Page 129 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

FEMINISM

prized in post-structuralist thought. “Her sexuality…is plural”, she
writes, “Is this the way texts write themselves/are written now?…
woman has sex organs more or less everywhere She finds pleasure
almost everywhere…the geography of her pleasure is far more
diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle,
than is commonly imagined—in an imaginary rather too narrowly
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focused on sameness”. And this is a matter not only of writing, but
also of speech. For Irigaray, the female body gives rise to a distinctive
women’s language, parler femme, in which “‘she’ sets off in all
directions… in what she says…woman is constantly touching herself”. 50
Showalter’s insistence that “there can be no expression of the body
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which is unmediated by linguistic, social, and literary structures” is,
of course, true, but is nonetheless much less pertinent to the kind of
argument advanced by Cixous and Irigaray than it might at first appear.
What is at issue is not biological determinism, as Showalter supposed,
but rather the nature of writing and of female sexuality, and of their
possible connections, given the undoubtedly mediated ways in which
the body finds cultural expression. A more serious objection, surely,
is that which Juliet Mitchell directs at Kristeva, but which could easily
be turned toward Cixous and Irigaray: that, insofar as femininity is
indeed like this, then it is so only by virtue of the effects of patriarchal
oppression. This “is just what the patriarchal universe defines as the
feminine,” Mitchell writes “all those things that have been assigned
to women—the heterogeneous, the notion that women’s sexuality is
much more one of a whole body, not so genital, not so phallic. It is not
that the carnival cannot be disruptive of the law; but it disrupts only
within the terms of that law”. 52
Mitchell and Kristeva share a common interest in the work of
Jacques Lacan, the post-structuralist psychoanalyst whose work had
aspired to a synthesis between Freud and Saussure. Lacan’s fundamental
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insight that “the unconscious is structured like a language” had led
him to the notion that language and sexual identity are simultaneously
acquired, or better perhaps, simultaneously required. For Lacan, the
child originally inhabits a pre-Oedipal “imaginary” characterized by
speechless identity between child, mother and world. Entry into the
symbolic order of language, and the acquisition of subjectivity, are
achieved only at the price of a loss of this imaginary identity with the
mother. The symbolic order is thus masculine, it is, in short, the law
of the father. Lacan is clear that the imaginary must be superseded by

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