Breaking Feminist Waves

Series Editors:

LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF, Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center

GILLIAN HOWIE , University of Liverpool
For the last 20 years, feminist theory has been presented as a series of ascend-
ing waves. This picture has had the effect of deemphasizing the diversity of past
scholarship as well as constraining the way we understand and frame new work.
The aim of this series is to attract original scholars who will offer unique inter-
pretations of past scholarship and unearth neglected contributions to feminist
theory. By breaking free from the constraints of the image of waves, this series
will be able to provide a wider forum for dialogue and engage historical and inter-
disciplinary work to open up feminist theory to new audiences and markets.
LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF is professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and
the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her books include Visible
Identities: Race, Gender and the Self ; The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy
(coedited with Eva Kittay); Identity Politics Reconsidered (coedited with Moya,
Mohanty, and Hames-Garcia); and Singing in the Fire: Tales of Women in
Philosophy.
GILLIAN HOWIE is a senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at
the University of Liverpool. Her previous work includes Deleuze and Spinoza:
Aura of Expressionism; Touching Transcendence: Women and the Divine (coedited
with Jan Jobling); Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (coedited with
Stacy Gillis and Rebecca Munford); Menstruation (coedited with Andrew Shail);
and Gender, Teaching and Research in Higher Education (coedited with Ashley
Tauchert).
Titles to date:
Unassimilable Feminisms: Reappraising Feminist, Womanist, and Mestiza Identity
Politics
by Laura Gillman
Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone
edited by Mandy Merck and Stella Sandford
Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone?
edited by Kimberly Hutchings and Tuija Pulkkinen
Femmenism and the Mexican Woman Intellectual from Sor Juana to Poniatowska:
Boob Lit
by Emily Hind
Between Feminism and Materialism: A Question of Method
by Gillian Howie
Resonances of Slavery in Race/Gender Relations: Shadow at the Heart of American
Politics
by Jane Flax

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 The Many Dimensions of Chinese Feminism
by Ya-chen Chen
Rousseau in Drag: Deconstructing Gender
by Rosanne Terese Kennedy
Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice
edited by Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, and Fanny Söderbäck

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 Undutiful Daughters
New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice

Edited by

Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, and

Fanny Söderbäck

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 UNDUTIFUL DAUGHTERS
Copyright © Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, and
Fanny Söderbäck, 2012.
All rights reserved.
Cover art: 1271–07 © Vicky Colombet
First published in 2012 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–0–230–11831–7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Undutiful daughters : new directions in feminist thought and practice /
edited by Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, and Fanny Söderbäck.
p. cm.—(Breaking feminist waves)
ISBN 978–0–230–11831–7
1. Feminism—History—21st century. I. Gunkel, Henriette. II. Nigianni,
Chrysanthi. III. Söderbäck, Fanny, 1978–
HQ1155.U547 2012
305.42—dc23 2012010440
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: September 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.

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 C on ten ts

Series Foreword vii

Preface: The Society of Undutiful Daughters ix
Rosi Braidotti
Acknowledgments xxi

Part I New Concepts

Introduction: A Politics of Polyphony 3
Fanny Söderbäck
1 The Future of Feminist Theory: Dreams for
New Knowledges 13
Elizabeth Grosz
2 The Need for the New in Feminist Activist Discourse:
Notes Toward a Scene of Anachronism 23
Red Chidgey
3 The Interruptive Feminine: Aleatory Time and
Feminist Politics 35
Emanuela Bianchi
4 Écriture Futuriste 49
M. F. Simone Roberts

Part II New Bodies and Ethics

Introduction: A Politics of Displeasure 65
Chrysanthi Nigianni
5 Feminist Extinction 71
Claire Colebrook
6 Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water 85
Astrida Neimanis

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 vi CONTENTS

7 The Breathing Body in Movement 101

Davina Quinlivan
8 Incubators, Pumps, and Other Hard-Breasted Bodies 113
Katie Lloyd Thomas

Part III New Subjectivities

Introduction: A Politics of Visibility 129
Henriette Gunkel
9 Rethinking Sexual Difference and Kinship in
Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism 141
Judith Butler
10 Transgenres and the Plane of Gender Imperceptibility 155
Jami Weinstein
11 Primal Scenes, Forbidden Words, and
Reclaimed Spaces: Voice, Body, and
Poetic Form in Recent South African Writing 169
Gabeba Baderoon
12 Going Gaga: Dissent, Refusal, and Feminism 183
Jack Halberstam
13 (Un)naming the Third Sex After Beauvoir:
Toward a Third-Dimensional Feminism 195
Kyoo Lee

List of Contributors 209

Index 215

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 Ser ies For e wor d

Breaking Feminist Waves is a series designed to rethink the conven-

tional models of what feminism is today, its past and future trajecto-
ries. For more than a quarter of a century, feminist theory has been
presented as a series of ascending waves, and this has come to repre-
sent generational divides and differences of political orientation as
well as different formulations of goals. The imagery of waves, while
connoting continuous movement, implies a singular trajectory with
an inevitably progressive teleology. As such, it constrains the way we
understand what feminism has been and where feminist thought has
appeared, while simplifying the rich and nuanced political and philo-
sophical diversity that has been characteristic of feminism through-
out. Most disturbingly, it restricts the way we understand and frame
new work.
This series provides a forum to reassess established constructions
of feminism and of feminist theory. It provides a starting point to
redefine feminism as a configuration of intersecting movements and
concerns, with political commitment but, perhaps, without a singular
center or primary track. The generational divisions among women do
not actually correlate to common interpretive frameworks shaped by
shared historical circumstances, but rather to a diverse set of argu-
ments, problems, and interests affected by differing historical con-
texts and locations. Often excluded from cultural access to dominant
modes of communication and dissemination, feminisms have never
been uniform nor yet in a comprehensive conversation. The genera-
tional division, then, cannot represent the dominant divide within
feminism, nor a division between essentially coherent moments;
there are always multiple conflicts and contradictions, as well as dif-
ferences about the goals, strategies, founding concepts, and starting
premises.
Nonetheless, the problems facing women, feminists, and femi-
nisms are as acute and pressing today as ever. Featuring a variety of
disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, Breaking Feminist Waves
provides a forum for comparative, historical, and interdisciplinary

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 viii SERIES FOREWORD

work, with special attention to the problems of cultural differences,

language and representation, embodiment, rights, violence, sexual
economies, and political action. By rethinking feminisms’ history as
well as their present, and by unearthing neglected contributions to
feminist theory, this series intends to unlock conversations between
feminists and feminisms and to open up feminist theory and practice
to new audiences.
—LINDA M ARTÍN A LCOFF AND GILLIAN HOWIE

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 Pr eface: The S o cie t y of
Undu t if ul Daughter s

One is not born, one becomes an undutiful daughter. Moreover,

and depending on one’s theoretical disposition, one can be unduti-
ful to one, three, or a multiplicity of structural and occasional oth-
ers. Strangely enough, though, it is more difficult and slightly more
problematic to be undutiful to two others simultaneously. The oedi-
pal constellation surrounding one’s relationship to two others raises
issues and contestations of an altogether different order. Let me start
therefore by exploring this numerical sequence of self-others relations
and the different forms of dutifulness they may engender. It mostly
comes down to zeros and ones.
Disloyalty to One is a must for any self-respecting theorist well-
read in the classic feminist texts of the second half of the twentieth
century. The rule of One—the universalistic standard of the domi-
nant vision of the subject as coinciding with rationality, conscious-
ness, and self-regulating moral agency—has come under fire from
the very early days of the second feminist wave right through the
successive waves of poststructuralist, postcolonial, punk, queer, and
other branches of critical theory. This hegemonic or majoritarian
vision of the subject is indexed, as psychoanalysis teaches us, onto
a symbolic order that establishes the phallic rule of One—as in the
Name-of-the-father—reducing the rest to the status of unrepresent-
able others; that is to say, to a lack or necessary absence: non-ones.
Marxist dialectics, on the other hand, can enlighten us on the nec-
essary and often violent antagonism that opposes One to constitutive
binary others. This scheme structures the triangulation between the
self, the oppositional others, and the transcendent breaking point of a
new order of relations to come. It also institutionalizes a hierarchical
system that defines difference as structural pejoration: to be differ-
ent from means to be worth less than—that is to say, to settle for the
position of One Minus.

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 x PREFACE

Disloyalty to a multiplicity is almost a contradiction in terms and

calls for more imaginative forms of sustainable betrayal. As Gilles
Deleuze convincingly argues, a nomadic process of becoming de-links
difference from both the black hole of symbolic lack and the oppo-
sitional dialectics of hierarchical subcategories. It also, however, dis-
solves any specificity related to actualized identities, thus de-linking
One from both transcendent categories and ontological foundations.
Nomadism leads to the overcoming of all bounded and steady uni-
tary identities. Multiplicities and process-oriented complex becom-
ings frame a conceptual apparatus that aims at freeing difference from
negativity and at unfolding its affirmative potential.
Compared to all of the above—that is to say, fractions of One and
subtractions of wholes on the one hand, and multiple series on the
other—being unfaithful to Two emerges as a singularly difficult chal-
lenge. The figure of Two seems to be so systematically deterritorialized
that it becomes slippery. Luce Irigaray’s work—especially in the second
phase, which is devoted to reconfiguring radical heterosexuality—is
the most creative contribution to a different relationship to Two—the
sexually differentiated yet multiple space of difference.
Thinking about Two rests on what I have called a “virtual
feminine,”1 which I set in opposition to Woman as Other-than
or different-from; the second sex of the dominant One, which is
specularly connected to the same as its devalued Other. Taking off
from Irigaray, as the undutiful daughter I have always been, I have
defended sexual difference as a political practice, constructed in a
non-Hegelian framework. Rejecting negation, I have nomadized
difference, stressing the need to work through many differences
between, among, and within women.2 Just like Marilyn Frye, I see
“differences among women” as being constitutive of the category of
sexual difference and not exterior or antithetical to it.3
The sexual politics of this project is clear, albeit complex. For
Irigaray, it is about how to identify points of exit from the univer-
sal model of Man as the measure of One-ness, toward a radical ver-
sion of heterosexuality based on the recognition of the specificities
of each sexed subject position. More specifically, Irigaray wonders
how to elaborate a site, that is to say a space and a time, for the irre-
ducibility of sexual difference to express itself, so that the masculine
and feminine libidinal economies may coexist in the positive expres-
sion of their respective differences. This positivity is both horizontal/
terrestrial and vertical/celestial, and it entails the (re)thinking
through of gender-specific relations to space, time, and the interval
between the sexes, so as to avoid polarizing oppositions. Issues of

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 PREFACE xi

“other differences,” notably religion, nationality, language, and eth-

nicity are crucial to this project and integral to the task of evolving
toward the recognition of the positivity of difference.
This radically heterosexual project of rethinking the Two, how-
ever, is not heterosexist, nor does it imply the dismissal of homosexual
love. Elizabeth Grosz, for instance, refers to Irigaray’s advocacy of
a “tactical homosexuality modeled on the corporeal relations of the
preoedipal daughter to her mother.”4 This mother-daughter bond
aims at exploring and reclaiming bodily pleasures and contacts that
have been eradicated from conscious memory. It thus becomes a tool
for undoing the oedipal plot and allowing women to experiment with
different approaches to their morphology and identity formation.
That this can be empowering for female homosexual identity is
explicitly stated by Irigaray. She argues that radical heterosexuality
postulates the need for a female homosexual nucleus: a primary homo-
sexual bond that is required to recompose women’s primary narcis-
sism after it has been badly wounded by the phallocentric symbolic.
The recovery of primary narcissism is the ontological foundation for
this fundamentally political practice of transformation or autopoietic
self-assertion.
The other woman—the other of the Other—is the site of recog-
nition of one’s effort of becoming in this special sense of in-depth
metamorphosis. This primary narcissism must not be confused with
secondary narcissistic manifestations—with which women have been
richly endowed under patriarchy. Vanity, the love of appearances, the
dual burden of narcissism and paranoia are the signs of female objec-
tification under the power (potestas) of the One. Nor is it per se the
prelude to a lesbian position: it simply states the structural signifi-
cance of love for one’s sex, for the sexual same, as a crucial building
block for one’s sense of self-esteem. Whereas under phallogocentrism,
the maternal marks the lack or absence of symbolic recognition, in
the “virtual feminine” proposed by Irigaray, it can be turned into an
empowering and affirmative gesture. In this respect, Irigarary’s Two
accomplishes the magical trick of turning non-ones into One-plus or
super-ones capable of fecund multiples. We can therefore relax and
be dutiful with regard to a virtual feminine as the stepping-stone to a
future, multiple Two, while continuing our struggle against maternal
despotism and paternal control.
All of the above therefore can provide undutiful daughters with
rigorous and gratifying grounds to demonstrate the precise scale and
intensity of their transgressive undutifulness. The preliminary con-
clusion I would draw from this is that, considering the variety of

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 xii PREFACE

possible strategies, one actually cannot just become undutiful once

and for all. A paradoxical sense of commitment is therefore needed by
undutiful daughters in order to actually endure the challenge of their
undutifulness. This statement is itself—and rather willfully—loyal to
Michel Foucault’s analysis of process-oriented relations of power as
being both restrictive and productive, positive and negative, potes-
tas and potentia. Deleuze travels much further down this road and
stresses the necessity of pursuing critical theory not as the critique of
representation or the struggle for recognition within the logic of Law
and Lack, but rather as the actualization of intensities and forces. The
point therefore is to practice undutifulness as affirmative politics and
to endure in the process.

On the Advantages of Defamiliarization

Endurance can be supported by practical strategies. One of the defin-
ing features of the undutiful daughters’ mind-set is a productive form
of conceptual disobedience. Ever since Adrienne Rich defined the
feminist project as a way of being disloyal to one’s civilization, out of
love for that same civilization, the transformative aspects of this proj-
ect require a radical repositioning on the part of the subject, which
is neither self-evident, nor free of pain.5 No process of conscious-
ness-raising ever is. Post-structuralist feminism has implemented the
methodology of disidentification from familiar and hence comforting
values and identities.6
Disidentification involves the loss of cherished habits of thought
and representation, a move that can be exhilarating in its liberatory
side-effects, but that can also produce fear and a sense of insecurity
and nostalgia. Change is certainly a painful process, but this does
not equate it with suffering, nor does it warrant the politically con-
servative position that chastises all change as dangerous. The point
in stressing the difficulties and pain involved in the quest for trans-
formative processes is rather to raise an awareness of both the com-
plexities involved—the paradoxes that lie in store—and to develop a
nomadic “ethics of sustainability.”7
Changes that affect one’s sense of identity are especially delicate.
Given that identifications constitute an inner scaffolding that supports
one’s sense of identity, shifting our imaginary identifications is not as
simple as casting away a used garment. Psychoanalysis has taught us
that imaginary relocation is as complex and time-consuming as shed-
ding an old skin. Moreover, changes of this qualitative kind happen
more easily at the molecular or subjective level and their translation

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 PREFACE xiii

into a public discourse and shared social experiences is a complex and

risk-ridden affair. In a more positive vein, Spinozist feminist political
thinkers like Genevieve Lloyd8 and Moira Gatens9 argue that such
socially embedded and historically grounded changes are the result
of “collective imaginings”—a shared desire for certain transforma-
tions to be actualized as a collaborative effort. They are transversal
assemblages aimed at the production of affirmative politics and ethical
relations.
Let me give you a series of concrete examples of how disiden-
tifications from dominant models of subject-formation can be
productive and creative. First of all, feminist theory is based on
a radical disengagement from the dominant institutions and rep-
resentations of femininity and masculinity, in order to enter the
process of becoming-minoritarian or of transforming gender. In so
doing, feminism combines critique with creation of alternative ways
of embodying and experiencing our sexualized selves.
Secondly, in race discourse, the awareness of the persistence of racial
discrimination and of white privilege has led to serious disruptions of
our accepted views of what constitutes a subject. This has resulted on
the one hand in the critical reappraisal of blackness10 and on the other
in radical relocations of whiteness.11 Specifically, I would like to refer
to Edgar Morin’s account of how he relinquished Marxist cosmopoli-
tanism to embrace a more “humble” perspective as a European.12 This
process includes both positive and negative affects: disappointment
with the unfulfilled promises of Marxism is matched by compassion
for the uneasy, struggling, and marginal position of postwar Europe,
squashed between the United States and the Soviet Union. This pro-
duces a renewed sense of care and accountability that leads Morin to
embrace a postnationalistic redefinition of Europe as the site of media-
tion and transformation of its own history, which I discussed above.
All these disidentifications occur along the axes of becoming-
woman (sexualization) and becoming-other (racialization), and hence
remain within the confines of anthropomorphism. A more radical
shift is therefore needed to break from the latter and develop post-
anthropocentric forms of identification. Donna Haraway’s work is
fundamental in actualizing this shift. My nomadic theory’s vital geo-
centrism—the love of Zoe —is a parallel effort in the same direction.
Becoming-animal/-earth or becoming-imperceptible are more radi-
cal breaks with established patterns of thought (naturalization) and
introduce a radically imminent planetary dimension. This anthropo-
logical exodus, however, is especially difficult emotionally as well as
methodologically. It actually establishes disloyalty to our own human

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 xiv PREFACE

species as a practical alliance with nonhuman others. All closeted

anthropocentric feminists need to come out at this point and express
their dutiful adherence to their own species supremacy. The others
can move on and run with the she-wolves of nomadic becoming.
The positive benefits aspects of disidentification are epistemological
but extend beyond; they include a more adequate cartography of our
real-life conditions and hence less pathos-ridden accounts. Becoming
free of the topos that equates the struggle for identity changes with
suffering, results in a more adequate level of self-knowledge. It there-
fore clears the grounds for more adequate and sustainable relations to
the others who are crucial to the transformative project itself.
On the methodological front, de-oedipalizing the relationship
to both human and nonhuman others is a form of radical pacifism
that sets strong ethical requirements on the philosophical subject. It
locates the core of subjectivity in relationality and collaboration, not
in aggressive self-assertion. This requires a form of disidentification
from a century-old habit of anthropocentric thought and human-
ist arrogance. Defamiliarization is a sobering process by which the
knowing subject evolves from the normative vision of the self he or
she had become accustomed to. The frame of reference becomes the
open-ended, inter-relational, multisexed, and trans-species flows of
becoming by interaction with multiple others. A subject thus consti-
tuted explodes the boundaries of humanism at skin level and turns
undutifulness into the generous proliferation of complex, internally
contradictory, and productive relations.
Nonhuman others are therefore no longer the signifying system that
props up the humans’ self-projections and moral aspirations. Nor are
they the gatekeepers that trace the liminal positions in between species.
They have rather started to function quite literally, in a code system of
their own. Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of “becoming-animal”
expresses this profound and vital interconnection by positing a quali-
tative shift of the relationship away from species-ism and toward an
ethical appreciation of what bodies (human, animal, others) can do.
An ethology of forces emerges as the ethical code that can reconnect
humans to nonhumans. De-oedipalizing the relationship to nonhu-
man others is a method of defamilarization that expresses a posthuman
bodily materialism and lays the grounds for bio-egalitarian ethics.13

Ode to Dolly, the Undutiful Sheep

Let’s take, for example, Dolly the sheep as the main figuration for
becoming-animal as the expression of the perverse temporalities and

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 PREFACE xv

contradictions that structure our technological culture. Dolly is that

sex which is not one—a collective entity repackaged as a bounded
self. She/it is simultaneously the last specimen of her species—
descended from the lineage of sheep that were conceived and repro-
duced as such—and the first specimen of a new species: the electronic
and biogenetic sheep that Phillip Dick dreamed of, the forerunner of
the android society of Blade Runner. Cloned, not conceived sexu-
ally, a heterogeneous mix of organism and machine, Dolly simply
changes the name of the game. Severed from reproduction and hence
divorced from descent, both the gender and the kinship, Dolly is
no daughter of any member of her/its old species—simultaneously
orphan and mother of her/itself. First of a new gender, she/it is also
beyond gender dichotomies. Her undutifulness defeats our powers of
comprehension.
A copy made in the absence of one single original, Dolly pushes
the logic of the postmodern simulacrum to its ultimate perversion.
She/it brings Immaculate Conception into a biogenetic third-century
version. The irony reaches a convulsive peak when we remember that
Dolly died of a banal and all too familiar disease: rheumatism. After
this, to add insult to injury, she suffered a last indignity: taxidermy.
She was embalmed and exhibited in a science museum as a scientific
rarity (shades of the nineteenth century) and a media celebrity (very
twentieth century!). Dolly is simultaneously archaic and hypermodern,
she/it is a compound of multiple anachronisms, situated across differ-
ent chronological axes, she/it inhabits different and self-contradictory
time zones. Like other contemporary techno-teratological animals or
entities (the onco-mouse comes to mind), Dolly shatters the linearity of
time and exists in a continuous present. This techno-electronic timeless
time is saturated with asynchronicity—that is to say, it is structurally
unhinged.
Thinking about Dolly blurs the categories of thought we have
inherited from the past—she/it stretches the longitude and lati-
tude of thought itself, adding depth, intensity, and contradiction.
Because she/it embodies complexity—this entity that is no longer
an animal but not yet fully a machine, is THE philosophical prob-
lem of today.
Like Dolly the sheep, we need to become nobody’s mother or
daughter—machines célibataires (bachelor machines); we must pur-
sue a genealogical line that got us to the point where it is possible
for us to think at all. The undutiful antidaughters of unrepresentable
mothers and long-dead fathers can mutate into anti-oedipal agents
of complex processes of reconfiguring what bodies can do, what the

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 xvi PREFACE

task of thinking is, and how we can allow the inhuman elements to
emerge productively.

Nomadic Feminisms
In conclusion, undutiful daughters of contemporary cognitive capital-
ism constitute the political branch of complexity theory. Heterogeneity
is injected into their practice from the word go and unitary forma-
tions get undone accordingly along the way. The “molar” line (that
of Being, identity, fixity, and potestas) and the “molecular” line (that
of becoming, nomadic subjectivity, and potentia) constitute two dis-
symmetrical paths. The central challenge nomadic feminism faces is
how to undo the gravitational pull toward dualistic thinking, so as to
redistribute the power relations rhizomatically, asymmetrically, and
unpredictably. The differences in the starting positions are impor-
tant in that they mark different qualitative levels of power relation.
In other words, you can have a becoming-woman that produces Lady
Thatcher and one that produces Lady Gaga: neither of whom is “fem-
inine” in any conventional sense of the term, and yet they are as dif-
ferent from each other as the workhorse is from the racehorse.
The collapse of the empire of One makes it all the more urgent to
reassert sexual difference as the privileged principle of alterity, of not-
One as constitutive of the subject, and to elaborate nomadic forms
of ethical accountability to match it. What is needed is an ethics of
embodied differences that can sustain this challenge: an undifferenti-
ated grammar of becoming simply will not do. Not a minus, not a
lack, nomadic feminists are complexity in action. What needs to be
abandoned once and for all is the delusional fantasy of unity, totality,
and One-ness. To recognize this basic, ego-deflating principle is the
ground zero of ethical subject formation.
Nomadic subjects are the expression of irrepressible flows of rela-
tions and encounters, and hence also affectivity and desire, that they
are not in charge of. This humbling experience of radical relationality,
which is constitutive of the nonunitary subject, far from opening the
doors to relativism, anchors the subject in an ethical bond to alterity,
to the multiple and external others that are constitutive of that entity
that, out of laziness and habit, we call the “self.” The split, or nonuni-
tary nature of the subject entails the recognition of an affective, inter-
active entity endowed with intelligent flesh and an embodied mind.
What matters here is to keep open the disloyal process of becom-
ing-minoritarian and not to stop at the dialectical role-reversal that
usually sees the former slaves in the position of new masters or the

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 PREFACE xvii

former mistresses in the position of dominatrixes. The point is to go

beyond the logic of reversibility. This is especially important for those
social subjects—women, blacks, postcolonial and other “others”—
who are the carriers of the hopes of the minorities. The process of
becoming nomadic is not merely antiessentialist, but asubjective,
beyond received notions of individuality. It is a transpersonal mode,
thoroughly undutiful and ultimately collective.
Becoming nomadic unfolds by constructing communities where
the notion of transience, of passing, is acknowledged in a sober sec-
ular manner that binds us to the multiple “others” in a vital web
of complex inter-relation. Kinship systems and social bonding, like
political agency, can be rethought differently and differentially, mov-
ing away from the blood, earth, and origin of the classical social
contract. A nomadic politics of becoming-minoritarian is a posthu-
manist, vitalist, nonunitarian, and yet accountable recomposition of
a missing people. A community not bound together by the guilt of
shared violence or by unpayable ontological debts, but rather by the
compassionate acknowledgment of our shared need to negotiate pro-
cesses of sustainable transformations with multiple others in the flow
of monstrous energy of a “life” that does not respond to our names.
You can never therefore be fully and self-assuredly undutiful; you
can only go on trying to become undutiful. Faithful to the premise
that politics begins with our desires and that desires escape us, are
always ahead of us in that they are the driving force that propels us,
I want to argue that we need to remain loyal to the process of becom-
ing-undutiful. This is the lucid expression of our paradoxical political
passion in the peculiar historical context in which we are trying to
make a positive difference. Being children of our times—and not born
fully clad and armed for combat from our fathers’ head—we are in love
with the changes and transformations we have witnessed in our life-
time. Neither nostalgia nor utopia will do. We rather need a leap for-
ward toward a creative reinvention of life-conditions, affectivity, and
figurations for the new kind of subjects that we have already become.
In the meantime, we need to live with transitions and processes,
in-between states and transformations, lingering within complexities
and paradoxes, resisting the fear for the imminent catastrophe.
There is consequently little time or space for nostalgia. Deleuze’s
hybrid nomadic selves; the multiple feminist-operated becoming-
woman of women; Irigaray’s virtual feminine; Haraway’s cyborgs; the
overexposed faces of celebrities and the anonymous faceless masses of
migrants and asylum-seekers who, not unlike Hélène Cixous’s new
Medusa express the transposed differences that constitute our era.

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 xviii PREFACE

They are often rendered in the old-fashioned social imaginary as mon-

strous, hybrid, scary deviants. What if what was at fault here, however,
was the very social imaginary that can only register changes of this
magnitude on the panic-stricken moralistic register of deviancy? What
if these unprogrammed-for others were forms of subjectivity that had
simply shrugged off the shadow of binary logic and negativity and
moved on? Through becoming-animal, machines, earth—through
met(r)amorphoses and meta(l)morphoses—the process of transforma-
tion of the feminist subject goes on. So what if the undutiful nomadic
daughters look, feel, and sound a bit unusual? What if their texts are
disturbing, challenging, and often too dense for the sedentary read-
ing habits of the majority? There is something monstrous, hybrid,
and vibrant in the air; dear readers, I feel new ideas coming our way.
We just do not know yet what this new corpus can do.
ROSI BR AIDOTTI

Notes
1. See Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of
Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).
2. See Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual
Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2011); and Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi
Braidotti (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
3. Marilyn Frye, “The Necessity of Differences: Constructing a Positive
Category of Women,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 21:4 (1996), pp. 991–1010, see especially pp. 1001–1002,
1006–1007.
4. Elizabeth Grosz, “The Hetero and the Homo: The Sexual Ethics of
Luce Irigaray,” in Engaging With Irigaray, ed. Carolyn Burke, Naomi
Schor, and Margaret Whitford (New York: Colombia University
Press, 1994), p. 338.
5. See Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and
Institution (New York: Norton, 1976).
6. See Joan Kelly, “The Double-Edged Vision of Feminist Theory,”
Feminist Studies 5:1 (1979), pp. 216–227; Teresa De Lauretis,
Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); and Braidotti,
Nomadic Subjects.
7. For a more detailed account of this notion, see Rosi Braidotti,
Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006).
8. Genevieve Lloyd, Part of Nature: Self-knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).

9780230118317_01_pre.indd xviii 7/18/2012 4:29:35 PM

 PREFACE xix

9. Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza,

Past and Present (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
10. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imaging Political Culture Beyond the Color
Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Patricia
Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and
the Politics of Empowerment (New York and London: Routledge,
1991).
11. Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History
(London and New York: Verso Books, 1992); and Gabriele Griffin
and Rosi Braidotti, eds., Thinking Differently: A Reader in European
Women’s Studies (London: Zed Books, 2002).
12. See Edgar Morin, Penser l’Europe (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).
13. Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the
Transhuman Condition (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).

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 Ack now l ed gmen t s

Many people have contributed to bringing this book into existence.

First and foremost, we would like to thank all the authors, who were
simply wonderful to work with throughout the various stages of the
process. We are grateful to Gillian Howie and Linda Martín Alcoff
for their unwavering support of this project; to Brigitte Shull, Maia
Woolner, Deepa John, and Joanna Roberts at Palgrave Macmillan for
their tireless work in preparing the manuscript for publication; and to
the anonymous reader at Palgrave Macmillan for insightful feedback
on our book proposal. Great thanks go, as well, to Kristin Cacchioli,
Christopher Childs, and Andrew Lomaglio at Siena College for their
invaluable assistance with quote checking; and to Michelle Ty for her
help with tracking down references for Judith Butler’s chapter. Our
gratitude also goes to Vicky Colombet for painting such a beautiful
cover image; and to Evi Michalaki for compiling the index. Finally,
we would like to thank the four members of our advisory board—
Rosi Braidotti, Adriana Cavarero, Julia Kristeva, and Jasbir Puar—
who have supported our project from its inception.

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 PA R T I

New Concepts

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 Introduction: A Politics of Polyphony

Fanny Söderbäck

One of the defining features of the undutiful daughters’ mind-set

is a productive form of conceptual disobedience.
—Rosi Braidotti1

At its best, feminist theory has the potential to make us become

other than ourselves, to make us unrecognizable.
—Elizabeth Grosz 2

When the Occupy protesters moved into Zuccotti Park in September

2011, they were met by stubborn silence, followed by widespread
complaints about the lack of a unified coherent message. The broad
agenda of the movement led to suspicion and frustration on the part
of journalists, politicians, and the general public alike, all of whom
were concerned that a protest without clearly formulated demands
and explicitly defined leadership would be futile at best, mob-like at
worst. What, exactly, did these people want? What were their goals?
And to whom should such questions be directed? Faced with this
demand for coherence, one might respond, as did Jack Halberstam,
that “the occupation groups do not need an agenda, their pain and
their presence is the agenda. They do not want to present a mani-
festo, they actually are themselves the manifestation of discontent.”3
But the demand for a unified message and a cohesive voice is symp-
tomatic. We are not sure how to deal with the vague, the multi-
lateral, the horizontal, or the polyphone. A coalition as broad and
amorphous as “the 99%” is bound to undo traditional partisan lines
and familiar utopian discourse. Its unruliness is seen as a threat, and
the only response authorities have been able to muster is unparalleled
doses of teargas and pepper spray.

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 4 FANNY SÖDERBÄCK

Criticisms of this sort have often been raised against the feminist
generation typically labeled as “third wave” too. Since the late 1980s
and early 1990s, feminists have, allegedly, been lacking a single cause,
and this has made it hard to claim or even identify concrete victories
or progress. Our grandmothers (“first wave”) fought for the right to
vote, and our mothers (“second wave”) got reproductive rights and
equality in the work place, but the agenda of the unruly and undutiful
daughters of the third wave has, just like the Occupy movement, been
difficult to label in any coherent way.4 This has led to declarations
that feminism is dead, that we have entered a “post-feminist” era. It
should be noted, however, that “post-feminism” was an expression
coined by a women’s literary group as early as 1919.5 Feminism has
had to resurrect itself multiple times, and through multiple voices.
I am far from the first to point out that this linear/generational
wave-model fails to recognize the fact that one feminist voice, with
one single agenda, never really existed. There have, arguably, always
been a multiplicity of voices, always only feminisms, in the plural. If the
second wave—as more recent feminists would have it—was hegemonic
in nature and tended to silence or marginalize women and feminists
who did not fit the white middleclass hetero mold (queer women, dis-
abled women, poor women, subaltern women, trans women, women
who had deliberately rejected motherhood, women of color), those
women, albeit marginalized, have of course always offered alternative
discourses, critical discourses, discourses from the margins.6
The issue of whose voice gets heard is, nevertheless, a challenge. It
always has been. And it remains a challenge for third wave feminists
and occupiers alike. In whose voice do we speak, and to whom? What
does it mean to speak in one’s own voice? And what spaces are made
available for that voice to unfold in? While the Occupy movement lacks
a single voice and agenda, the human microphone—a tactic protest-
ers have used to circumvent police bans on electronic amplification
of speech in public spaces and that Richard Kim in The Nation calls
a “horizontal acoustics of the crowd”7—has brought a new way of
speaking to the public sphere. It embodies a conceptual revolution on
the level of dissemination, and, more importantly, it energizes people,
“amps” us if you will, in that it vocalizes horizontally the collective
demand for change. Many are by now familiar with the prompt that
sparks public discourse and protest these days: “Mic check! Mic check!”
From intellectual superstars such as Slavoj Žižek, Cornell West, and
Judith Butler, to community organizers, war veterans, college students,
workers seeking to organize, anarchists, and men and women whose
homes have been foreclosed—they all speak their message sentence
by sentence, echoed by an assembly of people repeating their words,

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 INTRODUCTION 5

the sound traveling like rings on the water through the crowds. The
human microphone is a concept that turns my voice—our voices—into
a mouthpiece for anyone with a message to share. Their voices become
my voice, and my voice becomes theirs. And in the process, we are
forced to listen, forced to hear each of these voices, one at a time.
But what does it mean to speak not of others, not for others, not
even with others, but to speak the voice of others? What are the implica-
tions of my having to repeat, with my voice, claims and statements with
which, sometimes, I may very well disagree? I find myself standing in
the middle of a crowd of protestors, hesitatingly repeating words that
I find problematic and at odds with my own commitments and views.
Am I the one who is speaking, or am I just the tool for amplifying
someone else’s words? Do I need to believe in and identify with what
I/we say? Should I speak up or remain silent if I do not agree? Or resort
to the sign language that has been developed to express silent assent
or dissent? Will I be held responsible for what I say? Is the human
microphone a powerful tool for maintaining a multiplicity of voices, or
does it run the risk of reducing many voices to one? Halberstam puts
this last question succinctly: “Is the ‘human microphone’ technique
of amplification a brilliant metaphor for the multitude or a sign of
the propensity for consensus politics to weed out eccentricities while
centering pragmatic and ‘reasonable’ statements?”8
This seems to me a question that all feminists must ask them-
selves insofar as both feminisms and feminists are many. Can we ever
speak in one voice? Is consensus possible? Or even desirable? Does
the human microphone have to repeat dutifully, or can it take off on
its own paths, undutifully challenging and changing the discourse
and its intended course? Might it be a healthy exercise to commit
oneself to a movement despite the fact that one does not embrace
each and every claim made in the name of that movement? But how
can this be done without the appropriating forms of representation
Henriette Gunkel speaks of in her introduction later in this volume?
How, in other words, can this be done without sacrificing differ-
ence and singularity, and without a demand for dutiful unity? To
use the trope introduced by Rosi Braidotti in her preface—a trope
that lends its name to this entire volume: What would it mean to be
undutiful together? What might we accomplish as undutiful daugh-
ters so long as we remain committed to this very undutifulness?

* * *

If no single feminism exists, no book can accomplish the task of

mapping feminist voices in any coherent and systematic way. That is,

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 6 FANNY SÖDERBÄCK

therefore, not the task this book sets out to accomplish. If anything,
it seeks to highlight the very multiplicity of voices and agendas that
are necessarily integral to feminist thought and practice. Its aim is
to create an experimental space where feminist voices can be articu-
lated. It is meant as a cartography that reveals the points and the lines
where tension and dissent happen and change occurs—a cartogra-
phy, in other words, that points to the peripheral positions where a
permanently undetermined revolution is at work. Our hope is that
it will function as a map that traces new tendencies in the existing
body of feminist thought while at the same time probing the cracks
of the present so as to open up horizons for feminisms-to-come. The
essays presented here are thus both responses to and reflections on
the specific circumstances of our present, and attempts to dream and
envision possible alternatives for the future. To this end, contribu-
tors diagnose and discuss issues related to the environmental crisis;
reproductive technologies; queer and racialized subjectivities; activ-
ist strategies and aesthetic practices; conceptual challenges; transna-
tional alliances; and modes of dealing with our own feminist history
and memory.
The feminisms and feminists of this collection offer an array of
critical analyses and dreams for futures-to-come, just like those who
presently occupy public spaces and college campuses around the
world present us with a wide range of worries and visions alike. In
both cases, it may be hard to identify leaders, to articulate clearly
defined solutions or even demands, and to measure victory and prog-
ress. But this does not make such projects and protests futile. Rather,
it makes them ever more attuned to the complexity and heterogeneity
of political life. And just like the occupiers have been forced, in the
face of unique circumstances, to reinvent the means for protest and
public discourse—as in the case of the human microphone—the con-
tributors of this book are seeking to reinvent the conceptual toolbox
so as to be better equipped to deal with and respond to the particular
and unique circumstances of our time.

* * *

In the opening chapter of this book, “The Future of Feminist Theory:

Dreams for New Knowledges,” Elizabeth Grosz takes the opportu-
nity to dream. What, she asks, is feminist theory at its best? What is
its radical promise? To what can it aspire? It seems appropriate to open
a volume like this with a kind of manifesto for the future. If Grosz
is right that the possibility of any radical change first and foremost

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 INTRODUCTION 7

depends on new concepts, then the conceptual apparatuses developed

by the many authors included here (“feminist anachronism,” “aleatory
time,” “interruptive time,” “écriture futuriste,” “swervy writing,”
“polylectorality,” “feminist extinction,” “hydrofeminism,” “hard-
breasted bodies,” “transgenre,” “dandyism,” “shadow feminism,”
“gaga feminism,” “the third sex,” “third dimensional feminism,” and
so on) have the potential of providing new frameworks not only for
thinking through the issues at hand but also for generating a differ-
ent future. As Grosz puts it, concepts are “what we produce when we
need to address the forces of the present and to transform them into
new and different forces that act in the future.”
But if concepts indeed are the dynamite that can catapult us beyond
the current state of affairs, and if concepts, as Grosz puts it, render
change possible “by adding incorporeals, immaterials, to the force or
weight of materiality,” then how might we as feminists avoid repeat-
ing the common trope that equates concepts with masculinity and
matter with femininity? How, in other words, might we embrace con-
cepts without reproducing a traditional duality between the abstract
and the concrete, form and matter, the ideal and the real—couples
that all-too-often have been conceived as running parallel to an imag-
ined dualism between male and female?
The essays included in this first section could be seen as attempts to
address this very question. The authors gathered here take on central
conceptual issues in our culture and give them a feminist face. If Grosz
emphasizes the role of concepts in creating the new, Red Chidgey, in
her chapter, “The Need for the New in Feminist Activist Discourse:
Notes Toward a Scene of Anachronism,” explores the very category of
novelty through an examination of feminisms’ relationship to the past
and to history. Her text could be seen as resonating with Grosz’s claim
that theory and practice must go hand in hand; that practice—in this
case, activist voices in feminist zines—needs concepts in order to make
change. Chidgey provides a conceptual toolbox that helps us account
for the nonlinear genealogy of feminist generations. Her chapter is
one of several that treat the very question of political change through
a temporal lens, and the concept of time is indeed one that feminist
thinkers across the disciplines have grappled with in recent years so as
to dislodge it from its patriarchal moors and give it a feminist/femi-
nine face.9 As Grosz puts it in her chapter, questions of time “are no
longer the concerns of cosmologists and physicists but also of those
committed to social and political change.”
Time has always provided the frame in which we are able to
articulate both continuity and discontinuity, yet the progressive

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 8 FANNY SÖDERBÄCK

temporal paradigm that we moderns take for granted (linear time,

which, I have argued elsewhere, functions through a repression of
cyclical time and the material conditions of our existence10) is one
that runs the risk both of “forgetfulness” (it does not allow for the
“return” into the past that would ground us in history and provide
us with continuity) and, at the same time, “repetition” (it simulta-
neously and paradoxically traps us in the past, foreclosing the pos-
sibility of a radical break or the production of “new” horizons). As
Tina Chanter has noted, we “need an understanding of processes of
social change that accommodates both a sense of continuity with
the past and the possibility of and need for discontinuity.”11 This
is a dynamic that I take to be one of the important challenges for
feminist theory today, and each of the contributors in this section
takes on this challenge.
Chidgey deliberately seeks to address the tension between past
and future feminist horizons. How, she asks, can feminist activist
discourse respond to and relate to its own past, and how will such
a response come to shape our future? How, in other words, do we
negotiate the need for continuity with the desire for discontinuity
and change? On her reading, it is through our relation with—and
return to—the past that we can articulate new feminist agendas of the
present and future. Drawing on examples from British feminist zines,
she traces four distinct ways of articulating this tension, all of which
fall under the broader category of what she brands “re-feminisms”:
reverberation, repudiation, recall, and repetition.
Chidgey’s discussion of these four strategies—each of which is
an attempt to explain the relationship between continuity and dis-
continuity—is less concerned with how feminists ought to deal, or
how we do deal, with the past of a patriarchal tradition, and more so
with how feminists deal (or fail to deal) with our own feminist pasts.
The challenge, again, is that of the relationship between continuity
and discontinuity—both temporally and in terms of feminist agendas
and voices. How can a feminist cultural memory (or feminist cultural
memories) form the basis for a politics of transformation? And how
can such cultural memory be attentive to the heterogeneity of voices
that we call “feminism”? How, in other words, might we build coali-
tions of solidarity that resist institutionalization; that are driven by
a passion for collective productions of unpredictable and untamed
“dissident voices” rather than a mass-movement of likeminded femi-
nists? As we have seen already, so long as there is diversity among
feminists, and different feminist voices and subjects, feminists will
have to be well equipped to deal with such differences in a way that

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 INTRODUCTION 9

neither excludes some feminist subjects nor annihilates or collapses

the differences between us.12

* * *

In her chapter, “The Interruptive Feminine: Aleatory Time and

Feminist Politics,” Emanuela Bianchi explicitly tackles the question
of time in the context of feminist thought. Again, if time is a concept
that traditionally has been associated with male subjectivity and dis-
embodied ideality, Bianchi seeks to articulate time in feminine, cor-
poreal terms. Somewhat surprisingly, she finds her conceptual toolbox
in the work of Aristotle, whose discussion of woman as the result of
a disruption in the generative process, a force that acts against nature
in an unruly way, provides a starting point for her own discussion of
feminine time as aleatory and interruptive in nature—a rupture in the
smooth flow of masculine/linear/progressive time. What for Aristotle
doubtless was meant as misogynist remarks about woman as an evo-
lutionary “error,” Bianchi uses as a resource to establish woman’s dis-
ruptive, subversive potential. Women, on this account, are undutiful
not only genealogically (vis-à-vis their mothers and fathers), but also
more broadly through their most basic relation to time.
On Bianchi’s account, discontinuity (interruption) stands at the
forefront of a political program of radical change. If we moderns
have conceptualized progress and change in terms of masculine/lin-
ear time (typically juxtaposed with feminine/cyclical stasis), Bianchi
draws from the work of Aristotle an alternative coupling, namely that
between continuous cyclical and teleological masculine time, on the
one hand, and an aleatory and interruptive (undutiful?) time, marked
as feminine, on the other. The latter “offers a non-essential tempo-
ral, phenomenological, ethical, and political modality that supplies
a vitally necessary resistance” to the masculine narrative of modern
progress—a narrative that has casted woman as a passive and atempo-
ral bystander. But Bianchi, too, runs into the challenge of negotiating
the tension between discontinuity and continuity: if women indeed
represent interruption as a creative force and locus for change, then
women’s lives can easily be interrupted and their bodies encroached
upon. As Bianchi puts it, “Developing a feminist conception of being
as interruptive thus requires a framework for freedom from interrup-
tion.” Women’s right to bodily integrity (continuity in relation to
their own needs and projects) must therefore be publically recognized
and protected under the law. We begin to see the immediate ways
in which the conceptual analysis carried through here can come to

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 10 FANNY SÖDERBÄCK

inform more pragmatic concerns such as sexual rights and the legal
protection of women and women’s bodies.
The aleatory appears, again, in M. F. Simone Roberts’s chapter,
“Écriture Futuriste”—this time as a swervy figure, a mode of unduti-
ful writing, disrupting the lexical surfaces of the written text. As the
other contributors in this section, Roberts returns to the past in search
of the conceptual tools that we might use for renewal and change.
More specifically, she returns to the long lost past of the Bronze
Age, to Sumer, where to be literate was to read two—gendered—
languages. In the royal houses of the city of Emar, the feminine fine
tongue Emesal and the masculine princely tongue Emegir together
made up the Sumerian language. Feminists in the 1980s, particularly
French feminists such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, experi-
mented with what has become widely known as écriture feminine—
a unique and poetic writerly style meant to express the specificity
of female subjectivity, morphology and desire; of this we might say
that they in fact attempted to revitalize an age-long tradition of what
Roberts calls polylectorality. The issue, for Roberts, is not only our
capacity to speak or write differently, but also our capacity (or, more
accurately, incapacity) to read and understand such swervy writing.
If the Sumerians were polylectoral, our culture is decidedly monolec-
toral. We are thus poorly equipped to approach anything other than
the linear/philosophical/objective masculine language that has come
to largely dominate our discourse.
Not only what we say but how we say it matters. We saw this in our
discussion of the human microphone. One of the most important
conceptual insights reached by feminist thinkers is, as noted above,
the inseparability of form and content. Ever since we left the platonic
cave, the rigid distinction between form and matter has been heralded
as a powerful tool in the hands of patriarchal thinking. Language, phi-
losophy, culture, thought, reason—they have all triumphantly tried
to master the unruliness and undutifulness of matter. Such separation
has come at the expense of women and women’s bodies: the separa-
tion of form and matter (like that of time and space) depends on a
sexual division of labor. Feminist thinking is thus often marked by
stubborn attempts to collapse such distinctions, to put into question
the alleged purity of conceptual thought. Roberts, too, takes on this
task, stressing that “the tension between these terms be kept open,”
and that language—conceptual language, philosophical language—
be allowed to be swervy, impure, embodied, and subjective.
But if feminists before her emphasized the need for such experimen-
tal writing, Roberts goes one step further, stressing that “the écritures

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 INTRODUCTION 11

produced by feminine writing subjects (men and women) need to be

taught, read, and published as legitimate textual practices and as critical
methodologies” (my emphasis). It is, in other words, a matter of dis-
semination, of our capacity to read and to listen, to hear voices other
than our own. To bring it back to the discussion with which I opened
this introduction, it is as monolectorals that we demand one voice, one
message, one agenda. As polylectorals, we might be better equipped not
only to deal with experimental writing and voices from the margins,
but also to hear many voices at once, sometimes contradicting voices,
without imposing a demand for a unified and coherent message.
This requires that we listen actively and with patience. Anyone
who has participated in an exercise of humanly amplified speech
knows that it is a slow and sometimes painstakingly frustrating pro-
cess. The speech is disseminated through the crowd word by word,
sentence by sentence. And while real microphones amplify the sound
of one speaker, located in the center, the human microphone reverses
this dynamic: at the center stands an individual whose voice is barely
audible, while the echo created by the crowd—a crowd that grows
larger the further we move from the center—intensifies and can reach
deafening volumes at the periphery. On this model, amplification
happens on the margins, not in the center. The aim of this book is to
gather polyphonic feminist voices from our present. We ask the reader
to approach them polylectorally and with attentive patience, putting
aside for a moment the demand for a unified coherent message and
voice. Such is the task of an undutiful feminism. Such is the task of
feminisms-to-come.

Notes
1. Rosi Braidotti, “The Society of Undutiful Daughters,” p. xii in this
volume.
2. Elizabeth Grosz, “The Future of Feminist Theory: Dreams for New
Knowledges,” p. 22 in this volume.
3. Jack Halberstam with Jayna Brown, “Riots and Occupations: The Fall
of the US and the Rise of The Politics of Refusal,” October 19, 2011,
http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com, accessed on February 10, 2012.
4. For an illuminating discussion of the familial/generational language
that tends to mark our discourse on the feminist “waves” of the last
century (grandmother—mother—daughter), see Astrid Henry, Not
My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). Henry borrows the
term “matrophor” from Rebecca Dakin Quinn to illustrate “the per-
sistent nature of maternal metaphors in feminism” (2).

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 12 FANNY SÖDERBÄCK

5. Nancy F. Scott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 282.
6. Think, for example, of Celestine Ware, who already in 1970 (in her
book Woman Power) challenged the then emerging second wave to
address not only racism in general, but also its own internal racist
tendencies. See Leslie L. Heywood, ed., The Women’s Movement
Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism, vol. 1 (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), p. 136.
7. Richard Kim, “We Are All Human Microphones Now,” The Nation,
October 3, 2011, http://www.thenation.com/blog/163767/we-are
-all-human-microphones-now, accessed on December 23, 2011.
8. Halberstam, “Riots and Occupations.”
9. See, for example, Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist
Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002); Tina Chanter,
Time, Death, and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Lee Edelman, No Future:
Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2004); Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities,
Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010);
Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion (New York: Routledge,
1995); Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the
Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Elizabeth
Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2005); Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and
Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York
University Press, 2005); and, most recently, Christina Schües,
Dorothea E. Olkowski, and Helen A. Fielding, eds., Time in Feminist
Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).
10. See Fanny Söderbäck, “Revolutionary Time: Revolt as Temporal
Return,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37:2 (2012),
pp. 301–324. While time and change by no means are identical (the
relationship between the two has indeed been disputed among philo-
sophers since Aristotle), I hold that they are interdependent and that
we can only conceive of (social and political) change in light of a discus-
sion of time. Grosz has argued that a politics of change depends on a
reconsideration of and an attention to the question of time: “The more
clearly we understand our temporal location as beings who straddle the
past and the future without the security of a stable and abiding present,
the more mobile our possibilities are, and the more transformation
becomes conceivable” (Grosz, The Nick of Time, p. 14).
11. Chanter, Time, Death, and the Feminine, p. 22.
12. For a succinct discussion of this very challenge, see Lori J. Marso,
“Feminism’s Quest for Common Desires,” Symposium 8:1 (2010),
pp. 263–269.

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 CH A P T ER 1

The Future of Feminist Theory:

Dreams for New Knowledges

Elizabeth Grosz

Instead of asking questions such as, what will feminist theory become
in the future? how will it change? or how will it remain the same?
I want to address here a series of questions regarding what feminist
theory could be, or what I dream a future feminist thought should be:
what is feminist theory at its best? What is its radical promise? How
is it to be located relative to other fields of knowledge, to the range
and variety of interests of women understood in all their differences,
and to what remains unsaid, unspoken, and unrepresented in other
knowledges? To what, in short, can feminist theory aspire?

Concepts
In What Is Philosophy?, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari ask, what
is it to think? What is philosophy? What is a concept? In addressing
the question of what feminist theory is, and what it could become,
we need to understand first what theory in general is and might
become. Deleuze and Guattari’s work is, if not indispensable, then
at least extremely useful: they enable us to understand that con-
cepts and theories are strategies, struggling among themselves
with forces and effects that make a difference, that are significant
beyond themselves insofar as they become techniques by which we
address the real. In exploring what feminist theory is, I am pri-
marily addressing the question of what it is to think differently,
innovatively, in terms that have never been developed before, about
the most forceful and impressive impacts that impinge upon us and

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 14 ELIZABETH GROSZ

that concepts can address, if not resolve or answer. Concepts are

one of the ways in which we come to address and attempt to deal
with the overabundance of order that surrounds us; other ways
include the functive, which orders science, and percepts and affects,
which organize the arts.
Concepts emerge, have value, and function only through the
impact of problems, problems generated from an absolute outside,
from the real. Concepts are not solutions to problems—most prob-
lems, like the problem of gravity, of living with others, or that of
mortality, have no solutions—but ways of living with problems.
They are the production of immaterial forces that line materiality
with incorporeals, potentials, latencies: concepts are the virtualities
of matter, the ways in which matter can come to be otherwise, the
promise of a future different from the present.1 Concepts are ways in
which the living add ideality to the world, transforming the givenness
of the real, the pressing problem, into various forms of order, into
possibilities for being otherwise. Concepts are practices we perform,
not on things, but on events to give them consistency, coherence,
boundaries, purpose, and use. Concepts do not solve the problems
that events generate for us: they enable us to surround ourselves with
possibilities for being otherwise, which the direct impact of events
on us does not. So concepts are not answers or solutions—we tend
to think that solutions eliminate problems when in fact the problem
always coexists with its solutions—but modes of address, modes of
connection: they are “movable bridges” between those forces that
relentlessly impinge on us from the outside to form a problem and
those that we can muster within ourselves to address such problems.2
This is why concepts are created: they have a date and often, also a
name; they have a history that seizes hold of them in inconsistent
ways, making of them new concepts with each seizure and trans-
formation insofar as each concept has borders that link it up to and
evolve it with other concepts.
Perhaps most interestingly, concepts cannot be identified with
discourses or statements, which means that concepts can never be
true. Truth is a relation between propositions and states of affairs in
the world; concepts are never propositional because they address, not
states of affairs, but only events, problems. Events are, by definition,
problems, insofar as they are unique, unrepeatable conjunctions of
forces that require some kind of response under peril of danger. For
Deleuze, one of the mistakes of institutional philosophy is to collapse
the concept into the proposition, to assert questions of truth in place
of questions of force.3

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 THE FUTURE OF FEMINIST THEORY 15

We need concepts in order to think our way in a world of forces that

we do not control. Concepts are not means of control, but forms of
address that carve out for us a space and time in which we may become
capable of responding to the indeterminate particularity of events.
Concepts are thus ways of addressing the future, and in this sense are
the conditions under which a future different from the present—the
goal of every radical politics—becomes possible. Concepts are not
premonitions, ways of predicting what will be; on the contrary, they
are modes of enactment of new forces; they are themselves the mak-
ing of the new. The concept is what we produce when we need to
address the forces of the present and to transform them into new and
different forces that act in the future. It is an excess over matter that
enables matter to become other.
The concept is indispensable to addressing the new, not through
anticipation or forecasting but through the task of opening up the
real, the outside, or materiality that it performs. The concept is thus
the friend of all those seeking radical social change, new events, and
new alignments of forces. The concept does not accompany revolu-
tionary or radical change (change must be accomplished in its own
terms, in the field or territory in which it functions) but renders it
possible by adding incorporeals, immaterials, to the force or weight of
materiality. Materiality does not contain this incorporeal, which lines
its surfaces or facets, but they (matter plus the incorporeal) are its
virtualities or the possibility of becoming-other. The concept is how
living bodies, human bodies—male and female bodies of all types—
protract themselves into materiality and enable materiality to affect
and transform life. The concept is one way in which life attaches itself
to forces immanent in but undirected by the present. Along with the
percept and the affect, the concept is how we welcome a people to
come, a world to come, a movement beyond ourselves rather than
simply affirm what we are.
In short, theory is never about us, about who we are. It affirms
only what we can become, extracted as it is from the events that move
us beyond ourselves. If theory is conceptual in this Deleuzian sense,
it is freed from representation—from representing the silent minori-
ties that ideology inhibited (subjects), and from representing the real
through the truths it affirms (objects)—and it is opened up to the vir-
tual, to the future that does not yet exist. Feminist theory is essential,
not as plan or anticipation of action to come, but as the addition of
ideality or incorporeality to the horrifying materiality of the present
as patriarchal, racist, and ethnocentric, a ballast to enable the present
to be transformed.

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 16 ELIZABETH GROSZ

The Force of Concepts

Feminist theory is the production of concepts relevant to understand-
ing women, femininity, and social subordination more generally, and
that welcome women’s transformation beyond or at the very limits of
those concepts that have defined men, women, and their relations up
to now. Both patriarchal and feminist theory, each in their different
ways, address an intractable problem, the problem of sexual difference,
the problem of morphological bifurcation, the production of two dif-
ferent types of bodily form, and consequently two different types of
subjectivity, two different types of being that cannot be understood
through or reduced to a singular, universal, or purely human model.
This is a problem that every society, however small (whether human
or animal), must face—an ongoing event that cannot be evaded but
for which there is no solution. How the two sexes are to coexist is a
question that life itself, in its unpredictable variability, addresses with-
out universal solutions, for it is one of the pressing frameworks (along
with birth, illness, and mortality) that every society must manage if
it is to continue.
Sexual difference is managed in two contrary ways through patri-
archal and feminist conceptualizations: for patriarchy, the task is to
ensure a certain or guaranteed precedence of masculinity and male
privilege even as sexual difference remains open-ended and to be
resolved or lived through various strategies. For feminism, the task
is to seek either a more equitable distribution of resources between
men and women (for liberal and Marxist feminism) or the possibil-
ity of dual sexual symmetry entailed through an acknowledgement
of sexual difference. Each is a contestatory relation, a struggle that
attempts to bind or unbind certain forces through the elaboration of
concepts that singularize, specify, and surround these forces. Each
struggles to generate concepts that bring into existence a future that
serves its interests. Patriarchy and feminism, however, are not two
protagonists in an evenly matched struggle, for feminism is the very
excess and site of the transformation of patriarchy. Their relations are
more discontinuous, open-ended, and intertwined, each calling into
existence its own constituencies, its own future peoples, and its own
landscape of events without direct reference to one another.
Whether patriarchal, racist, colonialist, or otherwise, theory is one
means by which we invent futures, one intense practice of produc-
tion (like art, economic production, or many other kinds of labor)
that makes things—in this case, concepts—that did not exist before,
thus opening up worlds to come. This is not a privileged production

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 THE FUTURE OF FEMINIST THEORY 17

(indeed, within capitalism, its value is quite minimal), but it is nev-

ertheless a necessary condition for the creation of new horizons of
invention. Theory is by no means the only path to social change but
remains a necessary condition for the creation of new frameworks,
new questions, new concepts by which social change can move beyond
the horizon of the present. Although struggles at the level of practice
are obviously crucial for the accomplishment of social change, with-
out concepts—concepts that both face materiality and extract from
it some of its uncontained force, while providing us with a minimal
order with which to address and frame it for our purposes—we have
no horizon for the new, no possibility of overcoming the weight of
the present, no view of what might be. Without concepts, without
theory, practice has no hope; its goal is only reversal and redistribu-
tion, not transformation.

