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Using the experience of the body is privileged and fails to solve—only our materialist reunderstanding of theory allows it to be a site of struggle against patriarchal systems

Ebert 93 (Teresa, Professor of Humanities at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Albany who specializes in Critical and Cultural Theory, Feminist Critique, Marxist Theory and Globalization Theory, “Ludic Feminism, the Body, Performance, and Labor: Bringing ‘Materialism’ Back into Feminist Cultural Studies” https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1354189.pdf)//meb

One of the main questions for feminist culture critique, then, is what is the political effect of these rewritings of knowledge and everyday culture through the body? Do they disrupt and transform patriarchal knowledge and practices, or do they end up repro- ducing the division of subjectivities and significations necessary to patriarchal oppression-in spite of their feminist agenda? The body in feminist theory is the site of the concrete, the specific, the particular in opposition to abstraction-which is con- sidered masculinist and phallogocentric. As Rich puts it, women's need to begin with the female body-our own-[is] under- stood ... as locating the grounds from which to speak with authority as women. Not to transcend this body, but to re- claim it. To reconnect our thinking and speaking with the body of this particular living human individual, a woman. Begin . . . with the material, with matter, mma, madre, mut- ter, moeder, modder .... Pick up again the long struggle against lofty and privileged abstraction. (213) We are all well aware, since it has become a commonplace of both feminist and postmodern discourses, that abstraction marks the hierarchical dualism dominating Western rationalism in which the abstract, the ideal, the concept, and mind are privileged over the concrete, the material, experience, and the body. And as Hartsock writes in Money, Sex and Power, "[I]t is not accidental that women are associated with quasi-human and nonhuman nature, that woman is associated with the body and material life, that the lives of women are systematically used as examples to characterize the lives of those ruled by their bodies rather than their minds" (241). Diverse feminists thus share a commitment to overturning this hierarchical dualism dominating the binary other, whether nature, woman, or men and women of color. Thus we find Gallop beginning her book Thinking through the Body by decrying the "sys- tematic mind-body split that is killing our children" and quoting Rich: "Culture: pure spirit, mind . . . has . . . split itself off from life, becoming the death-culture of quantification, abstraction, and the will to power which has reached its most refined destruc- tiveness in this century" (2). Abstraction, in short, represents the alienation and destructiveness of dominant modes of knowing- especially the primacy of concepts-in Western thought. In opposition to this alienating abstraction, feminists increas- ingly posit the body as a concrete, anticonceptual, material knowl- edge that is both disalienating and creative. For many humanist feminists, such as Rich, Susan Griffin, and Andrea Dworkin, the experience of the female body-what Sandra Harding has de scribed as "female embodiment... [m]enstruation, vaginal pen- etration, lesbian sexual practices, birthing, nursing and meno- pause ... bodily experiences men cannot have" (661-62)-is seen as locating women in a specific, particular, material knowledge of daily life and involving them in creative, nondominating relations of nurturing and connection with others. Female embodiment is considered to overcome masculinist, rationalist dualism, for as Hartsock argues, a "unity of mental and manual labor ... grows from the fact that women's bodies, unlike men's, can be them- selves instruments of production" (Money, Sex and Power 243). Thus, Hartsock seeks to base an unalienated production with its "erotic possibilities" and a "reunderstanding of power and com- munity" on women's "bodily, sensual, creative" experiences (257). In fact, Hartsock argues that "the body-its desires and needs, its mortality ... would be given a place of honor at the center of the theory" (259) as both a feminist standpoint of epistemology and a specifically feminist historical materialism. The body, in short, has become such a privileged site of nonalienating, concrete, uni- fying experience that even a complex theorist like Hartsock bases her feminist historical materialism-with its theory of power, women's labor, and epistemology-in the end all on the female body, in other words, on a form of biological essentialism. Hart- sock's feminist materialism reverses the very relations of historical materialism: instead of critiquing how the body-that is, our ex- periences and understanding of the body, how we make the body intelligible-is produced through the political economy of social relations, she instead grounds her theory of social relations, in the last instance, on a biology and erotics of reproduction: on the menstruation, pregnancy, lactation of the female body as if these were self-evident, invariable, essential processes. And that is the question isn't it? Are these bodily processes natural, material grounds for social relations or are they always already mediated and thus constructed, made intelligible and ex- perienced through the structuring of the symbolic order and the operation of the political economy of social relations and the di- vision of labor? In other words, is the "meaning" of menstruation in the "experience" of menstruation (its physical bodiliness) or is the meaning in the way that experience gets read in a given social formation on the basis of the frames of intelligibility and labor practices that society produces. To answer this question we need to look more closely at how the body functions in feminist dis- courses. First, as I have already mentioned, the body is posited as the opposite of abstraction, of conceptuality, but the body as it circu- lates in feminist theory is a concept: a specific historically produced articulation or way of making sense of experience. Rich makes this dilemma especially clear when she says, "Perhaps we need a moratorium