Chapter 14 This Space Intentionally Left Blank: Francofeminism HERE is a dilemma at the heart of feminism. Should women get into shoulder pads, think rationally, break through the Tglass ceiling and take on the boys on the level playing field? That would be to fall for gung-ho masculist criteria of success. Or would it be better to play up the traditionally feminine, get in touch with emotions and bodies, and transform the world with quilting and yoga? That would be to accept the old masculine definitions of what is women’s business, and end up in ghettoisation and irrelevance, leaving the public realm to men.1 Those outside philosophy will naturally think of a dilemma as in some way a bad thing. If politics is one’s concern, a dilemma is a bad thing. It causes splits, enmities, loss of zeal, as activists and potential activists take up their positions. In philosophy, it is the opposite. There is nothing that feeds philosophy like a good dilemma, and a truly irresolvable one is a philosophical Magic Pudding. The more monographs, critiques, PhD theses and talkfests that have been carved out of it, the more there are left. Feminism’s dilemma can spawn fierce debate on virtually any issue. Fat is a feminist issue, but it is undecided whether slimming is an approved taking of one’s destiny into one’s own hands or a capitulation to male conceptions of female beauty. Women philoso- phers can either join in the disputes of traditional philosophy, or set up a ‘feminist philosophy’ sub-industry at the risk of diverting their graduate students into an intellectual sheltered workshop. But the 1 M. Gatens, Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality (Bloomington, Ind, 1991), pp. 4–5. 362 Corrupting the Youth most distinctively philosophical debate concerns the relation of women and ‘reason’. Descartes and many other philosophers have praised reason at length and regarded it as one of the supreme attributes of humanity. They have spoken of the faculty of reason almost as if it were disem- bodied, and as if it is threatened by too close association with the pas- sions and the body. Genevieve Lloyd, in her much cited book, The Man of Reason, and many other feminist thinkers, are against this im- age of reason and believe it has contributed to women’s oppression.2 Why exactly does a view of reason as independent of the body contribute to the oppression of women? A naive view might hold the opposite: that the more independent reason is from the body, the less that bodily differences between men and women should matter to it, and hence the more opportunity there would be for women to sim- ply pursue science and reason on the same terms as men. It is admit- ted that this is what Descartes intended.3 Feminist philosophers are not impressed. They object to ‘a “sexlessness” which, as many femi- nists have pointed out, is often a covert way of privileging maleness.’4 Why does it privilege maleness? The idea is that our ideals of ration- 2 G. Lloyd, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (London, 1984; 2nd ed, London, 1993); earlier in ‘The man of reason’, Metaphilosophy 10 (1979): pp. 18–37; later in G.M. Lloyd, ‘Maleness, metaphor and the “crisis” of reason’, in A Mind of One’s Own, ed L. Antoy & C. Witt (Boulder, 1993), pp. 69–83; A Companion to Feminist Philosophy, ed. A.M. Jaggar & I.M. Young (Oxford, 1998), ch. 16; summary in M. Nicholls, ‘Genevieve Lloyd and contemporary feminism’, in Australian Philosophers, ed. P. Dowe, M. Nicholls & L. Shotton (Hobart, 1996), pp. 97– 120; similar in J. Thompson, ‘Women and the high priests of reason’, Radical Philosophy 34 (Summer 1983): pp. 10–14; D. Russell, ‘Women and reason’, Hecate 14 (1) (1988): pp. 40–50; E.J. Porter, Women and Moral Identity (Sydney, 1991), ch. 4; V. Kirby, ‘Viral identities: Feminisms and postmodernisms’, in N. Grieve & A. Burns, eds, Australian Women: Contemporary Feminist Thought (Melbourne, 1994), pp. 120–32; Gatens, Feminism and Philosophy, ch. 5; C. Colebrook, ‘Feminist philosophy and the philosophy of feminism: Irigaray and the history of Western metaphysics’, Hypatia 12 (1) (Winter 1997): pp. 79–98; R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Sydney, 1995), ch. 7; objections in K. Green, The Woman of Reason (Cambridge, 1995), ch. 1; S.C. Hetherington, ‘Dispensing with (men of) reason’, Reason Papers 24 (Fall 1999): pp. 57–72; T. van Gelder, ‘Heads I win, tails you lose’, Quadrant 43 (7-8) (July-Aug, 1999): pp. 15–19; a middle view in R. Langton, ‘Feminism in epistemology: Exclusion and objectification’, in The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Philosophy, ed. M. Fricker & J. Hornsby (Cambridge, 2000). 3 Lloyd, The Man of Reason, 2nd ed, p. 45. 