Feminism against `the feminine'

STELLA SANDFORD

Whilst the distinction between French and Anglo-American feminism was always rather dubious (failing to be accurate, consistent or inclusive at the level of either national origin, language of choice or theoretical commitment; seeming to parcel feminist theory - or at least the feminist theory that mattered - out into two Western blocks from which the rest of the world might choose), two very specific linguistic differences between French and English have nevertheless determined two streams of feminist thought, and complicated the relation between them. Since the 1960s, English-language feminisms, in so far as they are distinctive, have centrally either presupposed or explicitly theorized the category of gender, for which there is no linguistic equivalent in French. At the same time, much (although not all) that came to be categorized as `French' feminism has been articulated around the category of le féminin, for which there is no ready equivalent in English, although there is an obvious translational choice: `the feminine'.1

Various Anglo-American feminisms have, of course, made consideration of what have been seen as feminine attributes and values central to their critical and reconstructive projects, but it is not this (adjectival) sense which is at issue here in the translation of le féminin, a noun. For despite the fact that the French and English words connote differently (in particular, le féminin also covers most of what is meant by the English `female'), `the feminine', as a direct translation of the different and specific uses of le féminin in various French discourses, has become a common category in English-language feminist discourse, specifically English-language feminist philosophy of a `continental' disposition, where it is often presumed to be both the proper object of such a philosophy and the proper goal of feminism.

But is it? Or what exactly is at stake in making it so? Is `the feminine' a necessary or useful category for feminism today?

A philosophy of our own?

The history of the category of `the feminine', as it concerns us here, arises within what has often been a peculiarly antagonistic relation between feminism and philosophy. Nothing like a self-consciously `feminist philosophy' was visible before the 1970s, but since then feminist interest in some of the canonical texts of the Western tradition has revealed aspects of those texts which were previously, to all intents and purposes, invisible. As soon as it became possible to recognize a dreary history of misogyny and sexism in philosophy, the job of documenting it was easy. Proving its philosophical relevance, however, was harder, and feminists quickly moved on to analyses of the systematic gender inflections and biases, hitherto concealed, in philosophical theories (from speculative metaphysics to political philosophy and philosophy of science) and philosophical concepts (`reason' and `man', for example, came in for a lot of attention).2 A concentration on the analysis of the linguistic and conceptual structures constitutive of the symbolic order, as they appear in canonical philosophical texts, marks, in many histories, the distinctiveness of `French' feminism.3 Especially in the work of Luce Irigaray - perhaps the most influential figure in the continental feminist philosophical tradition, and the one with whom the idea of `the feminine' is most closely associated - this move was something of a contraction; not an attempt to widen the philosophical canon but to infiltrate it, with subversive intent. This project was in some senses radical: an attempt to expose the linguistic and conceptual roots of the social superstructure; the location of the problem at this deep structural level; the call for revolution.4

Who, however, is the subject of radicalism? Who is the revolutionary subject? Who, more baldly, is the subject? In her critical, descriptive metaphysics, Irigaray insists on the internal conceptual relation between the masculine and the subject, traditionally conceived.5 The subject is, in terms of its conceptual history, masculine, as the masculine pronoun in the place of the generic would seem to indicate. Generalizing this point, which means developing it at a sufficient level of abstraction, Irigaray contends that `the masculine', far from being one of the two terms of sexual difference, is the effect, and thus the mark, of the foreclosure of sexual difference in a `hom(m)o-sexual' economy of the same.6 `The masculine' is, or is the name for, the absolute standard, the sole yardstick, in relation to which `the feminine' must always be found wanting, or in relation to which `the feminine' may only be conceived negatively. The revisionary (some would say visionary) challenge to the masculine philosophy of `the same' (which does not recognize difference) then brings into play a radically reconceived notion of `the feminine', the adequate (re)articulation of which is at the same time the revisionary aim:

what I want, in fact, is ... to restore the place of the feminine in sexual difference. That difference - masculine/feminine - has always operated `within' systems that are representative, self-representative, of the (masculine) subject. Moreover, these systems have produced many other differences that appear articulated to compensate for an operative sexual indifference. For one sex and its lack, its atrophy, its negative, still does not add up to two sexes. In other words, the feminine has never been defined except as the inverse, indeed the underside, of the masculine. So for woman it is not a matter of installing herself within this lack, this negative, even by denouncing it, nor of reversing the economy of the same by turning the feminine into the standard for `sexual difference'; it is rather a matter of trying to practice that difference.7

`Practising the difference', however, appears (especially in Irigaray's earlier and more influential work) as dependent upon prior philosophical work:

The philosophical order is indeed the one that has to be questioned, and disturbed, inasmuch as it covers over sexual difference. Having failed to provide an adequate interpretation of the sway philosophical discourse holds over all the rest, psychoanalysis [for example] has committed its theory and practice to a misunderstanding of the differences between the sexes ... philosophical discourse ... sets forth the law for all others, inasmuch as it constitutes the discourse on discourse.8

The first imperative, then, is to inhabit and transform philosophy into a philosophy of `the feminine', feminine philosophy, or philosophy `in the feminine',9 and thus Irigaray's work seems to represent a further stage in the relation between feminism and philosophy, an attempt to satisfy, one might say, the craving for a `philosophy of our own'.

back