Primacy

labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
juillet /décembre / 2014 -julho/dezembro 2014

How are we doing with difference so long after Irigaray’s critique of the model of one(sex)?

Since its inception western feminist discourse has critiqued the status of women and questioned the social power relations implicated in constituting sexual difference. This paper asks how we’re doing with questions of sexual difference now we’re some decades beyond Luce Irigaray’s (1985a) critique of the model of one(sex) in psychoanalytic theories. To begin a conversation, the problem of women’s (failure at) leadership and the rise of the Fathers' Rights movement will serve as exemplars for questioning the constitution sexual difference within the boundaries of (some of the) explanations for the status of women, particularly in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In relation to these exemplars, the paper questions how the presumption of singularity is disrupted through opening spaces to theorise intersectionality.

"That 'woman' finds herself now in the age of postfeminism deprived of her “essence” only confirms, paradoxically, a very ancient state of affairs: “woman has never been able to define herself other than through the violence done to her. (Malabou, 2011, vi)

Feminist analysis taught us that resistance to capitalism must be a kind of politics that attends to the condition of women precisely because we can then see better the nature of power, and we can see better why we must take care not to replicate that kind of power in our own organisations. At a time when capitalism is drawing upon what is usually thought of as women’s power and distorting feminism to create organisations that are ‘feminised’, it is all the more important that we know what we are doing when we reclaim feminism and know what we are doing when we say we want to reclaim feminisation for ourselves" (TP, 2013).

As I began writing this paper, I found these two quotes – on the same day and in entirely different contexts. They both refer to our time, to ‘now,’ to the politics of gendered power relations that we inherit, in this moment, and to an imperative to reclaim feminism. They also refer to the two examples that I use to structure my argument: violence against women and women’s participation in western governance. It seemed unusually serendipitous. More reflexively, these quotes enabled me to imagine that questions of sexual difference, now we’re some decades beyond Luce Irigaray’s (1985a) critique of the model of one(sex), are still (at least implicitly) central questions for feminisms of our time.

Difference has been thoroughly interrogated by feminists over almost five decades. Differences have fractured our debates and our understandings of each other, opening spaces for theories of intersectionality along other lines; “whether racial, sexual, religious, geographical, or cultural” (Cheah & Grosz, 1998, p.15). Theories of gendered subjectivity informed by feminist readings of the western masculinist cannon have been worked and re-worked as new challenges formed. Along the way, we’ve (en)countered essentialism, complicity, mistaken identity, political and economic privilege, dualism/s, deadlock and so on. Over almost half a decade, many of “those invested in the struggle for the articulation of differences” have recognised and resisted social (discursive) systems “built on the presumption of the singularity and value of a single group or ideal” (Cheah & Grosz, 1998, p.15) and theorised the presumption as an artefact of phallocratic western languages. As we write of sexual difference, now, how are intersections of race, culture, political geography, written into contemporary struggles? How are we opening up space for multiplicity, diversity?

The central question of how we’re doing with sexual difference, at the intersection of psychology and feminism, relies on tensions between the scholarly categories of French and Anglo-American feminism that are also underpinned by constructions of sameness and difference (Gambaudo, 2007). Both French and Anglo-American feminism are notable for their connections with the western masculinist cannon and their location within colonising geo-political spaces. So, along with asking how intersectionality is opening space in our debates, questions of how Irigaray’s critique informs western feminist responses to indigenous women’s writing will also emerge.

This paper takes the form of several fragmented re-connections of personal and political encounters with contemporary gendered power relations and theoretical writing on matters of doing and being gendered as women. The first fragment returns to collect Irigaray’s (1985) critique of the model of one(sex). I then re-position the model through Risman and Davies’ reflexively modern tracing of “the conceptual development of the study of sex and gender throughout the 20th century to now” (2013: 733). I’ve chosen Risman and Davies because they provide the kind of stable, progressive account of conceptualising gender that is grounded in the empirical traditions that can authorise a relationship between ‘feminism’ and ‘psychology’. This is also the kind of authority that legitimates the notion that ‘now’ we are living in an age of postfeminism, and so now might be a good time to interrogate our progress. Other fragments interrupt my reading of Risman and Davies (2013), through the critique of the model of the one sex, to reconnect with specific moments where the whole idea of progression stalls.

I want to start my recollection of Irigaray’s critique with a caveat: her writing exceeds critique; suggests that we exceed binaries, cultivate our interiority, and sexualise our civil rights; encourages thinking beyond the cultural, genealogical constraints of Antrocentrism; incites us to attend to sexual difference – again, and again, and again (Jones, 2011; Rawlinson, Horn & Khader, 2011). Necessarily much could be said of “her critique” of the model of the one sex that exceeds this particular paper.

