Gender, I-deology and Addictive Representation: The Film of Familiarity more

Introduction Gender, l-deology and Addictive Representation: The Film of Familiarity Custom hath a mighty influence: it hath the force of Nature itself. Bathsua Makin, An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen (1673) Man is serious when he takes himself for an object. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness The papers in this collection address in one way or another the repre- sentation of gender; and sexual roles, the impact of feminist criticism, and the specificity of gender issues in (post)modernity, as seen through a vari- ety of British and American literary works and films. The present essay will provide an introductory overview of these gender issues. I will start with a definition of gender difference and will go on to discuss its role in the ideology of the self, of the I—which we might dub I-deology. A Familiar Film Readers are probably familiar with the film Alien, the 8th Passenger, in which an engaging female warrior, played by Sigourney Weaver, defeats a ghoulish creature, half-mantis and half rapist, which stalks her in the crannies of a labyrinthine spaceship. Such active images of women are not uncommon nowadays in films, and it is easy to measure the distance be- tween Alien and one of its precursors, a science-fiction film from the fifties which also took place in a spaceship and featured a monster overacting his Gender, l-deoiogy and Addictive Representation role in a scaly suit too big for him and a crew of male... and female! astro- nauts. Here the male astronauts did the fighting, though, and the women cooed and provided moral support. I remember the reaction of an audi- ence of politically correct students, the hoots and wild laughter as the men sat for lunch and the women astronauts served the meal: a scene all the more dated becausejthe gender roles common in a family of the fifties ap- peared supremely ridiculous when acted out in the cosmic future. The film carried the imprint of its age in its pathetic carnival monster, but even more so in its representation of gender. Sex, Gender, Sexuality What is gender? Why is it so open to different forms of representa- tion? It may be because gender is a matter of language, of signs and sym- bols, a semiotic" construct. Gender does not equal sex. It is the set of cultural practices and representations associated to biological sex.1 I dare say those astronauts of the fifties were men and women, but as textual entities they were different from today's textual subjects. And a subject can only apprehend his or her own sexuality or other people's through textuality and semiotic representation. Since the difference between gender, sex, and sexuality is anything but clear, it may warrant a closer-look. There is a whole scale of different meanings associated to sexuality.2 Here we may distinguish the following: biological .sex, official sex, gender, and sexual orientation. Sex Sex consists of a set of anatomical characteristics, but it is in no way a simple phenomenon. It includes the following variables: • Chromosomal sex (primary sexual traits). • Hormonal sex (secondary sexual traits: breasts, body hair, voice, fat). • Sex of gonads (Does the individual produce sperm or eggs?) • Sex of internal organs (Does the body have a prostate? Uterus and vagina? Where are the gonads located?) • Sex of external organs. (Does the body have a penis? Clitoris? Scrotum? Vulva? Something in between?) The importance of genital configuration was overstated by Freud (among others) as the locus of the J Cf. Stoller 1968; Vance 1984a: 9; Elliot 1991: 4-5. 2 See e.g. Reinisch 1991: 236. 14 Jose Angel Garcfa Landa construction of sexual identity: it led him to an inadequate distinction between sex and gender.3 • Brain sex. There seem to exist innate as well hormone-induced dif- ferences in brain functioning between men and women. Individuals show some differences in behaviour and attitudes from birth. Reinisch argues that these differences are "very subtle and not likely to be noticed by most observers" (Reinisch 1991: 242). In any case, it would be a gross mistake to explain away the cultural construction of gender on the basis of such differences. 'Official sex. An official description of biological sex, "male" or "female," is assigned at birth and inscribed in official documents. Correcting a "sex error" simply by reinscribing a person under the "right" heading is simplistic and a possible cause of pathology if gender is not taken into account (as can be seen in the memoirs of the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin). Gender The term "gender" is used to refer to the cultural representation of sexual difference, as opposed to its physiological aspect: it is "the cultural meaning attached to sexual identity" (McConnell-Ginet 1980: 16. Cf. Stoller 1968: 9). The notion of gender is a convenient theoretical con- struct: in practice, it is not separable from a consideration of sexual anatomy, official sex, sexual preference, brain sex.... Being a complex is- sue, gender may be experienced and analysed at several levels of speci- ficity. We could distinguish three aspects of gender: gender identity, or an individual's ascription to a gender; the roles of each gender as defined in a culture; and gender style, the management of identity and roles through significant individual practices. Gender identity. Usually, an individual develops a gender identity which coincides with the official designations of sex: males think of them- selves as men and females think of themselves as women. Gender identity See Millett 1977, or the critique of "penis envy" in Beauvoir (1949: 2.29) and Irigaray (1985: 55ff). Genital configuration may also be undervalued, made to appear less significant for the construction of gender than it actually is. E.g.: "Although . . . genital configuration has neither coherence" nor significance outside discourse, the connection between it and 'woman' is trans-discursive, i.e. it is maintained by all the discourses which presently constitute the dominant symbolic order in the West" (Silverman 1984: 325; italics added). 15 Gender, l-deology and Addictive Representation is the most basic, far-reaching and permanent aspect of an individual's personality (Stoller 1968). It is very difficult to change once it is established in early childhood. According to the Kinsey Institute, "an individual's gender identity ("I am a boy" or "I am a girl" ) becomes established between 18 months and three years of age," and "rarely changes later in lffe" (Reinisch 1990: 242, 244). Of course this is not the whole story. "Although a woman will not suddenly decide "I am a man," the meaning of "I am a man/I am a woman" will change, develop and become specified all through the individual's life: gender identity is constructed on the basis of gender roles, not just' of biological sex. Cases of hermaphroditism are by no means the only source of conflict: transsexuals who have developed a gender identity different from their official sex usually experience serious psychological conflicts. It is easy to see, then, that the gender of a person is as real as it is imaginary. Gender roles are associated to the individual's generic identity. According to the Kinsey Institute, A person's enactment of gender role includes everything he or she says or does which suggests to others that he or she is a male or a fe- male. This includes the outward expression of what society expects as maleness or femaleness of clothing, hair styles, interests, careers, and so forth. (Reinisch 1991: 242) A gender role is the behavioural implementation of gender identity: what an individual does because he or she is a man or a woman, both spontaneously and in order to secure a clear gender identity, acting in the way people of the same sex are expected to act. There is, then, a continual feedback between the social and the individual representation of gender roles. Gender roles are communicated mimetically, and are always central to a culture's interests. They are defined not only by what men and women actually do or say, but by what they say they do or say: each culture will have a variety of means to express the way men and women are expected to behave. Literature and art are a major repository of such generic stereo- types. Gender roles, though, are eminently changeable and subject to revi- sion. The notion of gender role is more specific and variable than gender identity, both through one person's life and from one culture to another. Individuals' notions of gender identity may change in the course of their lives, and their gender roles change accordingly. And, of course, men and women's roles are in constant evolution throughout history. This is espe- 16 JosS Angel Garcfa Landa cially the case in the modern age, when traditional values and images of the self are shaken up and subject to redefinition. It is important to understand the meaning of gender representations and roles: we do not stand in a primitive, spontaneous or natural relation to ourselves: "our own bodily experience is mediated through culture": maleness and femaleness are constructed through discourse and significant social practices.4 Gender style. We can use the concept of gender style as a further specification of roles: style is the way each person manipulates his or her generic image through individual and circumstantial choices or behaviour: through greater or lesser erotic activity or assertiveness, body posture, clothing, language... (for instance, a woman may choose to appear as more or less traditionally feminine). We may think of gender roles as socially constructed; gender style is the individual assertion of agency within the limits of the socially given roles (Traub 1991: 87). In practice, individual subjects live and construct their gender identities and roles in ways which are ultimately unique: generic attitudes permeate the whole personality, and just as there are no identical individuals, there are only similar, individual gender identities and roles. There are not two genders (male and female): as an analytic category, gender is elastic and generic distinctions can be established as necessary. This is especially the case in the interface between gender and sexuality. Sexuality Together with our generic identity (men, women) we construct a sex- ual identity (for instance, heterosexual, homosexual). Sexuality refers in this connexion to erotic orientation, desire and sexual behaviour and plea- sure. Sexual identity should not be confused with gender, although it is constructed on the basis of gender and consists basically of erotic, orienta- tion towards the other gender or one's own or both. Heterosexuality is the dominant norm, and homosexuality is usually considered a deviation: in all cultures, individuals are' socialized into a dominant heterosexual eroticism. For some this is a simple question of biology and genital configura- tion. For others, sexual desire is a historical phenomenon, the result of 4 Vance 1984a: 11. See also Delphy 1984: J40ff; Silverman 1984: 324; Valcarcel 1991: 153. 