on saying 'the body.' For it's also possible to abstract 'the' body. When I write 'the body,' I see nothing in particular. To write 'my body' plunges me into lived experience, particularity: I see scars, disfigurements, discolorations, damages, losses .. ." (215). Rich, in other words, recognizes that the body is itself a concept, an abstraction, but she is, I think, wrong in believing we can overcome this abstraction if only we can make the body more particular, more specific-"my body," my scar, my color. We are back again to the bourgeois isolate, the monad so necessary to capitalist patriarchy: the specific, local me cut off from any un- derstanding of the operation of the social relations of exploita- tion. This concept of the body as anti-abstract continues to be trapped in the hierarchical dualism it is used to contest. The body is not so much a unifying experience as it is merely a reversal of the binary hierarchy. Instead of privileging mind, we privilege body; instead of reifying abstractions, we reify the concrete. The mind-body split still operates, and women are still located in the body. Only now it is women who confirm our place there in the name of change. Certainly such a move alters the relations of privilege-it valorizes what the dominant order denigrates-but it does not overthrow the system underlying oppressive dichotomy. It merely reverses its privileged terms without touching the struc- ture that produces the binarism. The dualistic system thus re- mains intact, only now it is partially concealed behind a false mo- nism of the body. The second question for us is whether those feminists en- gaged in ludic postmodern-specifically poststructuralist and La- canian-discourses have conceptualized the body in a more pro- ductive way for a transformative feminist politics, or do they reproduce the same aporias and limits in new terms? Gallop's Thinking through the Body is a lesson text for us to use in addressing this question not only because it is considered by many to be a primary discussion of the subject, but also, and perhaps more important, because its contradictions and confusions so vividly enact the contradictions over the body in postmodern feminist theory at this historical moment. In Thinking through the Body, Gallop contests what she calls the "mind-body split" that is "exemplified in an opposition between philosophers and mothers" (8). She begins by drawing on Roland Barthes to posit the body as a "bedrock given, a priori to any subjectivity." As she says: Not just the physical envelope, but other puzzling and irre- ducible givens, arising from the 'body' if that word means all that in the organism which exceeds and antedates conscious- ness or reason or interpretation. By 'body,' [she goes on to say] I mean here: perceivable givens that the human being knows as 'hers' without knowing their significance to her. In such a way a taste for a certain food or a certain color, a distaste for another, are pieces of the bodily enigma. (13) Taste or "predilection" for Gallop "indicates a bodily enigma; it points to an outside-beyond/before language" (16). It is through this unrepresentable, uninterpretable bodily enigma, this taste or predilection, in excess of language, of textuality-that we know (in other words, experience) the givenness of the body. This pos- iting of the body as the experience of a given outside, in excess of language and social relations and in opposition to abstract syste- maticity, is quite close to the humanist conception of the body discussed above. Gallop's text is fraught with contradictions: on the one hand, she asserts the poststructuralist position on textuality and the cri- sis of referentiality; on the other, she ends up affirming the body as referent and valorizing the experience of the body. For exam- ple, she claims at one point in the text that "everything is real and everything is textual, mediated, interpretable" (90). And at an- other point in discussing the work of Irigaray she says that belief in simple referentiality is . . . politically conservative, because it cannot recognize that the reality to which it appeals is a traditional ideological construction, whether one terms it phallomorphic, or metaphysical, or bourgeois, or something else. The politics of experience is inevitably a conservative politics, for it cannot help but conserve traditional ideological constructs which are not recognized as such but are taken for the "real." (98-99) This is an eloquent statement of the politics of referentiality and experience, but the question is, does it end up being a description of Gallop's own politics? For in her critique of the phallus in Lacan, for example, she repeatedly argues that the penis is the referent for the phallus and condemns Lacanians for attempting to dispense with the penis as the referent grounding the power of the phallus. To erase the penis as referent, she contends, turns the phallus into a self-referential transcendental signified. Her argu- ment thus defends an essential reference that she has herself already rejected. This, obviously, is one way to understand and critique Lacan. However, we can also read Lacan more politi- cally-read him, that is, as saying that the "phallus" is a social entity and, as such, its meaning does not reside in any secure ground such as the physicality of the penis. The meaning of the phallus, in short, is not secured in the penis, but is basically a matter of power. As Volosinov argues, the sign (phallus) is the site of contestation: the meaning of the phallus is "determined" through social struggles and labor relations and then attributed to the penis/clitoris as a way of naturalizing what is essentially a social phenomenon. Gallop's critique of Lacan is itself a very conserva- tive critique: it takes us back to the essentialism of humanism. A postmodern materialist critique, on the other hand, is aimed at moving beyond Lacan (not regressing to a "before") by teasing out the political possibilities in problematizing the referent of the phallus. Gallop's reading of Lacan, in short, is a serious misreading that ends up restoring the experience of the body as she quite clearly states: "By insisting on the penis, I was looking for some masculine body, some other body, some bodily object of female heterosexual