Sexing the Self

Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies

Elspeth Probyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134906185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Faced with the seemingly enormous difficulty of representing `others', many theorists working in Cultural Studies have been turning to themselves as a way of speaking about the personal. In Sexing the Self Elspeth Probyn tackles this question of the sex of the self, an issue of vital importance to feminists and yet neglected by feminist theory until now, to suggest that there are ways of using our gendered selves in order to speak and theorize non-essential but embodied selves. Arguing for `feminisms with attitude', Sexing the Self ranges across a wide range of theoretical strands, drawing upon a body of literature from early Cultural Studies to Anglo-American feminist literary criticism, from `identity debates' to Foucault's `care of the self'.

Chapter 1
A problematic Speaking the self

WHAT TO DO WITH ONESELF?

One of the central problematics that has emerged from postmodernist debates is that of representation. From one side of the argument, Jean Baudrillard’s denial of the possibility of representation deeply challenges many of cultural studies’ assumptions, theoretical and commonsensical, about the stakes involved in speaking; of who speaks for whom, and why. As Baudrillard bluntly puts it, the death of a social to represent is, or should be, the death of sociological theory: ‘The hypothesis of the death of the social is also that of theory’ (1982:9–10). Alongside these deaths, the question of who is speaking within theoretical accounts of the social is increasingly rendered transparent. Recalling Marx’s distinction between representation as Vertretung (the political project of standing in for another group) and Darstellung (depicting the social), Gayatri Spivak argues that the critic as ‘proxy’ should be dislodged. The critic’s position as a privileged speaker for class interests is undermined by the absence, or the indifference, of any constituency: ‘the choice of and the need for “heroes”, paternal proxies, agents of power– Vertretung’ (Spivak 1988:279). In turn, the problematic nature of being a proxy deeply troubles practices of interpretation, or at least those which seek to interpret the social for someone, or some group.

Now, it would be comforting to be able to state that this injunction against proxies only applies to male theorists, to middle-aged lefty heroes. Unfortunately, this is not the case and at the expense of alienating myself immediately, it’s been a while since anyone seriously considered some cultural theorists as the proxy for whomsoever. However, the project of representing women has been a condition of possibility for feminism and continues to provide the underlying epistemological basis for the articulation of feminisms. Quite simply, it continues to be the ground upon and from which many feminists and feminisms speak. Yet this ground, or rather, the representation of women as horizon, is not only undermined by theoretical decrees, it is increasingly attacked by the ‘public’–men and women alike.

The ambivalence towards feminism could be clearly seen in the aftermath of the 1989 massacre of fourteen women engineering students at the Université de Montreal; in fact, feminists were doubly hit. On 6 December 1989, a lone man in hunting gear entered classrooms at the Engineering Faculty (L’Ecole Polytéchnique), separated the women from the men and then shot them. Marc Lépine, the killer, clearly stated both at the moment of the shooting and in a letter that he wanted to kill feminists, that feminists had ruined his life. Later it was reported that these poor young women had protested that they weren’t feminists, and much was made of the fact that they were bright, articulate women who wanted good jobs as engineers–that they didn’t hate men. Amid all the public agony over why or how this tragedy had happened, some of the media turned to what became known as ‘la recuperation’, as they criticized feminists for ‘recuperating’ this event for their cause. Without forgetting either the actual pain of the massacre or the fact that most women are murdered or beaten or raped in their own homes and at the hands of husbands or acquaintances, we can move from this overall situation, or as it is called in Quebec, ‘L’événement’, and raise the very real problematics of feminist representation. Included in this event was the stated motive for the killing (that the women were feminists) and two denials of feminism (both in the reported words of the murdered women and then in the media’s recriminations against those feminists who spoke their interpretations of the slaughter).