The New
At its best, feminist theory is about the invention of new practices,
positions, projects, techniques, and values. Feminist theory must
understand and address what is and has been in attempting to pre-
apprehend and control what might come into being; to that extent,
feminist theory is committed to critique, that is, the process of dem-
onstrating the contingency and transformability of what is given.
There needs to be a production of alternatives to patriarchal (racist,
colonialist, ethnocentric) knowledges and also, more urgently and
less recognized, a freedom to address, make, and transform concepts,
so that we may invent new ways of addressing and opening up the
real, new types of subjectivity, new relations between subjects and
objects.
To be more explicit, the emphasis feminist theory places on cer-
tain questions needs to be reoriented and directed to other concerns.
I do not want to suggest that these questions are useless, for each has
had and will continue to have its historical significance for feminist
thought; rather, I would like to see their dominance of the field end,
and new questions be asked. There are four areas of feminist concern
that I believe it would be good now to displace in favor of other
issues, other inquiries:
1. The overwhelming dominance, even among those who lament
its existence, of identity politics; the concern with questions of the
subject’s identity, experiences, feelings, affects, agency, and energies.
The multiplication of subject positions; the opening up of the subject
to all the vagaries of a hyphenated existence as class, race, gender, and

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 18 ELIZABETH GROSZ

sexually specific being; the proliferation of memoirs; the overwhelm-

ing emphasis on the personal; the anecdotal; the narrational—while
important for a long period of feminism’s existence, they have now
shown us the limit of feminist theory. To the extent that feminist
theory focuses on questions of the subject or identity, it leaves ques-
tions about the rest of existence untouched. Feminism abdicates the
right to speak about the real, about the world, about matter, about
nature, and in exchange cages itself in the reign of the “I”: who am I?
Who recognizes me? What can I become?
This focus on the primacy of the subject has obscured two issues.
One relates to what constitutes the subject that the subject cannot
know about itself (the limits of the subject’s subjectivity; the content
and nature of the agency or agencies that we can attribute to a sub-
ject). The other relates to what is beyond the subject, bigger than
the subject, outside the subject’s control. The subject does not make
itself or know itself. The subject seeks to be known and recognized,
but only through its reliance on others, including the very others
who function to collectively subjugate the subject. We need to ask
with more urgency now than in the past, if the subject strives to
be recognized as a subject of value in a culture that does not value
that subject in the terms it seeks, what is such recognition worth?
And once the subject is recognized, what is created through this
recognition? In focusing on the subject at the cost of the forces that
make up the world, we lose the capacity to see beyond the subject, to
engage with the world, to make the real. We wait to be recognized
instead of making something, inventing something that will enable
us to recognize ourselves, or more interestingly, to eschew recogni-
tion altogether.
I am not what others see in me; I am what I do, what I make.
I become according to what I do, not according to who I am. This is
not to ignore the very real differences between subjects and their vari-
ous social positions, only to suggest that these differences, and not
the subjectivities between which these differences are distributed, are
the vehicles for the invention of the new.
It is the inhuman work of difference, rather than its embodiment
in human identity, subjectivity, consciousness, its reflection in and
through identity, that may direct a future feminism. We may become
more interested in those differences that make us more than we are,
recognizable perhaps for a moment in our path of becoming and
self-overcoming, but never fixed in terms of how we can be read (by
others) or how we classify ourselves, never on the basis of an iden-
tity or a position. Instead of seeing difference as the external and

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 THE FUTURE OF FEMINIST THEORY 19

preconfigurable relation between two distinct objects or things, dif-

ference in itself must be considered primordial, as a nonreciprocal
emergence, that which underlies and makes possible all identities. As
Deleuze claims,

Instead of something distinguished from something else, imagine

something which distinguishes itself—and yet that from which it
distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it. Lightning, for
example, distinguishes itself from the black sky but must also trail it
behind, as though it were distinguishing itself from that which does
not distinguish itself from it.4

Difference is the point at which determination (the lightning) meets

the undetermined (the black sky). This difference in itself is continu-
ally subjected to mediation, restructuring, or reorganization—to
a neutralization—and identified with entities or things. Whatever
identity there may be—lightning has the most provisional and tem-
porary form—difference is that movement of self-differentiation,
that movement of internal differentiation that separates itself from
the difference that surrounds and infuses it: difference produces its
own differentiations from the undifferentiated.
2. Linked to the preeminence of the subject is the privileging of
the epistemological (questions of discourse, knowledge, truth, and
scientificity) over the ontological (questions of the real, of matter, of
force, or of energy). Epistemology is the field of what we, as know-
ing, suitably qualified subjects, can and do know of the objects we
investigate, including those objects that are themselves subjects. Thus
it makes sense that in a politics of intellectual struggle, epistemologi-
cal questions have prevailed, and have come to displace or cover over
ontological questions. The whole of twentieth-century thought has
followed this trajectory—the translation of (metaphysical) questions
about the real into (epistemic) questions of the true—which is also
a translation of the categories relevant for the object into those con-
cerned with the subject. Feminist theory needs to turn to questions
of the real—not empirical questions regarding states of affairs (for
these remain epistemological), but questions of the nature and forces
of the real.
This means that, instead of further submersion in the politics of
representation, in which the real can only ever be addressed through
the lens imposed on it by representation in general and language in
particular, where ontology is always mediated by epistemology, we
need to reconsider representational forces in their impact on the

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 20 ELIZABETH GROSZ

mediation of the real. We need to reconceptualize the real as forces,

energies, events, impacts that preexist and function both before and
beyond, as well as within, representation. This opens us up to a series
of new questions and new objects for feminist interrogation: not just
social systems but also natural systems; not just concrete relations
between real things but also relations between forces and fields; not
just economic, linguistic, and cultural analysis but also biological,
chemical, and physical analysis; not just relations between the past
and present but also between the present and the future.
3. Feminist theory needs to affirm, not the human subject and
what it knows, but rather what is inhuman in all its rich resonances.
This is entailed in the very idea of difference itself. The concept of dif-
ference, ironically, links together various categories of subject, various
types of identity, all of them human, not through the elaboration
of a shared identity but through the variation or difference that the
human, in all its modalities, asserts in differentiating itself from the
inhuman, that is, both the subhuman (the material, organic, and liv-
ing worlds) and the superhuman (the cultural, the collective, the cos-
mic, and the supernatural). This perspective, which inserts cultural
and political life in the interstices between two orders of the inhu-
man—the pre-personal and the impersonal—provides a new frame-
work and connection, a new kind of liberation for the subject, who
understands that culture and history have an outside, are framed and
given position only through the orders of difference that structure
the material world.
A future feminism needs to place the problematic of sexual dif-
ference, the most fundamental concern of feminist thought, in the
context of both animal becomings (we have tended to oppose cul-
ture to nature, to see culture as variable and nature as fixed) and the
microscopic and imperceptible becomings that regulate matter itself.
Sexual difference—the bifurcation of life into at least two morpho-
logical types, two different types of body, two relations to reproduc-
tion, two relations to sexuality and pleasure, two relations to being
and to knowing—is not only our culture’s way of regulating subjects,
it is the way in which the dynamic natural world has generated a
mechanism for the production of endless difference. Sexual difference
is an invention of life itself, which the human inherits from its prehu-
man past and its animal connections.
We have devoted much effort to the social, cultural, representa-
tional, historical, and national variations in human relations. We now
need to develop a more complex and sophisticated understanding of
the ways in which natural forces—both living and nonliving—frame,

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 THE FUTURE OF FEMINIST THEORY 21

enrich, and complicate our understanding of the subject, its interior,

and what the subject can know. In other words, feminism needs to
direct itself to questions of complexity, emergence, and difference
that the study of subjectivity shares with the study of chemical and
biological phenomena. We need to understand in more explicit terms
how newness and change are generated, and what mechanisms are
available below or above the level of the social to explain the unpre-
dictability of social and political change. These are no longer just the
concerns of cosmologists and physicists but also of those committed
to social and political change.
4. Finally, perhaps the very notion of separate forms or types
of oppression, or the notion that various forms of oppression are
recognizable, systematic, and distinct needs to be reconsidered.
I certainly do not want to suggest that there is no such thing as
oppression, but I would like us to reconsider the terms by which
this is commonly understood. Oppression is made up of myriad acts,
large and small, individual and collective, private and public: patri-
archy, racism, classism, ethnocentrism are all various names we give
to characterize a pattern among these acts, a discernable form. I am
not suggesting that patriarchy and racism don’t exist and don’t have
mutually inducing effects on all individuals, just that they are not
structures, not systems, but immanent patterns, models we impose
on a plethora of acts to create some order. What exists, what is real,
are these teaming acts—the acts of families, of sexual couples, of
institutions and the very particular relations they establish between
experts and their objects of investigation: the acts of teachers and
students, or doctors and patients. Patriarchy, racism, and classism
are the labels we attach, for the sake of convenience, a form of short-
hand, to describe the myriad acts that we believe are somehow sys-
tematically connected.
Patriarchy is not a self-contained system that can be connected
to the self-contained system that is racism to form an intersectional
oppression: there are only a multiplicity of acts, big and small, sig-
nificant and insignificant. If we understand that this multiplicity
configures in unique ways for each individual, yet enables shared pat-
terns to be discerned for those who share certain social positions,
then we will not confuse these acts for a latent order or, worse, for a
coercive system. Instead, we will be able to see, not just how socially
marginalized groups are discriminated against, but the agency and
inventiveness, the positive productivity that even the most socially
marginalized subjects develop or invent through the movements they
utilize and the techniques that their marginalization enables them

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 22 ELIZABETH GROSZ

to develop. Perhaps there are only differences, incalculable and inter-

minable differences for us to address; no systems, no identities, no
intersections—just the multiplying force of difference.
Race, class, gender, and sexuality—although they appear as static
categories and, of course, are capable of conceptually freezing them-
selves through various definitions for various purposes, are precisely
such differences that cannot be determined in advance. What an
intersectional analysis means for, say, a poverty-stricken woman in
Sri Lanka, or a working class lesbian in Japan, or a single mother in
Nigeria remains to be determined, and it is wishful thinking on the
part of the analyst or activist to believe that these differences can be
represented by first-person voices, or measured by any “objective”
schemas (no voice ever represents a group, category, or people with-
out dissent, and no categories are so clear-cut and unambiguous that
they can be applied willy-nilly without respect for the specific objects
of their investigation).
In a future feminist theory, we may no longer look inward to
affirm our own positions but outward, to the world, and to what we
don’t control or understand in order to expand, not confirm, what
we know, what we are, and what we feel. Feminist theory can become
the provocation to think otherwise, to become otherwise. It can be a
process of humbling of the pretensions of consciousness to knowledge
and mastery and a spur to stimulate a process of opening oneself up
to the otherness that is the world itself. At its best, feminist theory
has the potential to make us become other than ourselves, to make
us unrecognizable.

Notes
1. “The concept is an incorporeal, even though it is incarnated or
effectuated in bodies” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is
Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell [New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994], p. 21).
2. Ibid., p. 23.
3. Concepts, unlike propositions, move, change, and transform—that is
why they do not form systems or have forms of truth: “Concepts are
centers of vibrations, each in itself and every one in relation to all the
others. This is why they all resonate rather than cohere or correspond
with each other” (ibid.).
4. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 28.

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 CH A P T ER 2

The Need for the New in Feminist

Activist Discourse: Notes Toward a
Scene of Anachronism

Red Chidgey

There is nothing as inevitable as declarations of “the new” in feminist

activist discourse. Whether across or within generations, this strategy
partakes in hybrid logics of post-feminism and grassroots agendas.
In an attempt to mobilize, these “new feminisms” often claim inno-
vative and historically specific materialisms, agendas, and identities,
whilst unconsciously disseminating a usually atrophied understand-
ing of feminist histories past.1
The purpose of this chapter is to rethink feminist claims to the new
through the lens of cultural memory. Drawing on excerpts from feminist
zines—self-produced, noncommercial, photocopied publications—this
chapter develops a concept of what I will call a “scene of anachronism.”
This creative strategy seeks to traverse the current impasse concerning
“third wave feminism,”2 and to re-read British feminist activisms across
established time-lines.

Feminism and Other Anachronisms

Anachronism, derived from the Greek ανά (ana: up, against, back,
re-) and χρόνος (chronos : time), refers to a rupture in the chronologi-
cal order. It is a term that can be used when (and where) something—
a mode of utterance, an artefact, a behavior, a being, or an event—is
outside of its assumed historical reference. As an adjective, to be
anachronistic implies an old-fashionedness that is out of step with

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 24 RED CHIDGEY

the present. This assumed taboo and embarrassment carries a cer-

tain attachment to feminism. In repeated cycles from early to present
surges of Western feminisms, advances in women’s rights have been
met with the anachronistic claim that feminism is dead, or no longer
needed.3 Even feminist narratives of loss, progress, and return com-
monly feature “the paradoxical positioning of feminism itself as over,
or as anachronistic.”4
Analytically, the anachronism names “a range of temporal anoma-
lies” as opposed to the “regular, linear, and unidirectional pattern”
of straight time.5 Recalling Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida’s
“methodological and political attention to undecidability,”6 the
anachronism can be used to rethink feminism’s frame of reference and
epistemic commitments.7 As Michael Rothberg puts it: “Although
forms of anachronism constitute different types of ‘error’ when per-
ceived from a historicist perspective, they can also be powerfully sub-
versive and demystifying in the ways that they expose the ideological
assumptions of historicist categorization.”8 To propose a scene of
anachronism, therefore, is to think through the assemblages of who
and what gets remembered, forgotten, revived, and reclaimed—in
what times and places—and of the inherent power-lines that amplify
such discursive practices.
Such strategies have already been explored in feminist scholarship,
including reading “queer tendencies” in the women’s peace camp held
at Greenham Common, United Kingdom (1981–2000); mapping
“third wave” praxis in the activities and politics of the British 1970s
feminist theater troupe Sistershow; and comparing similar textual
strategies in suffragette scrapbooks, women’s liberation movement
periodicals, and contemporary feminist zines.9 A strategy of anachro-
nism has also been used to reread second wave activism and theory, to
critique hegemonic narratives, and to generate more racially diverse
activist chronologies.10
I propose a scene of anachronism that can be used in five ways. First,
for interpreting convergences between generations (whether deemed
politically progressive or not). Second, to clarify socio-political-
technical changes and the ways in which feminists have responded
to and appropriated these, especially with regards to “new” as well as
residual forms of media, technologies, and hybrid articulations thereof
(such as zines in a digital age). Third, to identify and deconstruct dis-
courses proscribing feminism as being “out-of-date” (anachronistic
to the present). Fourth, to pay attention to how feminists seize past
moments and figures to activate their present moments, and what
this indicates about the production and economy of feminist cultural

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 NEED FOR THE NEW IN FEMINIST ACTIVIST DISCOURSE 25

memory. And finally, fifth, to encourage leaps in our political imagi-

nations to flesh out a fuller feminist historical consciousness.

Re-Feminisms
In tracking discourses of the new in mainstream media and feminist
activism, an interesting temporal theme may be identified. From con-
ferences provocatively titled “Re-branding Feminism,” to art activists
such as the Guerilla Girls, who tag their cultural work as “reinventing
feminism,” to the heading of the recent book Reclaiming the F-Word:
The New Feminist Movement,11 a symptom of the current moment is
the temporal politics of the “re”: rebranding, reinventing, and reclaim-
ing. Etymologically, “re” is a prefix coming from the Latin “again,
back, against” and meaning “back to the original place, again.” Such
a temporal framing implies a repetition and a backward motion, as
well as a fantasy of origins or cohesion. It has reverberations with the
notion of anachronism, which means “up, against, back, re-time.”
There is of course a “perpetual ‘re’ for things feminist.”12 It has
long been the work of feminists to recover, reclaim, rebuild, rewrite,
and rethink social, cultural, political, and economic structures to put
women center stage—whether in historiography, literature, the arts,
political representation, business, or other fields. In her early 1970s
article “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” Adrienne
Rich expresses a sentiment about canon revisioning that can be
applied more broadly to the task of feminism: “Re-vision—the act of
looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a
new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural
history: it is an act of survival.”13 Contemporary “re-feminisms” are
also an act of survival, but now the old text, the referent, has become
the idea of feminism itself.
The re-feminisms of our time are enmeshed within post-feminist
logics (trying to sidestep the stereotypes of feminism, for example),
even as they aim for the undoing of post-feminism and the continu-
ation of a political feminist project in the present. Just how these
dynamics work—how they unfold the “happening again” of femi-
nist identity and contestation—will now be examined with reference
to four UK zines: Riot Girl London; Trans-Feminism: Exploring the
Connections Between Feminism and Transgender ; Shape & Situate:
Posters of Inspirational European Women; and Race Revolt.
These issues will be addressed through four scenarios, each treated
in a section of this chapter: reverberation, repudiation, recall, and rep-
etition. Reverberation (from the Latin re [back] and verberāre [to whip,

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 26 RED CHIDGEY

lash]) considers how feminist discourse often incorporates rhetoric and

images of the antifeminist “backlash” within its own systems of intel-
ligibility; repudiation provides a category of analysis for how feminist
dissent, rejection, and disavowal (and attempts at coalition) are man-
aged within feminism’s own ranks; recall speaks to how feminists draw
on aspects of the past in order to re-invigorate and legitimize struggles
in the present; and repetition speaks symptomatically of the anxiety
within feminist movements of duplicating past oppressions by femi-
nists. Within each scenario, we can examine aspects that are brought
to the fore and aspects that are disarticulated or suppressed.

R EV ER BER ATION : Feminism as Rumor

Our first scenario takes place in an article written by a teenage girl,
Sophie Lawton, in the 2001 issue of Riot Girl London —a collective
zine, published between 2000 and 2002, for a feminist group of the
same name. The mission of the group, according to the publication’s
editorial, was “to bring young feminists together to form friendships
and to spread a grrrl positive message.”14 The content of the 2001
zine includes articles on street abuse, women in art, women in Iran,
radical menstruation products, the Guerilla Girls, Riot Grrrl, and an
interview with Natasha Walter, the author of The New Feminism.15
Lawton’s article, entitled “grateful?” begins: “How often do you
think about what women in the past have done for us? Are you grate-
ful? I know I am.”16 The author proceeds to discuss the achievements of
the first wave, women’s role in the Second World War and the context
of the 1970s feminist movement, before criticizing the lack of women’s
history taught in school. She writes: “All I got was two half-hearted
lessons on the crazy, violent vandals that were the suffragettes.”17 In a
tongue-in-cheek move elsewhere in the zine, some myths of feminism
are then laid out by Lawton and Clair Gilbert, including accusations
that feminists are man-haters, bra-burners, unshaven, lesbians, angry,
violent, and humorless. In turn, feminists are cited as being justifi-
ably angry; embodying a range of sexualities, genders, and body types;
seeking equality; and being human in their emotions.
In response to the particular accusation that feminists are angry
bra-burners, the authors note that this was only so “at a one-off event
that happened in the early 70’s,” and suggest that we should “Get over
it!”18 This appeal to cultural memory may get the date wrong (bra-
burning is an event commonly associated with the 1968 Miss America
pageant), but it is, more importantly, worth noting that bra-burning
never actually happened at all. What did happen was that The New

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 NEED FOR THE NEW IN FEMINIST ACTIVIST DISCOURSE 27

York Post ran the headline “Bra Burners and Miss America,” asso-
ciating radical feminism with the burning of draft cards during the
Vietnam war, and a myth was born.19 This myth then crystallized into
one of the most persistent misconceptions of Western feminism today.
What actually took place at the pageant was that women dumped their
bras into a “freedom trash can” with other props of restrictive femi-
ninity such as high heels and women’s magazines.
The way in which the bra-burning myth has traveled across geo-
graphical and generational boundaries speaks to the strength of cul-
tural memory and the iterability of mainstream media. The eventual
revisionism of the 1968 pageant, its stickiness and subsequent mis-
representation, demonstrates how backlash discourses are incorpo-
rated into feminists’ archive of meaning: reiterated, mutated, and
passed on (even if disavowed for their antifeminist sentiments). The
production of feminism as rumor and reverberation conceptualizes
the texture of feminist transmission of knowledge and the ways in
which contemporary feminist pasts can be productively assembled
through (antagonistic) mainstream and cultural discourses. This proc-
ess demonstrates that antifeminist backlash discourses are far from
ontologically distinct from profeminist discourses, and that they are
culturally mediated entanglements producing hybrid articulations,
re-articulations, and disarticulations of feminist identity.

R EPU DI ATION : Feminism as Radical Break

Much has been written about the third wave’s presumed break with the
politics and limitations of second wave feminisms around issues such as
sex, transphobia, and racism.20 An example of such a break appears in
the zine Trans-Feminism. Published in 2008 by the Feminist Activist
Forum (F.A.F.), this zine includes contributions from transgendered,
cisgendered, and gender-queer authors mostly in their 20s.21 The zine
features discussions about sex binaries, being a trans ally, transphobia
and gender myths as well as a trans-feminism manifesto and a glos-
sary of terms. One article, titled “Reclaiming Gender: On building
coalition between ‘Reclaim the Night’ and Trans activism,” details
tensions between activist groups around the women-born-women
policies of the London Reclaim the Night march.22 In this article,
Cassandra Smith discusses a queer counter-protest of women in drag
that took place at the 2007 Reclaim the Night event:

Come the march, the Queer Bloc, and, in particular the F. A. F. mem-
ber who had initiated the idea of a “Reclaim the Night” march was

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 28 RED CHIDGEY

heckled and booed by other marchers . . . and denounced by one of the

speakers . . . as a “F***king Idiot.”
The spat that broke out at the march is symptomatic of the inten-
sity of feeling and the potential for conflict inherent to the issue, one
where the tensions running between second and third wave feminisms
on a rhetorical level are seen to publicly and violently surface.23

Two things are illustrative in this excerpt. First, the reminder that
re-feminisms (in Rich’s sense) constituted an activist strategy during
the second wave, as epitomized in the idea of Reclaim the Night,
that sought to consolidate en masse a woman’s right to feel safe and
free from violence as she moves through the streets.24 Second, differ-
ing feminist paradigms are not presented here as a neat generational
schism, but rather as a matter of theory and tactics. What the author
identifies as usually playing out on the “level of rhetoric”—where the
second wave is commonly associated with essentialism and the third
wave with queer deconstruction—is repositioned as an embodied
scenario and an effect of transgenerational ideologies (or, as “waves”
co-existing). Since women of different ages organize and attend the
annual Reclaim the Night march in London, this article cannot be
about pitting the “new” or “young” feminists against “old” femi-
nists. Instead, a radical break is called for in understanding who the
feminist subject can be; the idea of gendered violence is called to
be expanded to include women-born-women and trans-people who
face high levels of violence in response to their perceived gender
transgressions. The kind of feminist recognition the author is calling
for marks a radical break able to transverse the limitations of wave
paradigms and theories and to expand the parameters of feminist
subjectivity.25

R EC ALL : Feminism as Radical Continuity

Despite accusations that contemporary young feminists mobilize
from “depoliticised and dehistoricised” contexts, 26 zine feminists fre-
quently express a sense of pride in reclaiming feminist legacies. One
example of how zines can function as pedagogical tools is the comic
zine Shape & Situate, published in 2010 and featuring contributions
from feminists ranging from their 20s to their 40s. Including 22
posters depicting women—from athletes to artists, from scientists
to activists, and from political groups such as Rote Zora and The
Red Wheelies to Dolle Mina—this comic zine represents a conscious

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 NEED FOR THE NEW IN FEMINIST ACTIVIST DISCOURSE 29

and aesthetic attempt to reactivate cultural feminist memories in the

present.
Taking inspiration from poster projects in the United States such as
Inspired Agitators and Celebrate People’s History, the editor Melanie
Maddison writes in her introduction:

This process of unearthing, revealing and uncovering important lived

lives has the ability to act as inspiration and agitation, helping us to
shape and situate our own lives.
It’s documenting history from a strategic engaging perspective—
not just consuming women’s histories, but to incite participation. We
too can learn from women in this zine, and recognise that we too can
create a world that we want to exist in, and do the things we need to
do, and it’s totally possible because it has happened before, and it will
happen again.27

This extract is underscored by the affective need to remember femi-

nist predecessors and to create an embodied repertoire of agitation.
Like UK feminists from the early twentieth century onward, histori-
cal precedence is sought to create a structure of feeling across time
and place, and to bolster “fantasies of participation.”28
The structural forgetting taking place in this scenario, however,
includes the disarticulation of feminist memory’s contested nature:
who is marginalized or championed within women’s movements,
and how problematic trajectories may be sidelined or silenced in favor
of celebratory appeal. For instance, one of the submitted posters
depicts Boudicca—the “warrior queen” who led an uprising against
Roman occupation in the first century AD and who has been her-
alded as a strong female icon in UK feminist movements since the
suffragettes—celebrated as “a face of a nation since the Victorians.”29
What is left out in this poster is that under Queen Victoria the figure
of Boudicca became emblematic of the British Empire and its ico-
nography of imperialism. As an article on the feminist webzine The
F-Word asks, “Is the idea of empire something we want our social
justice movements to be linked to? Nor was it just the Victorians
and the suffragettes—Boudicca has been appropriated by many social
movements—nationalism, conservatism (Margaret Thatcher was
often compared to her). Perhaps it’s time to let her go.”30 Such dis-
courses alert us to the politics of remembering in order to “forget”
old vocabularies and aesthetics—not just the staid but also the politi-
cally suspect —as discourses of the past inevitably highlight conditions
and contentions of the present.

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 30 RED CHIDGEY

R EPETITION : Feminism as Déjà Vu

One of the most seductive invocations of contemporary feminisms
is that third wave “is a form of inclusiveness; a feminism that allows
for identities that previously may have been seen to clash with femi-
nism.”31 Witnessing contemporary feminists commenting on their
movements and scenes, however, deflates any such guarantee of fem-
inist cognizance. For example, the zine Race Revolt, dedicated to
addressing race within feminist, queer, and “Do It Yourself” (DIY)
scenes through essays, reviews, art, poetry, and auto-ethnographic
reflections, maps continuing problems around racism and race privi-
lege. In an early issue, a contributor in her 20s, Terese Jonsson, dis-
cusses a white-dominated DIY feminist music and cultural festival
that she is involved in. She writes:

Racism (and classism) and white feminists’ ignorance marred and

weakened the women’s liberation movement in the 60s and 70s. As a
white feminist of the next generation, I am worried that we are making
some of the same mistakes again. If Ladyfests are meant to be some of
the most progressive feminist spaces of the new millennium, part of a
“third wave” of feminist cultural activism, then what does its failure to
diversify its appeal say about its political relevance?32

This anxiety about “making some of the same mistakes again” speaks
of a concern about feminist amnesia, especially around the politics
of race and class. The sentiment underscoring this article is that of
feminist déjà vu, not as the uncanny but, as Peter Krapp has put it,
“the overly familiar, the tediously repetitive, the already known, the
always present”33 —that which refuses to be learnt and continuously
acts out.
Two years after this article was published, the founder and editor
of the zine, Humaira Saeed—having also written a piece critiquing
Ladyfest for its white centrism and racism—wrote an introduction
to issue 5 of Race Revolt, drawing on the ideas of forgetting and
forgiving:

Forgetting about imperial pasts means creating imperial presents, it

repeats. And these “alternative” “radical” communities will do the
same unless people stand up and be counted.
Let’s talk about forgiving. Communities repeatedly forgive racism
for the sake of some kind of community cohesion, or appearance of
the same. This is a demand that is made of people of colour repeatedly,
that their experiences, needs and oppressions be denied because of the
needs of the larger (white) community.34

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 NEED FOR THE NEW IN FEMINIST ACTIVIST DISCOURSE 31

By putting these articles next to each other, a more complicated image

of feminist amnesia begins to emerge. It is not just the threat of for-
getting the lessons of the women’s liberation movement that is of
pressing concern. Urgent is also the forgetting of more recent “pres-
ent pasts,” of the actions and events of white activist networks, and
of the failed-to-transmit colonial histories within collective memory,
especially when this cumulatively means the erasure of the experi-
ences of people of color and the repetition of traumatic experiences
of racism.35
Certainly, more work needs to be done in mapping and under-
standing reflexivity, accountability, and transformation in feminist
cultural memory under late capitalism: how knowledge of feminist
activist pasts, as well as their intellectual legacies, are passed on and
acted upon. As Krapp reminds us, “To tell the story of déjà vu is to deal
with such distortions of the frame of reference . . . strictly speaking,
déjà vu is neither a failure of memory nor a form of forgetting . . . déjà
vu figures as a reserve: it is a kind of memory without memory, a kind
of forgetting without forgetting.”36 Such memory without memory,
or forgetting without forgetting, can be seen to enact scenarios of
class and race privilege and oppression. To forge transformative social
justice and cultural memory based on solidarity rather than competi-
tive understandings of identity and social struggles must, I believe,
be an integral part of decolonizing the feminist political projects of
today. Such re-imaginings would raise questions as to who the femi-
nist subject can be, how feminist and resistance knowledge is gener-
ated and accessed, and what understandings of the present pasts are
held as accountable for current injustices.

Concluding Remarks
By articulating these four dynamics of producing the feminist new—
which have been plotted around the notion of the “re” to include
reverberation, repudiation, recall, and repetition—I have attempted to
think through some of the re-temporalities of current feminist activist
discourse, of the feminist past present, as it intersects and meshes with
broader media and political rhetoric. In feminist activist scenes, these
dynamics provide an affective function of survival and transmission.
Whether to quash feminist stereotypes or mobilize new feminists, the
“need for the new”—as well as the critique of the new—involves more
complex negotiations of time, space, and subjectivity than established
backlash, post-feminist, or wave temporalities signaling distinct, lin-
ear periodization can account for. Creating an alternative scene of

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 32 RED CHIDGEY

anachronism, I propose, can generate a creative prompt for re-visiting

feminist antagonisms and alliances within and across movements, and
across and beyond the ubiquitous generational wave model that has
been played out in feminist narratives to this day.

Notes
Many thanks to the zine editors and writers discussed here, and to Dr. Anna
Reading and Dr. Hillegonda Rietveld for their insightful comments on ear-
lier drafts of this chapter.
1. Appeals to the “new” can be an activist rhetoric. Germaine Greer
famously named, and simultaneously helped bolster, the “second
wave” with her bestseller The Female Eunuch (1970), in which women
liberationists were pitched as different from the perceived reform-
ism of the suffragettes. See Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch,
rev. ed. (London: Harper Collins, 2006). In 1992, Rebecca Walker,
daughter of novelist Alice Walker and goddaughter of Ms. Magazine
founder Gloria Steinem, wrote an article entitled “Becoming the
Third Wave,” distancing her feminism from both second wave and
postfeminist trajectories. See Rebecca Walker, “Becoming the Third
Wave,” Ms. Magazine 39 (January/February 1992), pp. 39–41.
2. See Leslie L. Heywood, ed., The Women’s Movement Today: An
Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 2006).
3. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American
Women (New York: Crown, 1991).
4. Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of
Feminist Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 136.
5. Valerie Rohy, Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), p. xiv.
6. Ibid., p. xvi.
7. More can also be made of the anachronism’s relation to aleatory time
(see Emanuela Bianchi’s chapter in this volume).
8. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the
Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2009), p. 25.
9. See Sasha Roseneil, Common Women, Uncommon Practices: The Queer
Feminisms of Greenham Common (London: Continuum, 2000);
Deborah M. Withers and Red Chidgey, “Complicated Inheritance:
Sistershow (1973–1974) and the Queering of Feminism,” Women: A
Cultural Review 21:3 (2010), pp. 309–322; and Alison Piepmeier,
Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (New York: New York
University Press, 2009). The women’s liberation movement was a
name used within emerging feminisms in the United Kingdom,
Ireland, and North America from the late 1960s to the 1980s.

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 NEED FOR THE NEW IN FEMINIST ACTIVIST DISCOURSE 33

10. See Hemmings, Why Stories Matter ; and Rosalyn Baxandall,

“Re-visioning the Women’s Liberation Movement’s Narrative: Early
Second Wave African American Feminists,” Feminist Studies 27:1
(2001), pp. 225–245.
11. Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune, Reclaiming the F-Word: The
New Feminist Movement (London: Zed Books, 2010).
12. Alexandra Juhasz, ed., Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film
and Video (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 3.
13. Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,”
in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (London:
Virago, 1980), p. 35.
14. Clair Gilbert and Sophie Lawton, Riot Girl London 2 (London: Self-
Published, 2001), p. 1.
15. See Natasha Walter, The New Feminism (London: Virago, 1999).
16. Sophie Lawton, “grateful?,” Riot Girl London 2, p. 19.
17. Ibid., pp. 19–20.
18. Clair Gilbert and Sophie Lawton, “Feminists,” Riot Girl London
2, p. 20.
19. Bonnie J. Dow, “Feminism, Miss America, and Media Mythology,”
Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6:1 (2003), pp. 127–149. The bra-burning
myth is discussed on pp. 129–134.
20. For an account of “third wave feminism,” see Astrid Henry, Not
My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
21. In the zine, “cisgender” is defined as “a gender identity formed by a
match between your biological sex and your subconscious sex. May
also be used as a synonym for non-transgender (‘trans’ means across,
‘cis’ means on the same side).” “Cissexual” also refers to people who
are not transsexual, with “cissexual privilege” experienced by “cis-
sexuals as a result of having their fe/maleness deemed authentic,
natural and unquestioned by society at large. It allows cissexuals to
take their sex embodiment for granted in ways that transsexuals can-
not.” See Helen G, “Trans* 101,” in Trans-Feminism: Exploring the
Connections Between Feminism and Transgender, ed. Kris Hubley
(Bristol: Feminist Activist Forum, 2008), p. 31.
22. The London Feminist Network’s (LFN) tacit position is that the
march is open to all self-defined women. However, this is never spe-
cifically outlined in any literature surrounding the event and the
organization has a history of alignment with transphobic feminists
such as Julie Bindel.
23. Cassandra Smith, “‘Reclaiming Gender’: On building coali-
tion between ‘Reclaim the Night’ and Trans Activism,” in Trans-
Feminism, p. 26.
24. Inspired by actions in Germany earlier that year, Reclaim the Night
marches were initiated in the United Kingdom in 1977. They tar-
geted sex shops as a symbol of male violence against women. See

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 34 RED CHIDGEY

“We Will Walk without Fear,” in Spare Rib Reader: 100 Issues of
Women’s Liberation, ed. Marsha Rowe (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1982), pp. 590–594. The UK night demos petered out in the 1990s
and were revived in 2004 by the LFN.
25. To enact a scene of anachronism is to also realize that transgender
debates were happening in suffrage-related UK publications such as
The Freewoman in 1912, and that queer counter-protests involving
drag took place during the beginnings of the British women’s liberation
movement. See Lucy Delap, “Individualism and Introspection: The
Framing of Feminism in the Freewoman,” in Feminist Media History:
Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere, ed. Maria DiCenzo, Lucy
Delap, and Leila Ryan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp.
182–183; and Deborah M. Withers, Sistershow Revisited: Feminism
in Bristol 1973–1975 (Bristol: HammerOn Press, 2011), p. 33.
26. Stacy Gillis and Rebecca Munford, “Genealogies and Generations:
The Politics and Praxis of Third Wave Feminism,” Women’s History
Review 13:2 (2004), p. 170.
27. Melanie Maddison, Shape & Situate: Posters of Inspirational European
Women (Leeds: Self-Published, 2010), p. 3.
28. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural
Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2003), p. 54.
29. Verity Hall, “Boudica,” Shape & Situate, p. 10.
30. Hanna Thomas, “Out with the old warrior queens, in with the new?,”
The F-Word , http://www.thefword.org.uk/features/2010/10/out
_with_the_ol, accessed on January 3, 2010.
31. Leslie L. Heywood, “Introduction: A Fifteen-Year History of Third-
Wave Feminism,” in The Women’s Movement Today, vol. 1, p. xx.
32. Terese Jonsson, “Ladyfest, Race, and the Politics of Coalition
Building,” Race Revolt 1, ed. Humaira Saeed (Manchester: Self-
Published, 2007), p. 2. Ladyfests are autonomous art, activist, and
music festivals with a women-positive and feminist focus. They were
first launched in Olympia, Washington, in 2000, and have since
become transnational events.
33. Peter Krapp, Déjà Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. x.
34. Humaira Saeed, Race Revolt 5 (Manchester: Self-Published, 2010),
p. 3.
35. See Blanche Radford Curry, “Whiteness and Feminism: Déjà Vu
Discourses, What’s Next?,” in What White Looks Like: African-
American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, ed. George Yancy
(New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 243–262.
36. Krapp, Déjà Vu, p. x.

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 CH A P T ER 3

The Interruptive Feminine:

Aleatory Time and Feminist Politics

Emanuela Bianchi

Do modes of gender and sexuality have a time? Or more specifically,

does it make sense to speak about women’s time or queer time as
different modes of lived temporality, and if so, can thinking through
these temporalities illuminate and enliven feminist politics? Feminist
and queer thinkers of time have argued that a linear, progressive con-
ception of lifetime and history is not only distinctively modern, but is
also rooted in patriarchal kinship, in male/masculine styles of embod-
ied experience, and in a philosophical tradition that understands itself
either as a practice of death or transcendental freedom—incorporeal
and absolute.1 Temporality is at stake in numerous dimensions of our
lives: embodied, phenomenological, familial, historical, social, aca-
demic, metaphysical, and existential. None of these are reducible to
one another, yet they arguably form a complex in which the tempo-
ral textures of other kinds of lives—women’s lives, queer lives, non-
Western lives, black lives, subaltern lives, trans lives, disabled lives, or
even lives beyond the human or animal—are often suppressed and
rendered invisible.
In the twentieth century, philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir
and Julia Kristeva provided a vocabulary for thinking temporality in
sexed and gendered terms. In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir analyzed
women’s time as cyclical and static, entrapping women in the plane
of immanence from which they have little access to the linear projects
of transcendent subjectivity so dear to existentialism.2 In her impor-
tant essay on feminist generations, “Women’s Time,” Kristeva com-
plicated this scene by drawing attention to a certain jouissance to be

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 36 EMANUELA BIANCHI

found in feminine cyclicity as it corresponds with the rhythms of the

cosmos, and also by directing us to the Nietzschean category of mon-
umental time to describe the temporality of women.3 Monumental
time is time transformed into a kind of stasis; time expanded so far
beyond the line of the project and history, or that of a life ending in
death, that it can hardly be called time at all but rather becomes an
all-encompassing “imaginary space.”4 While they may offer redeem-
ing pleasures, these modalities of time also situate women outside
history and politics—beyond the social as such. These accounts obvi-
ously draw on women’s bodily experiences—the cyclicity of men-
struation and reproduction—and their accompanying association
with the register of species-being, as well as women’s traditional labor
and practices, functional and affective: the ever-repeated tasks of
housekeeping, food preparation, child rearing, caring for bodies and
psyches, mourning, and so on. Such allocations risk placing women
in a certain bind: if we wish to follow linear projects and participate
in public life, we must shake off our experiential, affective ties and
associations with the cyclical, and enter into the time of masculin-
ity. Or, conversely, if we seek a transvaluation of feminine time, we
find that these modes threaten to exclude us from the narrativity and
transformative potentials of history, entrapping us in the realms of
nature and the household, bound to cyclical temporality and monu-
mental eternity.
Here I want to move beyond these potentially stultifying binds,
tracing out and bringing into focus a rather different and submerged
dimension of temporality that has accrued to the side of women and
the queer under Western patriarchy and metaphysics—what I will
call “interruptive time.” Interruptivity indicates a kind of being in
time that is both interruptible and interrupting; in its middle-voiced
formulation may be heard simultaneously the passive capacity to be
interrupted and the active ability to interrupt. The association of
interruption with the feminine is discernable at the very inception
of patriarchal metaphysics. I will accordingly trace it from Aristotle,
through phenomenologies of female body experience, and then bring
it into dialogue with recent work on queer temporalities, consider-
ing some consequences of interruptivity for queer and feminist poli-
tics. As Donna Haraway has argued, the association of women with
what is passive in certain strands of (especially second wave) femi-
nist thought, exemplified by Catharine MacKinnon’s assertion that
“man fucks woman; subject verb object,”5 achieves “a totalization
producing what Western patriarchy itself never succeeded in doing—
feminists’ consciousness of the non-existence of women, except as

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 THE INTERRUPTIVE FEMININE 37

products of men’s desire.”6 Instead of countering this picture with

a fully legible activity (figured in MacKinnon’s current work by a
benevolent, enlightened, white, Western feminism reaching out to
rescue an abject, passive, brown, non-Western victim of trafficking7),
a politics cognizant of an opaque and subterranean aleatory inter-
ruptivity opens us to the radically contingent possibility that both
patriarchy and the metaphysics that constitutes it may—suddenly or
slowly—finally play themselves out.

Aristotelian Interruptions
As a philosopher of antiquity, Aristotle is not yet concerned with the
idea of history, nor progress, nor does he conceive human subjectivity
as a project of freedom. Indeed, we might say that he is not concerned
with any of the features that are typically associated with modern
linear time, and although his teleological world is directed toward an
end, it is not historical but metaphysical. The heavens move in circles
and the earth proceeds in cycles, natural beings are born and grow,
and men make things, act in the world, and organize themselves, all
in pursuit of what is best: the good and the divine. Aristotle’s own
conception of time in the Physics as “following on” from motion8
means that it is in his account of motion rather than time, and spe-
cifically in the movement of natural generation, that we may find
the association of the feminine with what waylays and interrupts the
unfolding of natural teleology.
As is well known, for Aristotle any phenomenon may be explained
by recourse to four kinds of cause or explanation: material, formal,
efficient, and final.9 In nature, the latter three are really the same: an
adult (male) horse causes another horse to come to be, and the adult
horse is also both the form and the final cause of the resulting foal’s
development. In effect, there are thus only two causes at play here:
the material on the one hand, and the formal/efficient/final on the
other, and these are apportioned to each of the sexes. According to
the famous account of sexual reproduction in Aristotle’s Generation
of Animals, the form is transmitted through the male semen, while
the female contributes only matter to the offspring, which as many
feminist commentators have pointed out relegates the female to the
order of pure passivity.10 The female contributes only the matter,
while the semen provides form, or logos, and the spark of soul for the
new creature. But a difficulty in this schema immediately appears,
for if the male contributes form, how is it possible that a female off-
spring might result, as it indeed does approximately half of the time?

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 38 EMANUELA BIANCHI

Aristotle’s answer is that a female is the result of a disruption in the

process, an error in the matter due to insufficient heat, which may
occur because of some exigency such as youth or old age, or a wind
in the south.11
While Aristotle normally portrays matter as passive or at best
inclined toward form “as the ugly desires the beautiful, and as the
female desires the male,” this account discloses a submerged feminine
materiality with the capacity to interrupt the smooth unfolding of
nature’s processes.12 The female, then, is characterized less by pas-
sive materiality than by matter’s irrepressible unruliness or its unac-
countable aleatory propensities, invisible within Aristotle’s traditional
rubric of the four causes. Indeed, in the Physics, chance and spontane-
ous motions in nature appear as accidental supplements to the four
essential causes.13 Instead of being identified with nature, then, the
female is the result of forces that act against nature as a constant inter-
ruption in the natural unfolding of motion toward what is best, even
though she is of course also necessary for the continuance of the spe-
cies.14 In this ancient scene, then, the opposition between masculine
and feminine time is less an opposition between linear and cyclical
time (as we moderns would have it) than one between a continuous
cyclical and teleological time that is masculine, and an aleatory and
interruptive time marked as feminine.
I want to suggest that retrieving this ancient articulation of the
feminine as aleatory may be a fruitful gesture for contemporary femi-
nist politics. Although radical epochal shifts have occurred since antiq-
uity in everything from formations of personhood and politics to the
very outlines of the cosmos, the ancient association of the feminine
with passivity and the masculine with what is active is still very much
alive in our contemporary world, persisting even in contemporary
accounts of the biology of sexual reproduction.15 At the time of writ-
ing, I am listening to news reports of the death of Osama bin Laden.
The first press release by John Brennan, the White House’s coun-
terterrorism chief, announced that bin Laden had used his wife as a
human shield and that she, as a consequence, had been killed—a story
eagerly embraced by a public intent on envisioning the last moments
of a misogynist Islamic monster. The next day, White House spokes-
person Jay Carney said that bin Laden’s wife had rushed the invading
commandos and was shot in the leg, but was still alive. It is worth
wondering how the almost unimaginably courageous action of this
unnamed woman—swerving in as if from nowhere like Lucretius’s
clinamen, rushing the commandos —became so quickly reformulated
as mute passivity, how she was so quickly reduced to an object, tool,

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 THE INTERRUPTIVE FEMININE 39

and obstacle—a shield—in a scene of action that can and must take
place between men alone. If the dominant modern construction of
temporality has shifted to that of linear historical progress, I contend
that this ancient notion of an aleatory feminine offers a nonessential
temporal, phenomenological, ethical, and political modality that sup-
plies a vitally necessary resistance to that masculine narrative.
While I am aware of the theoretical risk involved in the elision
of a clear distinction between “female,” “women,” and “the femi-
nine,” I am interested in a certain metaphysical complex they form,
embedded in the procrustean fabric of our philosophical and cultural
inheritance, of which passivity is the most resounding characteristic.
Women may be more or less feminine, and indeed more or less female,
and yet they, we, are ineluctably caught up in and bound to negotiate
a sex/gender complex framed by a patriarchal metaphysics that posits
a dualism between activity and passivity. The aleatory feminism I am
articulating here is an intervention into that ancient, persistent meta-
physics, and in fact grows out of it as its monstrous, queer symptom,
claiming the goddess Fortuna and the interruptive forces of Dionysus
for a politics that strenuously resists even the possibility of fixed iden-
tity and essence. After all, if what is found at the level of nature is no
longer what is in illo tempore monumental, frozen, essential, passive,
and fixed, then what is found in the psyche, and in social, political,
and philosophical dimensions, can hardly be fixed either. The argu-
ment here is not quite analogical, and not quite causal, and not quite
organic. The claim is rather that at different levels of magnification
and temporal duration, each with its own formations, assemblages,
and topographies, the aleatory and the interruptive is at work, and
may be harnessed for feminist ends.16

Interrupted Bodies
Beginning with the register of materiality and corporeality, it is worth
noticing that we encounter interruption as an insistent trope at the
level of female bodily experience. The woman’s menstrual cycle is not
experienced as a continuous cycle, but as a punctuation that inter-
rupts her daily activities with messy blood flow and sometimes pain-
ful cramping. In penetrative intercourse, the very boundary of the
body is interrupted. If a woman becomes pregnant, her very being is
further interrupted by the new presence. If she miscarries, that inter-
ruption is itself interrupted. If she breastfeeds a child, the hunger of
another being interrupts her bodily integrity, and she literally, materi-
ally, flows out of herself, becoming food and nourishment for another.

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 40 EMANUELA BIANCHI

As a primary caretaker, she is continually interrupted by the various

and more or less immediate demands for sustenance and attention by
those she cares for.17
In her classic second wave essay “Throwing Like a Girl,” Iris
Marion Young describes the inhibitions and discontinuities that beset
the girl in her movement through the world: the girl fears that, for
example, she cannot reach the apple up in the tree, so she does not
really jump for it; her rivenness by immanence and the weighty drag
of objecthood continually thwart her in her projects, undermining
her motility and her ability to make the space around her her own.
Her awareness of her materiality as such, as well as her subjection to
the gaze of the other, is experienced as interruption of a linear trajec-
tory toward a goal.18 Yet in reflecting upon that essay 20 years later,
Young is critical of her own acceptance of the specific temporality
of the linear project as universal, and the examples of “sport, labor,
and travel” as paradigms of free movement.19 She asks us to con-
sider a Tillie Olsen character canning tomatoes while minding a baby,
commenting: “The movement is plural and engaged, to and fro, here
and yonder, rather than unified and singly directed.”20 In “Pregnant
Embodiment,” Young transvalues the impositions of maternity, view-
ing them less as a weighty immanence than an oftentimes pleasurable
awareness:

As I sit with friends listening to jazz in a darkened bar, I feel within

me the kicking of the fetus, as if it follows the rhythm of the music.
In attending to my pregnant body in such circumstances, I do not feel
myself alienated from it, as in illness. I merely notice its borders and
rumblings with interest, sometimes with pleasure, and this esthetic
interest does not divert me from my business.21

These rhythms of the maternal body certainly resonate with Kristeva’s

account of the semiotic chora —the dimension of the material, rhyth-
mic, pleasurable drives that inhabit language identified with the space
of the mother’s womb—but in this essay, Young rather connects
movement in pregnancy with a spatial awareness emanating from the
body, and with a mode of motility that is decidedly not linear, namely
dancing. In dance—especially in improvisational dance—movement
is ambiguously active and passive as one alternately responds to and
anticipates the music, creating a flow of rhythm and syncopation
that is not known or conceived in advance. Does music, even sound
more generally, or perhaps any sense experience, stand here in the
place of a longed-for Other that would interrupt the monotony of

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 THE INTERRUPTIVE FEMININE 41

passive femininity?22 Or does it signify a more primordial enmesh-

ment in the world—a sensual, corporeal immersion beginning with
the iambic maternal heartbeat, and with which we thereafter find
ourselves entangled in sensorimotor relations of call and response,
call-response, anticipation, play, and interruption?23
Associating a phenomenology of women’s bodily comportment,
and especially pregnant embodiment, with the aleatory qualities of
dance, enmeshment in sound, and the improvisational space of the
jazz club, Young’s narrative takes us far from a reading of feminine
corporeality as passive and interrupted by a transcendent exteriority,
toward an understanding of this bodily experience as interruptive.

From Feminine Time to

Queer/Feminist Time
This interruptivity I am locating on the side of the feminine (albeit
strategically and provisionally) also brings us closer to the lived
temporalities of queer subjects. Queer theorists such as Elizabeth
Freeman and Judith Halberstam have argued compellingly for a sub-
stantial phenomenological difference in the way time is structured,
experienced, and created in queer lives and texts. Freeman describes
how seemingly innocuous phenomena such as schedules, calendars,
time zones, and even wristwatches function as a kind of Foucauldian
“implantation,” granting what she calls “chrononormativity” and
appearing to give a “natural” sense of time while regulating popula-
tions and individuals.24 Halberstam argues that the experience and
logic of lived temporality in the hegemonic, heteronormative mode
are structured first and foremost by the scheduling demands of family,
and are governed by certain beliefs about childrearing, generational
cycles of inheritance, the work ethic and demands of the workweek,
wage labor, and capitalist accumulation. She contrasts this “straight
time” with the time of certain modes of life on the margins experi-
enced by queers, but also “ravers, club kids, HIV-positive bareback-
ers, rent boys, sex workers, homeless people, drug dealers, and the
unemployed”—all of whom she includes as “queer subjects” whose
experience of and relationship to temporality is radically, qualitatively
at odds with straight life.25 Queer temporality veers away from nor-
mative time in unpredictable ways. The queer spaces of the nightclub
and the bathhouse, the bar and certain areas of the park, come alive
when good children are sleeping, and are experienced under a dif-
ferent sort of temporal logic—an unaccountable and dilated time,
often altered by drugs and alcohol, where watches are not consulted

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 42 EMANUELA BIANCHI

and whose narratives are sculpted through fantastical and gender-

reconfiguring performances, the skill of the DJ, and the dance of the
hookup. Such practices of radical openness to the aleatory encounter,
with their intensification of pleasures and dangers, and their stark
contrast with the times and rhythms of heteronormative reproductiv-
ity, have been assiduously theorized by Lee Edelman and others as
involving a necessary accession to the death drive.26
In the face of this, it may seem perverse to argue that pregnancy
and motherhood share in this queer temporal quality. However, as
Freeman argues, this queer temporality is not simply a time of the
new and different, of open erotic counternormativity prised away
from the reproductive imperative. It is rather “weighed down” by a
certain history, whether that of the queer archive or of certain failed
political projects such as the Equal Rights Amendment campaign
of the 1970s, 27 or by a faintly embarrassing second wave lesbian-
feminist past characterized by a stifling essentialism, for which a
repetitive cyclicity or even monumentality in Kristeva’s sense was the
governing temporal schema. Freeman complicates the queer empha-
sis on the counternormative, the aleatory and the new with what she
calls “temporal drag”—a queer engagement with a sometimes hard-
to-love past whose tangencies may also be erotic and affective—a
queer past with which queer subjects are necessarily entangled, and
which thereby necessarily conditions queer presents and futures.28
While I am not concerned here with the specific practices of queer
history, foregrounding a relation to the past or pasts is nonetheless
central to my formulation of interruptivity insofar as it advocates and
also enacts a certain “working through” of a patriarchal legacy in
which we are seemingly relentlessly mired. Such working through
requires the painstaking work of tarrying with what drags us down
and holds us back, with what repeats as well as with what is differ-
ent and new. The radicality of this openness, that of aleatory inter-
ruptivity, is that it is neither simply an openness to or libidinal drive
toward life, love, production, or reproduction, nor a queer accession
to the death drive whether figured as stasis or destruction. Rather,
the aleatory roll of the dice is embedded in a context that it inter-
rupts, giving unpredictable outcomes: love, life, and/or death. This,
in turn, should alert us to the possibility that this mode of being
may not, in fact, be sustainable without certain basic protections.
Living this interruptivity is also to live with a certain vulnerability:
one may be easily brutalized through abuses of hospitality, be sub-
jected to aggression by those threatened by this most courageous
mode of being, be instrumentalized by state and biopolitical forces,

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 THE INTERRUPTIVE FEMININE 43

and so on.29 Any formulation of women’s time as interruptivity must

take into account the necessity for protecting against hostile and
unwanted interruptions as well as promoting a liberatory transvalua-
tion of interrupted time as a mode of living in precarity, in openness
to what is aleatory, and to strange, new, queer formations of kinship,
gender, and social life.
Women’s characteristic capacity to be interrupted, by the demands
of family, by pregnancy, in their labor as caregivers and as managers of
human relations, and as a flexible and often home-based labor force,
requires specific theoretical and legal measures to provide a degree
of protection against exploitation. Here we might usefully turn to
Drucilla Cornell’s conception of the imaginary domain as a resource
that resonates in the sphere of interpersonal ethics as well as that of
political ontology and legal rights.30 Cornell formulated this notion
in order to articulate a minimalist legal standard that would protect
women from unwanted encroachments in relation to abortion, sexual
harassment, and pornography, creating a zone in which they would
be free to imagine themselves as whole and integral. She draws on the
psychoanalytic notion of the imaginary as a fantasized, temporalized
bodily boundary: bodily integrity and individuation grounded not by
recourse to a past, a history, or an ontological present, but by appeal
to the temporality of the future anterior—the tense of the “shall have
been.” The imaginary does not deny the aleatory as a factical, material
dimension of corporeality and lived temporality. According to this
analysis, the bounded and enclosed body, uninterrupted, is always
a matter of fantasy; unachievable in the here and now, and therefore
always futural and projective. But for Cornell’s psychoanalytically
nuanced argument, the protection of this imaginary domain must be
considered a legal right, since despite its futural and fantasized status,
it nonetheless functions in personal development as a minimum con-
dition for individuation and thus personhood. In order to become a
person, one must have access to a vision of oneself as a being free from
interruption and encroachment with a right to bodily integrity, and
the right to that projective vision must be publically recognized and
protected under the law.
Developing a feminist conception of being as interruptive thus
requires a framework for freedom from interruption, but it also
forms a possible ground for a mode of feminist politics that is nei-
ther simply reactive, nor simply exhausted by the protection of one’s
ability to open and close one’s bodily boundary at will. The inter-
ruptive is also that which disrupts, simply because that is part of what
it means to be on intimate terms with the aleatory encounter, and

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this interruptivity thus reveals the precarity of the existing (hetero-

patriarchal, white-supremacist, capitalist) order.31 This analysis thus
points toward a feminism that would rush toward commandos from
nowhere, that would take to the streets, that would—in the words of
queercore singer Lynn Breedlove—“unleash the teenage boy within”
or—as Twitter sensation Feminist Hulk puts it—“smash patriarchy,
smash gender binary,” and that would rise up, burgeon, and celebrate
with an eye to neither origin nor telos, but with humor, guile, and a
healthy disrespect for authority. The much remarked-upon presence
of women in the uprisings in the Arab Spring of 2011; the visibility of
women during anticuts protests in Britain in 2010 and 2011; and the
Slutwalk protests mushrooming across the United States, Canada,
and Europe at the time of writing all testify to this interruptive and
aleatory feminist spirit.
Interruptivity revels in corporeality, sensation, play, and sexuality.
It is a sensuous activity that is also always responsive—motor and
sensory—and this receptive/creative capacity is itself not something
that ever stays in one place. In all its openness and motility, the radically
counternormative force of aleatory interruptivity cannot ultimately
sustain or retain its articulation with what is specifically feminine.
Interruptivity countenances all possibilities, all reconfigurations of
past and present circumstances, including queer and transgender
reconfigurations of gender and sex. Interruptivity is as much trans
and intersex as it is feminine; it is necessarily open to differences (all
differences in embodiment and circumstance) among and between
women and queers, or indeed anyone, male or female, intersex or
trans bodied, who is committed to challenging fortified, essential-
ized, and teleologically egoic modes of subjectivity and sociality.
Starting from a feminine conception of temporality as interrup-
tive thus opens to an understanding of the opaque interruptivity of
being as such.32 The restless encounter and negotiation with what is
exterior—welcoming, incorporating, hosting, and shutting out, from
moment to moment growing into whatever it is that we are in the
process of becoming—must take place without forgetting that the
“welcome” is also always a contextualized performative act, laden
with a past but never simply a matter of factical passivity. With mini-
mal conditions in place securing women from the travails of interrup-
tion, but not jettisoning its value as an openness to the unexpected
encounter, we are freed up to imagine and enact other modalities of
lived temporality beyond the dichotomies of feminine and masculine,
queer and straight: toward generative, protean, and as-yet unthought
temporalities to come.

