Woman’s Erogenous Zones: from Discovery to Escaping Proletarization

written by Tiffany McFadden

In my reading of Luce Irigaray’s From This Sex Which Is Not One (1977), I realized that there is much that I did not know about the male and female body and how it relates to the society we live in.  Irigaray makes a strong case that in order for the woman to change her social status in society she must begin by taking “a long detour by way of the analysis of the various systems of oppression”. Irigaray gives her reader some starting points in order to begin this analyzing process such as examining the discourse on women and or exploring a woman’s understanding of her own body.

Irigaray makes it clear from the beginning that “the female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters.”  It is concepts such as a woman’s “lot is that of lack and atrophy and penis envy” where she should begin to analyze in order to understand this difference in value between man’s sex organ and woman’s sex organ(s). It was pertinent for me to do a little research in order to have a better understanding of Irigaray’s argument and to comprehend such words as “penis-clitoris” or “erogenous zones”.  In my research, I found that the male sex organ (the penis) and the female sex organ (the clitoris) are homologous. This means that the two sex organs are similar in structure and evolutionary origin, but not necessarily in function or value.

According to Irigaray, “the penis …the only sexual organ of recognized value” takes more of a precedence over the vagina that “is valued for the lodging it offers the male organ when the forbidden hand has to find a replacement for pleasure giving”. In “a society that privileges phallomorphism”, man’s sex organ is superior to the woman’s sex organ that is considered “a nothing to show for itself”; a form that “lacks a form of its own.” I believe that Irigaray is trying to make an argument that the difference in value of the two sex organs derives from a difference between the forms of man’s penis and woman’s vagina. As a woman, what I took from Irigaray’s argument is that all that occurs in Western culture is created and arranged for the continuity of patriarchy.

 

This Sex Which is Not One

By Amber Laraque

 Reading Luce Irigaray’s excerpt from This Sex Which Is Not One sparked questions in my head, regarding male sexuality versus female sexuality. As Irigaray describes it, “Woman touches herself all the time, and more over no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself she is already two – but not divisible into one (s)– that caress each other.”

 She describes this as autoeroticism and says that this autoeroticism is interrupted by a “violent break-in”—the penis entering the vagina.

 The questions that arose after reading this were, 1. how can one believe that because a woman’s lips touch all the time, that it could be a form of pleasure?; and 2. Why she describes the penis as “violating?”

 Reading further, my second question was answered, and it is understood that Irigaray believes that women have been put in the position to serve the purpose of pleasuring a man, what she describes as a “use- value for man,” or a “commodity.” Thus the penis would be violating a woman, seeking pleasure for only himself, while a woman doesn’t need a penis, nor a tool to pleasure herself.

 This takes me back to my first question. While I understand the points that Irigaray makes about a woman, self pleasure, and rediscovering herself, I don’t agree that women get pleasure because she “touches herself all the time.” Or is it because I have not rediscovered myself yet? Perhaps Irigaray’s point is that a woman needs to discover herself out side of “man” in order to understand herself, her pleasure, and her sexual organs.

    The concept of auto eroticism as described by Irigaray left me puzzled, and uncertain as to whether or not I agree with her argumement. “Woman ‘touches herself’ all the time…for her genitals are formed of two lips on continuous contact.” I must say, woman opposed, in denial or have never experimented with any form of (self) masturbation might find that concept hard to digest. The mere thought of my lips (not sure which pair Irigaray is referring to but I’ll assume the labia minora) caressing each other as a form of masturbation is absurd. After all, isn’t self pleasure the primary purpose of masturbation? In the case of women, doesn’t it allow her to get in touch(literally) with herself, and discover new and better ways of obtaining pleasure. If as a woman, I involuntary masturbate, why do I not feel pleasure? Why, as I sit on this chair, typing away am I not turned?

    In digression, I can’t help but wonder if autoeroticism exists for male. If woman experiences it, why not her male counterpart? Maybe I’m wrong, or over thinking Irigaray’s argument, but I believe males do. I’m picturing the male anatomy and if I’m correct, the testis rub against each other. Also, the penis rests on top of or between the testis. All three, in some way, caress each other. With that being said, don’t males experience auto eroticism. He doesn’t need “an instrument” to touch himself.

The Voiceless Woman

    “A woman without a body, dumb, blind, can’t possibly be a good fighter” (217)

On the first day of class we tried to define the word feminist while we shared our own personal experience with feminism.  As I read, “The Laugh of the  Medusa” by Helene Cixous  I was brought back to that day and questioned if all women are feminists but because of scrutiny are to afraid to associate themselves with the word.  Cixous states that women face an “inevitable struggle against conventional man”  and it is because of this censorship that women have felt a “shameful sickness”.