Feminist representations of the event fought against certain popular arguments which portrayed Lépine’s actions as the isolated incident of a madman. Perhaps more importantly, many feminists took their own anguish as a discursive point of departure. (I should clarify here my use of the third person when I speak of feminist reactions. Although I teach at the university I was in London both during and after the event. Thus, I was informed from afar by the bloody bodies on the first page of the British tabloids, caught in the nightmare of trying to find what exactly had happened from the location of a geopolitical point not much moved by colonial happenings, however sensational they may be.) Back home, two of my colleagues, Danielle Juteau and Nicole Laurin, powerfully argued that in a racist and sexist society crimes against women and minorities make sense. As Québécoises watched the media search for motives, as the nomenclatures of ‘un fou’, ‘un détraqué’, ‘un malade’ piled up, a fairly common feminist response was: ‘it’s absurd, they are looking for a motive, but haven’t they understood anything?’ (Juteau and Laurin 1989:206). The awful recognition of where we are as women, the terrible feeling as the very space of the university, of the streets, was rearranged in fear, brought forward another tone. There was no way of avoiding a sexed interpretation of the situation. As Juteau and Laurin wrote: ‘This action was aimed at each one of us and at us all…Fear, anger, fear, pain, fear, sorrow invade us…tearing us apart, piercing our hearts’ (ibid.).

While there have since been many responses to the event at the Polytéchnique, ranging from feminist collections of articles (Malette and Chaloux, 1990) to pamphlets blaming feminists, the immediate feminist representation of the massacre turned on the Vertretung, the spontaneous move to speak of and to a collectivity of women; grounded in their own fear and anger, feminist academics and journalists spoke out and represented the anguish of all Québécois women. And at the same time, this movement of anger and sadness was portrayed as parasitic in some press accounts; represented publicly and perhaps privately as a speaking position located upon the dead bodies of fourteen young women.

In many ways this is but a very brutal exemplar of the larger debates within cultural studies over identity and difference and who gets to speak, from where, and for whom. The tone of these debates is also bloody, if less immediately tragic. A recent British example of this is the collection of essays edited by Jonathan Rutherford, Identity, Community, Culture, Difference (1990). While this book brings together many important interventions, the tenor is one of agonistics, if not downright antagonism. Among the many targets, the Left and white feminism are the most severely trounced for having erected a hierarchy of difference. Pratibha Parmar argues that white feminism’s articulation of the politics of identity has ‘given rise to a self-righteous assertion that if one inhabits a certain identity this gives one the legitimate and moral right to guilt-trip others into particular ways of behaving’ (Parmar 1990:107). According to Andrea Stuart, by the early 1980s, ‘Being a feminist had come to say more about what you didn’t do–eat meat, fuck men, wear make-up–than what you did do’ (Stuart 1990:32). Many of these writers are from a generation influenced by the writing and the political stance of Stuart Hall, and so it was not surprising that Hall’s article was included at the end of the collection. There he argues for a theorization of identity that would be:

constituted, not outside but within representation…not as a secondhand mirror held up to reflect what already exists, but as that form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which to speak.

(Hall 1990:236–7)

While most of the authors cite, refer and defer to Hall, it is strange to note the ways in which ‘Identity’ emerges as an articulation of a rather static and rhetorical use of difference; difference as a second-hand image of various theoretical battles among feminists and within the Left. It’s as if in the late twentieth century, with the fragmentation of populist causes and political programmes as well as the commercial success of popular enterprises like ‘The Environment’, the project of Vertretung has given way to a rather vicious game of issues and individuals elbowing each other out of the way, each crying ‘listen to me’, ‘hear my difference’.

At this point in the game, at this sociocultural and theoretical conjuncture, it might be beneficial to remember Jane Gallop’s articulation of ‘the necessarily double and…urgent questions of feminism: not merely who am I? But who is the other woman?’ (1988:177). Now, of course, the first part of this equation, the question of who am I?, has already generated a small industry as, increasingly, theorists turn to their own difference, to the ‘I’, occasionally trying to explicate the world metonymically from their own situation, at times merely embroiled in the exigencies of their own locales. From Valerie Walkerdine’s analysis of herself as Tinkerbell (1986) to John Fiske’s semiotics of his living room (1990), the ‘me’ generation lives on. As Laura Marcus puts it: ‘“Enough about you, let’s talk about me”’ (1987).