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 THE INTERRUPTIVE FEMININE 45

Notes
1. Obviously this version of “dominant time” is schematic and fails to
capture various complex philosophical understandings of historicity
and temporality, and particularly ways of being toward the future
that might include dialectical materialism, Messianism, utopianism,
Heidegger’s temporal ek-stases, “destining,” the Derridean à venir,
and so on. While space constraints prevent my addressing any of
these conceptions directly in this paper, the account I develop here
may function as a critical engagement with any one of them.
2. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New
York: Vintage Books, 1973). In contrast with de Beauvoir’s univer-
salism, Dana Luciano’s Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body
in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University
Press, 2007) traces this separation of temporal spheres in nineteenth-
century US bourgeois culture. While I acknowledge the historical
specificity of these temporal formations, I explore them here in their
philosophical and phenomenological dimensions, assuming a larger
(though not universal) scale of normative entrenchments.
3. Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” in The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly
Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 351–371.
4. Ibid., p. 354.
5. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 124.
6. Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology,
and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” chap. 8 in
Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York:
Routledge, 1991), p. 159.
7. See Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human?: And Other
International Dialogues (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2006). For the critical stance, see Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance
and Redefinition, ed. Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema (New York
and London: Routledge, 1998) as a useful starting point.
8. Aristotle, Physics, trans. Philip H. Wicksteed and Francis M. Cornford
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), IV, 11, 219a20
and 219b16, my translation.
9. Ibid., II, 3, 194b24f.
10. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1979), I, 2, 716a2ff. Feminist engage-
ments include Lynda Lange, “Woman is Not a Rational Animal: On
Aristotle’s Biology of Reproduction,” in Discovering Reality: Feminist
Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy
of Science, ed. Sandra Harding and Merill B. Hintikka (Dordrecht,
Holland: D. Reidel, 1983); Luce Irigaray, “How to Conceive (of) a
Girl,” in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Judith Butler, Bodies That

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 46 EMANUELA BIANCHI

Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993);

and Cynthia A. Freeland, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). For
a review of the legacy of Aristotle’s theory of reproduction in the
West, see Nancy Tuana, The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious, and
Philosophical Concepts of Women’s Nature (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1993).
11. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, IV, 2, 766b28f.
12. Aristotle, Physics, I, 9, 192a23–4, my translation.
13. Ibid., II, 7, 198b6f. and 4–6 passim.
14. I analyze this causal overdetermination on the part of the female as
precisely symptomatic in “The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter
in the Aristotelian Cosmos” (manuscript under review).
15. See, for example, Emily Martin, “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science
Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female
Roles,” Signs 16:3 (1991), pp. 485–501; and Cynthia Kraus, “Naked
Sex in Exile: On the Paradox of the ‘Sex Question’ in Feminism and
in Science,” NWSA Journal 12:3 (2000), pp. 151–176.
16. There is certainly a confluence here with the Deleuzian feminism of
thinkers such as Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Claire Colebrook,
and Luciana Parisi. However, this project does not seek to simply
replace an outdated metaphysical regime with a new, immanentist
ontology of flows, intensities, assemblages, and unfoldings. It seeks
instead to attend to our enmeshment and situatedness in a context,
in a history, in a legacy, to both tarry with it and interrupt it, think-
ing through interruptivity less as the new, but rather as a painstaking
labor and practice of working through.
17. See Lisa Baraitser, Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption
(London: Routledge, 2009) for a compelling analysis that seeks to
transvalue such interruptions in maternal experience as uniquely gen-
erative and transformative.
18. Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” chap. 2 in On Female
Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005).
19. Iris Marion Young, “‘Throwing Like a Girl’: Twenty Years Later,” in
Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Donn Welton (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 1998), p. 288.
20. Ibid., p. 289.
21. Iris Marion Young, “Pregnant Embodiment,” in Body and Flesh,
p. 278.
22. For a powerful expression of this longing, see Faith Wilding’s 1972
performance poem “Waiting,” http://faithwilding.refugia.net/wait
ingpoem.html, accessed on May 5, 2011.
23. Kristeva’s account of the semiotic chora in Revolution in Poetic
Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1984), pp. 25–30, sharply distinguishes its inherent “ordering”

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 THE INTERRUPTIVE FEMININE 47

from the symbolic law that will subsequently interrupt it through the
destructive wave of negation issuing from the death drive and the
paternal function. Here, I want instead to emphasize a continuity, in
which aleatory interruptivity is already at work in the chora on the
side of the maternal and the feminine, not just as a later intervention
on the side of the masculine.
24. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 3 and passim.
25. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies,
Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005),
p. 10.
26. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2004). See also the work of Leo Bersani
and Michael Warner. Elizabeth Grosz, “Animal Sex: Libido as Desire
and Death,” in Space, Time, and Perversion (New York: Routledge,
1995), chap. 12, esp. pp. 204–205, complicates this characterization
of queer sexuality as death-driven by positing it as productive (of sen-
sations, transmutations, and intensities) if not reproductive.
27. The Equal Rights Amendment (ER A), seeking to constitutionally
guarantee equal rights on the basis of sex, was approved by Congress
in 1972 but failed to gain the required state ratification and was
therefore dismissed in 1982.
28. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds, chap. 2, p. 62 and passim.
29. Rosalyn Diprose, “Women’s Bodies Giving Time for Hospitality,”
Hypatia 24:2 (2009), pp. 142–163, considers various political devel-
opments in which women’s time has been interrupted and redirected,
put to the work of national security, of public health, and of eco-
nomic production. Such instrumentalizing encroachments on wom-
en’s given time obviously needs to be strenuously resisted.
30. Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography
and Sexual Harassment (New York: Routledge, 1995).
31. See Louis Althusser, “The Underground Current of the Materialism of
the Encounter,” in Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–87,
trans G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Verso, 2006), pp. 163–207, for an
account of the radical instability disclosed by the aleatory encounter.
32. This position is closely aligned with that developed by Elizabeth
Grosz, “Becoming . . . An Introduction,” in Becomings: Explorations
in Time, Memory and Futures, ed. Elizabeth Grosz (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1999).

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 CH A P T ER 4

Écriture Futuriste

M. F. Simone Roberts

“Would disrupting or upsetting the lexical surfaces, and the deeper

structures disrupt other contracts (social, political) we have entered
with those who have continually tried to dismiss us?”1 The answer
to this question, raised by Carole Maso in Break Every Rule, is, in
my mind, yes. The evidence? The ongoing resistance to the teaching
and publication of the experimental tradition that much “feminine”
écriture is part of (a tradition that I will describe as “swervy” in what
follows). But, here I swerve away from this question to some history
of gendered language.
First, by way of definition, the swerve is a writerly strategy of logi-
cal leaps, of associative connection that privileges theme and motif
over plot (in fiction) or over chronology linearity (in philosophy
or history). It is an aleatory writing; paratactic and disjunctive in
structure. It may also use more “linear” and transited tactics, but
only as one among many strategies. I think of it as a feminine strat-
egy. Feminine, not female, since male authors such as Michel de
Montaigne and Friedrich Nietzsche can be just as swervy as some of
their female colleagues. The term “swerve” becomes an aesthetic and
political term in Joan Retallack’s work. She defines it as a wager both
writerly and political, a wager that consists, in part, of “antiroman-
tic modernisms, the civil rights movement, feminism, postcolonialist
critiques”—which she in turn describes as “necessary to dislodge us
from reactionary allegiances and nostalgias” such as longing for an
unquestioned masculinist society or knee-jerk rejections of writing
that investigates both a topic and the standard modes of writing about
that topic.2 Aesthetically and politically, the swerve defamiliarizes our

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 50 M. F. SIMONE ROBERTS

comforts and asks us who we are and who we want to be; it has a pro-
found ethical dimension of reciprocal alterity.3
A swerve: In Sumer, in the Bronze Age, to be literate was to read
two—gendered—languages, that is, to be polylectoral.4 Maryanne
Wolfe’s Proust and the Squid —a study of how the human brain must
rewire itself in order for us to be able to read—pauses in its examina-
tion of the unnaturalness of all reading (the brain must bend to cul-
ture in order for us to read) to consider the two languages of Sumer.
In the royal houses of Emar, a major city in the first civilization,
women were literate and read and wrote in their own parole within
the Sumerian langue. Men also had their own parole. The two paroles
differed in lexicon and pronunciation. The feminine Emesal (the “fine
tongue”) and the masculine Emegir (the “princely tongue”) together
made up the Sumerian language. In the vatic poetry of Sumer, the
gods and goddesses spoke to each other in these paroles.5 A form of
what Luce Irigaray would call “being two” was a standard aspect of
culture from the beginning.
A transition: In our own age, in literary studies and in the world
of letters, we are faced with a similar polylectoral situation. We have
masculine and feminine writing subjects—some are feminist, some
are not, but their écriture is of concern to feminisms and to future
feminist subjects. Why? Because much of the architecture and expres-
sion of any subjectivity is symbolic—be it one’s écriture, RSS feed,
clothes, body art, playlists, or politics, any of the ways in which we
participate in and create culture. Even on the ontological level of our
sexes and sexualities, our genders and transgenders, our ambiguities
and paradoxes, the spectrum of masculine and feminine attributes
varies within any one subject’s personality. The resistance to our pres-
ence, our thriving, our imaginative, and our political agendas finds its
architecture and expression in the symbolic realms of our culture and
politics. Our literatures and our reading habits are crystallizations
of these symbolic flows. For the sake of future feminist subjects, we
must therefore learn to read both masculine and feminine écritures,
to read both Emesal and Emegir again, to read both the traditional
and the experimental tradition, and to let them inform our reciprocal
alter-subjectivities both in content and in form.
Another swerve: One of the intriguing topics in 1980s and 1990s
feminist theory courses was “écriture feminine.” It was a difficult cat-
egory to pin down, and a controversial term from its inception, owing
to the tensions between symbolic and ontological understandings of
the word “feminine.” Some of this writing seemed to be just experi-
mental and perhaps more part of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school

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 ÉCRITURE FUTURISTE 51

of poetry or various postmodern gestures in fiction. Categorization

was difficult but allegedly necessary—a box was needed. Several ques-
tions arose: do women write/think/experience in this swervy way?
Yes. Is this women’s writing? Not only. Women do write perfectly
traditional novels, and they can construct perfectly linear arguments
and, as mentioned, men sometimes write in a swervy way. No box
was ever really built. The “masculine” need to categorize just could
not be met. Scholars trained only to read and think in Emegir, the
princely tongue, wanted to remain monolectoral. They had a very
difficult time with an écriture that asked them to both expand and
to question their familiarity with poetry, literature, and philosophy;
with reading and language and epistemology. The situation was and
is not that swervy = feminine = feminist = experimental.6 The situa-
tion was and is that in ways both subtle and overt, and in ways that
are often structurally similar, all these kinds of writing were and are
often seen as irreconcilable with categories such as acceptable, logi-
cal, worthy, clear, readable, rigorous, valid, publishable, and so on.
What swervy, or feminine, or feminist, or experimental writing—and
especially writing that has all of these qualities—have in common is
that they deliberately pose a challenge, a counter-proposition to one
or more orthodoxies of form, or gender normativity, or patriarchy, or
tradition, or aesthetic decorum.
An example: Carole Maso is a novelist writing in the experimen-
tal tradition. Her literary ancestors include such aberrations as the
German romantics, the French symbolists, the international post-
symbolists, and many modernist modes of literary and philosophical
production. If we were to build a name cloud around her, it would
include Gertrude Stein, Charles Baudelaire, James Joyce, H. D.,
Virginia Woolf, and some less-famous contemporary figures such
as Ron Silliman, Joan Retallack, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Luce
Irigaray. She is not published by Random House. Her work is not
“popular.” It is distinctly literary, and distinctly counter-traditional.
Her work is not welcomed by critics, most of whom still want to read
in Emegir only, to be monolectoral. This narrowness is a problem
for emerging feminists—whether authors or not, we often feel this
restriction or expulsion personally, and we sense it culturally.
In 2000, Maso published some backtalk aimed at this critical and
political narrowness in her essay “Rupture, Verge, and Precipice /
Precipice, Verge, and Hurt Not”:

You wonder where the hero went.

You ask where is one sympathetic, believable character?

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 52 M. F. SIMONE ROBERTS

You ask where is the plot?

In fact you’ve been happy all these years to legislate literary
experience.
You think you know what the writer does, what the reader does.
You’re pretty smug about it.
You think you know what the reader wants: a good old-fashioned
story.
You think you know what a woman wants: a good old-fashioned—7
...
You rely on me to be dependent on you for favors, publication,
$$$$$$$$, canonization.
You are afraid. Too smug in your middle ground with your middle-
brow. Everything threatens you.
...
You think me unladylike. Hysterical. Maybe crazy. Unreadable. You
put me in your unreadable box where I am safe.
Where I am quiet. More ladylike.
In your disdainful box labeled “experimental.” Labeled “do not
open.” Labeled “do not review.”
...
Debase me and in the future I shall rise anew out of your cynicism
and scorn—smiling, lovely, free.
...
The future is all the people who’ve ever been kept out, singing.
In the future everything will be allowed.
So the future is for you, too. Not to worry. But not only for you.8

The struggle voiced in this complaint at a refusal to read and value

Maso’s Emesal writing is not only an academic matter. The struc-
ture of that struggle and the gendered terms in which it is cast are
symptoms of resistance to feminist cultural productions and politi-
cal demands. The monolectoral mind—rational, masculine—balks at
the notion of reading a feminine swerve. Upsetting lexical surfaces,
it turns out, does disrupt other social contracts by showing us that
we can think and be differently—possibly embodying ourselves and
producing culture in a whole range of Emesals and Emegirs. These
swerves open futures and wager the present; an écriture futuriste.
The thesis: If one shared goal of feminisms is the establishment of
feminine/female subjectivities in a feminine symbolic order as nex-
uses of cultural agency, and not merely as an ideal ephemera in the
marginal meta-territories of theory and literature, then the écritures
produced by feminine writing subjects (men and women) need to be
taught, read, and published as legitimate textual practices and as criti-
cal methodologies.

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 ÉCRITURE FUTURISTE 53

While the creative arm of this feminine writing has always been
under threat of amputation (e.g., the banning of Joyce’s Ulysses as
pornography in the United States), the critical and philosophical arms
are phantom limbs. Overly poetic, or swervy, or experimental works
in criticism or philosophy are difficult even for professional academics
to process and learn from, because they have not been trained to read
swervy works, much less swervy works of criticism or philosophy.
These small circles of likeminded writers and their limited read-
erships form “schools” and often function as counter-traditions,
historical examples being the Vorticists, the Beats, and the more con-
temporary L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and conceptual writing collectives.
Within these contemporary schools, there are women’s/feminist col-
lectives of writers, especially exemplified by the 1996 anthology Out
of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North
America and the UK.9 That this anthology is published by Small
Press Distribution signifies its marginality. Small Press Distribution
often publishes work considered “too risky” (the writer is new and
not a “name”) or “avant garde” (a host of works fall into this cate-
gory, among them feminine and/or feminist works). The mainstream
presses can “invest” in a money-losing book but do not. Such books
lose money partly because so few people know how to read them,
and that lack of another kind of training is a cultural choice. One
does not immediately and naturally understand Emily Dickenson or
Carole Maso or Luce Irigaray. One must learn to associate while read-
ing, not just to follow a line of argument or a plot. One must learn
this kind of reading to understand or enjoy Joyce or the Beats as well,
but their work does not offer a feminist point of view or critique or
imagination. They did, however, offer a critique (of “the epic” and of
“post-war American social expectations”) as écriture, which is a kind
of swerve, and were considered suspect for it.
Meanwhile, the influence of these writerly subjects and discourses
has gone a bit more mainstream and much more global as exemplified
by American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, in which we
find recognizably lyrical poems heavily inflected with experimental
methods, and Language for a New Century, in which many of the
works from India and the Middle and Far East bear clear traces of
counter-poetics.10 To read these poetries, it helps to be polylectoral,
to be able to comprehend both transited and disjunctive works. But,
that’s just poetry, and as poetry these works pose no threat to the
“real” authority attributed to scholarship and its lexical structures.
Yet, discourses of scholarship (in literary and philosophical studies)
remain “disinterested” and “transparent” (once you learn all the lingo,

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 54 M. F. SIMONE ROBERTS

and the habit of the embedded clause, that is). They remain “lin-
ear” and “rational” and transited and didactic and legitimate. Or, the
serious and approved work does. In relation to those creative styles,
they remain “objective,” monolectoral, “masculine.” Phallogocentric
scholars will talk about the experimental and swervy methods, but
they will not let us or themselves think in them. Forget teaching the
stuff. Monolectores find the methods of the experimental/feminine
writer (1) unreadable, (2) primary texts, to be parsed by experts, so
don’t bother yourself about them, and/or (3) unrigorous. They are,
*sniff*, poetic. We are to feel our unease with these texts to be fine
and a sign of our social good standing and patriarchal identification.
Few critical scholarly journals publish such work. Most that do are
literary, not critical ones. One is not to do the rigorous thinking, the
thinking that matters, in these aleatory, paradoxical, and juxtaposed
syntaxes. All these critics and scholars have to do is not learn some-
thing; not become polyliterate in this way; not discover the rigor of
these other forms. Not read. Not teach. Not publish. That is, one
can read Joyce or Stein as canonical examples of visionary genius, but
this is to be taken to mean that a new writer ought not follow them.
Genius is a term that both lauds and cages an artist or a work of art. It
is so exceptional that the critique it offers is secondary to its aesthetic
accomplishment, rather than taken to be part of its aesthetic accom-
plishment. Genius works are not really to be assimilated. The same
goes for the term poetic. It is used to say that something is beautiful
or admirable, and also to say that it is unrigorous, not consequential.
Hence theory, or criticism, that is written in a swerved/poetic/even
feminine style, because that is the best form in which to offer that
particular insight or critique or question, is “poetic,” not serious. The
rather feminine both/and of the rigor of such work smacks into the
either/or of established categories and bruises its forehead.
This choice that feels like tradition/clarity/reason prevents access
to the flexibility of the mind, the kinds of subjectivities people need
for living in the culture of differences which is feminisms’ logical
result. This choice prevents a more productive and very possibly more
enlivening conversation between tradition and counter-tradition—a
writerly reciprocal alterity. It does so via social and economic mecha-
nisms that operate like the sexism of patriarchy—as the subtext of
Maso’s passage above clearly indicates. Maso argues for space to
share—the future is for you, too, but not only for you—in reading
and living. Long rehearsed conventions (of gender, transcendent sig-
nifiers, certainty, objectivity, economics, and mimesis) are placed at

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 ÉCRITURE FUTURISTE 55

stake in these migratory and interdicting (swerved) logics and the

verve of these logics. For wagering tradition, they are called resistant
and experimental and put in the box marked “Do Not Review.”
Especially when they are written by women—still. Somehow, the
ontological fact of a writer’s sex still has a great deal to do with his
or her chances at publication and praise. The reality for most women
writers is to get published by some brave polylectoral editors, at small
publishing houses or university presses, ensuring a devoted but cul-
turally marginal coterie of readers.
What these published discourses do when one reads them, or
writes them, is to expand and let in more of the “blue air” DuPlessis
refers to when she imagines the book as a shared space in which at
least two subjects commune: “A book should be porous; it should
have enough air and space, enough blue air, so that whoever enters it
can breathe.”11 Her early book, The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist
Practice is one of the texts that inspired the term écriture feminine.
Reflecting on her own écriture, DuPlessis writes:

In my essays’ psychic and speculative search for contradictions, for

wholeness, linear and constellated forms coexist. The work is met-
onymic (based on juxtaposition) and metaphoric (based on resem-
blance). It is at once analytic and associative, visceral and intellectual,
law and body. The struggle with cultural hegemony, and the dilemmas
of that struggle, are articulated in a voice that does not seek authority
of tone or stasis of position but rather seeks to express the struggle in
which it is immersed.12

The cultural hegemony, authority, and stasis to which she refers are
coded as masculine in DuPlessis’s discourse, monolectoral in mine.
Her work combines genres of meta-theory, autobiography, and liter-
ary criticism. All of those topics and methods are available to her in
wrestling with the question, how can and do women even enter the
writing traditions? To make matters more complex, the methods she
uses are also placed under scrutiny. In The Pink Guitar, she excerpts
reviews of the work collected in that book:

(“I have a sense of the writer drunk on her own shrill voice”) (“con-
fessional”) (“repeatedly questioned the integrity”) (“not authentic”)
(“too experiential”) (“healthy self- doubt nonexistent”) (“garish”)
(“untransmuted, not art”) (“perso- nal”) (“narcissistic”)
[as she interprets their meaning]
and therefore suspect.13

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 56 M. F. SIMONE ROBERTS

DuPlessis describes part of her project as a “struggle to break into

the sentences that of course I am capable of writing smoothly. I want
to distance. To rupture. Why? In part because of the gender contexts
in which these words have lived, of which they taste.”14 Her project
as a writing and feminist subject was to think about how she thinks,
often about gender, and foregrounding this swerved style offers read-
ers that same chance to think about how they think and who they
are—if they learn to read it.
DuPlessis shares with Irigaray a concept of aesthetic production
and cultural life that the latter develops in her philosophical work.
Irigaray insists that a flourishing world would be one in which mas-
culine and feminine, in cultures and in selves and among selves,
would be in conversation, would provide to culture two fully legiti-
mate phenomena and sources of truth and reason and imagination—
a world of Retallack’s reciprocal alterity. Irigaray’s style also places
her in this experimental tradition, this écriture feminine, and she,
too, gets jilted. In “Ecce Mulier? Fragments,” Irigaray lashes out in
fine Nietzschean fashion at monolectoral critics who can/will not
read her work. She complains of being charged with “malicious-
ness.” Her retort: “Who could conceive of rigorous thought, com-
ing from a woman, that was anything but malice?”15 It gets worse:
“And if such a thought is expressed artfully, our categoricians and
synthesizers will be quite incapable of viewing it as philosophical,
so strong is the assumption that wisdom cannot express itself with
grace or poetry. Yet there is never a great philosopher who is not
a poet as well.”16 Both aesthetic pique and sociopolitical commit-
ments reveal themselves when readers choose or refuse to learn a
new reading strategy, or understand the creative tension between
content and form. And if one is a woman philosopher (and not
Parmenides or Nietzsche) “who claims to think and create without
submitting to the masculine order—[this] is a phenomenon that is
still inadmissible.”17
But it’s not just these women writers. It’s that whole tradition over
there that we call avant garde, experimental, counter-traditional. In
James Joyce’s streams, Roland Barthes’s chimera, and David Foster
Wallace’s footnotes and one-sided conversations, we find models of
commitment to the hybrid reality demanded by and coming to be
with the evolution of feminist subjectivities. It’s not just the subject
matter—Irigaray’s two lips18 —but the form and the textual strategies
that stretch the mind into seeing in more than one shape, or style, or
even gendered style. Between the narrow masculine in whose hege-
mony we live and the robust feminine (and more robust masculine

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 ÉCRITURE FUTURISTE 57

than is currently available) that is yet to be, there could be an open

word, that blue air, that wagered social space that does not presup-
pose the other’s being to be a threat to self or natural order, but a
source of wonder and vivacity.
Another swerve: In 1975, William Gass published On Being Blue:
A Philosophical Inquiry, which wonders and wanders aloud in disjunc-
tive, aleatory, and generally feminine ways around the epistemology
of blue. It is a book of epistemological and linguistic eroticism. He
writes a particular autobiographical male desire (coveting his slovenly
neighbor’s lovely and beleaguered wife) into the midst of an investiga-
tion of the Eros of syntax, about the difficulties of literary erotic writ-
ing, and about the near entire cultural field of “blue.” It is an essay
written in a recursive meander often noted as a mark of écriture femi-
nine. Blue partakes in vast regions of connotation and social meaning
from the honorable—as in the blue of first prize, blue bloods, and
the azure mantel of the Virgin Mother—all the way over to the out
of bounds, as in the blues, sex, blue stockings, or death itself. Gass is
most interested in the latter region:

So blue, the word and the condition, the color and the act, contrive
to contain one another, as if the bottle of the genii were its belly, the
lamp’s breath the smoke of the wraith. There is that lead-like look.
There is the lead itself, and all those bluey hunters, thieves, those
pigeon flyers who relieve roofs of the metal, and steal the pipes too.
There’s the blue pill that is the bullet’s end, the nose, the plum, the
blue whistler, and there are all the bluish hues of death.
Is it the sight of death, the thought of dying? What sinks us to a
deeper melancholy: sexual incompleteness or its spastic conclusion?19

His prose follows the wandering mind of the essayist, the experimen-
tal poet, and while the syntax is not ruptured, the line of thought
veers and juxtaposes at wild rates. We wouldn’t call it hardcore experi-
mentation, but we could call it swervy, even feminine. The review-
ers of the Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, the Chicago Tribune,
The New Republic, the New York Times Book Review, and the ALA
Booklist are all excerpted on the dust jacket:

(“virtuoso performance of great imaginative force”) (“such eclec-

tic Scrutiny”) (“gives philosophy back its good old name”) (“fasci-
nating, pro- vocative reading”) (“person who loves writing and the
sound writing makes”) (“enchanting”) (“exceptional for its insight,
eloquence and humor”).20

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 58 M. F. SIMONE ROBERTS

The facile sermon is part of my point: when men write their sex, their
body, it’s good philosophy. It’s brave. But the other point is that this
book presents itself as a philosophical trifle, an entertainment, not
one of Gass’s serious works. And yet, it is a very serious book, by a
man, pointing out that not only blue but also many of our nodes of
cultural organization are paradoxical, unstable, and given to mischief,
and that we do well to live with them as such rather than by them.
Gass is making a point rather like Retallack’s and DuPlessis’s, who
make the “mistake” of presenting their work as serious—and kudos
to him. He got one over on the monolectores.
But getting over on the masculine hegemony, conning him, is not
the point. As Retallack puts it in “The Experimental Feminine,” in
which she, as I do, associates the whole experimental tradition with a
feminine logic and rigor:

What’s the difference between the unintelligible world of the Feminine

and the knowable ideal of the Masculine? Counter to common wis-
dom, I want to assert that one (F) is a challenge, the other (M) a
mystique. To the extent that the Feminine is forced into service as
consolation for the loss of meaning within the emptiness of logics of
“world reason,” the energy of a productively conversational M-F is lost
to culture.21

The demand is the possibility of life, in this case enacted in writing that
can be dialogical, polyvocal, polylogical, sensuous, curious, serious,
and still intelligible. The methods of the ethical poetic, the poethic,
first expose the mystique of default masculinism (where most readers
object), and then go on to enact many versions of that M-F conversa-
tion (where most readers tune out). That kind of turn in reading and
writing practices (which are practices of subjectivity) might allow a
real gendered conversation in culture—as culture! What this nexus of
writers is after is a complex realism that sees gender, its narrow ideol-
ogy, its real effects, and the language that enforces that ideology and
its effects as part of the substance of that reality—including its wide
spectrums of embodiment, writerly expression, theoretical validation
and inquiry. A complex, nonpatriarchal reality would be for the mas-
culine, too, but not only for it.
Swerve and conclusion: To arrive at feminist ends—at a minimum,
a culture of dialogue between masculine and feminine (or tradition
and experiment, or reason and imagination)—will require that the ten-
sions between genders, styles, and modes of cognition be kept open.
That is probably the most difficult part of the project to grasp—its

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 ÉCRITURE FUTURISTE 59

deliberate lack of overdetermined telos. It requires new feminist and

new social subjects generally, those who can live without the closure,
the conclusion, the win of the masculine monolectore and risk the
unplannable openings of polylectores as a normal mode of life. This
a-telosity is an interval in which dialogue among gendered persons,
and gendered aspects of a person, becomes a state of being, culturally.
It requires not that tradition be replaced with experiment, but that
they and all their instances remain in creative and mutual tension or
relation—feminine and masculine, neither, both, and more. For that
complex and robust health to be possible, more people, both scholars
and nonscholars, should be trained to read in Emesal and Emegir, to
code-switch, to be polyliterate.
A new culture needs a new poetics, a new aesthetics, of both art
and of living the wager that a radically new kind of future presents
to humans. Our lives are the points where the real, the imaginary,
the symbolic, and power collide, naturally. When we take the read-
ing and writing of the (masculine) tradition and engage it in a con-
versation with the (feminine) experimental tradition, we get closer
to realism, to truth/s. The real world is infinitely more astonishing
and just plainly weird than our traditional knowledge, or reaction-
ary nostalgias, will let us easily see. The subjectivities of the future
will need their languages, their paroles. Some of them will develop
from these experimental traditions, and if we want to read that new
and inevitable realism, we will need training for it. We will need to
think critically in these swerved ways as well as in the linear ones. The
future is for you, but not only for you, dear Reason, dear Law, dear
Transcendental Signifier. Is the continued resistance to this deliberate
aleatory writing a concern for a future feminism, or future feminist
subjects? Are the strategies one learns in reading Gass, DuPlessis,
Retallack, Irigaray, and Maso culturally useful, and are they useful
to (the) feminist project/s? Should we be not only glancing at them
critically, but also writing critically with them?
My sense is that the answer to all these questions is yes.
The time-space of masculine and feminine paroles inheres in usage
and experiment, in the tensions between form and content, reception
and rupture, the play between denotation and connotation, logic and
metaphor. Because the real is wildly complex and disturbing to our
neat ideologies, language swerves and rustles to greet it. Because we
need expanded, not exchanged, literacies in order to shape ourselves
as subjects—feminist, complex, swerved enough to inhabit this com-
plex world. Because écriture futuriste, it’s already coming, whether
we can read it or not.

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 60 M. F. SIMONE ROBERTS

Notes
1. Carole Maso, “Break Every Rule: Remarks Made at Brown
University’s Gay and Lesbian Conference 1994 and at Outwrite,
Boston, Massachusetts, 1998,” chap. 9 in Break Every Rule: Essays
on Language, Longing, and Moments of Desire (Washington, DC:
Counterpoint, 2000), p. 159.
2. Joan Retallack, “Essay as Wager,” in The Poethical Wager (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), p. 3.
3. Ibid., p. 5.
4. Polylectoral: neologism of mine, adjective; n. polylectore. Able to
read many styles; with valences of Sigmund Freud’s polymorphously
perverse, the ability to find pleasure from many sensual sources. Vars.
polyliterate. The term is compared and co-paired with monolectore
and monoliterate. Their meanings will become clear.
5. Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the
Reading Brain (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), pp. 39–40.
Wolf references a dissertation from 2003, now published as Yoram
Cohen, The Scribes and Scholars of the City of Emar in the Late Bronze
Age (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009).
6. For instance, the hosts of “chick lit” novels, the plots of which revolve
around fashion choices, gossip chains, shopping, and lattes might be
“feminine” in many traditionally recognizable ways, but they are not
feminist, or swerved, or experimental.
7. The word implied here is “fuck.”
8. Carole Maso, “Rupture, Verge, and Precipice / Precipice, Verge, and
Hurt Not,” chap. 10 in Break Every Rule, pp. 162–170.
9. Maggie O’Sullivan, ed., Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative
Poetry by Women in North America and the UK (Berkeley, CA: Small
Press Distribution, 1996).
10. Cole Swensen and David St. John, eds., American Hybrid: A Norton
Anthology of New Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009);
and Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, and Ravi Shankar, eds., Language
for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia,
and Beyond (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008).
11. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Blue Studios: Poetry and its Cultural Work
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), p. 4.
12. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice
(New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 13.
13. Ibid., p. 166.
14. Ibid., p. 144.
15. Luce Irigaray, “Ecce Mulier? Fragments,” in Nietzsche and the
Feminine, ed. Peter J. Burgard, trans. Madeleine Doby (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 1994), p. 321.
16. Ibid., p. 323.
17. Ibid., p. 325.

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 ÉCRITURE FUTURISTE 61

18. See Luce Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak Together,” in This Sex
Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1985), pp. 205–218. The essay imagines the vulva
as an ontological stratum supporting a logic of difference as a coun-
terpoint to the Phallus and the logic of the Same.
19. William H. Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (Boston:
David R. Godine, 1976), p. 11.
20. To be fair, the jacket copy on The Pink Guitar begins, “ . . . is as much
a work of art as a book of feminist criticism . . . fuses meditation and
passion, an extensive critical understanding of modernism, and the
intensive rhythms of art.” Jacket copy is jacket copy after all.
21. Joan Retallack, “The Experimental Feminine,” chap. 5 in The
Poethical Wager, p. 96.

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 PA R T I I

New Bodies and Ethics

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 Introduction: A Politics of Displeasure

Chrysanthi Nigianni

The earth is evil; we don’t need to grieve for it.

Nobody will miss it.
—Justine in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia1

It is time to abandon the world

of civilized men and its light.
It is necessary to become totally other,
or cease to be.
—Georges Bataille 2

I do think that one cannot work with political theory without a

sense of the unforeseeable, without anticipating a break within the
present regime that cannot be known in the present. I’m always
searching for such breaks. I also think that what appears as a radi-
cal rupture usually turns out to have within it a trace of the past.
That produces a certain irony in the end.
—Judith Butler 3

Not the militant, not the radical, but the melancholic then. She is the
one who can bear the unforeseeable (and not the predetermined); she
sees but cannot represent (for she does not belong, she cannot partici-
pate in the rituals of our civilization); she is capable of breaking from
the present (she is already inhabiting this rupture—heavily breath-
ing within her crack, caught between, arrested, suspended from our
time). There is no before and after, just a fragile, insecure, contin-
gent threatened living on in a here and now; an enduring existence
without ends. She does not dream renewal, rebirth. She does not act
(against the norm, the symbol, the figure, or the stereotype). She is a

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 66 CHRYSANTHI NIGIANNI

watery body, always liquidated, in flow, in touch. Grief is watery. The

ground is burning her feet.4 She longs for the water. The melancholic
does not possess knowledge, though she knows, she remembers, the
moment when “they had to walk on their feet and ‘bear themselves’
whereas hitherto they had been borne by the water; a dreadful heavi-
ness lay upon them.”5
Porous skin, enlarged pupils, heavy breathing, trembling body
parts. “Simply a silence with only the sound of my own breathing.”6
She mobilizes the political economy of affect, the value of breathing,
the value of moving by staying still. “Hearts are racing and bodies are
breathless . . . skin vibrating . . . perception and movement is to become
attuned to the rhythms of one’s breath, to take a step back and retreat
to an interior world” (Davina Quinlivan, in this volume). It’s an
alchemic experiment she does not control. She senses and mocks at
the false sense of an “I,” the metaphysics of presence. She is, but does
not act, sterile: not (re)productive but receptive. She does not claim to
possess, nor does she demand: a different ethics of relating to Life and
Earth as not one’s own (against the tradition of huMANism as posses-
sive individualism). Not a feminist body-to-come as the self-righteous
Subject, the political Promise, the Truth, the Revolutionary, the
Radical, but the “second” coming of the melancholic “I” as radi-
cal falsification: the falsification of the subject of enunciation, the
“I think.”
“Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an
infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not
become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time?”7
The melancholic as the one who incarnates “modes of existence that
are not based on survival” (Claire Colebrook, in this volume), passes
fully through becoming-imperceptible, becoming-extinct (she has
nothing to lose), leaving the space for a future to be radically other
and not simply an extension of her present. Melancholia: a feminine
inflection. Only man perceives loss as his loss, in terms of lost objects.
Only he can mourn. For him there is no difficulty in reconstructing
himself: another object-choice (the woman, the animal, nature). Man:
an exclusive devotion to mourning. Melancholia: an oceanic feeling.
The distance between the subject and the object is not as clear for her
as it is for him. It “is at once as distant as the primeval sea, yet also
closer than our own skin” (Astrida Neimanis, in this volume).
Melancholia has the capacity to embrace disappearance, to pass
through the overcoming of mankind (she has already passed through
the overcoming of her self); the melancholic mocks and dances the
dance of death, playing with nonexistence, refusing to pay her due

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 INTRODUCTION 67

services to mankind and its capitalistic organization. She refuses to

be Man’s redemptive other. The Melancholic is the Exhausted. The
melancholic has lost interest in the outside world. She has taken dis-
tance from life so that it is no longer her life but life in its own endur-
ance, in its own terms and not in terms of her survival. It is only she,
Justine, the melancholic, who can take pride that her depression has
provided her with the greatest ability of any of the characters to cope
with Melancholia’s impending destruction of Earth, of our Earth, of
the planet with a human face. A true man of action, John simply kills
himself.8
A politics of displeasure goes against the pleasure man derives
from his capacity to exist “as a being who ends himself” (Colebrook),
insofar as he is able to give birth to himself as a proper new man, and
always finds himself anew through recuperating vampire gestures of
reincarnation. The melancholic lives beyond man, “for beyond ‘man’
one cannot figure the good life but only contingent, fragile, insecure,
and ephemeral lives” (Colebrook). The melancholic is more of a trou-
bling than a troubled figure, because she challenges our notions of
action, mastery, futurity. The melancholic refuses pleasure, the plea-
sure of his organization, for the economy of her affect.
“Think of how we could change society if only we rejected all of its
shallow claims on our wellbeing and attempts to instill in us a belief
in consumerism as a panacea . . . Our culture tends toward duality”9 —
the Man and the WoMan are its archetypes. The melancholic as a
watery unstable self “dives far deeper than human sexual difference,
and outswims any attempts to limit it thus” (Neimanis). The melan-
cholic is neither a woman nor a man. The Man has already become-
woman. Despair as genocide. His “being lies in some not-yet realized
becoming” (Colebrook), and is justified as an intrinsically posthuman
animal. Melancholia as the absolute negation of postexistence. She
refuses to be the host body.
She is “unmooring maternity from female essence, ‘natural’ repro-
duction, heterosexual intercourse, and mother-father families” (Katie
Lloyd Thomas, in this volume).10 She is bleeding no milk anymore
but finds “tenderness in the act of syringe feeding despite the sterile
packaging . . . and the literal distance” (Lloyd Thomas). She can com-
municate (with) the inanimate.
Melancholia: a feminine inflection, it has a female sex. The melan-
cholic as a becoming-woman-child-animal-imperceptible. A feminism
developing around the WoMan will always entail the Man. However
radical its claims, it cannot escape the instinct of survival and self-
preservation. Hence, a project of prolongation: prolonging the project

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 68 CHRYSANTHI NIGIANNI

of saving mankind. “Man lives on by feminist critique” (Colebrook).

The melancholic is not part of the oedipal family of humanity. The
melancholic is an orphan. Her bonds, her blood ties to humanity, are
ruptured. She cannot hide in the general concept of Woman or in
society, nor can she adapt to being a princess or to classes, to parties,
or to opinions of her time. She is the one who “can see the world end-
ing over and over again.”11 This is unmistakably internal.
The melancholic is “the women that are missing,”12 loyal to this
loss, refusing to forget and forgive, “a kind of female genealogy
of breath preserved” (Quinlivan). She denies “normal” mourning.
“The ocean remembers” (Neimanis).13 She realizes that she has
deceived herself, that she has let herself be tempted. Not that she has
done anything wrong, but now she is presented with the cold facts.
She “extends her self-criticism back over the past; (s)he declares that
(s)he was never any better.”14 She wants to grieve on her own terms,
publicly, under conditions in which grief is explicitly prohibited. Her
grief is not that of compassion—the melancholic denial for compas-
sion toward herself, toward his world. The melancholic denial to go
on living the same. The melancholic longing.
Gravity changes. It is no longer his gravity, his laws, his nature.15
The man who promises our survival, an ecological redemption, a reli-
gious saving. The man, the priest, the analyst, the philosopher, the
activist—they give the final warning. Only the melancholic does not
listen. Through breathing, not listening, she can understand words
and voices better. She cries: “You’re so damn arrogant!” She refuses
to raise her glass and give a toast to Life with him. She questions “just
who this ‘man’ is whose survival we seek to maintain” (Colebrook).
Eden is the scariest of places for her.16 She is the antichrist, emptied of
ideals of resurrection, of an afterlife. She refuses to cling to (his) Life.
Holding up to her future self, to her ego, getting better, means hold-
ing up to his construction: the Ego. She comes to question her very
sense of self: “In mourning it is the world which has become poor
and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”17 She can sense the
great injustice done in the world. She has a keener eye to the truth,
to the cold fact that “we have sacrificed our humanity to rapacity
and venality has already arrived, because that is how man has always
lived” (Colebrook).
Melancholia: between life and death, animate and inanimate. An
Ophelia floating, lying on the river shore, seduced by “a light without
representation.”18 “Lying down is never the end or the last word; it is
the penultimate word.”19 But how can one speak without prolonging
voices? The melancholic is the exhausted because she has arrived at

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 INTRODUCTION 69

the limit, a limit always displaced: “hiatuses, holes, tears we would

never notice, or would attribute to mere tiredness.”20 The women
who are missing:21 “all so seen unsaid.”22 An Ophelia floating: an
image standing in the void that loosens the grip of words. Not an
object but a process. An inclination for death as a failure of the will.
A longing for death as a change in will. Not willing death itself but
something in it, something yet to come. The melancholic longing
outside the livable and the loveable. The melancholic longing for
“touching, looking, singing, speaking, talking, and ‘magical think-
ing,’ which will enable [her] to cross the distance, to traverse the gap
which is both the separation and the very possibility of relation itself”
(Lloyd Thomas).
Not pleasure. Not desire for. Just the melancholic longing.

Notes
1. Lars von Trier, Melancholia, part II, “Claire” (Zentropa, 2011),
film.
2. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 179.
3. Judith Butler, “On Speech, Race and Melancholia,” interview with
Vikki Bell, Theory, Culture and Society 16:2 (1999), pp. 163–174,
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/judith-butler/articles/on-speech-race
-and-melancholia, accessed on February 9, 2012.
4. Lars von Trier, Antichrist (Zentropa, 2009), film.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, “O my Animals,” in Animal Philosophy: Ethics
and Identity, ed. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco (London:
Continuum, 2004), p. 4.
6. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, quoted in Gilles Deleuze, The
Logic of Sense (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 176.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German
Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams, trans.
Josephine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 119, §125.
8. Von Trier, Melancholia, “Claire.”
9. Anonymous blogger, “Depression, Melancholia, and Me: Lars von
Trier’s Politics of Displeasure,” “Occupied Territories,” http://
occupiedterritories.tumblr.com/post/13114178124/depression
-melancholia-and-me-lars-von-triers, accessed on February 9, 2012.
10. Katie Lloyd Thomas is here quoting Suzanne Bost, “From Race/
Sex/Etc. to Glucose, Feeding Tube, and Mourning: The Shifting
Matter of Chicana Feminism,” in Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy
Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2008), p. 354.
11. Anonymous blogger, “Depression, Melancholia, and Me.”

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 70 CHRYSANTHI NIGIANNI

12. Von Trier, Antichrist.

13. Astrida Neimanis is here quoting Robert Kandel, Water from Heaven
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 132.
14. Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, vol. 14, The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans.
and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), p. 245.
The text was originally published in 1917. The “(s)he” pronoun
indicating both genders is my addition.
15. Von Trier, Melancholia, “Claire.”
16. Von Trier, Antichrist.
17. Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, p. 245.
18. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S.
Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 13.
19. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 155.
20. Ibid., p. 158.
21. See Amartya Sen, “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing,”
The New York Review of Books 37:20 (December 20, 1990). Sen
points out that while we might expect that there are as many women
as men in the world, the ratio of women, especially in Asia, is in fact
lower than that of men, due to the widespread use of sex-selective
abortion and female infanticide, or to the malnutrition and inferior
health care that girls and women receive.
22. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 158.

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 CH A P T ER 5

Feminist Extinction

Claire Colebrook

The Bloated Monster

As the human race hurtles toward extinction, primarily as a result of
the annihilation of its own milieu, we feminists might start by say-
ing, “I told you so.” Feminism is, like any “ism,” perhaps too diverse
to be given any grounding identity, yet it has most certainly been
marked by criticisms of man. Even in its earliest, liberal, and inclusive
phases, feminism’s claim to include women within the category of
“man” or humanity did so not so much for its own sake as for the sake
of life in general. Feminism has never been a special interests claim
but has always appealed to some broader justice in which all humans
would be included. As long as man excluded and enslaved what was
other than himself—as long as he treated women as mere chattels—
his own humanity would be diminished. As Mary Wollstonecraft
pointed out in 1792, the relation of master to slave not only enslaves
the weaker party, but also precludes the full development of “man”
as a rational being: “Birth, riches, and every extrinsic advantage that
exalt a man above his fellows, without any mental exertion, sink him
in reality below them. In proportion to his weakness, he is played
upon by designing men, till the bloated monster has lost all traces of
humanity.”1
Wollstonecraft’s argument is a typical early instance of an insis-
tence on feminism as a better logic for all life. Even before the emer-
gence of explicitly ecological modes of feminism, there had been a
long-standing criticism of the limits or self-enclosure of man. But this
long-standing resistance to man is intrinsic to the history of humanist
self-critique. Feminism is best seen as an ultra-humanism in that it has,

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 72 CLAIRE COLEBROOK

from its inception, been based on the idea that man can only come to
himself and be properly human through the recognition of women.
The very concept of feminist emancipation harbors an implicit ecol-
ogy. From liberal to radical and post-structuralist feminisms, women
have always fought for themselves in the name of justice and equilib-
rium (and not as a warring special-interest group). It should come as
no surprise, then, that feminism would eventually claim an affinity to
otherness in general, 2 and see itself as extending naturally into envi-
ronmental and class concerns:

More and more men are embracing eco-feminism because they see
the depth of the analysis and realize that in shedding the privileges
of a male-dominated culture they do more than create equal rights
for all, that this great effort may actually save the earth and the life it
supports.3

There is—according to most forms of eco-feminism—something like

an affinity and passion for life as such that has been deflected by male
“power-over” and that might be redeemed by a return to a saved
earth. It is not only in the seemingly minor branch of an “ethics
of care” or eco-feminism that the critique of masculinism becomes
intertwined with a concern for the nonhuman. Eco-feminism is no
minor offshoot of feminist thought but structures its genealogy: lib-
eral feminism begins by saying that one cannot exclude a group of
bodies from the rights of the human animal; second wave feminism
questions the very nature of “the human,” and certainly does not
embrace its “self-evident” values of instrumental reason and univer-
salism; and by the time eco-feminism emerges, the concern for the
environment explicitly takes feminism from a mode of human-human
combat (women fighting for their rights) to a war on the man of rea-
son, whose drive to mastery for the sake of his own self-maintenance
has resulted in an unwitting suicide.
Feminism’s recent turn to life (in environmentalism and “new
materialisms”) should not appear as an addition or supplement but
as the unfolding of the women’s movement’s proper potentiality.
Indeed, this is just how eco-feminism has presented itself. It makes
no sense to strive to transform our relation to the environment with-
out transforming our own mode of being. Feminists’s criticisms of
man would not be add-ons to environmentalism but would be cru-
cial to any reconfiguration of ecological thinking. Insofar as man
has always been defined as a rational animal who calculates, manipu-
lates, and represents a world that is his proper domain—and if we

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 FEMINIST EXTINCTION 73

assume that “a dominating position alienates human beings from

the environment on which their survival depends”—a thought of life
without or beyond man becomes imperative: “When human beings
ignore natural processes, their antagonistic attitude towards nature
leads not only to the destruction of the environment but also to self-
destruction.”4
It is with this recognition of self-destruction that feminism gains
general purchase. Feminism’s criticism of man will not only trans-
form humanity and its milieu but will open up a new thought of life.
It is not only the case that a reformed relation to the environment
requires a reconfiguration of man; it is also the case that the pro-
ject of transforming man—allowing him to become something other
than the subject of instrumental reason—requires going beyond the
bounds of the organism to consider life in general.
But here we arrive at two questions: Is care for the environment
really an exit from the mode of anthropocentric blindness that has
accelerated the destruction of the biosphere? And, would not a
thought of life beyond the human environment—beyond our world,
our environment, the place or home for which we care—be a more
adequate response to man’s suicidal world tour?5 Put differently,
what I am suggesting here is that the very concept of “the environ-
ment” (seen as that which is vulnerable to our destruction and that
we, therefore, ought to save) shares all those features and affective
tendencies that structured the self-enclosed Cartesian subject that
feminism has always had in its sites. The very notion of an “environ-
ment” that encircles our range of living practice, and the very notion
of “woman” as tied to place and oriented to care, always figure the
world as our world. To say, as eco-feminists do, that we are essen-
tially world-oriented and placed in a relation of care and concern to
a world that is always place rather than meaningless space is to repeat
the (masculine) reduction of the world to its sense for us. Indeed, the
criticism of the scientific disenchantment of the world, along with the
lament that the world loses its meaning to become mere raw material
as we fall further into a mode of patriarchal domination, maintains
an insistence on the figure of the globe, or the environment as a self-
furthering and self-organizing totality: it is assumed that the proper
relation to the milieu that sustains us would be an extension of vir-
tues of respect, care, concern, and even communication to a nonhu-
man that is always presented in a normatively homely manner.6 What
remains out of play is a consideration of forces of life that are not
discernible within our milieu, and that do not perturb our coupling
with nature.

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 74 CLAIRE COLEBROOK

Even when the word vitalism is not used explicitly, we might

observe, today, a vitalist ethics in general that dominates our time.
Just as traditional vitalism set itself against René Descartes’s positing
of an extended substance that was the basis for a mechanistic and
calculable material world, so there is now a persistent, vehement, and
near-universal denunciation of Cartesianism, summed up by Antonio
Damasio as “Descartes’ error.”7 Against the idea of a mental substance
that represents an inert material world, neuroscientists, cognitive sci-
entists, cognitive archaeologists, researchers of artificial life, and phi-
losophers have insisted on characterizing life not in static terms but
as dynamic creativity. The mind or the self emerges from life rather
than being the privileged point from which life is known. One could
characterize this new anti-cognitive turn to life as a vitalism precisely
because it, too, places an emphasis on dynamism, relations, active
becoming, and creativity. Cartesianism is deemed to be horrific for all
the same reasons that it was condemned (mainly by theologians) in its
first articulation: the Cartesian subject is a disconnected, character-
less, disembodied, disenchanted, and disaffected ghost in a machine.
If life has meaning—if it is never mere matter but always this particu-
lar felt life for this particular living organism—then one must discard
Descartes’s error and arrive at a new Spinozism. For Damasio, this
means that there is no self who perceives the world in a certain way
and who is affected emotionally by it. In the beginning is affect; an
emotion that may or may not come to consciousness. The self is the
“feeling” of this happening.
In terms of environmentalism and questions of the human being’s
relation to the milieu that it has for so long disregarded, this might
seem to be a salutary elimination of man as homo faber. It appears,
perhaps, that from within their own trajectory, theories of “mind”
have arrived at the immersion of mind in life, at the recognition of the
inextricable intertwining of the mind with its milieu—and perhaps
even at the most profound of feminisms. Man as master representer
and disembodied thinker has, without assistance, and in his own
good time, recognized himself as an originally environmental being.
Feminists have, in other words, been right all along.
But is redemption this easy? Although we know that events are
occurring for which the old models of calculative reason are inade-
quate, it is uncertain just what or how much we could tackle from our
supposedly new point of view of engaged, dynamic, extended, embod-
ied, and emotive selfhood. Is this new vitalism really a felicitous shift
in modes of thinking that will allow us to deal with the current criti-
cal state of our milieu, or is it a reaction formation? I would suggest

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 FEMINIST EXTINCTION 75

the latter, especially if we consider not only the joyous affirmations

of life—with the discovery of empathy,8 affect,9 embodiment,10 uni-
versal creativity,11 and wondrous futures12 —but also seemingly dire
warnings. James Lovelock’s “final” warning is, after all, a warning for
us —otherwise it would not be final. It assumes our duration, the end
of life for us.13 What is not considered—beyond questions of warning,
surviving, saving, and death knells—is what kind of life the actual
death of man might enable, whether “we” ought to live on, and just
what this saved “we” approaching finality might be.
It is just at the point at which the future’s potentiality and open-
ness appears to be radically lacking in life that thinking discovers a life
that goes beyond the old, limited, finite, and all too concrete models
of mind. Man has always existed as a being who ends himself: as soon
as the human is given some natural or limited definition, man discov-
ers that his real, creative, futural being lies in some not-yet realized
becoming that will always save him from a past that he can denounce
as both misguided and at an end.14 Today, just as the human spe-
cies faces possible and quite literal extinction, “man” extinguishes
himself: he declares that he is not a brain in a body or a mind in a
machine, but always already ecological—sympathetically, emotion-
ally, and systemically attuned to a broader milieu of life. Once again
what is affirmed—against all the evidence for a malevolent relation
or intrinsically suicidal system of humanity and its environs—is an
original human connectedness, an irreducible system in which the
world is never alien raw matter but always this particular world as it is
disclosed for this particular organic life.
But has man really extinguished himself? Has there not always
been an insistence that thinking and being are the same, that—in old
Parmenidean terms—to think is to be in accord with a movement of
life that affirms and sustains itself? That is to say, man has continu-
ally realized that the world that he has depicted is to some extent a
projection of his own mastering reason, and he has then gone on to
claim that—after the Enlightenment—that mythic world has been
vanquished.15 If there has been a reaction against Platonism and intel-
lectualism, has this not been because such idealisms set values above
life? For the systems theory of Humberto Maturana and Francisco
Varela, which has been so influential across a range of domains, there
is not a primary world that is taken up and represented by a separate
subject, since there is just this coupling of organism and the world
the organism inhabits.16 It is against this anti-Platonism or naïve lit-
eralism that I would suggest that we consider the world not as our
own milieu but in its own duration. Should we not be considering

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 76 CLAIRE COLEBROOK

ourselves and conscious life not as emergent properties, but as a mon-

strosity that we do not feel, live, or determine but rather witness par-
tially and ex post facto? That is to say, the end of man is both desirable
and necessary, yet also impossible. Any attempt to vanquish man as a
blight on earth always depends on the notion of a proper human who
would find himself, again, being at one with the earth.

