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;
Ii
P
ir
i;
Ewa Kuryluk, Face, 1981, from the Installation, Fall in Princeton, 1984. Kuryluk's
works are drawings; they are installations; they are sculptures. The space and
volume of the drawing is both illusory and real, both permanent and ephemeral;
the draped cotton has a sculptural presence and inhabits our space.
A FEMINIST POLITICS OF NON-IDENTITY
LESLIEWAHLRABINE
HISTORICALCONTEXT
For French intellectuals,some symptoms of this general crisis
were the Hungarianrevolt of 1956, Nikita Khrushchev'scritique
of Stalinthe same year, the Algerianwar of independence,the
U.S. war in Vietnam,the Czechoslovakianrevoltof 1968,and May
1968. Profoundlyshaken in their certaintyof being able to know
truth and understandhistory, French intellectuals of the Left
began to call into questionnot only liberalismand Marxism,as it
was then conceived, but also the very structuresunderlyingand
producingWesternthought.They sought to distancethemselves
from the structureof their thought by, as Jacques Derridasaid,
thinking "the structurality of structure,"5by questioning as
ideologicallydeterminednot just thoughtsthemselvesbut also the
operationsthat produce thoughts. The structuresof Conscious-
ness, Identity,Reason,and Logicwere all subjectedto an analytic
light that showed them to be Westernsociohistoricconstructions,
appearinguniversal and naturalthrough ideologicalimposition,
and all serving the political ends of Western and bourgeois
mastery.
This massive critique and deepening of our understandingof
ideologybegins with the structuralistmovement, inspiredby the
structuralanthropologyof Claude Lvi-Strauss and throughhim
by the linguisticsof Ferdinandde Saussure.6Cultureand society
were conceivedof as closed systemsof interrelationships modeled
on systemsof language. aIn 1971talk,"Structure, Sign,and Playin
the Discourse of the Human Sciences,"Derrida connects the
anthropologyin this critiqueto the
leading role of Levi-Strauss's
historicalcrisis in Westernculture:"Onecan assume that ethnol-
ogy could have been bornas a science only at the momentwhen a
decentering had come about, at the moment when European
culture..,. had been dislocated..,. and forced to stop considering
itself as the culture of reference."' But Derrida also marked the
Leslie Wahl Rabine 13
also, on the other hand, raises questions about our academic and
intellectual institutions, in which deconstruction and other male
poststructuralist theories receive general credit and recognition for
discoveries when parallel discoveries, developed in feminist
theory, but couched in a different code and, more pertinently,
written by women, go unnoticed and unknown. Neither of these
conclusions precludes the other.
Chodorow sees gender identity as "neithera product of biology
nor of intentional role training"22but of asymmetrical parental
bonding. Girls and boys achieve different structures of personal
and sexual identity, because in our social order, girls bond with
the same-sex parent, whereas boys bond with a different sex
parent. To achieve his personal and sexual identity, the boy must
radically break his primary identification with his mother and
achieve secondary identification with the father as a distant, in-
tellectualized representative of the masculine role. Girls, on the
other hand, break the primary bond with the mother late and in-
completely. Their adult identification with the mother is con-
tinuous with their infantile primary identification and is also based
on day-to-day intimate contact with the female parent.
As a result of these different processes, men achieve an ego
structure that defines itself "asmore separate and distinct, with a
greater sense of rigid ego boundaries."Women, on the other hand,
achieve a structure of the self with "moreflexible or permeable ego
boundaries" and define themselves "more in relation to others."23
This differential structure of the self permeates gender difference,
determining that women and men will have different ways of
relating to themselves, to others, and to the outside world.