At the heart of my recollection is the critical importance of mimeses and irony in Irigaray’s conceptualisation of the form and matter of embodiment. In Irigaray’s writing, I sense the perpetual movement of discourse that matters and bodies that live. Discourse is sexed, bodies asymmetrically inscribed with differences, formed and forming through embodied social meanings. In science, for instance, tropes of masculinity – metaphors of singularity, law, control – simultaneously empty themselves of “any relation to the male body, and its specific modes of material existence” (Gross 1986b: 136). It’s a ruse. It works to produce a phallocracy, where the figure of man is the figure of unity and singularity, which at the same time produces otherness, and in the case of the figure of woman, otherness is constituted as lack.

The way the model of the one sex produces woman in the Symbolic has been translated for me through Elizabeth Grosz’s writing on three positions circulating through ‘women’ in our cultural imaginary: the other, the complement, the same:

"[...] whenever women are represented as the opposites or negatives of men; whenever they are represented in terms the same or similar to men; and whenever they are represented as men’s complements. In all three cases, women are seen as variations or versions of masculinity - either through negation, identity or unification into a greater whole”. (Grosz, 1989: xx)

The translation of Irigaray’s critique arrived on the Anglo-American scene at a time when it might have been taken up to support the critique of androcentrism already under construction (Bem, 1993, Crawford, 1989, Harding, 1986). At the time, there were various feminist analyses of the cultural context of knowledge production and the strategies through which women were seemingly invisible and silenced (e.g. Thiele, 1986). Yet Irigaray’s work primarily became mired in a to- and fro- argument about essentialism that wasn’t declared settled until later in the 1990s (Morgan, 2011). The ‘difference’ of the Francophone approach to the question of essentialism was both defended and maligned across this period. Tensions between the scholarly categories of French and Anglo-American feminism are also underpinned by the construction of sameness and difference (Gambaudo, 2007). I am wary of risking the reproduction of this binary, though I doubt I can avoid it altogether: I have already suggested a similarity between the more Anglo-American critique of androcentrism and the more French critique of the model of the one sex. Their differences also matter: especially as they relate to conceptualising essentialism and embodiment.

Risman and Davies (2013: 2) remind those of us on the Anglo side of the divide that we come from a long history of biological essentialism:

"[...]masculinity and femininity were the result of sex hormones (Lillie, 1939). William Blair Bell, a British gynecologist, first made this explicit in 1916 when he wrote ‘the normal psychology of every woman is dependent on the state of her internal secretions, and … unless driven by force of circumstances – economic and social – she will have no inherent wish to leave her normal sphere of action’ (1916: 129). Gendered behaviors began to be justified by sex hormones, rather than religion " (Risman and Davies, 2013: 2)

While they are noticing the shift from religion to hormones to justify what they call ‘gendered behaviours’, I am spellbound by the androcentrism of this historiography. Both masculinity and femininity are biologically sexed by hormones, yet only femininity exemplifies the case and in the course of doing so, ‘she’ is bodily bound to domesticity and childcare.

Although Bem isn’t quite analysing the symbolic structure of antrocentrism, the model of the one sex seems to be at work here. Sexual difference is located in the presence of testosterone and estogen, but no-one seems to be noticing what the testosterone produces, just yet. The specificity of the ‘one’ isn’t addressed and the ‘other,’ woman, becomes the example. In this case, the normal attitude of the one determines the singular sphere in which the other exemplifies difference.

By the mid twentieth century, it turns out that there can’t be a direct causal link between hormonally produced men’s masculinity and women’s femininity because both forms of human embodiment contain both hormonal substances: “both sexes showed evidence of estrogen and testosterone” (Risman & Davies, 2013 p.13). In our history, there is some branching at this stage. On the one side, there’s pursuit of the possibilities of androgyny as a solution to gendered social inequities while on the other, scientific attention turned to brain sex: the idea of binary sexual differentiation in brain matter that is responsible for latent behaviour, and itself shaped by the gestational action of hormones on the behavioural substrate (Risman & Davies, 2013). On this pathway, the search for the biological determination of sexual difference continued as the discipline of psychology became increasingly interested in engaging with technological advances in neuropsychological research.

The more socio-psychological pathway opened up a ‘heyday’ of sex and gender research. There was a considerable body of work that wasn’t the least interested in a social change agenda, and contentedly explained sexual differentiation in terms of socialised gender roles (man/masculine/head/strong/public – woman/feminine/heart/care/private). Risman and Davies (2013) attend more closely to another branching along this pathway: the work of intellectual foremothers influenced by second wave feminism and newly arrived in the academy as (social) scientists.

