How nice to see Monique Wittig cited here in xmca. I remember one powerful
quote from her that went something like, "there was a time that you were
not slaves. Remember. Or failing that, invent." She is also (in)famous
in feminist theory for the statement that "lesbians are not women." Of
course, she meant by that just what we've been talking about -- lesbians
are (or can be) resisters of the feminine category system and all its
accouterments.
L*
>[Helen Beetham] Ohmigod I'm doing it, I'm actually replying to XMCA. I
>must be having
>a particularly queer day today.
>
>Jay seems to be trying to distinguish between internalisation and
>appropriation by introducing
>'intentionality' into the equation, something which runs through his
>contribution (down to the 'deliberate
>twisting'). But if, from a CHAT (and indeed a queer theory perspective)
>'I' am constituted only in and
>through discourse with others, who an 'I' and where am 'I' standing when
>'I' reject or 'twist' the
>assumptions inherent in any particular discourse, dominant or other?
>Whence the 'intentionality'?
>
>
>And maybe if we are 'queer' in any way (gender/sexuality, but also lots of
>other and linked dimensions of human variation, and degrees of
>stigmatization or danger-to-status-quo as well), then we cannot NOT twist
>as we appropriate, because we are not the 'intended readers', do not live
>and do in the ways the learning is supposed to support. And of course we
>are all queer in one way and another, fortunately.
>
>[Helen Beetham] Well all normalising discourse addresses us 'queers' as
>intended readers
> as well as all non-queers, it just addresses us differently. And isn't
> this one indication of the
>inadequacy of either 'internalisation' or 'appropriation' as terms -
>implying simple acceptance
>or rejection or even (if we 'twist' it) 'mishearing' of a particular
>message. 'It' is not the message it
>is the mode of address, Althusser's 'shout in the street' which brings us
>into existence as social
>beings. We don't respond 'yes' or 'no', we respond, 'who, me?'. And so in
>being for the other etc etc
>
>Herewith a strong hypothesis. The most radical twisting occurs by
>internalization in the queerest of us, and it is much harder and much rarer
>to get such radical twisting by deliberate appropriations or efforts to twist.
>
>[Helen Beetham] Judith Butler et al have pointed out that every body is
>queer; the so-called
>'naturalness' of the body is itself constituted in and through discourse
>and in recognising our embodied
>selves in sensory experience we can't help 'missing' ourselves on the way
>back out the door of linguistic
>representation. So who is queerer than who?
>
>If we accept that we are all differently positioned in relation to and
>within different discourses, the question
>for me is how we can resist the dominant discourses - where can we stand
>to do so? If we accept the radical
>postmodernism of e.g. Lyotard and Baudrillard there is no solution in
>collective action - which only instantiates
>new forms of power and fails to do 'justice' to the incommensurability of
>different local narratives - the extreme
>of locality being individuality or monism ('no such thing as society', as
>Thatcher told us). The deconstructive
>solution is not concerted collective action but individual creative
>responses such as parody, ventrioloquism,
>deconstructive theory itself, or just the 'queerness' of being queer. This
>seems to me dangerously close to
>what Jay is advocating when he argues against 'deliberate appropriations
>or efforts to twist'. Surely new forms
>of collective activity engender new forms of discourse and understanding?
>And surely we can use tools from
>one discursive arena to critique another, refusing to do the 'justice' of
>respecting the 'incommensurable' boundaries
>between them?
>
>I don't have the answers to how this works but, echoing a previous
>contribution, Harraway's idea of the 'modest
>witness' seems to me a productive one: recognising that we are implicated
>and embedded in a whole series of
>discourses and power relations which 'press against our eyes' (Monique
>Wittig), so that we don't see clearly;
>but within that, bearing witness to the possibility of change. Perhaps
>collective action in the cultural-historical
>realm (i.e. collective action) like action in the ontogenetic realm, is
>unconscious first i.e. for the other
>(e.g. in opposition to a dominant discourse) and only subsequently becomes
>theorised for ourselves? But
>we should always act with the conscience of witnesses i.e. the will to
>make it conscious. Pessimism of the
>intellect; optimism of the will (or in another register, where id was,
>there ego shall be).
>
>Helen