Notes for 2/9/98 "Pleasures and Perils of Embodied Truths (1)"

What constitutes difference?

Wittig

• -"Lesbians are not women": They do not fit into society's construction of what Woman should be, so they are not "women", although they are female biologically.
• -"There is no sex.": Oppression creates sex, sex does not create oppression. Society creates Woman and Man as binary opposites in a hierarchy: men over women. She compares this opposition to master/slave, boss/worker, and dominator/dominated. There can be no equality where there is difference. Difference is not natural, it is socially constructed and enforced.
• -The heterosexual contract: Men are above women, and each have assigned roles in society, such as men do the productive work and women do the reproductive work. As a result of this enforced, hierarchical difference, women are denied civil rights. How are women not seen as people legally?: the marriage contract in which the husband has power over the wife and she is supposed to surrender her body and identity to him, inheritance laws, abortion laws that place fetus over woman, traffic in women, such as dowrys and fathers who "give away" their daughters to other men in marriage.
• -The straight mind: a mind that assumes dominant thinking and applies it to every field and thinks of this way of thinking as universal. Psychoanalysis is an example. Supposedly there is one Unconscious, it is heterosexual, and if one deviates from what psychoanalysis says is normal, then they are sick and need to be cured by psychoanalysts.
• -Wittig says that language is the most important manifestation of the straight mind. Women and men are differentiated: "She" vs. "He", for example. One has to speak in the terms of the straight mind when using the dominant language.

Epstein

• -debunks bio-social assumptions. She says that "scientific" evidence of differences between the sexes is not reliable. It is based on flawed studies, unreliable methods, etc.
• -worries about false analagies to prove what we already believe. Such as, when we compare our society to baboons and assume their behaviors are somehow related to us because we evolved from them, and that they are a more primative type of us. In fact, baboons and people are not comparable. They are not behind us on the road of development, they are on a different road.
• -criticizes male historians and biologists for thinking biological sex is so fundamental to one's behavior, but also some feminists (especially psychoanalytic) for doing the same thing. Sex is one factor among many.
• -scientists are supposedly trying to see if a hypothesis is true or false, but they actually want it to be true, because why would you want to keep proving yourself wrong? That would not be good for your career. This might make scientists try too hard to make a hypothesis seem correct.

Identity (continued from Wednesday 2/5)

• -In "The Occult of True Black Womanhood" Ducille feels ambivalent about letting whites and males into the field of African-American and women's studies. Should blacks and women try to include others, to invite open discourse, or try to keep it "ours", so that whites and men won't shut out our voices?
• -Minh-Ha in "Woman, Native, Other" talks about minorites who make it, are the first to be "let in", and who sell out their own group in order to keep their special status.
• -When a Pakastani comes to America, they are suddenly defined by their nationality, which wouldn't happen to a Pakastani in Pakastan. You are seen as different and you are defined by this difference. You have to "speak for" your whole group. --How do we discuss difference without reinforcing the difference by acknowledging it? Women's studies programs, for example, are (in some people's opinions) "special", and don't change the whole university.
• -How do we speak about difference with a language that supports inequality? What words do we use?
• -We notice socially important differences, as opposed to unimportant ones like haircolor.
• -According to Minh-Ha, differences end up dividing.
• -Is the "patchwork quilt" idea in America something we really believe in?