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TECHNOLOGIES O F GE NDER TECHNOLOGIES OF GENDER Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction BY TERESA DE LAURETIS INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis © 1987 by Teresa de Lauretis All rights reserved )\;0 part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicatioD Data De Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of gender. (Theories of representation and difference) Includes index. 1. Feminism and literature. 2. Feminism and motion pictures. 3. Feminism. I. Title. II. Series. PN 56. F46D4 1987 80 I 'AI 86-46317 ISBN 0-253-35853-1 ISBN 0-253-20441-0 (pbk.) 56789695 For her who rides the chariot of the sun CONTENTS PREFACE IX 1. The Technology of Gender 1 2. The Violence of Rhetoric: Considerations on Representation and Gender 31 3. Gaudy Rose: Eco and Narcissism 51 4. Calvino and the Amazons: Reading the (Post)Modern Text 70 5. Gramsci Notwithstanding, or, The Left Hand of History 84 6. Fellini's 9'12 95 7. Strategies of Coherence: Narrative Cinema, Feminist Poetics, and Yvonne Rainer 107 8. Rethinking Women's Cinema: Aesthetics and Feminist Theory 127 INDEX OF NAMES 149 PREFACE The essays here collected, except one, were written between 1983 and 1986. Like the book I wrote immediately before them, Alice Doesn't: Femi­ nism, Semiotics, Cinema (1984), and which to a large extent constitutes their theoretical framework, these essays also carryon an argument by means of textual readings. In some, a novel or a film is read through theory, that is, by taking a particular issue or assumption in theoretical discourse as magni­ fying glass in order to refocus the reading around questions of gender representation. In other essays, the reading of a fictional, filmic, or critical text provides the occasion to articulate a theoretical problem or to engage with a current critical debate. All but the first essay were originally written as lectures, conference papers, or special-issue contributions, and because the context of address is a very important aspect of any piece of critical writing, a short note at the head of each essay will identify the occasion of its writing. While all of the essays are centrally concerned with gender, the first one, "The Technology of Gender," specifically poses the question of how to theorize gender beyond the limits of "sexual difference" and the constraints that such a notion has come to impose on feminist critical thought. The essay takes its title and its conceptual premise from Foucault's theory of sexuality as a "technology of sex" and proposes that gender, too, both as representation and as self-representation, is the product of various social technologies, such as cinema, as well as institutional discourses, epis­ temologies, and critical practices; by that I mean not only academic crit­ icism, but more broadly social and cultural practices. Going past Foucault. whose critique of the technology of sex does not take into account its differential solicitation of male and female subjects, or the conflicting investments of men and women in the discourses and practices of sexuality, the essay then considers the potential of Althusser's theory of ideological interpellation with regard to an understanding of gender as (self-)repre­ sentation. It then argues that contemporary work in feminist theory goes further in defining the female-gendered subject as one that is at once inside and outside the ideology of gender: the female subject of feminism is one IX x PreJace constructed across a multiplicity of discol,trses. positions, and meanings, which are often in conflict with one another and inherently (historically) contradictory. A feminist 1heory of gender, in other words, points to a conception of the subject as multiple. rather than divided or unified. and as excessive or heteronomous vis-a-vis the state ideological apparati and the sociocultural technologies of gender. As the slight variance between its title and the volume's title is intended to suggest. the first essay is not meant to be an introduction to the volume as such, although it was written after the others and thus is chronologically the last, or the most recent; but it does not attempt to bring together the di\'erse concerns of the essays that follow it into a single critical argument. The volume is a collection of distinct, if related, essays. I feel, however, that "The Technology of Gender" is properly placed as the lead essay of the volume because it does layout the inclusive parameters and the critical frame of reference for the exploration of gender-related questions throughout the book. The inclusion of one essay written several years earlier than the others is motivated by its compatibility with that critical frame of reference, as well as by its direct relevance to the topic of the volume. A few words on the sequential ordering