Kristeva suggests that certain writers make strategic use of the archaic maternal abject. The feminine, the semiotic, the abject, although inexpressible as such, are articulated within symbolic representation by those (who happen to be men) who risk their symbolic positions in order to plunder the riches of the unspoken maternal debt. Men are able to maintain their imperiled hold on the symbolic only by naming the

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abject, naming the space of the undivided mother-child relation. By naming if they establish a distance, a space to keep at bay the dangers of absorption it poses. To speak (of) the abject is to ensure one’s distance and difference from it.

The abject according Julia Kristeva in the Powers of Horror refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other. The primary example for what causes such a reaction is the corpse (which traumatically reminds us of our own materiality): however, other items can elicit the same reaction: the open wound, shit, sewage, even the skin that forms on the surface of warm milk.

Kristeva’s understanding of the abject provides a helpful term to contrast to Lacan’s object of desire or the objet petita . Whereas the objet petita allows a subject to coordinate his or her desires, thus allowing the symbolic order of meaning and intersubjective community to persist, the abject “is radically excluded and as Kristeva explains, “draws me towards the place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 1982: 2). It is neither object nor subject, the abject is situated, rather, at a place before we enter into the symbolic order.

As Kristeva puts it, “Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre- objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be” (Ibid.: 10). The abject marks what

Kristeva terms a primal repression , one that precedes the establishment of the subject’s, relation to its objects of desire and of representation, before even the establishment of the opposition, conscious/unconscious. Kristeva refers, instead, to the moment in our psychosexual development when we establish a

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border or separation between human and animal, between culture and that which preceded it. The abject , at once represents the threat that meaning is breaking down and constitute our reaction to such a break down: a re- establishment of our “primal repression”. The abject has to do with “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, position, rules” (Kristeva 1982: 4) and, so it destabilizes the western thought system based on dichotomous thinking.

More specifically, Kristeva associates the abject with the eruption of the real into our lives. In particular, she associates such a response with our rejection of death’s insistent materiality. Our reaction to such abject material re-charges what is essentially a pre-lingual response. Kristeva therefore is quite careful to differentiate knowledge of death or the meaning of death (both of which can exist within the symbolic order) from the traumatic experience of being actually confronted with the sort of materiality that traumatically shows you your own death: A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death – a flat encephalograph, for instance – I would understand, react or accept. In a true theatre, without make up or masks, refuses and corpuses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being (Kristeva

1982: 3).

The corpse especially exemplifies Kristeva’s concept since it literalizes the breakdown of the distinction between subject and object that is crucial for the establishment of identity and for our entrance into the symbolic order. What

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we are confronted with when we experience the trauma of seeing a human corpse (particularly the corpse of a friend or family member) is our own eventual death made palpably real. As Kristeva puts it, “the corpse seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life (Kristeva 1982: 4).

The abject must also be disguised from desire (which is tied up with the meaning-structures of the symbolic order). It is associated with both fear and jouissance . In phobia, Kristeva reads the trace of pre-linguistic confrontation with the abject, a moment that precedes the recognition of any actual object of fear: “The phobic object shows up at the place of non-objectal states of drive and assumes all the mishaps of drive as disappointed desires or as desires diverted from their objects” (Kristeva 1982: 35). The object of fear is, in other words, a substitute formation for the subject’s object relation to drive. The fear of, say heights really stands in the place of a much more primal fear: the fear caused by the breakdown of any distinction between subject and object of any distinction between ourselves and the world of dead material objects. Kristeva also associates the abject with jouissance : “one does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [ on en jouit ] .Violently and painfully, a passion” (Ibid:

9). This statement appears paradoxical, but what Kristeva means by such statements is that we are, despite everything, continually and repetitively drawn to the abject.

Kristeva’s theory of le-sujet-en process gives rise to another key idea: that subjectivity occurs in an open system. She borrows this notion from the biologist Guberman :

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this opening that are of the order of procreation and rejection, and that permit a living being to live, to grow, to renew itself” (Guberman 1996: 76).

Instead of the conventional model of subjectivity: that we are individuals learning to act independently and autonomously or the eighteenth century western ideal that each individual should act of his own rational accord,

Kristeva offers a subject/self that is always in process and heterogeneous. The self’s affective energies continue to destabilize any given self-understanding. Moreover, we are also affected by the people around us especially the people we love. As McAfee explains whenever people are in a relationship an exchange of energy, desire, and memory is in process. One person’s excess may be offset by the other’s response, the two continue to respond to each other in one way or the other, keeping up a kind of oscillation (McAfee 2004).

Beings do not spring forth into the world as isolated subjects. According to Kristeva, our first experience is of a realm of plentitude, of a oneness with our environment (mother’s womb) and of the semiotic chora . The infant comes into being without any preexisting borders. These come into being only later. Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory, we have discussed, dealt with the formation of an individual. Drawing from yet largely modifying Lacanian and Freudian account of psychoanalytic development of subject Kristeva carves out her own theory of subjectivity. A short detour into Lacan’s theory would be helpful in understanding Kristeva’s position more clearly. Lacan argued that subjectivity arises when an infant at some point between six and eighteen months of age catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror (or some equivalent) and takes the image to be himself.

Lacan’s theorization involved an appropriation of Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud considered the ego to be an innate self. But for Lacan

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ego is a tenuous and provisional construct always vulnerable to the sway of the drives. For Lacan, culture, language and unconscious desires produce subjectivity. Lacan introduced a modification in Freud’s analysis concerning

Oedipus complex, Freud believed that when the male child realizes that the mother is not almighty – that she lacks a penis – the boy turns his aspirations toward being like his father. Here Freud’s concern is the subject’s father, while for Lacan it is not the father per se that the child turns to but to “what the father represents: language and the law including the universal taboo against incest. whereas Freud addressed children’s concerns regarding the actual male organ whether envy or fear, depending upon whether the subject is a girl or boy, if a boy it will be a fear of castration (of its loss) and if a girl it is an envy (envy of lack).

Lacan proposed that the concern is about what the actual or possible lack of organ might signify. At the biological level this male organ serves its biological function while at the level of imaginary, this has multiple meanings.

