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Adrienne Rich (born 1929). 媒介与社会性别精品课程专题演讲. Adrienne Rich (selected prose). 1976: Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution 1979: On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose
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Adrienne Rich (born 1929) 媒介与社会性别精品课程专题演讲
Adrienne Rich (selected prose) • 1976: Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution • 1979: On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose • 1986: Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose (includes the essay: “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” first published in 1980) • 1993: What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics • 2001: Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations • 2007: Poetry and Commitment: An Essay
Adrienne Rich (selected poetry) 1951: A Change of World. 1963: Snapshots of a daughter-in-law: poems, 1954-1962. 1966: Necessities of life: Poems, 1962-1965. 1971:The Will to Change: Poems 1968-1970. 1973: Diving into the Wreck. W.W. Norton. 1978: The Dream of a Common Language. 1984: The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984. 1989: Time’s Power: Poems, 1985-1988. 1991: An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991. 1995: Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems, 1991-1995. 1999: Midnight Salvage: Poems, 1995-1998. 2004: The School Among the Ruins: Poems, 2000-2004. 2006: Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004–2006.
simultaneity of oppressions • “As a forty-nine-year-old Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two, including one boy, and a member of an interracial couple, I usually find myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong.”
“Being women together was not enough. We were different. Being gay-girls together was not enough. We were different. Being Black together was not enough. We were different. Being Black women together was not enough. We were different. Being Black dykes together was not enough. We were different. . . It was a while before we came to realize that our place was the very house of difference rather than the security of any one particular difference.”
Works by Monique Wittig • 1964: L’Opoponax • 1969: Les Guérillères (The Warriors) • 1973: Le Corps Lesbien (The Lesbian Body) • 1976: Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes (with Sande Zeig) (Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary) • 1985: Virgile, non (Across the Acheron) • 1992: The Straight Mind and Other Essays (La pensée straight) (includes the essay, “The Straight Mind,” first published in 1980) • 1999: Paris-la-Politique
Some coincidences between Wittig’s and Rich’s Texts (I) • Both are published in academic Feminist journals in the United States in 1980 (though Wittig first presented hers orally in 1978). • Both function as political MANIFESTOS. • Both CRITICIZE heterosexual and patriarchal assumptions within feminism (especially Rich) and society at large. • Both see male-dominated systems as forms of TRYANNY (Wittig, 105; Rich, 652). • Both see heterosexuality as an IDEOLOGY deserving of critical reflection (Wittig, 105; Rich, 638). • Both see heterosexuality as a “COMPULSORY” (Rich) or “OBLIGATORY” (Wittig, 107) political and economic SYSTEM or INSTITUTION.
Compulsory/Compulsion • “Compulsory” (adjective): 1) required by law or a rule; obligatory: for instance, compulsory military service. • 2) involving or exercising compulsion; coercive. • “Compulsion” (noun): 1) the action or state of forcing or being forced to do something; constraint. • 2) an irresistible urge to behave in a certain way, especially against one's conscious wishes: for instance, he felt a compulsion to talk about what had happened. • ORIGIN late Middle English: via Old French from late Latin compulsio, from compellere ‘to drive, force’ (see “to compel”).
Obligatory/Obligation • “Obligatory” (adjective): 1) required by a legal, moral, or other rule; compulsory: for instance, use of seat belts in cars is now obligatory. • 2) so customary or routine as to be expected of everyone or on every occasion. • 3) (of a ruling) having binding force: for instance, a sovereign whose laws are obligatory. • ORIGIN late Middle English : from late Latin obligatorius, from Latin obligat- ‘obliged,’ from the verb obligare, from ob- ‘toward’ + ligare ‘to bind.’
Some coincidences between Wittig’s and Rich’s Texts (II) • Both dispute the notion that human beings are “naturally” and “freely” heterosexual (hence, the compulsory/obligatory forms it takes). • Both see sexuality as intimately related to politics and economics (class struggle, for Wittig). • Both understand discourse (language, symbolic systems) as having real, material effects. • Both consider pornography to be an especially powerful manifestation of male control over women (the subjugation and objectification of women for male pleasure).
Some coincidences between Wittig’s and Rich’s Texts (III) • Both understand heterosexuality as relying on romanticized myths, unconscious propaganda (in literature, art, advertising, mass media, cinema, religion, etc.), and un-self-critical forms of science that at once construct “nature” and conceal it as a construction. • Both understand heterosexuality (as ideological system or institution) as shaping, molding, permeating, or otherwise affecting consciousness and the unconscious.