The Sex of Extinction

Here we must turn to the sex of extinction. As man, today, faces
his death in the literal sense, he calls upon his figural death; he
demands and declares that man must become one with the life of
which he is an expression. In this becoming-with-the-world has man
become woman? In one sense the answer is yes, but this is not a new
becoming-woman, nor is it a new vitalism. There has always been
an affirmation of the life from which man emerges, a life that can
be relived, reaffirmed, and plundered so that man may overcome his
isolated subjective detachment in order to feel at one with his world.
Man has always been an environmental animal, has always viewed the
world as his environs, has always been a mode of becoming-woman:
he lives his proper being not in fully actualized and detached isola-
tion, but through a more profound autonomy in which he recog-
nizes and affirms himself through a world that is never alien, never
mere matter, but always a sign of his proper and profound life. That
is—and this is in the spirit of a quick, moral, and unthinking anti-
Cartesianism—man is most properly himself when he relates to and
lives himself through his own indispensable otherness.17 If there has
been a historical shift from instrumental Cartesianism—where the
world is dead matter to be mastered—to environmentalism, then the
latter move is a hyper-Cartesianism (since for the environmentalist
the world is not really other, alien, or inhuman but always already at
one with man’s proper life).
A feminist critique of man—a man who has always been vitalist
in his profound communion with life—would be the most tired of
gestures. Man lives on by feminist critique, by continually surpassing
and reviving his rationality through imbibing the blood of the dead,
by returning to and retrieving the life beyond the bounds of his own
life. Neither a traditional vitalism that regards matter as supplemented
by spirit, nor a “new” vitalism where matter is already dynamic will
save us. What any vitalism will sustain is just this lure of saving life (as
though one might find, in life, means for salvation). What we need to
consider is the dead end of life: man lives on either by gathering all

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 FEMINIST EXTINCTION 77

proper life within himself (seeing all life as mindful) or by positing a

good life that will save him from himself.
It is perhaps in this double bind (where man maintains himself in
the face of extinction by extinguishing himself) that a radical femi-
nism could provide a genuine thought of life beyond the human.
Here, there would be no woman who remains close to the earth,
life, and cosmos: no woman who provides man with the other he
has always required for his own redemption. Feminism, today, fac-
ing the extinction of the human, should turn neither to man nor
to woman: both of these figures remain human, all too human, as
does the concept of the environment that has always allowed man to
live on through a vitalist ethic. One would also need to say the same
about posthumanism, which is more often than not an ultra-human-
ism. In many ways, what passes for posthumanism consists in the
assertion that man is not an isolated animal with any specific features
that would mark him off from life, for he is always already at one with
life, animality, and technology. Rather than thinking of woman, the
finality and redemption of man, or living beyond man in an era of the
unified post-human (which takes heed of the final warning for us),
what really needs to be confronted is the way in which the figure of
“life” has always justified man as an intrinsically post-human animal.
Man has always been other than himself, always more than his own
mere being.
If vitalism has any general sense—and it has at least a performative
force in current calls for a new vitalism—then it does so in opposi-
tion to what is perceived to be a long-standing condition of Western
man. Man, according to anti-Cartesian and post-human critiques,
has conceived of himself as an autonomous, mastering, representing,
elevated, and rational near-divinity who owes nothing to his world.
The turn to the environment, to becoming one with a vitality that
exceeds the bounds of his own being, would supposedly be a depar-
ture from a history of instrumental reason. But the turn to vitalism is
another vampire gesture: man consumes himself, and then imagines
that he is no longer the rapacious animal he once was. Man believes
he has exited his self-enclosure to find the world and his better post-
feminist self. The concept of the environment—as that surrounding
and infusing life from which we have emerged, and which, so the
argument goes, would be retrievable through a vitalist overcoming of
our malevolent detachment—maintains the same structure of anthro-
pomorphism. What needs to be thought today is that which cannot
be thought, lived, retrieved, or revitalized as the saving grace of man
or woman.

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 78 CLAIRE COLEBROOK

Not the Postapocalyptic

(Not the Posthuman), Not Now
To give a sense of what this might mean both critically and positively,
we should perhaps ask what the future would be like beyond the fig-
ure of man (a figure that has always included both the post-human
and woman). What if we were to approach the future through sexual
difference, where sexual desire would be distinct from any notion of
survival or organic self-maintenance? Here, one would need to aban-
don notions of survival, and of the post-human, precisely because these
are recuperating gestures. If one considered sexual difference outside
dualist gender binaries, one might confront proliferating differences.
Difference is sexual, rather than gendered, when it is not the coupling
of two kinds (or genres) for the sake of mutual self-maintenance and
ongoing recognition.18 If a body connects with another body, not for
the sake of its own survival or reproduction but through something
like touch as such, then sexual difference would relate to what is other
than itself without a view to shoring up its own being. To be open to
what is not one’s own—to what cannot be figured as environment,
ecology (with all its motifs of oikos and interconnectedness) or the
post-human—would have two consequences.
First, one might ask about future modes of existence that are not
based on survival (for such would always be an extension of the pres-
ent). Margaret Atwood’s great counter-post-apocalyptic novel The Year
of the Flood does just that. In this novel, Atwood seems to be opening
with a (now) standard post-apocalyptic landscape in which human life
in its civilized and urbane modes has been destroyed, leaving a world
of fragile living on. Through the use of flashbacks, Atwood describes
a world prior to this wasted landscape: a world of traffic in women,
of the manipulation of life for corporate expediency and commercial
novelty, of a subclass of humans who function as waste for a techno-
scientific capitalist elite, and where the language of (once communi-
cating) humans circulates as noise and brand-names. Here, Atwood
opens one path for thought: our supposed post-apocalyptic future has
already arrived. The nightmare dystopia of some supposedly science-
fiction inhuman future whereby we have sacrificed our humanity to
rapacity and venality has already arrived, because that is how man
has always lived. Second, and more important for my purposes here,
Atwood describes another cult of the future—the Gardeners—whose
ecological discourse of sacred life and the purity of the origins of their
own retrieved humanity is structurally akin to the imagined “biopolit-
ical” corporatism of managed life. What Atwood suggests, against the

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 FEMINIST EXTINCTION 79

present idea that man might surpass himself and find a new ecological
future, is that such redemptive imaginaries have always allowed man
to master life in order to maintain himself.
Atwood also presents the hint of a future of refusal in which
the women who are traded, exchanged, and managed for the sake
of biological variation and reproduction reject the biological family
and familial production to produce new modes of haphazard social
bonding (beyond sexuality) and new forms of bio-art that decay
upon impact. In a world where a war takes place between eco-fascism
(or saving life at all costs) and bio-politics (the management of life
for the sake of maximized reproduction), Atwood describes fragile
female characters who make their way through this landscape, form-
ing friendships rather than effective communities of kinship systems.
One of the characters has a successful career in bio-art, where she uses
wasted bodily materials to produce artworks that are fleeting and
ephemeral: “She liked to watch things move and grow and then dis-
appear.”19 Atwood challenges the fetishized motif of life, the human
mode of monumental archives, and the idea that in turning to “life,”
art and man might find endurance.20
What Atwood poses is a world beyond woman as man’s better
other. The Year of the Flood continues two critical traditions in femi-
nist writing. Like Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, which aligned the
Romantic artists who imagine nature as a benevolent feminine other
with the scientist’s domination of nature as dead matter, The Year
of the Flood presents a world in which ecological redemption (as eco-
fascism) is the flipside of a bio-political management of life. The two
warring factions in the novel are an Adamic cult, the Gardeners, who
appeal to the vital value of the earth as a way of controlling bodies,
production, and reproduction, on the one hand, and a governing cor-
poration (CorpSeCorp) that aims at maximizing life through genetic
manipulation and data management, on the other. Both these fac-
tions are enabled by the post-apocalyptic imaginary or, to borrow a
phrase from Lovelock, the imaginary of “final warning.” If our only
value and horizon is that of life, then only one path is permitted: that
which saves and survives.
Both Shelley’s Frankenstein and Atwood’s Year of the Flood dis-
play a quite common urge in feminist fiction writing to question the
value of the maximization of life. Such literature instead conducts
thought experiments of futures that open up reproduction beyond
any notion of self-managing man. The Year of the Flood continues a
feminist-novelistic-radical capacity to question the very value of sur-
vival (which is also to say the value of value, if value has always been

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 80 CLAIRE COLEBROOK

given as that which furthers life). It would be incorrect to label this

tradition as science fiction, for the worlds depicted are those of the
present scientific imaginary: in both Frankenstein and The Year of
the Flood it is both science (as instrumental reason) and its supposed
other (the ecological connectedness with life) that are presented as
redemption narratives that fail to question just who this “man” is
whose survival we seek to maintain. One might say that the con-
sequences one can draw from this feminist tradition are that man
always plans his escape through imagined post-human futures and
others, and that what is required is a sense of the contamination of
the ecological imaginary. This brings us to the second consequence,
and the second tradition, in which the very figures of art, creativity,
and production—tied to fruitful life—are also interrogated.
This second critical tradition extended and radicalized by The Year
of the Flood is the feminist counter-aesthetic. In Virginia Woolf’s To
the Lighthouse —a novel that, like Atwood’s, ends with an ambivalent
figure of the approach to (or refusal of) light—the central maternal
nurturing figure, Mrs. Ramsay, dies. After an interlude that presents
a falling of darkness, the final section of the novel concludes with the
young female artist Lily Briscoe having a vision that prompts her to
act almost destructively toward the conventional canvas. Not only
does her vision result in a single dark line painted down the center of
the picture of Mrs. Ramsay that she has been struggling to compose
throughout the novel, but it is also coupled with a recognition of art’s
decay—as though Briscoe’s refusal of art history and representation
is also an embrace of transience. This is not man as homo faber, being
infused with a life other than his own that he goes on to present, rep-
resent, and preserve, for Lily’s approach to her canvas occurs quickly
and almost as a distraction:

Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to

her canvas. There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its green and blues,
its lines running up and across, its attempt at something . . . With a sud-
den intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in
the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down
her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.21

The Year of the Flood also presents an art event amid a world of
destruction that has occurred because of the shrill and myopic desire
for life. Just as To the Lighthouse is structured around the falling of
an immense darkness (the “great” war) that is the consequence rather
than the destruction of man’s apocalyptic imaginary (where he will

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 FEMINIST EXTINCTION 81

arrive fully at nothing other than his own mastery), so The Year of
the Flood presents the future of man. The minor ray of disturbance is
given in a practice of bio-art that, quite unlike the dominant bio-art
of the present that maintains man’s watchfulness over life, embraces
disappearance:

Amanda was in the Wisconsin desert, putting together one of the

Bioart installations she’s been doing now that she’s into what she
calls the art caper. It was cow bones this time. Wisconsin’s covered
with cow bones . . . and she was dragging the cow bones into a pattern
so big it could only be seen from above: huge capital letters, spell-
ing out a word. Later she’d cover it in pancake syrup and wait until
the insect life was all over it, and then take videos of it from the air,
to put into galleries. She liked to watch things move and grow and
then disappear . . . Her Wisconsin thing was part of a series called The
Living Word—she said for a joke that it was inspired by the Gardeners
because they’d repressed us so much about writing things down. She’d
begun with one-letter words—I and A and O —and then done two-
letter words like It, and then three letters, and four, and five. Now she
was up to six. They’d been written in all different materials, including
fish guts and toxic-spill-killed birds and toilets from building demoli-
tion sites filled with used cooking oil and set on fire.22

Atwood depicts the artist, Amanda, not as a retrieval of all that is

proper, foundational, and eternal in life, but as a scammer, joker, or
player who will take man’s game of life, money, and survival—includ-
ing the sanctity of the word—and play with nonexistence. Beyond
“man,” there is perhaps only “woman” and “life,” and so rather than
think apocalyptically in terms of our own finality we might—finally—
be given the opportunity to think of a world without ends.
Here lies the significance of Atwood’s work. First, she presents
the imagined nightmare of a future world of man’s psychotic drive
to master life as already evidenced in the present (rather than being
some imagined or possible post-apocalyptic future). We are always
and already so tied to life that it becomes the screen or tableau upon
which we imagine nothing other than our own living. Second, like
Shelley before her, she does not place a feminized nature outside man,
for beyond “man” one cannot figure the good life but only contingent,
fragile, insecure, and ephemeral lives. Finally, one cannot appeal here
to art or the aesthetic, for here, too, one encounters the fetishized
figure of redemptive creation. In its place, Atwood, like Woolf and
Shelley before her, imagines what life would be like if one could aban-
don the fantasy of one’s own endurance.

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 82 CLAIRE COLEBROOK

Notes
1. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New
York: Cosimo, 2008), p. 53.
2. See Gabriele Schwab, The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in
Literary Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996),
p. 34; and Peter Hitchcock, Dialogics of the Oppressed (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
3. Judith Plant, “Learning to Live with Differences: The Challenge of
Ecofeminist Community,” in Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature,
ed. Karen J. Warren and Nisvan Erkal (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1997), p. 129.
4. Rosi Braidotti, Ewa Charkiewicz, Sabine Häusler, and Saskia
Wieringa, Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development:
Towards a Theoretical Synthesis (London: Zed Books, 1994), p. 149.
5. I use the term man quite deliberately here: for it is this figure of
man that has been adopted by both parties, both those who deploy
notions of a generic humanity and those feminists who seek to find
a space of “woman” outside the man of reason. The concept of man
also brings with it a certain concept of world: as Heidegger and oth-
ers have pointed out, the earth becomes “world” when it is lived as
our own.
6. For a stringent critique of the myopias of environmental thinking,
see Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 18.
7. See Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the
Human Brain (New York: Putnam, 1994).
8. Jeremy Rivkin, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global
Consciousness in a World in Crisis (New York: Penguin Books,
2009).
9. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory
Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
10. Mark Rowlands, The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind
to Embodied Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
11. Peter Russell, The Global Brain: The Awakening Earth in a New
Century (Edinburgh: Floris, 2007).
12. Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World
in Cyberspace, trans. Robert Bononno (New York: Perseus Books,
1997).
13. See James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning
(New York: Basic Books, 2009).
14. Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 30:1 (1969), pp. 31–57.
15. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund
Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

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 FEMINIST EXTINCTION 83

16. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of

Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Boston:
Shambhala, 1992).
17. It is for this reason that Luce Irigaray does not see Descartes as
an “error” in the history of thought but instead recognizes in the
Cartesian cogito an ongoing appeal to a necessary otherness that will
enable man to return to himself, and live himself as nothing more
than the process of reflecting his own outside. See Luce Irigaray,
Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1985).
18. Unlike contemporary moralisms of evolutionary psychology that tie
sexual selection to species maintenance and identity (Robert Wright,
The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life
[New York: Pantheon Books, 1994]), Elizabeth Grosz insists that
Darwinian sexual selection creates couplings and creations that are
no longer either organic or species-bound. See Elizabeth Grosz, The
Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2004).
19. Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood: A Novel (New York:
Doubleday, 2009), p. 67.
20. For an insightful criticism of bio-art’s putative break with “man”—
a critique that would resonate with Atwood’s attempt to figure a
bio-art of dead waste—see Nicole Anderson, “(Auto)Immunity: The
Deconstruction and Politics of ‘Bio-Art’ and Criticism,” Parallax
16:4 (2010), pp. 101–116.
21. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 170.
22. Atwood, The Year of the Flood, pp. 56–57.

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 CH A P T ER 6

Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a

Body of Water

Astrida Neimanis

We are all bodies of water.

To think embodiment as watery belies the understanding of bod-
ies that we have inherited from the dominant Western metaphysical
tradition. As watery, we experience ourselves less as isolated entities,
and more as oceanic eddies: I am a singular, dynamic whorl dissolving
in a complex, fluid circulation. The space between ourselves and our
others is at once as distant as the primeval sea, yet also closer than our
own skin—the traces of those same oceanic beginnings still cycling
through us, pausing as this bodily thing we call “mine.” Water is
between bodies, but of bodies, before us and beyond us, yet also very
presently this body, too. Deictics falter. Our comfortable categories of
thought begin to erode. Water entangles our bodies in relations of
gift, debt, theft, complicity, differentiation, relation.
What might becoming a body of water —ebbing, fluvial, dripping,
coursing, traversing time and space, pooling as both matter and
meaning—give to feminism, its theories, and its practices?

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 86 ASTRIDA NEIMANIS

Hydro ǀ Logics
Our cells are inflated by water, our metabolic reactions mediated
in aqueous solution.
—David Suzuki1

The oceans are in constant motion . . . thermohaline circula-

tion . . . occurs deep within the ocean and acts like a conveyor belt.
—Environmental Literacy Council2

The land biota has had to find ways to carry the sea within it and,
moreover, to construct watery conduits from “node” to “node.”
—Mark and Dianna McMenamin3

Somewhere at the bottom of the sea, there must be water that

sank from the surface during the “Little Ice Age” three centuries
ago . . . The ocean remembers.
—Robert Kandel 4

Sixty to ninety percent of your bodily matter is composed of water.

Water, in this sense, is an entity, individualized as that relatively stable
thing you call your body. But water has other logics, other pattern-
ings and means of buoying our earthly world, too. Not least, water
is a conduit and mode of connection. Just as oceanic currents con-
vey the sun’s warmth, schools of fish, and islands of degraded plastic
from one planetary sea to another, our watery bodies serve as material
media. In an evolutionary sense, living bodies are necessary for the
proliferation of what scientists Mark and Dianna McMenamin call
Hypersea, which arose when life moved out of marine waters and
by necessity folded a watery habitat “back inside of itself.”5 Today,
when you or I drink a glass of water, we amplify this Hypersea, as we
sustain our existence through other “webs of physical intimacy and
fluid exchange.”6 In this act of ingestion, we come into contact with
all of our companion species7 that inhabit the watershed from which
that water was drawn—book lice, swamp cabbage, freshwater mussel.
But we connect with the sedimentation tanks, and rapid-mix floc-
culators that make that water drinkable, and the reservoir, and the
rainclouds, too. Hypersea extends to include not only terrestrial flora
and fauna, but also technological, meteorological, and geophysical
bodies of water.

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 HYDROFEMINISM 87

Even while in constant motion, water is also a planetary archive of

meaning and matter. To drink a glass of water is to ingest the ghosts
of bodies that haunt that water. When “nature calls” some time later,
we return to the cistern and the sea not only our antidepressants, our
chemical estrogens, or our more commonplace excretions, but also
the meanings that permeate those materialities: disposable culture,
medicalized problem-solving, ecological disconnect. Just as the deep
oceans harbor particulate records of former geological eras, water
retains our more anthropomorphic secrets, even when we would
rather forget. Our distant and more immediate pasts are returned to
us in both trickles and floods.
And that same glass of water will facilitate our movement, growth,
thinking, loving. As it works its way down the esophagus, through
blood, tissue, to index finger, clavicle, left plantar fascia, it ensures
that our being is always a becoming. An alchemist at once profoundly
wondrous and entirely banal, water guides a body from young to old,
from here to there, from potentiality to actuality. Translation, trans-
formation. Plurality proliferates.
As a facilitator, water is the milieu, or the gestational element, for
other watery bodies as well.8 Mammal, reptile, or fish; sapling or
seed; river delta or backyard pond—all of these bodies are necessarily
brought into being by another body of water that dissolves, partially
or completely, to water the bodies that will follow. On a geological
scale, we have all arisen out of the same primordial soup, gestated by
species upon watery species that have gifted their morphology to new
iterations and articulations.
On a more human scale, we gestate in amniotic waters that deliver
to us the nutrients that enable our further proliferation. Our waste
is removed by similar waterways, and we are protected from external
harm by these intrauterine waters, too. Gestational waters are also
themselves (in) a body of water, and participate in the greater ele-
ment of planetary water that continues to sustain us, protect us, and
nurture us, both extra- and intercorporeally, beyond these amniotic
beginnings. Water connects the human scale to other scales of life,
both unfathomable and imperceptible. We are all bodies of water, in
the constitutional, the genealogical, and the geographical sense.
Water as body; water as communicator between bodies; water as
facilitating bodies into being. Entity, medium, transformative and
gestational milieu. All of this enfolded in, seeping from, sustaining
and saturating, our bodies of water. “There are tides in the body,”
writes Virginia Woolf.9 We ebb and flow across time and space—
body, to body, to body, to body.

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Feminism ǀ Leaks
We ourselves are sea, sands, corals, seaweeds, beaches, tides, swim-
mers, children, waves . . . seas and mothers.
—Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément 10

Woman’s writing . . . draws its corporeal fluidity from images of

water . . . This keeping-alive and life-giving water exists simultane-
ously as the writer’s ink, the mother’s milk, the woman’s blood and
menstruation.
—Trinh T. Minh-ha11

In me everything is already flowing.

—Luce Irigaray 12

Thinking about embodiment in ways that challenge the phallogocen-

tric Enlightenment vision of discrete, atomized, and self-sufficient
Man has been a long-standing concern for feminist thinkers.
Particularly within the French feminist tradition of écriture femi-
nine, the fluid body of woman is invoked as a means of interrupting
a philosophical tradition that both valorizes a male (morphological,
psychological, symbolic, philosophical) norm, and elides the specific-
ity of “woman.”
At the same time, accounts such as Hélène Cixous’s, Luce Irigaray’s,
and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s have been criticized by other feminist think-
ers for their purported incarceration of women within a biologically
essentialist female and normatively reproductive morphology. Cixous
and Clément’s “Sorties,” for instance, connects the female body to
the sea, in that both are gestators of life. Irigaray, in her love letter to
Friedrich Nietzsche, continuously admonishes him for forgetting the
watery habitat that birthed him, and to which he owes a great debt.13
Both Minh-ha in Women, Native, Other and Cixous in “The Laugh
of the Medusa” invoke the “mother’s milk”14 or the “white ink,”15
which seems to reductively connect the woman writer to a lactating
female body. Is not, then, the “fluid woman” just another way of
invoking the phallogocentric fantasy of “woman as womb”?
The last century of (primarily Western) feminist thought has culti-
vated the view that to reduce a woman to her (reproductive) biology
is problematic, first, because of the troubling symbolic meanings—
passive, empty vessel, hysterical, contaminating—that persistently
imbue this biology. Moreover, within the social, political, and

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 HYDROFEMINISM 89

economic contexts in which this thought has circulated, compulsory

reproduction has generally foreclosed rather than facilitated mean-
ingful participation of women outside of the domestic sphere. But
why should this history predetermine any appeal to biological mat-
ter as necessarily antifeminist or reductionist? The desire of water to
morph, shape-shift, and facilitate the new persistently overflows any
attempt at capture. Is not “woman” similarly uncontainable? After
all, “woman’s” beings/becomings in these texts are not determined
in advance—even as she may be, like water, temporarily dammed by
dominant representations and discourse. As watery, woman is hardly
(statically, unchangeably) “essentialist.” She too becomes the very
matter of transmutation.
In an effort to circumvent the trap of biological essentialism, the
texts of Irigaray, Cixous, and Minh-ha have also been read as merely
metaphoric of gestation: women’s fluidity births new ways of think-
ing, writing, being.16 But surely, the watery body is no mere metaphor.
The intelligibility of any aqueous metaphor depends entirely upon the
real waters that sustain not only material bodies, but material lan-
guage, too.17 And are we not all bodies of water? In Marine Lover,
while Irigaray’s descriptions highlight woman’s aqueous embodiment,
she posits no clear separation of the man’s body from the amniotic
waters he too readily forgets. Irigaray’s male interlocutor in this text
is birthed in and by a watery body—yet this water is also an integral
part of his own flesh: “Where have you drawn what flows out of
you?”18 And, while what her lover thinks he fears is drowning in the
mother/sea, Irigaray subtly reminds him that what he should really
fear is desiccation, drought, thirst. No body can come into being,
thrive, or survive without water to buoy its flesh.
Similarly, Minh-ha suggests that woman’s writing draws from the
wellspring of her reproductively oriented fluid forces (menstruation,
lactation)—yet all bodies have reservoirs to be tapped.19 We might ask:
if the fluids of otherwise gendered bodies were acknowledged rather
than effaced, how might such attentiveness amplify the creative—
and even ethical and political—potential of these bodies? Rather than
alerting us to some “essentialist” difference between masculine and
feminine (or normatively reprosexual and nonreprosexual) embodi-
ment, such aqueous body-writing might invite all bodies to attend
to the water that facilitates their existence, and embeds them within
ongoing overlapping cycles of aqueous fecundity.
The fluid body is not specific to woman, but watery embodiment
is still a feminist question; thinking as a watery body has the potential
to bathe new feminist concepts and practices into existence. What if

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 90 ASTRIDA NEIMANIS

a reorientation of our lived embodiment as watery could move us, for

example, beyond the longstanding debate among feminisms whereby
commonality (connection, identification) and difference (alterity,
unknowability) are posited as an either/or proposition? Inspired by
Irigaray, we will still affirm that the rhythms of the fluid woman
belong to what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called “the species of
alterity”20 (for this alterity also safeguards plurality). But Irigaray also
reminds us that no body is self-sufficient in its fluvial corporeality;
we have all come from the various seas that have gestated us, both
evolutionarily and maternally.21 Water, in other words, flows through
and across difference. Water does not ask us to confirm either the
irreducibility of alterity or material connection. Water flows between,
as both: a new hydro-logic. What sort of ethics and politics could I
cultivate if I were to acknowledge that the unknowability of the other
nonetheless courses through me—just as I do through her?
To say that we harbor waters, that our bodies’ gestation, suste-
nance, and interpermeation with other bodies are facilitated by our
bodily waters, and that these waters are both singular and shared, is
far more literal than we might at first think. Neither essentialist nor
purely discursive, this watery feminism is critically materialist.

Membrane, Viscosity
Probably the most important feature of a biomembrane is that it is
a selectively permeable structure . . . [which is] essential for effective
separation.
—Wikipedia22

“Viscosity” retains an emphasis on resistance to changing form.

—Nancy Tuana23

Bodies need water, but water also needs a body. Water is always
sometime, someplace, somewhere. Even in our aqueous connections,
bodies and their others/worlds are still differentiated. The question,
then, of “what is” is never sufficient. How is it? Where is it? When is it?
Speed, rate, thickness, duration, mixture, contamination, blockage.24
If we are all bodies of water, then we are differentiated not so much
by the “what” as by the “how.” But what are the specific mechanisms
of this differentiation?
Attention to the mechanics of watery embodiment reveals that
in order to connect bodies, water must travel across only partially

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 HYDROFEMINISM 91

permeable membranes. In an ocular-centric culture, some of these

membranes, like our human skin, give the illusion of impermeabil-
ity. Still, we perspire, urinate, ingest, ejaculate, menstruate, lactate,
breathe, cry. We take in the world, selectively, and send it flooding
back out again. This selection is not a “choice” made by our subjec-
tive, human selves; it is rather always, as Nietzsche has taught us, an
impersonal expression of phusis’s nuances—affirmative material ener-
gies striving toward increasingly differentiated forms.25 Selection tra-
verses other more subtle membranes, too—those that are either too
ephemeral or too monumental to be perceived by us as such, yet that
choreograph our ways of being in relation: a gravitational threshold,
a weather front, a wall of grief, a line on a map, equinox, a winter
coat, death.
Nancy Tuana refers to this membrane logic as “viscous poros-
ity.” While the concept of fluidity emphasizes traversals across and
between bodies, viscosity reminds Tuana that there are still bodies—
all different—that need to be accounted for. Viscosity draws atten-
tion to “sites of resistance and opposition” rather than only “a notion
of open possibilities” that might suggest one indiscriminate flow.26
Despite the fact that we are all watery bodies, leaking into and spong-
ing off of one another, we resist total dissolution, material annihila-
tion. Or more aptly, we postpone it: ashes to ashes, water to water.
At what point is the past overtaken by the present? What marks the
definitive shift from one species to a “new” one? Where does the host
body end and the amniotic body begin? Our bodies are thresholds of
both past and future. The precise material space-time of differentia-
tion is only a matter of convenience, but any body still requires mem-
branes to keep from being swept out to sea altogether.
There is always a risk of flooding.

Adrift in the More-than-Human

We are in this together.
—Rosi Braidotti27

The problem was that we did not know whom we meant when we
said “we.”
—Adrienne Rich 28

The mostly watery composition of my body is not just a human thing.

From the almost imperceptible jellies in the benthos of the Pacific, to

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 92 ASTRIDA NEIMANIS

the Namibian desert catfish hibernating in the mud; from mangrove

to ragweed; from culvert to billabong to the roaring Niagara; cush-
ioned between fractocumulus cloud and deep earth aquifer, we are all
bodies of water.
In acknowledging this corporeally connected aqueous com-
munity, distinctions between human and nonhuman start to blur.
We live in a watery commons, where the human infant drinks the
mother, the mother ingests the reservoir, the reservoir is replenished
by the storm, the storm absorbs the ocean, the ocean sustains the
fish, the fish are consumed by the whale . . . The bequeathing of our
water to an other is necessary for the custodianship of this com-
mons. But when and how does gift become theft, and sustainability
usurpation?
“Trickle down”: While species extinctions are occurring at around
10 percent per decade, aquatic species face a higher threat of extinc-
tion than birds or mammals. Much of this oceanic swan song is due
to the automotive fluids, household solvents, pesticides, mercury, and
other toxins that make their way from human home to culvert to sea.
Most affected are those animal bodies that dwell at or near the bot-
tom of an aquatic habitat—such as fish eggs and filter feeders—where
pollutants tend to settle.29
“Currency”: Resources such as salt and sand have long been har-
vested from the sea for human use, but marine organisms—tunicates,
cnidaria, mollusks—also provide us with pharmaceuticals, cosmet-
ics, food additives, depilatories. For example, antigens derived from
eleven pounds of sea squirts can supply enough anticancer drugs to
satisfy the world’s demand for a year. Flows of power are inaugu-
rated between marine life, human bodies in pain, and Big Pharma.
Into which currents and what currencies are the sea squirts being
commandeered?30
“Liquidity”: The “human” has probably been around for five to
seven million years, but sharks are at least 420 million years old. In
recent decades, many shark species have been threatened by a black
market finning industry that nets over US$1 billion a year. A single
whale-shark fin can sell for ten thousand dollars.31 Cash in hand, they
say, is the most liquid asset.
The seeping of the biological into the cultural, of the more-than-
human into the human, happens in more ways than one. Watery bod-
ies sustain other bodies, but biological life buttresses our language,
our ways of making sense of the world, as well.32 Hydro-logics sug-
gest to us new ontological understandings of body and community,
but how might feminism ensure that this aqueous understanding of

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 HYDROFEMINISM 93

our interbeing become not another appropriation and usurpation of

the more-than-human world that sustains us?
To say that my body is marshland, estuary, ecosystem, that it is riven
through with tributaries of companion species, nestling in my gut,
extending through my fingers, pooling at my feet, is a beautiful way to
reimagine my corporeality. But once we recognize that we are not
hermetically sealed in our diver’s suits of human skin, what do we do
with this recognition? What do we owe, and how do we pay?

Ecotone
I like places and times that are pregnant with change.
—Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands 33

Inorganic life is the movement at the membrane of the organism,

where it begins to quiver with virtuality, decomposes, and is recom-
bined again.
—Pheng Cheah 34

As transition areas between two adjacent but different ecosystems,

ecotones appear as both gradual shifts and abrupt demarcations. But
more than just a marker of separation or even a marker of connection
(although importantly both of these things), an ecotone is also a zone of
fecundity, creativity, transformation; of becoming, assembling, multi-
plying; of diverging, differentiating, relinquishing. Something happens.
Estuaries, tidal zones, wetlands: these are all liminal spaces where “two
complex systems meet, embrace, clash, and transform one another.”35
An ecotone is a sort of membrane, too: a pause, or even an increase
in velocity, where/when/how matter comes to matter differently. If we
consider membrane logic as belonging to the species of the ecotone, we
are again made aware of the rich complexity of the hydro-logics that
sustain us. The liminal ecotone is not only a place of transit, but itself a
watery body. In other words, an ecotone has a material fecundity that
rejects an ontological separation between “thing” and “transition,”
between “body” and “vector.” The watery membrane, then, is no pas-
sive prop for the ontologically weightier bodies that traverse it. In Gilles
Deleuze’s terms, this event-full zone could be called “inorganic life.”36
But saturated with lively water, inorganic life is organic, too. The vir-
tual is also actual. These and other pairs begin to creep.
Eco: home. Tone: tension. We must learn to be at home in the
quivering tension of the in-between. No other home is available.

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In-between nature and culture, in-between biology and philosophy,

in-between the human and everything we ram ourselves up against,
everything we desperately shield ourselves from, everything we throw
ourselves into, wrecked and recklessly, watching, amazed, as our skins
become thinner . . .

Transcorporeal Creep
The material self cannot be disentangled from networks that are
simultaneously economic, political, cultural, scientific, and sub-
stantial . . . what was once the ostensibly bounded human subject
finds herself in a swirling landscape of uncertainty.
—Stacy Alaimo37

Tuana reminds us that our porosity is what enables us to live at all,

but “this porosity . . . does not discriminate against that which can kill
us.”38 Because water is such a capable vector, not only does life-giving
potentiality course through our transcorporeal waterways, but so also
does illness, contamination, inundation.
There are things we do know: skyrocketing rates of cancer in aborig-
inal communities downstream from the Alberta tar sands megaproject
in Northwestern Canada are directly attributable to the toxic tailings
ponds created by the bitumen extraction process. In November 2010,
seven months after the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of
Mexico, the deaths of 6,104 birds, 609 sea turtles, and 100 mammals
could be directly attributed to the oil spill—and the death toll con-
tinues to rise. Ongoing death and illness in the residents of Bhopal,
India, almost three decades after the Union Carbide methylisocyanate
gas leak are directly attributable to persistent groundwater contamina-
tion stealthily poisoning all that flows beneath.
But at what point do the sharp edges of our certainty begin to blur?
Consider that in addition to fat, vitamins, lactose, minerals, antibod-
ies, and other life-sustaining stuff, North American breast milk also
likely harbors DDT, PCBs, dioxin, trichloroethylene, cadmium, mer-
cury, lead, benzene, arsenic, paint thinner, phthalates, dry-cleaning
fluid, toilet deodorizers, Teflon, rocket fuel, termite poison, fungi-
cides, and flame retardant.39 Reducing direct exposure to toxins can-
not negate the fact that our bodily archives have deep memories, our
flesh fed by streams whose sources are beyond our view.
As Stacy Alaimo notes, transcorporeal threats are often invisible,
and risk is incalculable. The future is always an open question, and
our bodies must be understood as flowing beyond the bounds of

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 HYDROFEMINISM 95

what is knowable. Aqueous transcorporeality therefore demands of us

a new ethics—a new way of being responsible and responsive to our
others. On this “ever-changing landscape of continuous interplay,
intra-action, emergence, and risk,”40 even as we insist upon account-
ability, we must also make decisions that eschew certainty and neces-
sary courses of action. This is an ethics of unknowability.
Moreover, this new ethics must also be itself transcorporeal, tran-
siting across and through diverse sites of contestation. For whom
should rocket-fuelled breast milk be an issue, and why? Consider that
due to cold temperatures and little sunlight, persistent organic pol-
lutants (POPs) flowing from the industrial and agricultural wastes of
far-flung rich, Westernized outposts break down slowly in the Arctic.
A thumb-sized piece of maktaaq, a staple in the Inuit diet, contains
more than the maximum recommended intake of PCBs for an entire
week.41 As a result, Innu women’s breast milk is an especially toxic
substance, absorbing the liquid runoff of a global political economy
that produces vastly divergent body burdens. The inequalities of neo-
colonialist globalization course through waterways at scales both
individual and oceanic. Nursing one’s young becomes a complex con-
geries of questions in which we all are implicated, rather than an issue
for the biologically essentialized, lactating woman alone. The flows
of global power meet the flows of biomatter.

Hydrofeminism
It is a constant challenge for us to rise to the occasion, to catch the
wave of life’s intensities and ride it on, exposing the boundaries or
limits as we transgress them.
—Rosi Braidotti 42

Watershed pollution, a theory of embodiment, amniotic becomings,

disaster, environmental colonialism, how to write, global capital,
nutrition, philosophy, birth, rain, animal ethics, evolutionary biol-
ogy, death, storytelling, bottled water, multinational pharmaceutical
corporations, drowning, poetry.
These are all feminist questions, and they are mostly inextrica-
ble from one another. A key priority for feminism today, as Chandra
Talpade Mohanty has claimed, is building a transnational, anticapi-
talist, and anticolonialist solidarity, where local and global thinking
and acting are simultaneous.43 Few things are more planetary and
more intimate than our bodies of water. New feminisms thus must
also be transspecies, and transcorporeal.

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Not only does water connect us, gestate us, sustain us—more than
this, water disturbs the very categories that ground the domains of
social, political, philosophical, and environmental thought, and those
of feminist theory and practice as well. Thinking about our selves and
our broader communities as watery can thus unmoor us in produc-
tive (albeit sometimes risky) ways. We are set adrift in the space-time
between our certainties, between the various outcrops we cling to for
security. It is here, in the borderzones of what is comfortable, of what
is perhaps even livable,44 that we can open to alterity—to other bod-
ies, other ways of being and acting in the world—in the simultaneous
recognition that this alterity also flows through us.
Current feminisms have their own ecotones, where the “objects”
of feminist thought extend rhizomatically into areas one might never
have considered “feminist.” To follow our bodies of water along their
rivulets and tributaries is to journey beyond the cleaving and cou-
pling of sexually differentiated human bodies: we find ourselves tan-
gled in intricate choreographies of bodies and flows of all kinds—not
only human bodies, but also other animal, vegetable, geophysical,
meteorological, and technological ones; not only watery flows, but
also flows of power, culture, politics, and economics. So if projects
that move us to think about animal ethics, or environmental degra-
dation, or neocolonialist capitalist incursions are still “feminist,” it is
not because such questions are analogous to sexual oppression; it is
rather because a feminist exploration of the inextricable materiality-
semioticity that circulates through all of these bodies pushes at the
borders of feminism, and expands it.
By venturing to feminism’s ecotones, and leaping in, we can discover
that feminism dives far deeper than human sexual difference, and out-
swims any attempts to limit it thus. Here is gestation, here is prolifera-
tion, here is danger, here is risk. Here is an unknowable future, always
already folded into our own watery flesh. Here is hydrofeminism. At
least this is what becoming a body of water has taught me.

Notes
1. David Suzuki with Amanda McConnell, “A Child’s Reminder,”
in Whose Water Is It? The Unquenchable Thirst of a Water-Hungry
World, ed. Bernadette MacDonald and Douglas Jehl (Washington,
DC: National Geographic Society, 2003), p. 179.
2. “The Great Ocean Conveyor Belt,” Environmental Literacy Council,
http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/545.html, accessed on
April 23, 2011.

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 HYDROFEMINISM 97

3. Mark and Dianna McMenamin, Hypersea (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1994), p. 5.
4. Robert Kandel, Water from Heaven (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2003), p. 132.
5. McMenamin and McMenamin, Hypersea, p. 5.
6. Ibid., p. 15.
7. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and
Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).
8. See Mielle Chandler and Astrida Neimanis, “Water and Gestationality:
What Flows Beneath Ethics,” in Thinking with Water, ed. Cecilia
Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, forthcoming).
9. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Penguin Classic, 2000),
p. 124. I am indebted to Janine MacLeod for drawing my attention
to the tidal imagery in Woolf’s work.
10. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, “Sorties: Out and Out:
Attacks/Ways Out/Forays,” in The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy
Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 89.
11. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality
and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 38.
12. Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C.
Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 37.
13. “And isn’t it by forgetting the first waters that you achieve immer-
sion in your abysses and the giddy flight of one who wings far away”
(ibid., p. 38).
14. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other, p. 38.
15. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs 1:4 (1976),
p. 881.
16. For example, see Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive
Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993); or Margaret Whitford,
Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London: Routledge,
1991).
17. See Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination
of Matter, trans. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities
and Culture, 1993); and Janine MacLeod, “Water, Memory and the
Material Imagination,” in Thinking with Water.
18. Irigaray, Marine Lover, p. 38.
19. “A woman’s ink of blood for a man’s ink of semen” (Minh-ha,
Woman, Native, Other, p. 38).
20. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 72.
21. See Irigaray, Marine Lover, pp. 12–13, where Irigaray makes allu-
sions to Nietzsche’s evolutionary “descent.”
22. “Biological Membrane,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
/Biological_membrane, accessed on April 23, 2011.

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23. Nancy Tuana, “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina,” in Material

Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington:
University of Indiana Press, 2008), p. 194.
24. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on bodies and their composi-
tion, for example, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987), pp. 152–153.
25. See Melissa A. Orlie, “Impersonal Matter,” in New Materialisms:
Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 134.
26. Tuana, “Viscous Porosity,” p. 194.
27. Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (London: Polity,
2006), p. 119. This refrain is a motto for Braidotti’s posthumanist
ecological thought.
28. Adrienne Rich, “Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” in Feminist
Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, ed. Carole R. McCann
and Seung-Kyung Kim (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 451.
29. “Aquatic Extinction,” Earth Gauge, http://www.earthgauge.
net/2008/aquatic-extinction, accessed on April 23, 2011.
30. Astrida Neimanis, “‘Strange Kinship’ and Ascidian Life: 13 Repetitions,”
Journal of Critical Animal Studies 9:1 (2011), pp. 117–143.
31. “About Shark Finning,” Stop Shark Finning: Keep Sharks in the
Ocean and Out of the Soup, http://www.stopsharkfinning.net,
accessed on April 23, 2011.
32. See MacLeod, “Water, Memory and the Material Imagination” for a
complex analysis of the predatory relationship between the language
of capital flows and watery materiality.
33. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, “The Marginal World,” in Every
Grain of Sand: Canadian Perspectives on Ecology and Environment,
ed. J. Andrew Wainwright (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier
University Press, 2004), p. 46.
34. Pheng Cheah, “Non-Dialectical Materialism,” in New Materialisms,
p. 88.
35. Mortimer-Sandilands, “The Marginal World,” p. 48. See also Cecilia
Chen, “Mapping Waters: Thinking with Watery Places,” in Thinking
with Water.
36. See Cheah, “Non-Dialectical Materialism,” p. 88.
37. Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material
Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 20.
38. Tuana, “Viscous Porosity,” p. 198.
39. Florence Williams, “Toxic Breast Milk?” New York Times Magazine,
January 9, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/09/magazine
/09TOXIC.html?pagewanted=1&r=1, accessed on February 16,
2011.
40. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, p. 21.

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41. Andrew Duffy, “Toxic Chemicals Poison Inuit Food,” Ottawa

Citizen, http://www.chem.unep.ch/POPs/POP_Inc/press_releases
/ottawa-1.htm.5_July_1998, accessed on February 16, 2011.
42. Rosi Braidotti, “The Ethics of Becoming-Imperceptible,” in Deleuze
and Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2006), p. 139.
43. See Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited:
Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles,” Signs 28:2
(2003), pp. 499–535.
44. Spatio-temporal dynamisms “can be experienced only at the bor-
ders of the livable” (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans.
Paul Patton [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], p. 118).
Braidotti expands this notion as an ethics of sustainability (Braidotti,
“The Ethics of Becoming-Imperceptible”).

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 CH A P T ER 7

The Breathing Body in Movement

Davina Quinlivan

No other element can for him [the human being] take the place
of place. No other element carries with it—or lets itself be passed
through by—light and shadow, voice or silence . . . No other element
is in this way space prior to all localization, and a substratum both
immobile and mobile, permanent and flowing.
—Luce Irigaray 1

Air, if we are to believe Luce Irigaray, is the most fundamental aspect

of human habitation. It is important, then, to question how to move
between, or inside, such a space when it is always already part of our-
selves, as we inhale and exhale the air around us. When we breathe,
two types of movement occur: first, the micro-movement of our bod-
ies, the fall and rise of the chest; then, the movement through space
itself, through the air and the exterior world. In what follows, I want
to demonstrate the potential of art to harbor the question of the
breathing body.2 I focus on the shared experience of a gallery space
and its configuration of breath and movement. This leads me to the
examination of two possibilities: first, the ways in which Irigaray’s
thoughts on feminine perception and the sexed, breathing body offer
fresh perspectives on the issue of embodied subjectivity; and, second,
borrowing a term from Giuliana Bruno, how the figure of the flâneur
or “streetwalker” provides an articulation of such Irigarayan embod-
ied movement. As a principal example of how contemporary art can
enable us to think through the feminist specificity of the breathing
body, I will turn to a piece by Korean artist Kimsooja, which will

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 102 DAVINA QUINLIVAN

prompt reflection on the experience of hearing and seeing the breath-

ing body in movement.
Irigaray’s philosophical engagement with the topic of breath is
one of the most sustained and wide-ranging studies treating breath
beyond its biological function. While the recent cultural theory of
Steven Connor in his book The Matter of Air also offers a rich explo-
ration of the topic of breath from the broader perspective of embodi-
ment and society,3 Irigaray’s discourse is most attuned to questions
of female perception and the breathing body. Most notably, in her
1983 volume The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger —her phe-
nomenological engagement with air—Irigaray develops an important
stage in her overarching project of sexual difference, where the ele-
mental nature of air is also seen as corresponding with a particularly
feminine form of being.4 Subsequently, Irigaray develops several dis-
tinct philosophical enquiries into breathing, in texts such as “The
Way of Breath,” Being Two: How Many Eyes Have We?, “A Breath that
Touches in Words,” Everyday Prayers, and, most importantly, “The
Age of the Breath.”5 In these texts, Irigaray’s critical examination
of Western philosophy synthesizes Buddhist ways of looking at and
thinking about the world in order to suggest that breath might pre-
serve sexual difference in the body.6
For Irigaray, air fulfills a mediatory role between the sexes. In sim-
pler terms, it engenders a positive space within which to live. Indeed,
Irigaray contends that the sharing of breath between men and women
is more fundamental than any and all verbal communication between
them. This idea forms the basis for her own philosophical elabora-
tion of breath as well as her practical assessment of how to address
real, lived, subjective experience. Above all, Irigaray’s thought draws
attention to the shared breath between mother and child—an intra-
uterine sharing of air that occurs even before birth. Her view is that
woman “communicates through air, through blood, through milk,
and even through voice and love before and beyond any perceptible
thing.”7 While woman possesses a more natural relationship with air,
man “uses his energy in to order to fabricate, to make, to create out-
side of himself. He puts his vital or spiritual breath into the things
that he produces.”8 As we shall see, Irigaray’s thought enables a better
understanding of the sexed, breathing body and its locus in the art
of Kimsooja.
Irigaray’s thought is valuable to aesthetic theory because it wid-
ens an appreciation of materialist perspectives on the sexed body
and embodiment outside monolithic and essentialist perceptions.
Furthermore, Irigaray’s thought is especially relevant to contemporary

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 THE BREATHING BODY IN MOVEMENT 103

art experience and its increasing fascination with a more interactive

and participatory form of aesthetic encounter. While classical mod-
els of spectatorship and viewing pleasure privilege binary oppositions
and a patriarchal exercise of power, the thought of Irigaray lends a
different set of contours to modes of looking and viewing participa-
tion, precisely organized around the phenomenological dimensions
of the breathing body.

Bruno and Irigaray: Movement and

the Breathing Flâneur
One of the most significant ways in which Irigaray’s thought offers
new perspectives on embodiment and viewing relations in art is
through her sensuous reflection on breath and the space of air. This
is to say that physical sensation, on her account, necessarily interplays
with breathing. For example, smelling is also an act of inhalation,
and touch is also a gesture made possible by the air flowing through
our bloodstream. Her thought challenges existing conceptions of
embodied perception and, especially, the hierarchy of vision over the
senses so prevalent in Western philosophy. Her insistence that breath-
ing is intertwined with the senses both substantiates and complicates
the logic of discourses of the body and the materiality of language.
Most feminist discourse attempting to return to the body in general
and the materiality of language in particular has done so without
accounting for the vital role that breath plays in our existence. By
bringing attention to this repressed element, Irigaray offers a new
order through which to explore the meaning of our senses and their
implications for lived experience. Aesthetic experience, and indeed
criticism, invariably privileges questions of visibility and invisibility,
but its frequent search for new means in which to think about liminal
and ambivalent notions of vision resonates with the treatment of per-
ception and embodied subjectivity that we find in Irigaray’s philoso-
phy. Above all, her work invites a new, feminist phenomenological
discourse that breaks with the paradigm of vision (one represented
in what follows by the figure of the flâneur), and that introduces,
instead, an “aesthetic” paradigm of moving through a space hapti-
cally, with attention to breath.
While the nineteenth century French poet Charles Baudelaire ori-
ginally developed the concept of the flâneur (stroller, or streetwalker)
in response to the increasingly sensual and spectacular allure of urban
life (especially its many attractions and opportunities for consumerism),
the thought of Giuliana Bruno emphasizes the ways in which motion

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 104 DAVINA QUINLIVAN

is inextricably linked with the theorization of space in Baudelaire’s

account of urban France—places and locales, linkages and connec-
tions, mapped out according to various pleasurable ways of looking
and engaging with the world. For Bruno, lived space is experienced as
psychical geography or psychogeography, where emotion materializes as
a moving topography.9 Importantly, Bruno describes such perception
as “feminine,” or, rather, as belonging to a kind of female strategy that
counters the male gaze and its all-encompassing, appropriating vision.
Thus, Bruno’s investment in the notion of the female streetwalker, in
particular, opens up a space in which to fruitfully introduce Irigaray’s
philosophy of breath to haptic discourse and to articulate the position
of the breathing, female viewer.
Bruno is concerned with bringing to light a different way of look-
ing, or “a desire to know,” mapped on the lust of the eyes.10 For
her, knowledge is embedded in the senses and vision is implicated
in sensory experience; her pyschogeographical analyses reflect a kind
of lived experience of space that is antithetical to the penetrating,
scopophilic gaze of Bauderlaire’s flâneur. She rethinks the power rela-
tions of looking in terms of desire and openness to the sensations it
arouses:

Curiosity came to signify a particular desire to know, which, for a

period, was encouraged constantly to move, expanding in different
directions. Such cognitive desire implies a mobilization that is drift. It
is not only implicated in the sensation of wonder . . . but located in the
experience of wander.11

Bruno’s thought resonates with Irigaray’s deconstruction of patriar-

chal vision and her emphasis on embodied perception and contem-
plation. My interest lies in how the question of breath might also be
involved in such a mode of being, looking and wandering, as Bruno
suggests.
Bruno is well-known for her art criticism and her delicate treat-
ment of art spaces and spatiality in visual culture as a whole, and her
work sets up useful questions regarding the viewing experience of art
and its invitation to the senses that I too privilege in this chapter. But
Bruno has rarely commented on the topic of the breathing body or
its participation in the experience of lived space. In her book Atlas of
Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, she quotes a passage
from Barbara H. Channing’s A Sketch of Naples Sent from the Sisters
Abroad: Or an Italian Journey (1856), in which the female protago-
nists encounter the Bay of Naples: “Our travellers held their breath,

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 THE BREATHING BODY IN MOVEMENT 105

as their eyes caught, one after the other, the different points of this won-
drous panorama.”12 The passage foregrounds an interesting relation-
ship between viewing and breathing; the panoramic view elicits an
embodied response and this is actualized by an intake of breath. In
this context, breathing can be seen to represent a kind of expression
of delight and wonder, precisely motivated by visual stimuli and the
experience of space. Irigaray’s work enables further clarification and
elaboration of such sensual pleasure and embodied experience result-
ing from the evocation of space in the art gallery and the viewer as
a “wandering” streetwalker, as my discussion of Kimsooja’s artwork
will demonstrate in what follows.
To think about the intertwinement of breathing, perception, and
movement is to become attuned to the rhythms of one’s breath, to
take a step back and retreat to an interior world while moving forth
and making contact with the environs of the outside. The next sec-
tion of this chapter will closely examine the resonant connections
between Irigaray and Bruno’s theoretical discourse, focusing on the
key questions of embodied subjectivity and haptic discourse on which
this chapter’s main argument is based—to think through the various
ramifications of the sexed, breathing body in the aesthetic encounter
and its heralding of a new feminist discourse.

Kimsooja and Her Breathing Audience

The notion of the breathing female viewer, or streetwalker, to use
Bruno’s term, is foregrounded in the work of the Korean artist
Kimsooja. Rather than merely explicating or illustrating the theo-
retical discourse of Irigaray or Bruno, however, her work uniquely
configures questions of the sexed breathing body in motion and its
intersubjective implications. It permits an interrogation, and reck-
oning with, aesthetic experience as socially, as well as politically,
significant.
In her 2006 experimental installation Respirare—To Breathe,
Kimsooja invited audiences into the space of Venice’s Teatro la
Fenice.13 Seated, the audience waited, patiently, until the artist began
her work. A projection of color accompanied the sound of Kimsooja’s
breathing, transforming the auditorium into an extension of her body,
positing the audience inside a breathing, sepulchral prism of light
and sound. In particular, a recurrent motif emerged through which
Kimsooja used her voice to mimic the sound of a weaving tool—
an invisible blade of noise and breath incisively piercing the air. The
effects of such experiential manipulation served to channel the ghost

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 106 DAVINA QUINLIVAN

of Kimsooja’s grandmother, a former employee of one of the numer-

ous factories in Korea. While the factory was absent, its ghost also
insinuated itself in la Fenice. Yet, while such “ghosts” were invoked,
the projected spectrum of colors continued to illuminate the quiver-
ing sonic frequencies of the artist’s own breath; her body became a
conduit not only between herself and her ancestor, but between the
screen of light, her breathing, and the viewers themselves.
It is rather apt that la Fenice, Venice’s opera house, was selected as
the exhibition space for this piece. Geographically, and topographi-
cally, Venice is a fissuring mass of arterial linkages, its multiple canals
weaving in and out of itself like a vast, organic, respiratory system,
passing oxygen to the innermost, and outermost, parts of the city.
Such correlations between space and the body, matter and flesh, are
frequently alluded to in Kimsooja’s work, but Respirare manipulates
such a context in order to emphasize the interstices between move-
ment and stillness and the visual corollaries of rhythms and sound
waves articulated through her breathing body. Kimsooja’s body
offers a different kind of arterial linkage that the viewer must tra-
verse, mediated through screens and speakers, light and color. Unlike
Bruno’s streetwalker, Kimsooja’s viewers are made acutely aware of
their own breath and the breath they share with others as they jour-
ney, and wander, through the sights and sounds of Respirare. While
Channing’s protagonists might hold their breath, vision is resusci-
tated through Kimsooja’s artwork and her sculpting of color, sound,
and air.
Indeed, Respirare conjoins the material and nonmaterial world via
its technological and biological simulacrum and it is this dimension of
Kimsooja’s art that is especially Irigarayan. While Respirare is, princi-
pally, sculpted from two female bodies—that of the female artist and
her grandmother, or rather, the notion of her grandmother’s weav-
ing needles converted, in the piece, to a weaving voice—the viewer’s
breathing body is also implicated in the aesthetic experience of the
piece. Kimsooja’s audiovisual installation (formed via the twinning
of her individual pieces Invisible Woman and Invisible Needle) places
emphasis on the female body as itself a ubiquitous site of creation,
repossessed through breathing and, consequently, refusing its com-
modification through labor. Recalling the intrauterine sharing of
breath foregrounded in the work of Irigaray, Kimsooja’s invocation
of her grandmother makes visible, through her manipulation of color
and light, a kind of female genealogy of breath preserved, biologically,
through oxygenated cells that pass between mother and child. Only
women can give life to another being through their own breathing

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 THE BREATHING BODY IN MOVEMENT 107

and Kimsooja foregrounds this possibility through her emphasis on

her grandmother’s weaving, breathing presence.
While the installation consists of a projection of color that is
accompanied by the sound of Kimsooja’s breathing (from her piece
The Weaving Factory 5.1, 2004), it is the use of sound that ultimately
shapes the audience’s perception of the piece, and the viewer’s hear-
ing body is elicited more than any other aspect of their sense per-
ception. Indeed, during a discussion of the work featured on her
website, Kimsooja describes breath as a material object—an “invis-
ible needle”14 —that threads through flesh and the exterior world; a
movement emphasized by the projection of colors manipulated and
distorted by the vocal intensity of the piece. Vision is secondary to
sound. Kimsooja invites a comparison between breathing and weav-
ing where the object being woven is exchanged for air itself, flowing
through her body or what she describes as the “weaving factory.”
Kimsooja’s comparison of breath with a needle, a tool that imple-
ments creation, also calls to mind the Greek notion of technē, a con-
cept based on understanding the value of craftsmanship, not only as
an activity but as a “manner of knowing,” as the phenomenological
film theorist Vivian Sobchack writes: a bringing-forth of a greater
truth.15 Kimsooja’s “needle” of breath informs a view of technē as
a “practice” of carnality, or what could certainly be described as an
Irigarayan assertion of the self, and of the body, as an instrument of
truth itself. Furthermore, it is the human, breathing voice that her-
alds such enlightenment. Kimsooja subverts the commodification of
a (literally) laboring, breathing body by transplanting it to a theater,
an arena for the production of art, not objects such as the woven
fabric generations of women would have worked on in the factories
of Kimsooja’s homeland. Unlike the European art space of la Fenice,
the Korean industrial space that is also invoked through Respirare
politicizes Kimsooja’s art, reminding audiences of the exclusivity of
ideas and art in bourgeois culture and, conversely, the universality
of breathing and the different ways in which two spaces operate as
“breathing entities,” as it were. If Irigaray equates male subjectivity
with a form of breathing that fabricates and produces, while female
subjectivity attends to a more “natural” form of creativity, then the
weaving machines in the factory suggest a male, breathing body, and
the art space of la Fenice adopts a female mode of breathing. Thus,
the weaving machines in their original, factory location can be seen to
represent a male form of breathing that appropriates the breath of the
female factory workers, stinging their lungs with chemicals and, more
abstractly, stifling their creativity to serve consumerism and the labor

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 108 DAVINA QUINLIVAN

market. Replayed and refigured in the space of Kimsooja’s art instal-

lation, the sounds of the factory are displaced and take on a distinctly
female form. In this context, the factory sounds suggest a creation of
breath rather than any commodified means of production.
Ultimately, Kimsooja’s Respirare takes its viewers on a journey
through and with the body of la Fenice and the body of the artist
herself, fostering a connection between subjects that is innovatively
forged through the locus of breath in her art. While Baudelaire’s
thought operates according to a logic of appropriation and mastery,
Kimsooja’s artwork suggests a kind of feminine “streetwalking” that
builds on Bruno’s sensuous discourse in which subjects and objects are
reversibly enmeshed within each other; it’s an intersubjective encoun-
ter of the living and the lived space. However, Kimsooja might have
taken the concerns of her art even further if she had situated the piece,
and its viewers, in a public space. Indeed, the experimental sounds of
Kimsooja’s voice calls to mind the whistling howls of wind beneath
wooden slats at a pier, or the echoing underpasses in the suburbs.
If the key elements of Respirare were transported to a public area,
in the form of simple interactive devices and loudspeakers, its mean-
ing might change, but it would also evolve and shape a different form
of participatory encounter and social project. For example, the work
of the British sculptor and artist Antony Gormley has successfully
employed public space in order to situate art alongside everyday life.
On the Sefton coast near Liverpool city in the United Kingdom,
Gormley’s cast-iron sculptures of his own body gaze out at the shore-
line, prostrate and accumulating debris, burnished and oxidizing as a
result of their coming into contact with the sea air.16 Members of the
public intermingle with the silent figures of Gormley’s Another Place,
some even leaning or sitting on the shoulders of the life-size sculp-
tures. Perhaps Respirare could be reborn as a permanent soundscape
colored by the natural patterns of light and shadow in a child’s play-
ground or at a beach, like Gormley’s art, a defunct lighthouse wired
to the soundscape, projecting waves of colors over a sandy beach.