of the essays may be useful, since it is neither chronological nor strictly adherent to the three generic areas listed in the subtitle. The second essay. like the first. engages and rewrites "theory": "The Violence of Rhetoric" confronts structuralist and poststruc­ turalist theory (Levi-Strauss to Foucault and Derrida) with feminist readings of it (e.g., Spivak on Derrida on Nietzsche). as well as feminist work in social science (e.g., Breinesand Gordon on.family violence) and rhetorical analy­ ses of scientific discourse (e.g., Keller's critique of the "genderization of science"). Essays 3 and 4 offer close textual readings of two contemporary novels. Umberto Eco's best-seller The Name of the Rose and ltalo Calvi no's If on a winter's night a traveler, readings which engage the texts to test the intriguing allegations of a possible love affair between feminism and postmodernism. The essay that follows is anomalous in both topical and tropical location. First published in 1978 by a feminist collective's non-scholarly publication on art and politics, "Gramsci Notwithstanding, or. The Left Hand of History" is about neither theory or fiction, nor film. It is, and was written as, a presentation, or a record, of a specific textual practice in the Italian women's movement (a book based on unpublished women's letters, an experimental theatre performance based on the book, and the documenta­ tion of the theatrical production itself, also published in the book), and an instance of textual practice as feminist intervention in/against cultural hegemony. For this reason I have placed the essay after "Calvino and the Preface Xl Amazons," almost as a response to Calvino's text-as another feminist rereading next to my own, or, better, as a feminist rewriting of cultural history-and before the last two essays, which are also about feminist interventions in cultural hegemony through the practice, this time, of women's cinema. Moreover, because of its somewhat heterogeneous or liminal character in this collection, the fifth essay serves well as a divider between the previous four, which engage theory and fiction, and the last three, which deal primarily with film. "Fellini's 9W' is a reading of Juliet of the Spirits, the film Fellini made immediately after finishing his self-reflexive ~masterpiece" 81J2, and where the representation of gender is so transparent as to reveal, in the very image of woman, the massive narrative shadow of a Fellini in drag. "Strat­ egies of Coherence," on the uses and abuses of narrative in feminist avant­ garde filmmaking, and particularly in the work of Yvonne Rainer, and the last essay in the volume are concerned with rethinking or reformulating the notion of ~women's cinema" in light of current developments in feminist theory. Written almost concurrently with or just before "The Technology of Gender," the last two essays address questions of spectatorship, aesthetic response, and (self-)representation in the effort to specify the modes of consciousness of a feminist subjectivity and its inscription in certain critical textual practices. Finally, then, while all the essays in the volume imply the feminist per­ spective articulated in Alice Doesn't, a development may be seen to have taken place (especially in essays 1,7, and 8) with regard to the understand­ ing of feminism as a radical rewriting, as well as a rereading, of the domi­ nant forms of Western culture; a rewriting which effectively inscribes the presence of a different, and gendered, social subject. But even so, what these essays propose and argue for is a continued testing of the boundaries, an essaying of the no-man's land inhabited by "Alice," rather than a fully constructed view from "elsewhere." That must remain the project for another book. TECHNOLOGIES OF GENDER 1 THE TECHNOLOGY OF GENDER In the feminist writings and cultural practices of the 1960s and 1970s, the notion of gender as sexual difference was central to the critique of repre­ sentation, the rereading of cultural images and narratives, the questioning of theories of subjectivity and textuality, of reading, writing, and spec­ tatorship. The notion of gender as sexual difference has grounded and sustained feminist interventions in the arena of formal and abstract knowl­ edge, in the epistemologies and cognitive fields defined by the social and physical sciences as well as the human sciences or humanities. Concurrent and interdependent with those interventions were the elaboration of spe­ cific practices and discourses, and the creation of social spaces (gendered spaces, in the sense of the "women's room," such as CR groups, women's caucuses within the disciplines, Women's Studies, feminist journal or media collectives, and so on) in which sexual difference itself could be affirmed, addressed, analyzed, specified, or verified.

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