Cassandra Smith
On Athena’s Coming Out Story: the possibilities and problematics
of a Queer relation to the Maternal Body of Irigarayan feminisms
Before I begin to discuss the theoretical side to this paper, which in the broadest sense
explores the possibilities and problematics of the relationship of the queer person to
the maternal body(which I here read as the material, biologically female body), I
would like to contextualise my interest in this theme, which was sparked by the
debates surrounding whether trans-gendered and trans-sexual people should be
included in women only spaces, such as the debate surrounding the London Reclaim
the Night march which took place in 2007. These debates problematised a coherent
lineage between (biologically) female/female- identified/feminine-presenting/woman
and feminist. They raised the questions of whether one’s position as a feminist is
validated by the degree to which one’s body coheres along these lines and, if so, what
are the implications for those people who identify in ways that may dislocate from the
axis of alignment outlined above, but are simultaneously subject to the kind of
violence against the material body that works along gendered lines, that works
through through the (ef)feminization, such as rape (which Reclaim the Night is a
protest against)? In this paper I take up Amber Jacob’s text On Matricide: Myth,
Psychoanalysis and the Law of the Mother, and the mythology that it explores, in so
far as they thematize these concerns, keeping in mind the question of, as a subject
who seeks representation within both a queer and feminist politics, as I have
represented them here, how am I to negotiate my split subjectivity?
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One of the core myths explored in On Matricide is that of the Rape of Metis In this
myth Zeus, (who is emblematic of the patriarchal), attempted to seduce Metis, (the
matriarchal), but she refused his advances and attempted to escape him by changing
shape. Ultimately, however, she was raped by him, which was symbolized by her
being swallowed, and Athena was born as a result. Jacobs interprets this myth as an
allegory for occlusion of the matriarchal by the patriarchal within contemporary social
and political relations, and their relationship towards the filial. Working within this
framework, this paper extends this analysis in a particular direction, focusing on the
representation of the mother-daughter relationship within this myth as allegorical of
contemporary relationships between Feminism(s); in other words, I examine how the
myth thematizes the concerns and issues raised in my opening discussion of
contemporary feminist politics.
I identify the work of Jacobs and Irigaray (around whom Jacobs largely bases her
work) with the maternal and the work of Butler and queer theorists as the filial. I take
up this myth as a kind of “coming out story ”, where the trope of “coming out” acts
as a point of co-incidence between the mythological, the feminist and queer as
continuous with each other, and the feminist and queer as ruptured from each other.
Athena did after all “come out” of Zeus’s head, but furthermore, to say queer “came
out” of feminism emphasises how they are continuous with each other and how
feminism gave rise to, or even, we could say, gave birth to queer; on the other hand
to say that queer came out as queer in relation to feminism emphasises “coming out”
as a point of rupture between the two, and adopts the notion of queer as the assertion
of a new identity as distinct from the implicitly more conservative values of
2
feminism. Thus this particular coming out story is open to multiple positionalities and
outcomes.
The content of the myth is for me a powerful metaphor for the relationship between
Irigarayan and Butlerian feminist politics, and specifically for the limits of their
scope and radical potential, limits which I believe is mutually constitutive and based
upon the exclusions of the insights of one from the other; in other words ,even as
Jacob’s text identifies “a lack of symbolic mediation between mother and daughter as
a result of the present structural configurations underlying the patriarchal symbolic”1
and seeks to establish a between women symbolic paradigm based on a
depathologisation of the mother-daughter realtionship , both the text itself, and my
interpretation of it, are shaped by our maternal/filial positions within this cultural
formation, and our work carries its subsequent pathologies and unconsciously repeat
its tropes.
“To look back through one’s feminist “mothers” is no simple strategy; it may
bring as much conflict as support”2 .
Bearing this in mind, I experienced this text as linguistically violent: as reiterating in a
textual space the mode of exclusion that I had previously encountered in physical
space, not so much because its project is about “the theorization of a between womensymbolic paradigm”3, but more-so because of it’s somewhat defensive refusal of those
1
Jacobs, Amber On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanal;ysis and the Law of the Mother, Columbia
University Press, New York:2007, p.25
2
Jacobs, On Matricide, p.26
3
Jacobs, On Matricide, p 6
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post-structuralist theories that interrogate the status of what “woman” means.4 I found
myself asking “Does this text include me? On the other hand I was drawn to its
potential for a politics that acknowledges the materiality of the body- this spoke to an
aporia within a queer politics that can at times feel “disembodied”. I will address the
exclusions and aporias of each text in turn, as based upon this “lack of symbolic
mediation between mother and daughter”, and with a view to re-establishing this
relationship between maternally and queer identified feminisms.