Sandra Bem is accorded the status of foremother for her re-conceptualisation of masculinity and femininity in the early seventies. They had been thought oppositional and assumed that the presence of one excluded the presence of the other. Bem imagined them as “actually two different personality dimensions” (Risman & Davies, 2013: 4) potentially within the one person. Androgyny became controversial: A kind of ‘best of both worlds’ solution to the repeatedly demonstrated lower value assigned to femininity. This particular track in the earliest pathways explaining, exploring and producing sexual differentiation didn’t push into early twenty-first century though. By now, there’s the suggestion that masculinity and femininity are no longer useful terms for personality researchers: they are simply gross categories laid over the more usefully specific characteristics for which they’re known: efficacy/agency/leadership/ nurturance/empathy. The character of gender has been unhitched from both gender and sex. We could each have personality characteristics of any kind.

With the model of the one sex in mind, what I notice here is how quickly our foremother’s insightful authority devolves to put an end to masculine and feminine as ‘useful categories’. Sexual differentiation turns from biology to sex roles, to gender as personality characteristic and then to undifferentiated oneness. The model of the one suggests that ‘woman’ does not speak except through mimicking the authority of a ‘man’s voice.’ So, it isn’t entirely surprising that Bem’s insightful uncoupling of sex and gender so quickly reverts to a form of humanism that assumes that sexual differentiation is a matter of overlaying socialised gender, more or less successfully, on the raw biological material of individual human kind.

The individualism that characterised early ‘sex role’ studies piqued those who were still interested in a more political analysis of sexual differentiation and the inequalities of women to change direction towards ‘gender studies’ and consider ‘the social’ beyond the concept of socialisation. Here too, the pathway split, with some theorists and researchers forming the core of what Risman and Davies (2013) call ‘new structuralism’, while others headed off into performativity and the idea that gender is something we ‘do’ to be morally accountable in our social worlds rather than something we ‘are’.

By the mid-1980s - when two of Irigaray’s key texts (1985a, 1985b) are published in English – the new structuralists had figured out that “the structural conditions of everyday life proved more important than feminine selves” (Risman & Davies, 2013: 739) to account for women’s domestic responsibilities. The upshot of this was support for the idea that if men and women had the same opportunities or they were constrained in the same kind of roles then there would not be any ‘sexual differentiation’: they would be the same. Even so, by the late 1980s it is clear that although structural conditions, opportunities and social expectations, might account better for women’s domestic responsibilities than individualised personality characteristics, the situation is somewhat different in the public sphere.

Studies of workplaces through the 1980s and 1990s suggest that gender inequality is not simply a matter of the structural placement – the enabling and constraining – of women and men. Gender is enacted through cultural logic not just structure– like that of intensive mothering which means that even the most ‘high powered, professional women’ do most of the childcare at home. In the early 1990s, concern begins to focus on an apparently invisible barrier to women become leaders in the public sphere: a glass ceiling that prevents women progressing to the higher levels of hierarchically organised corporate structures (Weyer, 2007).

By the end of the 1990s, the problem of women’s leadership is fully formed and although women in Aotearoa/New Zealand have achieved many significant leadership positions since the 1980s, continued under-representation in key institutions of influence and governance was evidenced by a 2004 Human Rights Commission census. Olsson and McGregor, (2004) reported that women held only 5.04% of all directorships in companies listed on the New Zealand Stock Exchange, only four listed companies had as many as two women directors on their board while none had more than two and sixty four of the eighty nine listed companies had no women directors at all. This pattern of under-representation was also found in the legal profession where women held only 14.12% percent of partnerships in the twenty two law firms surveyed even though more women were admitted to the New Zealand Law Society (464 women to 316 men in 2003). Although these percentages have recently risen to 14.75% of Board Directorships in the top 100 stock exchange listed companies and 19% of Law Partnerships – parity is still a long way off (McGregor, 2012).

Of course, the problem is framed in thoroughly egalitarian terms: a problem of equality between white women and men in the public sphere of western governance – state and corporate. Although there are other issues that bear scrutiny, white women are still under-represented despite a couple of decades of apparent equal opportunity. The wall between the public and the private spheres that re-connects us to our history of domestication, does not seem to be collapsing under the weight of its breaching by women moving into positions of public leadership. Despite Soler’s suggestion that the triumph of the women’s movement, toward equality “seems irreversible” (2006, p. 158) it turns out that in the USA last year the most common job for women was still ‘secretary’ (Alphonse, 2013) – the same as it was in the 1950s. Employment within services industries, where women predominate, is increasingly becoming contractual, part-time and it’s still poorly paid (Eikhof, 2012; Rogerson, Morgan & Coombes, 2013). These same differences in women’s employment have structurally positioned women in the public sphere since the well before the middle of the last century.