Throughout history women have been censored and oppressed, but have the opportunity through writing to  “aim to break up, to destroy, and to foresee the  unforeseeable, to project” (215) their own chains of oppression.  Cixous elaborates on the idea of the “woman  writer”  who will “proclaim this unique empire” that has been “driven  away…violently” with emphasis on the truth of the body. By intertwining the body with writing Cixous expresses the female writing through voice. She intertwines writing with the body claiming that “writing is for you…your body is yours, take it”. If writing is the body then if you “censor the body and you censor breath and  speech at the same time”.(217) Cixous urges women to end this censorship by  writing. Interestingly she develops her argument by writing and directly speaking to women. In this way Cixous is bringing strength to her own voice and connecting  that voice and strength to her body.

Now the question is, why writing? Why does Cixous put so much  emphasis on writing? History has taught us the importance of writing. In the past history, music, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, and fairy tales were all told orally, causing loss of information and changing of tales; for example the tale of Medusa. Writing changed  all that. Now there is a written account of every event, every story and every  joke. Through writing women can make their own history or remake oppressionary tales like the Medusa to reflect their own truth. They can voice their own opinions and experiences like men have for centuries because women can write about women like men can write about men. Neither sex knows what it is to be the other sex. Without women  writers; women are left vulnerable, weak and at the mercy of male writers, continuing in ” a world of  searching, the elaboration of a knowledge, on the basis of a systematic  experimentation with the bodily functions, a passionate and precise  interrogation of her erotogeneity”. (215)

Cixous shows that writing is a powerful tool in the fight for equality among the sexes since it allows women to be uncensored.

Cixous’s Two Levels of Transformation From Female Writing

In Helene Cixous’s Essay “The Laugh of Medusa” she addresses the importance of woman’s writing. She talks about the importance of women’s writing on “two levels that cannot be separated”. On one level she addresses women’s writing as an individual act of woman taking ownership of her body and identity, and on another level she sees women’s writing as a shattering of the oppressive bounds historically imposed on women and their expression.

I was particularly interested in the first level, because I personally think I have been more interested in addressing this level of feminist identity. Unlike the other theories we have looked at so far, this essay specifically addresses the individual empowerment of women instead of just the larger societal scope. I enjoyed looking at feminism on the level of the individual, particularly because I personally think that it is more empowering to women and more likely to rectify past injustices if women take ownership of their femininity rather than create a world that is “gender neutral” as Gayle Rubin suggests. Cixous emphasizes gender difference and sees this as the vehicle through which women will reassert themselves, and I agree with her.

Cixous expresses how women being connected to their femaleness would empower them in a very beautiful passage,

To write. An act which will not only ‘realize’ the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal (FT 217).

This description of women taking ownership of their “native strength” is a sentiment I find powerful, honest, and inspiring, view of how to repair the oppression of women. I really believe that I need to consider this more however. What exactly is the feminist dream we are trying to create? Gayle Rubin says she finds an androgynous and sexless society to be the ideal, but Helene Cixous seems to be advocating an active embracing of the uniquely feminine experience. It is a complicated question which best serves the level of feminist problem that exists as an institutionalized problem.

Though there might not be a conclusive answer to which ideal is better for feminism, I still would like to complicate my own thinking since I seem to be strongly biased towards a vision of celebrating and emphasizing a uniquely female culture of sorts. I thought of two examples of drama that are used consistently as feminist touchstone texts. First, I thought of Eve Ensler’s celebration of feminity, The Vagina Monologues. This is a representation that aligns itself with Cixous’s vision. I particularly thought of a woman who discovered her vagina and masturbation and was brought to tears through this experience because of the power of personal expression and self-discovery. I also contextualized Rubin’s view with Lady Macbeth, who is a strong, ambitious female, who longs to be unsexed. Maybe this is part of why I have an unfavorable view of an androgynous society, since Lady Macbeth hardly is empowered by forsaking her gender, instead it feeds into a string of events that lead to painful guilt. Shakespeare was hardly a feminist though, and Lady Macbeth is nonetheless one of his most powerful female characters. I know that powerful androgynous women who encapsulate this vision of the future of feminism exist, however, I still need to find some more modern examples of this type of feminist ideal.

Through this course, I hope to explore this more through the various texts we have explored. I definitely think that Edna Pontellier is more aligned with Cixous’s ideals, but I wonder if she (and myself) have become too culturally wedded to the female gender being a good role to inhabit. Maybe Edna Pontellier would have seen a future in New Orleans if she had been able to embrace “native strength”, but then again she might have also been able to adopt a more androgynous role and still have been empowered and happy. I will continue to look at how empowered women who are serving this second level that Cixous talks about of breaking societal suppression, whether they are actively focusing on their femininity or they are regarding it as irrelevant.

This Sex Which is Not One

In Luce Irigaray’s excerpt This Sex Which Is Not One, I came to find the very same argument I have been contemplating for years. Women seem to always be signified as people of various roles and various titles where as, with men, they come to serve one purpose. This can go back to the old argument of double standards, where if woman really feel one way they must conform to ask another way in order to fulfill the esteem of being a “women.” Why is this such a dominant topic of conversation, I used to think to myself?

