How This Latina-American Became A French Feminist
US-American projections, intellectualism, and the power of unintended effects.
In the early 1990s, I became infatuated with something called French Feminism. Toril Moi's book Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Ty (1985) had introduced Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray to the U.S. academy. Toril Moi argued that, in comparison to American feminists that were more practical and political in their approach, French feminists were more abstract and philosophical, often engaging with psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theories to explore language and the symbolic order's effects on gender and sexual identity. I was not the only one that liked the idea of a more abstract, philosophical approach. For a budding philosopher, this seemed like just the right approach. It was an easy sell.
All three of these feminists argued some version of the following: “woman” does not exist, at least not yet. It was Simone de Beauvoir who pointed out in the “Introduction” to The Second Sex, that what passes for “woman” conceptually is but the negation of masculinity — he is rational, she is emotional; he is physically strong, she is weak; he is transcendence — that is, able to go beyond his given situation and engage in creating, thinking, and existing freely — while she is stuck in immanence, soldered to the material grounds of her concrete, day-to-day existence. The feminist of sexual difference — as Irigaray, Cixous, and Kristeva came to be called collectively — take Beauvoir’s observation a step further, each arguing in their own way that the language with which to communicate and share women's authentic experiences simply does not exist, has yet to be invented, or is blocked at a pre-linguistic, symbolic level. What exists of woman is man’s symbolic Other, the “Other of the Same” as Irigaray will quip, which has nothing much to do with women’s actual lived, embodied experiences.
“He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.” - Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Luce Irigaray speaks of parler femme, or speaking as woman, highlighting the need for women to find their own language and modes of expression within a symbolic order that has traditionally silenced or marginalized them. A Freudian psychoanalyst by training, her earliest work explored the differences in the language choices and speech between women and men, focusing on the ways in which gendered discourse reflects and perpetuates patriarchal structures. She then applied what she learned to a reading of Western Philosophy in Speculum of the Other Woman (the French original was published in 1974, with the English translation published in 1985), essentially psychoanalyzing Plato and Freud with maximum irreverence, and was promptly kicked out of the Freudian school for her efforts.
Hélène Cixous champions écriture féminine, or women's writing, urging women to write from their bodies and experiences in order to disrupt the phallologocentric discourse and create new spaces for female subjectivity. Cixous became a part of a generation of experimental writing by and for women. She played an important role in introducing (Ukranian-born) Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, part of an existentialist wave in Latin America, to the Parisian intellectual and literary scene.
"Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth." - Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa"
Julia Kristeva, on the other hand, delves into the concept of the semiotic, emphasizing pre-linguistic bodily drives that disrupt the patriarchal symbolic order, suggesting a mode of expression that precedes and challenges the patriarchal language system. Kristeva speaks of the abject and the ways in which identity and meaning are constituted through exclusion and the boundaries of the self. The masculine subject constitutes itself through the exclusion of all it is not, which it projects onto the feminine.
I found my place with this third, new wave of feminism that adopted “sexual difference” as their starting point. Smitten, I spent the next decade or so studying the work of Luce Irigaray in particular, and became engrossed in the ontological grounds of sexual difference in chora, an Ancient Greek conception of space-as-receptivity that appears in Plato’s Timeaus.
Years after my first encounter with French Feminism, as a graduate student contributing to the French Feminism Reader (2000) — a book aimed at introducing more French feminist work to English-speaking audiences — I encountered Christine Delphy's essay “The Invention of French Feminism: An Essential Move” in Yale French Studies (issue 87, from 1995) while writing about her contributions. Delphy is a French sociologist, feminist theorist, and writer, recognized as a co-founder of the journal “Nouvelles questions féministes” alongside Simone de Beauvoir. She is a leading figure in materialist feminism, known for her analyses of patriarchy, the social construction of gender, and the economics of sex-based discrimination.
In “The Invention of French Feminism,” Delphy argues that the term “French Feminism” has been artificially constructed by Anglo-American academic and feminist circles, which have tended to homogenize and essentialize diverse strands of feminist thought emerging from France. Delphy critiques the simplification and appropriation of French feminist theories by the Anglophone academy, particularly the work of figures such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, emphasizing certain aspects of the work of French feminists at the expense of a more nuanced understanding. She contends that this invention serves more the needs of Anglo-American feminism than it does to accurately represent the complexity and specificity of feminist debates and struggles within France itself.
In other words, Toril Moi's framing of the differences between American and French feminists — the practical and political Americans versus the abstract and philosophical French —highlights a valorization of European philosophy and theory as the pinnacle of intellectualism, while at the same time putting all the other feminist tendencies under erasure. To my mind, this situation signifies a form of hyper-intellectualism in the U.S. academy, a reaction to a pervasive anti-intellectualism in US-American culture. This valorization of certain types of French theory unveils an excessive penchant for 'high' theory among feminist academics, and the depiction of European (particularly French) intellectual traditions as superior, reinforcing the notion of an imagined European, i.e., white origin.
Of course, when you are smitten, it is hard to see the warts for what they are. Now, with more distance, I am trying to take account of my own relationship to Philosophy and my own identity as a feminist, intellectual, and lapsed academic. I am a Latina-American whose father traced back their roots to Spain (our Spanish colonizers, yonder on the European continent), conveniently bypassing the native Taino culture and imported African slaves that comprise our “mulatto” population. Our mythical origin story reaffirms our family's “whiteness” along with everything else that this whiteness entails. This original story sits uncomfortably next to the matriarchal history of our particular family, which has been led by women generation after generation. This is the matriarchal Taino in us, a tendency to which I attribute my best feminist instincts.
So, it's complicated. As a Spanish-speaking immigrant in California, United States, I felt compelled to prove that I was, well, not stupid. I could think of no better way to accomplish this than to get a Ph.D. in Philosophy at a top Continental Philosophy program. Working with French feminist theories seemed to me the pinnacle of intellectualism. I summited.
As many have noted, none of these three French feminists were actually French born, even though all became French nationals. Irigaray is from Belgium, Cixous is from Oran, Algeria (under French colonial rule from 1830 until it gained independence in 1962), and Kristeva is originally from Sliven, Bulgaria. If “French Feminism” is but a construct, a product of the American imaginary at a time when maybe we needed a little French je ne sais quoi to jump start a third feminist wave, then I can say, only half un-seriously, that I too am a French feminist. You gotta love these unintended effects! At the same time, I am more conscious today of the context out of which I cut my teeth as a feminist philosopher, and the limitations thereof.
I stand in my identity as an intellectual and a feminist philosopher. I love theory, talking about ideas, and tracing the history of concepts. I think that the work I did is still important, whatever subconscious motives originally animated it. At least I think so — you, dear reader, will have to be the ultimate judge of that.