Kristeva, Wittig, and Haraway
Day 47
““[the abject] is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that
the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that the
"I" does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime
alienation, a forfeited existence.”
Julia Kristeva (1941 – Present)
- According to Julia Kristeva in the Powers of Horror, the Abject refers to
the human reaction (the horror) to a threatened breakdown in meaning
caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between
self and other. The primary example for what causes such a reaction is the
corpse (which traumatically reminds us of our own materiality); however,
other items can elicit the same reaction: the open wound, shit, sewage, even
the skin that forms on the surface of warm milk.
- The abject "is radically excluded and," as Kristeva explains, "draws me
toward the place where meaning collapses". It is neither object nor subject;
the abject is situated, rather, at a place before we entered into the “Symbolic
Order” (acceptance of law and language, as the norm).
- "Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal
relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes
separated from another body in order to be" – Kristeva
- The abject marks what Kristeva terms a "primal repression," one that
precedes the establishment of the subject's relation to its objects of desire
and of representation, before even the establishment of the opposition,
conscious/unconscious. Kristeva refers, instead, to the moment in our
psychosexual development when we established a border or separation
between human and animal, between culture and that which preceded it.
Monique Wittig (1935 – 2003)
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Wittig was one of the first theoreticians and activists of the new
feminist movement. It was in this atmosphere of radical political
action that she completed what is often considered her most influential
work -- Les Guérillères – published in 1969.
In a variety of genres ranging from the philosophical essay ("The
Straight Mind") to the parable ("Les Tchiches et les Tchouches") she
explored the intersections of lesbianism, feminism, and literary form.
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For Wittig, gender in language is the "fictive sex." Linguistic gender
marks social convention, she says in an essay entitled "The Mark of
Gender," "cast[ing] sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping
it and violently shaping it." Thus, as women are marked by gender in
language (particularly French), so are they marked in the social world,
always particular, never universal as is "man."
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Wittig developed her ideas about what she described as "materialist
lesbianism," where lesbians represent the possibility of escaping the
category of "woman" by refusing her "role" and rejecting the
"economic, ideological, and political power of a man."
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Moreover, for Wittig, the category "woman" exists only through its
relation to the category "man," and the "women" without relation to
"men" would cease to exist. She advocated a strong Universalist
position, saying that the expression of one's identity and the liberation
of desire require the abolition of gender categories.
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Wittig identified herself as a Radical lesbian. In her work The Straight
Mind, she argued that lesbians are not women because to be a lesbian
is to step outside of the heterosexual norm of women, as defined by
men for men's ends.
Donna Haraway (1944 – Present)
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Donna Haraway's seminal work, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention
of Nature, has become the authoritative text in theorizing the politics of the posthuman, the cyborg, the techno-mythological ideal and its promised utopia(s). One
of the most influential essays in the book is entitled 'A Cyborg Manifesto:
Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century'. In
this essay, Donna Haraway introduced her metaphor of the 'cyborg', which was
to become highly influential in feminist and critical theory since the essay's first
publication in Socialist Review in 1985. In the text, which draws its title and
theme of a call to action from Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto, Haraway
utilizes the metaphor of the cyborg to make an original argument against the
presuppositions of essentialist feminism and identity theory.
The idea of the cyborg deconstructs binaries of control and lack of control over
the body, object and subject, nature and culture, in ways that are useful in
postmodern feminist thought. Haraway uses the metaphor of cyborg identity to
expose ways that things considered natural, like human bodies, are not, but are
constructed by our ideas about them. This has particular relevance to feminism,
since Haraway believes women are often discussed or treated in ways that reduce
them to bodies.
Haraway writes: "Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to
be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in
mothering and its metaphoric extensions. Only by being out of place could we
take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic
activity after all, appropriate to females."
Cyborg theory criticized traditional notions of feminism -- particularly its strong
emphasis on identity, rather than affinity. She uses the metaphor of a cyborg in
order to construct a postmodern feminism that moves beyond dualisms and moves
beyond the limitations of traditional gender, feminism, and politics.
In the Cyborg Manifesto, she writes: "The cyborg does not dream of community
on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The
cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot
dream of returning to dust."
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The concept of the cyborg is a rejection of rigid boundaries, notably those
separating "human" from "animal" and "human" from "machine." Cyborg theory
thus asserts that technology, as the artifacts of cultural evolution, merely comprise
material extensions of the material human body. This view follows from John
Locke’s logical justification for property rights, in that "mixing one's labor" with
external natural materials internalizes them and affords those materials the same
rights as one's body itself
Haraway feels that the cyborg myth has the potential for radical political action as
it frees feminists from a desperate search for similarity with one another, since
physical/epistemological boundary breaks can be extrapolated to political
boundary crossings.
Our life force flows through us and out into the objects we make, she reasoned;
thus there ought to be no distinction between the so-called real or natural
organisms that nature produces and the artificial machines that humans make. Her
conclusion: We are all cyborgs.
Cyborgs not only disrupt orderly power structures and fixed interests but also
signify a challenge to settled politics, which assumes that binary oppositions or
identities are natural distinctions. Actually those oppositions are cultural
constructions. Haraway underlines the critical function of the cyborg concept,
especially for feminist politics. The current dualistic thinking involves a "logic of
dominance" because the parts of the dualisms are not equivalent. Thus, the logic
produces hierarchies that legitimize men dominating women, whites dominating
blacks, and humans dominating animals. Instead, Haraway suggests that people
should undermine these hierarchies by actively exploring and mobilizing the
blurring of borders.
Homework Query: Using the ideas presented by these three
thinkers, explain how and why, according to Wittig, that
“Lesbians are not women…”. Hint: Include ideas of the Cyborg
and ideas of the Abject.