Ecriture feminine...2nd WAVE of feminism...

[Gopa B. Caesar]

What is PATRIARCHY?

1. male domination and limitation of women in society;
2. male superiority in ideologies (e.g. Aristotle declared that "the female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities"; St. Thomas Aquinas:woman is an ‘imperfect man’; Confucius）
3. in language and literature (e.g. chairman, the universal "he"; God as "He";
4. in sex and biology (women as rapable, receptacle of sperm)

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Male Dominance in Literature

-Predominance of male writers
-Women limited to writing in certain genres
 (e.g. diary, letter, romance).
-Stereotypical presentation of women

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Male Dominance in Literature (2): Images of Women

1) as objects of desire--e.g. "Araby," "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" "To His Coy Mistress" and courtly love poetry, “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”
2) as symbol--"Young Goodman Brown," "Grecian Urn" "To Autumn"
3) as Other or Villain – Snow White’s Stepmother; Fatal Attraction
4) women inferior or subordinate--Eve, romance (knight and lady), 007 films and the other Hollywood films (Working Girl, Coma, Silence of the Lamb)

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Male Dominance in the Other Cultural Products

-Classical Nude Paintings
-Hollywood Films 
 (contemporary ambivalent ones: Switch)
-Music videos
-Commercials, advertisement

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Ways of Seeing by J. Berger

-nudity is a sign, different from being naked.
-The nude in traditional oil paintings either look at "us" (the spectator-owners in the past) or look at the mirror
-The nude shows signs of submissiveness (e.g. being languid, passive and thus available).

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Dream World (on music videos)

Who gets to tell the story about sexuality in music videos?
Roles of women: musicians, back-up singers, dancers, part of the story, subject of the song.
Main functions: to be looked at, decorative
Behavior: always sexually aroused and active; nyphomaniac
Activities: getting in and out of clothes; available for peeping.
Even female artists are trapped by this male way of looking at women.   

[Gopa B. Caesar]

“The Female Body”

“The female body has many uses.  It’s been used as a door-knocker, a bottle-opener, as a clock with a ticking belly, as something to hold up lampshades, as a nutcracker, just squeeze the brass legs together and out comes your nut.  . . . “  Margaret Atwood

[Gopa B. Caesar]

The Irigaray Reader
Introduction to Section I (by Margaret Whitford)

Patriarchy (defined by Irigaray)—“an exclusive respect for the genealogy of sons and fathers, and the competition between brothers” (Sexes et parentes, p.202) maternal genealogy absent in western thought and institutions coexistence of two genealogies (patriarchy and matriarchy), not simply a reversal or a replacement (p. 23)

[Gopa B. Caesar]

“[W]hereas de Beauvoir emphasizes access to the world of men (equality), Irigaray is suggesting the creation of difference” (p.24).

develops de Beauvoir’s idea of Woman as Other (I: the ‘other of the same’, the necessary negative of the male subject, all that he has repressed and disavowed.)
 
“but a self-defined woman who would not be satisfied with sameness, but whose otherness and difference would be given social and symbolic representation. Each sex would then be ‘other’ for the other sex” (p. 24-25).

[Gopa B. Caesar]

“Equal or Different?” (1986; 1988; 1990)
  “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother” (conference on “Women and Madness”, Montreal, 1981)—
 â€œwestern culture is founded not on parricide (as Freud hypothesized in Totem and Taboo, but on matricide” (p.25).
I’s reinterpretation of the mythology (Clytemnestra) = the installation of patriarchy, built over the sacrifice of the mother and her daughters.
“The major cultural taboo is on the relationship with the mother” (p.25).
 â€œThe stress on Oedipus, on castration, serves to conceal another severance, the cutting of the umbilical cord to the mother”

[Gopa B. Caesar]

-hatred from men and archaic projection of male imaginary (woman as devouring monster threatening madness and death) has made women suffer culturally
-“This relationship with the mother needs to be brought out of silence and into representation”
-contraception and the legalization of abortion = control women’s reproduction = women’s identity as women not as mothers (role as ‘reproducer of children, as nurse, as reproducer of labour-power’)
-warns the daughters against repeating the murder of the mother.
-To move out the role of ‘guardians of the body’ for men
-To put into words and symbolic representations the primitive relation with the mothers’ body.
-Speaking about the relationships between women = create a new identity within the symbolic order

[Gopa B. Caesar]

reiterated in “Women-Mothers: the Silent Substratum of the Social Order” (interview)
overlap the preoccupations of other English-speaking feminists:
1. Women and madness
2. the inadequacy or failure of the ‘sexual revolution’ from women’s point of view 
3. the importance of consciousness raising as a practice
4. the analysis of the family as a social device for appropriating women’s labour
5. the mother-daughter relationship
6. the attack on psychoanalysis (a discourse which normalize patriarchy); the re-evaluation of hysteria (as the unheard voice of the woman who can only speak through somatic symptoms)
7. Second-wave (post 1968) women (both as daughters and mothers) must liberate themselves with their mothers (p.26)

[Gopa B. Caesar]

** the end of 1970—Anglo-American feminism: began to theorize women’s difference (as a source of cultural possibility rather than simply as a source of oppression).
I = examining equality, mother’s function (as the infrastructure of Western civilisation), and the obliteration of women as women.
 Speculum, 1974
Catholic countries (France and Italy) = the importance of attending to motherhood as an institution, sanctioned by the divine
“Volume with contours” (extract from Speculum)
male imaginary, philosophical logos and system (of discourse and representation… ) that confine/define women

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Dominant fantasy of the mother/Male Representation of Women = a closed volume = a ‘receptacle for the (re)production of sameness’ and the ‘the support of (re)production
men’s desire = immobilize women (control and possession), appropriate by masculinity
men’s fear of the ‘open container’, the ‘incontournable volume’, the fluid, the mobile, not a solid ground/earth, or not mirror for subject
 contemporary theory in the feminine = a fresh attempt at terrorialization of the maternal-feminine
I = an other woman (exterior to all these masculine metaphorizations) = shake the foundation of patriarchy

[Gopa B. Caesar]

I = oppose an ‘other woman’, a woman ‘without common measure’ (who cannot be reduced to the qualifying measurements by which she is domesticated in male systems, who exceeds attempts to pin her down and confine her within a theoretical system, whose volume is ‘incontournable’ = against Lacanian image of woman as a hole, oppose the image of contiguity of two lips (mother-daughter, mother-father, maternal-paternal genealogies) = woman’s desire could be represented for-itself (not in male representation) (p.28)