 

Now I can sit here and re-read this excerpt to find that the opening of The Sex Which Is Not One, describes women genitalia to be the emulation of men’s and only serves a purpose to pleasure and keep the men the way they’d like to be kept. More over she describes the disruption of the two lips by a “violating” penis. I feel as though this statement could be taken any way. Though I see the point, I feel distinguishing the penis, as something violating is radical. Though a woman can feel pleasure on her own, the warmth of the two joining together as creations of the world is not a violation but a mere embracement of longed feeling. I may come off as the radical one here, but that’s just my thought on that.

 

She moves on to describe the fact that male pleasure defines a woman’s. With the harsh discourse, I came to understand that women seek to find their sense of entitlement through what they can give someone of the opposite sex. I am not completely sure if what Irigaray is saying is valid or not, but the idea that we revolve a lot of our sexual needs around what our partner can offer our erogenous zones, could quite possibly be true. However, if I understood correctly, the idea that we have defective male bodies is insane. This can be referred back to science that the reason why our bodies are formed the way they are is for the purpose of reproduction.

 

Though all very complex and somewhat challenging, I got a lot from this reading. There is actual psychosis around the idea of women being the fixation of men. This reading has challenged me to really think about how I perceive my body and my genitals. How there is a complex definition and thought process behind this all. Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Woman embracing herself as woman

by Kaydian Campbell

Hélène  Cixous begins her article, “Laugh of the Medusa”, with the declaration that women must write… for women, about women and to women (my emphasis). Though she asserts that there is no such this as a universal woman, she explains that the differences in women are what make them creative, and limitlessly so, but that they can inspire other women by being bold in expressing their own desires: “I wished that that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard of songs” (876). The narrator expresses her own fear in producing beauty, when feeling the inspiration that would “burst” into something wonderful, “[She] said nothing, showed nothing… [She] was ashamed. [She] was afraid, and [she] swallowed [her] shame and [her] fear” (876). Cixous attributes this fear to the inculcation of proper feminine behavior and thoughts, and of course a phallocentrism that has taught her to be “ashamed of her own strength” (876). Woman has been taught to despise and fear her desires, her drives, and taught that “a well-adjusted normal woman has a… divine composure” (876).

Cixous strikes  a parallel between women’s writing and female masturbation to highlight, not only the shame associated with female writing, but the surprising beauty a woman holds within her, that she fears displaying to the world. The woman who writes in secret, but feels guilty, either for a feeling of inadequacy, the volume, or perceived depth of her work. This idea is reminiscent Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, who only writes to make herself feel better, or as Cixous puts it, “to take the edge off”, but who begins to physically embody the opinions of her husband and his sister who believe her writing is only exhausting her (877). But this is exactly the kind of opposition Cixous encourages women to write in spite of. Despite the men who will count her work as frivolous, and the publishers who will not endorse women’s writing, but who ironically make money on texts about women. “Woman must write woman. And man, man” , Cixous asserts, because man can only write from his own point of view, which is in terms of his fear and opposition to woman (877). Man’s point of view rests in the concept of “the power relation between a fantasized obligatory virility ment to invvade, to colonize, and the consequential phantasm of woman as a “dark continent” to penetrate and to “pacify” (877). Subsequently, this is the narrative that has been taught to women;to the little girls who, “as soon as they begin to speak, at the same time as they are taught their name, they can be taught that their territory is black… Dark is dangerous. You can’t see anything in the dark… And so we have internalized this horror of the dark” (877-8). This dark is not only representative of woman’s knowledge of herself, but the stigma associated with being herself. Women learn to hate themselves, to hate anything woman, “They have made for women an antinarcissism! … which loves itself only to be loved for what women haven’t got!” (878). This is a major issue in the reluctance of some women to “write woman”, because she seeks, not only to dissociate herself from women, but from “women’s writing”, as the narrator learns in Chapter 5 of A Room of one’s Own. She peruses a book by Mary Carmichael to find that the author[ess] deliberately tries to avoid the style of women’s writing.

Therefore, while Cixous encourages women to “write woman”, she acknowledges that various works written by women seem to in no way differ from men’s writing, “and which either obscures women or reproduces the classic representations of women (as sensitive- intuitive-dreamy, etc)”, in other words “the eternal feminine” (to which end I should add: chaste-nurturing- fertile, etc) (878). De Beauvoir depicts a similar separation in woman that causes her to think the “obsession” with embracing womaness. In her Introduction to The Second Sex, Simone De Beauvoir advocates that a woman may more truthfully depict woman because, “[women] know the feminine world more intimately than do men because we have our roots in it, we grasp more immediately than do men what it means to a human being to be feminine; and we are more concerned with such knowledge.” As for my interpretation of Cixous’ solution to this problem, she encourages women to no longer function “within” the discourse of a man, but instead, “it is time for her to dislocate this “within”, to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it,  taking it into her mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of” (887). Here Cixous implies that woman must not only surpass this “lack”, this “darkness” that has been attributed to her, but that she must use them to reveal herself and her writing.