The infant imagines that the mother must have this organ, but when it comes to realize that she does not have it and he too might lose it. Here penis becomes a “detachable object”, something he demands that his mother have. In Lacan’s theory the imaginary penis is phantasmatic and leads to the function that the phallus has as the ultimate signifier. The phallus is not the penis. It is a signifier exchanged in the symbolic realm. It is linked with penis, and thus signifies what women lack and what men have. In this sense, the phallus constitutes sexual difference: the symbol of women’s lack and men’s plentitude. But men only have the phallus to the extent that they have a woman around who wants what he has. Thus, men need women to be constituted as lacking in order for

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them to have the illusion that they have the phallus and the power that comes with it. But since the phallus is a signifier and not an organ, no one can ever have it. Thus no matter how much one might demand the penis as an imaginary, one can never have what one “really” wants: the power of the phallus, to be recognized as powerful, to be complete. No object can satisfy this desire. For Lacan the subject makes use of language to desire but this is a futile effort to get what they want, for they actually do not know what they really want. Lacan thus considers the phallus as the ultimate signifier for it is the signifier of something that can never be articulated or had. Yet this might be a reason why we speak at all: to try to get what we want.

For Lacan the subject is inseparable from the lack that produces it and the “unsatisfied quest for the impossible represented by metonymic desire”

(Kristeva 1998: 133).Here metonymy is explained as a process in language where a concept is expressed in terms of another concept related to it by necessity. By the same token, the expression “ metonymic desire ” refers to the rejection/expulsion [reject] of desire.

At first the child finds itself within a space of plentitude, a fullness that it feels in its mother’s embrace, in having all its needs met even before they are recognized as needs. The realm where nourishment is constant, so there is never hunger (at least for a healthy fetus), the lights are always dim, sounds are always muffled, and the temperature is always comfortable. This plentitude continues in the early stage, till the break between the need and its satisfaction is experienced by the infant. The mother becomes the object of the infant’s concerns but in as much as she is connected to the infant, and not as the mother is independent of the child’s existence: an object conceived to be located in

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internal or psychophysical reality, an object the subject reacts to as if it were real. At this time, the infant is in what Lacan calls the imaginary realm , the way “reality” appears to a preverbal hence pre-linguistic, consciousness. For

Lacan the imaginary is what the infant took to be “the world, the register, the dimension of images, conscious or unconscious, perceived or imagined” notes Alan Sheridan (Lacan’s translator), (Lacan 1997: ix). In the imaginary, the infant does not distinguish between the truth or fiction of its images, symbols and representations. It takes all its internal representations to be real.

Lacan postulated three realms, The Imaginary , The Real and The

Symbolic . The real is the realm outside of both the imaginary and the symbolic.

Lacan states it is always in its place , so part of it cannot be extracted and inserted into language and symbolization. As Alen Sheridan puts it, in Lacan’s thought the real

…became that before which the imaginary faltered, that over which the symbolic stumbles, that which is refractory, resistant. Hence the formula: “the real is the impossible”, It is in this sense that the term begins to appear regularly, as an adjective, to describe that which is lacking in the symbolic order, the ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element, which may be approached, but never grasped: the unbiblical cord of the symbolic (Lacan 1997: x).

While the symbolic always attempts to capture the real, it never can; for it is always only a substitute.

The child enters the symbolic realm when it makes a move from the state of plentitude, which was a state of most satisfying oneness with its primary caregiver (mother). This movement occurs with the realization of two things: (1) there might be some boundaries to itself that separate it from others, boundaries that it glimpses in the mirror stage. (2) That the mother is not all

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powerful. The child learns that language can be used to demand things, to get needs met. At first its cries signals that it is hungry or wet and the mother comes running. But even as she satisfies these needs, she cannot satisfy the primordial desire, the desire to have all needs met before they become needs.

The child now experiences the undesirable gap between need and satisfaction; it is in a state of ongoing desire; for desires that can never be met. But the infant, and later the adult, will keep trying and it will learn in the ways of language as it tries however futilely, to call out for what it thinks it needs. But for the reason that it wants much more than it needs the subject will always remain the subject of desire. This is why the ultimate signifier is the phallus: it is the representation of what one really wants. It is what is being ultimately sought but can never be achieved. And thus, to make up for the loss (mothers’ unwavering love) the child becomes compelled to use language. As McAfee puts it very cogently:

“If the truth be known to ourselves, what we truly want is to be the object of the mother’s unwavering love. But if we had that, we would never become civilized, speaking beings. The story is a sad one, but it is the story of how human beings create civilization. We learn language and its accompanying arts as a kind of compensation for what we must all lose: being embraced by our mother’s body. All our great buildings, novels, culture are the effects of our loss of our mother’s thorough devotion” (McAfee 2004: 34-35).

Lacan’s symbolic realm is not completely synonymous with Kristeva’s symbolic. For Lacan it is the realm of language and symbols, structures and differences, law and order. He suggested that it is the symbolic realm to structure the subject and not an imaginary realm for in this realm one learns language, signs and representations of all kinds with its accompanying laws

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Having stated Lacan’s theory, it becomes clear how and why Kristeva changes her course. She disagrees with Lacan’s theory regarding the infant’s differentiation of itself from its mother. For Kristeva the break occurs prior to the mirror stage, when the child begins to expel from itself what it finds unpalatable. This she calls abjection. Kristeva suggests that the child begins to learn the ways of the symbolic culture not just from its father but from its mother too that is in the chora , the psychic space in which the infant lives and in which it expresses its energy. And since the mother is the child’s primary caregiver, the chora is a maternal space and the child orients its energy in relation to its mother who is not yet an object for the child subject which is the subject-object duality is not yet drawn. The child experiences plentitude without differentiation. (In Lacan’s terms, the child is in the imaginary realm ).

In this stage the infant imagines that the breast which is the nutritional link to the child is actually its own part. Kelly Oliver makes a further observation:

Kristeva compares the infant’s incorporation of the breast to the subsequent incorporation of “the speech of the other… Infact, it is the incorporation of the pattern of language through the speech of the other that enables the infant to communicate and thus commune with others. And through the ability to “assimilate, repeat, and reproduce” words, the infant becomes like the other: a subject (Oliver, 1993: 72).

Though there is a correlation between Kristeva’s semiotic and Lacan’s imaginary , as well as between Kristeva’s symbolic and Lacan’s symbolic . The major difference lies in Kristeva’s formulation of the pre-symbolic dimension and Lacan’s realm of real. In Kristeva’s view the psychosymbolic dimension is not a lost territory for it always manifests itself in the semiotic mode of signification .Stating her difference from Lacan’s position Kristeva states in one of her interviews:

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For him the real is a hole, a void, but I think that in a number of experiences with which psychoanalysis is concerned – most notably, the narcissistic structure, the experience of melancholia or of catastrophic suffering and so on the appearance or the real is not necessarily a void. It is accompanied by a number of psychic inscriptions that are of the order of the semiotic. Thus perhaps the notion of the semiotic allows us to speak of the real without simply saying that it’s an emptiness or a blank; it allows us to try to further elaborate it (Kristeva 1996: 22-23).