To achieve the difficult "sense of secure masculine identity,"the
boy "represses those qualities he takes to be feminine inside
himself and rejects and devalues women and whatever he con-
siders to be feminine in the social world."z4His ego thus defines
itself not only by solid, impermeable boundaries but also by an in-
ner content of homogeneity, an affirmation of Oneness, a fear of
invading difference. In contrast, the woman's relational ego leads
her to define her identity in relation to others or, in other words, in
relation to what she is not. Because her ego is also more permeable
to her own pre-Oedipal attachment to her mother and her Oedipal
oscillation between mother and father, it also tends her toward a
more accepting relation to her own bisexuality. Thus, masculine
18 Leslie Wahl Rabine
DECONSTRUCTINGMETAPHYSICALSTRUCTURE
Chodorow'sanalysisof gendercan offera path into one of the key
concepts of deconstruction-that of diff~rance. Because meta-
physical structureproduces thought, language,and all symbolic
activity, it cannot, accordingto Derrida,simply be transcended.
But one can continuouslyunderminebipolaroppositionsby ac-
tivatingthe play of what Derridahas named diffdrance invisiblyat
work in them.
Diff~ranceis not simply a synonym of "difference," althoughthis
word enters into its multiple meanings. A noun composed from
the French verb "diff~rer," which means both to differ and to
defer, diffprancemeans literallya "differing" in space and a "defer-
ring"in time. A word that hovers between a noun form and a verb
form,between a spatialand a temporalreference,it signifiesa pro-
ductive energyand force that producesand continuesto work in-
visibly within the apparentlystable and self-identicalentities at
each pole of an opposition.By this process, each apparentlyself-
identical entity differs from itself within itself and continuously
puts off, or defers, the plenitude of its self-presence.A further
elaborationof this concept can be clarified with reference to
Chodorow'stheory of gender development.
The masculineego structureemergesas a seeminglyunifieden-
tity, accordingto Chodorow,througha rejectionof internaland
external femininity. It emerges as the boy moves to secondary
identificationwith the fatherfrom primaryidentificationwith the
mother.But within the relationof primaryidentification,the little
boy has no consciousnessof self and other, so that neitheridenti-
ty, identificationwith an other, nor the feminine exists for him.
20 Leslie Wahl Rabine
FEMINISTSTRATEGY
Drawingon deconstructionfor feministstrategy,however, would
require,I think, modifyingit quite a bit. In order to undermine
metaphysicsand bringinto play diffirance,Derridaand other de-
constructionistsengagein a strategyguidedby "indeterminacy" or
"undecidability." This strategy of textual reading and writing
evades the "metaphysical natureof takinga yes-or-noposition,"by
writingitself into an "abyss"where "substitutiongames are multi-
plied ad But
infinitum."45 the women's movementhas no choice but
to take yes-or-nopositionson specific issues and to communicate
them as unambiguouslyas possible.Yet we couldadaptto the tak-
ing of those positions a modified version of deconstructive
strategy.
Once again, this version can already be found implicit in ex-
isting feminist texts. In reading Minnie Bruce Pratt's"Identity:
Skin, Blood, Heart,"in Yoursin Struggle:ThreeFeministPerspectives
on Anti-Semitismand Racism,46Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade
Mohantyfind a feminism"withoutclaimto wholeness or finality."
But, the writers point out, instead of "aninsistence on 'indeter-
minacy' which . . . denies the critic's own situatedness in the
social,"Prattadoptsa narrativethat "forcesher to reanchorherself
repeatedlyin each of the positionsfromwhich she speaks,even as
she works to expose the illusory coherence of those positions."47
Althoughit is necessaryfor feministsto take positions,every posi-
tion can be analyzed as lacking a full truth or a fully correct
politics.
Over the past several years we have debated positions on many
Leslie Wahl Rabine 27
NOTES
11. H616ne Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine
Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken, 1981), 345-64, and The Young
First-Born (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Irigaray; Sarah Kofman, The Enigma
of Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); and Kristeva, About Chinese Women.
12. Jane Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1982), and Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
13. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1981), 25.
14. For discussions of similar issues in feminism, see Naomi Schor, "Dreaming Dissym-
metry: Barthes, Foucault, and Sexual Difference" (110); and Alice Jardine and Paul
Smith, "A Conversation" (250-51), both in Men in Feminism.
15. Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 71.