Overcoming Man’s “Hard Edge” in “This Sex Which Is Not One”

By Frank Miller

In “This Sex Which Is Not One” Luce Irigaray provides readers with her take on the state of female sexuality, that it simply serves as the stems to the roots of a plant, those roots being sexuality as man has defined it throughout history. She writes “the development of a sexually ‘normal’ woman, seems rather too clearly required by the practice of male sexuality” and that the vagina serves as a “sheathe [to] massage the penis in intercourse: a non-sex, or a masculine organ turned back upon itself, self-embracing” (363).

Irigaray expresses that a male dominated sexual world begins at birth when females are socialized to desire penises over their vaginas, and learns to hope (from her father) that she will indeed one day obtain one, or “at least come to possess an equivalent of the male organ” (363). Irigaray proposes that this process is unabashedly backward due to the fact that females have different anatomies, and thus find pleasure in completely opposite manner (the autoeroticism of women v. man). She proposes that women “self-caress” without the need of any external forces, “for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact” (363) and that man interrupts this continuous contact with his penis and animalistic nature that “desire[s] to force entry, to penetrate, to appropriate for himself the mystery of this womb where he has been conceived, the secret of his begetting, of his ‘origin'” (364) reducing women to an “obliging prop for the enactment of of man’s fantasies” (364). She indicates that within man’s attempt to pleasure himself with woman’s body, a woman “does not know, or no longer knows, what she wants” (364) due to the fact she becomes secondary within man’s sexuality and finds her sexual pleasure and self worth through her “state of dependency upon man” (364).

In a society that “count[s] everything, [and] number[s] everything by units” the woman serves as “neither one nor two” (365) Irigaray writes. She cannot be identified and lacks a proper name due to the “none-ness” of her sexual organ, meaning that only a “visible and morphologically designatable organ” (365) can be counted, otherwise identified as a penis. Irigaray claims that this wrong, that a woman does indeed contain sexual organs; however, “[the] two of them, are not identifiable as ones” (366). She claims that woman’s sexuality is vast and expansive, and reminds readers that a woman’s clitoris (baby penis) is not her sole source of pleasure, she possesses a vagina, and more importantly a “woman has sex organs more or less everywhere. She finds pleasure almost anywhere” (366). Irigaray explains that woman’s language, is a reflection of her sexuality, and something that males cannot easily categorize and ultimately dismiss. “What she says is never identical with anything, moreover; rather it is contiguous. It touches (upon). And when it strays to far from that proximity, she breaks off and starts over at “zero”: her body-sex” (366). And to further reinforce this, when asked what she is thinking “they can only reply: Nothing. Everything…thus what they desire is precisely nothing, and at the same time everything” (once again, becoming zero or none) (367). And while “their desire is often interpreted, and feared, as a sort of insatiable hunger, a voracity that will swallow you whole…it really involves a different economy more than anything else, one that upsets the linearity of a project, undermines the goal-object of desire, diffuses the polarization toward a single pleasure, disconcerts fidelity to a single discourse….” (367). This is, itself enough to prove why defining woman through a male illustrated picture of sexuality becomes problematic.

In further discussion, Irigaray proposes that females become a part of “a dominant scopic economy” and through her submission to this “she becomes the beautiful object of contemplation” (364). She learns to identify herself as this “beautiful object” and ultimately dreads “her sexual organ represent[ing] the horror of nothing to see” (364) within man’s terms. I see reflections of this within modern society as multiple people, as well as women use the proverb “a good man is hard to find.” At face-value this elevates man to a higher status then a woman (at least a good one); leaving women, and more specifically, “a good woman” as nothing to be celebrated, as well as nothing to see. I’m a man so the women in the class might have to help me out here, but doesn’t this spark some serious insecurities?

Woolf to Cixous: An Evolution

  In chapter 5 of A Room of One’s Own, ‘writing’ becomes a constructing binarism. “I had come at last, in the course of this rambling to the shelves which hold books by the living; by women and by men; for there are almost as many books written by women now as by men . . .” (Woolf, 137) The narrator affirms the change that has occurred in women’s writing in her own generation. She goes on to critique Mary Carmichael’s novel titled Life’s Adventure searching to see if Carmichael had the innate “characteristics and restrictions” of women writers of the past. She determines that her prose was not as good as Jane Austen’s. “First she broke the sentence; now she broke the sequence.”(Woolf, 137)

            The awakening moment in Mary Carmichael’s novelty comes from the words, “Chloe liked Olivia.” (Woolf, 138) After reading this the narrator (Woolf) realizes that women’s literature rarely presented relationships between women. They are “. . . almost without exception [. . .] shown in their relation to men.” (Woolf, 138) The idea portrayed in Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own can be compared and contrasted with Helene Cixous’ ideas in “The Laugh of Medusa” because they are both promoting societal change through women’s writing but with different approaches.