While Lacan argued that in order to understand subjectivity it is the symbolic realm that needs to be analyzed for the “imaginary” realm is beyond analysis Kristeva holds that imaginary realm never dies for its traces are always present in the semiotic mode. This realm is always in play in our more poetic and evocative means of signification. In other words, the symbolic law of the father , that is, the orderly aspects of our signifying practices, never triumphs over the semiotic which is more fluid and playful instinctual aspect of our signifying practices.

The organizing principle of the subject’s process and the signifying process (significance) is negativity. A principle borrowed from Hegel, negativity is the “time of dissolution of structure” (translation of Kristeva, 1977: 16). This principle clarifies how signification is recast, since it tends to dissolve all subjective unity “negativity is the concept that represents the irreducible relation of an “ineffable” flux….” The subject constituted according to this law necessarily has negativity moving through it for it is open, mobile, non-subjugated and free. It is not determinate and it is governed by a

“productive dissolution” (Kristeva 1983: 138).

As it causes the unitary subject to fade away, it points towards the space of production, toward the conditions of its own symbolicity. Following this principle, the fixed notion of the sign and the reality corresponding to it

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disappear, giving way to a disentanglement of syntactic chains that leads to a productive genesis (signifying space or chora). Negativity does not inhibit the signifying process [significance], since “the subject is not thereby lost but multiplied” (Kristeva 1998: 140). From this perspective, the sign (as well as the subject) appears to be a differential moment (a milestone) in the signifying process or, to be more precise expulsion is redirected. By deconstructing structure, negativity leads toward the infinite array of possible signifiers that engendered it.

By following both the principle of negativity and setting up the sign as a

“milestone” in the signifying process, we account for both the processes by which it is created: the symbolic function and the semiotic function . The symbolic function is the place of unitary law for the subject, the place for renouncing pleasures (drives that come up against social censorship). It is also the place where the closed sign is established (the linear division of the sign) through the absence of the rejected or repressed object (possible signifiers).

The symbolic space is thetic or representative. It is the place of language’s fixedness. “Linguistic structures are the blockage process. They intercept and immobilize it, subordinating it to semantic and institutional unites which are in deep solidarity with each other” (Kristeva 1998: 167).

While the symbolic function governs unity, the semiotic function demonstrates the heterogeneity of meaning. The semiotic function represents that which precedes the creation of the subject (the pulsion, network, or network drives). It is chronologically – anterior to the sign, to syntax, to denotation and signification, and at the same time moves through them.

Semiotic function is provisional articulation of the meaning incarnated in the

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chora of the process, which does not depend on the manifestation of signifiable discrete, identifiable units (Kristeva 1977: 14).

In Kristeva’s project of subjectivity a dialectic of the semiotic and symbolic is revealed, going back to the Hegelian understanding of dialectic as an ‘old science’, which returns anew, and it becomes necessary to draw conclusion different from those in this history of philosophy. Kristeva

‘furnishes’ the Hegelian dialectic with heterogeneity only to arrive at her own definition of dialectics as ‘a heterogeneous contradiction between two spheres which are irreconcilable, divided, but inseparable in a process which accepts asymmetrical functions. The Hegelian ‘fourth term of dialectics’; Negative act, turns out to be in Kristeva’s opinion the organizing principle, the ‘pattern’ of the process. Negativity , as opposed to nothingness or negation, ‘sets in motion’ and creates the subject in process, claims Kristeva. In other words, the subject constituting itself according to the laws of negativity cannot be anything other than its own subject penetrated by negativity, un-subjected (‘un-sujet non- assujitti’), free.

It now becomes abundantly clear that subjectivity is no longer dependent on a specific sexual identity but transcends the gender principle. Julia Kristeva acquires a theoretical position beyond essentialist suppositions. Moi admires Kristeva’s ability to open up language to the free-play of the signifier; to make it independent of a specific sexual identity.

Applied to the field of sexual identity and difference, this becomes a feminist vision in which the sexual signifier would be free to move; where the fact of being male or female no longer would determine the subject’s position in relation to power, and where, therefore, the very nature of power would be transformed (Moi 1985: 172).

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Kristeva is a part of a much bolder deconstructive enterprise that set out to put in question, the essentialistic basis of subjectivity her target being to interrogate the very nature of subjectivity. In declaring that ‘woman’ as sign, is a fictional construct of patriarchal discourse her theorization decidedly acquires a feminist instance.

For a more precise explanation of Kristeva redefinition of the woman- question, it would be of help to first study the Lacanian model, so that her divergence from her ‘master text’ can be highlighted. In Lacan’s readjustment of Freud, patriarchy is shown to be inscribed in the very language through which the child learns to define itself and in which it is confirmed in its gender.

According to Lacanians, the child, prior to speech, experiences itself as diffused and undifferentiated from the world. It is an hommelett , a little man , which, like a broken egg, spills over and spreads itself with no fixed (ego) boundaries. It experiences its being in the world, as a flux and is dominated by the ever changing drives (these drives Kristeva calls pulsions ). An important transition stage occurs at about six months when, shown its image in a mirror, it recognizes a self, which, because it is founded on an image, is imaginary.

This imaginary self is supported by the mother whose gaze confirms the separatedness of the I/thou positions.

It is not, however, until the acquisition of language, when the child can make its desires explicit to another and enter into social exchanges, that this self becomes formulated that is named and defined by its entry into the symbolic order. The symbolic is marked by the law of structuration of meaning which Lacan calls the nom-du-pere : the law of the father. In order to enter the

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symbolic order, some elements of the imaginary that cannot be expressed within the symbolic’s formulations are repressed, and effectively silenced. It is at the level of the imaginary that Kristeva locates the feminine. As the child says I, it constructs a fiction of selfhood that depends on the syntax of the language it has been born into. The ‘I’ position carries the authority and self possession which Lacan designates as male. For Kristeva’s re-reading of

Lacan, this is the crux: that the child’s sense of identity is filtered through external views of itself formulated in a language where the ‘I’ position is male . It is Lacan’s view that language, shaped through the patriarchal nom-du-pere with which only the boy child can identify himself, reserves the ‘I’ position for one gender, placing the other in the negative pole. At the point of entry into this realm of the symbolic, i.e. the acquisition of language, the subject divides, and that of the Imaginary which cannot find expression in words is repressed in the unconscious. This repressed ‘experience’ is a key to understand what Kristeva terms the semiotic (or the area of the unconscious on which conscious speech depends).