Some coincidences between Wittig’s and Rich’s Texts (IV) • Both subject the concept and term “NATURE” to massive critical questioning: (Rich: “Women learn to accept as natural the inevitability of [the male sexual] ‘drive’ because we receive it as dogma,” 646; Wittig: “Although is has been accepted in recent years that there is no such thing as nature, that everything is culture, there remains within that culture a core of nature which resists examination, a relationship excluded from the social in the analysis—a relationship whose characteristic is ineluctably in culture, as well as in nature and which is the heterosexual relationship. I will call it the obligatory social relationship between ‘man’ and ‘woman’,” 107).
Some coincidences between Wittig’s and Rich’s Texts (V) • Both effectively understand heterosexuality, its emphasis on reproduction, and most obviously its consecration through marriage in terms of “norms,” not “nature.” • Both understand the ideological system of heterosexuality as silencing, erasing, or denying the reality of human diversity in general (or, indeed, as denying, through the binding imposition of norms, nature as nature) and of lesbian experience in particular.
Some coincidences between Wittig’s and Rich’s Texts (VI) • Both conceive of their projects in terms of critique and, more generally, consciousness raising (Rich) or de-alienation (Wittig) as well as “speaking out,” struggle, resistance, and rebellion. • Both attempt to redefine either “lesbian” (Rich) or “woman” (Wittig) and the relations between the two terms/groups.
Some Differences between Wittig’s and Rich’s texts (I) • Wittig draws on and generally criticizes the structuralist thought of influential French male “social and human scientists” such as Lévi-Strauss (anthropology), Jacques Lacan (psychoanalysis), and Roland Barthes (semiology). • Rich draws and generally extols Anglo-American female creative writers such as Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Brontë, Zora Neal Hurston, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. • Wittig, emphasizing discourse and symbolic structures, famously declares that “Lesbians are not women” (110). • Rich, emphasizing experience and feelings, declares that “lesbian experience . . . , like motherhood, [is] a profoundly female experience (650, emphasis original).
Some Differences between Wittig’s and Rich’s texts (II) • Rich, more “historical,” offers an extensive list of cultural (and often trans-cultural) practices by which women are sexually suppressed, sexually coerced, exploited, controlled, confined, objectified, restricted in their creativity, and denied access to large areas of social knowledge and cultural production (638-640). • Wittig, more “theoretical,” invokes a “straight mind” (in clear, ironic reference to Lévi-Strauss’s concept of the “savage mind”) that functions, “primitively,” in and as “a conglomerate of all kinds of disciplines, theories, and current ideas” (107).
Some Differences between Wittig’s and Rich’s texts (III) • Rich insists on distinguishing lesbians from gay men. • Wittig insists on linking lesbians and gay men. • Rich insists on a “lesbian continuum,” that is to say, “a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience; not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman” (648). • Wittig insists on a radical break between “women”—whom she understands as having meaning only in an oppositional, hierarchically subordinate relation to “men” (110)—and “lesbians,” whom she elsewhere compares to “runaway slaves,” dissidents, defectors, conscientious objectors, etc.
Some Differences between Wittig’s and Rich’s texts (IV) • Rich advocates an expansion and reconfiguration of the concept of “woman” not merely to include “lesbian” but, more provocatively, as being under the sign “lesbian” (in the sense of women-identified experience). • Wittig advocates an overturning of the concepts “woman” and “man” (in a manner similar to an overturning of the concepts “proletariat” and “bourgeois” in classical Marxist thought).
Some Differences between Wittig’s and Rich’s texts (V) • Rich effectively reinforces, even “naturalizes,” a binary division between men and women (“men” and “women”) and gestures to a more accommodating sand cohesive feminist practice (by way of a continuum). • Wittig effectively shatters, or “de-naturalizes,” the division between men and women (“men” and “women”) and gestures to a “queering” (though this is NOT her term) of the male/female binary: “The function of difference is to mask at every level the conflicts of interest, including the ideological ones” and “If we, as lesbians and gay men, continue to speak of ourselves and to conceive ourselves as women and as men, we are instrumental in maintaining heterosexuality” (108).
Some Differences between Wittig’s and Rich’s texts (VI) • Although Rich criticizes what she calls “false dichotomies” (659), she never questions the truth value or validity of the “dichotomy” man/woman. • Wittig does question this dichotomy, and notes how the very act of doing so is typically met with fear and anxiety (or a ridicule that masks fear and anxiety): “What is woman? Panic, general alarm for an active defense” (111).
