This final page of the lesson on sexual difference asks you to think about the theories of four contemporary feminist philosophers, political theorists and cultural thinkers.
1. Rosi Braidotti’s idea of the nomadic subject.
2. Gayatri Spivak’s view of “strategic essentialism” in feminism.
3. Donna Haraway’s ideas in a manifesto for cyborgs.
4. Nancy Fraser’s ideas of recognition and redistribution.
Each one of these theories is different but they outline a possibility for thinking differently about woman/women; nature/culture; subject/Other; and changing women’s cultural, political and social relations with the world around them.
While a brief summary of one idea in their thinking is outlined below.
Watch the videos to find out more about their thought and ideas in their own words.
Rosi Braidotti’s Nomadic Subject
Rosi Braidotti outlines her ideas of a nomadic subject as a “situated, postmodern, culturally differentiated understanding of the subject” and this is combined with an analysis of the situated position of a female feminist political subject in her book Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (Columbia University Press, 1994). This book explores how feminism should develop a nomadic consciousness, re-examining the relations between identity, subjectivity and epistemology (the production of knowledge) while employing a post-structuralist use of sexual difference and making a critique of the gender-blindness of much post-structural theory. The book affirms the necessity of developing new ways of thinking and conceiving of feminism in terms of new feminist figurations: i.e. redefining subjectivity as a new form of corporeal materiality “by emphasizing the embodied and therefore sexuality differentiated structure of the speaking subject”. Her vision of the nomadic subject is presented as an iconoclastic myth or political fiction, redeploying Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notions of the nomad and associated de-territorialisation whose ideas of “becoming” and “lines of escape” are highly influential in her thinking. The nomadic subject as female feminist subject becomes a subversion of the “conventions that define the nomadic state, not the literal act of travelling”.
Chapter 8 of the book, “Sexual Difference as a nomadic political project” outlines how both theories of sexual difference and gender theorists have posited opposing positions in the last forty years and she situates her own theorisation in relation to overcoming fixed theoretical positions from the 1990s between them. She is clear that feminists must affirm the asymmetry that exists in the relations between men and women but that theories of sexual difference can be a powerful factor in understanding this asymmetry. In Braidotti’s words, feminist theory must negotiate the “multiplicity of variables of definition of female subjectivity: race, class, age, sexual preference, and lifestyles count as major axes of identity…the situated specific embodied nature of the feminist subject, whole rejecting biological or psychic essentialism.”
This chapter outlines a three-fold movement in feminist theory over the last 40 years while emphasising how this mapping provides a model that our thought continues to enter at any level or any moment.
The first level : sexual difference is constructed across a difference between a phallologocentric subject against which woman can only be positioned as “the lack”/excess/”other-than”/ subject.
Feminism’s response here can be found in the criticism of claims to universalism which can be seen as male-identified, evident in Simone de Beauvoir and in Judith Butler but it is also visible in Luce Irigaray’s ideas regarding the positioning of woman as the “unrepresentable” other. Therefore, feminist responses to the position of woman as “other” has been to turn this negative positioning into a critique of the system itself.
The second level: sexual difference as “woman as the Other” as both an institution and a representation versus “real-life women”, their experiences, their embodiment and their situated knowledges alongside recognition of the multiplicity of differences between women (race/age/class etc).
The key point here is the recognition of differences between and amongst women and finding adequate forms of recognition and acknowledgement of these differences without falling into relativism or tokenism. As she argues: “the feminist subject is historical because it is involved in patriarchy by negation; but it is also linked to female identity, to the personal”…”Feminism requires both an epistemological and a political distinction between woman and feminist” –and she goes on to argue this is the foundational basis of feminism.
The third level: Each real-life woman (n.b. not “Woman” as ideal/Other) or Female Feminist subject is a multiplicity in her self, slit, fractured, a network of levels of experience and full of identity in terms of identifications as well as in an imaginary relation to many variables, age, class, race, sexual preference and sexualities.
This third level represents her re-reading of embodied subjectivity in which the body always “exceeds representation” but also how individuals have a specific set of embodied experiences fixed in specific memories and recollections that remains always as a genealogy in process. Complexity, contradictions as well as confusions mark the constitution of subjectivity conceived in this mode and link it to the always “becoming-subject”. In this way, the project of feminism is presented as a continuing possibility.
Gayatri Spivak’s view of “strategic essentialism” in feminism.
