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Panel Discussion 3
Chela Sandoval
Donna Haraway's and Teresa de Lauretis' papers work against the hegemonic theoretical modes of feminism that U.S. women of color have labeled "white feminist" theory. These papers work toward generating other kinds of feminist theories and practices which are decolonial in their activity.
Teresa de Lauretis
I am aware all the time of the sliding of these two terms women in feminism, we in feminism. In other words, I was talking first historically, meaning the development of feminist discourse in this country as I read it is very much based on my personal history. I was re-reading feminist journals from the very early 1970's, and it seemed to me that in fact gender was the first axis along which difference was understood in those years. I really do think that gender is there for all women; the question of how you get to it, whether you get to it first as gender or whether you get to it first as race as in the passage I quoted from Barbara Smith, that depends very much on where one is located.
Jim Clifford
I just wanted to pick up a few themes that link some of the aspects of the whole session starting with Teresa's use of displacement and the very concrete notion of spatial practice, that is people moving from place to place physically. Donna picked up the theme of immigration and movement from continent to continent, and Aihwa Ong told us the story of the mobility of the capital, where enormous "Western influences" whether they be commodity, culture, advertising, labor, or discipline are moving very fast around the globe. This spatial circulation may be a kind of ground for a lot of the questionings that are going on here. It seems to me this geo-political ground is something very concrete that ought to be named as a historically specific context. I don't want to leave it there as an ultimate explanation or base that makes everything else superstructural, but I want to name it.
I think it figures in the morning sessions as well. Some of the questioning of ethnographic representation has to do very much with the breakdown of the notion that the world is divided into discrete spatialized cultures. I think there is such a thing as culture and cultural difference. But the idea that there were places that we could go and visit, using a particular technology (i.e. fieldwork), where the natives would, in some way, have a pure identity that could then be described--this idea is no longer viable. One finds instead the cosmopolitanism of natives, the sense of they themselves already traveling, moving about. This is a kind of geo-political spatial breakdown, identities on the move, instead of locatable cultures and locatable identities in a kind of map or theater of memory. A lot of the big spatializations which located people and discourses seem to be breaking down, for both liberatory and scary reasons, scary because the process depends on multinational capital. At the same time, why are we able to read a lot of non-western literature? This is good, but dependent on a whole realm of publishing and other constraints on books written in Third World languages. There's no escape from a very ambiguous but concrete context for rethinking the colonial subject, colonial authority, the objects of ethnographic representation, new subject positions, and also I think, issues of identity in feminist discourse. I don't want to say that this is the primary geo-political cause of it all. There was plenty of travel and displacement before the 20th century, but I can't help feeling a qualitatively and quantitatively new level.
Donna Haraway
I'd like to briefly comment about the kind of double requirement of feminist and anti-colonial discourse. The spatial breakdown and the fraying of previously secure places, large and small, has to be connected to the desire to build situated knowledges that don't simply go with dispersal. That's the kind of resistance to what has been labeled postmodernism, although that label is iffy. It's the double command to both take account in all kinds of ways from waving your syllabus in your face to the geo-political conditions of the mobility of capital, to the ongoing modes of the constitution of gendered subjects by people in various ways. Those inquiries are always breaking down both small and large spaces that had seemed secure from other points of view but with the commandment, really a kind of law, to build situated knowledges and webs of accountability. The pleasure has got to be somehow in that joining: the building of situated knowledges and webs of accountability. That the temptation of the pleasure of dispersal is class located, culturally located, and an available pleasure for me, for example, is the tough one because the webs of accountability don't go along with the webs of privilege, for the most part. They sometimes do, but not for the most part.
Teresa de Lauretis
I just want to bring up the fact that all of the words that we have been using are spatial metaphors, like locations, positions, positionalities, situated knowledges, spaces.