desire, trying to find not just the institution of het- erosexism but also the experience of heterosexuality" (131). This move is not just confined to the phallus/penis; rather much of Gallop's reading of the body puts forth a conservative politics of experience that, to use her own words, "conserves the traditional ideological constructs" of patriarchy and does not offer us a pos- sibility for an emancipatory politics. The more poststructuralist aspects of her text, on the other hand, participate in the limits of a ludic postmodern politics, spe- cifically the textualization of resistance and the reification of the local and the particular. Gallop's discourse, like ludic postmod- ernism as a whole, is an antitheory theory-think of Derrida's Glas, Richard Rorty's Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, de Man's Resistance to Theory, or Gregory Ulmer's Teletheory, a text which also reifies experience as "mystory." Theory in these discourses is es- sentialized as a phallogocentric, abstract, instrumental, dominat- ing system whose main apparatus is the concept (which is equated with an identity of language and reality) with its rigid, reductive fixity. Ludic opposition to this mastering theory involves displac- ing its concepts and subverting its categories through such decon- structive strategies as punning, parody, and cultivating the tropic play of signifiers-the dissemination of differance-that exceed the controlling argument of the system. Thus we have Ulmer's "puncept" (147) and Naomi Schor's "patriody": a form of tropic play and difference that "hovers between parody and parricide" (xii). This ludic notion of theory, to which Gallop and other post- structuralist feminists subscribe, is obviously similar to the domi- nant feminist essentialization of theory as a masculinist abstrac- tion and provides a site for many for the convergence of some forms of feminism and ludic postmodernism. But the limits of the feminist ludic resistance to theory are quite evident in Gallop's claims for the disruptive potential of the body. As she points out in her discussion of the Marquis de Sade, the conflict is "between rational order, that is, 'philosophy' and irrational bodily materiality.... [T]here is always some disorderly specific which exceeds the systematizing discourse" (Thinking through the Body 47) and disrupts the mastering impulse of knowl- edge. Thus, in her discussion ofJustine and The NewJustine Gallop claims that [t]he pedagogical examination which attempts to regulate the student on the basis of external rules, of the teacher's rules, is messed up by the regles, the rules, flowing from within. The bodily, fluid, material, feminine sense of regles [as "woman's bloody (menstrual) 'rules'" or period] undermines the Sadian pederastic pedagogue's attempt at exact examination, at sub- jugation of the pupil to his rational, masterful rules. (52) This is a fairly subtle and sophisticated reading of Sade, exposing both rationalism's violence toward the body and the body's un- containable excess. But what is its political effectivity? It exposes and disrupts dominant rational categories, but does it move be- yond a local, subversive annotation? Does it transform them? Gal- lop asserts that "the really disturbing violence is not physical vio- lence but the physical as it violates the rational categories that would contain and dominate it" (18). In other words, in a very ludic move, she proposes that what is disturbing is not the violent exploitation and abuse of the body but the body's violation of rational categories. And by this she does not mean a revolutionary act of resistance by the body as agency of conscious social change but rather the excessive, disorderly, irrational details and predi- lections of the body-its differences-that passively escape ratio- nal logic. This, in effect, is a textualizing of violence, of the phys- ical, a dehistoricizing of the social, and an erasure of the economic, all in the name of the body. It is a subversion of lin- guistic categories on behalf of a concept-that conceals its own conceptuality-a concept of the body as fragmented, nomadic details that escape knowing: its difference from itself. We need to keep in mind that the texts Gallop is attempting to disrupt through the tropic excess and violence of a textual body are ones in which teachers and fathers sexually assault, physically abuse, cut up, and murder mothers and daughters. This is not merely some pornographic fantasy, some libertarian rationalism gone amuck-this is the reality, the historical situation of exploi- tation of innumerable women in racist, patriarchal capitalism today. According to MacKinnon, only "7.8% of women in the United States have not been sexually assaulted or harassed in their lifetime" (Feminism Unmodified 6). Moreover, only 17% of all inci- dents of rapes and attempted rapes are committed by strangers; the majority are committed by men the women know-acquain- tances, friends, lovers, relatives, authority figures (247)-and "women of color (... specifically ... Black women) are raped four times as often as white women" (82). The ludic textualization of violence that Gallop is articulating ends up erasing the political economy of the body in the social relations of exploitation and turning resistance into a tropic game.' In what way does Gallop's textualized body in excess trans- form the mind-body split? It merely reinscribes woman in the same place she has also been in the patriarchal hierarchy: in the unknowable, unrepresentable, bloody body that exists in opposi- tion to concepts. This anxiety over concepts in ludic postmodern- ism and humanist feminism is, to my mind, especially counter- productive for an emancipatory politics. Concepts are not only unavoidable, they are also a necessary means for social change. Thinking/experience without concepts is impossible: concepts are the "mediating" frames of intelligibility through which we know the world. Experience-which is put forth as liberation from con- cepts/thinking by ludic feminists (such as Gallop) and cultural feminists (as different as Susan Griffin and Camille Paglia)-is itself intelligible only through the mediation of concepts. The issue here is not to romantically dismiss concepts but to question how we theorize and use them.