            Woolf acknowledges that, “Very well, she [Carmichael] has every right to do both those things if she does them for the sake of breaking, but for the sake of creating.” (Woolf, 137) Woolf’s statement shows that as a writer, she was unsettled by the social restrictions of her time; where new forms or styles were accepted as long as they didn’t destroy what was done before. She acknowledged the changes in writing but with some opposition, making her idea structural. Woolf thought of women’s writing as following a gender convention because she referred to it as ‘flowery’ and ‘sentimental’.

            Although like Woolf, Cixous understands that writing will empower woman she approaches that concept differently. Woolf touches on change with opposition while Cixous wants women to reclaim their sexuality in order to “write themselves”. She wants ‘woman to write woman’.

“Write! And your self-seeking text will know itself better than flesh flood, rising, insurrectionary dough kneading itself, with sonorous, perfumed ingredients, a lively combination of flying colors, leaves, and rivers, plunging into the sea we feed.” (Cixous, 219)

This suggesting that woman not only should write a link to the body, but that woman should write of the signifying woman in order to make women writing stable. The writing would become stable because it would be defined by binary opposition of female/male not each on its own. Cixous’ approach can seem to only contrast with Woolf’s approach but what is shown through these ideas is an evolution in women’s writing.

Woman’s Role in Fiction, Via Woolf.

In presenting her theory, Virginia Woolf has a distinct advantage over the average feminist theorist, for she can weave her questions and thoughts about women and fiction in an almost lyrical prose. As a reader, though, one cannot be fooled by her “flowery” narrative, for like her hypothetical Mary Carmichael, she “provides a superfluity of thorns” when she asks pointed questions like, “What is a woman’s role in fiction?” (137)

Zooming into a work of fiction from one Mary Carmichael, Woolf hopes to understand women’s contemporary fiction after an in-depth examination of her predecessors. Before even cracking the spine of Life’s Adventures, she muses that “books continue each other…and I must also consider her – this unknown woman – as the descendant of all those other women who’s circumstances I have been glancing at.” Her words imply a duty upon Carmichael not only to live up to the standard of her literary ancestors, but also to continue this perhaps universal narrative. Is this a fair obligation on the author? Is a male author expected to keep pace with or revolutionize Shakespeare, Dickens and Whitman? Whether the pressure is gender-specific or not, Woolf perceives Carmichael’s struggle beneath it. Immediately, she is taken aback by her prose, questioning its “terseness…short-windedness,” and why “she is heaping on too many facts.” (137) It’s true, Woolf seems to smirk. Carmichael does feel pressure, and her attempts to conquer it only make its presence more obvious.

Woolf, however, is intrigued by Carmichael’s portrayal of characters Chloe and Olivia. From briefly pondering on the potential sensuality of the relationship (“Sometimes women do like women”), she begins to examine what roles exactly do women play in a work of fiction, wondering “where two women are represented as friends.” Save for very few exceptions, Woolf concludes that women are exclusively “shown in their relation to men.” How tragic to keep half the population from both expressing their creativity and being creatively expressed in the works of others. What a narrow viewpoint, remarks Woolf: “…how little can a man know [of a woman’s life] when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose.” No wonder man fears the mysterious woman, for he clearly learns so little about her from both truth and fiction. (138)

Turning the situation around, Woolf wonders what would have become of literature had the same principle been applied to male characters:

“Suppose…that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer. We might perhaps have most of Othello; and a good deal of Antony; but no Ceasar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, no Jacques…” (138)

If one wrote about a man as one would a woman, the art of literature to become nothing more than that of the tawdry, two-dollar novel one finds in the pharmacy. Why are women so limited in the roles they play fiction? According to Woolf, “literature is impoverished…by the doors that have been shut upon women.” Simply put, a woman is limited in fiction because she is limited in real life. She is the wife, the mother, and for the “dramatist…love was the only possible interpreter.” (138)

To consider this apparent dearth in a woman’s fictional characterization is to warm to Carmichael’s hypothetical prose. Her sentences may lack “Jane Austen’s…shape,” but in characterizing women as more than the deviation to man’s default, she progresses the universal narrative that appears to exist, and honors her proverbial foremothers, regardless of “whether she has a room to herself.” (137, 138)

On the Other Side of Discourse: Wittgenstein, Irigaray and Female Sexuality. L.R. Corcoran

In the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein compares the act of explaining to someone the meaning of a word to the act of explaining to someone the use of a chess piece in the game of chess. “ ‘This is the king’ (or ‘this is called the  “king” ’) are explanations of a word only if the learner already knows ‘what a piece in the game is’.” Further down, he continues, “We may say: it only makes sense for someone to ask what something is called if he already knows how to make use of the name [my italics]” (Wittgenstein p. 19). We can take from this proposition that in order for a person to name an object or ask for the name of an object, she or he must be aware not only of the structure of which the name is a part, but also how the name is used in that structure (a structure that Wittgenstein would refer to as a “language game.”)