In the Lacanian account of language acquisition, the phallus is the universal signifier being the source of the symbolic itself and hence the root of all meaning in language. But while the phallus provides all possible meaning, woman, in contrast, is always the other in the symbolic universe. She has no meaning in and of herself because the phallus is the source of all meaning. She is, quite literally, a lack, something that is not there:

“There is no such thing as the woman, where the definite article stands for the universal. There is no such thing as the woman since of her essence-having already risked the term, why think twice about it? Of her essence, she is not all (Lacan 1985: 144).

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Thus, in Lacan’s view woman is a gap, a silence, invisible and unheard, repressed in the unconscious. Kristeva argues that this unconscious or feminine remains at the level of the semiotic . Kristeva argues that this ‘feminine’ remains at the level of the ‘semiotic’, accessibly in patriarchal discourse only at the point of contradiction, meaninglessness and silence and thus can be defined only as lack ,a gap, invisible and unheard, repressed in the unconsciousness.

The subject then is processed by the linguistic categories which structure experience. There can be no possible socialization outside this structuration so that, in Lacan’s schema, a woman who ‘refused’ to enter the symbolic order through language would remain unsocialised psychotic and autistic.

For Kristeva, at the point where consciousness isolates the feminine is repressed into the semiotic, a level of discourse which precedes symbolization and the Oedipal structuring of sexuality. Marked by the rhythms and patterns of sound that are the basic partitions of the oral and anal drives, the semiotic continuum can be recognized as the suppressed feminine. The semiotic is not an alternative to the symbolic order but a process at work within that structuration. If the symbolic embodies the law of the father, then the semiotic is that which may disrupt that order from within; it is as much part of the language of poets as of women. Thus woman does not exist except as constituted in opposition to the male, that which is other than, rather than a thing in itself. ‘In woman, I see something that cannot be represented, something that cannot be said, something above and beyond nomenclature and ideologies’ says Julia Kristeva (Tel Quel 1974:19-24). She further says:

If logical unity is paranoid and homosexual (directed by men to men) the feminine demand… will never find a proper symbolic, will be at best enacted as a moment inherent in rejection, in the process of ruptures, of rhythmic breaks. In so far as she has a

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specificity of her own, a woman finds it in asociality, in the violation of communal conventions, in a sort of symbolic singularity (Revue de Sciences Humaines 1979:495-501).

Kristeva’s thesis is that these meanings remain as the semiotic , inscribed inside the symbolic as part of the condition of its coherence. It is essential to grasp that the semiotic cannot be separated out form the symbolic but remains as a pressure on language as a contradiction, meaninglessness, silence and absence. It works from within signification, indicating what is lacking in codified representation.

It is Lacan’s linguistically constructed subject that forms the basis for

Kristeva’s discussion of the subject and the feminine. The fundamental presupposition of her analysis is a radically anti-Cartesian definition of the subject as a process rather than a pre-existent entity. She states:

“The subject never is. The subject is only the signifying process and he appears only as a signifying practice, that is, only when he is absent within the position out of which social, historical and signifying activity unfolds. There is no science of the subject. Any thought mastering the subject is mystical: all that exists is the field of practice where, through his expenditure, the subject can be anticipated in an always anterior future”(Kristeva 1984: 215).

The Cartesian subject is a matter who discovers truth through abstract rationality. Kristeva explicitly revolt against the conception of the subject as a master, arguing that this conception is a product of a particular culture, a particular linguistic constellation, and that the “pasture of this mastery” cannot be maintained (Kristeva 1980b: 165). For Kristeva subjects are products of discourse, they do not exist in a pre- given sense, and they are not producers, but produced.

Despite her criticism of the subject, however, Kristeva rejects the notion that we should abandon the concept of the subject. She writes: “Far from being an ‘epistemological perversion’, a definite subject is present as soon as there is

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“We are no doubt permanent subjects of a language that holds us in its power. But we are subjects in process, ceaselessly losing our identity, destabilized by fluctuations in our relations with the other, to whom we nevertheless remain bound in a kind of homeostasis” (Kristeva 1987: 9).

Kristeva’s subject is not a reconstitution or reconceptualization of the Cartesian subject but it is a radical departure from the subject as it has been known in the tradition of phallogocentrism – it is a different entity entirely. But the constituted subject that Kristeva describes, like that of Foucault, is not a passive dupe of social forces. Rather, she claims that this subject possesses revolutionary potential. She argues that each new subject that is constituted transforms and revolutionizes the subject that precedes it; it contains the potential of deconstructing the subject that it challenges. Kristeva discusses this revolutionary potential most extensively in her analysis of the poetic subject in Revolution in Poetic Language . Avant grade writing, since the end of the nineteenth century, she claims, possesses the potential of transforming the signifying process of unifying conceptual thought that previously constituted the subject (Kristeva 1984: 185). It creates the possibility of what she calls in another context traversal (Kristeva 1980b: 165). Poetry is able to accomplish this by penetrating the symbolic order, thus creating a revolution not only in the linguistic sphere, but, she emphasizes, in the social sphere as well (Kristeva 1984: 83).

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Kristeva’s description of how this traversal takes place brings her to an analysis of the feminine in language. The presupposition of Kristeva’s discussion of the feminine is a corollary to that which informs her discussion of the subject. She rejects the notion of an essentially feminine and argues instead that women and feminine, like the subject, are linguistic constructs. She writes:

“In other words, if the feminine exists it only exists in the order of significance or signifying process and it is only in relation to meaning and signification, positioned as their excessive or transgressive other that it exist, speaks, thinks (itself) and writes (itself) for both sexes” (cited in Moi 1986: 11)

.She moves from this position to assert that the body itself is not an essential unity, a pre-existent given. Rather, the body, like the subject, is in process, it has no unity without a signifying process to articulate it. (Ibid: 101).

The linguistically constructed concept of the feminine is the focus of some of Kristeva’s most powerful commentaries on the subject and the revolutionary potential of the new subject she is discussing. In Revolution in

Poetic Language Kristeva argues that we need a new theory of the subject that can encompass elements that the Cartesian theory of the subject ignores (Moi 1986: 27). The basis of her theory of the subject is the division between the symbolic and the semiotic. She argues that the different ways in which this dialectic is played out will result in a different form of discourse and, hence, a different constitution of the subject. Thus although the subject is always both semiotic and symbolic, these elements will combine in different ways in discourse to constitute different subjects (Moi 1986: 24).

Kristeva uses this definition of the semiotic to argue for a new understanding of how the subject is constituted. The semiotic, she claims,

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precedes the positing of the subject and the distinction between subject and object. The Cartesian subject ignores the semiotic element because it defines the subject as a fixed entity, the transcendental ago. Kristeva argues against this in stating the subject as in process (Kristeva1984: 27-40). The symbolic enters this picture in what Kristeva defines as the “thetic” phase, the deepest structure possible in enunciation. In the thetic phase subject is separated from object in the proposition and, as a result, the symbolic emerges. The separation from the maternal chora is accomplished first through language learning, but ultimately through the discovery of castration. It is the connection between castration and the symbolic, she argues, that entails that the phallic function is the symbolic function (Ibid: 42-7).