The repression of the filial within On Matricide
The pathological structuring of the mother is also necessarily that of the daughter,
who I believe becomes erased: after all, in the myth of Metis, where is the daughter
who knows of or acknowledges her mother? What would it have meant for Metis to
have had a daughter other than she for whom matricide was a birthright5, and what
kind of a daughter would she have been? However, these are question to be put aside
here and answered within the larger project of my dissertation. Here, I will limit my
comments to the way that I feel On Matricide engages with queer theory in such a
way as to position it as a daughter constructed through a pathological transference.
In On Matricide performativity is fundamentally misread as a naïve and superficial
strategy that treats sex and gender identities as a “performance that could be literally
played with to explode normative stereotypes and constraining models”6 and uses
such performance to avoid the realities of pain and loss. The queer daughter, as agent
of performativity, emerges as an act within the “post-modern circus” “cart-wheeling
4
Jacobs, On Matricide, pp 6-7
Jacobs, On Matricide p.63
6
Jacobs, On Matricide p.10
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4
and dancing around different sexual positions” “juggling” with “which particular
version of femininity to inhabit from day to day”7. I disagree: performativity is not a
matter of being liberated from ones original identity, and being giving free reign in a
kind of dressing up box of identity, as this reading seems to implies, but rather of
there being no “original” grounding identity (which this reading seems to assume
there is), and of all identities, be they “straight” or “drag” or whatever else, as being
constructed through accumulative reiteration. However, it is not my task here to go
into the nuances of Butler’s theory of performativity. What I am interested in how
Jacob’s reading functions as a weak point within an otherwise exceptionally rigorous
intellectual analysis, a kind of blind spot or zone of occlusion or disavowal of the
daughter, and therefore a zone that will yield richly to further analysis.
It is my contention that pathological responses to the daughter coalesce around
Jacobs’s interpretation of performativity. Could the interpretation of performativity as
playful and naïve be an attempt to “deal with” Butler (as we all seem compelled to do)
by strategically undermining her intellectual gravitas? Furthermore the fact that
Butler’s work is dealt with through being collapsed with the work of Finzi and Rosi
Braidotti, where the work of these three theorists is referred to as “early Butleriantype theories”, and the very limitation of Jacob’s analysis to Butler’s early work, seem
to be strategies for minimizing and over-simplify her work through condensation and
through a quite literal delimiting of her to her “early development” in terms of her
oeuvre. Through Jacob’s treatment of Butler emerges a pattern of her being
theoretically dealt with through being infantilised. Whilst this is interesting in and of
itself, its takes on further significance when we consider that not only are multiple or
7
Jacobs, On Matricide pp. 11-12
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fluid identities celebrated elsewhere in the text, as it calls for “ a structural economy
that could accommodate more than one mode of symbolization”8 and adopts as a
metaphor for a new female symbolic the toy image of a kaleidoscope where “we have
a diverse and unpredictable dynamic sequence of constellations that are not predetermined or programmed to result in an integrative master pattern”9 (as opposed to
the jigsaw of a rigid symbolic), but furthermore, the strategy that Metis used in her
attempts to escape her rape by Zeus could itself be called a kind of strategic
performativity. My point in showing how instances of performativity and fluid
identities that are variously labelled as “good” and “bad” in fact mirror each other in
this text is to subvert mother/daughter binary, and to expose that here, as elsewhere,
mother and daughter are always present within each other.
Butlerian Theory as cut off from the maternal
Within the cultural paradigm of a pathological cutting off from the mother, an erasure
of the myth of Metis has been inherited through texts as they have systematically cited
the birth of Athena as a mythological origin. In this section I wish to illustrate how
Butler’s theory of representation and matter also repeats this pathological cutting off.
If we take Zeus, in his role as the father who mediates the child’s passage into the
symbolic, as representative of the function of representation (the signifier) and Metis
as representative of matter (the signified), then the fact that Athena is birthed out of
the head or the intellect, and that the conditions of her birth prevent her from knowing
about her mother, represent symbolically Butler’s thesis that representation always
already frames experience, to the extent that even that which we posit as material,
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9
Jacobs, On Matricide p.29
Jacobs, On Matricide p.29
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where materiality functions as the other of discourse, “retains that positing as its
constitutive condition”10. However, Clare Colebrook has discussed how the work of
Lloyd, Gatens and Grosz challenge Butler’s conflation of the way that a thing is
known with the way in which the thing is, in an attempt to locate resistance not in
how the subject engages with or troubles “the symbolic”, which Colebrook terms as
“the critical possibility”, but rather in how the subject adopts modes of being which
bring them closer to the material or ontological which has been foreclosed from
them- “the speculative possibility”. This speculative possibility, in it’s resonance with
the project of ecriteure feminine to articulate a language that in fact enacts the
materialities of female experience, serves as a potential point of mediation between
Butler and Irigaray that retains Irigaray’s ontological insights, whilst not necessarily
constraining the axis of gender alignment along which they play.
10
Colebrook, Claire, From Radical Representations to Corporeal Becomings:The Feminist Philosophy
of Lloyd, Grosz, and Gatens, Hypatia 15.2(2000), 76-93, p. 78
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