Yet there are some ‘special cases’ of women’s public leadership and I had the opportunity of supervising some research that interrogated men’s talk about working for women in the higher ranks of capitalist corporates, conducted by a man who’d previously been a peer of the participants (Howard, 2006). At the time, I confess, I was not much interested in the problem of women’s leadership. Apart from construing ‘the problem’ as a downside of privileges that are only accessible to a few, I’d been put off any position that might ring with tones of ‘specialness’ in the realms of phallocracy by a passage from Trinh Minh-ha that I read long ago. She wrote:

"One cannot help feeling “special” when one figures among the rare few to emerge above the anonymous crowd and enjoys the privilege of preparing the way for one’s more “unfortunate” sisters... despite my rhetoric of solidarity, I inwardly resist your entrance into the field, for it means competition, rivalry and sooner or later, the end of my specialness. I shall, therefore, play a double game: on the one hand, I shall loudly assert my right, as a woman, and an exemplary one, to have access to equal opportunity; on the other hand, I shall quietly maintain my privileges by helping the master perpetuate his cycle of oppression.... Specialness as a soporific soothes, anaesthetizes my sense of justice; it is, to the wo/man of ambition, as effective a drug of psychological self-intoxication as alcohol is to the exiles of society." (1989: 86-87: 88)

I might be stating the obvious but I’d assumed there was a temptation for this kind of ‘specialness’ among women who overcome the problem of leadership to take up privileged, executive positions in large western corporates. Supervising Stephen’s research reminded me of this assumption. For instance, he reported some findings from Rindfleish and Sheridan’s (2003) Australian study, demonstrating that although women in senior management said there was need for changing organisations to enable more women to participate, they’d not used their positions to advocate for the necessary changes. Stephen connected this finding to women leaders’ capacity to act in ways that reproduced rather than challenged the gendering of the organisation, since their positions depended on it. He also contextualised the more empirical studies of the ‘special cases’ of women’s leadership through discursively analysing the talk of men who held executive positions reporting to women managers in corporate organisations.

Stephen’s research identified four discourses that were woven through the talk of these men. He called the systematic way that they minimised gender and naturalised competition when they spoke of the nature of ‘organised, public work,’ a Darwinian competition discourse.

"But, you know, inherently the world is a competitive place. People want, you know… the animal kingdom does it the same, there's…. a pecking order is established, um." (Howard, 2006:.47)

In this discourse, competition is naturalised and organisations are formed through essentially biological characteristics – inherent – to humans, whether men or women. Organisations are constituted as the manifestation of a natural force, and gender is marginalised. Even so, competition is marked as masculine, and Stephen was challenged by one of his participants to propose an alternative to structuring organisations based on feminine characteristics. This challenge, Stephen says, elides the way that Darwinian accounts of evolution value co-operation and symbiosis in evolutionary theory.

While the Darwinian competition discourse minimised gender, elsewhere Stephen identified a systematic way of drawing attention to gender differences that positions them as either insignificant to leadership or favouring women because leadership makes more demands for stereotypically feminine qualities, like nurturance and negotiation, nowadays.

"And, as the world has got more sophisticated the sheer strength of the male species has meant they don’t dominate everything. Because people are looking at more holistic things and women, women’s less physical strength has come through." (Howard, 2006: 58)

The argument that draws attention to gender differences, here, is that patriarchy, the rule of men, is an historical phenomenon that depended on men’s superior biological capacity for physical strength. Apparently, this is a relatively primitive, crude way of organising power, and other, more feminine capacities are valued for leadership in organisations, now. The discourse constitutes sexual difference as inherently biological, and the characteristics that are so naturally formed are socially organised into gender roles that are normally assigned according to sex. As it happens, though, even when sexual differences are central, and feminisation of leadership is valued, it is still the case the participants constructed sex and gender as irrelevant in relation to ideal organisation leadership.

The kind of essentialised sexual differences that shouldn’t be relevant to leadership, also turns out to be central in a Gender War discourse that Stephen identified. This way of speaking constructs the power of leadership as a battleground between men and women, where women have already won and there is little incentive for organisations to change;

"I mean, at first we tried to do it by physicalness, when we couldn’t, when we couldn’t, when physicalness wasn’t enough we legislated so they couldn’t have power, we wouldn’t let them vote. Um, you know, so all those barricades, you know, they’ve broken down the physical barrier, and then they broke down the regulatory barrier." (Howard, 2006: 70)

Crediting men with creating barriers to exclude women from public life, and progressively exercising measures of control as women advance on their protected territory, the Gender War discourse casts a simple image of declining masculine hegemony in corporate capitalism. Stephen found no evidence here of complexities of class, culture, religion, ethnicity: no mention of multiple, shifting masculinities in various, complex relationships with the figure of the white, western man of power. And no reference, in the participants’ use of Gender Wars discourse, to the women who shared more intimate relationships in their lives. In the simple, linear and progressive version of an historical battle between men and women for power in public life, the participants’ of Stephen’s study constructed feminist analysis and activism as irrelevant, now that men had retreated from the Gender War. Stephen says that the Gender War discourse has a lot in common with those postfeminist accounts that claim triumph for the women’s movement.