The thetic phase that establishes the symbolic attempts to deny the semiotic; it establishes its own “truth” that excludes the semiotic. Poetic language challenges this truth. By revealing the pretentions of the thetic, it “constantly tears it up” (Kristeva 1984: 62). Kristeva is careful to qualify these assertions with the claim that the signifying process always involves the dialectical interplay of semiotic and symbolic. The semiotic does not attempt to deny the thetic, but, rather, attempts to re-instate the semiotic function that the thetic ignores. Originally, she claims, the semiotic was considered a precondition of the symbolic. The fact that the role of the semiotic is denied by the Cartesian concept of the subject entails that today the semiotic functions within the symbolic as a transgression (Ibid: 68). It is through this transgression,

Kristeva argues, that a new disposition of the subject can be articulated (Ibid: 51).

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Kristeva is very clear about how woman, the semiotic, are to go about fomenting this revolution. Since the symbolic order is masculine, patriarchal, women cannot identify with this order. Nor should they try to reverse that order or set up an order of their own. Rather, their function is to subvert the order from within.

What Kristeva is trying to do is not to define a female essence, or to create a feminine language opposed to masculine language. Rather, she is trying to define the feminine in language and its potential for creating a new subject, a subject-in-process (Spivak 1981: 171).

The reconstitution of the subject proposed by Kristeva constitutes a radical departure from the Cartesian subject because she challenges its constituting role. She replaces the constituting Cartesian subject with a subject that is constituted by discourse, but one that is by no means passive. Opposed to the fixed entity that is Descartes’ knowing subject, she presents a subject in process, one that is constituted differently by different forms of discourse.

Kristeva rejects the dichotomy between the constituting Cartesian subject and the passive constituted subject. Instead she explodes these categories by describing a subject that is both constituted and revolutionary.

The reconstituted subject of Kristeva’s theory is much radical than that posited by the American feminists. These theorists wanted to fuse elements of the Cartesian subject into that of the constituted subject in order to overcome its passivity. As a result their reconstitution fails because it does not break through the epistemology of the Cartesian subject. Kristeva’s reconstitution, because it rejects the fundamental epistemological basis of the Cartesian subject, is more successful.

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Kristeva’s approach offers yet another advantage: her stress on the revolutionary character of the feminine within language. Like Foucault and Derrida she rejects the attempt to reverse the polarity of phallogocentrism by privileging the feminine over the masculine. She also refuses to argue for the creation of an oppositional, feminine language. Instead she claims that the semiotic transgresses the symbolic from within by exploding the discourse that creates patriarchal order.

The speaking subject and subject in process reveals yet another concern of Kristeva: to bring the speaking body back into phenomenology and linguistics. She addresses this problem by exploring the relation between language and the bodily experiences. By insisting that the language expresses bodily drives through its semiotic elements, Kristeva’s articulation of the relationship between language and the body circumvents the traditional problems of representation. She attempts this, by postulating that through the semiotic elements, bodily drives manifest themselves in language, For, once the body is brought back into the signification, it will no more be a passive or inactive thing, instead it always remain active as an essential part of signification and hence discourse.

Besides, Kristeva clarifies that mother (mother’s body) body plays equally vital role in the psychosexual development of a child and in the socialization. This, she explains by examining mother-child relationship of dependence of fetus on the mother’s body, revealing the fact that ‘the mother is as much a socializer as the father’.

By insisting that the language expresses bodily drives through its semiotic elements, Kristeva’s articulation of the relationship between language

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and the body circumvents the traditional problems of representation. The tones and rhythms of language, the materiality of language, is bodily. Kristeva’s theory addresses the problem of the relationship between language and bodily experience by postulating that, through the semiotic element, bodily drives manifest themselves in language. Instead of lamenting what is lost, absent or impossible in language, Kristeva marvels at this other realm that makes its way into language. The force of language is living drive, force transferred into language. This transfusion happens in the process of signification. Where signification according to Kristeva is an “interplay of the symbolic and the semiotic (bodily drives, gestures) with this interplay she also suggests that language is not cut off from the body. And, while bodily drives involve a type of violence, negation or force, this process does not necessitate sacrifice and loss. The drives are not sacrificed to signification, rather bodily drives are an essential semiotic element of significations.

Kristeva attempts to bring the speaking body, complete with drives, back into language in two ways. First, she argues that the logic of signification is already present in the material body. In Revolution in Poetic language she says that “our philosophies of language, embodiments of the idea, are nothing more than the thoughts of archivists, archaeologists and necrophiliacs” In order to counteract what she sees as the necrophilia of phenomenology and structural linguistics, which study a dead or silent body, Kristeva develops a new science that she calls “semanalysis”. She describes semanalysis as a combination of semiology (or semiotics) which starts with Ferdinand de Saussure, and psychoanalysis. In order to avoid the necrophilia of other theories of language

Kristeva designed semanalysis such that it would always question its own

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presuppositions and uncover, record and deny its own ideological gestures

(Kristeva 1969: 78-79).

In the Revolution in Poetic Language she argues that a logic of material rejection is already operating within the body prior to the onset of signification.

For example, anality is a process of rejection and separation that prefigures the separation that give rise to signification. In anality excess leads to separation.

Too much matter is expelled. And although it is a privation, it is pleasurable.

For Kristeva, the entrance into language is not just the result of lack and castration. Rather, pleasure and excess as well as lack motivates the more into language. Kristeva suggests that more people would be psychotic and refuse to leave the safe heaven of the maternal body if the entrance into language were motivated solely by threats and lack.

Birth is another example where separation is inherent in the body. As

Kristeva points out in Powers of Horror , one body is violently separated from another in birth. In the maternal body excess give rise to separation. The maternal body not only embodies a separation that is material but also harbours a regulation that is prior to the mirror stage. The maternal body regulates the availability of the breast, among other things. This maternal regulation operates as a law before the law (law of father). The maternal law prefigures and sets up paternal law, which, within traditional psychoanalytic theory, forces the child into language and sociality.

The second way in which Kristeva brings the speaking body back to language is by maintaining that bodily drives make their way into language. Just as Kristeva brings the speaking body back into language by putting language in the body, she brings the subject into the place of the other by

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putting the other in the subject. Just as the pattern and logic of language are already found within the body, the pattern and logic of alterity are already found within the subject.