Conclusion
A spring evening in 2006: At the end of Kimsooja’s Respirare, the
audience filters out into the narrow Venetian alleys, their paths
streaked with light. Hearts are racing and bodies are breathless.
Their breath has mingled with the artist’s and she has sculpted it
into image, sound, and color. Ears are ringing. Skin vibrating. For
Baudelaire, the flâneur’s gaze embodies the hierarchy of the senses,

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 THE BREATHING BODY IN MOVEMENT 109

vision encapsulating the apparatus of appropriation par excellence.

However, those who experience Kimsooja’s artwork submit to her
alchemic experiment in which the sight and sound of breathing
stimulates the senses and disrupts dominant modes of reception and
spectatorship. In the space outside la Fenice, the audience breathes
differently, watching air particles dance in the light and foam gather-
ing by the canals.
Contemplating air is like contemplating the invisible, intersubjec-
tive spaces between and inside us all, as Irigaray’s philosophy of breath
suggests. Breathing breaks down the distinction between the inside
and the outside—it exists in the interstices of such binaries. Irigaray’s
work informs a new kind of feminist thinking in which matter, and
the material world, holds the key to our existence.
This chapter has offered a new materialist perspective on the body,
and has sought to articulate embodiment outside monolithic and
essentialist perceptions. Breathing incarnates a kind of relating that is
attuned to the presence of others, contemplating the intimate flow of
life and breath that is shared among us. If we can respect this com-
monality, while remaining separate subjects, then we can understand
words and voices better. The breaths shared between two people, or a
community of breathing bodies, symbolize, for Irigaray, a vital aspect
of existence that constitutes the foundation for all bodily, linguis-
tic, and environmental linkages pertinent to human life. All humans
enter into a dialogue with each other through breath, a relation that
is established the moment we take our “first breath.” As this chap-
ter has emphasized throughout, the very notion of two breaths and
the possibility of “breathing together” can lead to a more fruitful
dialogue between subjects, between communities and cultures. For
Kimsooja, Venice is an apt meeting place for such breaths to inter-
mingle, a place in which air and light passes through the city’s narrow
veins, its embodied passages, attuning travelers, wanderers (as Bruno
might suggest), to new ways of seeing and being, wondering and wan-
dering with each other.
Irigaray’s philosophy of breath might be viewed as a utopian
discourse, but this is to undermine its sharply political and ethical
dimensions. For example, Irigaray’s reflection on the intrauterine
sharing of breath between mother and child prompts new ways in
which to treat the subject of bioethics and intersubjectivity. If we can
understand and embrace the intersubjectivity of breath, we might be
able to live together more peacefully, and this relates to issues such
as the development of housing (architecture designed on the basis
of sharing breath and air as a community), education (listening and

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 110 DAVINA QUINLIVAN

attending to the breath and voices of others), and indeed the cathartic
qualities of art, as I have suggested here.17
Back in the Venetian alley, a tiny dust particle settles in the sky and
we take another breath, subjectively and intersubjectively, toward our
future.

Notes
I would like to thank Dr. Sarah Cooper, my PhD supervisor, for introduc-
ing me to the work of Luce Irigaray, and for her continued and unrelenting
support of my work.
1. Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, trans. Mary
Beth Mader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), p. 8.
2. For a more detailed reflection on the role of breath in the contem-
porary art experience, see the introductory chapter of my book, The
Place of Breath in Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2012).
3. See Steven Connor, The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal
(London: Reaktion, 2010).
4. Breath is also tentatively gestured toward in Luce Irigaray’s Elemental
Passions, trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still (New York: Routledge,
1992).
5. See Luce Irigaray, “The Way of Breath,” chap. 3 in Between East
and West: From Singularity to Community, trans. Stephen Pluháček
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Being Two: How
Many Eyes Have We?, trans. Luce Irigaray, Catherine Busson, and
Jim Mooney (Russelheim, Germany: Christel Gottert Verlag, 2000);
“A Breath that Touches in Words,” chap. 12 in I Love to You: Sketch of
a Possible Felicity In History, trans. Alison Martin (London and New
York: Routledge, 1996); and “The Age of the Breath,” chap. 14 in
Luce Irigaray: Key Writings (London: Continuum, 2004). Irigaray’s
poetry also contains frequent references to breathing. See Everyday
Prayers, trans. Luce Irigaray with Timothy Mathews (Maisonneuve
and Larose: University of Nottingham Press, 2004).
6. For example, Irigaray’s engagement with Buddhism is implicitly felt
throughout her critique of Martin Heidegger in Being Two.
7. Irigaray, Introduction to Key Writings, p. xiii.
8. Irigaray, “The Way of Breath,” p. 85.
9. Giuliana Bruno, Prologue to Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art,
Architecture, and Film (London: Verso, 2002); and Streetwalking On
a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 57.
10. Bruno, “The Architecture of the Interior,” chap. 5 in Atlas of
Emotion, p. 156.

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 THE BREATHING BODY IN MOVEMENT 111

11. Ibid., emphasis mine.

12. Barbara H. Channing quoted in Bruno, “Views from Home,” chap. 11
in ibid., p. 381.
13. Kimsooja’s Respirare—To Breathe was curated by Francesca Pasini
and inaugurated on January 27, 2006, at Teatro la Fenice, Venice,
Italy. Further details on the installation are available at Kimsooja’s
website: http://www.kimsooja.com/projects/breathe.html.
14. Kimsooja, http://www.kimsooja.com/projects/breathe.html.
15. Vivian Sobchack, “‘Susie Scribbles’: On Technology, Technë, and
Writing Incarnate,” chap. 5 in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and
Moving Image Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2004), p. 132.
16. Images of Gormley’s sculptures can be seen on the Sefton Council
website: http://www.sefton.gov.uk/default.aspx?page=6216.
17. For examples of such work on Irigaray’s philosophy of breath and
its political meaning, see, in particular, Andrea Susan Wheeler,
With Place Love Begins?: The Philosophy of Luce Irigaray, The Issue
of Dwelling, Feminism and Architecture (Saarbrücken, Germany:
Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010); and Luce Irigaray, “Teaching
How to Meet in Difference,” in Luce Irigaray: Teaching, ed. Luce
Irigaray with Mary Green (London and New York: Continuum,
2008), pp. 203–218.

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 CH A P T ER 8

Incubators, Pumps, and

Other Hard-Breasted Bodies

Katie Lloyd Thomas

It is now more than six years since I gave birth to my son at 26 weeks
and was catapulted into the unknown and then terrifying environ-
ment of the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), where he stayed for
the third trimester of my “pregnancy.” He is now a robust little boy,
but the experience remained central when with taking place —a group
of feminist artists and architects—I was part of initiating a series of
temporary and permanent art interventions entitled “The Other Side
of Waiting” for the mother-and-baby unit at Homerton Hospital in
East London, where he had been looked after.1 For my own piece,
This Is For You, 2 I chose to work in the NICU and to “celebrate” the
collective work of the medical equipment, mass-produced and hand-
made objects, staff, and others in caring for very preterm babies. The
outcome of This Is For You is a bespoke display cabinet installed at
the heart of the unit, based on my own research and a series of inter-
views and workshops with a group of nine other mothers of preterm
babies, with much of its contents provided or created by them.3 Their
experiences and contributions inform this piece of writing and their
words are included here, in italics and marked only by their initials,
as they requested.
Early on in the project, I made a drawing detailing the network
of machines and equipment supporting a baby in the highest depen-
dency room of the unit: the syringe drivers that give the infant nutri-
tion, fluids, drugs, and blood transfusions; the ventilator that delivers
oxygen; and the monitors and endless tests that regulate these flows
and the related practices of care. In a second drawing, I mapped some

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 114 KATIE LLOYD THOMAS

of this kit onto an image of a placenta, and, onto an image of the

womb, the parts of the kit that replace the containment of the womb:
the incubator; the bedding; the practices of making, remaking, and
cleaning them; and the constant hygiene and security procedures that
are an ongoing part of life on the unit.
The work of the NICU is typically described as taking care of sick
babies. It is rarely included in the plethora of feminist and other com-
mentaries on artificial reproductive technologies (ARTs)4 except in
occasional references to gestation outside the womb. These tend to
focus on more literal versions of the artificial womb such as rearing
fetuses in lab-grown womb linings.5 But some consider it more likely
that full ectogenesis will actually come about through the meeting
of IVF techniques, where embryos can be kept alive for six or seven
days before implantation, with neonatal care, where fetuses have been
known to survive even at less than 22 weeks of gestation.6 My draw-
ings imagined this matrix of equipment and medical procedures as
ectogenetic—as a specific assemblage of humans and nonhumans
that replaces the gestating maternal body.
This premise is central to the development of This Is For You, and
because of it I interviewed only birth mothers. It is the work of their
bodies that is replaced by kit and staff, even if the new situation in the
unit means, with the exception of milk expressing, that most of the
“cares” (nappy changing, syringe feeding, applying oil to the baby’s
skin, and so on) can be carried out by both parents. It is their prena-
tal relationship with their baby that is cut short and might somehow
be remade in these new circumstances. The staff on the unit also
seemed to recognize this dissymmetry between parents. They named
us women “mums,” and in what follows I use this term for the moth-
ers I interviewed.
Understanding the sociotechnological matrix of neonatal care as
an alternative to the womb also entails that we consider it in terms
of relations—between mothers, babies, carers, nonhuman kits, and
myriad practices that are constructed through a specific materiality.
If feminist theorists such as Bracha L. Ettinger and Luce Irigaray
privilege naturalized intrauterine relations in their figurations of
becoming subject in the feminine,7 I want to be able to include tech-
nological and social constellations in our accounts of maternal and
feminine subjectivity and relationality. I want to recognize that alter-
ing “natural” processes might also lead to changes in social realities,
as utopian feminists such as Shulamith Firestone and Marge Piercy
did in their advocacy of ectogenesis as a means to liberate women
from their biological role.8 In distinction from these two thinkers,

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 INCUBATORS, PUMPS, AND OTHER HARD-BREASTED BODIES 115

however, I want to make this claim without resorting to the eradica-

tion of sexual difference. These new constellations can—even in the
rather harrowing conditions of the NICU—bring about new pos-
sibilities for living and relating (although in less revolutionary terms
than Firestone proposed).

Mother the Machine

A door slid aside, revealing seven human babies joggling slowly
upside down, each in a sac of its own inside a larger fluid recep-
tacle . . . All in a sluggish row, babies bobbed. Mother the machine.
Like fish in the aquarium at Coney Island.
—Marge Piercy 9

In Piercy’s 1978 science fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Time,

the heroine, Connie, travels into the utopian future of Mattapoisett
where technology has liberated women from their childbearing
role. Fetuses are grown from selected genetic material and gestated
in the “brooder”—a yellow, windowless building that hums gently
and disinfects visitors on arrival. We might recognize the NICU in
its “strange apparatus, the tanks and machines and closed compart-
ments.”10 Indeed, Piercy’s reference to Coney Island recalls one of the
many displays of incubators with “live” preterm babies inside what
appeared as futuristic exhibits in amusement parks and international
expositions at the turn of the last century.11 For most parents, their
first encounter with the NICU is in the midst of an unexpected and
frightening emergency and the environment seems strange, even
futuristic:

C: We had three miscarriages before we had [our first son] T. It all became
quite surreal really. Then just the idea that [our second son] C was born
and he was in this incubator. It was like it’s not real somehow. It’s space
age—that whole thing about the baby in the box.

Despite the dramatic life and death stories of the NICU that make
the press and the fact that a stay in the unit is now relatively com-
mon,12 the environment and the day-to-day reality of having a baby
there remains little known and retains its “science fiction” image.
What is perhaps most disturbing about Piercy’s image of the brooder
is that the attendant has no interaction with the babies as they bob
up and down in their receptacles. Only “mother the machine” is
needed to take care of them. This is very different from the NICU,

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 116 KATIE LLOYD THOMAS

where staff constantly minister to the infants. Some of their routines

are clearly medical, such as the insertion of “long lines” for feeding,
while others, such as “gentle stimulation”—the prods and pats nurses
give to stimulate breathing during frequent apnoea—are more basic
but no less essential. In addition, the mother’s involvement is encour-
aged as soon as it is possible and is supported in the design of the
technology.13
In his extraordinary and nuanced history of incubator technology,
The Machine in the Nursery, Jeffrey P. Baker makes clear that this has
not always been the case. Whether incubator technology has tended
toward the fully automated or has made space for maternal care, it has
at least in part depended on the prevailing attitude toward mothers
and/or whomever is believed to care best for the infant. Baker explains
that in the United States in the early twentieth century, incubators
were developed to be as fully automated as possible with mechanical
regulation of air temperature and humidity. “Minimal stimulation”
was considered the best treatment for the baby, and formula milk was
preferred because it did not vary on account of “emotional causes.”14
In the North American context, the mother was seen as unreliable and
nervy, whereas science (and medical practitioners) “could imitate and
improve on nature . . . and save the infant from the harmful influences
of its own mother,” Baker explains.15 A photograph of the American
Chapple Bed of 1933 shows a nurse standing, peering down through
a small vision panel, her hands entering an otherwise entirely closed,
flush metal box through two holes to minister to the infant.16
But in France, where incubator technology had developed in
maternity hospitals, two obstetricians recognized that a mother’s
involvement could improve survival rates. First, Pierre Budin realized
that rising infection rates amongst infants were caused by using wet
nurses to supply milk. Second, Adolphe Pinard’s research suggested
that infants survived better once they went home if breast-feeding
had already been established. As a result, mothers were encour-
aged to “lie-in” with their sick babies and feed them. And incuba-
tors became transparent on all sides to allow mothers to watch over
their babies and tend to them. A journalist described the change in
rather flowery terms: “The glass cover permits the mother to watch
every moment of the poor, fragile little being. And thus by watch-
ing him, almost minute by minute, the mother becomes attached to
her baby; she trembles for him during the weeks she remains at the
Clinique.”17
Budin’s approach greatly reduced premature infant mortality rates.
It also produced a technology that allowed for a relationship between

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 INCUBATORS, PUMPS, AND OTHER HARD-BREASTED BODIES 117

mother and child, by involving her in feeding, by allowing the mater-

nal gaze, and by enabling proximity. When a baby is still very depen-
dent on medical technology, proximity and watching may be the only
ways parents can maintain a relationship with their child.

A: You know it was a life-and-death thing. I just wanted to know whether

she was going to survive and I felt that it was so primitive, the only things
I could do were have skin-to-skin contact, touching, and looking into her
eyes. Nothing else.

Neonatal technology did not go down the fully automated route. In

contrast to Piercy’s vision of babies growing in a self-regulating envi-
ronment free of human involvement, in the NICU the side of the
incubator opens and allows for nurses and others to hold and touch
the baby. Mothers routinely express milk, managing to retain milk
production until the baby’s suck reflex develops and breast feeding
can begin, and alongside the nurses, they (and other family members)
are encouraged to take part in what is sometimes referred to as the
“cares.”

L: When they were very small, there were rare occasions when somebody
would say, “Do you want to do the tube feed?” and they’d let me . . . hold it,
and it felt like I was actually doing something; I was taking care of her. I
think it does make a difference no matter what way you’re feeding them,
whether it’s a tube feed or a bottle or whatever. It gives you more of a con-
nection to their care and to getting to know them.

The “machine” in the NICU is an assemblage of humans, nonhu-

mans, and ongoing procedures, but it is not by chance that Piercy’s
vision of ectogenesis was fully automated. Woman on the Edge of
Time was heavily influenced by Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, first
published in 1970.18 In Firestone’s analysis, “sex class” was a more
invisible and fundamental social problem than class, and led to even
deeper oppression. According to her radical polemic, “the develop-
ment of a technology capable of freeing women from the tyranny of
their sexual-reproductive roles” provided an opportunity that femi-
nism should not ignore.19 As the attendant explains to the visitor in
the brooder: “It was part of women’s long revolution . . . Finally there
was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had,
in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the
power to give birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained,
we’d never be equal.”20

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 118 KATIE LLOYD THOMAS

What becomes apparent in Piercy’s vision is that it is not so much

the work of bearing and birthing a child as the maternal relation
that women must be freed from. “Blood” ties are to be ruptured
by genetic engineering, and the bond created in carrying a child
is to be severed by ectogenesis. Even the sounds of a heartbeat,
of voices and music are automated and the relation that might be
forged through ministering to the “babies” in the tanks appears to
be eradicated. In these radical formulations of alternative gestation,
Piercy and Firestone recognized only too well that the maternal
relation (that in their feminist politics is part of the problem con-
stituting women’s oppression) might arise through other situations
and practices than when a child grows in the “haven” of a mother’s
womb.

Her Womb, then, Haven of Skin, of

Membranes, of Water
During that time in her womb, then, haven of skin, of membranes,
of water—a complete world, in fact, in which and through which
he receives all he wants, with no need for work or clothing—air,
warmth, food, blood, life, potentially even the risk of death, come to
him via a hollow thread.
—Luce Irigaray 21

In her groundbreaking Psychoanalysis and Feminism, first published

in 1974, Juliet Mitchell devoted a chapter to The Dialectic of Sex, and
argued that, despite her claim that the Freudianism and feminism of
the early twentieth century both grew out of the same concerns with
sexuality, Firestone missed the point of psychoanalysis, in that there
was no theory of the unconscious in her polemic, only an entirely
rational subject.22 We might add that neither Firestone nor Piercy
asks what the implications of ectogenesis might be for the formation
of subjectivity, and indeed these questions are worryingly absent or
glossed over in many of the contemporary discussions of the artifi-
cial womb. In Irigaray’s work, instead, the prenatal relation that is
imagined as so completely severed in their utopias becomes a central
resource for figuring feminine subjectivity. According to Ettinger,
psychoanalysis, too, has omitted fundamental aspects of the forma-
tion of subjectivity in that it has failed to include any account of the
prenatal mother/infant relation. How might Irigaray’s and Ettinger’s
work on the prenatal maternal relation inflect these reflections on the
neonatal matrix, even if it is naturalized in their thought?

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 INCUBATORS, PUMPS, AND OTHER HARD-BREASTED BODIES 119

For Ettinger, the third trimester of pregnancy—the period of ges-

tation that is denied to the mother and infant with very premature
birth—sets up the conditions for the formation of a partial subjectiv-
ity, prior to the entry into the symbolic order that Jacques Lacan iden-
tifies. According to Ettinger, this “matrixial time and space” provides
the conditions for both the “becoming-mother (the mother-to-be)
and the becoming-subject (baby-to-be)” to “turn into partial sub-
jects” or “I(s) and non-I(s).”23 As Griselda Pollock puts it, Ettinger’s
so-called matrixial borderspace challenges conventional psychoana-
lytic models of subjectivity by taking prenatal experience into account
and by insisting that “the Several comes before the One.”24 Matrixial
borderlinking establishes an aspect of subjectivity that is specific to
intrauterine experience and the (prenatal) maternal relation. Clearly
it is not replicated by the matrix of machines, medics, and procedures
that care for the premature infant, but Ettinger doesn’t ask what it
might mean for the developing fetus to miss out on this phase, or
to experience a version of it that would be anything other than the
naturalized “haven” of the womb.25 Ettinger’s account of prenatality
is thus characterized by being the scene of another kind of becoming
in relation and in the feminine; one that is also necessarily presocial
(and pretechnological).
This is so for Irigaray, too. In her work, the “placental relation”
has a special significance. Following biologist Hélène Rouch’s work
on the placenta, she suggests that it represents not a fusion between
mother and fetus, but coexistence that is “respectful of the life of
both,” “redistributing maternal substances” in ways that both sustain
the mother and allow the fetus to develop.26 Rouch describes the
role the placenta plays in ensuring that the mother’s immune system
does not reject the fetus, and that this involves a recognition of the
fetus as the nonself in a continuous negotiation.27 For Rouch and
Irigaray, the placental economy represents a condition that is neither
(psychotic) fusion nor separation; that in Irigaray’s terms “respects the
one and the other.”28
More generally, Irigaray problematizes the notion of womb as
container, since, as she puts it in “Place, Interval,” if the woman (in
general) is the place (or container) for the infant (and in sexual rela-
tions, for the man), where is the “container for herself”? She proposes
that we think of what surrounds the infant—the womb, the mem-
branes, the fluids, and the placenta—as less a container and more
as in continuum and at the same time as interval between infant and
mother: “In gestation, there will always be a gap, an interval between
the body that is in the envelope and the envelope itself which will

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 120 KATIE LLOYD THOMAS

more or less fit that body, and the amniotic fluid which separates the
two.”29 As with other figures in Irigaray’s work—air, mucus, breath
or voice—the gap is thought in terms of its material constitution that
both separates and connects, that is shared and allows for exchange.
In “Belief Itself,” this fleshy corporeal gap is also conceived as a kind
of matrix of relations: “Within her womb, an amnion and a placenta,
a whole world with its layers, its circuits, its vessels, its nourishing
pathways, etc., a whole world of invisible relations.”30
Just like Ettinger, Irigaray is not concerned with any sociotech-
nological matrix that would replace this maternal corporeal “world,
with its layers, its circuits, its vessels.” But she gives us a figure of
identities that are neither fused nor separate but bound by a fleshy
relational gap, comprising a specific materiality of tissues, fluids, and
nourishing pathways. We can’t suggest that the neonatal matrix is in
any way a direct replacement of this naturalized intrauterine condi-
tion, but we might ask what its “invisible relations” are comprised of.
We might also recall that in the NICU, the mother is still part of this
sociotechnological matrix, albeit very much relocated, and that she
(and others) come into relation with the infant despite and through
Perspex, tubes, syringes, bloods, gases, milk, and procedures that
include the gaze, the voice, and the caress—a matrix of relations that
also has its own specific materiality.

She’s Listening, We Have a Connection

S: It’s weird to think your child is in this little box being looked after
by a lot of machines. Somehow I didn’t feel that distance. I used to
talk to her a lot . . . R and I both did this—we used to tell her what
she needed to do . . . As the days went by and I started to understand
what the monitors meant then we would tell A that she needed to
bring her blood pressure up or down, or her heart rate down or up.
This is magical thinking but it seemed like she did it. I know that’s
mad but it did feel like, “She’s listening, we have a connection.”

I was struck by the many ways in which the mums involved in This
Is For You made connections with their preterm babies. I myself had
done so through storytelling and acts of imagination. I discovered
tenderness in the act of syringe feeding despite the sterile packaging,
the medical procedures, and the literal distance above the incuba-
tor from which I handled the syringe to instigate the flow of milk
into my son’s feeding tube. Other mums educated themselves so they
could enter into negotiations about treatment with the doctors, or

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 INCUBATORS, PUMPS, AND OTHER HARD-BREASTED BODIES 121

became experts in nursing procedures. One mum learned to insert

the nasogastric tube; another couple learned the art of towel rolling
and made the “nests” that give some containment to the tiny exposed
bodies in the cavernous space of the incubator:

J: We were experts in building nests . . . At the beginning the nurses did

it, but I knew how to build a nest with some towels so I just got some new
towels and wrapped them and put them in . . . We could feel that he liked
to have boundaries especially because he loved his feet, he liked to kick
against something, so we felt “he is lost without anything,” so . . . [we would]
do it at the sides, so they would surround him.

Here the containment of the womb is endlessly reenacted in the

remaking of the bedding. For others it will be touching, looking,
singing, speaking, talking, and “magical thinking” that will enable
them to cross the distance, to traverse the gap that is both the separa-
tion and the very possibility of relation itself.
In including the mother, this specific matrix also opens this role
to others, even if in only the most partial of ways. At the furthest
remove of community, these may be blood donors or milk donors. At
Homerton, there are volunteers who knit blankets and clothing; there
is the staff who cleans, maintains supplies, and makes bespoke hats for
the tiniest babies to keep the breathing kit close to their heads. There
are technicians, doctors, administrators, and nurses who perform the
endless routines of cares when parents are not there. And there are
families, friends, parents—men as well as women—for whom this
social matrix transforms the maternal exclusivity of some aspects of
infant care. As one mum recalled, while expressing milk took her
away from her daughter’s side, it enabled a powerful connection for
her daughter’s father:

S: It [the situation in NICU] really equalized things. There was really

nothing I could do that he couldn’t do except for the milk expressing, and
in some senses that was a disadvantage because it meant that I had to
leave L [laughs]. It got him more contact time with L. I still think it was
incredibly good for their relationship and created a bond that he might
not have . . . there would still have been a bond but I don’t know if it would
have been as strong.

While we can detect some ambivalence in this mother’s words—what

is an opening for her child’s father is also something of a loss for
her—the space that is made for the maternal role in this alternative

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 122 KATIE LLOYD THOMAS

gestational matrix also sets up new possibilities for others to take

that role.
In Waiting in the Wings, Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga nar-
rates her encounter with the NICU, when her son Rafa was born at
28 weeks. It was “artificial insemination” (amidst laughter, she recalls)
that enabled her to conceive him in a same-sex partnership, and it was
the sociotechnological matrix of the NICU that enabled him to sur-
vive after his early birth.31 For her, the neonatal matrix had transfor-
mative potential beyond the fact of finally taking her baby home. Her
account is permeated with recollections of the new connections she
made not only with her son but also with medical procedures, tech-
nologies, and with people such as those on the nursing staff and other
(heterosexual) parents whom she had previously felt separate from. She
finds herself praying for all the babies: “for Alex, that her sleeping
limbs will awaken; for Nathaniel, that his heart will heal; for Simone,
that her eyes will see clear and far; for Freddy with Downs; and for
all the others I’ve seen.”32 When it is time to leave, she fears for her
dependency on the nurses (“Rose, Stacey, Bobbie, Sue, Gurline, Donna,
Terry, and others whom we never met ”) who have shown a mother’s love
for her son.33 And in the midst of the routines of sitting, watching,
pumping, expressing, and feeding, she makes a link between her own
“milk-hard-breasted body” and the “incubator walls”:

In that place [my heart] resides a seamless connection between my baby’s

essence beating inside those incubator walls and my milk-hard-breasted
body.34

As Suzanne Bost has put it, Moraga’s experience also challenges

the social norms of maternity: “This intimacy of life with machine
further ‘queers’ the ‘queer motherhood’ Moraga narrates, unmoor-
ing maternity from female essence, ‘natural’ reproduction, hetero-
sexual intercourse, and mother-father families.”35 This “queering”
of maternity does not take us to the utopian future envisaged by
Firestone and Piercy, however. It holds on to the maternal relation,
while nevertheless taking us away from the naturalized intrauterine
relation described by Ettinger and Irigaray. The sociotechnological
matrix that replaces the mother’s body in the NICU is specific. It
involves the mother when, as Baker has shown, it could be otherwise.
It values the mother and in so doing it enables others to take part
in the maternal role and, as a consequence, provides openings for
new social practices and subjectivities that are worth exploring. To
insist that we look at its specific material constitution, as one possible

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 INCUBATORS, PUMPS, AND OTHER HARD-BREASTED BODIES 123

matrix amongst others, is to recognize that, as Karen Barad puts it,

“material constraints and exclusions and the material dimensions of
regulatory practices are important factors in the process of material-
ization.”36 As has been suggested here, an open incubator that allows
the gaze, that is set up for handling, bed-making, feeding, and the
caress, is not the same as one designed to function automatically. Such
a matrix produces specific closings and openings that in turn give rise
to new practices of maternal relation and care that may be extended to
a wider community, at the same time revealing, in the ways Moraga
found so transformative, one’s own already intimate connection to
those not so radically other “hard breasted bodies” that replace, sup-
port, or exist alongside our own.

Notes
1. For more on “The Other Side of Waiting,” see www.takingplace.org.
uk; and Katie Lloyd Thomas with taking place, “The Other Side of
Waiting,” Feminist Review 93:1 (2009), pp. 122–127.
2. The title of “This is For You” is taken from Elaine Scarry’s The Body
in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985), p. 292.
3. Most of the “mums” involved in this project gave birth to their
babies within 27 weeks (“very premature”), and all of the babies
required intensive care. The group included a same-sex couple and a
single mother. Most of their babies’ journeys were fairly straightfor-
ward, while two babies were in the unit for more than eight months.
I am extremely grateful to all of them for their involvement with the
project.
4. For example, Dion Farquhar, The Other Machine: Discourse and
Reproductive Technologies (London: Routledge, 1996); and Charis
Thompson, Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of
Reproductive Technologies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
5. See Jeremy Rifkin, “The End of Pregnancy: Within a Generation
There Will Probably Be Mass Use of Artificial Wombs to Grow
Babies,” The Guardian, January 16, 2002. Christine Rosen argues
for the extension of existing technologies in “Why Not Artificial
Wombs?,” The New Atlantis 3 (Fall 2003), pp. 67–76. For a more
politicized debate, see Gena Corea’s “The Artificial Womb: An
Escape from the Dark and Dangerous Space,” chap. 12 of The Mother
Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to
Artificial Wombs (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 250–259.
6. See Aida Edemariam reporting on the survival of Amillia Taylor,
born at 21 weeks and 6 days, in “Against All Odds,” The Guardian,
February 20, 2007.

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 124 KATIE LLOYD THOMAS

7. See, for example, Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Luce Irigaray,
“Body Against Body: In Relation to the Mother,” chap. 2 in Sexes and
Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993); and Luce Irigaray, “On the Maternal Order,” interview
with Hélène Rouch, chap. 4 in Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of
Difference, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1993).
8. See Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist
Revolution (New York: Bantam Books, 1970); and Marge Piercy,
Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976).
9. Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time, p. 102.
10. Ibid.
11. For details on these exhibits, and the resident incubators exhibit in
1903 at Luna Park, Coney Island, see Jeffrey P. Baker, The Machine
in the Nursery: Incubator Technology and the Origins of Newborn
Intensive Care (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1996), pp. 93–99.
12. Figures given for the numbers of babies who are treated in NICUs in
the United Kingdom range from around one in eight to one in ten
babies born.
13. The need for parental involvement and attention to the baby’s devel-
opmental needs beyond mere survival is increasingly promoted in UK
units. See Caroline Scott, “Bubblewrap babies,” The Sunday Times,
February 27, 2005.
14. Baker, The Machine in the Nursery, p. 73.
15. Ibid.
16. See Felix F. Marx, Die Entwicklung der Säuglings Inkubatoren (Bonn:
Verlag Siering KG, 1968), p. 72.
17. A. Belmin, “Visites de la Societé Internationale: La Clinique Tarnier
et le Dr. Budin,” Revue philanthropique 18 (1905/6), p. 491. Cited
in Baker, The Machine in the Nursery, p. 60.
18. For an analysis of the relationship between the two, see Sarah Mary
Lawrence, Beyond Revolution: The Theory of Shulamith Firestone and
Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (Phoenix: Arizona State
University Press, 2009).
19. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, p. 31.
20. Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time, p. 105.
21. Luce Irigaray, “Belief Itself,” chap. 3 in Sexes and Genealogies, p. 33.
22. Juliet Mitchell, “Shulamith Firestone: Freud Feminized,” chap. 5 in
Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian
Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 346–350.
23. Bracha L. Ettinger, “The Matrixial Gaze,” in Bracha Lichtenberg
Ettinger: The Eurydice Series, The Drawing Center’s Drawing Papers
no. 24, ed. Catherine de Zegher and Brian Massumi (New York: The
Drawing Center, 2001), p. 93.

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 INCUBATORS, PUMPS, AND OTHER HARD-BREASTED BODIES 125

24. Griselda Pollock, “Femininity: Aporia or Sexual Difference?,” in The

Matrixial Borderspace, p. 14.
25. In passing, I asked Ettinger about premature birth, and she answered
that the effects could only be known through analysis.
26. Irigaray, “On the Maternal Order,” pp. 38f.
27. Ibid., p. 40.
28. Ibid., p. 41.
29. Luce Irigaray, “Place Interval: A Reading of Aristotle, Physics IV,”
chap. 3 in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and
Gillian C. Gill (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 42.
30. Irigaray, “Belief Itself,” p. 33.
31. For a detailed discussion of ARTs in the context of lesbian practices,
see Laura Mamo, Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the
Age of Technoscience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
32. Cherríe Moraga, Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood
(New York: Firebrand Books, 1997), p. 69.
33. Ibid., p. 78.
34. Ibid., p. 57.
35. Suzanne Bost, “From Race/Sex/Etc. to Glucose, Feeding Tube, and
Mourning: The Shifting Matter of Chicana Feminism,” in Material
Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2008), p. 354.
36. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding
of How Matter Comes to Matter,” in ibid., p. 140.

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 PA R T I I I

New Subjectivities

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 Introduction: A Politics of Visibility

Henriette Gunkel

Protest must also shape itself around new social media formats
that favor the remote over the immediate, spectacle over speech,
form over content.
—Jack Halberstam1

I am a believer of every word I say and I am willing to live in

danger under the many threats I receive in order to obtain the real
freedom all Egyptians are fighting and dying for daily.
—Aliaa Elmahdy 2

When Aliaa Elmahdy posted on her blog an image of her naked self,
demanding “real freedom” for all Egyptians, she became the unduti-
ful daughter to many: to Facebook, which removed the image from
her site; to the April 6 Movement in Cairo, which gathered in Tahrir
Square in 2011 demanding a different life and democratic elections,
and which quickly distanced itself from Elmahdy before she could be
linked to its cause and become its face;3 and, finally, to a number of
feminists worldwide, who could widely and across differences identify
with the demands expressed in Egypt to end oppression, including
oppression against women, but who envisioned the unveiling of heads
and faces only, not entire bodies.4 Considering the body as the “best
artistic representation,”5 and propelled by the desire to end the objec-
tification of, and violence against, women in her society, Elmahdy
used her own body and agency to push forward a radical politics of
visibility. She took a self-portrait in which she posed with a red flower
in her long hair, wearing only red shoes and black stockings, with one
leg heightened and placed on a stool, and turned slightly outward.
With her eyes looking confidently and defiantly into the camera, here

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 130 HENRIETTE GUNKEL

was a daughter from the South who was clearly not waiting to be
saved (by the North); defiantly also in relation to one of the continu-
ous splits within feminism—among mothers, daughters, and grand-
daughters, among those who are in favor of and those who are against
the pornographic.
By posting her image on the Internet, Elmahdy made use of the
media strategies that were already in place and so important for the
success of the people in the streets of Cairo—pointing not only to
the traps of new media and communication technologies (such as the
constant surveillance and mapping of [the movement of] bodies, and
the endless collection of data for marketing strategies, etc.), but also
to its possibilities by allowing the world to witness in live time what
was going on in Egypt, and in neighboring countries such as Tunisia
and Libya. This way, people throughout the world not only turn into
witnesses of wars (through unmanned drones, embedded journalism,
24-hour news cycles, and so on), but also of protests against oppres-
sion, torture, violence, and discrimination, thus of local political
actions transmitted globally. This was also true of the Occupy Wall
Street (OWS) movement which the protests in North Africa affected,
as well as rather marginal movements, movements that claim land
rights, demand houses and basic services such as water, electricity,
health service, and so on; movements that took action before, dur-
ing, and after the revolutionary moments in North Africa, and that
fail to make it into the global newspapers, television, and/or radio
stations—hence, into mainstream media.6
In the live transmission of the recorded event, the protesting and
resisting body turns into a platform for broadcasting messages, as
Jack Halberstam argues in this volume; it’s the body that records,
and gets recorded digitally, directly connected and sent out of the
local context into a global world of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook—you
name it. As cultural texts, the images and sounds—transmitted live
and/or sampled; real and/or fictional—take us into one, two, three,
and many other different worlds and lives. They inspire us, affect us,
and allow us to imagine different levels of undutifulness (as set out by
Rosi Braidotti in the preface of this volume), of choices, of intensities,
of collaborations, of improvisations that help us to come closer to the
multiplicity we aim to become. And it is not only the stories of success
and happy endings that inspire and affect us to become undutiful. It
is also the images and texts that represent the apocalyptic, the melan-
cholic, the unpleasurable that propel our desire to intervene in social
and political life, to reformulate radical politics and hold together and
shift the lived multiplicity of positioning. The visual and the virtual

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 INTRODUCTION 131

hence remain crucial sites for the practice and process, and for the
production of subjectivity—online and offline.

* * *

As Fanny Söderbäck points out in her introduction, in the current

OWS movement the demands are not single demands under which
the movement as a whole can be subsumed. While the dream of a
different life is still central, there is no single vision and version of
what such life should look like, and how it can be reached. The visions
are in fact (irritatingly?) manifold and multiple, not identifiable—and
hence not controllable—from the outside. The political strategies we
use and the alliances we form—through processes of political soci-
ality, through an intersubjectivity, or, possibly, an interviduality, as
Jami Weinstein proposes in this volume—impact our understand-
ing of ourselves in relation to others. They impact how we want to
appear in front of others—not only to the immediate other, but also
to an other that could be anywhere in the world.7 As the case of the
Amina hoax8 has highlighted, however, the strategies we use not only
impact our self-understanding, but they also impact our understand-
ing of others, how we make them appear, and hence render them
intelligible. A recent critique formulated by South African activists
in response to international online petitions against hate crimes in
the post-apartheid country further highlights the need to continu-
ously rethink strategies of visibility or appearance as a precondition
to effect social and political change.9 Since the beginning of 2011,
we have seen an increase in online petitions and campaigns, emerg-
ing from Europe and North America, against hate crimes in South
Africa—notably against black lesbians—creating a specific visibility
of queer African subjectivity with some remarkable global success.
One petition by AVAAZ.org—a global organization with its main
office in New York—was particularly effective, collecting nearly a
million signatures worldwide in a short period of time in an attempt
to force the South African President Jacob Zuma to act. The peti-
tion mobilized its political goal against a (supposed?) increase in hate
crimes in the country around a specific image, the battered face of
Millicent Gaika. Through its international circulation, Gaika’s face
quickly came to symbolize the cruelty of homophobic violence and
rape in South Africa, despite the fact that her “case” dated back nine
months at the moment the petition was circulated.
Here we have a battered face that is used and in fact exploited10 to
mobilize political forces and signatures; an image that stands in stark

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 132 HENRIETTE GUNKEL

contrast to the one taken by Elmahdy of herself to mobilize around

sexual politics. The difference between these images could not have
been more striking, and the global response is perhaps equally mean-
ingful: while the face that can be turned into a victim attracts sup-
port and mobilizes feminist and queer global solidarity, the one that
refuses victimization—and hence does not provide the feel-good
moment that petition-signing can engender—fails to generate such
support. In the online petitions, and the irritated responses they
effected amongst South African LGBTIQ organizations, we, there-
fore, not only see the need for an applied ethics in virtual politics,
but also (and perhaps more importantly) the need to historicize the
form of subjectivity employed, an argument that is made strongly by
Gabeba Baderoon in this volume.
It is the historicization of subjectivity that allows us to trouble
the strategies of visibility at work in global activism by questioning
exactly the hypervisibility of African queer bodies in virtual spaces
when it comes to hate crimes. Instead of reproducing and exploiting
this hypervisibility, we might draw attention to the multiplicity of
local and transnational LGBTIQ activists organizing throughout the
African continent, alongside new academic scholarship on nonhetero-
normative sexualities and socialities, and the rich cultural archive cre-
ated by African activists, artists, filmmakers, and writers. This way we
can offer a historiography that constitutes a different reading, away
from the ordinary and the normative, that enables new concepts,
new theories, and new forms of feminist practices—as, for example,
offered by Toni Morrison who, as Kodwo Eshun has pointed out,
argued that the African subjects that “experienced capture, theft,
abduction, mutilations, and slavery were the first moderns,” and by
doing so rendered modernity forever suspect.11
A politics of alliance, therefore, not only raises questions around
visibility and representation, but also the very question of the political:
what is constituted/defined as political? What is defined as feminist
politics? And who is constituted as a political subject? What are the
(theoretical, geographical, legal, cultural, economic, social) references
that we use in measuring politics and the political? Whose reference
points are we using? And who is the target of that framework? Linked
to this is the question of the globalization of movements, demands,
actions, and legal frameworks—not only in order to get international
financial support, but also the moral support needed. Are such move-
ments one dimensional in that they get funneled through the United
Nations in Geneva or its tribunal in The Hague to the rest of the
world? Or are they, instead, two-, three-, or four-dimensional, to use
Kyoo Lee’s approach in this volume? Are they rhizomatic? How do we

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 INTRODUCTION 133

relate and refer to one another? To each other’s desires? In the context
of the OWS movement, we saw similar events happening throughout
the globe, mostly symbolic actions of an international solidarity mixed
with local politics and demands. In other cases, a globalized and often
universalizing form of politics and demands seems more difficult, as
visible for example in the context of the hate crime legislation and the
legal recognition of the term “corrective rape” requested in the online
petitions against hate crime in South Africa, or the Slut Walks that
regained global popularity in 2011 and effected various responses, not
only supportive ones, in the global South.12
In an interview that followed the posting of her image, Elmahdy
claims that although she partially joined the protests in Cairo, and
refuses to remain silent, she “was never into politics.”13 Although
Elmahdy employs the strategy of visibility, and hence the politics and
art of representation, she resists being identifiable, perceptible for
organized politics; in fact, she develops a formation of active sub-
jectivity whose aim is not at all to achieve political subjecthood. Her
subversive strategy resists an absorption into liberal feminist think-
ing and politics, and pushes the question of representation further. It
triggers not only the question of who is considered a political subject,
but also that of who can be considered a subject in a politicized envi-
ronment in need of (international) protection.
The contributions of this section all deal in one way or another,
and from different perspectives, with the question of how to become
an undutiful daughter—theoretically and practically—via processes
of identification and dis-identification, loyalty and dis-loyalty, remem-
bering and dis-remembering, doing and un-doing. This section in
fact shows that there is not only one undutiful way; being and/or
becoming undutiful itself consists of a psychic, bodily, semiotic, and
discursive web of subversive strategies and desires and does not reflect
any form of universality. As Halberstam states in this volume in refer-
ence to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a feminist politics does not only
need to include the reflection on why struggles are supported and
how, but it must also include and listen to the multiplicity of struggles
that are not considered properly feminist by liberal feminists. The
link between theory and social reality/subjectivity therefore needs to
be constantly rethought, questioned, and re-enacted in our workings
toward a desired non-normative future.

* * *

In her chapter, “Rethinking Sexual Difference and Kinship in Juliet

Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism,” Judith Butler returns to a

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 134 HENRIETTE GUNKEL

feminist classic from 1974 that Juliet Mitchell herself revised in 1999.
Butler does not simply reject an inspiring but—in light of current
debates—also problematic text from another generation of feminists
but, instead, motivates us to think through the text, through the
relationship between sexual difference, psychoanalysis, and the poli-
tics of kinship that it presents us with, in order to respond to current
political backlashes—in this case, the public perception around and
against gay parenting, as well as single parenting, and its underlying
questions as to who can be a parent, and what is considered a func-
tioning, healthy family (environment).
While Mitchell insists, as Butler argues, that sexual difference
has largely unconscious dimensions, and that these are transmitted
through generations across time and space (with women then consti-
tuted as the “ascribed repositories of that human conservatism”), this
transmission is at the same time unaffected by broader social dimen-
sions and workings of and toward social change, and hence toward the
futures that feminists strive to achieve. By following Mitchell’s own
examples, Butler explores the question of whether the social really
is as separable from the unconscious, and whether sexual difference
can in fact be viewed as a supposedly universally organized struc-
ture transmitted into the present “without translation, transposition,
without some loss or new twist and turn, without some queer derail-
ment or deviation.” It is Butler’s insistence on alternative politics and
theorizations of kinship that makes her analysis so compelling for
raising questions about subjectivity. It allows us to include, imagine,
and perform forms of subjectivity that are not considered by Mitchell:
the subject positions that represent a possibly queer “derailment” of
sexual difference through—conscious—modes of generational trans-
mission (such as the subject position of female husbands and ancestral
wives, for example, that are available to sangomas [traditional heal-
ers] in South Africa who inhabit their gender position through their
ancestors, a gender position unbound to the reproductive organiza-
tion of sexuality).14
In her chapter, “Transgenres and the Plane of Gender
Imperceptibility,” Jami Weinstein is similarly interested in render-
ing sexual difference, based on a heteronormative gender dichotomy,
porous in order to oppose (biopolitical) controls of desire. Inspired
by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Weinstein traces the political
implications of the notion of becoming imperceptible—as the end
of all processes of becoming—in relation to a queerfeminist prac-
tice that seeks the “ability to reorganize, re-oedipalize the affects,
intensities, and forces that constitute our corporeal materiality.” In

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 INTRODUCTION 135

order to move beyond the boundaries of gender, and to explore “one

alternative for transcending” the oedipal organization of sex/gender/
sexuality, Weinstein focuses on becoming as an aesthetic and linguis-
tic self-creation. She offers what she calls a “transatlantic linguistic
ping-pong” by proposing a shift from the concept of gender to that of
transgenre, which allows a “transversal, rooting and shifting, deter-
ritorializing and reterritorializing, sexual politics.” A sexual politics
that includes relations between humans, non-humans, the bacterial,
and so on (hence, a transspecies sexual politics), and that, at the same
time, “parallels a transition from the self as autonomous and indi-
vidual to what we might call interviduals.”
What kind of subjectivity, we must ask, does gender impercepti-
bility and transgenre create? Weinstein approaches this question by
focusing on the figuration (as a relatively stable hardening of bodily
practices) of the dandy. While Weinstein understands the dandy as
“precisely the sort of imperceptibility of affectively intensive bodies
without organs,” she also acknowledges that the dandy is generally
understood as an effeminate male. But does this not make the dandy,
at least in terms of gender, perceptible? Weinstein pushes the inten-
sities of imperceptibility further by asking, “What would it mean
if a woman-identified female underwent a becoming dandy?” For
Weinstein, the concept of transgenre makes us better equipped to
answer this question than would a concept more readily familiar to
us, namely transgender. By asking the question in this way, then,
Weinstein indirectly pushes toward the end of a politics of representa-
tion and toward new formations of political subjectivity: not visibility,
but imperceptibility.
Gabeba Baderoon’s chapter, “Primal Scenes, Forbidden Words,
and Reclaimed Spaces,” picks up on questions around the strategy
of visibility and its aesthetic self-creation by providing a “produc-
tive attention to [contemporary South African] poetic language and
form.” Baderoon offers a dialogue between two approaches in con-
temporary literary texts, both attending to representations of the
systemic (sexual) violation of black women’s bodies in different his-
torical contexts. In her reading of Makhosazana Xaba’s poem on Sara
Baartman, Baderoon introduces the concept of “preferred silence”—
a very timely concept that works against a quite common feminist,
but also queer and antiracist, understanding of representation as the
goal of all politics—a concept, as Baderoon argues, that “involves a
strategic refusal to engage with dominant modes of rendering bodies
visible.” She develops this in particular in relation to the representa-
tions of Baartman in the last 30 years, joining herewith a relatively

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 136 HENRIETTE GUNKEL

recent critical scholarship that argues that it was postcolonial theory

(initiated by Sander Gilman’s text “Black Bodies, White Bodies”15)
that finally succeeded in reducing Baartman to her genitals. Baderoon
thus uncompromisingly questions the way black women’s bodies
appear in public through discourses, even in postcolonial and femi-
nist discourses, that end up reproducing the very visibility that they
sought to work against in the first place. Baderoon points to the lim-
its of what can be known and urges us to think of “new parameters
for calling her into visibility” while keeping Baartman at the “center
of heroic women” whose memories need to remain alive.
Baderoon hence does far more in her chapter than just assemble
counter-memories that contest the colonial archive: she works with a
cultural archive in South Africa to expand into a (pleasurable and hope-
ful) future. In her reading of the drama “Reclaiming the P . . . Word,”
Baderoon further points to the political strategy of reclaiming and
bringing into visibility in a different way the meaning of “proclaimed
words”—swear words that address (often sexual) parts of the female
body being reclaimed and redefined in order to articulate “a radi-
cally different claim on public space by black women in South Africa
than previous narratives have,” which “ultimately comes to include
pleasurable meanings,” without erasing the painful histories that the
words refer to. It is the insistence on not only pain but also pleasure
and power that moves Baderoon’s analysis into a slightly different
direction than what Halberstam proposes in this volume—namely
masochistic refusal—or what Chrysanthi Nigianni in her introduc-
tion names “a politics of displeasure.” Baderoon focuses on a plea-
sure that for centuries has been denied, exactly due to the colonial
and apartheid history that imbued black bodies in South Africa with
“unsettling sexualized meanings.” She seeks to “reclaim” the space
that is already occupied by several uses of the p-word, almost all dam-
aging to women. It is, as Baderoon argues, the very title, “Reclaiming
the P . . . Word,” that signals the ongoing nature of this attempt.
In the chapter “Going Gaga: Dissent, Refusal, and Feminism,”
Jack Halberstam also offers a shift in focus to not so obvious forms
and representations of resistance, a shift to what Halberstam calls a
“shadow archive of resistance,” which is traceable from activist tradi-
tions and feminist memories to contemporary protests such as the
OWS movement. Halberstam presents a genealogy of this different
(black, postcolonial, queer) archive of resistance and links it to the
hypermedialization of contemporary politics and sociality and hence
“around new social media formats that favor the remote over the
immediate, spectacle over speech, form over content.” This includes

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 INTRODUCTION 137

the human microphone (that Söderbäck set up for this book in her
introduction), as well as Lady Gaga’s ability to media manipulation
and her subjectification as a “kinetic avatar of feminism”—an ability
combined with a “spirit of (pop) anarchy” that gives these new poli-
tics a name: “Gaga Feminism.”
What at first sight looks like a glamorous and popular politics and
archive turns out to include a politics of failure and disidentification
in the sense of self-destruction and queer masochism—an anti-social
feminism that builds its project around an “anti-heroic, disintegrating
subject.” As shown through different literary texts that deal with the
undoing of conventional womanhood and femininity and also with
the dismantling of generational relationships and kinship narratives,
the concept of feminist refusal that Halberstam proposes can extend
to a complete undoing/unbecoming/dismantling of the self. Here,
again, the focus is not any more the request for recognition (and here
we are dealing with similar issues as those discussed in relation to the
politics of imperceptibility in Weinstein’s chapter) but rather multiple
forms of resistance “that can be overlooked or misread but constitute
an elaborate web of subversive gestures.” In fact, we deal with a politi-
cal response “that does not announce itself as politics,” and hence
with political subjectivities, at least not in the Western, liberal sense,
as Halberstam argues, “where being has already been defined in
terms of a self-activating, self-knowing, liberal subject.” Halberstam
hence proposes an anti-oedipal feminism that is, nevertheless, not a
Deleuzian body without organs, as in the case of Weinstein.
In her chapter, “(Un)naming The Third Sex After Beauvoir:
Towards a Third Dimensional Feminism,” Kyoo Lee in effect also
questions the choices that feminisms offer—feminisms, as she argues,
that give way and are in fact conceptualized via a continuous center-
ing of the first or the second, while “the ‘third’ remains or tends
to get colonially ‘replicated,’ it remains of secondary significance,
‘foreclosed by the seminal-ontological order to the original-copy’”;
feminisms, in other words, that are bound to leave minorities on the
move, searching for the “real freedom” beyond the choices offered.
In her workings toward a third dimensional feminism, rather than
a temporal and geopolitical third feminism, Lee refers back to an
archive of resistance, to feminist memories and struggles that are
informed by black and queer politics—in this case women/queers
of color in the United States—and asks the question of how to
respond to the problems of the continuous generational transfer-
ences of social categories and subjectivities, of sexual difference, and
colonial-colonized relationships from way back then that remain

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 138 HENRIETTE GUNKEL

relevant today. Lee responds to this question by linking the archive

of resistance to a thinking “with and after Beauvoir,” to a reconfig-
uring of the “critical intimacy” of the The Second Sex , in order to
“see that ‘third’ voice traveling, to keep the second voice of the sec-
ond proliferating itself, so as to prevent the critically minoritarian
force of the other from becoming regressively ‘white-washed.’”
This way, Lee acknowledges the “decentered, displaced, or dif-
fused” potentiality of the second in relation to the first, while push-
ing forward a third dimensional that is accumulative rather than
additive—a third dimensional that invests in the potentiality of the
transformative, in a “more transparadigmatic inter-feminist dialogue”
that possibly enables nondefined “radically new sorts of feminism”
instead of an investment in yet another form of othering, or gen-
dering for that matter. She is interested in a third dimensional that
allows a “fourth dimensional world, a fifth in one with four dimen-
sions, and so on”—a multiplicity of differences, contexts, categories,
and dimensions that enables the subjectification of one that, in turn,
enables the subjectification of another: “this one, that one, another
one—one, two, three, four . . . every single one.” We might not only
want to relate this transformation of multiplicity back to Weinstein’s
proposed politics of becoming (imperceptibility), and to Halberstam’s
proposed unbecoming; it also enters an interesting dialogue with
what Kodwo Eshun proposes in his afrofuturistic reconfiguring of
W.E.B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness”: afrodiasporic assemblages
of “conceptual approaches and countermemorial mediated practices
in order to access triple consciousness, quadruple consciousness, pre-
viously inaccessible alienations”16 —alienations that in undutiful ways
highlight the complex relations of subjectivity, history, the psychic,
and (cultural) politics, while working toward a multiplicity of choices,
toward the “real freedom” that not only Elmahdy but also many of
the undutiful daughters in this volume strive for.

Notes
1. Jack Halberstam, “Going Gaga: Dissent, Refusal, and Feminism,”
p. 183 in this volume.
2. Aliaa Elmahdy in an interview with Mohamed Fadel Fahmy,
“Egyptian Blogger Aliaa Elmahdy: Why I Posed Naked,” CNN.com,
November 19, 2011, http://articles.cnn.com/2011–11–19/middlee
ast/world_meast_nude-blogger-aliaa-magda-elmahdy_1_egyptian
-blogger-nude-photo-ka reem-a mer?_ s=PM:M I DDL EE A ST,
accessed on February 8, 2012.

