10 YEARS AFTER 9/11

Magazines and newspapers on sale have begun to cover the upcoming ten-year mark of September 11, 2001. I can only step back and reflect on where I stand today since this was the most significant event in American history to have happened inside the US in my lifetime. There is a solid difference between History and Memory. I won’t delve here into theories and conspiracies or even media propaganda. History regardless of who decides what gets written into textbooks always has a way of coming out as time moves away from the event. Facts always float to the surface.

Personally: How have I lived my own life since then? I certainly moved from one phase in my life to another. I graduated from a liberal arts college several months prior to September. I was no longer a child and no longer naïve. My sheltered knowledge of reality outside the middle-class bubble was clearly not sustainable.

I no longer was required to be in the classroom. A well-standard education was complete. Yet the job market was already slim in 2001. I was in New York, and couldn’t get work. So I decided to go camp out in the Everglades for a month and learn about nature. En route my cousin had an application for the Peace Corps that she was not using, so I filled out the application while I was in the swamp.

Before the year ended, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi, Africa. I wanted to meet people that I would never have met otherwise, and I did. My understanding about human nature and life were broadened and awakened. My strongest reason to work in another country was my deep-need to counter-balance the image the US military was spreading of America. While I was primarily a teacher in a remote village, I was the real student.

The real world is harsh. I had always been passionate about human rights due to my grandparents surviving the Holocaust. But my time in Malawi gave me first-hand experience in how the poorest of the poor struggle to live. I saw how many challenges my female and male students had to face on a daily basis, and I became a feminist. I became an advocate, a teacher, and an activist. I saw how most well to do Americans take our opportunities and freedoms for granted.

I couldn’t just look at the world the same way again. I had to ask vigorous questions. I had to learn about history on a much wider and broader margin of understanding. When I was in high school, I did not read much history. Most of my history teachers were football or track coaches, and I always felt that they portrayed history as another sport, a mere game.

After my life-changing experience in Malawi, I remained reflective of 9/11. I was invigorated to do more than just the practical job. I grew very skeptical of my government and the wars. Still today, many of my fellow Americans won’t question the events, or who or why the attack happened, and why should we trust the very Bush-Cheney government investigation to the event, when the two heavily tied to business cronies, had lied to the public on countless occasions to go into false wars and deregulate big business.  

I debated about which Masters program I wanted to go to. I eventually found myself in the Netherlands, in The Hague, the same city as the International Criminal Courts and at the same time Milosevic was on trial for his genocide in the Balkans. I was at a small school studying with people from over fifty different nations. I became a citizen of the world. I became friends with people from all religious, ethnic, and national affiliations and I learned about real people from real places.

I primarily studied International Political Economy and Human Rights. I argued with any professor who only discussed economics but failed to include the social repercussions to economic policy. I not only learned about what the most powerful governments and corporations were doing globally. I began to understand more and more why so many individuals outside the US loved the ideas of democracy and freedom, but that in their very own countries my own government and corporations had been falling short on our ideals through invasion, shifty trade deals, assisting military coups, or dumping our trash in their front yards.  

History became a food for me. Rather than just learning history for trivia or sport, I began to read history in order to not allow others more powerful to manipulate me with propaganda, whether it was George Bush or Barak Obama. I have read history books from the far Left to the far Right, and of course the more I learned the more Left I became. I read history so that I can build new directions of understanding and to make change.

I learned that 9/11 was not a single event that can stand on its own. The US and British oil interests in the Middle-East is a significant part in understanding the attack. My government and corporations have been unjustly exploiting the region throughout the 20^th Century and the British have been there even longer.

In regards to 9/11, we supposedly think we know most of the details. But perhaps in thirty years from now, we will be able to understand more. Yet even the Kennedy and King assassinations are still out of factual acceptance. It may take even longer. But facts always float to the surface over time.

There is no justification for violence, and there is no just war, or right to passage. As Howard Zinn always promoted, just because one country is a democracy and another is not, does not give the democracy more right to inflict suffering on to others through bombs and fear.

Over the past ten years, I have been fortunate to have worked and traveled in countries like Kosovo, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malawi, and more. Rather than fearing people that I don’t understand, I reach out and begin to learn from them, and realize how much we care about the same basic principles of human dignity. I learn that there are good people with good intentions everywhere.   

Currently at this time in 2011, the Martin Luther King Jr, Memorial is completing construction. Some people will think that the timing is ironic for being near to the 10 years since 9/11.  Of course, there will be propaganda. But yesterday, Cornel West mentioned in an interview that Martin Luther King Jr, would not be happy in seeing a monument in his name representing a symbol, rather than actual freedom and liberty.