17 Gender, l-deology and Addictive Representation ideology iand institutional constraints, not a primitive natural force. Eroticism is an expression of an individual's overall outlook on existence and his/her life history: it is not predetermined by biology (Beauvoir 1949: 2.185). Sexual identities are also historical products: for instance, homo- erotic experiences did not give rise to a consistent homosexual identity in the Renaissance (gFraub 1991: 99-101). Some thinkers reject the concept of "erotic identity" as excessively reifying, and restrictive of actual erotic practice. For instance, according to the Kinsey Institute, most "homosexuals" have had heterosexual experiences, and about one third of "heterosexual," adult men have had sexual experiences with another man. Even the concept of "sexual preference" is being challenged by certain theorists. Some lesbian and gay critics try to theorize desire beyond the confines of object choice, to free desire from gender, which they see as inherently reifying. They speak in favour of the individualization of desire, disengaging it from gender considerations, not making people think of themselves as heterosexuals or homosexuals: "implicit in the idea of sex- ual preference is the assumption that anyone of the preferred sex can seek access to one's body" (Hooks 1984: 155; cf. Heath 1982). And of course these critics also denounce the still prevalent assump- tion of compulsory heterosexuality (Traub 1991: 107; Zimmerman 1985). Some go so far as to,assert the total independence of sexuality and.gender, arguing that there is a danger of reification and essentialism in discourses which define desire on the basis of gender and not on an individual basis. This new line of thought would define eroticism as a function of the indi- vidual self, not of gender. The gender of object choice is only one variable among many, in- cluding erotic identification, fantasy and preference for specific ac- tivities, and it is not necessarily the most crucial. (Traub 1991: 88) We could draw a parallel between this valuation of individual erotic style and the dissolution of traditional genres in literary theory and practice in favour of the self-fashioning activity of the individual work. But, although it is clear that the relationships between gender and sexuality are in constant redefinition, I think that gender is a crucial consideration in determining the object choice for most people: as Traub recognizes, "we -can barely conceive" [let alone live, I would add] "an eroticism free from gender constraints" (Traub 1991: 90). The relative importance of other considerations is more variable: age within certain limits, beauty and body configuration, education, language, social class, race, health, beauty.... 18 Jose Angel Garcia Landa Private sexual practices between consenting adults (practice unspecified, sex unspecified) seem to be the limit of today's progressive sexual consen- sus.5 But gender identity is universally experienced as the more sexually specific constraint, whether the individual desires an object of the same gender, of the other, or of both. Sexual identities result, then, from the complex interaction of several levels of stereotypes: 1st, men and women 2nd, homosexuals and heterosexuals, making up four "sexual types." 3rd, "virile" or "feminized." Amounting to eight. 3rd, cross-dressing or in straight dress. Sixteen potential types. 4th. But then there may be chromosomal or genital disorders (XX or XY, but also XXX, XYY, XXY..., hermaphroditism (apparent or real), and then there are gender styles, roles.... It is easy to see that although generalizations as to "sexual types" are useful and commonsensical in many contexts of discussion, they may also be misleading and they should be recognized as being no more than con- venient abstractions, with an ontological status comparable to that of liter- ary genres. Our generic perception oscillates between the classical fascina- tion with fixed types and the modern fascination of seeing them dissolve and come apart. The theoretical interest in phenomena which challenge the classical masculine/feminine division, such as bisexuality, androgyny, ho- mosexuality, hermaphroditism, castration, cross-dressing and transvestism, transsexualism, is clear enough in the papers that follow. I think it is fair to say that for the most part they take up a constructivist stance. Essentialism versus Constructivism The opposition between essentialist and constructivist positions is im- plicit, too, in the foregoing discussion. In the realms of cultural studies, anthropology and psychology, philosophical essentialism, which empha- sizes nature and tends to be conservative, can be opposed to constructivism (or conventionalism), which emphasizes culture and tends to be progres- sive. See for instance how Rubin's (1984) supposedly non-prescriptive discussion is weaker in her definition of these limits. 19 Gender, l-deology and Addictive Representation Before you can set about changing the world, you need to define it in such a way that changes are possible. You do this by conceiving of it not as a physical essence (a bundle of atoms held together by gravity) but as a social system (a bundle of categories held together by cus- tom). (Ruthven 1984: 36) Philosophies#of gender may be essentialist in varying degrees: expos- ing hidden essentialist assumptions in systems of thought which may seem at first sight anti-essentialist is a favourite critical move. It will be seen that in this paper I take a mainly constructivist position. "Mainly," because constructivism, too, is relative, rarely a matter of all-or-nothing. Essen tialism The word "sex" is eminently ambiguous: it may refer to either anatomy, or gender, or sexual orientation (Rubin 1984: 307), which is a sign of the essentialist assumptions our culture has inherited. In traditional Western culture, sex has often been seen as a dangerous or negative force: a view which is an unfortunate inheritance of Christianity and the epitome of essentialism; Freud, too, linked culturalization to necessary sexual guilt (Weeks 1981; Freud 1988a: 3059). According to essentialist assumptions, traditional or normal sexuality (heterosexuality) is the natural result of gender differences which are the same as sexual differences: males are and should be masculine, women are and should be feminine—not just female. In analyzing sexuality, essentialism is basically "the idea that sex is a natu- ral force that exists prior to social life and shapes institutions," whereas constructivists reject this grounding on nature, denouncing that "one of the more tenacious ideas about sex is that there is one best way to do it, and that everyone should do it that way."6 Sexuality is the result of social practices, a construct, not a primary drive (Beauvoir 1949: 1.87). Essentialism pervades most male philosophical treatments of gender, sexuality and eroticism, from Schopenhauer to Bataille. Often, curiously enough, the essentialism with which issues of gender are treated is only an enclave within a more lucid and dialectical philosophical approach to other issues.7 Feminist criticism has rejected and discredited classical essentialist Rubin 1984: 275, 283. It was already observed by Freud that this was one of the er- rors of the sexual mores of our culture (1988a: 3042). Cf. Irigaray 1985: 17; Puleo 1992: 3, 92. Essentialism may appear as a weapon of confrontation even in supposedly anti-essentialist discourses, e. g. in the following 20 Jose Angel Garcia Landa theories of gender (Beauvoir 1949: 1.75; Ruthven 1984: 8). For construc- tivist feminists, like Simone de Beauvoir, "you are not born a woman: you become one," and the sexual symbolism which surrounds both genders is a construction.8 All feminists emphasize the cultural differences between the genders (see, e.g., Heilbrun 1985, Gilbert 1985, Moi 1986). Some feminists, though, give greater play to the essential difference of genders; they assume a "strategic essentialism" in order to combat patriarchal assumptions (cf. Spivak 1987; Showalter 1989: 369). Cixous or Irigaray defend essentialism, valuing women's experiences (the female body and sexuality, motherhood, etc.), and advocate a culture not of equality but of difference and respect for both genders. They oppose the idea of an unde- fined egalitarianism.9 But althouh these French feminists often peddle their own brand of essentialism, they are by no means wholesale essentialists: for instance, Irigaray acknowledges the importance of myths as constitutive of lived reality (1990: 24). Constructivism For constructivists (Beauvoir, Foucault, Weeks, Rubin...), sexuality is not a given, an animal element, the call of nature, but a social construction. Culture is not simply the repression of sexuality: it is also the construction of sexuality and desire through institutions and the exercise of power. We may mention Michel Foucault as an influential instance of extreme con- structivism. Foucauldian analysis shows how discourses about sexuality are an instrument of power and help constitute the reality they are supposed to simply describe. Constructivist philosophies tend to be more self-conscious about their political role than versions of essentialism, as can be seen in the notion of institutional reflexivity: Terms introduced to describe social life routinely enter and transform . it. . . because they become part of the frames of action which individ- uals or groups adopt. (Giddens 1992: 29) extract from an anti-essentialist feminist treatise: "La antigua agresividad falica de caracter filogen&ico presente en la monta ritualizada de los primates se perpettia en la especie humana a traves de la cultura" (Puleo 1992: 195). Beauvoir 1949: 2.13; 1.88; my translation. Cixous 1981; Irigaray 1977; 1990: 11, 82. For a critique of Irigaray's essentialism, see for instance Haug 1987: 189. 21 Gender, 1-deology and Addictive Representation This concern with reflexivity is similar to that of poststructuralism in literary theory. But you do not need to be a poststructuralist in order to ad- vocate some form of constructivism. According to the 16th-century skeptic Cornelius Agrippa, women's roles are limited '-Sr .... not by the will of God, not by necessity or reason, but through cus- tom, education, work and above all through violence and oppression. {Apology for the Nobility and Excellence of the Female Sex; quoted in Beauvoir 1949: 1.179. My translation). Constructivists often advocate a sociological approach to culture-spe- cific sexual practices in order to examine them in detail: One may then think of sexual politics in terms of such phenomena as . populations, neighbourhoods, settlement patterns, migration, urban conflict, epidemiology, and police technology. These are more fruitful categories of thought than the more traditional ones of sin, disease, neurosis, pathology, decadence, pollution, or the decline and fall of empires. (Rubin 1984: 277) What does constructivism tell us about men and women? First of all, that "masculinity" and "femininity" are the result of culture and ideol- ogy, not the result of biology. Men and women are castes, not merely sexes (Mill 1966: 489; Millett 1977: 26ff, 35; Delphy 1984: 71). Men Man is a being with two genders: in the dyad man/woman, "man" is both a positive and a neuter term, "woman" a negative one: The relationship between the sexes is: not that of two energies, two poles: man is both positive and neutral. . . . She is determined and dif- ferentiated with respect to man, but the reverse is not the case; she is the inessential face to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute, she is the Other.10 " Le rapport des deux sexes n'est pas celui de deux electricites, de deux p61es: I'homme repr&ente a la fois le positif et le neutre." "Elle se determine et se differencie par rapport a l'homme et non celui-ci par rapport a elle; elle est l'inessentiel en face de l'essentiel. II est le Sujet, il estTAbsolu: elle est 1'Autre" (Beauvoir 1949: 1.14-5, my translation; cf. also Beauvoir 1949: 2.174; Irigaray 1985: 50, 71). 