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 INTRODUCTION 139

3. See, for example, http://colombotelegraph.com/2011/11/18/egyp

tian-feminists-blog-received-2–5-million-hits-with-her-full-frontal
-nude-shot-2, accessed on February 8, 2012.
4. Elmahdy’s image initiated various and diverse responses, also
amongst feminists, and in this introduction I am polemically only
referring to one strand. This line of thought emerged within dis-
cussions amongst feminists friends, as well as in virtual discussions
on Facebook, various blogs (see, for example, http://www.cook
dandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?PHPSESSID=eec5f2c3443a
88b6bb4c33aa6f0125eb&topic=30043.0, accessed on February 8,
2012), and in response to online articles (see, for example, http://
colombotelegraph.com/2011/11/18/egyptian-feminists-blog
-received-2–5-million-hits-with-her-full-frontal-nude-shot-2,
accessed on February 8, 2012).
5. Fadel Fahmy, “Egyptian Blogger Aliaa Elmahdy.”
6. At the same time, we see an increase in (moving) images documenting
the violence perpetrated by the state and its institutions such as the
police, the military, or the paramilitary against those who resist—as
well as images by the perpetrators themselves that find entry into the
global net and get multiplied; for example, the images of the tortures
perpetrated and staged by the US military in Abu Ghraib, or more
recently of the desecration of dead bodies in Afghanistan.
7. For a theory of alliance, see also Judith Butler’s recent re-reading
of Hannah Arendt, in particular her theorization of political action
in relation to the “space of appearance” (Judith Butler, “Bodies
in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” European Institute for
Progressive Cultural Policies, September 2011, http://www.eipcp
.net/transversal/1011/butler/en, accessed on February 8, 2012).
8. For more information on the so-called Amina hoax, see, for example,
Esther Addley, “Syrian Lesbian Blogger is Revealed Conclusively
to be a Married Man,” The Guardian, June 13, 2011, http://www
.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/13/syrian-lesbian-blogger-tom
-macmaster, accessed on February 8, 2012.
9. For a critique of various online petitions addressing homophobia
in a post-colonial African context, see, for example, the open letter
posted by Triangle Project, a well-established LGBT organization
in Cape Town, South Africa, in which the organization explains its
refusal to sign online petitions against so called “corrective rape”
in South Africa: http://www.triangle.org.za/news/2011/02/online
-corrective-rape-campaigns-and-petitions, accessed on February 8,
2012.
10. As Susan Sontag has argued so convincingly, “There is shame as well
as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only
people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme
order are those who could do something to alleviate it . . . or those

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 140 HENRIETTE GUNKEL

who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not
we mean to be” (Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others [New
York: Picador, 2003], p. 42).
11. Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” The New
Centennial Review 3:2 (2003), pp. 287–302.
12. Elaine Salo, for example, issued the following statement on Facebook
in response to the idea of introducing the Slut Walk tradition to South
Africa: “And NO, we do not need to hook up SA feminist protests
to what begun in Toronto just so we can claim ‘Cool Global Status.’
Renaming local protests against GBV Slut Walk means that the local
concerns about and causes of GBV are swallowed up, ghettoised by the
concerns elsewhere of an equally local northern context . . . The insis-
tence upon local, particular histories and roots of GBV must occur
whilst still acknowledging that GBV is a global issue” (https://www
.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=260534060642680, accessed on
January 29, 2012).
13. Fadel Fahmy, “Egyptian Blogger Aliaa Elmahdy.”
14. For a succinct discussion of this question of gender among sango-
mas, see, for example, Nkunzi Nkabinde’s autobiography, Black Bull,
Ancestors and Me: My Life as a Lesbian Sangoma (Johannesburg:
Jacana, 2009).
15. Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography
of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and
Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12:1 (1985), pp. 204–242.
16. Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” p. 298.

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 CH A P T ER 9

Rethinking Sexual Difference

and Kinship in Juliet Mitchell’s
Psychoanalysis and Feminism

Judith Butler

There are surely many reasons to return to Juliet Mitchell’s

Psychoanalysis and Feminism (originally published in 1974), if only
because she herself returned there in 1999 in order to revise her ear-
lier view and make an even stronger case for what she calls the shared
terrain of psychic life.1 Upon reflection, she considered whether cer-
tain invariant or, at least, recurrent laws of sexual difference were
transmitted through generations, and whether there might be a
way through a consideration of such rules to understand what links
human cultures and historical periods, despite their apparent vari-
ability. What may we derive from this reading about the relationship
between sexual difference, psychoanalysis, and the politics of new
kinship? How does our understanding of generational transmission
presuppose what a generation is and how it relies on certain concep-
tions of kinship and its modes of transmission? To what extent does
the theory of sexual difference in this founding text prefigure and
reach its limit in a new theorization of kinship? What is at stake here
are less new structures of kinship than the modes of its transmis-
sion. In revisiting Psychoanalysis and Feminism, does Mitchell’s new
introduction revise her former theory and, if so, what implications
does it hold for how we understand the temporal, even translational,
modalities of kinship?
We will see that the problem of generational transmission informs
many of the contemporary debates about who can be a parent and

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 142 JUDITH BUTLER

what can function as a family. In the first instance, Mitchell insists that
sexual difference has largely unconscious dimensions, and that these
unconscious dimensions are transmitted through time and across
generations. Moreover, there is a kind of stasis or “drive to stay put”
that characterizes sexual difference, some way in which it endeavors
to stay in place even as it is transmitted, conveyed from place to place,
time to time (xix). If we focus on what sexual difference is, we find
no easy ontological determination; however, the following formula-
tions prove central: sexual difference has to be included among those
phenomena that “persist” and that remain “incommensurate with the
real social situation” (xvii). These claims prompt Mitchell to deliver
the bad news to socialization theory: “deliberate socialization is inad-
equate to explain the structure of sexual difference and the inequali-
ties that always arise from it, despite the fact that there is enormous
diversity of social practice” (xvii). At a certain point, she tries to find
other metaphors for explaining this “persistence,” suggesting that it
is perhaps more like a persistent and transmissible recalcitrance. For
instance, she asks, “Why, despite massive social, economic and legal
changes, is there still a kind of underwater tow that makes progress
regress on matters of ‘gender’ equity?” (xviii, my emphasis). I should
note here that “gender” is in quotation marks, suggesting that it is
a term that Mitchell is only provisionally willing to use to make her
argument. Indeed, it will be some presuppositions of the language of
gender equity that she seeks to contest.
So, sexual difference is not exactly defined, though something
about its operation is characterized in an initially paradoxical way; it
stays in place, pulls backward, and poses a problem for notions of gen-
der and progress alike. Although it persists, it does not exactly move
forward; it is “a kind of underwater tow” or, again, a “current,” as she
puts it: “feminism seems always to be rowing against a current that is
ultimately the stronger force” (xviii). She concludes here—still in the
new introduction—with the following remark: “conservatism actu-
ally seems inherent in the very construction of sexual difference—as
though the difference itself has in its construction insisted on sta-
sis” (xviii). This conservatism is inherent in what Mitchell calls “the
psycho-ideological living of sexual relations” (xviii), and it is distin-
guished by the fact that “it is ‘women’ . . . who become the ascribed
repositories of that human conservatism” (xix). The category of
“women” here seems to emerge as a sociological given, which means
that whatever sexual difference is, it depends on those sociologically
demonstrable women to receive it at the same time as it remains irre-
ducible to any account of socialization. So how do we distinguish

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 RETHINKING SEXUAL DIFFERENCE AND KINSHIP 143

among senses of the social in this account? And how do we under-

stand them in relation to the unconscious?
Mitchell tells us that this conservatism is largely unconscious. She
does not give us a precise topography of the unconscious, nor does
she let us know whether any topography would suffice to explain its
operation. As something received and transmitted, sexual difference
seems by definition not to have a circumscribed place, but instead to
be exceeding the topographical as a necessity. Even under the best
possible circumstances, we would not be able to locate this conser-
vatism somewhere. Rather, we are asked to understand it as being
transmitted across generations, as a kind of passage or conveyance,
a translation from one modality or instance of kinship to another.
There is a “kind of thought” about masculinity and femininity—
understood as equivalent to the thought of sexual difference—that
takes place in the course of a transmission and that is understood
as a relay or a transposition; the mobility and temporality of this
thought, although partially conscious, “is primarily an unconscious
process” (xix).
If sexual difference is a transmitted process, if it is itself a trans-
mission, then transmission is the mode of its reality: it spans and
links psychic life across time and place. Sexual difference does not
belong to a single psyche, and when it does structure a psyche, as it
invariably does, it does so by virtue of having been transmitted from
somewhere else, from another time, and as that which is in the course
of being transmitted elsewhere. So, any given psyche would be a kind
of way station or relay point for the transmissibility of this thought.
This point seems to be important for Mitchell’s argument in favor of
“a shared mental terrain” (xxii), one that ultimately serves as the con-
dition for understanding the nexus of the psyche and ideology, a cen-
tral thesis of Psychoanalysis and Feminism to which we shall return.

* * *

I propose to consider the two examples that Mitchell offers to sup-

port her claim about the transmission of unconscious ideas, especially
the transmission of unconscious ideas regarding sexual difference.
But first, I want to draw attention to the commitment that her posi-
tion makes to a semantic understanding of masculine and feminine.
She not only refers to ideas about sexual difference that are transmit-
ted from one psyche to another across space and time, those that
undoubtedly include interpretations and semantic delimitations, but
she is also willing, throughout, to identify sexual difference with the

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 144 JUDITH BUTLER

masculine and feminine. Is there anything about sexual difference

that makes that very identification difficult? I am wondering whether
it is not possible, even within a psychoanalytic account of sexual dif-
ference, to agree with the propositions that sexual difference is per-
sistent, that it works as an undertow, even that it is characterized by
a constitutive conservatism, without thereby concluding that sexual
difference is invariably identified with masculine and feminine sub-
ject positions.
Some of the questions I pose here are certainly not new, but that
seems only to confirm the idea that some problem is echoing here
that does not assimilate well into any notion of temporal progress:
can there be sexual difference, say, within homosexuality that cannot
quite be described as masculine and feminine? If so, what implica-
tions would that have for separating sexual difference, understood as
a deep-seated and largely unconscious thought transmitted over space
and time, and specific social ways of determining the itinerary of that
thought? In other words, at what point is sexual difference separable
from its social determinations, if ever?
To answer these questions, we may have to separate the question
of social determination from socialization per se. Hence, on the one
hand, if we follow Mitchell, we need to assume such a separation
when we claim that changes in the social organization of men and
women are impeded by a conservatism that seems to be inherent
in sexual difference itself. On the other hand, if we define sexual
difference as “masculine and feminine,” are we not already giving
social organization to those terms? Can we use the terms without
attributing a specific semantic sense to them, or without them accru-
ing a semantic sense that exceeds whatever intentions we may have?
Moreover, if the “shared mental terrain” established through the gen-
erational transmission of the terms is also a social reality (how else
would we understand that “shared” character of the terrain except
as a social one, even if a partially unconsciously articulated set of
social linkages), then we are not precisely referring to a psychic reality,
presumptively unconscious, and a social reality, presumptively con-
scious, but rather to two modes of sociality, even two temporalities of
the social—one that lags behind, struggles to impede progress, and
another that forges ahead, trying to effect social change. At the same
time, we are supposing that we are mistaken about the ideal of the
social if we cannot account for those forms of transmission that rely
on unconscious processes and their effects.
Just to be clear: those theories of socialization that maintain that
gender relations and the prospects for gender equity are determined

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 RETHINKING SEXUAL DIFFERENCE AND KINSHIP 145

only by social conditions and effects preclude the operation of the

unconscious on the assumption that the unconscious forms no part of
the social. And yet, if the rejoinder to that theory takes as its presup-
position that the unconscious is definitely separable from the social,
that it undercuts the progress made in the name of the social, then
that position tends to share the same dichotomy that the first position
supposes.
My suggestion is that, just as the theory of the social invariably
relies on unconscious dimensions, so the theory of the unconscious
cannot be elaborated on without reference to modes of transmission
that form an important, if undervalued, dimension of social rela-
tionality. I think we can find both dimensions of this argument in
Mitchell’s analysis, even though her explicit theoretical commitment
is to divide the one from the other. For instance, there are progressive
social reforms involving gender equity that find themselves impeded
by something unconscious that is understood as the persistent and
impeding effect of sexual difference. And yet, what impedes such
social reforms is itself “a largely unconsciously acquired history” (xxi),
one that presumes “a shared mental terrain” (xxii). If this shared
domain is a largely unacknowledged or devalued domain of social
connectedness, then the social clearly occurs twice, each time in a
modality of history: one is acquired and performs a regressive and
conservative function; the second belongs to a more deliberate pres-
ent, operative in reforms that seek to make change in and for the
future. Mitchell aptly cites Sigmund Freud in this regard: “Mankind
never lives entirely in the present. The past, the tradition of the race
and of the people, lives on in the ideologies of the superego and yields
only slowly to the influences of the present and to new change” (xxx,
Mitchell’s emphasis). Of course, it is this phrase—“ideologies of the
super-ego”—that interests Mitchell, and rightly so. The super-ego
belongs to the later topography of Freud, and it is the one that Jacques
Lacan largely neglects when he considers the conscious (mapping it
almost exclusively onto the castration complex). Mankind does not
live fully in the present: some history is transmitted at the level of the
unconscious, and this is surely part of what is meant by sexual differ-
ence. How do we understand this slower and recalcitrant history, this
strange undertow or persistent counterhistory, as part of an ideology
of the super-ego?
I am not altogether sure that this link can be established in a defin-
itive way, but one of the two examples Mitchell offers starts to shed
light on the connection. The first is “the unconscious sense of guilt”
experienced by those who have not committed any crime, the topic

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 146 JUDITH BUTLER

of Freud’s essay “Criminals from a Sense of Guilt.”2 Mitchell makes

use of this example to support her idea of “a shared mental terrain”
or a generationally transmitted set of unconscious thoughts.3 What
remains unclear is whether we are asked to assume that the guilt
passed along was once attached to past deeds and whether, at some
point in the course of its transmission, the guilt was taken to be a sure
sign of a crime. And yet, as we know from Freud’s analysis, guilt can
be related to a wish or a fantasy, even grounded in confusion about
where the line is drawn between wish and deed. The criminal act
that sometimes follows from a sense of guilt seeks to make the guilt
commensurable with a crime, fulfilling that imperative of induction,
“if there is guilt, there must be a crime.”4 In other words, there is no
reason to infer from a sense of guilt that there was a crime, even if
committed long ago and only with belatedly registered aftereffects.
Guilt may be no more than a sign of anxiety over unacted desire and
its ambiguities (“Did I merely wish it, or did I do it? Was the wish-
ing itself the guilty deed?”), coupled with a desire to be done with
the anxiety over whether or not the act has happened or will happen.
The sense of guilt may thus be the self-infliction of a punishment in
advance of any acts yet to be committed, even those that most likely
will never be committed.
When guilt proves more bearable than anxiety, it is doubtless
because it allows for a temporal shift at the level of the psyche: guilt
presumes that the act has already taken place, presumes the deed even
when it has never been committed and so resolves the anxiety that
attends the inability to distinguish wish from deed. One can imag-
ine well enough how criminal deeds are averted through preemptive
guilt: the fear of punishment is supplanted by guilt, understood as
an instrument of self-punishment, at once fulfilling the expectation
of being punished as a consequence of committing the deed and pre-
empting the commission of the deed itself. But in the case in which
criminal deeds are committed from a sense of guilt, the psyche seeks
ratification of its conviction in the form of action. Guilt seeks its
guilty action and, when it cannot be found, brings it about.
What is coursing through the psyche in the form of guilt? For
Mitchell, that guilt has been passed from a certain past, acting we
might say on the model of the “curse” in Greek tragedy. If I com-
mit an act from this guilt, I am unconsciously affirming that psychic
bond to those—or that one—who came before. Of course, there are
other ways of explaining this guilt that at first corresponds to no
culpable deed. In Melanie Klein’s analysis, guilt that corresponds to
no act may well be a way of managing an impulse that could possibly

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 RETHINKING SEXUAL DIFFERENCE AND KINSHIP 147

destroy an object of love and dependency, and so operates as a pro-

phylactic against destructive aims. In any case, we can see that the
existence of an unconscious sense of guilt (or partially conscious one)
that seems to correspond to no misdeed may well seek to foreclose a
possible future trajectory of action.5 And yet, if the one who suffers
guilt acts criminally to fulfill the demands of the guilt, is there not,
even for Klein, a certain acting out of a history that remains largely
unconscious at that time? What remains unclear is whether it is a fan-
tasy that is transmitted from one generation to another, or whether
it is the deeds of the former generation for which the latter bears
responsibility. If it is the incest and murder committed by Oedipus,
or some historical version thereof, it does not answer the question of
whether or not what courses through the psyche in the form of guilt
is motivated by a transmitted deed or a fantasy. Indeed, that particu-
lar equivocation seems to be precisely what is transmitted and crime
becomes the way to overcome that equivocation—and its anxieties—
for the moment: it’s a deed!

* * *

Mitchell likens this example of criminals who act from a sense of guilt
to a second example that focuses on kinship in order to make the
case for sexual difference as an unconsciously acquired history that
proves recalcitrant to social change. In the second example, “a child
raised by two parents of the same sex . . . may make a ‘normative’
adjustment to heterosexuality” (xxi). In fact, the argument suggests
that the child emerges into heterosexuality (by which, I suppose, she
means a presumptively normative heterosexuality) not only by virtue
of biology, educational influences, media, and other environmental
factors, but also that some other force has intervened, one that can-
not be accounted for by “the actual situation” (xxi). Mitchell writes:
“Unconscious thought processes are an important contribution to
these instances of normalization” (xxi). In this example, sexual dif-
ference contributes to the forming of the child’s sexuality, and so
exercises a formative power. So in this second example, we are meant
to assume that unconscious thought exercises its “conservative” force
on sexuality, that a set of socially transmitted and acquired thoughts
about sexual difference emerge in (or as) the heterosexuality of the
child, where it might not be predicted on the basis of parental influ-
ence and expected forms of identification. In some ways, this con-
firms what Mitchell argued in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, namely
that “conscious, deliberate socialization is inadequate to explain the

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 148 JUDITH BUTLER

structure of sexual difference” (xvii). And yet, it seems that in this

case the heterosexuality of the child raised by two parents of the same
sex is another example of this “persistence” of sexual difference. Are
we to understand sexual difference in this instance as exemplified
by heterosexuality? Is this a paradigmatic exemplification? And if so,
does that mean that the persistence of sexual difference, understood
as historically transmitted unconscious thoughts, is also the persis-
tence of heterosexuality as the social organization of sexuality?
One quick way to test the hypothesis is to ask whether the unpre-
dictable homosexuality of a child raised by heterosexual parents is
equally a sign of sexual difference. If not, then it would seem that
the heterosexual organization of sexuality and sexual difference are
linked in this example, if not in this theory. Sexual difference exercises
its formative power in contributing to the making of the heterosexual
child in the midst of a gay family (though the example does not let
us know whether the significance of this unpredictability alters if the
child is a girl or a boy or if the parents are two men or two women). Is
the idea that someone else’s heterosexual union from before is trans-
mitted to the child and enters into the formation of sexuality through
largely unconscious processes? Is it the heterosexuality of those who
came before that emerges as the heterosexuality of the child? And
is it their wish or their deed? Would it be equally true that uncon-
scious homosexuality can be transmitted from prior generations as
well? If so, does it follow that the role of unconscious transmissions
in the formation of sexuality exceeds the operation of sexual differ-
ence? And how would we account for ambivalent or “over-inclusive”
organizations of sexuality, whether bisexual or indeterminate? Would
these be a sign of sexual difference or its limits?
In the first example, the person who has done nothing wrong
and who, Freud tells us, is not exposed to hypercritical judgments
from his or her parents nevertheless suffers from self-beratement
and guilt and even commits a crime motivated by this guilt. In the
second example, a child—whose sociologically established gender is
unknown—is raised by two parents of the same sex, and turns out to
be heterosexual in orientation (an example that assumes that orien-
tations can be and are definitively established in this way). In both
examples, we are meant to see incommensurabilities. Indeed, we are
meant to infer that something has been effectively and consequen-
tially conveyed over a temporal distance that alone can account for
this anachronistic emergence of guilt or desire. The crime happened
earlier, and so the guilt is effectively acquired from another time. The
heterosexuality is also somehow transmitted from earlier times, and

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 RETHINKING SEXUAL DIFFERENCE AND KINSHIP 149

so emerges now in spite of the homosexuality of the parents. And in

both cases, it remains unclear whether what is transmitted is fantasy
or the effects of action itself (or some combination of both). The first
example does not pertain immediately to sexuality, though it cer-
tainly could. If Oedipus is the subtext, then the crime is surely both
sexual and murderous. Indeed, whether it is the nameless and recur-
rent crime of Oedipus transmitted through the ages or some other
guilty reactions to what is unconsciously transmitted from an earlier
time and another space, there seems to be a living out of someone
else’s guilt or desire that suggests that neither really start with the
discrete and present ego.
Taken together, the examples suggest a transmission of guilt and
desire from another time, and the awkward and unknowing ways that
others persist in our most basic sense of self and sexuality. Indeed,
we seem to be haunted by the actions and fantasies of those who pre-
cede us, and sometimes this makes us do things (commit crimes) or
assume a given sexual definition (heterosexuality). In either case, we
are both haunted and formed by these unconscious processes, both
of which are meant to support, directly or indirectly, the thesis that
sexual difference is transmitted unconsciously and perhaps also that
women are its designated repositories.
Let us then reflect on the emergent or accomplished heterosexu-
ality of the conjectured child who is meant to confirm the persis-
tence of sexual difference, even its countersocial force. To understand
the importance of this example as a way of confirming historically
acquired unconscious thoughts about sexual difference, we would
have to accept that sexual difference is not already operative in the
home or in the larger circuits of kinship and surrounding social rela-
tions. Is any gay or lesbian family so fully sequestered from the social
circulation of heterosexual meanings and effects that the emergence
of a straight kid confirms the countersocial status of sexual difference?
I do not mean to reduce the question of sexual formation to a purely
sociological approach, but rather to consider what of psychoanalysis is
really pertinent here. In other words, to accept the illustrative power
of the example, we would first have to consider the peculiar ways in
which “transmitting” and “acquiring” work in the development of
more or less stable forms of sexual orientation. After all, if we were
to change the example, as I suggested above, and ask how a lesbian
is formed within a family with heterosexual parents, we would not
be able to conclude with confidence that some unconscious content
regarding sexual difference was transmitted to the child, and that
this accounts for the incommensurability between the actual parental

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 150 JUDITH BUTLER

situation and the formation of sexual desire. Apparently, the straight

kid who emerges from gay or lesbian parents also acquires a mode of
desire that cannot be accounted for by “the actual situation.” But it is
equally true that the lesbian kid who emerges from straight parents or
a single parent cannot be easily accounted for by the actual situation
(it would be good to know where an “actual situation” begins and
ends, and whether it is presumptively coextensive with those orga-
nizations of parenting that prevailed during the years in which sex-
ual orientation is presumptively established). This unaccountability
or incommensurability does not seem to follow necessarily from the
constitutive conservatism of sexual difference or, indeed, its osten-
sible corollary—heterosexuality. It may well be the case that sexual-
ity is formed in response to something that is not manifest in any
parenting environment. But why would that be any more or less true
for the straight or gay kid, or indeed for the bisexual, questioning, or
asexual one?
As a psychoanalytic generalization, it can be said that the forma-
tion of sexual desire does not emerge on the basis of a clearly read-
able mimesis. And the idea of parents as “models” not only fails to
be explanatory of the social forms that sexuality takes (here Mitchell
and I agree), but the idea of the “model” belongs to a behaviorist
framework that generally fails to understand how parents or caregiv-
ers are diversely understood not only in light of complex and shifting
structures of kinship but also in light of the fields of fantasy to which
they give rise. Moreover, a number of presuppositions are made by
both the behaviorist model and the psychoanalytical rejoinder of the
kind that Mitchell makes: (1) the idea that sexuality can be adequately
understood by the idea of sexual orientation and that the latter can be
explained and established in a definitive way within existing vocabu-
laries; and (2) the idea that parenting structures are the primary causes
or formative factors in the establishing of sexual orientation when
parenting structures are themselves formed, even haunted, by any
number of other social, historical, and economic ways of organizing
reproduction and child-rearing. Parents also come from somewhere,
and are as formed and haunted by unconscious processes as those
they nurture. As a result, the parent-child dyad has to be rethought
within the historicity of kinship, and the way transmission occurs—if
it does—has to be rethought as well.
When Mitchell claims that “we are still all universally conceived
by one mother and begotten by one father” (xxiii), she means to
articulate that despite reproductive technologies and new kinship
arrangements, sexual difference makes itself known in reproductive

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 RETHINKING SEXUAL DIFFERENCE AND KINSHIP 151

heterosexuality. But more, in claiming that the mother is the one

who gives birth, she relies on a theory of kinship that is bound by
reproductive functions alone. If reproductive sexuality establishes
appropriate kinship terms, then donors are fathers, and there can be
no two—or more than two—mothers. Indeed, fathers who adopt or
anyone who adopts runs the risk of being designated as “unreal” or
deviating from the law. And yet, it seems to me that new kinship not
only consists in such deviation from the law, but that deviation is itself
the means through which rules are reproduced—and derailed. Thus,
queer kinship is not just a form of kinship among several others but
also strikes at the very idea of transmission by which the universal
law of sexual difference becomes joined with reproductive sexuality.
This is also why mimetic accounts of sexuality that focus on the ques-
tion of what kind of parental “model” a child will have misapprehend
the way in which sexuality emerges. There again, a certain possibility
of displacement from an original object establishes the possibility of
sexuality itself.
Neither a recourse to parenting structures nor to the archaic and
persistent force of sexual difference can offer an explanation for
that unexpected turn of events that is the emergence of sexuality
in a particular form or within the rhythms of a particular compul-
sion. This is not to say that sexuality is ahistorical, but only that we
require a broader idea of history to begin to approach its trajectory.
This is also not to deny that forms of triangulation persist within
the queerest structures. A person socially established as a lesbian can
consciously identify with her father or with ideas of fatherhood, or
even find intensified traces of the father in another sociologically
established woman, or she can fail to find him time and again. But
whether that drama takes place at the site of a man or a woman may
well be less important than the drama itself. She may well have more
in common with some guy who is doing the same sort of thing in
relation to his father or some other masculine figure, and the two of
them might have a queer alliance of a psychic sort, whether or not
they are focused on a woman or a man. We can imagine the explana-
tion that claims that the boy child of lesbian parents may well end
up desiring a girl as a form of identifying with his parents’ objects,
or even becoming part of the crowd. Indeed, that object-choice may
well confirm for him a greater form of loyalty and identification
than would becoming gay, since that would introduce the masculine
object of desire in a way that could be destabilizing for the opera-
tive solidarities in that kinship arrangement. Or maybe straightness
is a way to avert the possibility of any rival for the lesbian prince

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 152 JUDITH BUTLER

who knows he has the absolute and irreplaceable love of both of his
mothers, for better or for worse. I relay here a story relayed to me
(thus “transmitting” in ways I cannot predict) in which a young
adolescent girl says to her two dads, “Will you be disappointed in
me if I am not gay?” They respond, listen, and one replies, “If you
are gay, you will be like us; if you like men, you will be like us as
well, so either case, you can’t escape us!” A strange parental trap,
we might say, even a deplorable narcissism, but the story basically
eliminates sexual orientation as a possible site of breakage between
parents and child.
We could certainly say in all of these scenarios that sexual differ-
ence is at play, and I do not have a problem with that claim. But if
something about sexual difference persists, I am not sure that what
persists are established semantic ways of organizing sexual differ-
ence, already formed legacies of the past that are relayed into the
present without translation, transposition—without some loss or
new twist and turn; without some queer derailment or deviation. For
this reason, I am even less sure that heterosexuality is a sure way of
confirming sexual difference or providing its paradigmatic instance.
But even if both of those speculative propositions proved true (and
I am not sure how they could finally prove true), an ever more fun-
damental problem emerges: how do we understand “transmission”
and “acquisition”? The problem is not simply accounting for how a
specific content is passed from one generation to the next, but of
taking stock of how changing organizations of kinship alter the very
idea of the generation. Thus, it is difficult to reconcile the two claims
that Mitchell makes: first, that sociologically established kinship is
the vehicle through which the unconscious thought of sexual dif-
ference is transferred, and that changes in kinship are impeded by
an operation of sexual difference that, considered as unconscious, is
independent of social forms of kinship; second, that heterosexuality
is taken to be the sign of that persistent and unconscious sexual dif-
ference, meaning that we depend on the sociological form that sexu-
ality takes to affirm the workings of an unconscious whose absolute
separability from such social forms is supposed to be illustrated by the
example itself.
To the extent that generational belonging is determined by pat-
terns of kinship, and those patterns are presumed to be reproduced
identically along generational lines, they are at once evidence of a per-
sistent and invariant law and said to be the vehicle through which that
law is conveyed. The fallacious character of this argument is clearly
exposed by the fact that it builds sexual difference, understood as

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 RETHINKING SEXUAL DIFFERENCE AND KINSHIP 153

heterosexually organized kinship, into the very definition of what a

generation is, so that the laws that generations are said to hand down
to one another are actually built into the modes of conveyance them-
selves. If existing or established organizations of kinship (or sexuality)
are the evidence for the universal laws of sexual difference, and if they
are defined by that very law, then they do not serve as independent
evidence of the law, but rather illustrate the closed economy by which
the law projects its inevitability, ruling out precisely those queer devi-
ations that characterize both alternate kinship and the emergence of
sexuality.
Of course, we have to be able to account for that recalcitrance, that
undertow, that reverse current that makes our efforts at social change
so difficult. But there is no reason to take that recalcitrance and coun-
tercurrent as a sign of the invariant laws of human society. Sometimes
change is slow, and loss is difficult, especially when the ideology of
the super-ego speaks in the name of such laws.

Notes
A longer version of this chapter originally appeared as “Rethinking Sexual
Difference and Kinship in Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism,” in differ-
ences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 23:1 (2012). This abridged and
modified version has been approved by the author and reprinted with the
permission of the author. Copyright © Judith Butler 2012.
1. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment
of Freudian Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. xxii.
Originally published in 1974, this book was reprinted with a new
introduction by the author in 2000. All references to the text are to
the new edition, and will be given parenthetically in the main body
of the text.
2. Sigmund Freud, “Criminals from a Sense of Guilt,” chap. 3 of Some
Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work, vol. 14 of The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press,
1953–74), pp. 332–333. The essay was originally published in 1916.
3. See Mitchell, new introduction: “From clinical experience psycho-
analysts know beyond doubt that unconscious thoughts may be
communicated between people, and even through people, across
generations—but this is only inexplicable if we deny a shared mental
terrain” (xxii).
4. See “Criminals from a Sense of Guilt,” where Freud writes,
“Paradoxical as it may sound, I must maintain that the sense of guilt
was present before the misdeed, that it did not arise from it, but
conversely—the misdeed arose from the sense of guilt” (332).

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 154 JUDITH BUTLER

5. See Melanie Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-

Depressive States,” in The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell
(London: Penguin, 1986). See also my essay “Moral Sadism and
Doubting One’s Own Love,” in Reading Melanie Klein, ed. John
Phillips and Lyndsey Stonebridge (New York: Routledge, 1998),
pp. 175–184.

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 CH A P T ER 10

Transgenres and the Plane of

Gender Imperceptibility1

Jami Weinstein

The problem never concerned the nature of some exclusive group

or other, but the transversal relations where the effects produced
by any thing (through homosexuality, drugs, etc.) can always be
produced by other means. Against those who think, “I am this,
I am that” . . . one must think in uncertain, improbable terms:
I do not know what I am, there is so much non-narcissistic, non-
oedipal research or experimentation necessary to do—no gay can
ever say with certainty “I’m gay.” The problem is not that of being
this or that in man, but instead of becoming inhuman, of a uni-
versal animal becoming: not to be taken as a beast, but to unravel
the human organization of the body, through this or that zone
of bodily intensity, everyone discovering their own zones and the
groups, populations, and species that inhabit them.
—Gilles Deleuze 2

Introduction
In the passage above, which is part of a response to an ad hominem attack
against him, Gilles Deleuze refutes his critic’s misconceived charge that
he is an opportunistic tourist who capitalizes on the risks taken by those
who inhabit various so-called marginalized positions by dispelling
identity politics wholesale and supplanting it with a positive theory of
how one might live. The latter, he suggests, could be achieved through
the strategic dehumanization process of becoming-imperceptible. As
Ronald Bogue explains, “Becoming-imperceptible is a process of elimi-
nation whereby one divests oneself of all coded identity and engages

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 156 JAMI WEINSTEIN

the abstract lines of a nonorganic life, the immanent, virtual lines of

continuous variation that play through discursive regimes of signs and
nondiscursive machinic assemblages alike.”3 Becoming-imperceptible
is the “immanent end”4 of becoming, a wholesale deterritorialization
of the human. Like the homosexuals, drug users, masochists, and
schizophrenics the harsh critic blamed Deleuze for objectifying, we all
have the ability to reorganize and de-oedipalize the affects, intensities,
and forces that constitute our corporeal materiality. We not only can,
but also should do this, as Deleuze prescribes throughout his work,
especially in that published with Félix Guattari. All becomings, they
contend, are “rushing toward” becoming-imperceptible, passing first
through a requisite becoming-woman.5 In effect, Deleuze is suggesting
that we remediate the very speciation and biopolitical identity construc-
tion Michel Foucault famously diagnosed when he proclaimed that in
1870, “the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual
was now a species.”6 To codify the homosexual, much like asserting “I
am this,” is to reify the fiction of corporeal wholeness and intelligible
signification rather than interpreting bodies as intensive maps open to
limitless recharting from the impressions made by so many machinic
assemblages of forces and affects.
It is toward this latter end that, following the Deleuzian prescrip-
tion, I explore the possibility of shifting from the concept of gender to
that of transgenre. This move attempts to unmoor sex/gender/sexu-
ality from the heteronormative and oedipal sovereignty of corporeal
affective organization—not only for those who choose to focus their
experiential or experimental risks on sex/gender/sexuality resignifica-
tion, but for all of us. With the concept of transgenre, I aim both to
make an intervention into the stalemate surrounding feminist debates
on sex/gender/sexuality and to explore one alternative for transcend-
ing it. It is a move away from the commonplace views of these con-
cepts with their concomitant normative corporeal baggage, toward
body genres, figurations, bodies without organs, and horizontal dif-
ference—differences from differences rather than differences vertically
counterposed against some standard unmarked norm. And it is a strate-
gic step toward developing a queerer notion of identity, one demarcated
according to immutable classificatory schemes. However, as Laurent
Berlant cautions, we must not envision this as necessarily liberatory in
itself, since “a genre is an aesthetic structure of affective expectation,
an institution of formation that absorbs all kinds of small variations or
modifications while promising that the persons transacting with it will
experience the pleasure of encountering what they expected.”7 Genres
are open but, as conventions, still carry some anticipation for the pre-
dictable; one could even argue that, to some degree, they involve the

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 TRANSGENRES 157

citation of norms. But, these conventions and their attendant norms

have embedded within them their own negation and are, hence, inter-
nally self-contradictory, unlike ordinary conventions that cite norms.
As Berlant argues,

The power of a generic performance always involves moments of

potential collapse that threaten the contract that genre makes with
the viewer to fulfill experiential expectations. But those blockages or
surprises are usually part of the convention and not a transgression of
it, or anything radical. They make its conventionality interesting and
rich, even.8

Thus, with transgenre, I do not aim to valorize some transgres-

sive potential. Rather, I hope that this concept will both complement
the deterritorialization endorsed above—one that sets its sights toward
imperceptibility—and offer some critical purchase toward remediat-
ing some of the limitations associated with the now classic sex/gender
paradigm. In other words, I am not putting transgenre forth as the
solution to all our sex/gender woes, but as a strategy for pushing these
concepts into a new register.
In order to grasp the ways in which transgenre might be better
suited to address some of the critical and sociopolitical agendas of
contemporary queerfeminist theorists, I will first perform an abridged
linguistic and conceptual analysis, productively unpacking the poly-
valence of the word genre.9 Here I will trace the genetic lineage of
genre and its family relations with terms such as genus, generic, and
gender, subsequently discussing the merits of appealing to a perspec-
tive focused on aesthetic self-creation. Next, I will provide the back-
ground for augmenting this term with the prefix trans. After doing
so, I will canvass one of the ways in which I think transgenre may
provide a richer account than sex/gender by briefly applying it to the
notion of the dandy.

Genre
To be clear at the outset, this analysis is not intended to contribute to
the field of genre studies. The focus is rather to play a sort of transat-
lantic linguistic ping-pong with the term such that we open up new
lines of flight for understanding gender as it might be if divested from
its oedipal organization. Additionally, I draw on Jacques Derrida’s
“infolding” of gender and genre in his claim:

The question of . . . genre . . . covers the motif of the law in general,

of generation [and] birth in the natural and symbolic senses, of the

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 158 JAMI WEINSTEIN

generation difference, sexual difference between the feminine and

masculine genre/gender, of the hymen between the two, of a relation-
less relation between the two, of an identity and difference between
the feminine and masculine. The word “hymen” . . . serve[s] to remind
the Anglo-American reader that, in French, the semantic scale of genre
is much larger and more expansive than in English, and thus always
includes within its reach the gender.10

It is this reminder and the interrelationship between gender and genre

that I, too, want to underline in my deployment of transgenre. For, it
was the observation that transgender was translated as transgenre for
inclusion in the Paris lesbian, gay, and bisexual pride parade almost
a decade ago that sparked my realization of genre’s interlinguistic
semantic asymmetry and first inspired this study. Subsequently,
I uncovered the genetic heritage of the term genre and its family lin-
eage with its roots in terms such as genus and generic. Briefly, in
French, genre is not only used to denote the linguistic gender of
nouns but also for what in Linnaean species classification is called
genus in English. Interestingly, in a Swedish inversion of the French,
genus refers to what in English we call gender, while what we mean by
the English use of genus can be found in the Swedish original (since
Carl Linnaeus was Swedish) släkten, from the root släkt : family, kin,
relatives. But it was the use of genre in English (originally derived
from French) that initially captured my attention—genre not in the
literary, linguistic, or scientific sense, but rather in the way it signifies
type, kind, sort, category, and style.
Clearly these latter resonances are more expansive and open, more
general or generic than anything we mean when we use the word
gender in English. Thus, the translation of transgenre from trans-
gender constructed a franglais faux amis, or “fake friend” coupling:
two words in different languages that are similar in spelling and
sound, but significantly different in terms of meaning. Often, these
dizygotic linguistic twins possess a common etymological parent; in
this case, they share genus as their common ancestor. It is, moreover,
the very definitional dissonance in the juxtaposition of this particu-
lar faux amis paring that I believe generates novel lines of flight for
analysis. My own use of generic above is intended not in the adjectival
sense of the nouns genre or genus, but in the sense of unspecified,
unbranded, unmarked, common, or undefined. Seeing this transpo-
sition from noun to adjective, genre to generic, however, provides
additional support for the claim that genre, in its link to generic, has
a wider scope of less rigid potentialities. Again, Derrida offers ammu-
nition with what he calls “the law of the law of genre,” which he

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 TRANSGENRES 159

claims is “a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical

economy . . . a sort of participation without belonging—a taking part
in without being part of, without having membership in a set.”11 It
is precisely this impurity, contamination, and participation without
membership that signals the greater semantic breadth and ontologi-
cal excess of genre in contrast to the well-rehearsed shortcomings of
corporeal figurations parsed out on the basis of gender.
Another factor to consider is the way in which genre, in its role
as a method of aesthetic classification, invokes the Nietzschean
concept of aesthetic self-creation when it is applied to concepts like
identity. Rather than considering only biological and social criteria,
aesthetic and, along with it, affective criteria, become primary. In
his study of Friedrich Nietzsche’s aestheticism, Alexander Nehamas
holds that “Nietzsche . . . looks at the world in general as if it were
a sort of artwork; in particular, he looks at it as if it were a literary
text.”12 Pertinent here, he continues, is that to Nietzsche, “literary
characters . . . are constituted simply as sets of features or effects that
belong to no independent subjects,”13 and “the self . . . is not a con-
stant, stable entity” but “something one becomes . . . constructs.”14
This gels with the proposal to move away from identity bounded by
gender and toward framing a self through genre. It also parallels a
transition from the self as autonomous and individual to what we
might call interviduals,15 capturing the sense in which identity or
concepts of it are enmeshed in assemblages of forces and affects, at
core relational—connected with both organic and inorganic entities,
always already multiple and self-contradictory, inchoate, and chaotic.
As Berlant articulates it, “It is a form of aesthetic expectation with
porous boundaries.”16
So it is armed with this taxonomic, multilingual, grammatical,
sexed, gendered, generalized, unspecific and unmarked, contami-
nated, and aesthetic polyvalent definition of genre that we now pro-
ceed to the addition of the prefix trans.

Trans
In this section, in order to transduce17 the notion of trans and genre,
I want to push on Bailey Kier’s provocative contention that,

Everybody on the planet is now encompassed within the category of

transgender . . . Shared interdependent transsex refers to “bodies” as
constant processes, relations, adaptations, and metabolisms, engaged
in varying degrees of re/productive and economic relations with

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 160 JAMI WEINSTEIN

multiple other “bodies,” substances, and things, in which no normal

concept of re/production, as based on our common categories of sex,
gender, and sexuality, exists.18

This assertion does not seem entirely accurate given the references
to (trans)gender and (trans)sex, even with the qualification that it
is not founded on “normal” notions of reproduction based, as Kier
interprets it, on “common categories of sex, gender, and sexuality.”
Normal and common in what sense? After all, sexual reproduction
maintains a statistically insignificant percentage of the totality of
reproduction performed by organic beings on the planet.19 Moreover,
noting that these relations may also be established with substances
and things entails that the use of terms such as sex and gender is
misplaced, since with such terms we still find ourselves trapped in a
humanistic and organicist notion of reproduction and sex difference,
a paradigm that has little relevance to nonsexually reproducing spe-
cies or inorganic entities. Reading Kier more generously, however, we
can infer that he is reaching toward something like transgenre, not
transgender or transsex. Thus, if we push deeper on the spirit of this
contention, employing transgenre instead, we might capture the full
flavor of what he strives to argue.
This returns us to interviduality, discussed above—an intervidu-
ality Deleuze and Guattari advocate in their notion of transversal
machinic assemblage portrayed by their example of the reproductive
interaction between wasp and orchid:

How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of reter-

ritorialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one
another? The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing
of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is
nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s repro-
ductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting
its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhi-
zome . . . a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a
becoming-orchid of the wasp. Each of these becomings brings about
the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritorialization of the
other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of
intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further.20

There can be no clearer rendering of the ways in which transspecies

interviduality—and trans mechanisms taken more generally—operate
than in this assemblage (agencement). The orchid “masquerades” as
and “sexually deceives” the wasp not only by performing wasp (by

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 TRANSGENRES 161

forming an image and tracing of it) but also by producing wasp pher-
omones.21 The wasp, in turn, simultaneously transduces the orchid.
There are no individuals, no singularities, in this process of becom-
ing. This is the very point, I maintain, that Kier intends with his
provocation. In the case of the wasp and the orchid, it is about trans-
genres; sex and gender, even in non-normative or atypical readings of
these terms, have no place in this sort of discussion about interspecies
“transversal”22 reproductive processes.
Scientific research on the wasp-orchid mating process has dem-
onstrated that this “sexual deception” establishes the interspecies
reproductive boundary as leaky: male wasps attracted to the orchid
based on the visual and olfactory signals it transmits find it so entic-
ing that they ejaculate. While we may think this is the end of the
story and declare this practice evolutionarily disadvantageous to the
wasp as a species—a squander of wasp sperm that could be better
expended enhancing the wasp population—the plot thickens. Wasps
can reproduce by two methods: either sexually, spawning only female
offspring, or via parthenogenesis of the female, creating only male
offspring. Moreover, after repeated liaisons with various orchids,
male wasps eventually learn that this form of interspecies sex is not
productive and cease ejaculating, suggesting that they then turn to
sexual reproduction and produce more females to ensure the future of
their own species. Since it is the male wasp that, through his (pseudo)
copulation with the orchid, becomes the reproductive vehicle for the
orchid, parthenogenic reproduction serves the evolutionary interests
of both populations: more male wasps are produced which, in turn,
guarantees the perpetuation of the orchid population. Thus, it is a
win-win situation for all the interviduals involved.23
It is, in part, for this reason that I want to graft trans onto genre
in the present exploration. As the case of the orchid and wasp reveals,
the transspecies, transversal, transducing, transgressive transmission
of genetic material through one another, the co-constituting and
mutually reproductive processes, the deterritorializing and reterrito-
rializing of one another simultaneously, all play in the registers of
both trans and genre. And these concepts, together as transgenre,
provide a new lens through which to undertake analysis, one that the
concepts of sex and gender could only, at best, perform inadequately.
Deploying a transgenre analysis, we can see the way the wasp-orchid
assemblage becomes “a body without organs [BwO] upon which
intensities pass, self and other—not in the name of a higher level
of generality or a broader extension, but by virtue of singularities
that can no longer be said to be personal, and intensities that can no

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 162 JAMI WEINSTEIN

longer be said to be extensive.”24 Imperceptibility here takes the place

of identity. For, as Deleuze and Guattari instruct, “The BwO is never
yours or mine. It is always a body . . . It is an involution, but always a
contemporary creative involution.”25
A final interesting feature of this analysis is the relation it has to the
aesthetic self-creation mentioned earlier. Elizabeth Grosz, in her work
on Darwin and sexual selection, maintains that in sexually reproducing
species, aesthetic attraction is the foundation of mate selection.26 As
witnessed in the example above, it is the orchid’s ability to produce a
tracing or image of the wasp that attracts the wasp to the orchid where
it then detects the alluring sexual pheromones that result in the wasp’s
desire to copulate with the orchid, despite their species differences.
Aesthetics, then, can be said to be the motor of this assemblage of
multiple and transspecies meta-reproductive praxes as much as it can be
attributed to cases of binary sexual difference in the classic paradigms.
However, given the fact that sex and gender differences do not prop-
erly explain this transspecies phenomenon, or at least cannot exhaust
the analysis, we might find it more suitable to use the general sense of
genres (as types, sorts, and kinds) and more specifically, transgenres,
because of the transversal, rooting and shifting,27 deterritorializing
and reterritorializing, sexual politics of the wasp being attracted to,
and mating with, the orchid. It is also this aesthetic feature, in effect
an analysis beyond both the doer and the deed, that will provide the
backbone to the transgenre analysis of the dandy that is to follow.

The Dandy as a Transgenre

Judith Butler famously cites Nietzsche from the Genealogy of Morals as
claiming that “There is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind
doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the
deed—the deed is everything.”28 This, in part, generates her perfor-
mative theory of gender, where gender is cast as epistemological and
repetitiously styled, rather than as an ontological fact, and where sex
becomes an effect of gender. However, elsewhere Nietzsche contra-
dictorily asserts that “first an act is imagined which simply does not
occur, ‘thinking,’ and secondly a subject-substratum in which every
act of thinking, and nothing else, has its origin: that is to say, both the
deed and the doer are fictions.”29 If we take Nietzsche’s second proc-
lamation seriously, we are left empty-handed with respect to what, if
anything, we could say about “what we are”—as he seems to dash pros-
pects for claiming either a classic substance-based ontological truth of
the self or a self based on the sum total of actions. There are multiple

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 TRANSGENRES 163

and ambiguous threads stitched throughout Nietzsche’s work, offer-

ing clues to what remains in an effort to understand the self; perhaps
the most germane is his call to those of us who “want to become those
we are . . . human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give
themselves laws, who create themselves.”30 Thus, despite the claim
that neither being nor doing provides us with a definitive ontological
self-understanding, we are implored by Nietzsche to “become what
we are.” This appeal seems to privilege doing over being, though,
unlike Butler, this doing is not affected by citing preexisting scripts
or norms. Rather, Nietzsche calls upon us to self-create outside the
law, outside of norms, something Butler argues would be impossible
even if we can disturb and subvert those laws and norms under her
theory. Nietzsche’s claim also seems to imply that there is some thing
or substance that we are, and that is what we should become. Lest we
misinterpret this as some form of essentialism, note that the emphasis
is on the becoming and that what we would become is something
new, not prior to the self-construction.
Who better to fill the shoes of Nietzsche’s uniquely and aestheti-
cally self-created person than the dandy? Charles Baudelaire, dandy
apologist extraordinaire, depicts the dandy as someone “whose soli-
tary profession is elegance,” who “will always and at all times possess
a distinct type of physiognomy, one entirely sui generis,”31 and who is
“enamoured . . . above all of distinction, perfection in dress consists in
absolute simplicity . . . the best way of being distinguished . . . It is, above
all, the burning desire to create a personal form of originality, within
the external limits of social conventions.”32 Baudelaire’s characteriza-
tion of the dandy as someone who strives to be distinguished through
absolute simplicity—imperceptibility we might say—echoes the themes
of transgenre detailed above. These motifs are buttressed by Baudelaire
in his claims that the dandy can “establish his dwelling in the throng,
in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite . . . be away
from home and yet . . . feel at home anywhere . . . see the world . . . be at
the very centre of the world, and yet . . . be unseen of the world,” as
they are “independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend
themselves easily to linguistic definitions,”33 and that “these beings
have no other calling but to cultivate the idea of beauty in their per-
sons, to satisfy their passions, to feel and to think.”34 The dwelling in
flux, being at home anywhere, and the being unseen he underscores
here, along with the inability to be linguistically taxonomized and the
emphasis on feeling or affect, evince precisely the sort of impercepti-
bility of affectively intensive bodies without organs described above,
which transgenre as a critical tool is intended to map.

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 164 JAMI WEINSTEIN

As cited earlier, Derrida chronicles the law of the law of genre as

parasitical, contaminated, and impure, a sort of partaking in a class
without membership in or identity with it.35 Here, too, we discern
reflections of dandyism, which, Baudelaire informs us, “is an institu-
tion outside the law, has a rigorous code of laws that all its subjects are
strictly bound by, however ardent and independent their individual
characters may be.”36 Interestingly, on the surface, dandies exhibit a
belonging to the fabric of the aristocratic class. This, like the orchid,
is an aesthetic deception, a mere tracing, a deterritorialization of the
aristocratic, a trans-class lure, since dandies were generally known to
be of the middle class. The aesthetic economy and law of the dandy
can thus be said to be both impure and a participation without belong-
ing, a transgenre replete with the Berlantian “prospects of failure that
haunt the performance of identity and genre.”37 Furthermore, dan-
dies “all spring from the same womb . . . partake of the same charac-
teristic quality of opposition and revolt . . . that compelling need . . . of
combating and destroying triviality,”38 where triviality can be read as
simplistic identity politics, intelligibility, and a politics of recognition,
while the oppositional tendency aims toward instability, ambivalence,
chaos, destabilization, and contamination.
One final slant on the dandy transgenre merits consideration: the
autobiographical. What would it mean if a woman-identified female
underwent a becoming-dandy? Dandies, it should be stressed, are
typically gendered as effeminate males—transfigured feminine mas-
culinity. In that light, a female presenting as a male dandy would
be considered feminine only in a masculine manner. While a limited
analysis of this aspect of this version of the female dandy could be
undertaken using gender theories, I want to suggest that the notion
of transgenre might provide a fuller account of this phenomenon.
Calling such a woman transgendered does not seem quite right, nor
does it exhaust the analysis. Transgenre, on the other hand, seems to
open up the fuller scope of the various transversal contaminations
(class, historical era, gender, sex, nationality, genre, etc.) embedded
in that corporeal, affectively intensified assemblage.

Conclusion
Gayle Salamon writes that “questions of what we are cannot be extri-
cated from questions of what we do, and if that doing sometimes
disturbs presumptions of proper identity or proper place, perhaps that
disturbance can be a means of forging hopeful new modes of knowl-
edge and methods of inquiry from the old.”39 I hope to have offered

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 TRANSGENRES 165

such a new method with the foregoing analysis. It is that very disso-
nance, observed also at the linguistic level, that generates transgenre
as a potentially rich analytic tool. Transgenre offers us new, more
open, affective, and aesthetic lines of flight with which to approach
some of the more thorny issues thought to be exhausted by a sex/
gender analysis. For this reason, it might also offer us a shift in our
general perspective of these problematics and lead the way toward
imperceptibility and the unraveling Deleuze proposes in the epigraph.
Indeed, as he and Guattari declare: “The question is not, or not only,
that of the organism, history, and subject of enunciation that oppose
masculine to feminine in the great dualism machines. The question is
fundamentally that of the body—the body they steal from us in order
to fabricate opposable organisms.”40 And it is that very destabilization
of the sovereignty of the oedipally organized body and its decoding
that transgenre is meant to affect.

Notes
1. In “Transgenres and the Plane of Language, Species, and Evolution,”
Lambda Nordica 16:4, special issue on Animals (2011), pp. 85–111,
I undertake the task of analyzing the concept of transgenre in rela-
tion to language, animals, and evolution. I do not see the argument
in that article as separate from the one I make here, rather these are
two of several parts of a larger whole. It might, thus, be helpful to
read them together.
2. Gilles Deleuze, “Lettre à un critique sévère,” in Pourparlers 1972–1990
(Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 1990), p. 22, my translation (with
reference to “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” in Negotiations 1972–1990,
trans. Martin Joughin [New York: Columbia University Press, 1995],
p. 11).
3. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze’s Wake: Tributes and Tributaries (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 73.
4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 279.
5. Ibid.
6. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction,
trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 43.
7. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of
Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2008), p. 4.
8. Ibid.
9. See my “Transgenres and the Plane of Language, Species, and
Evolution” for a more thorough etymological analysis of the term
genre than the one I provide here.

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 166 JAMI WEINSTEIN

10. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Critical
Inquiry 7:1, special issue on Narrative (1980), p. 74.
11. Ibid., p. 59.
12. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 3.
13. Ibid., p. 5.
14. Ibid., p. 7.
15. I borrow this term from Andrew Miller in “Pan: Orientation,” at:
http://thereturnofpan.tumblr.com, p. 3. In this text, Miller cites
Christian de Quincey describing Miller’s notion of interviduality:
“Subjectivity is not, as Descartes believed, sealed up in the privacy
of an individual mind, only to be communicated via sensory utter-
ances such as language or other gestures. Quite the opposite, really:
you will have realized that our sense of ‘subjectivity’ is deeply inter-
twined with other sentient beings, with other subjects. Subjectivity is
fundamentally intersubjectivity. We are not so much ‘individuals’ as
interviduals. We cocreate each other. And since my very being, my
subjectivity, is a cocreation that involves all other sentient beings I am
in relationship with . . . then part of my being is literally created by and
shared with the ‘Other.’” I employ this term in order to capture that
same sense of co-creation and intersubjectivity Miller intends, though
expanding it beyond interpersonal or intra-organic relations.
16. Berlant, The Female Complaint, p. 4.
17. “Transduce: 1. To convert (energy) from one form to another. 2. To
transfer (genetic material or characteristics) from one bacterial cell
to another.” From http://www.thefreedictionary.com/transduce,
accessed on July 1, 2011.
18. Bailey Kier, “Interdependent Ecological Transsex: Notes on Re/pro-
duction, ‘Transgender’ Fish, and the Management of Populations,
Species, and Resources,” Women & Performance: A Journal of
Feminist Theory 20:3 (2010), p. 299.
19. While the majority of animals reproduce sexually, the rest of organic
life—bacteria, viruses, fungi, plants, and other microorganisms,
which outnumber animals enormously—does not.
20. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 10.
21. See the discussion of wasp-orchid derived from Bob B. M. Wong
and Florian P. Schiestl, “How an Orchid Harms its Pollinator,” The
Royal Society, July 3, 2002, pp. 1529–1532, at http://kvond.word-
press.com/2008/05/15/23/, accessed on June 27, 2011.
22. Deleuze and Guattari often employ the term “transversal” in these
contexts. I am, thus, following suit while simultaneously referencing
what Nira Yuval-Davis outlines in “What is ‘Transversal Politics’?,”
Soundings 12 (1999), pp. 94–98.
23. See, for example, A. C. Gaskett, C. G. Winnick, and M. E.
Herberstein, “Orchid Sexual Deceit Provokes Ejaculation,” The
American Naturalist 171:6 (2008), pp. E206–212.

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 TRANSGENRES 167

24. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 156.

25. Ibid., p. 164.
26. See, in particular, Elizabeth Grosz, Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution,
and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); and
Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of
the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
27. See Yuval-Davis, who explains rooting and shifting as “the idea . . . that
each . . . participant in a political dialogue, would bring with them the
reflexive knowledge of their own positioning and identity. This is the
‘rooting.’ At the same time, they should also try to ‘shift’—to put
themselves in the situation of those with whom they are in dialogue
and who are different” (“What is ‘Transversal Politics’?,” p. 96). To
her, “it is the message, not the messenger that counts. This does not
mean, of course, that it is immaterial who the ‘messenger’ is” (p. 96).
These ideas map neatly onto the Deleuzo-Guattarian notions of deter-
ritorialization-reterritorialization, and to the privileging of impercepti-
bility over identity advocated in this paper.
28. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 25. Italics indicate the
portion not included in Butler but present in the original Nietzsche
citation (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals I, vol. 13,
trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Vintage Books, 1967], p. 45).
29. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and
R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), §477, p. 264,
emphasis mine.
30. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Vintage Books, 1974), §335, p. 266.
31. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed.
and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), p. 26.
32. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Baudelaire:
Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet (New
York: Viking Press, 1972), pp. 395–422. Abridged PDF version
cited: http://athena.wells.edu:6080/special/user-wganis/ARTH270
/Baudelaire.pdf, accessed on July 1, 2011.
33. Ibid., p. 3.
34. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, p. 27.
35. Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” p. 59.
36. Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” p. 7.
37. Berlant, The Female Complaint, p. 4.
38. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, p. 28.
39. Gayle Salamon, “Justification and Queer Method, or Leaving
Philosophy,” Hypatia 24:1, special issue on Oppression and Moral
Agency: Essays in Honor of Claudia Card (2009), p. 230.
40. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 276.