THE PROBLEMATIC OF THE SELF

In a charitable vein, one could ask, when faced with public indifference (be it manifested in the severe cutbacks in the educational systems or to the funding agencies for academic and artistic work, or just the widespread feeling that nobody really cares), where are intellectuals to turn to if not to themselves? It is, of course, easy to scoff at the idea of middle-aged tenured university professors, dressed in black leather jackets, cut loose from an ideal of the ‘public’ or ‘organic’ intellectual, desperately going through their personal crises of lost authority. However, individual crises sometimes meet up with a more general situation. In a sense, Dick Hebdige’s theoretical statement can be understood as describing a fairly common sentiment: the ‘“we” is the imaginary community which remains unspeakable with the Post…there is no space to struggle over, to struggle from (or…to struggle towards)’ (1986:86–95). For instance, I was just recently agonizing over whether to go on a demonstration celebrating Gay Pride in Montreal and denouncing the police brutality towards the gay and lesbian community. Here was a space that desperately needs struggling over; however, while I know that marching is a very necessary form of struggle, it is not my favourite form of contestation; the ‘solidarity’ of large crowds makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, if not claustrophobic. Eventually I did go because a visible presence of gays, lesbians and bisexuals peacefully walking along through the downtown centre is an effective way of combating homophobia and heterosexism. However, as we proceeded along our route, it became obvious that many of these marchers were of another generation–the ten years separating me from those proudly ‘out’ dykes in their early twenties meant that the ‘we’ somehow died in my throat along with the chant, ‘We’re here, we’re queer, we’re fabuuulous’.

While the creation of a ‘we’ is a pragmatic political question, it is also and always a theoretical one. As Hebdige reminds us, and against the gloomy scenario of nothing to say and nowhere to go, ‘the “we” in Gramsci has to be made and re-made, actively articulated in the double sense that Stuart Hall refers to…both “spoken” and “linked with”, “combined”. (It has to be at once “positioned” and “brought into being”)’ (1986:95). However, in order to articulate a ‘we’, there must be certain conditions already in place.

We need to theorize a feminist enunciative position which could articulate a discursive space to speak from and something to say. This entails an examination of how we could put ourselves to work in theoretical contexts, in such a way as to produce both discursive and extradiscursive effects. As I have already suggested, there is something of an autobiographical turn currently taking place in cultural theory. If my tone in describing this moment is less than effusive, it is because I consider the possibilities of speaking selves to be great, and the liabilities of an untheorized return to the ‘I’ to be even greater. While I do not want to police uses of the personal within theory, I do think that the political and theoretical stakes at hand merit that the problematic of the self be carefully considered.

To continue on a rather negative note, I will offer some anecdotal evidence of the difficulty of speaking in the first person singular. Meaghan Morris has argued that, rather than being an expression of the personal in Jakobson’s sense of the emotive and connotative functions, anecdotes can be made to serve referential functions:

They are oriented futuristically towards the construction of a precise, local, and social discursive context, of which the anecdote then functions as a mise en abyme. That is to say, anecdotes for me are not expressions of personal experience, but allegorical expositions of a model of the way the world can be said to be working. So anecdotes need not be true stories, but they must be functional in a given exchange.

(1988a:7)

To return to my story, several years ago I mentioned in a conference presentation that I had been anorexic as a young girl. This was my first attempt to create a discursive abyme and thus throw into relief some of the theories that I had been grappling with by placing them within my own social landscape. The paper was in fact on anorexia nervosa and was taken from my master’s thesis, which was a feminist discursive and historical analysis of anorexia. In a way, I had stumbled across the idea of doing my thesis on anorexia. The idea had been to do a discursive analysis of the Parti Québécois’ White Paper on cultural policies–a subject more evidently worthy of a master’s thesis in media studies. However, as I read more and more poststructuralist theories, I found that I was using my remembrances of being anorexic as a sort of touchstone; an unthought-out problematization of some of the stricter Althusserianism in vogue at the time. In the conference paper I used Angela McRobbie’s lovely analysis of the British girls’ magazine Jackie as a springboard into my own argument:

However, at the same time a small voice in me questioned what seemed to be the over-privileging of this particular text and the overdetermination of the reader’s experience. I mean, I read Jackie and I didn’t go around yearning for boys and clothes and despising my female friends. In fact, buying Jackie was part of a small site of defiance and in a way solidified the group I hung around with. At that time in preThatcher Britain, all state schools provided subsidized hot mid-day meals which were, as one might imagine, rather foul. In any case it became the thing to do to keep the 10 shillings for the week’s meals and sneak up to town to buy chips, smoke a cigarette and read Jackie. This lasted for a while but gradually the group disintegrated–one of the group was pregnant, another spent all her time studying for the O Level Exams, one switched to a tougher (and more interestingly deviant) crowd, and I became anorexic.

(Probyn 1987:112)

While neither the content nor the style of my paper was exactly groundbreaking, a ‘postmodernist’ member of the audience subsequently stated that this personal mode of enunciation made him ‘nervous’. Now it is obviously difficult to say whether it was my particular discursive striptease or, more generally, a dis-ease with feminist speaking practices that most displeased this particular individual. However, following the publication of the paper I was also roundly rebuked in print by a feminist reviewer. Apart from what she called ‘my weighty words’ of confession (when I stated that I was anorexic), she condemned my article and argument for lacking ‘sweat and blood’ (Szekely 1988). As if making postmodernists nervous and angering feminists by supposedly betraying the material weight of the female body were not enough, a mainstream sociologist recently summed up this same piece as a ‘confession of anorexia’, another example that in ‘postmodern America, the natives are now writing their own ethnography’ (Frank 1990:148, 146).

What I want to take from this anecdote is the way in which these three different reactions, from three different theoretical agendas, all assumed that I was telling, or wanting to tell, the truth, in this case about the essence of my being. I found these reactions rather bewildering. First of all, and in a very general manner, anorexics (and perhaps even some ex-anorexics) are notoriously duplicitous; after all, anorexia involves living a myriad of lies (from pretending that you have eaten to reading others’ horror at your body as admiration or even envy). Second, my particular argument concerned the ways in which women have historically and conjuncturally used anorexia as a way of negotiating the dominant discourses of their times (whether religious, economic, medical, or other). It was, therefore, an argument against the idea that anorexia is a modern epidemic reducible to a causal paradigm of the direct effects of media discourses on women i.e., that anorexic women represent the sad truth of our times. Third, and perhaps most important and obvious, the experience I presented in speech was, of necessity, a representation forged for the sake of my argument (my mother’s reading of the article was that I had had a happy childhood; my sister’s was a little more to the point as she pointed out the academic licence involved in the descriptions).

Without overly privileging or overestimating the virtues of my paper, since the rest of the article plodded offinto the usual disembodied type of argument and thus conformed to a general pattern within feminist criticism of merely using the personal at the outset of an argument (Kennard 1981), I will use it and the reactions it raised to explore the ‘problematic’ of the self. In the Althusserian sense of ‘une problématique’, a problematic only exists in both the presence and absence of problems and concepts. If concepts cannot be found in isolation, the problematic is then a conjunctural question; it is never a universal or immutable configuration:

it is only in the specific unity of the complex structure of the whole that we can think the concept of these so-called backwardnesses, forwardnesses, survivals and unevennesses of development which co-exist in the structure of the real historical present: the present of the conjuncture.

(Althusser 1970:106)

So the problematic must always be thought in its conjuncture, as necessarily structured by its conditions of possibility. It is in this sense that current uses of the self in cultural theory have neglected to consider what conditions of possibility support, displace or disarm any use of the personal within theoretical arguments. In the turn to the autobiographical as a panacea for the ills of criticism, speaking from the heart has replaced a much needed theoretical consideration of the epistemologi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: speaking the self and other feminist subjects
• 1 A problematic: speaking the self
• 2 Problematic selves: the irony of the feminine
• 3 Moving selves and stationary others: ethnography’s ontological dilemma
• 4 Materializing locations: images and selves
• 5 Technologizing the self : Foucault and ‘le souci du soi’
• 6 ‘Without her I’m nothing: feminisms with attitude
• Conclusion: sexing the self
• Bibliography
• Index