22 Jose. Angel Garcia Landa This peculiar logic is the origin of the pernicious logical trap known as the double bind, used to confine women within the bounds of femininity. We are all familiar with the equation between masculinity and activity, feirriV ninity and passivity (e.g., in Freud 1988b). This is an instance of the dou- ble bind. If we accept that activity is inherently masculine, then women can act only by emulation and can be accused of showing masculine tendencies whenever they assume an active role. For instance, a woman displays herself in order to attract a man. Her tricks are discovered, and she is accused of being a calculating siren, although she has done nothing but follow the only course of action socially allowed to her (Beauvoir 1949: 1.93, 2.115). Men are culturally constructed as active, as subjects who must face and master the world though manipulation and action: they are human subjects, while women are assigned a peculiar ground between the human and the objectuaL The male self is of course not wholly undefined or neutral. Men have always been the bearers of reason, culture, and seen as inhabiting the public sphere: women are traditionally seen as closer to. nature and to emotion, theirs is the private sphere. Conversely, as noted by Puleo (1992: 178), when reasoning is pictured as a limiting and mechanical faculty (as sometimes happens in modern thought), it is often given as a devaluated job to women, while male intellectuals assume the irrationality of genius. Emotion and intimacy are commonly seen as feminine: a man in love becomes feminized (Barthes 1990: 14). Since emotions and feelings are women's business, men traditionally rely upon women to do the work of intimacy, both within the couple and in their exchanges with other men. Examples of this fact range from the selling of daughters as wives to the role, of woman as representation, a sign of the man's status in the social scale, to homosociality and to the role of women in building male self- confidence in couples: since he is forbidden to express uncertainties about his strength or virility, and is often engaging in competitive relationships with other men, "the conflicting burdens of his male need for reinforcement of his self-image, and his human need to share his self- doubts, fall on his wife or lover."11 Thus, the generic shortcomings of men are usually shouldered by women as well. Relationships between men are based on competitiveness. There is also male class solidarity, usually based on rituals of affirmation of virility and initiation of younger males into proper male attitudes. Football, for in- 11 Peele 1991: 199. See also Giddens 1992: 125; Sedgwick 1985; Beauvoir 1949: 1.281. 23 Gender, l-deology and Addictive Representation stance, is a modern equivalent of the men's house of primitive societies, a "group of men united in the cult of an object that is a materialized penis and excluding the women from their society" (Roheim 1932, quoted in Miilett 1977: 50-51). Some essentialist feminists would hold that male instincts are inher- ently violent and destructive. Male theorists of sexuality, like Sade, Bataille and Blanchot|have often taken an essentialist stance, and define desire (masculine de'sire) as destruction, expenditure, waste of energy, and ag- gression. Feminists argue that these ideas are aggressive macho philosophi- cal constructions, based on an antidemocratic and aristocratic conception of "human" (that is, male) essence, a perpetuation of ancestral male atti- tudes in which the preying subject marks the flesh of an object/victim (through rape, defloration, etc.). Patriarchal sexuality is haunted by dreams of possession and the marking of women's bodies (e. g. by defloration and rape).12 The well-known macho way of kissing or fucking a woman as a way of possessing or dominating her is, of course, a political act (Miilett 1977: ch. 1, and 300 ff.) and a favourite of popular mythologies, narrative and film. The cultural products and the sexual behaviour of men are often experienced by women as alienating and manipulative. The transformations that occur in the personal sphere in our age often leave men in a false position, since so many certainties about their self and the right way of dealing with women are being called into question. Nowadays, Male sexual compulsiveness can be understood ... as an obsessive, but brittle, acting out of routines that have become detached from their erstwhile support. . . . Many men are unable to construct a narra- tive of self that allows them to come to terms with an increasingly democratised and reordered sphere of personal life. (Giddens 1992: 112, 117) The traditional competitiveness of relations between males, especially under capitalism, may become an important obstacle to deeper human relationships: 2 Beauvoir 1955; 1949: 2.74, 90, 130-69; Puleo 1992: 187-90; Miilett 1977: 298ff. From this some feminists draw consequences dangerously close to puritanism: "Cultural feminist sexual politics really offer us nothing more than women's traditional sexual values disguised as radical feminist sexual values" (Echols 1984: 64). Echols denounces some feminists' "monomaniacal concern with sexual danger" in the USA (Echols 1984: 65). 24 Jose Angel Garcia Landa Unable to involve oneself deeply with people of the same sex, one cannot really get to know people of the opposite sex. Instead, one sees the opposite sex as an abstract thing, as something needed to complete one's existence. In this objectification of human beings lie the roots of [emotional] addiction. (Peele 1991: 143) Peele refers here to "love addiction," although this extended concept of addiction has some relevance for attitudes towards gender. As we see, Man has a problem. Women Simone de Beauvoir said that if there were no women, men would have had to invent them. According to Nietzsche, men did invent them, which gives us a parody of Genesis: Man created woman. With what? With a rib he took from his God, from his ideal. (The Twilight of Idols) Femininity is not explicable through essentialist myths such as the feminine mystique. Rather, those myths must be explained. Feminine women are cultural constructs in the interests of patriarchal ideology.13 Femininity is a fragile construct, ambivalently placed between the human and the objectual, between the ideal and the abject, often with a touch of unreality: Poetry tries to capture what lies beyond ordinary prose: woman is an eminently poetical being, since man projects on her everything he de- cides not to be. (Beauvoir 1949: 1.289) Women are constructed in patriarchy as a negative pole, man as both the neutral and the positive term, just as "day" includes both "night" and "day" (Beauvoir 1949: 1.14; Genette 1969). Woman is the Other: within human culture, she is fixed as immanent object, while man poses as tran- scendental consciousness, active will. The elements of biological passivity in the female body are transformed by culture into a whole mythology: for instance, the analogy between the relative mobility of the reproductive cells and the individuals, as if sperms had a human (masculine) will in compari- 13 Beauvoir 1949: 1.13; Friedan 1963; Mill 1966: 451; Miilett 1977: 46. In this account of femininity I follow in the main Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. 25 Gender, l-deology and Addictive Representation son with the mere inertia of eggs, etc.'4 We try to see masculine and femi- nine traits in all animal species, unconsciously projecting onto them the stereotypes of our human culture. As noted by Simone de Beauvoir, (1949: 1.50), it is very difficult to give a general definition of what it is to be a female in the animal world. The cultural r|?le of woman has been an incarnation of Otherness. She is characterize! by means of polarities: she is conceived either as sexless or as the incarnation of sexuality, an angel or a demon. Female sexuality is represented as either nonexistent (in mothers, virgins, or Angels in the House) or threatening (in sirens, Medusas, prostitutes, femmes fatales). In patriarchal mythologies, woman is matter, man is spirit, woman is darkness and night, man is light and day, man is the sun, woman is the moon, man is the original, woman is the copy, etc. Man is given the centre and woman both margins. And the margins are always ambivalent. A prostitute, for in- stance, can be seen either as a slave or as the woman who manipulates men; the femme fatale is both a marginal by-product of the patriarchal system and a limited agent within it. Woman is inferior, but can also be an equal, and granted token representation—a classical manoeuvre of control.15 Woman has been constructed by man as an intermediary between na- ture and consciousness, an Other who is a consciousness that can neverthe- less be possessed in the flesh, an Other who does not require a symmetrical recognition of my otherness vis-a-vis her. The culture of patriarchy is characterized by what deconstructivists have called "phallogocentrism": a belief in the transcendental value of the sign and the phallus, a negation of the body, of mortality, of the materiality necessary to constitute thought and meaning: "It is this challenging of spirit by life that makes sex an ob- ject of scandal."16 We find a practical instance of phallogocentrism in the male experience of gendered sexuality: "In the erotic spasm, the man em- bracing his lover tries to lose himself in the infinite mystery of flesh" (Beauvoir 1949: 1.249). Man tries to dominate nature and physical exis- tence through the domination of women. Men construct a self-identity through images of transcendence, and it is clear that these images work all the better when the subject can posit an Other as a foil who does not transcend, an Other who represents the subject 14 Beauvoir 1949: 1.47. As an instance, see Bonaparte 1965: 79-80. 15 Beauvoir 1949: 1.31, 102, 241, 306; Millett 1977: 57; Cixous 1986. 16 Beauvoir 1949: 1.263; Derrida 1975; Cixous 1981; Moi 1985: 211. See also Beauvoir 1. 233, 239 for her own avant la lettre versions of some well-known aspects of Derridean thought. 