French Psychoanalytic Feminism

An Identity Which Is Not One:
The Banner Under Which We March

In their articles “This Sex Which Is Not One” and “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous respectively discuss the overlapping (dare we say contiguous?) concepts of parler femme and l’ecriture feminine with which they hope to engender a freer, truer manifestation of the female gander. When considering the success of their endeavors, it is important to start by noting that parler femme and l’ecriture feminine amount to much the same thing for our purposes . Both terms describe an act which is more than a seizure of voice – it is a creation, through preparation and performance, of a speech that then allows the existence of the speaker. To put it another way, this voice enables “woman” to begin to escape her identity as masculine object in a world dominated by a symbology that she lacks, one which excludes her at every turn because it creates her as an absence so as to create itself as the state of being. Parler femme serves to address a fundamental schism between the societal structure in which we live and the female person, whose being is fundamentally repressed and whose oppression is made routine by the heavy mantle of lack. Although Cixous and Irigaray’s psychoanalytic approach comes under fire for its questionable relevance in certain situations, I believe that the approach of parler femme is still sound, and that it merely needs to be filled out by a fuller chorus of voices.

To begin with, the problem that parler femme sets out to address is that of our (woman’s) socially generated position as lack, as desire for penis, which has been relegated to the class of individuals known as “women”. The dominant symbology of our (white, western – in a word – ideologically dominant) culture is arranged around the idea of a gender binary. Here “binary” is taken to mean a whole composed of two parts of which the male is positive while the female is negative . Under this system, simply put, the male is the existence, the female the lack. Female sexuality, in particular, is the lack of penis, so that she is neatly created to be the desire for the penis – a constant justification for the existence of man.

This ideological identity is taught to us as something central to sexuality, the sex-act boiling down to the man/penis filling the hole/woman. Under this system, until the woman/hole is filled, she can never be complete, and is thereby controlled through her desire to be made complete by man, as well as by her blindness to her own existence which she is told she cannot own until it is given to her by a male. As women, we are indoctrinated into this ideology through the male phallocentric symbol systems. Viewed in this light, we can begin to understand why a parler femme is necessary in order to escape our place as silence/absence/object in the masculine economy. Our quest for identity is being struck down at its very roots: our thoughts. We are being incapacitated from the start by a language that does not allow for woman as anything but the opposite of man/being.

If our identities, our sexualities are being defined simply as the other to a masculine parameter, what then might a feminine sexuality look like? Luce Irigaray describes a sexuality that is very different from that phallocentric/scopic sexual economy we are taught to take for granted. Irigaray bases her definition on a concept of female genitalia as defined, not as a hole, a zero, but as a plurality. A man's sex organ is singular, objectifiable, she says, whereas a woman's sex is plural, is not an organ, a single object, but rather resides in the touching of plural objects (as of the two vaginal walls touching). It is in this crucial difference that Irigaray is finally able conceive of female sexuality. Here already we can see the need to (re)think in parler femme – we speak of a sex organ as the locus of sexuality, but for woman, sexuality is not in the object but the touch. Our sexuality is not located singularly, in an object, but is everywhere, because it is an action, a relationship.

Historically, we have been unable to conceive ourselves in this manner and so are relegated to an imperfect position in the (voiced) masculine economy of sex organ, sex object. In practice, this objectifiable sexuality is also necessarily scopic. Masculine sexuality, often characterized by a proprietary order, can be understood through sight and the visual relationship created between seer and seen. Sight, like masculine sexuality, has a clear subject and object. Touch, on the other hand, is analogous to (and definitive of) female sexuality, where the relationship is not so easily categorized because both parties touch each other, thereby doing away with the idea of subject and object. Since it is the masculine relationship which is normalized in our culture, women are forced to exist in a world structured around the subject/object relationship and, not being natives to what Irigarary refers to as the “scopic economy” (325), women are relegated to the role of object of desire. In this system, a woman can only ever desire to be desired, she cannot desire something in and of itself.

Parallels can be drawn between a woman’s plural sex being forced into a binary sex system and a woman’s contiguous thought being forced into the metaphorically-dominated form of masculine thought. Desire, which we think of as being sexual in origin extends its reach into the intellectual realm as well – helped along by both substitutive logic, which creates a desire for something which will make us more desirable, and by a capitalist economy, which harnesses this principal to create desire for the consumption on which it runs. Thus the structure of thought is affected by this structured desire, and we can conceive of a female thought, which is, as female sexuality, contiguous.

Central to this female thought, then, is dialogue, because it is the form that bridges and unites the plural selves of woman – it is the verbal/textual equivalent of touch – and woman is constantly engaged in dialogue as a means of unifying her parts. Language on its own (language as object rather than as relation) does not express woman, and so she must harness it through dialogue. The dialogue (as well as the monologue, for they are one and the same to woman, for whom a speech to the self also represents a speech to the Other) is an important tool in the constant (re)creation of her self. When spoken, or written aloud, then, “[w]riting is precisely the very possibility of change” (Cixous 337), because woman can find herself in language instead of trying to find language in herself. “By writing herself, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display” (337), says Cixous, and herein lies the efficacity of parler femme, which will “tear [woman] away by means of this research, this job of analysis and illumination” (338), becoming the touch which awakens her from the numbing isolation of her artificial, scopic identity, making her aware of the concept of relationship, without which feminine thought and sexuality are impossible.