Spivak’s discussion of “strategic essentialism” can be found across several chapters of her book, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (Routledge, 1990).
Her arrival at this term to argue for why feminism requires “women” as a strategic identity (a necessary represention) in order to stage feminist politics is closely related to her views on representation as proxy and portrait (already raised in Lesson 3) and her post-colonial critique of Western Imperialism, especially regarding ideas of what is named as universal and specific in Enlightenment thought.
For Spivak, to name oneself as a ‘deconstructionist’ or a ‘feminist’ is in itself a form of essentialism: a reduction to a recognisable political position as an essence – a move which is not only generalising but universalising. This is because positions are always identifiable in and through particular representations of them. In this approach, she is following Jacques Derrida’s attention to how a method is identified with its proper name and at the same time offering a deconstruction of it which draws attention to the epistemic violence which excludes Others in this naming. Her critique of the closures of post-structuralist thought in relation to Imperialism also follows from this close attention to how textuality and discourse not only name and generalise but also seek to universalise experiences and she employs strategies of reversal and displacement to question this and expose the limits of “worlding the world” in this way.
What matters (strategically) is whether this representation speaks for someone else – as a proxy – silencing others while claiming to represent them (a role politicians frequently perform) or whether it is claimed as a portrait (a representation of / for/ by a speaking subject). This distinction is very important in one of her major essays: ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ which focuses on how Third World Women are subaltern subjects spoken for and about, rather than heard as speaking political subjects.
‘It seems to me that when one thinks about the question of women or women specifically as sexed subject either in terms of psychoanalysis or in terms of counter-psychoanalysis, what it leaves out is the constitution of women as sexed subject outside of the arena of psychoanalysis. This is one of the things I am trying to search out. Then you begin to see how completely heterogeneous the field of the woman elsewhere is, because you have to focus on regulative psycho-biographies which are very situation/culture-specific indeed; and that effort is one way of using our disciplinary expertise, to see that the constitution of the sexed subject in terms of the discourse of castration was, in fact, something that came into being through the imposition of imperialism, so that the discourse of anti-psychoanalysis is in itself the working within a field which leaves out the constitution of the female subject elsewhere.’
Gayatri Spivak in discussion with Elizabeth Grosz The Post-Colonial Critic (1990) p.9
In her own work, she regards this as ‘unlearning our privilege as loss’; one of the means to acknowledge the specificity of different women’s lives and at the same time exposing how discourses are imposed upon women – often silencing them.
Much of Spivak’s work has insisted on the value of literacy, on the value of knowledge production and on a careful and considered critique within the humanities which would expose the limits of its universalising representations for their relationships to privilege and power. This goes hand-in-hand with a recognition of the heterogeneity in international labour markets (including for women) and a strong commitment to looking at the urban sub-proletariat or the para-peripheral woman, tribal women or aboriginal women – those whose stories/voices are left out of the dominant universalising narratives.
Move to Lesson 7
Listen to Rosi Braidotti lecturing on Thinking as a Nomadic Subject ICI, Berlin: 7 October 2014.
The video here is a 4 min. clip, click on the link to reach the full lecture.
Watch: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak speak about ‘Situating Feminism’ a lecture at The Beatrice Bain Research Group, USA, 26 Feb 2010
Donna J. Haraway is a Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States. Haraway, a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies, was described in the early 1990s as a “feminist, rather loosely a neo-Marxist and a postmodernist” She is the author of numerous books and essays that bring together questions of science and feminism, such as ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ (1985) and Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective (1988). Haraway has taught Women’s Studies and the History of Science at the University of Hawaii and Johns Hopkins University. In September 2000, Haraway was awarded the highest honor given by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), the J. D. Bernal Award, for lifetime contributions to the field. Haraway’s works have contributed to the study of both human-machine and human-animal relations. Her works have sparked debate in primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology. Haraway participated in a collaborative exchange with the eminent feminist theorist Lynn Randolph from 1990 to 1996. Their engagement with specific ideas relating to feminism, technoscience, political consciousness, and other social issues, formed the images and narrative of Haraway’s book.
Video is from 2016 Anthropocene Consortium Series: Donna Haraway
The Evergreen State College Productions
Published on 27 Sep 2013 – Nancy Fraser ‘Between Marketization and Social Protection: Ambivalences of Feminism in the Context of Capitalist Crisis’
Sponsored by the United States Studies Program.
A lecture by Nancy Fraser, one of the leading political philosophers and feminist theorists practicing today.