This concept takes on relevance to gender theory to the extent that we can synthesize it with Wittig’s conception of language as structurally gendered and patriarchal. In Gender Troubles, Butler explains Wittig’s concept of domination of gender in language: “Domination occurs through a language, which in its plastic social action, creates a second order, artificial ontology, an illusion of difference, disparity, and consequently, hierarchy that becomes social reality” (Butler p. 150). Therefore, if Wittiq’s conception of language is overlaid across Wittgenstein’s, then it is possible to say this: the fundamental structure of language is patriarchal and any act of naming, or any act of name comprehension, can only be understood in terms directly relational to the patriarchy implicit in the language.

From this premise, how female sexuality is discursively formulated may be elucidated. Simply put, female sexuality must be marked by the phallus somehow in order to gain entry into the patriarchally formulated discourse; it must become a piece in the patriarchal language game. Let us now turn to Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One to further discuss this idea.

At the beginning of her essay, Irigaray states, “Female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters. Thus the opposition between ‘masculine’ clitoral activity and feminine vaginal passivity.” In this description of female genitalia, each description functions in relation to the phallus, the clitoris as its mimetic image, and the vaginal canal as its complementary. Irigaray argues that this phallusiation of female sexuality does not account for the wholeness of female sexuality. She states that, “the geography of her pleasure is far more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle that is commonly imagined.”  Hence female sexuality is a gestalt and in order for it to enter the language it must be parceled into pieces in relation to the phallus.

Female sexuality, in its entirety, must always then be situated on the other side of sexual discourse; it may never fully enter without fragmentation occurring. Thus a woman in society is put “in the position of experiencing herself only fragmentarily, in the the little structured margins of a dominant ideology, as waste, or excess, what is left of a mirror invested by the (masculine) subject to reflect himself, to copy himself” (FT p. 320).

In the closing of her essay, Irigaray gives her ideas a Marxist tinge: if it were possible for women to recover herself to her original wholeness, it would be a thread to the established order, and in particular to capitalist economics. If an entity cannot be sectioned into pieces, if it cannot be commodified, then it cannot be traded or exchanged, and thus it cannot participate in commerce. In other words, an ideology that allows for complete wholeness is antithetical to capitalism, for capitalism is founded upon division.

Works Cited (Outside of Course Documents)

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, and Joachim Schulte. Philosophical Investigations. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2009. Print.

From a Room of One’s Own

Virginia Wolf starts off her excerpt by going into detail on how she observes the author of The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority  the Female Sex, she feels that as he writes his story he is killing women. His ideas are written with a pen. Wolf sees the  pen as a symol, representing a knife.  He stabs women on this paper.  Wolf continues by saying ” but even when he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on killing; and even so, some cause for anger and irritation remained”.  Wolf is explaining how the writer was not satisfied with the first thoughts that were articulated on that paper. He wanted to continue diminishing the idea of the women and his thoughts on her inferiority. She then talks about the book  Life’s Adventure by Mary Carmichael. She finds Carmichael to be an insecure writer her ideas are inconsistent. Carmichael seems to be afraid of expressing herself openly. But she then stumbles upon the  interesting  plot of the story. Which is  of two women that are friends and labratory partners. Enjoying the book she realizes that these two women are the main characters who are named olivia and chloe. She sees the writer in a new light. Carmichael  portrays the relationship of these two women as co-workers and simply friends. Unlike in other novels which women usally have the role of mother, sister, wife, or care giver. In this novel these women are on an important quest for life and medicine. Wolf is astonished  and impressed. Carmichael was capapble of displaying a diffrent type of relationship between women. The courageousness of this writer showing something different. Wolf explains how Carmichael has a room to herself where she sees things differently and writes and expands her thoughts turning them into a uniques story.  Unlike the writer that was first mentioned.  Wolf says “I think that some thing of great importance has happened”.

Jackie TOrres

Rallying Women to the Cause of Woman

Of the readings this week, I found Helene Cixous’ The Laugh of the Medusa extremely powerful and the most demanding of some analytical commentary. Cixous made it her business to address women directly in her piece, and not just in name or direct address, but in defining what woman writing is, and then clearly writing it. Woman must take up her own pen and write to create a new history and world that is not restricted by the past just because it was the past. History, as Cixous urges, has no right to mandate destiny(256). By writing honest projections of their minds and bodies, women can shape the world into something completely different from the man dominated paradigm to which it is warped. This is woman writing.