In a world of corporate organisations, where sex is simply a natural category that determines valuable capacities for leadership or management or perhaps for staying in or out of the competition, gender becomes a term for a battleground that’s now transformed to a peaceful meritocracy. Stephen also identified a neo-liberal discourse of individual choice that places all the responsibility for change and accommodating organisational structure and culture on the individual worker.

"You can choose, you can, you know, you can choose to do this or you can not choose to do this. But, if you make choices about other things being priorities in your life then you’re making a choice that work is less important. I mean, that’s, nobody frowns upon you making the choice here, it’s just that you’ve got that right to do. So, you’ll. So, the role that you can play in the organisation is determined by the other choices that you are making." (Howard, 2006: 83)

Through this discourse, neoliberal organisations let you choose because they’re flexible and meet your needs easily. You can prioritise commitments for yourself, among the options that the organisation permits. Since you’re able to either accept and comply with the possibilities the organisation opens up for you or choose something else, the legitimacy of resistance is questionable. Stephen says that there’s little room for negotiation in this discourse, and a pervasive sense of powerlessness travels alongside the closed down spaces where struggles for inclusion might have been possible. The organisation seems to escape the relations of power among those who collectively enact its structure. And about power relations that socially bind men and women, Stephen says:

"Each of the four discourses... represents a different but related way of accounting for how the concerns of women as gendered subjects are rendered irrelevant in terms achieving career progression and surviving within corporate organisations. [They] draw on ideas that are deeply woven into our popular culture and even the basis of our political and economic systems of thinking”. (Howard, 2006: 90, 91)

The discourses engaged by participants in Stephen’s research, accounting for their relationships with their women managers, are embedded in cultural logic that perpetuates hierarchical structural placement and they repeat the patterns of sameness and difference that Irigaray critiques.

While the new structuralists of the 1990s were coming to terms with the failure of equal opportunities in public life, another, parallel pathway was opening for theorising gender as performative: a term for what we do with our sexually differentiated bodies. Risman and Davies (2013) identify two branches to this pathway, one following the Anglophone tradition of West and Zimmerman (1987), and the other following Judith Butler (1990, 2004). The difference between the West and Zimmerman pathway and the Butler pathway to performative gender is that for the former there is a ‘self’ that performs gender, and exists however flexibly and temporarily beyond discourse, while for the latter the possibility of a self beyond discourse is deconstructed. As I understand the distinction that Risman and Davies are making, the uncoupling of ‘self’ and ‘gender’ and the relocation of sexual differentiation to the spheres of culture, language, history, discourse, is more thoroughly undertaken along the Bulter pathway than it is following the path that still commits, ontologically, to a unified individual selfhood. They don’t say a lot more about Butler’s influence. For the purpose of linking this branch of the gender performativity pathway, to my fragmented history of the unravelling of sexual difference over the last fifty years, I want to draw on a particular passage from an article by Aaron Balick’s (2011) article. He speculates on sexual subjectivity within a call to reassesses the relationship of post-Foucaultian gender theorising in the context of psychotherapeutic practice.

Balick accords Butler the status of inaugurating queer theory though he suggests that the readings of her work that instigate a movement to remove sexual and gender identities on the grounds of performative fluidity are reductionist and privilege performativity over other significant socio-political and psycho-affective processes. While “Butler implores us to think gender differently” (2011: 20), when it comes to a radically divisive severing of a connection between gender and embodied sexual differentiation, in this case on the basis of sexuality linked to objects of sexual desire and engendering sexual identity, there’s good reason not to go too far. In as much as heterosexual normativity ought to be resisted as an organising principle of gender in the interests of politically transforming the oppressive trajectories of western genealogies of sex and gendered power relations, then refusing the link that has biologically determined sexuality and gender as if heterosexual normativity was caused by natural sexual differentiation, makes sense. However, if uncoupling sexuality and gender implies that there is no sexual regulation of gender, no ordering by sexuality that normalises the heterosexual, then performing gender subversions – acting out gender trouble – may “work to keep normative sexuality intact” (Butler, 1999: xiii–xiv) rather than resist or subvert it. For Balick (2011), the crucial issue is that Butler attends to the uncoupling of sex and gender as a political act with consequences.