26 Jose Angel Garcia Landa himself in his immanence, a scapegoat on which he can project his own shortcomings. Women become in this way a subordinated part of men's projects, or an obstacle to those projects. They are the trap of the species, the body which impedes the free-ranging male mind, the material ball and chain for his will, his pure spirit. Women perpetuate the folly of life by luring men into reproduction: they trap men within the confines of mar- riage.17 Once and again we find in patriarchal mythology the motif of the transcendent male to whom the female clings: she disturbs his dreams of adventure, of the frontier, of empire, of travel, of freedom and indepen- dence (Circe and Ulysses, Dido and Aeneas, Spleen et ideal, Sons and Lovers...) (cf. Baym 1985: 70ff). Girls are taught that they must assume the role of objects if they are to be successfully socialized. The spontaneous desire of the little girl to affirm herself is often restrained and checked (Beauvoir 1949: 2.27, 34). Such conditioning starts from earliest childhood: "Many people who might toss a baby boy into the air, for instance, would refrain from doing so with a baby girl." (Reinisch 1991: 241). Beauvoir emphasizes the significance of encouraging such associations between masculinity and height or elevation in climbing, urinating, etc. A girl will learn that it is not women, but men who rule the world and her self-image is constructed accordingly; she is informed she must accept a role which is presented to her as subordinate and limited (Beauvoir 1949: 2.35, 43). That is probably reason why so many little girls say they would like to be a boy, while the reverse does not happen. Women become acutely conscious of their bodies at puberty, and then every time they have their periods; social attitudes reinforce the idea that they must be careful with their sexual image, and mistrust their bodies. "In girls, the process of individual socialization is synonymous with the sexual- ization of the body and its parts" (Haug .1987: 203; see also Beauvoir 1949: 2.65, 84). This process of sexualization involves being willing to be- come the object of male sight. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. . . . Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. (Berger 1972: 46-47; cf. Beauvoir 1949: 2.58). !7 A view most characteristically formulated by Schopenhauer (1966: 2.559). See Puleo's critique (1992: 180). 27 Gender, l-deology and Addictive Representation In classical visual arts, the implicit spectator is generally assumed to be male (Berger 1972: 64; Mulvey 1975). Femininity, then, is essentially a masquerade, a fact which is further emphasized by fashion and cosmetics. Women are socialized as already interpreting a role—more so than men.18 They learn that the way to erotic fulfilment is an indirect one: they can only conquer by ofjering themselves as preys. Women's body images are used under pa^iarchy as a way of exercising emotional control over the female sex, often giving rise to a guilty conscience, and to such disorders as hysteria and anorexia. As children we assimilate not only bodily standards but also, alongside them, the knowledge we need in order to conceal our own "deviations". . . . Our constant preoccupation with self-examination is what causes us continually to realign ourselves with the dominant values of femininity. (Haug 1987: 129, 161) Both men and women defend the traditional opposition between mas- culinity and femininity. This is only the consequence of the alienation and ideological control to which women are subjected under patriarchy. Women have always been educated in a Rousseaunian way, both avant et apres la lettre—according to Rousseau, the whole education of women ought to be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to make life sweet and agreeable to them—these are the duties of women at all times, and what should be taught them from , their infancy. (Emile, quoted in Millett 1977: 74) Feminist critics deplore that this kind of socialization often leads to the complicity of women in their subordinate situation.19 Just as feminine women appeared at a given moment in history, so they may well equally disappear in the future. The aura of femininity, the special erotic nature of the feminine body, all may disappear with the myth of woman's otherness. (Beauvoir 1949: 1.13, 235, 2.574). Echols notes that "early radical feminists believed that women's oppression derived from the very construction of gender and sought its elimination as a meaningful social category." (1984: 50-51). But more or less essentialist Riviere 1929; Beauvoir 1949: 2.360-1, 465; Elliot 1991: 166. See, e. g., Beauvoir 1949: 2.565; Millett 1977: 38, 55ff, 350; Moi 1986: 212; Gilbert and Gubar 1989: 146. 28 Jose Angel Garcfa Landa versions of feminism have gradually developed since. As women are what they have been in fact up to now, the definition of femininity and the value of essentialist explanations remain a problem in feminist thought (cf. Moi 1986:213). If theorizing the future of gender is a way of fictionalizing, we should be aware that fictionalizing acts as boundary-crossings should not be taken as a pro- cess of transcending, but, rather, of doubling, because whatever has been left behind is dragged along in the wake of the individual acts and remains a potential presence. (Iser 1989: 222). Hence the need for "strategic essentialism" (cf. de Lauretis 1989). Some theorists exploit some aspects of the traditional construction of women as bisexual, or more polymorphous than men, to create positive role-models (e.g. Cixous 1981: 254; 1986: 87-88). Many theorists, too, speak in favour of some form of androgyny or development of the "feminine" side of men and the "masculine" side of women, eliminating aggressive competitiveness, the double standard, and other negative generic traits from men's socialization (Millett 1977: 62). Both Coleridge and Woolf believed that the creative mind is androgynous, combining male and female characteristics.20 In Sanskrit sacred writings we find the concept of the feminine cosmic energy (shakti) which is latent inside men and can be beneficially liberated (Puleo 1992: 99). Androgyny is an interesting con- cept, although it should be examined lest it maintain as essential polarities the "male" and "female" that it seeks to transcend. For instance, some literary critics would argue that androgynist poetics may obscure the dis- tinct experience and consciousness of women's writing (Showalter 1989: 360-1). Anyway, in the present state of affairs, a cultural evolution toward androgyny would no doubt involve a greater "feminization" of the public sphere. Whether the emphasis falls on biology or on cultural inheritance, women have been for many theorists of all persuasions "the emotional revolutionaries of modernity" (Giddens 1992: 130). Self "Character" means both "self and "sign." The self is a semiotic structure: it is socially constituted, being not a pre-existent essence, but the 20 Woolf 1977: 94. Cf. Ransom 1938: 77. 29 Gender, l-deoiogy and Addictive Representation result of a situation and a life story (Beauvoir 1949: 1.12; Hillis Miller 1992). For modern anti-essentialist thought the self is a construction; it is articulated by means of images and is accessible only through representa- tions, not in an unmediated way.21 This process can be analysed and de- scribed through psychology, sociology, semiotics—even narratology. The narrative of the self^s a way of articulating time in a meaningful way. This is done traditionally in different ways by men and women: men's narrative of the self is a story of work; for women it is a story of love, marriage and children. In patriarchy, women stand therefore to some extent "outside time" while men build the linear time of history (Giddens 1992: 57, 59). The modern self is problematized, open to redefinition through dis- course. "The self today is for everyone a reflexive project—a more or less continuous interrogation of past, present and future." (Giddens 1992: 30), Individuality is lived in modern society as something which has to be con- structed. Gender and sexuality are an important element in selMashioning. There is an endless refashioning of gender identity in order to construct individual selves. We could compare this situation to the experimental na- ture of modern literature. Defamiliarization, ostranienie, the departure from well-tried modes of representation is a key concept in aesthetics and literary theory (Shklovski 1965; Pozuelo 1988). Modern theory sees litera- ture as an exercise in renewed perception, following Coleridge's famous definition of the way poetry works, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes that see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. (Coleridge 1975: 169) Something similar is happening in the philosophy of gender. Theorists of sexuality break down stereotypes, showing that men and women are not what traditional representations show them to be. They show the ideological contradictions inherent in such traditional representa- tions and the way in which images or narratives contain conflicting dis- courses on gender—"contain" in the double sense of being a vehicle for, and trying to defuse potentially disruptive images (the latter usually not in a wholly successful way). The analyst, the critic, has a fundamental role in bringing out these repressed discourses and voicing them. Feminist criti- Lacan, quoted in Beauvoir 1949: 2.15. 30 Jose Angel Garcia Landa cism started as a study of representations. And this is still a crucial step in analysis: studying a representation we construct an alternative representa- tion which corresponds to our perception—which is already a form of rep- resentation. Thus we create a distance between representations which are seen as ideological and representations which articulate a new perception, those that we can only perceive as "the thing itself:"22 The self is something that is fashioned through culture. Therefore, what we experience as our private concerns are really only a manifestation of wider cultural issues. Feminists defined "consciousness raising" as the process of making individuals realize that "the personal is the political": showing how experiences, fears, attitudes, which seem to belong to the in- dividual realm are in fact social and political issues (Mitchell 1971: 61; Ruthven 1984: 71). Even the personal body image is defined as a political project (Wolf 1991: 378-9). Contemporary theories of the subject go be- yond the premature "death of the subject" to the theorising of subjects as the locus where different discourses act on each other and may be trans- formed. Personal experience is the locus of subversive practice for many students of gender (Traub 1991: 92). This interest in the personal should not involve a return to expressionist subjectivism and emotionalism: it is often the case that "our emotions, in contrast to our thoughts, are sponta- neously reactionary" (Haug 1987: 59). A theoretical and political frame- work is necessary. Today, the construction of personal identity is linked to choice of mode of life. Sexual identity, gender, love and desire, relation- ships, are perhaps the most obvious theatre for such choices, since in the modern world the sphere of sexuality becomes private property, related to the definition and development of the self, and becomes disengaged from immutable relationships with property, kinship, social order, and ethical codes (Giddens 1992: 198, 175). Love Love, like sexuality, is a structured experience, a construction: that is why we can speak of different kinds of love: Platonic love; courtly love, roman- tic love, passionate love... We are used to studying medieval courtly love as a system of conventions, but love as lived in modern industrial societies (that is, in the heart of the reader) does not escape that definition. Passionate love is studied by Barthes as "discourse," as a repertory of im- E. g. "women themselves" as used unconsciously in Traub 1991: 85. 