Why writing? Cixous addresses the oppression of women as a violent separation from the body. It is this separation that perpetuates woman’s seemingly unfounded fear of expression. Their body is not their own, they cannot fully grasp or understand it, and therefor can not express it. Cixous encourages women, “Write! Writing is for you, you are for your body is yours, take it.(257)” Writing will heal woman’s division from her body because what they will create will come from “beyond ‘culture'” and from underneath frigidity imposed upon them in childhood by man.(257) They will write from a place apart from “man’s” world and therefor purely woman. Writing then, will unite woman with her strength, pleasures, and mind.

“I write woman, woman must write woman. And man, man.”(257)Cixous states this simple, but very clear statement. A man cannot write woman writing. But why? Why cannot man understand and empathize enough to express for woman? The answer, to put it simply and direct as I can from my understanding of Cixous, is that men have their own problems in the world that they have created. By defining a woman by their lack of a phallus, a man is “reduced to a single idol with clay balls.”(260) Man has placed so much importance on this symbol that he fears losing it above all else. In his view, woman, who has no phallus, has literally with her “lacking” body, embodied this fear. It is from this label that woman lose control of their own physical form. She does not possess a woman’s body, but the body of man’s worst nightmare. Cixous responds to man’s terror, “Too bad for them if they fall apart upon discovering that women aren’t men, or that the mother doesn’t have one.(260)” Lack of a phallus is man’s fear and therefor man’s concern. A woman cannot lack a phallus because she is not a man, so she should not concern herself or be infected by with man’s sickness. “It’s up to (man) to say where his femininity and masculinity are at.”(257) Let man sort out himself because until he does, how could he possibly begin to understand woman?

It is here that Cixous so ingeniously interweaves the classic symbol of the Medusa, a gorgon who’s gaze could kill the mightiest of  Greek heroes. Cixous’s Medusa, the true embodiment of woman, who, when looked upon in the light of truth or “straight on”, is beautiful and intelligent.(260) She doesn’t kill, man looks upon her, sees his own greatest terror, and drops dead of fright.  The gorgon is a Greek myth, it is a story, but certainly one of power. Like history, these puissant stories influence the society and can blur fact into culture or habit. Woman, as Cixous demands, must write their own stories and use their own voice, but they must write from truth and of their body instead of fear.

The Inner and Outer Bounds of Gender Identity

Judith  Butler sets up an interesting analysis of  the body and what possible gender constructs define it; She is all the while really questioning if it is in fact,  the boundaries of the body that define gender (at least that is how I understood it).  Through her research, she is able to reveal how historical influences are able to mold perception of body, thus tying in the idea of a culture influenced gender (and slightly re-visiting the ideas of the nature /culture binary discussed in Orton’s essay). “Within the metaphoric of this notion of cultural values is the figure of history as the relentless writing instrument, and the body as the medium which must be destroyed and transfigured in order for “culture” to emerge” (FT 435).

Additionally, Butler also discusses how understanding the physical limitations of the body can then give room to analyze the the gender performatives that are outwardly expresssed.  I found that part of her essay to be particularly interesting because it forces us to think about how and why we carry out specific behaviors.  It’s  actually confusing to think that expressions are or  could be manifestations of a gender identity that we are trying to hide, as Butler discusses, “…acts, gestures, and desire produce…this on the surface on the surface of the body…but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause” (FT438). When these actions are closely considered, we are left to catagorize behaviors and then impart the nature/ cultural standards of gender, which would be exclusive.

I  can partially understand what Wittig argues about , where gender can be seen “…as the workings of sex.”  But at the same time it also complicates the issue of our bodies being seen as a curltural sign when we are considering those who do not conform to the inner and outter bounds of the body due to performative expression that would render a different appearance or essence (as with Newton’s study).  Butler is right to say that “…gender should not be construed as a stable identity…” (FT441).  As society continues to change and adopt new ways of thinking, its important to redefine gender roles.  Although I still feel your sex is either male or female regardless of performaitve expression, there should be serious discussion on how gender is to be understood…or just agree to disagree that is incredibly ambiguous.

 

 

 

The life of Feminism

I must start this post by saying, feminism never seemed as complex as it is before this course. As one of 19 females within my family, I never stopped to think what exactly does it mean to be a female. Hearing the word ‘feminist’, but not fully understanding the complexity of it has left me reading and re-reading this excerpt. Judith Butler, though very articulate, has left me in a slight radical state of mind. Are we born females or is this gender role something that we acquire over time?

The challenge posed among the initiation of the reading, set up my perspective for the entirety of the exerts. The thought that sex and gender are socially constructed was something that I had never conceived to be true. How is it that my entire life I have distinguished ‘females’ as something that we are born as, whereas in all actuality it is something we have been socially constructed to be. When I began to associate this notion, I realized that as young girls we are automatically deemed to be delicate. It is implied that we be represented by specific colors, themes, roles etc. But does this make it true that sex and gender are both delegated?

