Feminism and the Politics of Marginality

In About Chinese Women, Kristeva's account of her three-week stay in China in 1974 with other members of the Tel Quel group, she examines her position as a Western woman observing China by first analyzing the Judeo-Christian traditions that undergird traditional notions of femininity and sexual difference. In Genesis, she notes, it was written "male and female created He them" before the story of woman's creation from Adam's rib---told to correct any misinterpretation, no doubt. Then, she traces the development of the patriarchal monotheism of Judaism which "triumphed" over the matriarchal, fertility-based early religions, reducing women to the "silent other" of the symbolic order. Later, she notes, Christian ideology added the insistence on female virginity and martyrdom. In Christianity, motherhood is a conspicuous sign of "jouissance," the pleasure associated with the female body which must be repressed. Procreation must be kept strictly subordinated to the rule of the Father. For women, then, access to the symbolic order is through the father, entrapping women in THE classic double bind: If a woman identifies with the mother, she ensures her exclusion from and marginality in relation to the patriarchal order. If, on the other hand, she identifies with the father---makes herself in his image, then she ends up becoming "him" and supporting the same patriarchal order which excludes and marginalizes her as a woman. Kristeva argues that women must refuse this dilemma! They must, in fact, uphold the Law and sexual difference within the patrilinear frame and refuse to become one of "them." If, as she argues, the Judeo-Christian culture represents woman as the unconscious of the symbolic order---basic instinctual, drive-related "jouissance," then, from her very marginal position she can disrupt the symbolic chain. So, women must not refuse to enter the symbolic order, but neither should they adopt the masculine model of femininity. This balancing act turns out to be much too costly for some woman for whom madness and suicide become the only routes (Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Maria Tsvetaeva).

Key for Kristeva is that women know the material conditions---the body, sex, and procreation---which permit the very existence of the community, its permanence, and, therefore, man's dialogue with God. Just recently I saw the following written somewhere, "Christ was created by God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with it." It is, perhaps, a bit of feminist patter, but I think it supports to some extent Julia Kristeva's idea that women CAN return to the mother and that their roles as mothers themselves may be the key to real social change. She sees motherhood as a mode of love (like transference love in psychoanalysis). It is unconditional and directed toward the final separation of two subjects caught in a loving relationship. The idea for both mother and psychoanalyst is to help produce subjects free to construct imaginary fantasies (or works of art) to produce NEW LANGUAGE. Being able to situate themselves in relationship to the Law enables them to construct provisional identities, subjects in process in the symbolic order. Mother love (like psychoanalytic interpretation) may be poised in that space between ONE MEANING and the rejection of all truth. Kristeva sees love as a concept of agency which gives subjects permission to act.

Carnivalesque language broke through the laws of language censored by grammar, semantics and their attempt to manage the voice of the other; at the same time it was a social protest which came into being in the margins of the dominant culture, but from that position it was powerful enough to begin to generate social change. Perhaps, the margin is the place to be.

In "Women's Time" Kristeva makes the point that female subjectivity seems linked to both cyclical time (menstruation, pregnancy, repetition) and monumental time in sense of eternity---from the perspective of motherhood, reproduction, and the genetic chain. The time of history and language, however, is linear. Her stated aim in this work is to emphasize the "multiplicity" of female expressions to avoid essentializing or homogenizing "woman" and to insist on recognition of sexual difference. She projects a new generation of feminists who will have the task of reconciling "maternal" time with linear time. She writes, "No longer wishing to be excluded or no longer content with the function which has always been demanded of us (to maintain, arrange, and perpetuate this symbolic contract. . .), how can we reveal our place, first as it is bequeathed to us by tradition, and then as we want to transform it?" (The Rhetorical 1258) Her thought is that unless we are able to theorize the continued desire of women to have children the door will be open to religion and mysticism. "Without refusing or sidestepping this sociosymbolic order. . .This leads to active research, still rare, undoubtedly hesitant but always dissident, being carried out by women. . .particularly those attempts, in the wake of contemporary art, to break the code, to shatter language, to find specific discourse closer to the body and emotions, to the unameable repressed by the social contract. . .What remains is to break down resistance to change" (1259-60). She argues that the "role of what is usually called 'aesthetic practices' must increase. . . to demystify the identity of the symbolic bond, to demystify, therefore, the community of language as a universal and unifying tool. . .in order to bring out---along with the singularity of each person and, even more, the multiplicity of every person's possible identifications. . .the relativity of his/her symbolic as well as biological existence, according to the variation in his/her specific symbolic capabilities. And in order to emphasize the responsibility which all will immediately face of putting this fluidity into play. . ." (1266). [source]