Here I notice we’ve arrived at a place where being wary of the political consequences of personalising experiential positioning within social orders that are structured by ordering sex, gender and sexuality, has become an ethical responsibility for those who identify with what Harding, Ford and Fotaki (2011) call the ‘f-word’. Crucially, though, the political act of uncoupling sex and gender in this case relies on conceptualising sexuality as a matter of sexual ‘orientation’ linked to objects of sexual desire: and here, it is a binary conceptualisation of sexual difference that categorises the objects and shapes sexual identities. It is the same binary conceptualisation that Irigaray critiques as the model of the one sex.

By the late 1990s there seems to be a consensus “that ‘doing gender’ is ubiquitous” and we’ve worked out that ‘structural placement’ in public organisations privileges white men over white women and men of colour. Curiously, there doesn’t seem to be much mention, here, of women of colour: “Racial privilege is embedded as a status characteristic of employees just as is gender” (Risman & Davies, 2013: 8). White men’s privilege in organisational life means that structures are not, after all, gender-neutral or colour-blind frameworks into which any sexed or racialised body could be inserted. Sexual – and now racial differentiation – elides the universalising ‘oneness’ of neutrality and appears as a cultural effect that inscribes differences through expectations about who is who, and who does what – best.

Now it is time for gender to be conceptualised “as a stratification system that exists outside of individual characteristics and varies along other axes of inequality” (Risman & Davies, 2013, p.10). Scholars interested in oppression, including many white western feminists who accepted critiques from women of colour that the second wave movement made ‘woman’ appear as singular, an unsurprisingly white western individual, became more interested in the way gender, race, sexuality, class, nationality, and age must be understood interactively rather than distinctively.

Around the same time that feminists are reconceptualising gender towards ever more fragmented authorisations of multiple sexual differentiations, the fathers’ rights movement rises as a global and politically influential counter to feminism. By the mid 2000s it was evident that the movement was heavily lobbying government in Aotearoa. A while later, I was asked to do an analysis of their arguments by a colleague who worked for refuge and was seriously worried about their lobbying to change the family court in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Already, the court was not doing well at protecting women and children (e.g. Elizabeth, Gavey & Tolmie 2010, 2011, 2012a, 2012b). With colleagues, Robbie and Leigh, we began a study analysing four websites that were prominent examples of New Zealand internet texts and provided ample evidence of the publically accessible discursive activity of the fathers’ rights movement (Busch, Morgan, & Coombes, 2014).

Our analysis was “informed by Khader’s (2008) reading of Irigaray’s critique of equality claims; the claims that are appropriated by fathers’ rights rhetoric from the discourse of egalitarian feminism. Khader identifies a two-way danger in egalitarianism: the interpolation of a gender-neutral subject who privileges the masculine, even in the construction of ‘women’s equality’; and the reproduction of “existing symbolic repertoires” that have constituted patriarchal social relations. The interpolation of gender-neutral subjects participates in and reproduces the logic of ‘the same’ by posing a moral universal (such as ‘human’ rights) which presupposes that sex is insignificant. In doing so, it paradoxically elides the historically patriarchal relationships though which the ‘human’ – in the West – is saturated with the singularity of the one sex. Appeals to gender equality risk perpetuating women’s subjugation, because they analogize women’s and men’s experiences and because they often do so without questioning deeply patriarchal representations of women” (Busch, Morgan & Coombes, 2014:.3-4). We located four strategies identified by Khader (2008): the reproduction of masculinist universals, the use of quantitative logics to assess individuals morally, the conflation of inequality with either natural deficiency or injustice, and the constitution of all subjects as aspiring to equality within a universal moral order.

Masculinist universals were evident in the way in which the term masculinism was claimed to constitute a complementary movement to feminism: required because both men and women experience prejudice and discrimination based on their sex. It posits a kind harmonious balance in an ideal world, through universalising oppression. When both men and women aspire to redress their subjugation, they are interpolated into positions that turn out to be gender-neutral and evoke ideals of a human right. In promoting masculinism, the fathers' rights movement reproduces the figure of woman as the same as man, as well as his complement: “two of the three figures of phallocentrism that return egalitarianism to the service of patriarchal social order” (Busch, Morgan & Coombes, 2014:.7).