Though I understood the gist of the reading, I found it difficult to agree or disagree with it all. Butler brings up valid points of sex and gender being social and political, but that could be said of many things in life. It comes down to a point of how we want to identify a person. When we think about women, we think about all the things that come along with them; make up, dresses, heels, bows, ceremonies. This may be off topic, but why is it that a women is more fluid into a “male” role. They can wear sneakers, ties and shave their heads, things that are dignified male traits, but still be deemed women, but men who do the opposite are exemplified as transgender etc. Though I may be flipping the script, it wouldn’t be a post by me if I didn’t refute what was argued in our readings.

Over all, I tried my best to understand this reading, and it may be that last week was my first class, but I am having a hard time understanding the theory. Reading everyone’s post has helped me catch a gist of it, but still difficult for me to write about it. Does anyone have any suggestions as far as being an effective reader with this type of literature?

Priori in gender Identity

By Mayra Jiménez

I have written a creative answer to Wittig and Foucault in relation to the body, and the idea of a preexisting priori that culture has defaced by placing categories to fit a planned scheme.

“Priori”

My body is the subject for much criticism, and has been used to define the ways of the world, as if my body is only a defining and concrete answer to everything I feel, think, and do.

I, the mind inside, the spirit, the human, the child, the parent, the sibbling, the artist, the worker, the healer…all my I’s are what I am; whatever I fit into my bucket, that’s who and what I am.

It is not my body, and not certainly a sticker posted on my forhead or on my back, what can define who I am. I am me, the I that is not defined until the day I die.

I can write tattoos on my skin, but that doesn’t mean I am dirty or perverted. I choose the lenght of my hair, not to fit into a gender acepted kind of look, but to match the way I want to feel the air against my skin…

Culture and Gender

           “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one”; Butler claims that the phrase is “odd” and “nonsensical”. I agree with Butler’s beginning point, that culturally we put to much emphasis on gender and those who do not fall into this category are left “outside the human”. Leaving those who feel that God has placed them into the wrong body shunned from our society and viewed as taboo. Our culture imposes gender rules on us from the very beginning by asking if  “is it a girl or boy” and assigning the color pink to a baby girl and blue to a boy. Butler poses a question from the very beginning, “are there ever humans who are not, as it were always already gendered?” I believe that there are people who are not always gendered. For those who are transgender they are stuck between what is “culturally correct”and their own feeling of what their gender is.  In these terms gender goes beyond the body but implies that gender is also a state of mind. 

         This opening phrase is entirely culturally driven which caused me to think about many coming of age ceremonies such as; a quinceanera and a bar mitzvah, and many phrases such as; “a girl becomes a woman once she has a child” or “or a woman becomes a mother once she becomes pregnant while a man becomes a father upon seeing his child born”. Each of the ceremonies mentioned are transitions for a child to become an adult and each phrase represents a cultural accomplishment which Beauvoir means. As Butler states, ” Beauvoir, of course, meant merely to suggest that the category of women is a variable cultural accomplishment, a set of meanings that are taken on or taken up within the cultural filed, that no one is born with a gender–gender is acquired”. 

     The importance of gender and being defined as either male or female is “odd” since once we are in our mothers wombs we are “female”. It isn’t until later that the male hormone kicks in and his gentiles appear. Something that is mentioned later on in the piece when Butler presents Wittig’s second argument that lesbians are not woman. ” Wittig understands sex to be discursively produced and circulated by a system of significant oppressive to women, gays and lesbians”.

From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

During the discusions of gender there has been the main idea of society indicating which is the way to go for each gender in terms of roles to take in every aspect of life. This excerpt from Butler is an example of many stereotypes that are said about certain situations in life about what genders should and should not do. Butler mentions the diffrence between the external and the internal of the body. Butler feels that the body is sometimes looked ‘as passive and prior to discourse”. In other words there are many times that we are judged by our appearence. Our gender is one of the first things that are evident physically and our part of our external.

Butler mentions Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas. This excerpt according to Butler suggests that the body entails many taboos and cultural coherence. The body give impressions of somone from the outside but in actuallity internally the intelect is completley different. The way to differentiate the two are two words used by Butler one of them is the performatice they are gestures, acts, and desires created by each person. Then their is the fabrcications which is what the body demonstrates by general and corporal signs.

In Butler’s excerpt there are many examples of showing the diffrence between the external and internal of each individual. The gender troubles seem to be the “body” because it immediatley associates certain objective views. As Butler mentions other subjects like gays and lesbians and states that people immediatley associate gay with the AIDS disease. This can be seen as a performative stereotype. Butler’s excerpt mentioned many important examples and thoughts that explain the gender trouble.