31 Gender; l-deology and Addictive Representation ages; "no love is original," though, problematically, the lover proclaims the uniqueness of the experience, and feels threatened by the possibility of its being revealed as a stereotype (Barthes 1990: 35, 137). The emergence of romantic love can be: linked to the emergence of a personal narrative model and a concept of the self—the individualist bourgeois self and the novel, the bourgeois genre (Giddens 1992: 37ff). Radical feminists have seen in romantic love an instrument of inequality or even, in Firestone's words, "the pivot of women's oppression."?3 Romantic love gives way un- der women's enfranchisement, and the "relationship" which is based on "opening oneself out to the other" becomes the new narrative of the self, the new use of intimacy. (Giddens 1992: 61, 63). The Family and Marriage The family has often been under attack from feminist positions. It is seen as the instrument of patriarchal domination and the guardian of re- ceived ideology.24 The family is also studied by materialist feminists as a unit of production whose proper sphere is a pre-capitalist economy. The end of the family as unit of production and the development of an indus- trial economy entails women's liberation, as promised by Engels, although this tendency can be checked as long as the capitalist practice of paying women less than men is consistently applied. From the constructivist viewpoint, marriage is not the merely logical result of natural (heterosexual) love; it is a social institution which shapes the desires and activities of subjects. There is a paradox in the arrangement of the traditional patriarchal household: the woman properly integrated within the social system was the least privileged and most dependent (Beauvoir 1949: 1.162). Marriage is a form of subjection and mystification as long as it is linked to economic dependence. Outsp6keh male chauvin- ists such as- Balzac recognize the fact: "A married woman is a slave one must know how to place on a throne."25 And in a class society, the myth of "making a good marriage" is a way of upholding the myth of class open- ness and social mobility, a device for exerting ideological control over the lower classes, and of course over women considered as a class. Independent 23 Firestone 1972: 121. See also Beauvoir 1949: 2.507; Millett 1977: 37. 24 Beauvoir 1949: 1.142; Millett 1977: 33; Delphy 1984: 93ff. 2^ Balzac, Physiologie du manage, quoted in Beauvoir 1949: 1.188. Cf. Mill's literal assertion of the chattel status of women (1966: 460ff). 32 Jose Angel Garcia Landa women (whether prostitutes, widows, or spinsters) are usually marginalized and considered oddities within the social framework of patriarchal culture. The figure of the saintly wife is surrounded by evil or threatening women: whores, the symmetrical Other of the wife, or, closer to home, the archety- pal mother-in-law, a projection of the wife's prehensile aspect: the foreboding of her aging and of the illusory nature of her charms.2*5 Even if they consider its relation to love, constructivists often reject marriage: it is seen as the death of love as spontaneity; it is considered obscene by critics such as Barthes (1991) and Beauvoir (1949: 2.225ff). The eroticism of traditional marriage often begins with clumsiness and violence (the celebrated wedding night) and ends in the viciousness of repetitive and animal sexuality. This kind of married sexuality often leads to sexual in- hibition or to frustration. It goes without saying that adultery will only dis- appear with the disappearance of marriage. There is an inherent paradox in bourgeois marriage: there is no possible conciliation between sexual attrac- tion and servitude. The certainties and predictability of "conjugal love" are seen by some of these critics as making space for pitiable addictive be- haviour.27 Other critics are more optimistic: Foucault (1987) sees the development of the ideology of married love as; a step towards the equality between men and women, and Irigaray speaks out in favour of marriage "au sens le plus general d'alliance charnelle et spirituelle entre homme et femme" which must be thought out anew in the new sexual order (1990: 17). Work Human history might be reduced to the history of the gradual division of work; and gender differences are highly relevant to this process. It is from this point of view that we can define women, for instance, as a social class, as did Engels, Sirrione de Beauvoir or Christine Delphy.28 While women make up half of the world's population, they cover about two thirds of the total hours of work, and receive only one tenth of the total pay; besides, they own less than one per cent of the goods.29 Only as mod- 26 Beauvoir 1949: 1.219, 228, 279; 2.201, 204. 27 Beauvoir 1949: 1.298-300; 2.274; Peele 1991: 141. 28 Engels 1968; Beauvoir 1949: 1.226; Delphy 1984: 20ff. 29 Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs, quoted in Wolf 1991: 29. 33 Gender, l-deology and Addictive Representation els and prostitutes do women earn more money than men (Wolf 1992: 65). Economic independence is of course a prerequisite of enfranchisement for feminist critics (Woolf 1977: 108; Beauvoir 1949: 2.521ff). Attempts to dignify housework (i.e. unpaid labour) as a fit choice for women in gen- eral should be countered. It is a subordinative and frustrating task, which defines woman aiga dependent and second-class citizen and cuts her off from active engagement in society; it transforms activity into endless repe- tition without the possibility of ever achieving enduring results (Beauvoir 1949: 232ff)- Housework for women is the characteristically patriarchal mode of production, which falls outside the labour market, and was there- fore insufficiently theorized by Marxism (Delphy 1984: 79ff). The relationship between reproduction and production is not a question of wordplay. The development of birth control techniques has been a crucial step in women's liberation: the contemporary development of a sexuality entirely separable from reproduction has altered the social order and gen- der roles significantly. Even if women enter the labour market, there re- mains the problem of equality. It is a well-known fact that women's labour is worse paid than men's (about half its value, when it is paid at all) and that it has always tended to be ignored by legal regulations.30 Patterns of gender-specific appropriate appearance or behaviour are especially pernicious when used as instruments of control in the workplace (Wolf 1991: 48ff). And there remains the key problem of the conciliation between production and reproduction (Beauvoir 1949: 1.197), which is still unsolved, as any woman trying to work in a male preserve learns soon enough. This is why some feminists argue in favour of reorganizing work and production on the basis of a culture of sexual difference. For instance, many services are organized on the assumption that society consists of family units in which a male works and a woman stays at home (Irigaray 1990: 97, 136). There is also the issue of authority at the work place. The two genders do not have equal authority. There is male and even female resistance to that minority of women who hold positions of power. Male authority in work, too, gives rise to cultural authority: students (of both sexes) show more deference towards male than towards female statements and writings.31 Inequality is a matter of both day-to-day attitudes and of the whole cultural tradition of mankind. 30 Beauvoir 1949: 1.192-203; Giddens 1992: 2; Millett 1977: 40, 31 Beauvoir 1949: 2.544; Goldberg 1968, quoted in Millett 1977: 55. 34 Jose Angel Garcia Landa History History has been written by men, as was loudly proclaimed by that medieval feminist, Chaucer's Wife of Bath: By god, if wommen hadde writen stories, As clerkes han with-inne hir oratories They wolde han writen of men more wikkednesse Than al the mark [sex] of Adam may redresse. (Prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale, lines 693-96) Simone de Beauvoir asserts that "The whole of women's history has been the work of men" (1949: 1.216). For many centuries there have been no great women philosophers, painters, writers, critics, physicians, scientists, warriors... and very few politicians. Generally, great women in history have an exemplary and symbolic rather than an active role.32 As Beauvoir argues, "One is not born a genius: one becomes a genius. And women's lot has made this becoming impossible." It is difficult to make significant contributions to art or culture while occupying a subordinate position.33 There is a crucial moment in which women begin to write about their experience; it is located around the rise of the bourgeois culture in the eighteenth century. The outcome of women's writing is the feminist reinvention of history, starting with a revision of one's personal history, since it is often alienating for women to teach or learn a man-made history which systematically excludes them.34 We have said that history may be read as the history of work. Industrialization and urbanization provide the material basis for modernity and for the new sexual ordering in the western world, reorganizing the family, creating new gender roles, etc. (Rubin 1984: 285). Gender roles are, then, transformed in urban culture, although they do not immediately dissolve: in order to become socialized in an anonymous mass, the individ- ual needs to fit patterns of acceptability. City dwellers have close ties with fewer individuals instead of having to deal with a whole, community as is the case with villagers. This may help reinforce gender stereotypes, espe- cially as the American model, more rootless than the European one, has 32 Beauvoir 1949: 1.220. Cf. Mulvey's (1975) thesis about the role of woman in narra- tive. 33 Beauvoir 1949: 1.222; cf. 2.551; Woolf 1977: 67ff. 34 Woolf 1977: 63; Gilbert 1985; Showalter 1985: 265ff; Irigaray 1990: 29, 138; Kolodny 1985b: 153. 