Kristeva is concerned with discourses that break identity. She examines crises in signification; places where identity breaks down. She analyzes the extremes of language, the before and after of language, the child’s acquisition of language, and the psychotic’s loss of language. Three of her models for discourses that challenge identity are poetry, maternity and psychoanalysis. Poetry, first of all, points to the signifying process qua process. Its attention to sounds and rhythms in language points to the semiotic element in signification, out of which the symbolic and any subject position come. This pointing reactivates the semiotic within language. It reactivates semiotic drives and thereby puts the unified subject-in-process/on trial.

The maternal body is the very embodiment of the subject in process/on trial. It cannot be neatly divided into subject and object. It is the embodiment of alterity within. Maternity is the most powerful model of alterity within because it exists at the heart of the social and the species. In Tales of Love , Kristeva uses the maternal body as a model for an outlaw ethics, what she calls herethics . This ethics brings the subject to the other through love and not through law.

Since in the prenatal period the fetus is radically dependent on the mother’s body for nourishment and life, it is never autonomous. Even after birth, however, the infant continues to be dependent. The child’s identity is achieved only through the painful separation from this primordial symbiosis.

The fetus’s and infant’s development are dominated by the rhythms set by the

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mother’s body and moods. A maternal law organizes the infant’s life prior to the law of the father that emerges during the Oedipal crisis. Thus, mothers support order and law as much as chaos and multiplicity. On the other hand,

Kristeva insists that fathers play an important nurturing role by supporting the infant when it distinguishes its identity from the mother’s. The father facilitates this separation and sustains the infant’s tenuous selfhood. On this basis,

Kristeva insists that the meaning attached to “mother” and “father” – male and female – are mixed. Both nurture and both establish limits/laws for the developing child. The mother is thus as much a socializer as the father; mothers are not merely vehicles of nature, and fathers are not instruments of culture.

Kristeva further suggests that women’s oppression can be explained at least partially as a misplaced abjection. It is necessary to abject the maternal body qua the fulfiller of needs. But within culture woman, the feminine, and the mother have all been reduced to the reproductive function of the maternal body and the result is that when we abject the maternal body we also abject woman, the feminine and the mother. We need a new discourse of maternity that can delineate between these various aspects and functions of women. Kristeva has set the stage by highlighting and complicating the maternal function. To view the mother’s relation to the developing infant as a function uncouples the activities performed by the caretaker from the sex of the caretaker. Although Kristeva may believe that the maternal function should be performed by women, she does use the language of functions to separate caretaking functions from other activities performed by women. Woman, the female, the feminine and the mother cannot be reduced to the maternal function. Women and mothers are primarily speaking social beings.

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Beyond this, Kristeva claims that motherhood shatters the sense of identity both, because pregnancy befalls the woman and because the experience of carrying a child produces a sense of merging with the fetus, of fragmenting of her body into part objects, and of splitting of the mother’s identification.

Most significant is Kristeva’s claim that the newly pregnant woman finds herself identifying both with her own mother and with the developing fetus.

Thus, mothering threatens self-identity within mothers. It also underlines her corporeality and animality. This period in the development of the child is the source of the semiotic. In the prenatal period, the fetus is both part of the mother and distinct from her; the whole concept of identity explodes in this experience. Thus, the mother’s own sense of autonomy and identity dissolves as she recovers the primordial semiotic condition that Kristeva values. This interfusion of identities is an important source of ethical responsiveness, according to Kristeva. Felt obligations towards the child emerge, and its symbiosis with the mother provides the child with a potential connectedness to others that is never completely lost. If ethics is to be emotionally sustainable after the death of God, the mother-child relation makes this possible.

Besides, Kristeva’s concern often revolve around the issue of the place or position from which women can speak: Can woman speak from the place of the father or the mother, or both .If women speak from the place of the father they will be alienated from their own identity and desire. But if they speak from the place of the mother in the Imaginary , outside the symbolic, they risk being engulfed in what is normally considered an infantile realm whose form in adult experience is hysteria and madness. Alternatively, if the Imaginary and the pre-Oedipal mother is simply revalued as positive, they risk being caught

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up in and promoting another category of truth which simply reflects, as a reverse image, the phallic position they oppose.

For her this Imaginary position is as futile as the position of male authority because any position, even that of the powerful phallic mother, can be absorbed into language so that its meaning becomes rigid and potentially oppressive. All positions can be assimilated into the symbolic, no settled experience or identity can guarantee a challenge to the phallic ordering of meaning. As Kristeva aptly puts it:

Once represented, be it under the aspect of a woman, the truth of the unconscious passes into the phallic order. The vulgar but oh how effective trap of ‘feminism’: to recognize ourselves, to make of us the Truth so as to keep us from functioning as [the order’s] unconscious truth (Kristeva 1974: 42).

Kristeva takes the view that the meaning of the pre-Oedipal mother actually encompasses both masculinity and feminity. By this she means that the mother in the Imaginary is masculine in the sense that the baby sees her as all powerful before the intervention of the father/phallus and feminine because she lies outside the phallic imposition of meaning which asserts itself during the

Oedipal crisis. In part mothering, the experience of mothering and child’s dependence on mother produces the dissolution of line of separation of two different identities: a woman and a child within. This unborn child is both the other and self. Kristeva shows that masculine (as symbolic or law of father) and feminine (as semiotic, drive, desire or will) represent poles within each person aims for a better balance (in symbolic and semiotic dialect) in which the feminine pole is less repressed in everyone.

Yet another crucial issue that Kristeva’s theory of ‘subject in process’ resolves is the definition of woman. For she held that the subject is never

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complete, it is always in process, the definition is always in state of change, in making. Kristeva understands ‘woman’ as a metaphysical term, which is the binary opposite of man. It is an essentialist and biologistic category that ignores heterogeneity of positions and difference amongst women. She positions women on the route of subversion, even if she believes that women react to their socially sanctioned positions of subordination in one of two ways: either they aspire to the phallic status attributed to men – that is, they suffer from a

‘virilising’ ‘masculinity complex’ (cited in Marks and des Courtivsan 1981: 166); or on the other hand, they shun all that is phallic in an opposite extreme:

‘we flee everything considered “phallic” to find refugee in the valorization of a silent underwater body, thus abdicating any entry into history’(Ibid). Both positions Kristeva points out involve the unquestioned given value of the phallic – one by affirmation, the other by denial.

It would be pointless to aim at subverting this time honoured establishment by merely pursuing to Utopia of a ‘counter society’, for little is to be gained and much to be imperiled when power changes hand without altering its fundamental nature. Like Wittig, Kristeva argues that the idealization of motherhood, for instance easily deteriorates into yet another form of mythologization, a refusal to grapple with the reality, or rather the legion realities, of feminity in the name of the unifying icon of woman as procreator.