Some criticisms (by feminists, lesbians, queers) of Rich’s and Wittig’s texts (I) • Rich has been criticized for expanding “lesbian experience” to such a degree that the term loses any concrete historical and political meaning, contradictorily erasing the experience, and political power, of women-who-love-women. • Wittig has been criticized for appearing to claim that lesbians are already “outside” the male/female dichotomy, binary, or opposition.
Some criticisms (by feminists, lesbians, queers) of Rich’s and Wittig’s texts (II) • Rich has been criticized for overestimating the possibility of (absolutely free) choice, consistent with Anglo-American political thought which tends to be “voluntaristic” (see, for instance, 659). • Wittig has been criticized for underestimating the possibility of redefining (or, in her terms, “redeeming”) terms and categories, consistent with French political thought which tends to be “structurally deterministic” (see, for instance, 108)—though elsewhere Wittig also speaks of “choice” (as in the lesbian who “runs away” from heterosexuality like a “runaway slave”). Queer theory has done precisely what Wittig here seems to claim to be impossible: redefine, if not “redeem,” at least in part, a formerly injurious term and category.
Some criticisms (by feminists, lesbians, queers) of Rich’s and Wittig’s texts (III) • Rich has been criticized for assuming that bonds between women are more important than those of class, race, religious, national or other markers of identity. • Wittig has been criticized for understanding women as “slaves” and lesbians as “runaway slaves” and hence of erasing real historical differences, among women, regarding the institution of slavery (Rich, it should be noted, also writes of a general “female sexual slavery,” 644)
Some criticisms (by feminists, lesbians, queers) of Rich’s and Wittig’s texts (IV) • Rich has been criticized for romanticizing women-identified experience even as she criticizes dominant heterosexual romanticism. • Wittig has been criticized for de-historicizing and trans-historicizing lesbianism even as she criticizes the de-historicizing and trans-historicizing moves of Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Barthes, and others.
Some criticisms (by feminists, lesbians, queers) of Rich’s and Wittig’s texts (V) • Rich has been criticized for acritically invoking notions of experience (feelings, sentiments, affect, etc.). • Wittig has been criticized for eliding notions of experience (feelings, sentiments, affect, etc.) altogether. • Rich has been criticized for failing to see how the ideology and institution of heterosexuality limits men, especially “homosexual men,” as well. • Wittig has been criticized for failing to attend to the differences among lesbians.
Important passages: Rich (I) • “I am suggesting that heterosexuality, like motherhood, needs to be recognized and studied as a political institution—even, or especially, by those individuals who feel they are, in their personal experience, the precursors of a new social relation between the sexes” (637).
Important passages: Rich (II) • “it becomes an inescapable question whether the issue we have to address as feminists is, not simple ‘gender inequality,’ nor the domination of culture by males, nor mere ‘taboos against homosexuality,’ but the enforcement of heterosexuality for women as a means of assuring male right of physical, economical, and emotional access” (647).
Important passages: Rich (III) • “The assumption that ‘most women are innately heterosexual’ stands as a theoretical and political stumbling block for many women . . . partly because to acknowledge that for women heterosexuality may not be a ‘preference’ at all but something that has had to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized, and maintained by force, is an immense step to take if you consider yourself freely and ‘innately’ heterosexual” (648)
Important passages: Wittig (1) • “The discourses which particularly oppress all of us, lesbians, women, and homosexual men, are those discourse which take for granted that what founds society, any society, is heterosexuality. These discourses speak about us and claim to say the truth in an apolitical field, as if anything of that which signifies could escape the political . . . and as is . . . politically insignificant signs could exist. These discourses of heterosexuality oppress us in the sense that they prevent us from speaking unless we speak in their terms” (105)
Important passages: Wittig (II) • “the straight mind develops a totalizing interpretation of history, social reality, culture, language, and all the subjective phenomena at the same time. I can only underline the oppressive character that the straight mind is clothed in its tendency to immediately universalize its production of concepts into general laws which claim to hold true for all societies, all epochs, all individuals” (107).
Important passages: Wittig (III) • “What is woman? Panic, general alarm for an active defense. Frankly, it is a problem that the lesbians do not have because of a change of perspective, and it would be incorrect to say that lesbians associate, make love, live with women, for ‘woman’ has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems. Lesbians are not women” (110).
