Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English

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

<< < (7/12) > >>

Gopa B. Caesar:
“Equal or Different?” (1986; 1988; 1990)

most claims to equality = superficial critique of culture, and utopian as a means to women’s liberation.
“The exploitation of women is based upon sexual difference, and can only be resolved through sexual difference” (p. 32).
neutralization of sex (contemporary feminists) = end of human race (divided into two genres—ensure its production and reproduction)
“Trying to suppress sexual difference is to invite a genocide (destruction of women and all values) more radical than any destruction that has ever existed in History” (p. 32).
define the value of a sex-specific genre [genre as sexuate (p. 33)] and form a culture that respects both genres

Gopa B. Caesar:
We are still in the childhood of culture: “People constantly split into secondary but murderous rivalries without realizing that their primary and irreducible division is one between two genres” (p. 33).
We must give, or restore cultural values to female subjectivity (not simply procreative) e.g. The Second Sex

Gopa B. Caesar:
The Bodily Encounter with the Mother” (conference on “Women and Madness”, Montreal, 1981)

Men-practitioners’ absence = a sign of their psychiatric practice (self-sufficient) = madness of women: their words are not heard (p 35).
Scientific discourses, serious scientific practices, therapeutic decisions and diagnoses = still the privilege of men (who define women’s function, social role, and the sexual identity)
“Each sex relates to madness in its own way” (p 35)
 â€œAll desire is connected to madness” (in the relationship with the mother—a mad desire (the ‘dark continent’ par excellence)) = shadows of our culture, it is its night and its hell

Gopa B. Caesar:
the infrastructure of western culture = women as mothers, the unacknowledged foundation of the social order
“The maternal function underpins the social order and the order of desire (satisfying the individual and collective need)  e.g. in the religious dimension of need (women = mothers)
women’s/mothers’ own desire suppressed/forbidden by the law of the father
Women’s looking for their sexual identity and the meaning of motherhood: contraception, abortion…
“western culture is founded not on parricide (as Freud hypothesized in Totem and Taboo, but on matricide” (p.25).
Freud forgot a more archaic murder of the founding of a certain order in the polis (of the primal horde)

Gopa B. Caesar:
Clytemnestra myth—
forgot the tragedy of Iphigenia
 Orestes (son) kills his mother for the establishment of a new order (commanded by the God-Father (Apollo))
The Furies = the ghosts of his mother = women in revolt, rising up like hysterics against the patriarchal power in the process of being established (p. 37).
the law of the primal horde and mythology:
 men bury women beneath the sanctuary
regulation Athenas (virgin-goddess, born of the father and obedient to his law in forsaking the mother)= perfect models of femininity (always veiled and dressed from head to toe)

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page