Julia Kristeva says ‘To believe that one “is a woman” is almost as absurd and obscurantist as to believe that one “is a man” (Kristeva 1974: 70). “I therefore understand by “woman”, Kristeva later adds, ‘that which cannot be represented, that which is not spoken, that which remains outside naming and

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ideologies’ (Ibid: 21). Woman, then, denotes a subject position that must always retain elements of fluidity and liminality if it is to escape a fate of reductive stereotyping analogous to the one imposed upon women by patriarchy through the binary representation of feminity as coterminous with either ‘Lilith the whose of Babylon’ or ‘Virgins and Mothers of God’ (Moi 1985: 167).

Kristeva’s theoretical and pragmatic alternative consists of examining and foregrounding not the difference between men and women as such but the sociosymbolic internalization of difference as the basis of identity.

Psychoanalysis can aid this difficult process by showing precisely that the key events in our psychosexual development, as argued in relation to castration anxiety, are always already invested with multiple layers of sociosymbolic significance. She contends, psychoanalytic theory emphasizes that divided status of human subjectivity, the idea that every person is simultaneously ‘the same and the other, identical and foreign’, and can therefore help us both recognize and allow scope for the expression of the multiplicity and diversity of each being’s potential selves: ‘I simply have to analyze incessantly the fundamental of the distinctiveness of each subject. This leads Kristeva to propose a shift from a feminism of difference that encourages us to think only of two, namely men and women as distinct entities, towards an ethos of ‘singularity’ that hinges on the recognition of ‘the irreducibility of individuals

– whether they be men or women’ (Kristeva 1996a: 43). This position may seem incongruous with Irigaray’s determination to extend the two. However, Kristeva, like Irigaray, views the recognition of inassimilable difference as the precondition of any relationship based on mutual respect, and respect, in turn,

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as both a concept and a practice to be continually negotiated. Thus, the bonds we form with others require choices that are made ‘temporarily and forever’ (Kristeva 1996b: 72) choices that are contingent upon circumstances and always susceptible to redefinition, yet constant in their unremitting demand that this process of reassessment must go on.

Precisely, Kristeva response to the rejection of the possibility of at all defining woman as such involves deconstructing all concepts of woman. She argues that both feminist and misogynist attempts to define woman are politically reactionary and ontologically mistaken. Replacing woman as housewife with woman as superman or earth mother or super professional is no advance. She argues that such errors occur because we are in fundamental ways duplicating misogynist strategies when we try to define women, characterize women, or speak for women, even though allowing for a range of differences within the gender. The politics of gender or sexual difference must instead be replaced with a plurality of differences where gender loses the significance attached to it.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS

As feminism has evolved, theorizing has taken many different directions and forms. Feminist theory constantly reflects and recogitates on its own frameworks, its own ideas, changing its stances in response to the debates and challenges from other feminists and develops new concerns. Feminist theory, therefore cannot be totalizing or complete it is always open to challenges of women’s oppressed conditions which shape their lives. Feminist theory has moved away from universalizing statements towards the more particular and individual. It might be better characterized as a process of theorizing rather than a static and privileged body of knowledge. Feminist theory in a way implies that thinking is fluid and requires continuous modification.

Burdened with the weight of the western intellectual tradition that has been overwhelmingly masculine, structured around a sex/gender system, confined to the interests of men feminist philosophers found it necessary to deal with it critically. Beginning from the Greeks, through Kant’s and Rousseau’s overt misogyny, Locke’s defense of slavery to an almost universal presumption of European superiority, all force woman philosophers, to look beyond this attitudinal inclination. But the future can be equally treatening without a past to hold on to, a past that has been submitted to a thorough perusal with the purpose of avoiding any danger of repeating the mistakes planted on account of masculinist inclination.

Mary Wollstonecraft holds financial dependence and lack of education responsible for the despairing situation of women. John Stuart Mill in agreement with Wollstonecraft’s analysis committed himself to the cause of women’s emancipation. Feminist theory at this juncture sought to analyse the social and political conditions which shape women’s lives and to explore Concluding Remarks

philosophical understanding of what it means to be a woman. Feminists refuse to accept that inequalities between women and men are natural and inevitable and insist that they should be quesitoned. In this context we have discussed Simone de-Beauvoir’s account. The Second Sex is a rich and complex work which draws upon literature, myth and religion, theories of biology, accounts of social and eocnomic development, Marxism, psychoanalysis and existentialist philosophy. De Beauvoir’s aim is to address the question ‘what is women?’ Her rigorous analysis uncovers and addresses the nature of the oppression and exclusion of women. She is responsible for promoting the idea that sexuality is not just ‘added on’ to human beings but plays a fundamental role in the meaning of an individual’s existence: that we are ‘embodied’.

De Beauvoir, rejects the acounts of sexual difference which subscribe to an ‘essential’ notion of identity, whether this is found in the biological differentiation of the sexes (male / female) or in the ‘eternal feminism’, an ideal ‘essence’ of feminine qualities. She rejects these accounts first because she sees individuals as dynamic, engaged in struggles towards freedom, and second because she fears that to suggest an ‘essential’ nature of woman will force women to be imprisoned back into the problematic identity of the oppressed. This identity is unacceptable for the ideals of existential freedom, and for feminist claims that women should have equal opportunities to engage freely in their projects in the world. Her overwhelming historical evidence points to the fact that, in general men possess such freedom and women do not.

De Beauvoir dissociated herself from the ‘biology is destiny’ position, and often comes close to rejecting biology altogether. If women are restrictively defined as ‘mere’ bodies or as mothers then such restrictions must be overcome, to ensure that women are able to realize their choices

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consciously. But de-Beauvoir does not always consider the extent to which she may be echoing a mesogynistic distaste for the female body in trying to overturn such determinations. ‘It has been well said that women have infirmity in the abdomen, and it is true that they have within them a hostile element – it is the species gnawing at their vitals’ (De Beauvoir, 1978: 62).

The complex accounts of ‘otherness’ that feminist in France have developed are indebted to de-Beauvoir’s analysis of woman as other. Feminists like Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva have sought to combine the forceful philosophical critique provided by drawing attention to poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory. With such an analysis French feminists draw attention to the self’s pursuit to displace the socially and culturally constructed nature of identity, implicating systems of language (symbolic and semiotike) in such a critique.