35 Gender, 1-deology and Addictive Representation become culturally dominant. And many alternative communal role-models other than gender stereotypes have been weakened or lost in modernity: a fixed class identity, religious belief, etc. (cf. Peele 1991: 124, 151). But stereotyped gender patterns diffused through the mass media often are more uniform, available and powerful than ever (Wolf 1991: 20). Body images are now mediated through publicity and here, as is the case with all other produ|ts, "The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life" (Berger 1972: 142)— or with her own body. Rethinking historical evolution will involve thinking out strategies of oppositional discourse. We have alluded to some common ground between Marxism and feminism. Alliances can be found, too, between ecological thought and feminism, where male assertiveness is associated with capital- ism, militarism and consumerism (Irigaray 1990: 28, 113). Language A word about language and gender. Feminists often argue that lan- guage has been made mainly by men, and is the reflection of a male-cen- tred universe.35 No doubt women and men relate to language differently, and gender is a good marketplace for idols of all kinds. Leaving essentialist theories aside, we may concentrate on the use of language, starting with the use of the masculine as neuter. Los ingleses pueden ser mas discretos en este sentido, pero hablando en plural los espanoles o los franceses podemos ignorar la presencia de mujeres entre nosotros. This untranslatable phrase might be loosely rendered as "English allows its speakers to be more discreet in this regard, perhaps, but Spanish or French will normally allow their speakers using the plural to ignore the presence of women." Spanish women, meanwhile, have to acknowledge the presence of a man among them by using the masculine form "nosotros." Men's language has been catalogued as more abstract, more in- strumentalizing and appropriative, etc. (Irigaray 1990: 36-38). These differences are best seen as the end-product of the positions and roles available to the subject. Women tend to use more tentative and deferential language, as a consequence of their relative powerlessness in male culture. It is also well known that in ordinary conversational turn-taking men interrupt and silence women in a significantly higher proportion. See e.g. Wittig 1975; Spender 1980; Ruthven 1984: 59-70. 36 Jose Angel Garcia Landa As to written style, there have been attempts to identify a specifically female writing. But it-seems pointless to try to define it as a separate set of features uniquely present in women's texts.36 Of course, literary works by women can be linked to historical and cultural situations, practices or gen- res—for instance, the romance is a "female" genre, which may be dis- credited by feminists as an instrument of ideological control or recovered as the site of the irruption of a desire which disrupts conventional narrative patterns (see Mussell 1981; Elam 1993). Female writing has been praised as the exploration of representation from a new perspective, an exercise in perception. But isn't that a definition of all good writing? Theories about exclusively male or female characteristics tend to collapse eventually by attributing them both to male and female writers.37 Feminist Criticism of Literature and Culture Feminism is not a closed topic—it has always been too easy to speak of "post-feminism." Simone de Beauvoir denounced this attitude nearly 50 years ago,38 and the situation is much the same today. The tremendous impact of feminist criticism in the USA is well known (see Heilbrun 1985). It has had a different reception in Spain. We need only read any newspa- per's headlines, though, to see the relevance of feminism in today's public sphere: • Veteranas de guerra abuchean a la presidenta Clinton. • El Consejo de Ministras aumenta un 26% los fondos del PER. Las dirigentes de Bankpyme obligadas a pagar una fianza. • Polfticas y juezas reprueban a las magistradas de la Sala Civil del Tribunal Supremo por apelar a la Jefa del Estado. • Rebeli6n masiva en UGT (Union General de Trabajadoras) contra Nicolasa Redonda y todas las miembras de su Ejecutiva. The fact that these headlines are untranslatable should make Spanish speakers all the more aware that we are not beyond a need for critical atti- 36 Cf. Showalter 1985: 253ff; Ruthven 1984. 37 Ruthven 1984: 112; Gilbert and Gubar 1989: 154; see, for instance, Woolf 1977: 81, 98-99; Cixous 1981. 38 "La querelle du feminisme a fait couler assez d'encre, a present elle est a peu pres close: n'en parlons plus" (1949: 1.11). As to her own view: "II est clair qu'aucune femme ne peut prendre sans mauvaise foi se situer par dela son sexe" (Beauvoir 1949: 1.13). 37 Gender, l-deology and Addictive Representation tudes, and that we may need to look deeper into the nature of the reactions to feminist criticism and thought in our own society.39 Feminist criticism contests the "man-made order" of culture vari- ously labelled as patriarchal, "phallocratic," "phallocentric" or "phallogocentric." The phallus is shown to be the archetypal symbol of male order: this ojder governs the representation of women as castrated, in- ferior or de||>rmed men. Culture masquerades as neutral, and may be shown to be gender-specific, androcentric and discriminatory. Feminist criticism is moral and political criticism. It works essentially through the reading of culture as a system of power exercised through institutions and discourses which constitute women as powerless subjects. Feminist analysis consists basically in reading gender into all discourses (philosophy, litera- ture, etc.) to show that discourse is not neutral but gender-specific, and in the interests of those in power (Gilbert 1985; Ruthven 1984: 14). In this sense, feminism is not only the concern of women: in fact some of the best-known feminist theorists in history have been men: Cornelius Agrippa, Poulain de la Barre {De I'egalite des deux sexes, 1673), John Stuart Mill, Leon Richer, Henrik Ibsen.40 As patriarchy has proved to be remarkably resilient, feminism has been an ever-returning concern in history (Ruthven 1984: 16). The first wave of political feminism achieved many of its objec- tives, consisting basically in equal civil rights for women. In America, the women's vote was established' through a constitutional amendment in 1919. Unrestricted vote for Englishwomen dates from 1928.41 But such objectives were too limited, and many modern feminists aim at a wholesale transformation of roles and attitudes, through an emphasis on micropolities and education. Nowadays we find nothing like a dominant organized movement: there as many feminisms as there are feminists, or even as there are women. Some feminists are reactionaries who speak out basically against pornography and violence. Radical feminists advocate the develop- ment of a polymorphous sexuality after a sexual revolution which involves women's liberation (Firestone 1972; Echols 1984: 57, 66). More recent Many people's aversion to feminism is all too easy to explain: feminism is not "sexy" for them (Wolf 1991: 368). Others see "being a feminist" as a limiting and reifying role: saying "I am a feminist" arouses suspicion while arguing in favour of feminist ideas, without labelling them, often does not (cf. hooks 1984: 29). Richer organized the International Congress on Women's Rights in 1878; Ibsen's A Dolls' House was a landmark in feminist consciousness raising. On men in feminism, cf. Delphy 1984: 105ff; Ruthven 1984: Iff, Moi 1986. Vote on a restricted basis was allowed from 1918. On the history of feminism and the fight for women's rights, see Beauvoir (1949: 1.105ff) and Millett (1977). 38 Jose Angel Garcia Landa theorists seem to favour a discrimination between revolutions. They argue that feminism should not be considered the privileged locus of a theory of sex, since this would amount to confusing gender oppression with the sex- ual oppression of homosexuals (Rubin 1984: 307; cf. Zimmermann 1985). Similarly, there are calls from Marxist and minority feminists, such as black critics in the USA, warning against the reduetivism of considering gender to be the sole determinant of women's situation and experience (Smith 1985; Hooks 1984: 14). Feminism has also variously absorbed the teachings of structuralism, of deconstruction, of marxism and psychoanalysis. In the field of literary and cultural criticism, there have been several phases of feminism, usually in the wake of some key text (cf. Ruthven 1984: 21). Some of them are Virginia Woolf s A Room of One's Own, Simone de Beauvoir's T/ze Second Sex, Kate Millet's Sexual Politics, Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own and the works of Kristeva and Irigaray. The: emphases of feminist criticism have gone from (a) reading men, to (b) reading women, to (c) reinventing women and men: (a) Feminist critics analyse texts written by men, showing that "all writing, not just writing by women, is gendered" (Showalter 1989; 367), The analysis of images of women in canonical or popular texts is a well- known aspect of early feminist approaches, (see Showalter 1985: 125-43). Representations of women in literature or culture at large are analyzed by feminist critics and found to be politically motivated. Sacred books (Manu, the Bible, the Koran) define woman as an inferior, limited and often nega- tive being—St Paul's egalitarian text on love which is always read at Catholic weddings is a carefully chosen exception. The figure of the Virgin Mary is paradigmatic in this respect: she is defined by her submission, she becomes the instrument of a male God, is justified through maternity; she is elevated to the category of "immaculate" and made an emblem of the rejection of sexuality, and finally becomes a glorified auxiliary: Beauvoir notes that "as a servant, woman is offered splendid aphotheoses" (1949 1.276)—even the most powerful female representations of the past are patriarchal constructs (1949: 1.123). Feminists denounce the use of negative or demeaning representations of women, e. g. in misogynous texts or in pornographic literature (see Millett 1977, LaBelle 1982). The affirmative side of such criticism consists in fostering positive role-models, often found in women's texts (Register 1975: 20). Images of men in narrative are more enabling than images of women. A man is typically the hero, the subject of the action. On the other hand, women are presented as passive objects right from the first traditional 39 Gender, !