Tavis Smiley reflects that it is one thing to admire a memorial; it is another thing to address the methodology. The issues of poverty in the US and overseas is clearly connected to the level of capitalistic imbalances and that corporations have been no friend to compassion and freedom; unless that freedom is for everyone being free to be exploited.

I am no longer naïve as I had been before 9/11. I am not fearful nor am I going to resort to stereotyping those who I have never met. I will ask hard questions and remain skeptical until I believe otherwise that violence and injustice is not man’s healthiest friend or best route. It is never justified with revenge, especially if it is used against innocent people during wartime and when we are at so-called peace. As Rousseau once stated: there is a difference between freedom and peace; Peace comes at the expense of other people, Freedom is a constant battle to end exploitation in all its forms.   

Anticipating Libya and Absolutism

Revolutionary change involves changing the map you associate with geography, otherwise, the old borders limit new ideas.

While the hour by hour play between media and facts on the ground in Tripoli lead us to anticipate what future will be next for the nation, perhaps too many may be too quick to label the challenge as over and done. The biggest challenge is what comes after the dictator’s fall: how they want to proceed in Libya? We as observational support or conscientious web-humanitarians, we are staring at tweets and media voices guessing as much as everyone else.

I don’t think the real challenge has even fully started. Learning from Egypt since the spring, nothing is over until it is over, and the challenges in Egypt are far from over. One has to anticipate counter-revolution, Western corporate initiative to pull as much headway into the natural resource development, or even whether or not these rebels have what it takes to be revolutionary rather than mere rebels. Even the media still calls them rebels, not revolutionaries.

Amilcar Cabral: "Do not confuse the reality you live in with the ideas you have in your head."

Will the Libyan rebels reach out to other minorities in the country, will they stop targeting black Libyans with fear of liquidation, will they care to develop women’s rights and women’s voices in political decisions? They have not expressed any interest to these questions over the past year of activity.

Revolutionary change involves changing the map you associate with geography, otherwise, the old borders limit new ideas.

One of the most frustrating interactions at this time, not directed merely to the Libya issue, but about history and society in general, especially here in the United States of America, is having to discuss issues with countless individuals who think they have all the answers to everything and think their understanding to the world outside their own reality is the most true, when they have never read a history book, interviewed individuals from different walks of life, or traveled extensively to understand someone else’s reality.

There is a sociology term for this called ‘phenomenal absolutism’. Selective perception and failing to accept any form of disagreement is creed of mainstream media from pundits and is not just in the camera’s eye, it is a cultural bias of individuals assuming knowledge one did not work at to obtain, just absorbed dictation from other dominant voices.

There is a way to overcome short sightedness, but it takes a committed energy to reach a higher standard. Even on the street today, a young group of Jehovah Witnesses approached me and asked me to believe in Jesus. When I stopped to discuss with them my own belief, they showed no interest. How can one expect others to listen to them if they are not willing to listen themselves? I respect their belief, and hope that they will respect mine.

Deaf ears do not create an open dialogue. It was just too much for a liberal to take.

Amilcar Cabral: "Do not confuse the reality you live in with the ideas you have in your head."

Hypothetical Sport between: Race, Creed, Greed, and More:

On the basketball court is Race, Creed, Color and National Origin, facing their opponents on the other side of the court: Racism, Greed, and Annihilation. Racism has the ball, he passes to Greed, Greed passes to Annihilation, Annihilation throws the ball back to Greed, and Greed shoots and scores a two-pointer. Race has the ball. He passes to Creed, Creed passes the ball back to Race, Race tosses the ball to Color, and Color fakes a throw to National Origin. Instead, Color takes the shot. The ball bounces off of the basket, and Greed picks it up. Greed dribbles past National Origin; he tosses the ball to Racism, Racism runs, dunks and scores another two pointer. No one can keep up with Racism. He quickly steals the ball from Race. … But then Greed steals the ball from his own teammate. Greed nearly tramples over Racism. All of the players step away and slowly walk off the court. The only two players left on the court are Greed and Annihilation. Will they work together, or will they fight until one is still standing? Will Greed overcome Annihilation? Tough call! The other players have vanished from the entire field of play. Annihilation looks angry, very angry.

LEFT: BOGGS, DUNAYEVSKAYA, AND LONDON RIOTS:

A vivid video of a black woman on the streets of London during the riots this week has her standing tall and fearlessly shouting, “This is fucking reality! You understand! She’s working hard to get her business to work! Now other people are in poverty! This is about a man who got shot in Tottenham! Get real! If we are fighting for a cause, then lets fight together for a cause!”

