Page 61 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

NAMING THE PROBLEM 55

the conspiracy of language. She writes about the ‘hidden agendas concealed in
the texture of language’, going on to argue that ‘deception is embedded in the
very texture of the words we use, and here is where our exorcism can begin’
(1978/1984:3). Daly uses various strategies in her campaign to combat the
conspiracy of patriarchal language. One method is to revalorize the very terms
which have been used against women. Daly takes the figure of witches, for
example, and turns the negative associations of the word into a positive model
for feminist activity. Daly aims to rewrite the ‘deception plotted by the male-
supremacist scriptwriters’ by (re) creating a new mythology—a new plot—for
‘Lesbians/Spinsters/Amazons/Survivors’ (1978/1984:20). Unlike the playfulness
of WITCH, however, Daly always takes her reappropriation of the term seriously.
A second tactic is the creation of woman-centred counterparts for male terms
and characteristics. In place of men’s ‘own paranoid fears’ (1978/1984:29), for
example, Daly offers the notion of ‘pronoia’, or positive paranoia, which she
defines as ‘seeing/making new patterns of perception as preparation for the latter/
deeper stages of Journeying’ (1978/1984:401). ‘Pronoia’ is just one of the
countless new coinings Daly employs in Gyn/Ecology. Her prose is shot through
with a series of neologisms, which aim to bring about in miniature a disassembly
and recombination of the patriarchal conspiracy. As Meaghan Morris (1988)
argues, Daly’s emphasis on the individual sign forecloses discussion on the
effects of discourse as a whole. In addition to new words, Daly also concentrates
on the etymology of key terms. Her analysis, however, is often directed less to the
deep cultural histories embedded in certain words than to the surface appearance
and literal inclusion of particular syllables. ‘Manipulation’, for example, reveals
within itself the word ‘man’. Daly’s emphasis on particular signifiers results in a
shift towards a ‘literal-minded’ view of language in the 1970s, in which
individual words can come to cause social effects.
This concern with the material and the literal effects of representation has been
fundamental to the campaigns against rape and pornography which began to
dominate feminist activism from the late 1970s. The literature on these topics is
too large for me to analyse in detail here, but I want to outline a few important
issues which arise from these interlocking campaigns. The first is that the logic
of conspiracy became indispensable to the analysis of rape, in books such as
Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will. Brownmiller defined rape as the
‘conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of
fear’, establishing a Manichean division of society into men who are all guilty
and women who are all victims (1975:14–15). In an analogous fashion to the
way belief in a lone gunman in the Kennedy assassination was superseded by
analyses of systematic conspiracy in American society, feminist analyses of rape
began to describe it as the ‘all-American crime’, and as the principal fact of
patriarchy which ensures ‘the perpetuation of male domination over women by
force’ (Griffin, 1970:3–22; Brownmiller, 1975:209). In addition, the cold war
paranoid figuration of bodily invasion, infiltration and contamination returned as
literal descriptions, as the female body became not a displaced metaphor for the