Jim Clifford
I picked up also in Aihwa's talk, and I think it is something that we haven't developed, a notion of historicities, a temporal problematic, when she talked about futures instead of talking about, for example, local cultures. She brought out local people's views of what is happening to them historically. To me, that raises questions of multiple outcomes. It organizes questions of subjectivity, identity, as issues of emergence--adding a temporal dimension. That is also on the agenda but actually hasn't been talked about that much, has it?
Teresa de Lauretis
Not by me anyway, but for me the temporal or the historical is a very important notion.
Roberto Rivera
One of the things that I celebrate, being in ethnic studies, is that we were attempting a criticism of colonial discourse but at the same time we were also engaged in theorizing. For instance, one of the main things that you did was to give the necessary conditions for the construction of the object of study. One of the things that Teresa did was show how the new theory would have to take into account what you called the multiple construction of the subject given class, gender positions. It seems to me that you also gave an account of how the theory evolved. It's something that you do in philosophy of science all the time--you give an account. It seems that you both also gave an account not only of the theory but also a meta-theory that reflects on itself. So I'm really happy, first of all, to see that in ethnic studies we were doing all this. For my own work and from my own endeavors as a teacher, I want to show that we were not merely criticizing, that we were not merely reacting, but that we were also busily constructing theories.
Teresa de Lauretis
Thank you. I would also add that within women's studies, there is a willingness to listen to what I've been doing which is theorizing out of what you were saying, so to speak. But I don't really think that in other scientific discourses they would listen to this.
Mira Kamdar
You made the comment about how we could engage in feminist discourse without othering our predecessors the way traditional academic discourse does, or can we? The metaphor of location seems something that we can use instead of othering; instead of all the kind of bitching we do with each other, we can locate.
Donna Haraway
Think of what Trinh Minh-ha and Aihwa Ong had to say in terms of this kind of issue and the discussion that we've just had briefly about situation and location and these multiple spatial metaphors that attempt both to break up falsely ideological hegemonic notions of space and locate people for accountability--to hold on to the political without going for the master narratives. And think of the way both Trinh Minh-ha and Aihwa Ong with quite different rhetorical strategies offered ways of doing it. For example in Aihwa's work, not only does she go for both using Foucaultian discourse analysis, Marxist analysis and analyses from various feminist places, but she simultaneously problematizes them all in order to keep trying to get at the various modes of experiencing, articulating and not articulating of the factory women, while also destabilizing a narrative of tradition. The Malay peasant woman in Aihwa's work does not exist as some kind of prior utopian moment but is a creation, in particular of British colonialism, to provide a particular kind of ideological and social space around the development of plantation agriculture in the colony. So already there are immigrations, emigrations, and bringing a particular population to construct them as traditional. The young virgin peasant woman doesn't have a kind of utopian, outside-the-story moment to somehow serve as anybody's resource for the factory woman. There is built into the way that she does it a kind of mobility in history and present time. Trinh Minh-ha did it not with the same disciplinary discourses but in much more evocative and spiritual metaphor. The Yin Yang symbol was brought in, to both name and not give up a kind of edging and anger but also to recognize always the sameness in the other, always the self in the other, even when you're coming out of a political anger. How do you continue to be a political person who doesn't just find it all fun or depressing, depending on your mood? How do you simultaneously keep moving and building when the master narratives that have motivated our politics are precisely part of what we are using and part of what we are critiquing? The issue of location for me is constantly both a profoundly personal one and a deeply political one about the problem of holding--holding one's actions and pleasures and all these places at the same time when they're mutually contradictory.
Kamala Visweswaran
I had a question for Donna Haraway. I wanted you to clarify your rhetoric, if you will. I was puzzled when you talked about the pleasure of displacement, and then you also seemed to delight in the reading of this Nigerian woman's book. You said something about constructing her ambiguities as my feminist utopia and it sounded very much like what Debbie Gordon talked about earlier, the white male critic's delight in the ambiguities and the contradiction.