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 CH A P T ER 11

Primal Scenes, Forbidden Words,

and Reclaimed Spaces: Voice, Body,
and Poetic Form in Recent
South African Writing

Gabeba Baderoon

So I guess
the P is not for poetry.
—Reclaiming the P . . . Word1

The colonial period is the primal scene for understanding images of

Black bodies in South Africa. At the Cape, ruled successively by the
Dutch and the British from 1652 to 1910, control over sexuality was
central to definitions of race. Ann Stoler points out that “the very
categories ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’ were secured through forms
of sexual control.”2 Slave-owning colonists exercised sexual license
over the bodies of enslaved and indigenous women through enforced
prostitution and other forms of sexual violence, and European dis-
courses about race and sexuality normalized the sexual violation
of such women. As Philippa Levine puts it, notions of “natural-
ized prostitution, promiscuity, and homosexuality” claimed to be
central to indigenous societies “were definitive of what made these
places ripe for colonial governance, unworthy of self-rule, and infe-
rior to their colonial masters.”3 In colonial settings, the sexual is
therefore central to the making of race, rather than simply acting in
concert with already stable, raced identities. Yet, precisely because

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 170 GABEBA BADEROON

of this European sexual license to indigenous and enslaved bodies,

the racial implications of sexual transgression haunted the colonies.
Contraventions of permitted sexual relations between Europeans
and indigenous people posed an intolerable threat to the racial sta-
tus of whites, and in the colonies “fears around racial difference”
were “often represented in sexual terms.”4 One can track the creation
of gendered white identities in the colonies through panics about
“Black peril” and the need to protect white women from the per-
ceived threat of indigenous sexuality.
Given this history, it is unsurprising that, since colonial times,
Black bodies in South Africa have been imbued with unsettling sexu-
alized meanings. Black female bodies, in particular, have been por-
trayed through patterns of “hypervisibility” that have simultaneously
subjected women to heightened levels of surveillance and rendered
invisible the systemic violence to which they have been subjected.5
In a range of recent literary texts in South Africa, however, the lan-
guage for talking about such bodies has been reimagined. This chap-
ter discusses two instances of this shift. One is what I call a theme of
“preferred silence,” involving a strategic refusal to engage with domi-
nant modes of rendering bodies visible. Another is the move toward
reclaiming and redefining the very meaning of visibility. I suggest
that these seemingly divergent patterns articulate a radically different
claim on public space by Black women in South Africa than previous
narratives have.
I discuss these patterns as they appear in two texts: Makhosazana
Xaba’s poem “Tongues of their Mothers,” published in a collection of
the same name,6 and Reclaiming the P . . . Word, a play in eight scenes
written and performed by students and staff at the Gender Equity
Unit of the University of the Western Cape (UWC). These texts pres-
ent views of women’s bodies that are unprecedented in South African
writing in their attention to forms of sexual violence suffered by Black
women since the colonial period, and their insistence, crafted in poetic
language, that a holistic exploration of Black women’s bodily experi-
ences incorporates pleasure and power as well as pain.
While the two texts differ significantly in terms of genre, time,
and subject matter, I show that they are connected by what I see as
their productive attention to poetic language and form. Both texts
draw on the discursive possibilities opened up by poetry to con-
vey the violation of Black women’s bodies without reproducing an
intrusive gaze on their suffering. Poetic form works in distinctive
ways in the texts. “Tongues of their Mothers,” on the one hand,
uses the formal qualities of poetry to craft a narrative of a life that

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 PRIMAL SCENES, FORBIDDEN WORDS 171

is invisible in official archives, and creates a vivid portrait through

a combination of poetic image and silence. The poem traces new
pasts and lineages for Black women, replacing a legacy in which they
are defined only by and for those who dominate and abuse them.
Reclaiming the P . . . Word, on the other hand, employs theatrical
performance to present women’s voices in a range of registers to call
attention to the damaging effects of misogynistic terms in everyday
discourse. At the same time, the play’s supple and radiant use of
language reshapes the violent meanings of such words. As the title
of a recent volume on the topic of hate crimes and homophobia in
South Africa proclaims, such textual worlds have powerfully genera-
tive effects and hold the potential to create “the country we want
to live in.” 7
Both of the texts treated here allude to the germinal figure of Sara
Baartman, the nineteenth-century South African woman whose body
was used in a taxonomy of racial difference that placed European men
at its apex and Black women at its nadir, and asserted the inferiority
and sexual deviancy of Black people. The public display of Baartman’s
brain and genitals in the Musée de L’Homme for 159 years exempli-
fies the invasive access that colonial society claimed over Black wom-
en’s interior spaces. After long-stalled negotiations with the French
government, Baartman’s remains were finally returned to South
Africa in January 2002. On August 9 of that same year, in an official
burial conducted by the South African government in Hankey in the
Eastern Cape near the place where Baartman was born, she was writ-
ten into new narratives of the nation through the creation of a monu-
ment to her memory, but subsequently also claimed in other, poetic
registers for envisioning Black women’s bodies. I go on to trace a
mode of speaking about Baartman that refuses knowledge gained by
invasive methods of access and, instead, observes what I call a “pre-
ferred silence” about her.
Any project that engages with Baartman’s life must deal with the
risk of complicity with ways of knowing that continue the violat-
ing practices they set out to contest, a challenge addressed by Zine
Magubane and Pumla Gqola in their analyses of writing on Baartman
over the past 30 years. Such writing has once again made Baartman
one of the most visible women in African history.8 Magubane points
out that a “veritable theoretical industry” has grown up around her,9
while Gqola shows that Baartman once again has become a figure
of “hypervisibility.”10 Both point to the way that many contempo-
rary images of Baartman discomfortingly echo nineteenth-century
representations.

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 172 GABEBA BADEROON

However, there is a different way of talking about Baartman, set in

motion by a groundbreaking essay by the novelist and literary scholar
Zoë Wicomb, who located Baartman for the first time in a femi-
nist history of slavery in South Africa. Wicomb shows that Baartman
came to “exemplif[y] the body as site of shame”11 through a formula-
tion that linked the memory of slavery with an accusation of Black
women’s complicity in the violation to which they were subjected.
As a result, Wicomb argues, for descendents of enslaved people, the
memory of surviving slavery is burdened by an almost ontological
shame, symbolized by Baartman, who came to signify both violation
and culpability, or, as Wicomb phrases it, “the shame of having had
our bodies stared at, but also the shame invested in those (females)
who have mated with the colonizer.”12 In a painful reversal, there-
fore, Black women’s bodies have been made the bearers of the mark
of sexual violence during slavery, rendering invisible the systemic vio-
lations of slavery. Wicomb argues that this “shameful” burden is the
reason for “the total erasure of slavery from the folk memory” among
the descendents of enslaved people in South Africa.13 This erasure has
an obverse side, however: South African popular language is strewn
with swearwords based on derogatory terms for Black women’s bod-
ies. These familiar and ubiquitous curses summon Black women’s
bodies into public visibility, evoking slavery’s legacy of sexual vio-
lence without mentioning slavery. I argue that these erased histo-
ries are excavated and reimagined in “Tongues of their Mothers” and
Reclaiming the P . . . Word.

Preferred Silence: “Tongues of

their Mothers”
In her compelling essay “(Not) Representing Sara Bartman,” Gqola
proposes a limit on what can be known about Baartman’s life, to
avoid creating representations that unwittingly echo the violations of
the past.14 Gqola writes that Baartman is ultimately unknowable, and
that to accept this unknowability is a way to accept her full human-
ity: “A tale that begins with [Baartman] . . . cannot be one with nar-
rative certainty.”15 Xaba’s poem articulates this threshold. However,
rather than having the effect of proscribing knowledge, the poem
opens up different possibilities for envisioning Black women’s bodies
in South Africa:

I wish to write an epic poem about Sarah Baartman,

one that will be silent on her capturers, torturers and demolishers.

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 PRIMAL SCENES, FORBIDDEN WORDS 173

It will say nothing of the experiments, the laboratories and the

displays
or even the diplomatic dabbles that brought her remains home,
eventually.
This poem will sing of the Gamtoos Valley holding imprints of her
baby steps.
It will contain rhymes about the games she played as a child,
stanzas will have names of her friends, her family, her community.
It will borrow from every single poem ever written about her,
conjuring up her wholeness: her voice, dreams, emotions and
thoughts.16

As these stanzas show, “Tongues of their Mothers” refuses conven-

tional terms for talking about Baartman. It will, in fact, “be silent
on her capturers, torturers and demolishers” and “will say nothing”
about the suffering they caused her. The insight conveyed in these
lines is that to simply reproduce testimony about her capture and
torture would, again, reduce Baartman’s life to acts of erasure and,
in effect, threaten to erase her as a human subject. Instead of focus-
ing on violation, the poem crafts new parameters for calling her into
visibility. The speaker juxtaposes the genre of the epic poem, often
used to invoke nationalist and masculine heroes, with the “wish” to
write, thus articulating a desire that will be neither nationalist nor
completely fulfilled. Importantly, the poem’s tone is not hesitant in
its restraint. It announces that its incompleteness, its preferred silence,
is strategic and intentional. It pauses before the imperative to follow
those who have “captured” and “tortured” Baartman through lan-
guage and, instead, emphasizes the wholeness and inviolability of the
figure it invokes.
The poem recalls Baartman’s childhood, and the “imprints” of
her footsteps in the Gamtoos Valley. The line reads history in the
signs left by the body. As a salve to the familiar image of a lonely, suf-
fering Baartman in Europe, Xaba “conjur[es]” for her “stanzas [that
hold the] names of her friends, her family, her community.” Further
countering the abstracted figure conveyed even in recuperative
accounts, Xaba reinvents Baartman’s genealogy, transforming her
from a figure who had come to symbolize ontological shame for her
descendents into a founder of new lineages of women. Through an
epic poem, itself composed of “every single poem ever written about
her,” Xaba names Baartman as the first in a series of heroic women—
until now known only by their relation to men—whom she presents
instead in their “wholeness.” This is a view of poetry as a collec-
tive memory that can counter erasure and fracture. Finally, language

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 174 GABEBA BADEROON

and voice are poetically embodied in the image of the “tongues of

their mothers” in the poem’s title, where “tongue” refers both to the
often-denigrated and forgotten languages of women and the part of
the body that makes speech possible.

R ECL AIMING THE P . . . WOR D : The History of

a Painful Term
In light of the history that can be recovered through proscribed
words, I turn next to the possibilities to be found in radical forms
of theater. In its themes, conception, writing, and mode of perfor-
mance, Reclaiming the P . . . Word forms part of a tradition of radi-
cal theater-making in South Africa. The play was directed by Mary
Hames and was first performed in 2006 in response to the prevalence
of sexual violence in the contexts encountered by students and staff
at the University of the Western Cape.17 Even more than this physical
context, the play addresses the mental universe for Black women cre-
ated by the constant pressure of sexualization and sexual violence, as a
result of which, “sexual assault stalks the imagination of many South
African women.”18 In responding to the high levels of gender-based
violence in the country, Reclaiming the P . . . Word draws on collabora-
tive, nonrealist modes of performance and “the use of private details
as a means of public resistance”19 to the norms that sustain violence.
Simultaneously attentive to history and intensely personal, the play’s
themes include the impact of colonial settlement at the Cape, alluded
to in the seventeenth-century figure of Krotoa and in Sara Baartman;
the fact of sexual violence in contemporary South Africa; and asser-
tions of sexual pleasure by Black women. The final scene reclaims the
word symbolized by the ellipsis in its title: poes, the Afrikaans word
for vagina.
But what, we must ask, can the “p-word” tell us, and what does it
say about ways of representing the Black female body in South Africa?
As Hames suggests, it is the broader use of the “p . . . word” in the
title that illustrates the regulation of public space in South Africa.20
This is because the word carries such derogatory connotations that it
is a term of abuse and contempt, used against women as well as men
as a means of disempowerment. The play takes this common practice
and makes it the basis of a powerful reclamation of the word, which
ultimately comes to include pleasurable meanings.
Why does the title of the play use the ellipsis in “p . . . word” rather
than spelling out poes? Partly because this opens up a productive
ambiguity, for instance, posing the question, does the “p . . . word”

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 PRIMAL SCENES, FORBIDDEN WORDS 175

stand for poes? We know from the rest of the play that the answer is
mostly yes, but as one of the characters says, “I guess the P doesn’t
stand for poetry,” while the next line asks, “And why not Poes
poetry?” However, the larger answer is that the word poes is already in
the public sphere, and that the play wishes to bring it to visibility in a
different way. It seeks to “reclaim” the space that is already occupied
by several uses of the word, almost all damaging to women. The title
signals the ongoing nature of this attempt.
As the play shows, the word poes has a remarkable degree of seman-
tic dexterity; although it is a swearword, it can also act as a noun
(poes), adjective (poeslik), and diminutive (poesie). Its meanings include
the denotative “vagina,” but also range in the direction of ontology,
as in, Jy is ’n poes (You are a poes), and the quality of being inherently
poeslik or “poes-like.” Thus, to look at poes in this way offers the
possibility of seeing the body differently, not by directly countering
negative stereotypes, but by examining dominant meanings, explor-
ing their power, uncovering the history to which they allude, attend-
ing to their strange and powerful currency, and listening carefully for
meanings that hover on the edge of screaming.21
The common South African swearwords naai (both “to sew” and
a crude term meaning “to have sex”), moer (“matrix” or “womb”),
poes, and doos (literally “box” and figuratively “womb”) are ubiqui-
tously heard on the streets of Cape Town and are associated with the
very name of the city.22 When I look up the word poes in the multi-
volume Oxford English Dictionary, 23 I find nothing under that term,
although there are several entries for “puss.” And indeed, in Dutch,
the word poes means cat. English retains this sense in “puss” and
“pussy.” However, where does the expletive force of poes come from,
its abrupt intimacy, the intake of breath at the taboo of saying it?
Like moer, the word asserts rage, disgust, rejection, and violence. The
Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles shows
that moer is slang for mother but “not in polite use.”24 To say jou
moer (your moer) and jou ma se moer (your mother’s moer) is always
an obscene and abusive mode of address. Similarly to poes, when used
as an expletive, the word moer expresses rage, disgust, or aggression.
Used in the verb form, to moer someone is to beat them or even to
kill them, indicating the close association of the word with violence.
While this is the entry in the Dictionary of South African English for
the related word moer, as in the Oxford English Dictionary, there is
nothing on poes.
In engaging with the latter word, Reclaiming the P . . . Word
enters a long-standing debate about how to respond to abusive but

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 176 GABEBA BADEROON

widely used terms for women and sexual minorities. Reclaiming

the power of proscribed words is a venerable political strategy,
but it continues to be a sensitive one, nonetheless. By eliding the
word to which it refers in the title, the play signals that the project
to reclaim a familiar term for a woman’s vagina is subversive and
yet also potentially hurtful. Does using the word in new contexts,
where its violent meanings are subsumed and disguised by humor,
run the risk of erasing the painful histories to which it alludes? This
is the position taken by Dale Choudree, a member of the 2009
Cape Town Pride Committee, in a debate set in motion by the
theme of that year’s parade: “Pink Ubuntu: Jou ma se Pride ” (Your
mother’s Pride). For Choudree, “Such a theme seems unconscious
in its disrespect towards the position of women.”25 He noted that
one of the justifications for the theme was that Jou ma se Pride
would reclaim the term by charging it with positive connotations,
thus echoing the appropriation of terms such as “queer” and moffie
(Afrikaans for a gay or effeminate man). However, Choudree
argued, since the phrase “Jou ma se poes is specific to an underprivi-
leged socioeconomic group of people of color, it is my view that
such reinterpretation, if any, should come from the group of people
with whom the term is associated.”26 He eventually resigned from
the Pride Committee as a result of the intense controversy that this
issue provoked.
In contrast to Choudree, Hames advocated a “politics of engage-
ment and transgression” in which “naming, renaming and reclaim-
ing and the appropriation of names (like queer, moffie, dyke, faggot,
stabane, etc.)” are themselves part of a broader political debate that
is not limited by ethnicity, class, or sexual orientation.27 She pointed
to the fact that “the politics of naming and renaming takes differ-
ent forms in queer and Black women’s struggles, since Black women
have been objectified in several ways.”28 Her own approach, which
is to reclaim words such as poes, is aimed at encouraging “those
who have been insulted and abused to proudly reclaim their voice
and bodies.”29 This act of reclamation is exemplified in a startling
moment in the climactic last scene of Reclaiming the P . . . Word. In
the performance I attended in Observatory, Cape Town, in August
2010, “Jou ma se poes!” was shouted loudly and slowly from behind
the audience. At first, I could not see who was speaking and it was
unclear if this was part of the play or if someone had walked in from
the street and was shouting this far-from-uncommon interjection at
the audience. Then I saw the speaker as she entered from behind the
audience and walked among us, winding her way to the front of the

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 PRIMAL SCENES, FORBIDDEN WORDS 177

room which acts as the stage, continuing to shout the phrase several
times, in various registers.

Does it grab your attention?

Or are you one of those that pretend that you did not hear it?
JOU MA SE POES!
On the street, in the township. Oh and let’s not forget the taxi!
Parow, Elsies, Cape Town!
Hallo girl, ga jy saam! What, are you coming? No? Your Poes!
Women, men, children, some can’t even speak yet. They all use it.
Your Poes.
You are a Poes. You look like a Poes. You act like a Poes.
I mean really, come on listen to it. Poes. Women, men, children,
some can’t even speak yet. They all use it. Your Poes!
You are a Poes. You look like a Poes. You act like a Poes.
I mean really, come on listen to it. Poes.
One of the UWC managers said, when told about the name of this
production, “So I guess the P is not for poetry.”
And why not Poes poetry?30

In her performance, the woman intones the many inflections that the
phrase can hold, from incipient violence to derisory laughter, part of
its humor coming from its very familiarity. What if we took the word
away from its usual associations? What if the audience were not cowed
and despised, but women (and some men) holding the mirrors and
female condoms handed out at the beginning of the performance
and invited to look differently at themselves, to visit, to touch, to
think and speak with pleasure about their bodies? The last scene com-
mences with the repeated use of “Jou ma se poes!” and ends with the
poetry of poes.
The movement in the play from pain to pleasure is as difficult
and formally challenging as highlighting the topic of violence and
invisibility is. To reclaim the wholeness of Black female sexuality
presents a profound political and artistic challenge. Desirée Lewis
notes that within a broader history of visual representation, “Black
women’s bodies have often been the subject of voyeuristic consump-
tion, the consumption not only of Black women’s sexuality, but also
of Black women’s trauma and pain.”31 A repeated focus on violation
and trauma becomes a dangerous formula that entraps people in nar-
ratives of violence, rendering them vulnerable to further violation
and distancing them from the possibility of empathy and exchange
with others. Reclaiming the P . . . Word is acutely aware of this dan-
ger and interrupts a voyeuristic focus on trauma through humor

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 178 GABEBA BADEROON

and word play, for instance, through puns such as, “My vagina is
gatvol ” (meaning “fed-up,” but also literally, “My arsehole is full”).
This section of the play, “Vagina Dialogues,” refers to the precursor
play by Eve Ensor, and to the multiple ways in which women view
their own bodies. Even to say the list of transgressive words used to
denote vagina—doos, cunt, poes—is to enunciate a litany of forbid-
den words that becomes funny when it is said in the usually polite
space of the theater.
To counter this list of insults, the speaker in this scene remembers a
term for vagina learned from her mother: “Thank god I grew up with
my mother telling me I had a honeypot . . . a honeypot mind you.” She
reminds the audience that we have been trained into using certain
words for the body, from the home, where she learned that she had a
“honeypot,” to the reversal of tone at school where her mother’s lan-
guage was overwritten and a new code for Black women’s bodies was
scrawled on the “toilet doors, station walls [and] schoolboys’ desks”
of the broader world. Clearly, the denotative meaning of this phrase,
“your mother’s vagina,” is only part of its effect. What else does this
powerful and intimate insult connote? The second-person address
hails the person in a direct call to engagement. It invites reciprocity,
followed by an open-ended, incomplete sentence, an eternal begin-
ning. The rest of the sentence proclaims access to “your mother’s
vagina”—everyone’s entry point into the world, and the history that
it holds. Jou ma se poes. What comes before and after this? What
histories does it point to?
“The Vagina Dialogues” ends with a list that becomes a tool of
reclamation. The speaker intones a series of words, renaming and
reclaiming the vagina, and recasting it in the first-person possessive:
“My pussy, my cunt, my poes, my doos.” And with this list, the speaker
calls for “pleasure, my sisters.” With softly sequential alliterative plo-
sives, the speaker arrives at a climactic reclamation: “My vagina . . . my
honeypot . . . has reached a stage where she’s into pure, pristine, pussy-
like pleasure.” To say these various incarnations of the word poes out
loud also means that, briefly, the vagina issues from the mouth. This
recalls the division between the tongue and the womb charted by
Meg Samuelson, who has shown that in postapartheid South Africa
women could be domesticated by the womb through the role of
motherhood and directed away from the tongue and the promise of
speech.32 The connection between the vagina and the mouth shows
what happens when the Black female body occupies a space hitherto
unimagined, and owns both power and pleasure: the body becomes
the site of desire, of words, of mouth, of vagina.

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 PRIMAL SCENES, FORBIDDEN WORDS 179

Conclusion
In their varied and dissident use of language, “Tongues of their
Mothers” and Reclaiming the P . . . Word craft powerfully regenera-
tive ways of representing Black women’s bodies. In these texts, poetic
language enables a vision of Black female bodies that does not repli-
cate the violating hypervisibility of many earlier representations, but
instead makes visible a world of Black women’s realities that is com-
plex, multilayered, and original. The subjectivities crafted through
such language are many-faceted and sometimes contradictory, and
articulate the fullness of women’s lives in hitherto unimagined ways.
In “Tongues of their Mothers,” Xaba has written a text in which
a refusal to speak about known violations and trauma is less impor-
tant than the imagined past and future that it gives to Baartman,
and from this vision of Baartman issues an incantatory list of heroic
foremothers. Xaba’s narrator turns away from the story of the violence
that Baartman experienced, declining to give it authority once again.
Instead, she calls into consciousness what is impossible to know, redi-
recting our gaze toward a hitherto unattainable view of Baartman,
the interior world of “her voice, dreams, emotions and thoughts.”
Baartman’s transformation in “Tongues of their Mothers” is made
possible through poetic form.
In the subtlety and constant inventiveness of its language,
Reclaiming the P . . . Word fashions new meanings for words that have
been used to violently exclude women from public space. Like Xaba’s
text, the play draws both on silence—suggested by the ellipsis in
the title—and on words spoken too often and with violent intent.
Reclaiming the P . . . Word excavates a history buried beneath the
plethora of South African curse words based on women’s bodies, and
gives them a complex set of meanings in the present. Both texts there-
fore construct a necessary and haunting silence, and then write into
that fertile space a future that could not otherwise be envisioned.
In so doing, “Tongues of their Mothers” and Reclaiming the
P . . . Word form part of a provocative shift in recent South African
literature that writes Black women’s bodies into alternative modes
of visibility. Through a complex interplay of silence and reclama-
tion, the works look unflinchingly at the topic of sexual violence, but
do not confine themselves solely to themes that recount suffering.
They also portray their characters’ resilience, wholeness, and sexual
pleasure. Such writings have an important structural character; they
craft holistic, original, and sometimes unsettling Black subjectivi-
ties, shaped not by resistance but by a sophisticated reclamation of

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 180 GABEBA BADEROON

language and history. Using poetic form, performance, and autobi-

ography, these works chart a powerful new claim on public space by
Black women.

Notes
A longer version of this chapter originally appeared as “ ‘This Is Our
Speech’: Voice, Body and Poetic Form in Recent South African Writing,” in
Social Dynamics 37:2 (2011). This abridged and modified version has been
approved by the author and reprinted with the permission of the publisher.
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group 2011.
1. Reclaiming the P . . . Word, unpublished script written by students
and staff at the Gender Equity Unit, University of the Western Cape
(2006).
2. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and
the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002), p. 42.
3. Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal
Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003),
p. 325.
4. Ibid., p. 324.
5. Pumla Dineo Gqola, “‘Crafting Epicentres of Agency’: Sarah
Bartman and African Feminist Literary Imaginings,” Quest: An
African Journal of Philosophy 20:1–2, special double issue on African
Feminisms (2006), p. 45.
6. Makhosazana Xaba, Tongues of their Mothers (Scottsville, South
Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008).
7. Nonhlanhla Mkhize, Jane Bennett, Vasu Reddy, and Relebohile
Moletsane, The Country We Want to Live In: Hate Crimes and
Homophobia in the Lives of Black Lesbian South Africans (Cape Town:
HSRC Press, 2010).
8. I write about alternative approaches to the “hypervisibility” of
Baartman in the essay “Baartman and the Private,” in Representation
and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman, ed. Natasha
Gordon-Chipembere (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp.
65–83.
9. Zine Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism,
Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus’,”
Gender and Society 15:6 (2001), p. 817.
10. Gqola, “Crafting Epicentres of Agency,” p. 45.
11. Zoë Wicomb, “Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in
South Africa,” in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and
Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly
(Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 93.
12. Ibid., pp. 91–92.
13. Ibid., p. 100.

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 PRIMAL SCENES, FORBIDDEN WORDS 181

14. The variation in spelling of Baartman’s name signals the loss of control
by Africans over their names during the colonial period. For an illu-
minating discussion of this issue, see Natasha Gordon-Chipembere’s
introduction to Representation and Black Womanhood.
15. Pumla Dineo Gqola, “(Not) Representing Sarah Bartman,” chap. 2
in What is Slavery to Me?: Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-Apartheid
South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2010), p. 79.
16. Xaba, Tongues of their Mothers, p. 25.
17. See Mary Hames, “‘Reclaiming the P . . . Word ’: A Reflection on an
Original Feminist Drama Production at the University of the Western
Cape,” Feminist Africa 9 (2007), pp. 93–101.
18. Mkhize et al., The Country We Want to Live In, p. 4.
19. Jill Dolan, Theatre and Sexuality (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010), p. 34. Dolan is here referring to Lois Weaver’s Diary of a
Domestic Terrorist, which is a lecture-performance project that, pre-
cisely, makes use of private details as a means of public resistance.
20. See Hames, Reclaiming the P . . . Word.
21. I have previously used this approach in researching the historical
meanings of another term of abuse that survived from the period
of slavery to apartheid, namely kaffir, and showed through its ety-
mology the specific ways in which race and sex are encoded in it.
See Gabeba Baderoon, “A Language to Fit Africa: ‘Africanness’ and
‘Europeanness’ in the South African Imagination,” in Africa Writing
Europe: Opposition, Juxtaposition, Entanglement, ed. Maria Olaussen
and Christina Angelfors (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009).
22. The very name for the city implicates it in the history of sexual slavery
to which slave women were subject under Dutch rule. The phrase
“van de Kaap” (Afrikaans for “of the Cape”), when used as the last
name of a slave, indicated a mixed-race parentage, as the novels The
Slave Book (Cape Town: Kwela, 1998) and Unconfessed (Cape Town:
Kwela, 2006) explore.
23. Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,
1996).
24. Penny Silva, Wendy Dore, Dorothea Mantzel, Colin Muller, and
Madeleine Wright, eds., A Dictionary of South African English on
Historical Principles (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1996).
25. Dale Choudree, personal communication, October 26, 2010.
26. Ibid.
27. Mary Hames, personal communication, October 28, 2010.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Reclaiming the P . . . Word, scene 8.
31. Desirée Lewis, “Against the Grain: Black Women and Sexuality,”
Agenda 63 (2005), p. 15.
32. See Meg Samuelson, Remembering the Nation, Dismembering
Women?: Stories of the South African Transition (Scottsville, South
Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007).

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 CH A P T ER 1 2

Going Gaga: Dissent, Refusal,

and Feminism

Jack Halberstam

As many feminist theorists over the years have pointed out, all too
often the modalities and intensities of love, sex, and desire are seen
as extraneous to the workings of the state, the processes of coloniza-
tion, and the consolidation of state power. But, as we have seen in the
recent riots, protests, and occupations happening around the world,
we seem to have reached the end of a certain paradigm of political
contestation and entered a new era of anticorporate and anticolonial
struggle in which the form matters as much as the content. In an
era of multiple screens and multimedia penetration of markets, sub-
jects, and desire—in an age when war can be fought virtually and at
a distance using unmanned drones and computer programs, protest
must also shape itself around new social media formats that favor the
remote over the immediate, spectacle over speech, form over con-
tent. The human body, in a sense, becomes another platform (like the
computer, the iPad, the iPod, or the TV) for the streaming of mes-
sages, and as a platform, the human body becomes less of a vessel of
speech and more of a medium for social connection.
And so, in terms of the occupation movements, bodies have
become forms of media; they are gadgets through which speech can
pass (think of the human microphone). Bodies create volume, mas-
sification, and presence. In the context of Occupy Wall Street (OWS),
the protesters are no longer content simply to march, to make a list
of demands, or to request recognition. Instead, the new movements
that OWS represents turned politics into performance and combined

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 184 JACK HALBERSTAM

anarchist mistrust of structure with queer notions of bodily riot and

antinormative disruption.
The markers of this new form of politics, in addition to the lack of
a clear agenda or list of demands and the strong presence of a clear
belief in the rightness of the cause, have to do with the unusual mix
of whimsy and fierce purposefulness, ludic improvisation and staying
power, passive resistance and loud refusals. The occupation groups,
as I have implied elsewhere,1 recognize that in an economy that engi-
neers success for an elite few through the failure of the many, failure
becomes a location for resisting, blocking, slowing, and jamming
the economy and the social stability that depends on it. So, in a
world where 1% of the population benefits from the ruin of the other
99%, we might want to think about failure as what James C. Scott
has called one of the “weapons of the weak.”2 Scott draws attention
to the multiple ways in which radically disempowered people have
exerted their own forms of resistance through actions and inactions
that can be overlooked or misread but that constitute an elaborate
web of subversive gestures. Foot-dragging, feigned incompetence,
stupidity, and laziness are all cast as the features of a people who
cannot rule themselves and so must be ruled, but can actually be
understood better as a commitment to refuse the logic of rule—be
it colonial, capitalist, feudal, or neoliberal. And while there are clear
and important differences between the forms of power in each sys-
tem—be it power exercised bureaucratically or financially, violently
or hegemonically—there are always places where the most dispersed
systems of power manifest as unadulterated violence and where the
most forceful modes of resistance become more creative, surrepti-
tious, or cunning.
The 99% use both the language of colonialism—occupation—and
the techniques of anticolonial struggle—refusal and mimicry. They
also circumvent certain logics of power that would dictate the terms
of resistance and engage in activities that are hard to read as action
at all. They do not want to present a manifesto; they actually are
themselves the manifestation of discontent. The 99%ers simply show
up, take up space, make noise, witness. This is a form of political
response that does not announce itself in the conventional grammar
of the political; instead of appearing as protest and action, it enters
quietly into the public sphere, sits down, and refuses to leave. Some
insightful commentators, such as Harsha Walia, have pointed out
that to some indigenous peoples, the occupation movements use a
rhetoric of territorialization that is all too familiar, and that the move-
ments, in fact, need to acknowledge that they are occupying already
occupied lands.3 Walia, however, goes on to acknowledge that the

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 GOING GAGA 185

power of these movements lies in their ability to be “transitional”

and to eschew individual rights projects in favor of the broad goal of
imagining another kind of world. Walia cites Slavoj Žižek who, in a
speech to OWS on October 2011, highlighted the immanent danger
of cooptation: “The problem is the system that pushes you to give
up. Beware not only of the enemies. But also of false friends who are
already working to dilute this process . . . They will try to make this
into a harmless moral protest.”4
Here I want to depart from Walia and suggest that Žižek him-
self is a co-optor in that he always anticipates co-optation and often
even helps it along. He denounced the London riots in an article
that appeared in the London Review of Books titled “Shoplifters of the
World Unite,” and made it seem as if the rioters were just mall rats on
a consumer rampage.5 And when he addressed the OWS crowd a little
over a month later, he commented,

Carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have
to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want
you to remember these days, you know, like “Oh, we were young and
it was beautiful.” Remember that our basic message is “We are allowed
to think about alternatives.”6

True indeed that the basic message is that there are always alterna-
tives, but the idea that “carnivals come cheap” misses the point of
the entire movement. This is a carnival and carnivals are precisely
protests, and they are protests that never envision a return to “normal
life” but that know that normal life is one of the fictions of colonial
and neocolonial power—a fiction used to bludgeon the unruly back
into resignation.
Like many anticolonial and anticapitalist movements, this current
movement refuses to conjure an outcome, eschews utopian or pragmatic
conjurings of what happens on the “morning after,” precisely because
the outcome will be decided upon by the process of dissent, refusal, and
carnivalesque failure. All we can know for sure is that the protests signal
and announce a collective awareness of the end of “normal life.”
This new political moment requires new conceptions of feminism,
struggle, collectivity, protest, and resistance. The protests that we
have witnessed around the world in response to the global collapse
of capital rewrite the old scripts of revolt and transformation and
help us to think about resistance in terms of anticapitalist practices
of failure that stall the reproduction of capitalism and authoritarian
forms of democracy, and that refuse futurity altogether where futu-
rity has been established as the continuity of older forms of rule. The

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 186 JACK HALBERSTAM

French anarchist group The Invisible Committee summarizes it most

succinctly in their coauthored pamphlet The Coming Insurrection:
“The future has no future.”7

Feminist Refusal
There are many different political and activist traditions that meet in
the contemporary art of protest. Such a very important tradition is the
one of feminist refusal, a mode of dissent from femininity and con-
ventional womanhood that often takes on an anticolonial spin. I will
trace this concept first through the work of some postcolonial critics
and novels and then turn to contemporary performers to think about
how they carry on the work of refusal and resistance—in many ways,
I am tracing a genealogy for contemporary revolt in order to make
sure that as we historicize the origins of the OWS movements we now
find so inspiring, we don’t fall back into the trap of only narrating
those movements in terms of conventional lefty, white, male revolu-
tionaries. This new form of carnivalesque politics bears the marks of a
strain of feminism that I propose to call “shadow feminism.”8
Building on the work of feminists such as Saidiya V. Hartman9
and Saba Mahmood,10 and locating a queer femininity that revels
in refusal and reshapes the meaning of the political in the process,
I elaborate a queer theory of masochism and negative affect that
builds its project around an antiheroic, disintegrating subject, and
that in the process recasts the project of love, sex, and desire in a
neocolonial frame. I also chart a genealogy of an antisocial or anti-
humanist or counterintuitive feminism that arises out of queer,
postcolonial, and Black feminisms and that thinks in terms of the
negation of the subject rather than her formation or stabilization.
In this queer feminist genealogy—which could be said to stretch
from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s meditations on female suicide in
“Can the Subaltern Speak?”11 to Hartman’s ideas about slavery and
freedom in Scenes of Subjection; from Toni Morrison’s ghosts12 to
Jamaica Kincaid’s antiheroines,13 and which passes through the ter-
ritories of silence, stubbornness, self-abnegation, and sacrifice—we
find no stable and coherent feminist subject, but only subjects who
cannot speak, who refuse to speak; subjects who unravel, who refuse
to cohere; subjects who refuse “being” where being has already been
defined in terms of a self-activating, self-knowing, liberal subject.
In other words, these authors have thought of the feminist sub-
ject not in terms of some clearly defined active form of self-made
woman—an agentic body, a doer, a mover, and a shaker—but in

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 GOING GAGA 187

terms of a form of subjectivity that is subjected to power, that is con-

stituted by religious practices, that is made and unmade, becoming
and unbecoming, all at once. For Spivak, the postcolonial feminist
subject takes form only in relation to and perhaps against a subaltern
subject who does not speak; for Mahmood, the Western feminist sub-
ject understands her agency by dis-identifying with women who are
formed by their religious practices and piety; for Hartman, the black
woman becomes a site for the making and unmaking of notions of
freedom and slavery.
Liberal feminist subjects in Europe and the United States have, in
other words, invested in a singular notion of agency but find them-
selves challenged by other modes of embodiment, resistance, and
desire that run counter to this forceful and propulsive sense of agency.
If that sounds too abstract, we can think about the range of feminist
possibilities in relation to one of my favorite feminist texts of all time,
the epic animated drama Chicken Run.14 This film tells the story of
politically aware chickens who come to recognize the ways in which
their labor, their production, and their physical mobility have been
controlled and limited by the evil capitalist farmers, the Tweedys,
and seek to organize themselves against exploitation while schem-
ing about how to, literally, fly the coop. They are led in their efforts
by the politically active and explicitly feminist bird, Ginger, who is
opposed in her struggle to inspire the birds to rise up by two other
“feminist subjects.” One is the cynic Bunty, a hard-nosed fighter who
rejects utopian dreams out of hand. The other is Babs (voiced by Jane
Horrocks), who sometimes gives voice to feminine naiveté but who,
at other moments, points to the absurdity of the political terrain as
it has been outlined by the activist Ginger. When Ginger states, for
instance, “We either die free chickens, or we die trying,” Babs naively
asks, “Are those the only choices?”
Like Babs, we may want to refuse the choices offered—freedom
in liberal terms or death—and think about a shadow archive of resis-
tance, one that does not speak in the language of action and momen-
tum but, instead, articulates itself in terms of evacuation, refusal,
passivity, unbecoming, unbeing. This is a form of queer feminism
preoccupied with negativity and negation. As Roderick A. Ferguson
puts it in the chapter “The Negations of Black Lesbian Feminism”
in his book Aberrations in Black, “Negation not only refers to the
conditions of exploitation. It denotes the circumstances for cri-
tique and alternatives as well.”15 Ferguson, building on Hortense J.
Spillers’s work,16 understands negation as an attempt to circumvent
an “American” political grammar that insists on casting liberation

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 188 JACK HALBERSTAM

struggles within the same logic as the normative regimes against

which they struggle.
For Spillers, American political identities are held in place by a
logic, a grammar if you will, and within that grammatical structure
only certain syntaxes make sense. And so, the articulation of black
resistance can be cast as irrational, the anger of black women can
be categorized as crazy, and the violence of white supremacy can be
articulated as rational and sensible. In order to resist this kind of
grammar, Spillers speaks in many different voices in this essay. She
calls out and lists the violence committed against the black body in
the context of slavery, and she channels the speech of both stereo-
typed female subjects and new subjects who struggle to be heard. The
implication in her essay is that a different, anarchistic type of struggle
requires a new grammar, possibly a new voice. In what follows, I want
to explore passivity, refusal, and the passive voice as powerful instan-
tiations of such new feminist grammar.
Babs’s sense in Chicken Run that there must be more ways of think-
ing about political action or nonaction than doing or dying finds
full theoretical confirmation in the work of theorists like Hartman,
whose investigations in Scenes of Subjection into the contradictions of
emancipation for the newly freed slaves proposes not only that “lib-
erty” as defined by the white racial state enacts new modes of impris-
onment but also that the very definitions of freedom and humanity
within which abolitionists operated severely limited the ability of the
former slaves to think of social transformation outside of the struc-
ture of racial terror. Hartman notes, “The longstanding and intimate
affiliation of liberty and bondage made it impossible to envision free-
dom independent of constraint or personhood and autonomy sepa-
rate from the sanctity of property and proprietal notions of self.”17
Accordingly, where freedom was offered in terms of being proper-
tied, placed, and productive, the former slave might choose “moving
about” or roaming in order to experience the meaning of freedom.
Hartman writes, “As a practice, moving about accumulated nothing
and it did not effect any reversals of power but indefatigably held onto
the unrealizable—being free—by temporarily eluding the restraints
of order.”18 She continues, “Like stealing away, it was more symboli-
cally redolent than materially transformative.”19 There are no simple
comparisons to be made between former slaves and sexual minorities.
I want, however, to join Hartman’s deft revelations about the con-
tinuation of slavery by other means to various new forms of politi-
cal protest that are better described in terms of masochism, pain,
and failure rather than mastery, pleasure, and heroic liberation. Like

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 GOING GAGA 189

Hartman’s model of a freedom, which imagines itself in terms of a

not-yet-realized social order, so the maps of desire that render the
subject incoherent, disorganized, and passive provide a better escape
route than those that lead inexorably to fulfillment, recognition, and
achievement.
A few examples from literature might reveal the political stakes
in a project like this, which sounds as if it would have no real mate-
rial application. The texts I consider here briefly propose a radical
form of masochistic passivity that offers up a critique, not only of the
organizing logic of agency and subjectivity itself, but that also opts
out of certain systems built around a dialectic between colonizer and
colonized, master and slave. For example, in the work of Kincaid, the
colonized subject literally refuses her role as colonized by refusing to
be anything at all. In Autobiography of My Mother, the main character
removes herself from a colonial order that makes sense of her only as a
daughter, a wife, and a mother by refusing to be any of the above and
even refusing the category of womanhood altogether. The character
neither tells her own story of becoming nor does she tell her mother’s
story, and by appropriating her mother’s nonstory as hers, she sug-
gests that the colonized mind is passed down from generation to gen-
eration and must be resisted through a certain mode of evacuation.
This way the novel accesses a Fanonian world of anticolonial struggle
within which colonized people have to not only uproot the coloniz-
ers, but where they also have to break with the mentality of coloniza-
tion that makes becoming equivalent to whiteness, being equivalent
to Englishness or Frenchness, and Blackness into the symbolic terrain
of absence, unbeing, and unbelonging.
If we look at the other side of the equation of power, we find a
similar tactic of unbecoming that can be extended to the perpetra-
tor. And so, in a brilliant and incisive narrative, Elfriede Jelinek’s The
Piano Teacher, 20 where a female protagonist literally unravels in order
to untie her relation to power and domination, we find the former
colonizer adapting to the postcolonial frame by undoing her own
sense of being. In this novel by the Austrian Nobel prize-winner, the
refusal is played at the other end of the scale of power: Erika Kohut,
the main character, is an unmarried Austrian woman in her 30s who
lives with her mother in post–World War II Vienna and gives piano
lessons in her spare time while colluding with her mother in a certain
fantasy about music, Austria, high culture, and cultural superiority.
As the story progresses, Erika slowly pulls back from the complicity in
an Austrian national mythology of greatness, and she begins to pul-
verize herself as if to destroy all that is Austrian within her. She gets

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 190 JACK HALBERSTAM

involved with a young man, one of her students, and demands that he
sexually abuse and mistreat her, that he break her down, starve her,
and neglect her. She wants to be destroyed and she wants to destroy
her own students in the process. While the narrator of Kincaid’s novel
seeks to avoid and refuse the colonial narratives that would otherwise
shape her subjectivity and that of her mother, Jelinek’s strategy of
refusal amounts to exposing her mother/daughter duo to intense and
violent scrutiny and locks them in a destructive and sterile incestuous
dance that will only end with their own deaths. The novel ends with
the protagonist first wounding a young student and then cutting into
her own flesh, not to kill herself exactly, but to continue to slice away
at the part of her that remains Austrian, complicit, fascist, and con-
forming. Here, Erika’s passivity is a way of refusing to be a channel
for a persistent strain of fascist nationalism, and her masochism or
self-violation indicates her desire to kill within herself the versions of
fascism that are folded into her being—through taste, through emo-
tional responses, through love of country and music, and through
her love of her mother. Both texts thus provide failure—feminist and
anticolonial struggle and refusal—as a frame for the models of politi-
cal dissent that currently circulate through occupation movements
grounded in the inactivity of refusal and obstruction.

Gaga Feminism
In Gaga Feminism: Gender, Sex and the End of Normal, I squeeze a
new form of feminist politics out of the star image of Lady Gaga by
asking the following set of questions: Who is Lady Gaga? What do
her performances mean? And, more importantly, what do her gender
theatrics have to say to young people about identity, desire, and new
forms of politics and celebrity? Is Lady Gaga an icon for a new kind
of politics or a charlatan just living out her moment in the spotlight?
In this last section of my chapter, I want to suggest that Lady Gaga
can be seen as a symbol for a new kind of feminism. Recognizing
her power as a maestro of media manipulation, a sign of a new world
disorder, and a loud voice for different arrangements of gender, sexu-
ality, visibility, and desire, we can use the world of Gaga to think
about what has changed and what remains the same, what sounds
different and what is all too familiar. I read Lady Gaga as a kind of
kinetic avatar for feminism—a set of performances of excessive femi-
ninity that explode the meaning of womanhood from within and that
push through to an anarchistic, cacophonous, dramatic soundscape
of inchoate political affiliations.

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 GOING GAGA 191

To be clear, what I am calling Gaga here certainly derives from

Lady Gaga and has everything to do with Lady Gaga, but is neverthe-
less not limited to Lady Gaga. In other words, just as Andy Warhol
was a channel for a set of new relations between culture, visibility,
marketability, and queerness, so the genius of Gaga allows Lady Gaga
to become the vehicle for performing the very particular arrange-
ment of bodies, genders, desires, communication, race, affect, and
flow that we might now want to call Gaga Feminism. Gaga Feminism
is simultaneously a monstrous outgrowth of the unstable concept of
“woman” in feminist theory, a celebration of the joining of feminin-
ity to artifice, and a refusal of the mushy sentimentalism that has
been siphoned into the category of womanhood. It is also about
the unreadable, the indecipherable, the monstrosity of the new that
arrives in shapes that are not immediately discernible.
Gaga Feminism leads the way to an anarchic project of cultural riot
and reciprocation—a project that Peter Harry Kropotkin has called
“mutual aid.”21 By drawing a theory of economics from the tendency
of animals to cooperate rather than compete (contrary to the way that
Charles Darwin presumed that all species compete for survival), anar-
chist theorist Kropotkin turns cooperation into a model for human
interaction that privileges the sharing of resources and that becomes
a newly vital model for human interaction. Mutual aid, mutual pro-
tection, or new notions of exchange actually flourish already in the
worlds we inhabit and those we are making as we go—open source
exchange on the web, cooperative food collectives, subcultures, new
modes of kinship, and so on. Different understandings of our mutual
responsibilities exist already for the purpose of exchange, and not
profit, and this notion of working with others rather than in competi-
tion is probably the only thing that will save us from the greed of free
market economies.
And it is this Gaga spirit of anarchy that I believe courses through
Lady Gaga’s music and forms the spine of a liberatory anthem. Forget
about “Born This Way,” and focus on the rhythmic freefall accom-
plished by Lady Gaga, especially in her live performances. Her music
may not itself stray far from pop, but when she performs it in crazy
costumes and with wild abandon, we sense the new world that she
opens up for young people in particular. In recent years, she has per-
formed with a number of different artists who make up a kind of
compressed history of Gaga Feminism.
One such collaborator is, perhaps surprisingly, Yoko Ono, whose
2009 album, Between My Head and the Sky, features a collection
of rather spunky songs with dark themes but a bouncy, new wave

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 192 JACK HALBERSTAM

treatment. From the track “The Sun Is Down” to the final cut,
a short statement set to a sparse percussion—“It’s Me, I’m Alive”—
the 76-year-old icon yelps, howls, and chants her way through a
multigenre journey to the dark side. But, in a wild duet with Lady
Gaga, captured by a fan and posted to YouTube from their live show
together at the Orpheum in Los Angeles in 2010, the point is not to
mourn a life passed or an opportunity missed or the end of light. Ono
and Gaga instead ride a cacophonous tide into a funky frenzy when
they howl their way through Ono’s “The Sun Is Down.”
The two join forces for this dark duet—dark both in terms of its
theme and its refusal of the forward momentum of the pop song—
and they push each other to new levels of going gaga. The short video
clip on YouTube presents both a very different Gaga and a very dif-
ferent Ono. But the duet also crafts a family resemblance between
Gaga and Ono and emphasizes the dark streak that resonates through
Ono’s own performance history. Ono’s work with Gaga also sits com-
fortably alongside Ono’s early jazz work with Ornette Coleman and
John Cage, which is filled with screaming and vocal noise. But in
performing this piece as a duet with Lady Gaga, Ono’s corpus, filled
as it is with dark noise, circles of repetition, and a resistance to sense
making, speaks anew, and Lady Gaga’s media friendly, pop heavy ori-
entation is quickly contaminated by the noisy riot of going gaga.
Lady Gaga does not emerge from a vacuum, nor does she spring
fully formed in the space vacated by Madonna, Gwen Stefani, and
Britney Spears. She is in fact the latest manifestation of a long line of
feminine, feminist, and queer performers who have used their time
in the spotlight to produce funky forms of anarchy; to demonstrate
an antisentimental fascination with loss, lack, darkness, and wild per-
formance; and to dig into the intersections of punk and glamour to
find songs of madness and mayhem. While most commentators on
the Gaga phenomenon are content to trace Lady Gaga’s lineage back
through her time at New York University and her connections to
other blond performers, we want to connect her to a different group
of performers. Instead of tethering her to pop hopefuls who came
before her, we need to make the connections to a long line of cultural
anarchists, musicians, and writers—people such as Emma Goldman or
Grace Jones, Yoko Ono and Marina Abramović, but also Ari Up of The
Slits and Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex. Think of Grace Jones in 1979
channeling Joy Division in her amazing cover version of “I’ve Lost
Control”—this is what I am calling gaga politics: a form of politics
where the governed refuse government, where the ruled refuse rule,
and where we literally lose control or give up our desire for mastery.

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 GOING GAGA 193

Lady Gaga might be engaged in the same kind of project as the

group that coauthored The Coming Insurrection, The Invisible
Committee. While they encourage people to “find each other” and to
exploit this crisis of capitalism and to start making different forms of
connection, Lady Gaga coolly dissects the pop market and finds new
sounds, new messages, and new forms of political engagement. She
tweets, she texts, she uses every medium available; she sings about the
phone and indeed becomes a phone! She knows about The Coming
Insurrection because it partly takes the form of Gaga herself.
A Gaga Feminism does not need to know and name the political
outcome of its efforts. More important is to identify the form that
transformative struggle should take. In this chapter, I have named
these forms variously as carnivalesque politics, anticolonial refusal,
and the quest to find creative spaces within which to go gaga and in
the process catching a glimpse of the something else that we call the
(queer) future. The queer future, as queer visionaries from Kincaid
to Babs from Chicken Run to Lady Gaga have suggested, is better
understood as a horizon beyond which we cannot see, as a distant
dream whose form appears now only as a vague shape of what is to
come. This is not no future, not the future; it is one future we can
make by going gaga here and now.

Notes
1. See Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2011). The present chapter draws heavily
from the thoughts developed in that book.
2. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant
Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).
3. Harsha Walia, “Letter to Occupy Together Movement,” rabble.ca,
October 14, 2011, http://rabble.ca/news/2011/10/acknowledge
ment-occupations-occupied-land-essential, accessed on January 29,
2012.
4. Slavoj Žižek, speech to OWS on October 9, 2011. Quoted by Walia
in ibid.
5. Slavoj Žižek, “Shoplifters of the World Unite,” London Review of
Books, August 19, 2011, http://www.lrb.co.uk/2011/08/19/slavoj
-zizek/shoplifters-of-the-world-unite, accessed on January 29,
2012.
6. Slavoj Žižek, speech to OWS on October 9, 2011. Quoted from
“Slavoj Žižek speaks at Occupy Wall Street: Transcript,” The Parallax:
Philosophy, Cinema and Science, October 10, 2011, http://www
.imposemagazine.com/bytes/slavoj-zizek-at-occupy-wall-street
-transcript, accessed on January 29, 2012.

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 194 JACK HALBERSTAM

7. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles,

CA: Semiotext(e), 2009), p. 23.
8. For a more developed discussion of this concept, see Judith
Halberstam, Gaga Feminism: Gender, Sex and the End of Normal
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2012).
9. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-
Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997).
10. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist
Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
11. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can The Subaltern Speak?,” in
Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and
Lawrence Grossberg (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988),
pp. 271–313.
12. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).
13. Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (New York: Plume,
1997).
14. Peter Lord and Nick Park, Chicken Run (Dreamworks Animated,
2000), film.
15. Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of
Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004),
pp. 136–137.
16. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American
Grammar Book,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American
Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003).
17. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, p. 115.
18. Ibid., p. 128.
19. Ibid.
20. Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher, trans. Joachim Neugroschel
(New York: Grove Press, 2009).
21. Peter Harry Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (New
York: Forgotten Books, 2010).

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 C H A P T ER 1 3

(Un)naming the Third Sex After

Beauvoir: Toward a
Third-Dimensional Feminism

Kyoo Lee

Your Problem?
“How does it feel to be a problem?”1 Perhaps this is one marker of a
minority on the move: to be stopped for such a question every now
and then, literally or not. W.E.B. Du Bois may not have an answer to
it, but did, famously, in 1903, restage the question in a piece called
“Of Our Spiritual Strivings”:

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked ques-

tion . . . They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curi-
ously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How
does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man
in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern
outrages make your blood boil? . . . To the real question, How does it
feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.2

With “the question” (un)masked here, a few other names, all American,
all colorful, circle around my mind: Zora Neale Hurston, Rey Chow,
Elaine Kim, and Moustafa Bayoumi—all of whom repeated it, each
in his or her own way.
Back to the South in the early 1900s, to the ever-so theatrical
Zora Neale Hurston, who, as a kid, used the front porch of her house
as a gallery seat from which to watch, and entertain, a slew of white
folks flocking to Orlando, Florida, for the summer. Hurston, less

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 196 KYOO LEE

depressed than the young Du Bois, still finds herself surrounded by

that “unasked,” “real” question:

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the grand-

daughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is
sixty years in the past . . . I feel most colored when I am thrown against
a sharp white background . . . For instance at Barnard. “Beside the
waters of the Hudson” I feel my race. Among the thousand white
persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through
it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb
but reveals me again.3

The literal racial segregation is gone, and yet the ghost of the past
will not separate itself from Hurston’s body: “Music. The great blobs
of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard
what I felt . . . He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so col-
ored.”4 It is as if, as Toni Morrison has noted, the colored body
existed so that whiteness (too) could be felt, played out in the dark.5
Such problems of “color” so-contrasted, so-gendered, are “felt,”
registered feelingly first. As a Unique Minority of One (UMO) at
Barnard, although not one for “the sobbing school of Negrohood,”6
that (colored) woman (Hurston) must have faced just that on a daily
basis: that striking contrast washing her all over, which would pro-
duce a “colored me” time and again. Surely, a son and a daughter,
even if schooled together, do not always share the same problems,
but they stand close enough in the department of problematics, espe-
cially if they come from the same (sort of) “families.”7 The “colored
me” that “would still be me” à la Anthony Appiah (who thinks gen-
der might ultimately disappear) is revealingly caught in the “ebb”
and web of identities that carries the usual and unusual, intercutting
marks of gender, race, class, and so on, all vibrantly compressed into
the ethico-existential singularity and narrativity of a person—dead
or alive—or even a thing.
Now this time, replace “colored me over here” with “China over
there”:

I heard a feminist ask: “How should we read what is going on in China

in terms of gender?” My immediate response to that question was, and
is: “We do not, because at the moment of shock Chinese people are
degendered and become simply ‘Chinese’” The problem is not how we
should read what is going on in China in terms of gender, but rather:
what do the events in China tell us about gender as a category, especially
as it relates to the so-called Third World?8

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 (UN)NAMING THE THIRD SEX AFTER BEAUVOIR 197

The “unasked, real” question Rey Chow is reframing is, how does
it feel to be a Chinese-woman problem? What is it like to live in or
come from “the Third World” perceived and named as such? When
and where does one feel caught, “so-called”? Could there, in fact,
be anybody, anything, that is not a “so-called” something? Why do
such social categories and labels seem limiting rather than inform-
ing, often demoralizing “folks” rather than enabling or invigorating
them? And who, of all those problem cases, embodies such transac-
tional crises and cries within and outside codified systems of signifi-
cations? “At least you are not black,” 9 says someone to Elaine Kim, a
woman nonetheless. Again, “How does it feel to be a problem?,” asks
Moustafa Bayoumi through stories of Muslim youths in Brooklyn,
New York, who, facing the rising tides of Islamophobia, fear for their,
and our, lives and livelihood.10
Why is that still a problem?
Gender, race, ethnicity, class, religion, culture . . . How are we to
rearticulate and retool these kaleidoscopic, endlessly serialized “prob-
lems” of social categories and identities, each time differently, with
different productivity, even as different “products,” this capital, fron-
tal problema, this “sufficient” bodily evidence in and of reality, “in
front of you” and me?11 Such is the broad philosophical force of the
questions I wish to dwell on here, if only briefly.
Of particular interest to me is Chow’s focus on “gender as a cat-
egory, especially as it relates to the so-called Third World,” perhaps
an old topic for some in this early twenty-first century of third wave
feminisms, Transnational Studies, Global This and Global That,
where those very intermeshed categories of identification themselves
provide not only the analytical ground but, rightly, propel synthetic
reflections. As Chow stressed already in the 1990s, when such cate-
gorical complications and multiplications almost defined the “decon-
structive,” “genealogical,” or “new historical” character of much of
the critical theoretical scenes of the time, the guiding question we
should keep asking is not so much what gender or sex or sexuality is
but rather what it “relates to,” or, more specifically, what it melts into:
how, where, and when it co-originates from and co-operates with
other categories in any specific and evolving contexts.
Further, I am interested in those invisibly generative, discursive
grids at work, yet I hope to assess them in terms of gendering rather
than gender per se: what animates, dictates, and validates such spa-
tio-temporal protocols, categorical imperatives, and grouping habits
that materialize, for instance, in ethno-gendered, geopolitical dis-
courses on the “third” pressed or positioned as such, be it the “third

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 198 KYOO LEE

world” or “third wave” feminisms. I am asking what motivates all this

“third” talk and “third” kind, as in “third way,” “third space,” “third
cinema,” and so on. I am not interested, however, in what transcends
or unifies such telos-driven, ordinal thinking toward and away from
the spatiotemporal other, the late-comers and developers of a better
world: what the “first” is, with respect to which the second or third
remain secondary, less important, “second”-best alternatives. Rather,
my focus is on what problematizes the auto-constitution of the first
as such, what deconstructs the first in the first place, as it were: I want
to know, and follow, what compels, and sustains, the centrifugal cul-
tivation or disorientation of the first. So my question is irreducibly
twofold: what remains structurally problematic as well as productive,
critically pressing as well as repressive, in the very conception, in the
typical configuration, of the “third world woman” problem or “third
wave” questions? In short, here is my problem, shared by many, à la
and contra the Simone de Beauvoir of The Second Sex : how and why
does, or should, the second sex of the third world—the secondary
second sex—become an issue for every feminist, regardless of her or
his generational or geographical belonging?