16. Jacques Derrida, "Le Facteur de la Verit6," in The Post Card, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 473.
17. Derrida, De la Grammatologie, 64, 65-66.
18. See Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience and Institution (New
York: Norton, 1976), 70-97; and Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman (New York:
Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1978).
19. Jacques Derrida, "The Double Session," in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 173-286, Glas, trans. John P. Levi, Jr. and
Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), and Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles/
Eperons: Les styles de Nietzsche, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1979).
20. Sarah Kofman, Lectures de Derrida (Paris: Galil6e, 1984), 69, 26 (my translation).
21. See Cixous, "Laugh of the Medusa."
22. Chodorow, 7.
23. Ibid., 169, 93.
24. Ibid., 165, 181.
25. Lacanian psychoanalysis is, I think, of greater interest and use to feminist theory
than Derridean deconstruction, and, not surprisingly, feminists have a much more in-
tense relation of ambivalence and outrage to this theory.
26. Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," in Writing and Difference, 197.
27. Kofman, Lectures de Derrida, 19.
28. The psychological theories of Lawrence Kohlberg assume in this context a
paradigmatic position because of Carol Gilligan's critique, based on Nancy Chodorow's
work, of his fundamental male bias. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice:
Psychological Theory and Women'sDevelopment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1982), 1-23.
29. Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," in Writing and Difference, 197.
30. Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1-16, and Revolution in Poetic Language.
31. Chodorow, 168. Sarah Kofman elaborates a psychoanalytic theory of women's
bisexuality in Enigma of Woman.
32. For a discussion of these theories of gender, see Alice Echols, "The New Feminism
of Yin and Yang," in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine
Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 439-59.
33. See Judy Houseman, "Mothering, the Unconscious, and Feminism," Radical
America 16 (November-December 1982): 47-62.
34. Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," 203.
35. Andrew Parker, "Futures for Marxism: An Appreciation of Althusser," Diacritics 15
(Winter 1985): 63-64.
36. Derrida, Positions, 94.
37. Derrida, "Women in the Beehive: A Seminar," in Men and Feminism, 194.
Leslie
Leslie Rabine
WahlWahl Rabi ne 31
31
38. Tania Modleski analyzes this practice whereby "man'man thus once again achieves
universality at the expense of women," in her critique of Jonathan Culler, On
Deconstruction:TheoryandCriticismafterStructuralism (Ithaca:CornellUniversityPress,
'Feminismand the Power of Interpretation:Some Critical
1982). See Tania Modleski, "Feminism
Readings,"in FeministStudies/CriticalStudies,ed. Teresa de Lauretis(Bloomington:In-
Studies/Critical
diana University Press, 1981), 121-38.
39. PerryAnderson,In the TracksofHistoricalMaterialism(London:Verso, 1983), 104,
91, 92-93, 92.
40. MichaelRyan,MarxismandDeconstruction: A CriticalArticulation(Baltimore:Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1984).
"TheDouble Session,"210.
41. Derrida,"The
42. Ferdinandde Saussure,Coursde linguistiquegin6rale
geindrale(Paris:Payot, 1969), 160 (my
translation).
43. Ryan, 66.
19. Fora more recent socialistfeministcritiqueof the Marxisttheory
44. Eisenstein,6, 19.
'Feminism and Marx: Integrating with the
of production, see Linda Nicholson, "Feminism
Economic,"in Feminismas Critique,ed. Drucilla Cornell and Seyla Benhabib (Min-
neapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1987), 16-30.
45. Derrida,Positions,104, "Double
'Double Session"265, 268.
46. Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and BarbaraSmith, Yoursin Struggle:Three
FeministPerspectiveson Anti-Semitism and Racism(New York:Long Haul Press, 1984).
47. BiddyMartinand ChandraTalpadeMohanty,"Feminist'FeministPolitics:What'sHome Got
to Do with It?"in FeministStudies/CriticalStudies,194.
Studies/Critical
48. Derrida, "Structure,Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,
Sciences,"
280-281.