Donna Haraway
I was naming my temptation in trying to be very clear that it's a real one and it isn't just white male academics who somehow indulged in that, but that I have access to that as a white female. That is hard to get a little distance from. On the other hand, I would also like to hold on to that pleasure. There is something about Buchi Emecheta's mobilities and plays of privileges and oppressions and stories around her in her own stories. It isn't all just about what Debbie was naming and that you also did, but there is something about this person who is active in various kinds of politics and writing and who is not only appropriable into a discourse that names affinities and partial connections and mobile relations. There is something about her that is an allegory or parable that has a moment of hope in it. There is her history and the way she pulls together contradictions. There is something that I find hopeful in reading Buchi Emecheta that doesn't, on the other hand, seem to be reducible to my privileged positions. It's a play that I'm trying to suggest as a metaphor for ongoing political feminist work, mapping these readings and re-readings, mapping the way two other readers, Christian and Ogunyemi, did it, trying to see what our various stakes are and there is a way to joke about them seriously.
Kamala Visweswaran
I guess it is the joking that I am still struggling with because I think that people's contradictions are painful.
Donna Haraway
Yes, they are, and pain and joking make each other. Jokes are not possible, not very interesting ones anyway, without world history and without pain.
Debbie Gordon
What matters is how that temptation or indulgence is acted out, engaged, or made. All appropriations of other political discourses for the making of your own positions are not the same. Donna's and Paul Rabinow's or Donna's and Jim Clifford's "play" with ambiguities are not identical, because the circumstances of enunciation are different.
Kamala Visweswaran
No. What I was responding to was the rhetoric, the delight, the pleasure. It recalls Roland Barthes' "the pleasure of the text" and the privileges which I think you were trying to get at.
Vivek Dhareshwar
Donna, I didn't quite get what you meant by accountability?
Donna Haraway
It means a lot of different things at different times. But let's take it on a small scale of the women's studies context in which we tried to set up these talks. When one teaches a women's studies course, to whom is one accountable as a teacher? To a feminist theory community that has a certain relationship to publishing hierarchies and status hierarchies of various kinds, or to the students in the classroom (just for starters) whose various agendas and histories are quite different from one's own? There are choices of languages, ways of moving, and the feeling that certain issues are terribly important to try and think through; but are those the ones that you ought to be working with in the class? How do you bring people into the conversation versus performing in front of them? The politics of teaching would be one place where the webs of accountability I was trying to name in these areas are very sharp. What kinds of material, political structures would you want to build into a women's studies program that keeps its faculty honest, for example? That keeps time commitments to students in a kind of fruitful tension with publishing commitments. These are old-fashioned issues. But they are very real in this particular political place. It is important to try to figure out how you build in certain kinds of tensions to the many ways that you go for privilege when you start from a position of power in a particular relationship. If you start from a position without power in a particular relationship, the nature of accountability is going to be quite different. For one thing, you can have, in some ways, considerably more freedom; in other ways less. So it is daily issues I am trying to get at.
Mira Kamdar
I was very intrigued by the metaphor that you cited of "the co-wives of an invisible husband." My first reaction is, great, we have a transcendental, phallocentric signifier. I'm sure that is not at all what Ogunyemi meant, and obviously she is coming from a radically different cultural context to speak in these terms which are totally foreign to any kind of critical discourse I'm familiar with. I just wondered if you could say something more about that.
Donna Haraway
One very practical dimension of it is that she is very interested in affirming the revaluing of polygamy in Nigerian cities right now, and naming the sort of rural-city relationships around questions of forms of marriage. I think it is bound to have some of the same complexity as the debates around veiling and unveiling. The connection I make is that marriage has been used as a trope in feminist discourse co-extensive with the field that Teresa and I are talking about to argue just about everything. And the particular way that Ogunyemi enters that field immediately brings up the similarities as well as the differences.
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Last modified: Dec 7, 1998 by Megan O'Patry.
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