-deology and Addictive Representation tales children are told. Generally speaking, women appear in narratives as the object of the quest or the obstacle in the hero's path,42 Assertive women are usually tamed through love and common sense or the superior assertiveness of the male (Beauvoir 1949: 2.40, 105). Needless to say, these narrative roles are cultural stereotypes, not eternal psychological archetypes (Ruthven 1984: 72). (b) Another direction of feminist criticism has led to the rediscovery or revaluatiori^of texts written by women (feminist historicism). Women have been both silenced and not taught to speak.43 Feminist critics set out to recover female cultural traditions, whether in literature or in other cul- tural disciplines.44 Such revisions of the canon lead to heated debates with other academic critics, because of the deliberate mixture of political and aesthetic criteria.45 Feminist critics often find in women's literature alle- gories of women's cultural powerlessness, anger, or silence. We also find in feminist criticism a reassertion of goddesses, matriarchy, and female Utopias.46 Such dreams of separate female cultures (utopias, secret com- plicities between women, etc.), are the product of women's oppressed condition under patriarchy, which is in fact the dominant system in all known cultures.47 The archetypal victory of patriarchy over matriarchy is celebrated in Aeschylus' Eumenides,4* although this episode is perhaps best read as the mythical narrativization of a static structure of domination. (c) The revision of past assumptions naturally leads to the formulation of new theories of gender (cf. Moi 1986: 212ff; Showalter 1989: 359). In this area we might single out the importance of revised versions of psycho- analysis. Psychoanalysis is a part of the reflexive project of self in moder- Beauvoir 1949: 2.37; Mulvey 1975; de Lauretis 1984. Cf. Freud 1971, who assumes a mechanism of male identificatiooiin the text. Black and Coward 1981: 85; Irigaray 1990: 19. Woolf 1977: 72-73; Moers 1986; Showalter 1978, 1985; Kolodny 1985a; Irigaray 1990: 14. See e.g. Baym 1985; Robinson 1985; Kolodny 1985b: 150ff; Ruthven 1984: 121ff; Gilbert and Gubar 1989: 150-1. See, e.g., Silverman 1984; Gilbert 1985; Abel 1980; Irigaray 1990. Cf. Beauvoir 1949: 1.217, Millett 1977: 25. Matrilineal cultures should not be mistaken for matriarchies. On female communities, see Showalter 1985: 125-43; Raymond 1986. Irigaray too (1990: 103) embraces a measure of female utopianism as a political project. Noted in Bachofen's Das Mutterrecht (1861); cf. Beauvoir 1949: 1.131; Millett 1977: 112 ff. Jose Angel Garcia Landa nity: it creates an ordered narrative of the self which, when it is truly analytical* that is, critical, calls into question "any individual's pretension to a smooth and coherent psychic and sexual identity" (Rose 1983: 10; cf. Giddens 1992: 31). Feminists have often criticized the biological essential- ism of classical psychoanalysis,49 according to which women do not project themselves in the phallus, and they therefore "become" the phallus, they pose as objects with their full self. The development of "normal" femi- ninity involved for Freud a repression of the "male" sexuality of the cli- toris and the development of a "passive" vaginal sexuality. These notions have been sufficiently denounced. For feminist thinkers, the psychological phenomena surrounding the phallus are not a biological given: they are a consequence of cultural assumptions (Beauvoir 1949: 1.85-90). Deconstruction converges here with feminism. A deconstructive analysis shows how the centre of a discourse is not a real (essential) ground but rather a product of that discourse, a function, a position. The phallus is not an absolute centre, but a sign which is given a value without any essential ground. The deconstruction of gender differences would show that the al- leged "consequences" of anatomical difference are also "causes" which make anatomical difference significant rather than irrelevant for the pur- poses of generic construction within the frame of a given discourse. Roles Social identity and social behaviour can be approached as a system of role-playing, a gender role being one of several types of role. A study of the female condition, for instance, is to a large extent a study of the social roles left open to women in different periods and cir- cumstances (at work, in the family, in the class system, as miners, as the or- ganizers of soirees, etc). The traditional requirements of the beauty myth, dress and "feminine aspect," have been denounced as being conducive to the reification of women and the exercise of control over of their move- ments. "How are you supposed to be able to go anywhere in skirts"50 and high heels? Today, mass produced images of women are sexualized aes- thetic objects, in which the breasts, buttocks and legs are often emphasized, presented as consumer products offered for male manipulation, while the 49 See e.g. Millett 1977: 179ff. For a dissenting view on Freud, see Moi 1986: 213. 50 Marie Bashkirtseff, quoted in Beauvoir 1949: 1.222; see Beauvoir 1949: 1.257; 2.45; Wolf 1991. 41 Gender, I-deology and Addictive Representation gaze is either sexually alluring or passively absent. In marriage or in the media, women are by definition young. Aging is tolerated in men, but scarcely so in women—indeed, it could be argued that men project the most vivid experiences of aging and decay onto the female body. The spontaneous solidarity generated among women who chafe at the require- ments of preserving an-adequate gender image, real though it may be, hardrly justifj|s this state of affairs.51 Gender roles are representations. That is, they are cultural constructs which create a mimetic version of the world, but "mimesis" does not mean photographic reproduction, it means active refashioning. Representing al- ways involves difference. Where does this difference manifest itself? Everywhere: in behaviour, movements, attitudes, conversation patterns. As philologists and semioticians of art, the contributors to this volume focus on such roles as they are constructed and transmitted through texts. Textually codified gender roles have a crucial cultural role, because they are massively diffused and they persist, they help create a tradition. Our thoughts, behaviour, attitudes, are made out of previous texts. The present essay is a tissue of influences and plagiarisms from other authors—-I ac- knowledge some of them in the notes and references, but when I delivered it as a lecture those other texts spoke through me, or I through them, indis- tinguishably. The question of what is genuinely "mine" in this discourse is then problematic. Nevertheless, I become what I say, my borrowed dis- course fashions me and helps characterize me from now on. The textual nature of the self, moreover, is especially evident in those areas where it is governed by desire and the imaginary: that is the case of gender identities and differences. But we should not conceive of humans as simple role-bearers; instead, we should see the subject as the site where they are redefined and conflict with each other. Human agency can be approached as the interaction and transformation of such roles (Haug 1987: 42-44). Addiction I shall try to justify , the relevance of the idea of addiction to the present dis-cussion. Addiction here is to be understood not as an illness or a chemical dependence (which is the obvious essentialist explanation of the drug problem), but as compulsive behaviour which develops as a response I follow Beauvoir 1949: 1.257-60 and Wolf 1991: 97. 42 Jose Angel Garcia Landa to experience an individual finds rewarding and a centre for his or her personality: an addiction exists when a person's attachment to a sensation, an object, or another person is such as to lessen his appreciation of and ability to deal with other things in his environment, or in himself, so that he has become increasingly dependent on that experience as his only source of gratification. (Peele 1991: 56) Thus understood, it is easy to see that there is a measure of common ground between addiction and what we have been discussing under the heading of "idols," "i-deology" and "roles." An addiction is an experience that takes on meaning and power in the light of a person's needs, desires, beliefs, expectations, and fears . . . . The addict is a person who never learns to come to grips with his world, and who therefore seeks stability and reassurance through some repeated, ritualized activity. (Peele 1991: 3, 17) Addiction is a consequence of the values of individuals and their commu- nity. Gender stereotypes reinforce themselves in a vicious circle, like other forms-of-compulsive behaviour: we internalize roles, we make our identity with them—even with pernicious ones.52 It is people without deep ties,; a consistent self-image or strong com- mitments that tend to become addicts. In addiction to cults or drugs, the addict's lack of internal direction and purpose creates the need for ritualized escape in the first place, and is in turn exarcerbated by ex- clusive involvement with the addiction and abandonment of the sub- stance of a normal life. (Peele 1991: 17) The addictive experience becomes soothing for these subjects because "it gives their lives a structure and secures them, at least subjectively, against the press of what is novel and demanding" (Peele 1991: 45). We must all construct a self in order to act, to simply exist and experience the world. Oversimplified roles provide a useful shorthand formula to cope with new situations, but at the same time they make us face the contingency of our identity or assume the blindness of bad faith. Existentialist philoso- phy used to argue that we can assume fixed roles only with a measure of 52 Wolf 1991: 107. Cf. Millett (1977: 123) on psychic addiction as a factor in prostitu- tion. 43 Gender, l-deology and Addictive Representation bad faith, hiding from ourselves the possibility that we might assume other roles; we often act our roles in bad faith as if they were what we are, intrin- sically, not what we assume we are (Sartre 1984: 94; cf. Barthes 1990: 161). Such roles become the basis of compulsive behaviour: Disbelieving his own adequacy, recoiling from challenge, the addict welcomes^ comrol from outside as the ideal state of affairs.... AddictiorrSakes place with an experience sufficiently safe, predictable, and repetitive to serve as a bulwark for a person's consciousness, allowing him an ever-present opportunity for escape and reassurance. (Peele 1991: 55, 177) Addictive individuals refrain from developing their identity, and maintain "a false identity built from dependent attachments to external sources" (Kasl 1990: 36). The concept of addiction should be related to the modern transformation of the self and the disruption of essentialist so- cial roles. Compulsive emotional relationships as a form of addiction are an obstacle for the reflexive project of the modern self (Giddens 1992: 92). The same happens with petrified notions of personal identity or gender roles. When there was a continuity of tradition, and a particular social pattern followed what was long established, as well as sanctioned as right and proper, it could hardly be described as an addiction; nor did it make a statement about specific characteristics of self. Individuals could not pick and choose, but at the same time had no obligation to discover themselves in their actions and habits. (Giddens 1992: 75) An addiction always has a social side. The drug addict has an under- world of unlawful complicity; compulsive lovers have each other. The "gender addict" has the role models cherished by his peers, ultimately the enduring stereotypes of masculinity and femininity as specified by social and historical contexts. Excessive fixation with generic stereotypes could be described as a childish, immature attitude—since children are militant essentialists: While children are refining their gender roles, they are often rigid in their ideas about what males and females must or must not do. In gen- eral, individuals who are more confident about their gender iden- tity/role are also more flexible in their ideas about masculinity and femininity and less rigid in their notions about what is appropriate be- haviour for themselves and others. (Reinisch 1991: 244-5) 44 Jose Angel Garcia Landa The analogic state of affairs I call "gender addiction" also helps us see the problematic relationship between physical and psychological de- pendence that is at issue in other addictive processes. The addictive use of chemical drugs cannot be deduced from a simple study of their properties. Likewise, gender role-playing has complex psychosomatic