The fathers’ rights texts used quantitative logic to focus on intimate violence against women, especially in sexual relationships. Ignoring the voices of women who have long asserted the multiplicity and context specificity of violence, all forms of violence with their interconnected complexities and intersections of meaning, were reduced to discrete acts of physical assault. This reductionism enabled the moral assessment of a particular woman, guilty of perpetrating such an isolated act of assault, and at the same time supported the universalising claim that men and women are equally lethal in their acts of intimate violence. And yet, reductionism and decontexualising are recognisable strategies for privileging masculine values. In the context of the fathers' rights movement, they’re engaged to reassert that women are subject to the one, masculinist, moral order (Busch, Morgan & Coombes, 2014).

We analysed representations of reproductive rights as similar to employment rights in the fathers’ rights texts. Their comparison between unequal reproductive opportunities and unequal opportunities for work repeats the phallocratic division of the world into public and private. The division is engaged to construe the inequalities of maternal and paternal obligations and responsibilities as an injustice done to men. It is particularly in relation to the Family Court that men’s rights as fathers are presented as if they were unjustly violated. When the court awards custody to mothers, they claim an injustice is done to fathers who must share the costs of raising their child without having a say over their family. Apparently, the court’s interference also constitutes public intrusion into their private lives.

These texts of the fathers’ rights movement are thoroughly saturated with the singularity of idealised rights, responsibilities and obligations, shared among women and men who all aspire to be equal, at home or at work, under the law or as a moral imperative. They move fluidly between “gender neutrality and androcentric constructions of woman’s specificity as the ‘other’ of man, they pierce the legitimacy of women’s, mothers, and children’s accounts of their familial relationships and denounce women’s activism as if it were injustice” (Busch, Morgan & Coombes, 2014: 16).

Each of the strategies identified by Khader (2008), which we found again in the texts of the fathers’ rights movement in Aotearoa/New Zealand, repeats the same old pattern of sexual sameness and difference that Irigaray critiques. They still repeat, even though by the same time, the conceptualisations of sex and gender in the academy – among feminists - have transformed so that sexual and racial differentiation appear as cultural effects that fracture the universalising ‘oneness’ of neutrality into a multiplicity of socially constituted intersections.

We have arrived now at the age of postfeminism that Malabou evokes when she says that woman has been deprived of her essence through the violence done to her:

"That 'woman' finds herself now in the age of postfeminism deprived of her “essence” only confirms, paradoxically, a very ancient state of affairs: 'woman' has never been able to define herself other than through the violence done to her”. (Malabou, 2011: vi)

By the late 1990s, intersectionality has made its appearance in the ubiquitous field of “doing gender”, and knowledge of a multiplicity of differences along various axes of inequality is being legitimated in feminist research and theory. Now, Irigaray’s critique of the model of the one sex surfaces as a critique of all social systems that are founded on singularity: whether racial, sexual, religious, geographical, or cultural.

"The central issue [Irigaray] raises in her critique of the model of one is certainly among the most gripping questions of our time, not only for feminists, but for all those invested in the struggle for the articulation of differences, whether racial, sexual, religious, geographical, or cultural: if social systems, such as those in the West or the North, or in much of the East or the South, are built on the presumption of the singularity and value of a single group or ideal, how is justice possible? The question is whether, in contemporary globalization, these systems can also be rendered more just, more ethical, more open to other forms of difference if they can be made more open to sexual difference." (Cheah & Grosz, 1998: 15)

Intersectionality, say Brah and Phoenix, “fits with the disruption of modernist thinking produced by postcolonial and poststructuralist theoretical ideas” (2004: 82). They mention a distinctive strand of work on intersections that “foreground processes underlying colonial and postcolonial discourses of gender” (p.83). This work frequently engages with deconstruction, of a Derridian kind, or versions of discourse analysis that claim their heritage from Foucaultian theory. They don’t mention Irigaray or feminist engagements with psychoanalysis, although I would think they also fit here – among multiple disruptions of modernist thinking.

Whether or not centralising issues of singularity that follows from Irigaray’s critique of the model of one serves as a gripping question for all invested in struggling with differences is contestable. Some, like Sabrina Hom (2013) have argued that Irigaray’s insistence on sexual difference primarily, needs to be revised given how whiteness functions. While effective, Irigaray’s critique dramatically lacks analysis based on race or class so while it might open up the question of singularity there are limits to a myopic focus on sexual difference.

My last digression emerges from a background of research that has repeatedly demonstrated the reproduction of the model of the one sex in relation to issues like women’s participation in corporates and the rise of a counter-feminist movement that appropriates egalitarianism to reinstate women’s subordination in the family. They concern whiteness and postcolonial intersections: working alongside Viriginia Tamanui as she wrote a “Mãori indigene’s autoethnography of whanaungatanga” – entitled “Our unutterable breath” (2012).