4 Lloyd, The Man of Reason, p. xi. 14. This Space Intentionally Left Blank: Francofeminism 363 ality have been symbolised in ways that are traditionally associated with the male. The main evidence provided for this assertion is a list of dualities attributed to the ancient Pythagoreans: light versus dark- ness, right versus left, mind versus body, odd versus even, male versus female. The first of each pair is said to be valued over the second.5 Not much evidence has been supplied for the prominence of these dualities in Western thought between the time of Pythagoras and women’s studies courses in the 1980s, but they are presumed to have somehow infected Western thought at a deep level. The other evi- dence is that some men in several past centuries sometimes used mas- culine metaphors like ‘conquest’ in talking about the advance of rea- son. Despite the tenuousness of the evidence, later and more radical feminists take these conclusions to have been firmly established, and assert without further argument: ‘Within philosophy, for example, the presumedly timeless values of the discipline — Truth, Reason, Logic, Meaning, Being — have been shown by feminists (such as Lloyd, Irigaray) to be based on implicit but disavowed relations to their “others” — poetry, madness, passions, body, non-sense, non- existence. These “others” are defined as feminine ...’6 Not all feminists were happy with demonising logic. Some noticed the awkward fact that showing that pursuing a norm of reason harms women does not thereby prove there is anything mistaken with it. Instead it invites the question, what is wrong with women that norms of reason are a problem for them?7 The assault on reason was especially trying to those feminists capable of writing intelligible prose. Kate Jennings says, ‘Here I was wanting “to know more than I did yesterday”, lead a sane life, and write lucidly, and my feminist peers were deeming all knowledge suspect and finding rationality to be “complicitous with male privilege” and clarity “a male strategy” ... It has been a jolting experience to be repudiated by my peers; to be bundled up in a job lot with Margaret Thatcher and Leonie Kramer.’8 5 Lloyd, The Man of Reason, p. 3. 6 E.A. Grosz, ‘The in(ter)vention of feminist knowledges’, in Crossing Boundaries: Feminisms and the Critique of Knowledges, ed. B. Caine, E.A. Grosz & M. de Lepervanche (Sydney, 1988), pp. 92–104, at p. 96; similar agreed to by Gatens, Feminism and Philosophy, ch. 5; R. Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 185–90, etc. 7 R. Langton, ‘Beyond a pragmatic critique of reason’, AJP 71 (1993): pp. 364–84. 8 K. Jennings, Bad Manners (Melbourne, 1993), p. 64; cf. pp. 80, 43–5; cf. A. Summers, Ducks on the Pond (Melbourne, 1999), p. 284. (Leonie Kramer’s evil is taken as read among feminists; one writes that she is ‘seeming proof that gender is socially constructed rather than biologically determined’: P. 364 Corrupting the Youth Nevertheless, in feminist philosophy the debate has moved on. If it is agreed that reason is a bad thing, what is the alternative? There are two possible moves to make. The first is to find out something about logic and make some alternative suggestions. The second is to change the question altogether, and praise some opposite of reason. The first alternative has been taken by some unusual work by the ecofeminist Val Plumwood, who had earlier done some work on alternative logics. Writing on ‘Classical logic as the logic of domination’, she objects to the way in which logic defines the negation of a proposi- tion p, not-p (symbolised ¬ p) in terms of p: Such an account of ¬ p specifies ¬ p in relation to p conceived as the controlling centre, and so is p-centred. The very features of simplicity which have helped to select classical logic over its rivals are implicated here. In the phallic drama of this p-centred account, there is really only one actor, p, and ¬ p is merely its receptacle.9 But, she says, there are non-classical logics available which are not so arrogantly dualistic. This plan, whatever may be said for or against it, at least requires some knowledge of logic, which arguably involves too much of a concession to reason. A purer, not to say easier, strategy is to simply attack an undifferentiated reason and talk about some opposite of it. Since reason is done by the mind, the opposite of it must be ‘the body’. There is a whole Australian school of ‘corporeal feminism’.10 Gilbert, ‘Personal growth or critical resistance? Self-esteem in the English curriculum’, in Hearts and Minds, ed. J. Kenway & S. Willis (Lewes, 1990), pp. 173–89, at p. 184.) 9 V. Plumwood, ‘The politics of reason: Towards a feminist logic’, AJP 71 (1993): pp.