effects on many areas (for instance, on sexual arousal). At the risk of taxing the reader's good will, we may draw a few more analogies between gender patterns and drugs. "People model their re- sponse to a given drug on the way they see other people responding, either in their social group or in society as a whole" (Peele 1991: 30). Therefore, a drug is most harmful for a person if it is a source of conflicts in the user's culture. Gender has a somewhat special status in this respect, since it is perfectly integrated within human culture and then rarely acquires self- destructive proportions. Indeed, it might be said that the disruptive effects of gender addiction are seen not in isolated individuals, but in social dy- namics as a whole. Sexual stereotypes foster conformity and the oppression of the "others": deviants tend to be marginalized and disempowered. Sexual insecurity and ignorance, usually masked as commpnsensical certitudes, are a source of intolerance and oppression whenever we meet sexual difference (Millett 1977: 233; Rubin 1984: 292; Vance 1984a: 20). Besides the wider social implications of generic polarization, there are others at the psychological and the interpersonal/affective level: —Psychologically, "self-image is always a factor to be considered in the addiction process" (Peele 1991: 293). In so far as adherence to gender patterns can be considered addictive, this kind of addiction is clearly cen- tral to the subject's self-image. A criterion to determine whether a given behaviour is addictive "is the distinction between a desire to grow and ex- perience and a desire to stagnate and remain untouched" (Peele 1991: 60). Gender roles should be open to evolution if they .are not to become addictive. In addiction, active desire is replaced by need: "an exclusive craving for something is accompanied by a loss of discrimination toward the object which satisfies the craving" (Peele 1991: 63).-Generic identities and scripts satisfy many addictive requirements: they merge seamlessly with a person's consciousness, they are reassuring, patterned, predictable, and ascribe the subject to a group (cf. Peele 1991: 70). —Interpersonally, compulsive gender patterns of course reinforce the addictive elements in personal relationships, where partners seek above all reassurance from each other, "unchallenged acceptance of themselves as 45 Gender, l-deology and Addictive Representation they are, including their blemishes and peculiarities" (Peele 1991: 85). Many of these peculiarities that couples find in each other are actually not individual at all, but rather the acting out of generic addictive patterns— e.g. masculine overbearingness or the recourse to the double standard of sexual behaviour, feminine "clinging", fussiness or passivity.... Woman has been traditionally constructed as dependent on man (the elm and the vine, etc.): $ This is why woman's conventional position in society can serve as a symbol of the socially approved addicted state, and why the concept of addiction has such relevance for an appreciation of the psychologi- cal pressures on women. (Peele 1991: 184) Addiction to gender-determined behaviour is therefore linked to ad- dictive relationships. In many cases it can also be related to eating disorders (anorexia, bulimia). Contemporary society has developed a full panoply of addictions. We find people addicted to work ("workaholics"), to food, to physical exercise, to cults or relationships, to pop music or urban tribes, etc. Addiction is a refuge, a pre-determined ritual of behaviour and surrendering of freedom, which is at odds with the ideals of creativity, openness and reflexive criticism that characterize the poetic self. As Bergson noted, the main role of habit is to make the world manageable and predictable (1984: 136-7). Habit and regularity are necessary. But too often the danger is the opposite: our perception is too dulled by "the film of familiarity," and we believe that the world is what it has always been as- sumed to be. But it never is: it is always new, and never manageable. And laughter is the appropriate answer to the mechanization and fixity of character.53 Gender can be read as the cultural consequenpe of sexual differences. But it can also be read as a series of habits and preconceptions, as a set of addictive practices, as a social ideology. Ideology is defined by J. Hillis Miller as the mistaking of the figurative for the literal. Idolatry, too, has sometimes been defined as taking literally what is figurative.54 Whether an instance of ideology or idolatry, it is clear that the trappings of gender may be interpreted as literalized figurative language. Gender represents sex. But which is the line of demarcation to be drawn between the tenor and the ve- Bergson 19.84: 135. See also my epigraph from Sartre. A woman who does not think of herself as an object is of course even less serious! In the medieval tradition of negative theology. Cf. Minnis et al. 1988: 126, on Ralph of Longchamp, who apparently follows Boethius. 46 Jose Angel Garcia Landa hicle? It is problematic: under patriarchy, a woman has to dress and behave like a woman in order to be feminine, i.e., a "real woman." Here we have another instance of the double bind, and a problem of applied rhetoric which this paper cannot afford to explore at length. The Agenda of Cultural Semiotics I would like to finish by stressing the potentially demystifying role of literature, of feminist literary criticism and cultural semiotics. Literature and film are models for reality. Fiction is an elastic instrument: it must be, since it is the limit of human reality and of anything thinkable (Iser 1989: 215ff)- It can be ruled by cultural fantasies and become the perfect vehicle for received ideology, the more perfect since it may construct its own space of verisimilitude and eschew the sanction of the reality principle. But fic- tion is also a mode of thought and exploration. At best, it may be an experiment in social semiotics. The innovative potential of fantasy can be easily understood (see Jackson 1981). But even the realistic representation of roles is already a form of criticism, since we get to know roles only through a paradox which reveals their nature: if we think of a role we play as a role, we detach ourselves from it—what was a part of our subjectivity can suddenly be grasped as an object.55 For Sartre, the in-se nature of the role orientates our consciousness but only as something that cannot be actualized, as a regulative mechanism, not as the constitutive mechanism of the self. To put it differently, becoming conscious of our addictive patterns is the first step towards fighting them—" acceptance of personal responsibility is the first step toward freedom from addiction" (Peele 1991: 230). .. This exploratory role of fiction is supplemented (and I mean supple- mented) by criticism, criticism in the sense of a liminal semiotics capable of multiplying the figurative capability of social discourses and representa- tions, even the most stubbornly ideological.56 Reading fiction critically, re- flexive criticism helps us see that the literal is always figurative. Critical thought on gender should expose the constructedness of gender, explain- ing it through semiotics and not just through biology (e.g. by means of "Si me lo represento, no lo soy; estoy separado de el como el objeto del sujeto" (Sartre 1984: 94). See, for instance, Simone de Beauvoir analysis of Montherlant's works (1949: 311- 31) or Kate Millet's analysis of Tennyson's The Princess (1977: 76-79). 47 Gender, l-deology and Addictive Representation semiotic readings of biologist explanations). It should study gender repre- sentations to see how culture is passed off as nature in order to consecrate the existing order of things. It should revise concepts of eroticism which base it on aggression, transgression or violence. It should explore the sex- ualization of language, discourse, culture and thought, and fight the pseudo-neutrality#of the male order. It should also have a reflexive stance, showing tha|? philosophical thought on sexuality is linked to a political conflict between the sexes, and that it is not exempt from the constraints it analyzes: critical discourse is mediated by the play of power and desire, and may become in its turn an object of interpretation.57 I began this introductory essay with a story about Alien and the spatial housewives of the fifties. I will end it now with another "film of familiar- ity"—one which is still being shown. The story is about lines of cars wait- ing for the green light, all with a man and a woman inside, and all with the man driving. The joke this time is that nobody ever laughs, because it is not a fiction, but everybody's main street, and, besides, the joke is on us all. Now, is this example statistically relevant? Who is really still in charge in our society, after so many years of equal rights? More important, perhaps: what is a fictional representation and what is reality? It is all too easy to become an addict to our allotted roles, to act as expected, above all if we think that only fixed roles are available. Or again, let us look at our audience of university students of literature, with four times as many women as men, and ask ourselves—isn't teaching comparatively underpaid, and therefore a job fit for a woman? Isn't this because it is associated with childcare? Doesn't teaching decrease in prestige, as the medical profession does, as more and more women fill the ranks of teachers? As secondary and higher education becomes a mass-produced commodity, its value diminishes. And the cheapest way to provide it will be through cheap labour: women's labour has traditionally been unpaid, the cheapest way of production.58 So let us think twice before we assume that having so many women university students taking courses on women's studies means that gender trouble is a thing of the past. The concerns of cultural criticism are always closer than we realize to our own lives, a fact which becomes more evident the more we reflect upon it. To quote Simone 57 Ruthven 1984: 37, 45; Irigaray 1990: 61; Valcarcel 1991; Ellio 1991: 199; Puleo 1992: 211. Cf. Millett 1977: 42, 76; Lettera di una professoressa, a document from the female section of the late Italian PCI, quoted in Irigaray 1990: 134, 146. 48 Jose Angel Garcia Landa de Beauvoir once again, human activity does not consist in a mere repetition of the past: it must take over the present and invent the future.59 Let us then discuss gender, let us think critically about gender, and not wait for our children to do it. Jose Angel GARCJA LANDA Universidad de Zaragoza "Le projet de 1'homme [sic] n'est pas de se rep£ter dans le temps: c'est de regner sur 1'instant et de forger l'avenir" (1949: 1.113). * * * I am grateful for the financial aid provided by the DGICYT (Programa Sectorial de Promoci6n General del Conocimiento, proyecto PS94-0057), which has allowed me to carry out this and other related proyects. 49 Gender, l-deology and Addictive Representation Works Cited Abel, Elizabeth, ed. Writing and Sexual Difference. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Barbin, Herculine. 1985. 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