Rather than situating projects for change and emancipation within existing philosophical and cultural practices, Irigaray and Kristeva have subjected such practices to a sustained critique, asking questions about the very constitution of meaning and the nodal concepts of phallocentric discourse. Whereas de Beauvoir pressed women to exercise freedom and make chocies to gain equality and access to the world of men. Irigaray warns that such equality would mean genocide for women. She held that women need an identity as women (and not as man) and that there should be womankind as well as mankind, Irigaray therefore suggests the creation of difference: ‘ sexual difference ’.

Irigaray, criticizes Beauvoir’s ‘other’, pointing that de-Beauvoir’s other is the ‘other of the same’, the necessary negative of the male subject all that he has repressed and disavowed (Irigaray, 1996: 54). Irigaray proposed an ‘other’

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which would not simply be the ‘other of the same’, but a self-defined woman who would not be satisfied with sameness but whose otherness and difference would be given social and symbolic representaiton. Each sex would thus be ‘other’ for the other sex. Irigaray alleges that with such equality women can become subjects if they assimilate into male subjectivity for a separate subject position for woman does not exist. Irigaray’s goal is to uncover the absence of a female subject position, the relegation of all things feminine to nature or matter, and ultimately the absence of true sexual difference in Western culture. Irigaray’s philosophy of difference challenge philosophical assumptions that ultimately work against supporting difference. Irigaray for example, searches for a language of the female sex, repressed or censored by the hegemony of powerful men. Yet, if Irigaray’s intention is to find a language for the female sex, then she herself is subjecting the plurality of female voices and experiences to the hegemony of powerful women in culture. Le Doeuff argues that, by subscribing to the insights of Lacan and other masculinist writers, Irigaray fails to exercise many of the malignant effects of patriarchal thought. For Le Doeuff, if opening up discourse to allow for a plurality of viewpoints is the goal, then characterizing this as “allowing’ the represessed female voice to speak” is not the answer, for then we will only hear the speaking of a female voice that was created by men.

Le Doeuff accepts Beauvoir’s belief that women belong to a ‘group’ that cannot call itself a ‘we’, for it has no shared traditions, history, or even experiences of oppression. If woman cannot speak as a ‘we’, then how do we begin to theorize who women are, in their plurality? Le Doeuff responds that through collective work, collective projects, women might establish a community in which they support each other’s different needs and experiences.

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All that is required of this group, forged through a shared desire to articulate and specify what women are outside of their relationship to men, is a ‘minimal consensus’.

Le Doeuff envisions feminists moving beyond either the ideological commitments of ‘equality feminism’ or ‘difference feminism’, for both subscribe to a particular model of politics. Perhaps women philosophers would revision philosophy not as synonymous with the viewpoint of famous male philosophers, but treat it as an ongoing endeavour that is open to different interpretations.

Julia Kristeva is the one to present the most sustained and powerful critique of the masculinist discourse. Through a complex intersection of theoretical perspectives, Kristeva develops her account of the material/linguistic forces which constantly disrupt identity, but are still located within the corporeal body. She suggests that identity is forged in a precarious and dynamic relation between various possibiliteis which can be accepted by the social and cultural meanings in the symbolic, and a force of negativity which is persistently engaged. First Kristeva emphasizes the critique of identity as a fixed or essential notion. Second, she identifies the constructed nature of meaning and sexuality, and the determining or restructure effect which existing deifnitions, stereotypes, and cultural roles can have in shaping identity. Third, she identifies a transgressive force which, if activated, can have a disruptive or revolutionizing effect on the social / cultural context in question. Her account of ‘the subject-in-process’ analyses the expense involved in subject formation, but it also hints at ways of subverting the dominant forms of understanding sexual difference. Kristeva negotiates essentialism by suggesting that subject ‘positions’ are being created and destroyed in the ongoing dialectic of

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signification, and yet she refuses to diffuse subjectivity into merely an effect of language.

Regarding the question of the ‘other’ Kristeva argues that the overcoming of this ‘other’ realm can never be wholly successful, and it will continue to break through or corrupt into the symbolic order, where its effects will be felt bodily as pleasurable disturbances. Symbolically, such disruptions will resonate the pre-oeidipal and the feminine.

Kristeva is explicitly critical of Lacan for making the repression of the mother the condition of subjectivity. As she draws attention to symbolic connection of the chora with feminine or maternal notions, she is taking up pre- figured connections which identify the notion of an origin with a primordial mother: ‘this palce which has no thesis and no position, the process by which significance is constituted. Plato himself leads us to such a process when he call this receptacle or chora nourishing or maternal’ (Kristeva 1996: 64). However, the semiotic is in one important sense opposed to the symbolic: it is a site of resistance and disruption against which the organizaiton of the symbolic is to be compared. Kristeva takes up the equation of otherness with the feminine or maternal, in order to demonstrate the sacrificial process involved in identity construciton, and to suggest how the inherent violence might be made less painful or channelled in more creative ways.

Despite the alignment of otherness and the feminine for Kristeva, it does not constitute an alternative identity for women, nor does it allow a specifically female or feminine language. However, there are ways of maximizing its disruptive effects in order to combat the restrictive impact of the symbolic. She considers women as potential disruptive figures.

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Despite Kristeva’s characterization of the subject as an open system, she did not commit to the denial of sexual difference or the ‘erasure’ of the subject. However, she does argue that the positionality which may lead to a metaphysical hypostatization of identity is to be found in feminsit discourse too. This is perhaps what leads her to be harsh on the variety of feminist positions which do not coincide with her own; a fear of the reintroduciton of the essentialist subject which has led women to ‘sacrifice or violence’. If this is a challenge to feminist theory, it is the kind of critique which feminist theory requires.

As of now Julia Kristeva is perceived to be a thinker who manages to negotiate the phallocentric discourse and sustain the tentions with acuity, a position which itself invites further responses and engagements with her writings.

It may however be suggested that feminist philosophy should not limit itself to one system or model, always leaving questions half answered or explored, awaiting contribuitons and opinions. Analysing the condition of women is not the subject matter of a particular group of thinkers, neither is it an object of study created by purely subjective concerns. It is an object of study that extends through history and across cultures. The truth of women’s oppression, however as Le Doeuff claims cannot be summed up in an abstract, general claim, but emerges through a plurality of voices that cannot be unified into a coherent logos.

Perhaps it would not be inappropriate to close with an observation made by Morwenna Griffiths:

Trying to reduce all our complexities of self-identity to relatively simple designs and simple stories, of the kind that mainstream philosophy tells, has resulted in inappropraite

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Concluding Remarks stories about ways in which to deal with our personal and collective dilemma. It is a simplicity which has contributed to sameness and oppression. Infinitely preferable is the variety, confusion, colour, hotchpotch, kaleidoscope, medley, motley and harlequin of patchwork selves. (Griffiths 1995: 19).

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