Over almost a decade I supervised Ginia’s writing – me, doubly privileged as the one thoroughly saturated with whiteness and the comforts of academic life - Ginia, well, writing an indigene’s autoethnography of thoroughly different experiences. Ginia often asks; “how did we do that?” and we’re talking about a writing project that aims to address her question. Between our conversations I’ve been needing to think with Ginia – and with Leigh, her other supervisor – through my questions of how Irigaray’s critique informs my western feminist responses to Ginia’s indigenous woman’s writing.

Khader (2011) writes about thinking with Irigaray, and says, “to think with another is to challenge that other’s worldview and to have one’s own worldview challenged” (p.2). Thinking with Ginia, unquestionably challenges my worldview. Often in our talking, Ginia (and Leigh) and I talked about essentialism: biological essentialism, strategic essentialism, racial and sexual essentialism, the politics of essentialism. We also talked about essences – of love, blood, breath, mothering. Colonialist intersections of sex, race, class structured our differences – and we talked about that too – along with the deficits of whãnau and whakapapa that traversed my whiteness, situated me as tau iwi[1], alienated me from the heart of Ginia’s indigeneity.

"What I learnt in supervision is that I cannot imagine what it is like to be able to trace my whakapapa back to the 1700s. In terms of the complexities that Virginia writes as she unfolds stories of whakapapa that connect her, whãnau, hãpu, iwi (Tamanui, 2012), I can barely trace a memory of family. I certainly can’t remember stories of great-great-grandparents, not even stories of my great-grandparents, on some sides of my family tree. I have heard that my ancestors arrived relatively early in the great waves of colonising landings that occupied Australia. Few particular stories, acts of heroism or treachery, spoke through the violences of conquest and settlement.

It is impossible for me to imagine what it would be like to trace my whakapapa. Historically, culturally, specifically, I can’t gather or hear the stories of my ancestors surviving particular events, even though I have heard that they happened: domestic, chaotic, brutal violences: rape, hunger, beatings; children’s deaths, betrayals, disease. I remember that these domestic violences unfolded simultaneously with the massive, organised, cruel murders of imperialism, revolution and colonisation. Yet I do not know how they connected to the organised murders that constituted colonisation in my homeland. I do not know whose blood connects me to my white privileges. " (Morgan, 2013:1 86)

What I notice here, as I’m thinking with Ginia and Leigh through intersectionality, colonisation and my white woman’s responses to Ginia’s writing, is that Irigaray’s critique of the model of one sex doesn’t speak to my deficits of whānau and whakapapa. Still, her myopic focus on sexual differentiation, and it’s limitations for articulating multiple, fragmented and permeable differences, split open a shadow for me to see that the colonialist intersections of sex, race, and class were as thoroughly saturated with whiteness as I am. Differences for me, Leigh and Ginia, can be radically otherwise, even though our privileges and deficits are structured through colonial intersections.

So, as I’m brought to re-conceiving myself through thinking my deficits of whãnau and whakapapa alongside white normativity, privilege, and the comforts of academia, I am also brought to the paradoxical necessity of re-conceiving sexual differences (multiple, plural) essentially and structurally.

…because we still keep repeating the same old patterns of sexual sameness and difference, …because egalitarianism is so normalised that fathers claim the same reproductive rights as mothers and women’s leadership is problematised as if only public life matters,

…because racial, religious, geographical, or cultural differences intersect with sexual differences along axes of privilege and disadvantage that turn out to be the compass points of colonisation.

Well, when we talk – Ginia and Leigh and me - about essentialism or mothers or university or sexual difference – Woman becomes an empty signifier that we fill with our lives, our breath, our talk, tears and laughter – and there are moments of whanaungatanga that are not of blood and not only of love or breath or mothering. There are moments where boundaries are permeable enough and we catch our breath in apprehension of essences that Ginia writes as “behind the veil”. That I can’t articulate at all.

“Our First Mothers’ voices were low and soft and very convincing…” (Tamanui, 2012: 125).

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Mandy Morgan is a Professor of Feminist Psychology at the School of Psychology, Massey University in Aotearoa/New Zealand. She has particular interests in theoretical debates concerning the relationships between feminism, poststructuralism and psychology. As well as these theoretical interests, she’s involved in a research programme in the area of domestic violence services and interventions. Email: c.a.morgan@massey.ac.nz

[1] Whãnau is often translated into English as family, though the kinship relationships aren’t the same. Likewise, whakapapa might be translated as genealogy, but many relationships, perhaps including those with land and spirit might be elided. Both are implicated in whanaungatanga, a kind of interconnectness that I don’t understand or experience. Tau iwi translates variously as ‘without tribe’, ‘immigrant’, ‘from another place’.

labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
juillet /décembre / 2014 -julho/dezembro 2014