Thinking (Toward) a Third Dimension

Let’s start with a snapshot, at the risk of repeating the epistemic vio-
lence of chronological clustering: as the usual story goes, the tidal
spirit of third wave feminisms that emerged roughly in the 1980s and
continues to this day is traceable to the civil rights movement of the
1960s as a pointed yet vocally diverse response to the perceived fail-
ures or weaknesses of the “second wave” movements. The latter were
more directly and systematically nurtured by the 1960s and 1970s
ideals of legal recognition and liberation of the oppressed. Third
wave feminist movements highlight and mobilize what was not fully
registered or even completely ignored by the first and second wave
feminists, namely that women are diverse, all different in aesthetic
taste, age, biological makeup, class, culture, ethnicity, environmental
background, familial situation, gender identity, geohistorical experi-
ence, linguistic origin or affiliation, marital status, mental orienta-
tion or capacity, nationality, physical capability, political inclination,
profession, race, religion, sexuality, size, and so on, with each of these
categories remaining malleable, self-decomposable, and interbreed-
able, often to the point of metamorphic self-transformation. What
does Lady Gaga have in common with de Beauvoir, for instance, and
who of the two would you date? Perhaps both? Or neither?

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 (UN)NAMING THE THIRD SEX AFTER BEAUVOIR 199

Ironically enough, “third world” feminism, very much informed

by and also influencing “third wave” feminism, is much less color-
ful: quite simply, why is this discourse for and by women of “color”
rather than colors? Could this binarized, racial abstraction (colored-
uncolored) have something to do with it being seemingly less fun
and fantastical than third wave feminism? Lady Gaga, a woman of
white color, for instance, might epitomize the third wave but not
third world. The problem lies in that tendency toward one-way traf-
fic. Situated at the bottom of the world developmental model that
charts countries and geopolitical zones in terms of the developed
(coded Anglo-European white), developing (aspirationally white or
white assimilated), and underdeveloped (doubly colored), third world
feminism is still rhetorically locked into the political topology of the
1950s Anglo-European Cold War ideology that first engendered the
very idea, the Third World, denoting the countries that belonged nei-
ther to the capitalist NATO nor to the communist Soviet Union.
Inheriting such a binary double-knot of coupled us-and-them, third
world feminism, singularly clustered as such, remains the structural
grammar of third world feminisms.
Also, such different origins notwithstanding, third wave and third
world both come in third, not second; they come “after” the second,
which battled with the first, as in the “battle” of the sexes. The “third”
here, given its narrative orientations and indexical parameters, does
not quite embody dialectical subjectivity or elevated positionality. It
remains more of a supplementary misfit or outfit, the disenfranchised
rest or capitalized niche. Rather than volumizing, complicating, and
cross-fertilizing the ongoing world-historical stories of territorial
struggles between those polarized parties—for example, men ver-
sus women, advanced capitalism versus failed communism/emerg-
ing capitalism, the G7 versus the G20—those “third” nonplayers
or minor extras, along with the “monolithically”12 subjectified, and
mytho-culturally essentialized assumptions about them, still tend to
get colonially “replicated,”13 flattened and inserted into the Anglo-
Euro-centric master narrative of the post-Enlightenment progress,
of ascent and descent, of success and failure. Again then, “third-
wave-world” feminism, thus monolingualized even when seemingly
internally multiple, remains of secondary significance, caught up in
the logic of discursive (self-)reproduction foreclosed by the seminal/
ontological order of the original/copy. Some kind of paradigmatic
change, even just a change of the name, seems in order.
Third “dimensionally” then, instead, I am trying to imagine what
it means to think across the board with and after de Beauvoir, the

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 200 KYOO LEE

thinker of the second(ary). What remains fertile is her insight into the
centrifugal ordering and positioning, that is, gendering, by the man
of the woman as a constitutively marginalized “other,” as a secondary
socio-bio-ontological category, what comes after or follows the first:

Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as
relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being . . . For him
she is sex—absolute sex, no less. 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.
The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself.
In the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one
finds the expression of a duality—that of the Self and the Other.14

What I am entertaining while thinking, with de Beauvoir, about the

gendered dialectic of “Self-Other” is a possibility of inscriptively infus-
ing the cardinal and singular into the ordinal or additive, a second
birth that is a birth nonetheless, biological or otherwise: this one,
that one, another one—one, two, three, four . . . every single one.
To begin with the very concept of the “second” sex—strictly
speaking, the absolute “other” is by definition just the other, not the
second, but de Beauvoir proceeds to name woman the other of man,
the second sex, rather than just the other sex. This seems a cunningly
prophetic move worthy of revitalizing re-cognition. In this posi-
tioned gesture within de Beauvoir’s dialectical abstraction, I detect
a profoundly enduring logic of serial subversion and subversive self-
differentiation at work: the woman named—linguistically marked—
as a sexed being, the “second” sex, in turn, reveals the man, the first
sex, as an irreducible problem post-marked as such—the sexless sex,
as it were. By defining the female sex as the sexed sex, she is also, in
fact, debunking the myth of the other sex, the kind of (hu)man being
that supposedly does or can or will or should transcend (like his God)
such a biological condition and destiny of sexuation. De Beauvoir
is ironizing the formative logic of man(hood), key to which is the
strategy of serialized self-subordination: must we, every one of us,
come after you, Sir? (I am hearing an echo: must we, every one of us,
come after you, first wave feminists?) Her philosophical genius here
is to point to that pattern of discursive ordering—dictating, position-
ing, calling forth—in terms of gendering. This is how a discursive
preoccupation with gender identity becomes a necessary supplement
to man’s identity. Read this way, the story of the second sex becomes
that of the first sex which, as de Beauvoir indirectly highlights, is

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 (UN)NAMING THE THIRD SEX AFTER BEAUVOIR 201

not there in the “first” place except in an asexually gendered figure

of Him, God, that completes his identity: “Some say that, having
been created after Adam, she is evidently a secondary being; others
say on the contrary that Adam was only a rough draft and that God
succeeded in producing the human being in perfection when He cre-
ated Eve.”15 Evidently indeed, this vexing “woman question,” which
“masculine arrogance,” so blindly gendered, turned into a “quar-
rel,” would require the impartial judge, “an angel—neither man nor
woman—but where shall we find one?”16
De Beauvoir holds onto that “second line” and holds it open for
other possible inscriptions, unlike Luce Irigaray, for instance, who,
instead of diffusing the problem into a quasi-angelic allegory, just
corrects that confusing “second” into two, into a recuperated het-
ero-pair. For the de Beauvoirean storyteller and listener, it is as if
there were still only one sex, the female sex, despite the other sex,
the situation of which “evidently” is absurd, existentially or other-
wise; what the “second” points to, dialectically, is just that incoherent
social facticity and oddly stratified vicissitude of “to have become”17;
X has become this or that, caught in acts of naming by the unnamed
center(s) from day one of its appearance in and to the world.
De Beauvoir’s formulation, not simply a formulaic abstraction,
remains incisively productive to the extent that it carries this recursive
capacity for the retrospective debunking of the mythical center of the
“first.” What comes in second, as one might also think of the senior/
junior hierarchy, will produce its own second, its secondary subcat-
egories or subordinates in its material diversity, while the first gets
decentered, displaced, or diffused along the way; this is also how de
Beauvoir gestures toward some “deep similarities between the situa-
tion of woman and that of the Negro,”18 their secondariness in rela-
tion to their respective first. White women as the first women, as it
were, will then have remained raceless/colorless, until challenged by
their “second,” such as the woman “of color.” This is not to draw a
material analogy between race and sex, which de Beauvoir does not
do. I do not mean to inscribe the categorical priority of gender over
race, either, which de Beauvoir does not do. Without denying, how-
ever, that de Beauvoir’s intention was to get (closer) to that un-bodied
center (for transcendence), what I am trying to do is simply to register
the uncanny formalistic force of the logic of seconding, of gendering,
despite de Beauvoir, who was mainly focused on “woman,” and spe-
cifically the woman who looks like her—hence, with and against her.
So this is what I am at: What if we rethink the second not just as
“secondary,” as derivative, additive, or subtractive, as de Beauvoir did

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 202 KYOO LEE

(albeit ironically), but as, more specifically, accumulative? What if we

rethink it as logically, choreographically, and chemically momentous?
Can “the second sex” be continuously built on and networked with
itself in various modalities and colors, without becoming imposingly
monumental?
For example, third world feminism as a discursive framework, aris-
ing from the postwar construction of “underdeveloped” or “other”
zones in the world, involves at least two narrative agents in a dialog-
ical transaction or transfer, literal or figurative, with one occupying
the symbolic, ideological position of the first world woman, typi-
cally that of North Atlantic upper-middle-class Caucasian women
cartographically codified as “Western.” The typical(ly colored) sce-
nario, for instance, of the-(colored-)minority-woman-rescued-from-
the-(colored-)minority-man-by-the-(white-)majority-man would
put the colonial (white-)super-heroes in the (proxy-)position of the
first second sex, and vice versa. This usual way in which Western
feminisms come to identify non-Western feminist discourses and
sometimes identify with them is ironically developmental: a highly
prescripted network of developmental language, that is, the West
getting and wanting to know the “rest” by learning how to save
it from degrading itself further, becomes the invisible grammar of
sexuated thinking. Master categories of sex, gender, and sexuality as
well as race and class, developed and emerging from the West and
then remapped onto the feminist logos of the rest, get to scaffold the
normativizing convention of one-way top-down discourses of lib-
eration, part and parcel of the intellectual and ideological legitima-
tion of third world/wave feminism(s). Such a collateral sequence of
discursive transposition becomes natural, as natural as the first fol-
lowed by the second followed—but not superseded—by the third,
and so on. One model becomes central and original while another
becomes marginal and mimetic. But does it have to? Will that be the
only way? Of course not.
Tamsin Lorraine, for instance, writes, in 1990:

Gender identity is one way of representing ourselves. By labeling myself

a “man” or a “woman” I am also conjuring up a range of possibilities
presented to me in my culture and language . . . I will push beyond con-
ventional bounds, thus adding to my culture or language new possibili-
ties of what a man or woman could be.19

Well over two decades into the world of third wave feminisms in the
plural, this passage, a snapshot of its movement at its inception, comes

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 (UN)NAMING THE THIRD SEX AFTER BEAUVOIR 203

across as incisive but also preclusionary. The critical acumen with which
Lorraine acknowledges and individuates her own discursive positional-
ity and particularity remains refreshing, and yet I expect that Lorraine
herself would today problematize that very taxonomic impulse with
which new possibilities back then were seen as “additional” rather than,
say, transformative; for the latter possibility, for more trans-paradig-
matic inter-feminists dialogues, might we have to wait for the emer-
gence of radically new sorts of feminism, whatever they may be?
I am, again, reminded of the absence of perspectives of or on non–
de Beauvoir look-alikes in The Second Sex, “the ethnocentrism of de
Beauvoir’s perspective” that Margaret Simons for instance articulated
as early as in the late 1970s: “The result is a lack of sensitivity to the
situations of minority women and a failure to understand their reluc-
tance to identify with a predominantly white organization.”20 True,
why can’t we find a word about, say, Algerian or Vietnamese women
in The Second Sex, not to mention “Black” women—if, again, we are
to temporarily employ the now customary, cataloguing language of
third world feminism? Unlike Kate Millet, however, who will not
acknowledge “the differences in the situations of minority and white
women,”21 de Beauvoir is quite cautiously aware of her own privileges
and particularities. I wonder whether there is a reasonable way to rea-
son this absence of the other “others” in de Beauvoir’s otherwise fertile
philosophical text: seen even developmentally, such seems a function
of the self-identified (French, or Parisian, or Latin-Quartered, non-
Jewish, non-Black) lady philosopher of existentialist persuasions in the
mid-twentieth century starting to speak from her own standpoint as
if for the first time. This sardonic thinker’s prefatorial lingering, as I
smell it, is perfumed with just such intellectual conscientiousness that
constantly registers its own “secondary” specificities:

For a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman. The sub-
ject is irritating, especially to women; and it is not new. Enough ink
has been spilled in the quarrelling over feminism . . . and perhaps we
should say no more about it. It is still talked about, however, for the
voluminous nonsense uttered during the last century seems to have
done little to illuminate the problem. After all, is there a problem? And
if so, what is it? Are there women, really?22

With Critical Intimacy

As I “have become,” à la de Beauvoir, an Asian woman, I find myself
drawn to these passages of embodied philosophical self-reflections,
hearing them speaking to me in certain ways, or hearing myself

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 204 KYOO LEE

hearing them hearing some other textual whispers from both the
past and the future. To me, the above are not just “white” femi-
nist philosophers speaking, but all of us in the imaginary domain of
feminism, however naïve and contestable that collective identity may
be, speaking in the irreducible language of a self-analytic vulnerabil-
ity that almost immunizes itself by immediately attracting “critical
intimacy”23 from the listener-reader. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
notes, such “a critical intimacy . . . might help metropolitan feminist
celebration of the female to acknowledge a responsibility toward the
trace of the other, not to mention toward other struggles,”24 and it
is from such a very complicated attraction to the canonized “metro-
politan” feminist classics too that I draw part of my theoretical blood
line(s). By “‘looking into’” the text while “developing critical intimacy
with (the situation of) these women,”25 by reconfiguring earlier texts
with critical intimacy, 26 and by embracing while dismantling them, 27
we can begin to see how “the concept of ‘other’ loses its innocence
and can make its home wherever it wishes.”28 As Mieke Bal professes
at the start of her embodied reflection on this “concept-as-method”29
as used in Postcolonial Studies for instance, “A teacher needs to know
how not to know. I am a teacher.”30
As a perpetual disciple in the interdiscipline of feminism who
returns to The Second Sex as one allegorical anchor among many, I am
interested to see that “third” voice traveling, to keep the second voice
of the second proliferating itself, so as to prevent the critically minori-
tarian force of the other from becoming regressively “white-washed,”
as the idiom goes. What I envisage broadly in terms of what I have
simply refiled and recast as third-dimensional feminism in place of the
much paraded and contested paradigm of third world/wave feminism
is a serialized theoretical labor that is radically receptive to its own
evolutionary, but not narrowly developmental, alterity, while vigilant
toward its own centrist or expansive tendencies. Already, a number of
feminist thinkers today, whom I would even dare to recall here in the
imaginary noncategory of third-dimensional thinkers, are engaged in
responding to such calls for trans-categorical thinking. Here is a list of
a few of their most thought-provoking concepts, presented randomly:

• “epistemic violence” or economized desires (Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak)31
• heterosexist normativity in the discursive formation of gender
(Judith Butler)32
• the multiple obscuration of the “intersectional” gender oppres-
sions (Patricia Hill Collins)33

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 (UN)NAMING THE THIRD SEX AFTER BEAUVOIR 205

• the double folly of overdetermination/under-specification of

interlaced identities (Linda Alcoff)34
• the unbridled expressions of racialized love (Mariana Ortega)35
• the regressively systematic monolithicization of the other
(Chandra Talpade Monhanty)36
• the neoliberal construction and securitization of the American
homo(friendly)nationalism (Jasbir K. Puar)37
• the normative sexualization of gender categories as culturally
given or self-evident (Rey Chow)38

The list could—and should—go on. Surely, given those singular

voices of focused disorientations pitched against the discursive mono-
lingualism of gendered binaries, I am not alone in this three-dimen-
sional, constantly rotating global village that should truly become
“global” rather than trying to find itself on the latest HDTV.
Perhaps not unlike one who, in the words of Judith Butler, would
stand “as a latecomer to the second wave,”39 pondering forwardly on
“the irrepressible democratic cacophony of its [feminism’s] identity,”40
now including its third wave manifestations, I have tried to follow the
pulse of this question that also came to me as a sort of hypothetical
vision in an era of post-everything, including post-feminism: might
we not be able to “post” forward (to insert a postal image) a less
hierarchical, less historicized, less truncated, more dynamic, more
alchemistic, more voluminous way of articulating and mobilizing
this “third” sex, as ephemeral as it may seem? Finally, as some might
have been wondering, why not approach this third kind from a third-
dimensional feminism rather than three? The guiding idea is again
rather axiomatically cast: this “third,” the (post–)de Beauvoirean
second, could function as a kind of formal metonym for another
dimension yet to be discovered from within and built back into any
gendered thoughts; so, let there be the fourth dimension in a three-
dimensional world, the fifth in one with four dimensions, and so on.
We could then all go, at least, beyond the One-dimensional Man,41
placated by the techno-mutation of oppositional dialectic, and away
from the One-dimensional Woman,42 consumed by self-deceptive
positivism and utopian fantasy today.

Notes
1. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (an African American
Heritage Book) (Radford, VA: Wilder Publications, 2008), p. 5;
Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young
and Arab in America (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).

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 206 KYOO LEE

2. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 5.

3. Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” in The
Florida Reader: Visions of Paradise from 1530 to the Present, ed.
Jack C. Lane and Maurice O’Sullivan (Sarasota, FL: Pineapple Press,
1991), p. 120.
4. Ibid., p. 121.
5. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
6. Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” p. 120.
7. Anthony Appiah, “‘But Would That Still Be Me?’ Notes on Gender,
‘Race,’ Ethnicity, as Sources of ‘Identity’,” The Journal of Philosophy
87:10 (1990), pp. 493–499.
8. Rey Chow, “Violence in the Other Country: China as Crisis,
Spectacle, and Woman,” in Third World Women and the Politics of
Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes
Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 82, empha-
sis mine.
9. Elaine H. Kim, “‘At Least You’re Not Black’: Asian Americans in
U.S. Race Relations,” Social Justice 25:3 (1998), pp. 3–12.
10. See Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?.
11. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David
Wood, John P. Leavey Jr., and Ian McLeod (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1995), p. 10.
12. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship
and Colonial Discourses,” Boundary 2 12:3 (1984), pp. 333–358.
13. Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-
World Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 43; Uma Narayan,
“Essence of Culture and a Sense of History: A Feminist Critique
of Cultural Essentialism,” Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a
Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World, ed. Uma Narayan
and Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000),
pp. 84, 86.
14. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Howard M. Parshley
(New York: Knopf, 1953), pp. xviii–xix.
15. Ibid., p. xxxi, emphasis mine.
16. Ibid., p. xxxi.
17. Ibid., p. xxviii.
18. Ibid., p. xxvii.
19. Tamsin E. Lorraine, Gender, Identity, and the Production of Meaning
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), p. 17, emphasis mine.
20. Margaret A. Simons, “Racism and Feminism: A Schism in the
Sisterhood (1979),” chap. 2 in Beauvoir and The Second Sex:
Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. 27.
21. Ibid., p. 31.
22. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. xv.

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 (UN)NAMING THE THIRD SEX AFTER BEAUVOIR 207

23. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason:

Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999), pp. 114, 198, 242n. 70, 425; and Mieke Bal,
“Critical Intimacy,” chap. 8 in Travelling Concepts in the Humanities:
A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).
24. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 198.
25. Ibid., p. 242n. 70.
26. Ibid., p. 114.
27. Ibid., p. 425.
28. Bal, “Critical Intimacy,” p. 289.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., p. 286.
31. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 269.
32. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(New York: Routledge, 1999).
33. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans,
Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004).
34. Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The
Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” Signs 13:3 (1988), pp. 405–436.
35. Mariana Ortega, “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White
Feminism and Women of Color,” Hypatia 21:3 (2006), pp. 56–74.
36. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, Third
World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1991).
37. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer
Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
38. Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading
between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991).
39. Judith Butler, “The End of Sexual Difference?,” chap. 9 in Undoing
Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), p. 176.
40. Ibid., p. 175.
41. Herbert Marcuse, One-dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of
Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
42. Nina Power, One-dimensional Woman (Winchester, UK: 0 [Zero]
Books, 2009).

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 C on tr ibu t or s

Gabeba Baderoon is an assistant professor of Women’s Studies

and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She writes on
representations of race, sexuality, and religion, and her essays have
appeared in Feminist Studies, Social Dynamics, and Research in
African Literatures. In 2010–11, she held a research fellowship in the
Islam, African Publics and Religious Values Project at the University
of Cape Town, where she wrote on “Public Privacies,” a project about
autobiography, religion, and sexuality. Baderoon is also a poet, and
the author of the collections The Dream in the Next Body (Kwela
Books, 2005) and A Hundred Silences (Kwela Books, 2006).

Emanuela Bianchi is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature

at New York University. She works at the intersection of contem-
porary continental philosophy, feminist/queer theory, and ancient
philosophy, and is the editor of a collection of feminist philosophy
essays, Is Feminist Philosophy Philosophy? (Northwestern University
Press, 1999). Her articles have appeared in Hypatia, Continental
Philosophy Review, Philosophy Today, Epochê, and The Graduate Faculty
Philosophy Journal, and she is completing a manuscript entitled The
Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos. Her
recent research engages the thought of Reiner Schürmann to help
think through the complex inceptions and destructions of patriarchal
kinship in Greek antiquity and the present day.

Rosi Braidotti is a distinguished university professor in the Humanities

at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and founding director of the
Centre for the Humanities. Her books include Patterns of Dissonance
(Polity Press, 1991); Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual
Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (Columbia University
Press, 1994; renewed and revised edition: Columbia University Press,
2011); Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming
(Polity Press, 2002); and Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Polity
Press, 2006).

9780230118317_18_con.indd 209 7/18/2012 12:39:51 PM

 210 CONTRIBUTORS

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative

Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and Visiting Tam
Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. She is the
author of numerous books, including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990); Bodies That Matter: On the
Discursive Limits of “Sex” (Routledge, 1993); Antigone’s Claim: Kinship
Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000); Precarious
Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (Verso Press, 2004); Undoing
Gender (Routledge, 2004); Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?
(Verso Press, 2009); and, most recently, Parting Ways: Jewishness and
the Critique of Zionism (Columbia University Press, 2012).
Red Chidgey is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Media and Culture
Research at London South Bank University, United Kingdom. Her
thesis looks at feminist memory assemblages and the politics of
what is remembered, secured, or erased within feminist activist net-
works. Her essays have been published in Signs: Journal of Women
in Culture and Society, Feminist Media Studies, and n.paradoxa. She
has been involved in digital archive projects such as Fragen: Sharing
Core European Feminist Texts Online (www.fragen.nu) and Grassroots
Feminism: Transnational Archives, Resources and Communities (www.
grassrootsfeminism.net). She blogs about her research interests at
Feminist Memory (www.feministmemory.wordpress.com).
Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at
Penn State University. She has published on Gilles Deleuze, femi-
nist theory, and literary theory. Her two most recent publications
are Theory and the Disappearing Future: On de Man, On Benjamin
(Routledge, 2010, with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller) and Blake,
Deleuzian Aesthetics and the Digital (Continuum, 2011). She is cur-
rently completing a book on human extinction.
Elizabeth Grosz is a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at
Rutgers University. She has edited many anthologies on feminist
theory and is the author of numerous books, including The Nick of
Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Duke University Press,
2004); Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Duke University
Press, 2005); and Chaos, Territory, Art (Columbia University Press,
2008).
Jack Halberstam is a professor of English, Gender Studies, and
American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California.
Halberstam is the author of several books, including Female
Masculinity (Duke University Press, 1998); In a Queer Time and

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 CONTRIBUTORS 211

Place (NYU Press, 2005); The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University
Press, 2011); and, most recently, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the
End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012). Halberstam works and writes
on popular culture, subcultures, and queer theory and can be found
blogging at www.bullybloggers.wordpress.com.

Kyoo Lee is an assistant professor of Philosophy at John Jay College,

CUNY, where she is also affiliated with the Justice Studies and Gender
Studies Programs. She teaches courses and leads faculty seminars in
feminist theory and critical theory at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Dually trained in European philosophy and literary theory, Lee
works widely in the intersecting fields of the theoretical Humanities
such as Aesthetics, Asian American Studies, Comparative Literature,
Continental and Feminist Philosophy, Critical Race Theory,
Cultural Studies, Deconstruction, Gender Studies, Poetics, Post-
Phenomenology, and Translation. Her first book is entitled Reading
Descartes Otherwise (Fordham University Press, 2012).

Katie Lloyd Thomas is a lecturer in architecture at Newcastle

University and completed her PhD on concepts of materials and the
architectural specification at the Centre for Research in Modern
European Philosophy at Middlesex University. She is a founding
member of taking place, a group of artists and architects concerned
with feminist spatial practice, whose most recent project is a series of
art installations for the new prenatal center at Homerton Hospital,
East London, funded by the Arts Council England. Lloyd Thomas’s
work explores materials, representation, and production in architec-
ture, the philosophy of technology, and feminist theory and practice.
Her publications include an edited book entitled Material Matters:
Architecture and Material Practice (Routledge, 2007) and “The
Excessive Materiality of Stock Orchard Street: Towards a Feminist
Material Practice,” in Around and About Stock Orchard Street, ed.
Sarah Wigglesworth (Routledge, 2011).

Astrida Neimanis is a feminist scholar and writer who thinks a lot

with water, and is interested in exploring the porous border between
academic and artistic expression. Her work has been published in both
scholarly and literary journals, and she has worked in collaboration
with poets, playwrights, artists, and graphic designers to find alterna-
tive ways of presenting feminist theory to diverse publics. She is an
editor of the interdisciplinary theory and culture journal PhaenEx
(www.phaenex.uwindsor.ca) and co-organizer of the Thinking with
Water project (www.thinkingwithwater.net).

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 212 CONTRIBUTORS

Davina Quinlivan is a part-time lecturer in Film Studies at King’s

College, London, and at Kingston University. She holds a PhD in
Film Studies from King’s College, and her book The Place of Breath
in Cinema came out with Edinburgh University Press in 2012. Her
article “Material Hauntings: the Kinaesthesia of Sound in Innocence”
(Hadzihalilovic, 2004) received the 2009 Studies in French Cinema
prize for best PhD article. She is currently working on her second
monograph, entitled The Film’s Body Heals Itself, which examines the
intertwinement of the healing body and notions of hope in contem-
porary moving image media.
M. F. Simone Roberts is a poet and independent scholar of com-
parative poetics and feminist philosophy. She is an assistant editor for
the humanities journals Common Knowledge and Thirdspace. With
Alison Scott-Baumann, she is coeditor of Iris Murdoch and the Moral
Imagination: Essays (McFarland, 2010), and is the author of A Poetics of
Being-Two: Irigaray’s Ethics and Post-Symbolist Poetry (Lexington Books,
2010). She is currently at work on a study of and critical response to the
yogic and tantric influences on Luce Irigaray’s later work.
Jami Weinstein is a university research associate and assistant profes-
sor of Gender Studies, and director of The Zoontology Research Team
at Linköping University’s Tema Genus, Sweden. She coedited the vol-
ume Deleuze and Gender (Edinburgh University Press, 2008) with
Claire Colebrook, and they are at work on another volume entitled
Inhuman Rites and Posthumous Life. She has also published a number
of articles, such as “A Requiem to Sexual Difference: A Response
to Luciana Parisi’s ‘Event and Evolution’”; “Transgenres and the
Plane of Language, Species, and Evolution”; “Reality TV: Social Life
as Laboratory Experiment”; and “Traces of the Beast: Becoming-
Nietzsche, Becoming-Animal, and the Figure of the Trans-Human.”
She is currently working on a large-scale international project entitled
Conflict Zones: Genocide, Extinction, and the Inhuman, and on a
monograph tentatively entitled Returning to the Level of the Skin and
Beyond: A Microzoontology.

Editors
Henriette Gunkel received her PhD in Cultural Studies from the
University of East London, United Kingdom, and is a postdoctoral
research fellow at the Bayreuth International Graduate School of
African Studies, University of Bayreuth, Germany. She is the author
of the book The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality in South Africa

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 CONTRIBUTORS 213

(Routledge, 2010), coeditor of darkmatter ’s third themed issue

on the subject of postcolonial sexuality (www.darkmatter101.org/
site/category/issues/3-post-colonial-sexuality), and coeditor of the
anthology What Can a Body Do? Praktiken und Figurationen des
Körpers in den Kulturwissenschaften (Campus, 2012). She is also
the cocurator of the annual African Film Festival Cinemameu in
Inhambane, Mozambique.
Chrysanthi Nigianni holds a PhD from the University of East
London, and has recently joined the thinking machine of a neo-
materialist feminism. Educated in the social sciences—she has a
Sociology degree from Panteion University (Athens), and an MSc in
Sociology from the London School of Economics (LSE)—she then
took the turn to philosophy and feminism with the focus being on
queer theory, theories of sexuality, and continental philosophy. She
has taught at the University of East London and at Anglia Ruskin
University, United Kingdom. She is coeditor of the book Deleuze and
Queer Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), and of the New
Formations issue on Deleuze and politics (2009). She is currently a
visiting scholar at CUNY GLAGS, where she is working on a manu-
script on film as philosophy.
Fanny Söderbäck is an assistant professor of Philosophy at Siena
College. She received her PhD in Philosophy from the New School
for Social Research in 2010. She is the editor of Feminist Readings
of Antigone (SUNY Press, 2010), and her work has been published
in journals such as Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism, and in French
in l’Infini. She is the cofounder and director of the Kristeva Circle.
She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled
Time for Change: On Time and Difference in the Work of Kristeva and
Irigaray.

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 Inde x

Abramović, Marina, 192 antichrist, 68, 69–70n

activism, 7–8, 22, 23–32, 32–4n, apartheid, 136, 180n
131, 132, 136, 186 post-apartheid, 131, 178, 181n
Adorno, Theodor W., 82n apocalyptic, 80, 130
aesthetic, 6, 29, 49, 51, 54, 56, 59, post-apocalyptic, 78–81
80–1, 102–3, 105–6, 135, Appiah, Anthony, 196, 206n
156–7, 159, 162, 164–5, 198 Arab Spring, 44, 129–33
affect, xii, xiii, 14, 15, 17, 66, 67, Arendt, Hannah, 139
74, 75, 82, 130, 134, 156, 159, Aristotle, 9, 12n, 36–8,
163, 165, 186, 191 45–6n, 125n
Afrofuturism, 138, 140n art, 14, 16, 25, 26, 30, 34, 50, 54,
agency, ix, xvii, 17, 18, 21, 52, 98, 55, 59, 61, 79–81, 83, 101–8,
129, 167, 180, 187, 189 110, 113–14, 121, 125, 133,
air, 55, 57, 81, 101–3, 105–10, 116, 140, 167, 186, 193
118, 120 assemblages, xiii, 24, 39, 46n, 138,
Alaimo, Stacy, 69n, 94, 98n, 125n 156, 159, 207n
Alcoff, Linda Martín, i, viii, xxi, Atwood, Margaret, 78–81, 83n
205, 207n
aleatory, 7, 9, 10, 32n, 35, 37–9, Baartman, Sara, 135–6, 171–4,
41–4, 46–7n, 49, 54, 57, 59 179, 180–1n
alliance, xiv, 6, 32, 131–2, 139n, 151 Bachelard, Gaston, 97n
alterity, xvi, 50, 54, 56, 90, 96 Baderoon, Gabeba, 132, 135, 136,
Althusser, Louis, 47n 169, 181n
amnesia, 30–1 Baker, Jeffrey P., 116, 122, 124n
anachronism, xv, 7, 23–5, 32, 34n Barad, Karen, 123, 125
anarchism, 4, 184, 186, 188, 190–2 Baraitser, Lisa, 46n
anarchy, 137, 191–2 Barthes, Roland, 56
animal, xiii, xiv, xv, xviii, 16, 20, Bataille, Georges, 65, 69n
35, 37, 45–7n, 66–7, 69n, 72, Baudelaire, Charles, 51, 103–4,
76–7, 83n, 92, 95–6, 98n, 155, 108, 163–4, 167n
165–6n, 191 Bayoumi, Moustafa, 195, 197,
animality, 77 205–6n
anthropocentric, xiii, xiv, 73 Beauvoir, Simone de, 35, 45n,
post-anthropocentric, xiii 137, 138, 198–201, 203,
anthropomorphism, xiii 205, 206n

9780230118317_19_ind.indd 215 7/18/2012 5:08:59 PM

 216 INDEX

becoming, x, xi, xiii, xiv, xvi, xvii, cartography, xiv, 6

xviii, xviii n, 12n, 15, 18, 20, Channing, Barbara H., 104,
32n, 39, 44, 47n, 66–7, 74–7, 106, 111n
85, 87, 89, 93, 95–6, 99n, 114, Chanter, Tina, 8, 12n
119, 133–5, 138, 151, 155–6, Cheah, Pheng, 93, 98n
160, 162–4, 187, 189, 202, 204 Chidgey, Red, 7–8, 23, 32n
becoming-imperceptible, xiii, Choudree, Dale, 176, 181n
66–7, 134, 155–6 Chow, Rey, 195, 197, 205,
becoming-woman, xvi, 67, 206–7n
76, 156 cinema, 110n, 193n, 198
Berlant, Laurent, 156–7, 159, Cixous, Hélène, xvii, 10, 88–9, 97n
165–7n coalition, 3, 8, 26–7, 33–4n
Bersani, Leo, 47n Colebrook, Claire, 46n, 66–8, 71
Bianchi, Emanuela, 9, 32n collective, xv, xvii, 4, 8, 18, 20–1, 26,
binary, ix, xviii, 44, 103, 162, 199 31, 53, 82n, 113, 185, 191, 204
body, xiv, xv, 4, 6–7, 9–10, 12n, 15, collective imagining, xiii, xix n
20, 22n, 26, 36, 39, 40, 43, Collins, Patricia Hill, 204, 207n
45–7n, 50, 55, 58, 63, 66–7, colonial, 31, 136–7, 169–71,
72, 75, 78–9, 85–6, 95–6, 174, 180–1n, 184–5,
97–8n, 101–9, 113–14, 117, 189–90, 202, 206n
119–23, 123–4n, 129–30, 132, anticolonial, 183–6, 189–90, 193
135–7, 139–40n, 153n, 155–6, neocolonial, 185–6
159–63, 165, 169–80, 180n, post-colonial, 136, 139n, 181,
183, 186, 188, 191, 196 186–7, 189, 204, 206–7n
BwO (body without organs), colonialism, 95, 184
161–2 commonality, 90
Braidotti, Rosi, xviii, xviii n, xix n, community, xvii, 4, 30, 79, 82n, 92,
xxi, 3, 5, 11–12n, 46n, 82n, 94, 96, 109, 110n, 121, 123, 173
91, 95, 98–9n, 130 concept, vii, 7, 13–17, 22n, 46n,
breath, 55, 57, 65, 66, 68, 91, 89, 132, 156–7, 159, 161,
101–10, 110–11n, 116, 204, 207n
120–1, 175 corporeal, xi, 41, 88, 120, 134, 156
Bruno, Giuliana, 101, 103–9, incorporeal, 7, 15, 22n, 35
110n, 111n corporeality, 39, 41, 43–4, 90, 93
Butler, Judith, xxi, 4, 45n, 65, 69n, incorporeality, 15
97n, 133–4, 139n, 153n, culture, xv, xviii n, xix n, 7, 10,
162–3, 167n, 204–5, 207n 12n, 18, 20, 45n, 50, 52, 54,
56, 58–9, 67, 69n, 72, 82n, 87,
canon, 25, 52, 54, 204 91, 94, 96, 97n, 104, 107, 109,
capitalism, 17, 31, 98n, 185, 111n, 124n, 141, 165n, 189,
193, 199 191, 194n, 197–8, 202, 206n
carnivalesque (politics of), cyborg, xvii, 45n
185–6, 193
Cartesianism, 74, 76 Damasio, Antonio R., 74, 82n
anti-Cartesianism, 76 dandy, 135, 157, 162–4
hyper-Cartesianism, 76 dandyism, 7, 164

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 INDEX 217

Darwin, Charles, 162, 191 discourse, xiii, 3–8, 10, 11n, 14, 19,
daughter, xi, xv, 32n, 121, 130, 23, 25–7, 29, 31, 34n, 53, 55,
189, 190, 196 78, 89, 102–5, 108–9, 123n,
granddaughter, 196 136, 171, 199, 202, 206n
undutiful daughter, ix-xviii, 3, 4, dissonance, 158, 165
129–30, 133, 138 (see also drag, 27, 34n, 42
undutiful) dualism, 7, 39, 165
death, 12n, 35–6, 38, 42, 47n, 57, Du Bois, W.E.B., 138, 195–6,
66, 68–9, 75–6, 91, 94–5, 205–6n
97n, 115, 117–18, 187, 190 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 51, 55–6,
deconstruction, 28, 83n, 104 58, 59, 60n
De Lauretis, Teresa, xviii n duration, 39, 75, 90
Deleuze, Gilles, x, xii, xiv, xvii,
13–14, 19, 22n, 69–70n, 93, écriture, 7, 10, 49–53, 55–7, 59, 88
98–9n, 134, 155–6, 160, 162, écriture feminine, 49, 50, 55,
165, 165–7n 57, 88
democracy, 129, 181n, 185, 205 écriture futuriste, 7, 10, 52,
Derrida, Jacques, 24, 82n, 157–8, 56, 59
164, 166–7n, 206n Edelman, Lee, 12n, 42, 47n
Descartes, René, 74, 82–3n, 166n Elmahdy, Aliaa, 129–30, 132–3,
desire, xiii, xvi, xvii, 8, 10, 12n, 138, 139–40n
37–8, 47n, 57, 60n, 69, 78, 80, embodiment, viii, xviii n, 18,
89, 104, 129–30, 133–4, 146, 33n, 40–1, 44, 46n, 58, 75,
148–51, 162–3, 173, 178, 183, 85, 88–90, 95, 102–3, 109,
186–7, 189–92, 204 111n, 187
deterritorialization, x, 156–7, emotion, 26, 74, 82n, 104, 110n,
160–2, 164, 167n 173, 179, 196
dialectic, ix, x, 82n, 117–18, 124n, Enlightenment, 75, 82n, 88, 107
189, 200–1 post-Enlightenment, 199
difference, vii, viii, ix, x, xi, xvi, xvii, environment, 72–3, 77–8, 82n, 98n,
xviii n, 8–9, 13, 16, 18–22, 113, 115, 117, 133–4, 150
22n, 41, 44, 54, 58, 61n, 67, environmentalism, 72, 74, 76
78, 82n, 89–90, 96, 99n, 102, epistemology, 19, 45n, 51, 57
111n, 115, 117, 124–5n, 129, equality, 4, 26
132–4, 137–8, 141–5, 147–53, Eros, 57
153n, 156, 158, 160, 162, eroticism, 57
170–1, 184, 203, 207n (see also essentialism, 28, 42, 89, 163, 206n
sexual difference) ethics, xii, xiv, xvi, xviii n, 43, 46n,
dimension, xiii, 7, 35–6, 39–40, 63, 66, 69n, 72, 74, 90, 95–6,
43, 45n, 50, 103, 106, 109, 97–9n, 125n, 132
123, 134, 138, 142, 145, bioethics, 109
198, 205 ethnicity, 176, 197–8, 206n
dimensional, 132, 137–8, 195, ethnocentric, 15, 17
204–5, 207n ethnocentrism, 21, 203
Dionysus, 39 Ettinger, Bracha L., 114, 118–20,
Diprose, Rosalyn, 47n 122, 124–5n

9780230118317_19_ind.indd 217 7/18/2012 5:09:00 PM

 218 INDEX

evolution, 12n, 56, 83n, 165n, Gatens, Moira, xiii, xix

167n, 194n gay, 60n, 134, 148–52, 155,
existentialism, 35, 206n 158, 176
expression, xiv, xvi, xvii, 4, 46n, 50, gender, x, xiii, xv, xviii n, 18,
58, 76, 91, 105, 200, 205 22, 26–8, 33n, 35, 39, 43–4,
50–1, 54, 56, 58, 70n, 78,
Faludi, Susan, 32n 134–5, 140n, 142, 144–5,
femininity, xiii, 7, 16, 27, 41, 125n, 148, 155–62, 164–5, 170,
137, 143, 186, 190–1 174, 180, 190–1, 194n, 196–8,
interruptive feminine, 9, 35, 38 200–2, 204–5, 206–7n
feminism, vii, viii, xii, xiii, xvi, 4–8, cisgender, 33
11, 11–12n, 16, 18, 20–1, 23–8, gender equity, 142, 144–5,
30, 32–4n, 37, 39, 44, 45–6n, 170, 180n
49–50, 52, 54, 59, 67, 69n, gender imperceptibility, 134, 155
71–4, 77, 85, 88, 90, 92, 95–6, genealogy, 7, 34n, 68, 72,
97–8n, 111n, 117–18, 124–5n, 106, 124n, 136, 162,
130, 133, 136–7, 138n, 141–3, 167n, 173, 186
147, 153n, 167n, 180n, 183, generation, 4, 7, 23–4, 30,
185–7, 190–1, 193, 194n, 195, 34n, 35, 37, 107, 123n,
197–9, 202–5, 206–7n 134, 141–3, 147–8, 152–3,
anti-oedipal feminism, 137 153n, 157–8, 189
Chicana feminism, 69n, 125n generational, vii, 4, 11n, 27–8,
ecofeminism, 72, 82n 32, 33n, 41, 134, 137, 141,
fi rst/second/third wave 144, 152, 198
feminism; see wave Gormley, Antony, 108, 111n
Gaga feminism, 7, 137, 190–1, Gqola, Pumla Dineo, 171–2,
193, 194n 180–1n
hydrofeminism, 7, 85, 95–6 Grosz, Elizabeth, xi, xviii n, 3,
Marxist feminism, 16 6–7, 11–12n, 13, 46–7n,
queerfeminist, 134, 157 83n, 162, 167n
shadow feminism, 7, 186 Guattari, Félix, xiv, 13, 22n, 98n,
Ferguson, Roderick A., 187, 194n 134, 156, 160, 162, 165,
Firestone, Shulamith, 114–15, 165–7n
117–18, 122, 124n Gunkel, Henriette, 5, 129
flâneur, 101, 103–4, 108
Foucault, Michel, xii, 156, 165n Halberstam, Jack/Judith, 3, 5,
Freeman, Elizabeth, 12, 41–2, 47n 11–12n, 41, 47n, 129–30, 133,
Freud, Sigmund, 24, 60n, 70n, 136–8, 138n, 183, 193–4n
124n, 145–6, 148, 153n Haraway, Donna, xiii, xvii, 36, 45n,
Frye, Marilyn, x, xviii n 82n, 97n
futurity, 6, 7, 8, 12n, 13–22, 43, Hartman, Saidiya V., 186–9, 194n
52, 59, 66, 67, 75, 78, 79, 81, Heidegger, Martin, 12n, 45n, 82n,
91, 94, 145, 185–6, 193 102, 110n
Hekman, Susan, 69n, 98n, 125n
Gaga, Lady, xvi, 137, 190–3, 198–9 heterosexuality, x, xi, 67, 122,
Gass, William H., 57–8, 59, 61n 147–53 (see also sexuality)

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 INDEX 219

homophobia, 139n, 171, 180n logos, 37, 202

homosexuality, xi, 144, 148–9, Lorraine, Tamsin, 202–3, 206n
155–6, 169 (see also sexuality) Lovelock, James, 75, 79, 82n
Horkheimer, Max, 82n Lucretius, 38
Howie, Gillian, viii, xxi
humanism, xiv, 66 MacKinnon, Catharine, 36–7, 45n
antihumanist, 186 Mahmood, Saba, 186–7, 194n
posthumanism, 67, 77–8, 98n Marcuse, Herbert, 207n
ultra-humanism, 71 masculinity, xiii, 7, 16, 36, 143, 164
Hurston, Zora Neale, 195–6, 206n Maso, Carole, 49, 51–4, 59, 60n
hysterical, 52, 88 Massumi, Brian, 98n, 124n, 165n
materialism, xiv, 23, 45n, 47n,
identity, x, xi, xii, xiv, xvi, 17–20, 72, 98n
22–3, 30–1, 39, 69n, 71, 83n, maternal, xi, 11n, 40–1, 46–7n, 80,
120, 155–6, 158–9, 162, 164, 114, 116–22, 123–5n (see also
167n, 169–70, 181n, 188, 190, mother)
196–8, 200–1, 204–5, 206–7n matter, xvi, 7, 10–11, 14–15,
feminist identity, 25, 27 18–20, 28, 32–3n, 37–8,
gender identity, 33n, 200, 202 43–4, 46n, 52, 56, 74–6, 79,
homosexual identity, xi 85–7, 89, 91, 93, 97–8n, 102,
immanence, 35, 40 106, 109, 110n, 117, 125n,
Irigaray, Luce, x, xi, xvii, xviii n, 10, 138, 170, 180n
45n, 50–1, 53, 56, 59, 60–1n, Medusa, xvii, 88, 97n
83n, 88–90, 97n, 101–7, 109, melancholia, 57, 65–9, 69–70n
110–11n, 114, 118–20, 122, memory, 6, 8, 23, 25–7, 29, 31,
124–5n, 201 32n, 34n, 47n, 97–8n,
171–3, 181n
jouissance, 35 Millet, Kate, 203
Minh-ha, Trinh T., 88–9, 97n
Kandel, Robert, 70, 86, 97n Mitchell, Juliet, 118, 124n,
Kimsooja, 101–2, 105–9, 111n 133–4, 141–7, 150, 152,
Klein, Melanie, 146–7, 154n 153–4
Krapp, Peter, 30–1, 34n modernism, 49, 61n
Kristeva, Julia, 35, 40, 42, Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 95,
45–6n, 70n 99n, 205–7n
Moraga, Cherrie, 122–3, 125n
Lacan, Jacques, 119, 145 Morrison, Toni, 132, 186, 194n,
law, xii, 9, 43, 47n, 55, 59, 68, 141, 196, 206n
151–3, 157–9, 163–4, 166–7n mother, xv, 4, 11n, 22, 40, 57, 67,
Lee, Kyoo, 132, 137–8, 195 88–90, 92, 102, 106, 109,
lesbian, xi, 22, 42, 60n, 125n, 113–23, 123n, 124n, 150–2,
131, 139–40n, 149–51, 158, 175, 178, 189–90, 194n
180n, 187 (see also maternal)
Levinas, Emmanuel, 12n grandmother, 4, 11n, 106–7
Levine, Philippa, 169, 180n mother-daughter relation, xi, 4,
Lloyd, Genevieve, xiii, xviii n, xix n 9, 11n, 130, 190

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 220 INDEX

mother—Continued Piercy, Marge, 114–15, 117–18,

motherhood, xviii n, 4, 42, 122, 122, 124n
125n, 178 politics, x, xii, xiii, xvii, xix n, 3,
mourning, 36, 66, 68, 69n, 125n 5, 8–9, 12n, 15, 19, 24–5, 27,
multiplicity, ix, x, 4–6, 21, 130, 29–30, 34n, 36–9, 50, 67,
132–3, 138 69n, 83n, 90, 96, 98n, 132–8,
139n, 141, 155, 162, 164,
nationalism, 29, 190, 205 166–7n, 176, 180n, 183–4,
homonationalism, 207n 190, 192–3, 194n, 206–7n
nature, xvi, xviii n, 4, 9, 11–12n, bio-politics, 79
18–20, 29, 36–9, 45–6n, 66, feminist politics, 9, 35, 38, 43,
68, 72–3, 79, 81, 82n, 88, 94, 118, 132–3, 190
102, 116, 136, 155, 175 identity politics, 17, 155, 164
Nehamas, Alexander, 159, 166n politics of failure, 137
Neimanis, Astrida, 66–8, 70n, 85, queer politics, 137
97–8n radical politics, 15, 129–30
Nietzsche, Friedrich, xix n, 49, 56, Pollock, Griselda, 119, 125n
60, 69n, 88, 91, 97n, potestas, xi, xvi
159, 162–3, 167n psychoanalysis, ix, xii, 118,
Nigianni, Chrysanthi, 65, 136 124n, 133–4, 141, 143,
nomadism, x-xviii 147, 149, 153n
normative, xiv, 41, 45n, 132–3, 147, Freudian psychoanalysis, 124n,
156, 161, 188, 205 153n
heteronormative, 41–2, 134, 156 Puar, Jasbir K., 205, 207n

Occupy Wall Street (OWS), 3–6, queer, ix, 4, 6, 12n, 24, 27–8, 30, 34n,
130–3, 136–7, 183–6, 193n 35–6, 39, 41–4, 47n, 122, 125n,
Oedipus, 147, 149 131–2, 134–7, 151–3, 167n, 176,
anti-oedipal, xv, 137 184, 186–7, 192–3, 193n, 207n
de-oedipalization, xiv, 156 Quinlivan, Davina, 66, 68, 101
oedipal, xi, 68, 135, 155–7, 165
pre-oedipal, xi race, xiii, xix n, 6, 18, 22, 24, 25,
re-oedipalization, 134 30–1, 32n, 34n, 69n, 125n,
Ortega, Mariana, 205, 207n 169–71, 180n, 181n, 188, 191,
otherness, 22, 72, 76, 82–3n, 97n 196–9, 201–2, 205, 206n
racism, xix n, 12n, 15, 16, 17, 21,
Parisi, Luciana, 46n 27, 30–1, 135, 206n, 207n
Parmenides, 56 realism, 58–9
patriarchal, 7–8, 10, 15–17, 35–6, reason, 10, 54, 56, 58–9, 72–5, 77,
39, 42, 54, 73, 103–4 80, 82–3n, 146, 152–3, 161,
heteropatriarchal, 44 165, 172, 203
patriarchy, xi, 16, 21, 36–7, 44, 51 man of reason, 82n
Pearson, Keith Ansell, xix n refusal, 52, 80, 135–7, 138–9n,
perception, 66, 101–5, 107, 109, 134 170, 179, 183–93
phallogocentrism, xi, 54, 88 future of refusal, 79
phenomenology, 12n, 41, 82n politics of refusal, 11n

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 INDEX 221

religion, xi, 197–8 heterosexuality, x, xi, 67, 122,

representation, viii, xii, 5, 15, 19–20, 147–53
25, 68, 80, 89, 129, 132–3, homosexuality, xi, 144, 148–9,
135–6, 171–2, 177, 179 155–6, 169
reproduction, xv, 20, 36–8, 42, Silliman, Ron, 51
45–6n, 67, 78–9, 89, 122, singularity, 5, 110n, 196
125n, 150, 160–1, 185, 199 slavery, 132, 172, 181n, 186–8,
Retallack, Joan, 49, 51, 56, 58, 59, 194n, 196
60n, 61n social media, 136, 183
reterritorialization, 135, 160, YouTube, 130, 192
162, 167n Facebook, 129, 130, 139n, 140n
rhizome, 160 Twitter, 44, 130
rhizomatic, xvi, 96, 132 Söderbäck, Fanny, 12n, 131, 137
Rich, Adrienne, xii, xviii n space, x, xvii, 4, 6, 10, 12n,
15, 30–1, 40–1, 45n, 47n,
science, xv, 14, 45–6n, 60n, 78, 80, 54–5, 57, 66, 73, 82n, 85,
98n, 110n, 115, 116, 193n 87, 91, 93, 96, 101–9, 115–16,
gay science, 69n, 167n 119, 121, 123n, 132, 134–6,
new science, 82n 139n, 143–4, 149, 170–1,
technoscience, 125n 174–5, 178–80, 184,
sensation, 44, 47n, 103–4 192–3, 198
sex, x, xi, xv, 27, 33n, 37, 39, borderspace, 119, 124–5n
41, 44, 46–7n, 50, 55, 57–8, cyberspace, 82n
61n, 67, 69–70n, 76, 97n, imaginary space, 36
102, 117–18, 122, 123–5n, time-space, 59
135, 147–8, 150, 156–7, Spillers, Hortense J., 187–8, 194n
160–2, 164–5, 175, 181n, Spinoza, Baruch, xviii, xix
183, 186, 190, 194n, 197, Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty,
199–200, 201–2 90, 97n, 133, 186, 194n,
the fi rst sex, 200 204, 207n
intersex, 44 Stein, Gertrude, 51, 54
the second sex, x, 35, 45n, 138, subaltern, 4, 35, 186–7, 194n
198, 200, 202–4, 206n suffragette, 24, 26, 29, 32n
the third sex, 7, 137 swerve, 49–50, 52–3, 57–8
sexism, 54
heterosexist, xi, 204 (see also temporality, xiv, 12n, 31, 32n, 35–6,
homophobia) 39, 40–4, 45n, 47n, 143–4
sexual difference, x, xvi, 16, 20, 67, time, x, xii, xv, xvii, 7, 9, 10, 12n,
78, 96, 102, 114–15, 133–4, 15, 23–5, 29, 31, 41, 45n, 59,
137, 141–53, 158, 162 (see also 87, 91, 96, 115, 117, 124n,
difference) 134, 142–4, 149, 170
sexuality, 20, 22, 32n, 35, 47n, 79, aleatory time, 7, 9, 32n
118, 134–5, 140n, 147–53, cyclical time, 8, 35, 38
156, 160, 165n, 169–70, 177, interruptive time, 7, 9, 36, 38, 43
181–2n, 190, 197–8, 202 linear time, 8, 9, 37
cissexual, 33n matrixial time, 119

9780230118317_19_ind.indd 221 7/18/2012 5:09:00 PM

 222 INDEX

time—Continued second wave feminism, ix, 4, 12n,

queer time, 12n, 47n, 207n 24, 27–8, 32n, 33n, 36, 40,
revolutionary time, 12n 42, 72, 198, 205
transcendence, ix, x, 35, 41, 54, 201 third wave feminism, 4, 11n, 12n,
transgenre, 7, 134–5, 156–8, 23–4, 27–8, 30, 32n, 33n,
160–5, 165n 34n, 197–9, 202, 204, 205
Trier, Lars von, 65–9, 69–70n Weinstein, Jami, 131, 134–5, 137–8
Whitford, Margaret, 97n
unconscious, 118, 134, 142–50, Wicomb, Zoë, 172, 181n
152, 153n, 176 Wolf, Maryanne, 50, 60n
undutiful, ix-xviii, 3–5, 9–11, 130, Wollstonecraft, Mary, 71, 82n
133, 138 (see also daughter) woman, xi, xviii n, 9, 12n, 22, 28,
universality, 107, 133 36, 38–9, 45n, 52, 56, 66–8,
utopia, xvii, 118 73, 77–9, 81, 82–3n, 88–90,
utopianism, 45n, 109, 114–15 95, 97n, 102, 106, 115, 117,
119, 124n, 135, 151, 164,
virtuality, 14–15, 93 171, 176–7, 186–7, 189, 191,
vitalism, xvii, 74, 76–7 196–203, 205, 206–7n
womb, 40, 88, 114, 118–21, 123n,
Walia, Harsha, 184–5, 193n 164, 175, 178
Walker, Alice, 32n Woolf, Virginia, 51, 80–1, 83n,
Walker, Rebecca, 32n 87, 97n
Wallace, David Foster, 56
Warhol, Andy, 191 Xaba, Makhosazana, 135, 170–4,
wave, vii, ix, 11n, 28, 31, 32, 88, 179, 180n, 181n
95, 108
fi rst wave feminism, 4, 26, 200 Žižek, Slavoj, 4, 185, 193n

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