From Aoife:
“If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop?” –Mary Wollstonecraft
We at Gender Apostates are a diverse lot; despite this, we find encouragement and support in that — while acknowledging the differences in our varied backgrounds and experiences — we collaborate through the honest sharing of our experiences. As individuals, who are both trans and not trans, we do not pretend to share a singular point of view but enact, by acknowledging the ways in which gender has hurt and limit us, to push past the rhetoric of identity and category as a cooperative endeavour.
Every Thursday at Gender Apostates is Feminist Reading day. Last week, my very dear friend Sass shared some of her favorite authors and the impact they had on the raising of her consciousness. Week 2, and it’s Aoife’s turn! This exercise in creating lists, while quite appealing to the book nerd within, is not intended to canonize essential texts, or to promote certain writings as superior to others. Rather, these are personal reflections on the women whose words have instructed my awareness. I am a work in progress.
1.
“The Laugh of Medusa” — Hélène Cixous (1976)
“I, too, overflow . . . . my body knows unheard-of songs.”
I love teaching Cixous: her rambunctious confrontations with mental health, “hysteria”, and the uniquenesses of female embodiment are deliberate challenges of ugliness to the purified male versions of “womanhood”. Cixous’ writing leaks and pustulates, finds laughter in disgust and gorgeousness of abhorrence. Ecstastic and physical, her philosophy tests the limits of male language by invoking the vagina as the unsayable and unregardable, contradicting the censorship of a woman’s body as a conduit of shame.
French post-war feminism abounds in the robust polemic of laughter, the medusa mirroring the accusation of hysteria. Similarly in Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) Luce Irigaray indicates that language of embodiment always work against female self-awareness. The most consistent act of misogyny, in the global project of woman-hating, is to rob women of the very language necessary to assess the realities of their own bodies.
2.
Sexual Politics — Kate Millett (1970)
“Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.”
The early 1990s produced several RadFem critiques of transgenderism that have not, to my mind, been adequately rebutted. Sheila Jeffreys (1990): “Transsexual males want to become their image of what women should be”; Judith Butler (1990): MtF transsexuals are “disavowed homosexuals”.
Kate Millett is a theorist who examines the materiality of disempowerment and discontent. Indeed, considered by some as one of the most important RadFem thinkers, Millett unflinchingly locates the sites of male violence not just as an idea or a concept, but as a war upon female bodies in which identity is a brutalized gratuity offered in exchange for material invalidation and sex-based oppression. With such a cohesive class analysis of biological sex as a caste system of control, Millett is radical in that her analysis of corporeality emphasizes the body as the condition of violence. One can’t identify her way out of oppression.
No wonder “Gender Studies” departments won’t teach Millett! Indeed, I was quite frankly shocked to peruse Talia Bettcher’s forthcoming inclusion in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory in regards to transgenderism and radical feminism. Bettcher readily cites Namaste, Bornstein, Serano, and every other queer-vaudeville “transfeminist” theorist of the last decade, but only bothers to mention Raymond as a brief nod to radical feminism. Kate Millett (one shakes a head at this) didn’t even make Bettcher’s shallow bibliography.
Kate Millett assigned a kind of psychotic intervention to transsexuality, as the physical space in which the dominant male imagination meets the technology of sexed inventions. Shulamith Firestone’s Marxism provides a useful accompanying analysis as to how female biology, which is a thing not a “notion”, becomes commodified as artefact and token of exchange for patriarchal consumption.
3.
The Dialogue — St Catherine of Siena (1378)
“If you are what you should be, you will set the whole world ablaze!”
That I’m a practising Catholic is not a secret (and continually a topic of fascination for some) and so no surprises that my respect and devotion to the women doctors of the church would be evident here. A product of premodern Italian political contexts, St Catherine’s Dialogue is not immediately a ‘feminist’ work in the sense that most of my readers are expecting … theologians can’t decide if she is or not. But the contemplative pursuit of personal independence as a challenge to male social authority is evident in this work as St Catherine shrugs off external expectations for female writers and embraces her own voice in communication with God. Historians are re-evaluating the rise of feminism, dating it to pre-Enlightenment activism through women’s intellectual lives. St Catherine of Siena’s insistence on voice and dialogue, of confrontation through assertion and question, was a personalized gravitas that, by its very conception, refused to take male social authority as an absolute given.
4.
“Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” — Chandra Mohanty (1986)
“The practice of solidarity foregrounds communities of people who have chosen to work and fight together.”
Mohanty is a brilliant critic whom I have taught many times, and a very useful introduction to postcoloniality, race, and feminism as a globalist movement.
Mohanty eschews both the reticence of an Asian nationalism as well as a facile “intersectionality” identitypolitik. Concerned with a coalitional praxis that confront the political entanglements of ethnicity and collectivity, her critique examines how “identity” is in fact an organized call to bad-faith constancy.
It’s curious to me how transgenderists will speak of persons of colour as somehow a stable, coherent, and consistent notion … but somehow women is an open-access floating signifier to be claimed by word alone. Mohanty shows that #SharedGirlhood, while not universal in an essentialist sense, is nonetheless best understood as a dialectic in which “the white woman” and the “third world woman” are mutual contrivances that satiate the patriarchal metric of femininity. As Mohanty assesses,
“Each of us carries around those growing up places, the institutions, a sort of backdrop, a stage set. So often we act out the present against the backdrop of the past, within a frame of perception that is so familiar, so safe that is is terrifying to risk changing it even when we know our perceptions are distorted, limited, constricted by that old view.”
5.
The Bell Jar — Sylvia Plath (1963)
“I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”
Oh, the limitless ramblings I could make on Plath, feminist poetics, and women’s life writings under the sacrificial crux of the male gaze.
Perhaps what is most compelling in our time, revisiting The Bell Jar, is Plath’s merciless evisceration of liberal feminism. Chosen in a competition, Plath’s barely veiled alter-ego travels to New York to work on a woman’s magazine — because we all know nothing says empowerment like cover photos and America’s media elite, wine coolers and a shopping trip to NYC! Caitlyn Jenner is a national hero for simply buying outfits that very few actual women could afford.
Plath would shake her head at Jenner as a gussied up pantomime of the plastic comeuppence. The promise of choice as personal liberation proves to be illusory almost immediately: Plath’s mental health collapses inward, becoming claustrophobic and suffocating even as the expansive panorama of fame, attention, and external validation offer temporary rewards. How free is a choice to go left or right if the end result is to stay within the maze?
People refuse to accept that identity is not a personal construction but an intersubjective negotiation. As an antithetical autobiography that attacks the eat/pray/love dramatics of neoliberal self-help through identity, Plath’s split persona — between public darling of approval and personal hell of depression and self-denial — demonstrates the painful conundrum that gender inflicts upon female bodies.
—
I would say, out of the writings cited above, what interests me overall is they address the ethics of encounter: do we dare to try to know someone who is not ourself? We must: that is the moral crucible of letting go of identity.