I hope that I have done some justice to the proponents of a parler femme in setting forth not just a justification thereof, but the need for parler femme to (re)create woman, however, there are several arguments which call into question the relevance of Irigaray and Cixous’s writing on a global scale, and now we must consider those. The first is that they do nothing to address the most direct and physically embodied oppression suffered by women who are not as privileged or educated as the authors, such as genital mutilation, or blatant exclusion and discrimination which keep women from any sort of independence. This first, I believe, is adequately addressed by Arelene Dallery in her article “The Politics of Writing (The) Body”. She points out that a solely political approach may solve the immediate issues but does nothing about the unconscious issues that create the problematic situation. To that end, she offers:

French feminists… have unearthed the deep structures of feminine repression in the symbolic suppression of woman’s subjectivity, body, and desire in the logocentrism of western knowledge. (61)

In other words, Dallery believes, as I do, that dismissing the psychoanalytic work of the French feminists because it does not address the “real” oppression of women misses the underlying issues of an invisible but very real system of symbolic and structural oppression.

This system, while it may legitimately be criticized as one that speaks mostly to white, upper-class, western women, could perhaps express the underlying structures which effect the more apparent oppression of all women. Dallery uses the example of clitoridectomy (something we often think of in terms of Other women), illustrating the interconnectedness of the abstract oppression theorized by psychoanalytic feminists and the “real” (read direct, embodied) oppression undeniably visited on women worldwide:

Symbolically, the construction of women as exchange objects, to be exchanged by men, required effacing the clitoris as an autonomous source of sexuality… Clitoridechtomy, the effacement of the clitoris can be real in some cultures and symbolic in the West. (61)

Here Dallery shows not only how a theoretical understanding of symbology can be important to the day to day struggle against an issue like genital mutilation, but also how consequences of an intellectual, symbolic oppression can be just as invasive as a physical mutilation. Of course bodily pain and the very immediate issues of infection and loss of sensation are spared the women who are spoken to/of by psychoanalytic feminism (in other words, white, upper-class, Western: privileged and educated), but emotionally, intellectually, Dallery’s comparison suggests that these women are suffering from an oppression which – if “comparable” is perhaps a bit strong – is at least analogous.

This point (or perhaps just this author’s reading thereof) may be inflammatory, but I believe it serves an important purpose in an analysis of the usefulness of author’s like Cixous and Irigaray. First of all, to those for whom psychoanalytic feminism seems effete, who would perhaps advocate a more direct/political attack of the day-to-day oppression of women for whom clitoridechtomy is a reality, Dallery offers that

Cixous and Irigaray seem to be saying that unless woman’s unconscious is liberated from repression, unless women can authentically voice their own desire and pleasure, then all forms of political liberation will be to no avail. (61)

Secondly, highlighting the connections and parallels between oppressions suffered by women of vastly different cultural and class backgrounds brings a feeling of camaraderie to a class of people that is notoriously historically lacking in unity – to the point where it is often debated whether it is even appropriate to classify women as a class or to attempt to unite them behind a single front, given the diversity of issues and outlooks within the category. Still, the significance of a greater, shared oppression that typifies a group of people must carry some weight in any attack on the oppression of certain members of that group insofar as those waging war wish to demarcate their cause under that same banner.

So, in considering the relevance of parler femme and l’ecriture feminine to women who are not privileged and highly educated, who can be said to suffer under the direct fire of physically violent or blatantly exclusionary misogyny in situations where their physical person is harmed or coerced – or where the means of an independent life are directly denied them – I believe that Dallery satisfactorily provides the necessary connecting tissues, showing that a theoretical explanation and intellectual solution are to one class of woman as political reform and outside aid are to another – both prongs of the same attack against different kinds oppression; one fighting the manifestations of oppression, the other battling the underlying social structures which allow for those manifestations.

However, where Cixous and Irigaray’s philosophies can be said to fail is in the dissonance with the experiences of women who have the “luxury” of fighting oppression at the intellectual, societal level, but whose cultural structures of oppression differ from those of either author – for instance, middle-class American woman of color. To put it another way, opponents of psychoanalytic feminism who argue that it is does not address the issues of women who are not economically privileged and well-educated miss the point that it serves a function for the women who are that is comparable to, say, a grassroots campaign to teach illiterate women how to read so that they are able to take care of their own affairs when they are abandoned by a male relative. At the same time, their parler femme fails to address the issues of women of different cultural backgrounds in the way that a program to teach women how to read would be ineffective in a situation where women were literate but knew nothing of sex or birth control and so were constantly burdened by unwanted children. In both cases it’s a feasible approach but the wrong specifics.

To this end, I am afraid that I can offer only a plea for the voices of women who feel left out by the parler femme described by Irigaray and Cixous to sing the song of their own particular oppression and begin the process of freeing their bodies and minds. If it is not a man who expects you to be the absence so that his presence is continually confirmed, is it not still the expectations of a man which are creating you always in relation to himself, whatever that relation may be? Perhaps it is not. This is hole is one with which I am unfamiliar and therefore unqualified to fill. I must settle (temporarily, unsatisfactorily) for a sign to caution other travelers in expectation of new voices to speak out in dialogue, creating relationships through which more women are able to embody themselves. This is the purpose of parler femme and l’ecriture feminine, and I argue that any holes in their current incarnation are, far from justification to discard the approach, reason to pursue it even further.