The incredible unexpected riots in London are a shocking display of how society can run amok at the face of disorganized rage among frustrated displaced masses. Looting and violence are all across London. In Chile, the protests this week are as intense and yet slightly more organized and much more focused on frustrations of students demanding changes in public education.

When the breaking point occurs in the US, will this be the similar image? Remember when Hurricane Katrina happened. The Bush-Cheney government waited so long to actually get involved. The only sign the federal government stepped in was initially to secure the oilrigs off the coast. But then when looting disrupted the city, the authorities entered. Most of mainstream media slandered the image of reckless looting but did not really show the scenes of the looting by people seeking basic needs such as food and clothing. One can only fear what will happen across the country if the stock market collapses.

I seek out the ideas of Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs to find a lesson for the recklessness. In her book Woman’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution, Raya reflects on her inspiration from Karl Marx: “Marx envisioned a totally new man, a totally new woman, a totally new form of life, in a word, a totally new society. But suddenly, Marx found it difficult to answer a simple question from Vera Zasculitch on the future of the Russian commune, in the manner in which it was debated between the Narodniks and the Marxists – that is to say, whether it could lead to communism without needing to go through capitalism and evidently without a revolution?” (RD). Will change happen without a revolution and without violence?

In the 21^st Century, Marx’s economic and revolutionary concept of politics is no longer appealing for the youth. Dialectics seems to just be a term that is loaded with jargon and bore.  Grace Lee Boggs claims that we must go beyond Marx and his assumptions. Grace and her husband during his lifetime continually grappled with the ideas of revolution.

She says, “Revolutions are made in order to advance the evolution of humanity, and require struggles not just against the enemy but also against the enemy within ourselves” (Boggs, Living for Change). Self-criticism and self-interrogation are essential to every movement, so that we do not just resort to looting. If all the Marxists and other revolutionary thinkers want to push the public to militancy just to seize power, then they have failed before they have even started.

If all we want is just more things, more consumer materialism, whether we need them or not, and seizing this opportunity only to evade responsibility, we have lost (Boggs).

Looting reflects our value over material things more than social ties. Part of our own irresponsibility comes from our own lack of self-will over acts of civil disobedience versus the easy route to selfish stealing and taking. But we all know whether we want to admit it or not, the nurturing of Corporate Capitalism, especially in the last hundred years has depreciated moral society. “Corporations have no commitment to the reforms that Americans have won through hard struggles” and will leave us as a whole, like the few have done in Detroit and Flint.

In James and Grace Boggs’ Revolution and Evolution, they assert that a new American revolution “must begin by our recognizing how down through the years we have retarded our” social evolution by “separating ethics from politics and by interpreting freedom as an evasion of political responsibility to ourselves and to the rest of the world” (Boggs).

Corporations will bail on the American people at all costs, because they have done this before and are doing it now. They have turned human relations into money relations. Grace Lee Boggs spent decades and still today in Detroit trying to build up community involvement, while the auto-industry jumped ship and built factories overseas and recklessly laid off thousands of American employees.

While the Lady screams in London that this is reality, we realize that if we resort to mindless looting and rioting, anger will only destroy our homes and not necessarily affect the actual source of power.

“Movements are not initiated by Revolutionaries. They begin when large numbers of people, having reached the point” of exhaustion and cannot take the way things are anymore, hope to improve their daily lives and begin to move on their own.

Raya Dunayevskaya reminds us that all the great revolutionary movements were made by the people and not just by theorists. All great revolutionary movements had women making the strongest shouts of reason and initiative for their cause. Louis Michel in France, Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, in the Abolitionist Movement there was Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, in the Labor Rights Movement there was Mother Jones and Emma Goldman; even in Russia, the Bolshevik revolution did not take place until after the 50,000 women in the textile factories that February 1917 signaled the Russians were ready.  

Reckless greed does not help gain what people need. This year marks the hundred years since the infamous Triangle Shirt Factory Fire in the New York garment district that killed over 100 women workers. But in the Spring 1908, the garment workers declared International Woman’s Day on March 8^th, and the media called it the “Uprising of 20,000”.

Though Grace Lee Boggs and Raya Dunayevskaya worked closely together during the 1940’s and 50’s, for the last thirty years of Raya’s life they had branched into different circles. However, they grappled with the same issues of society. They both emphasize,  “New paths to freedom are not easy to work out,” it’s an ongoing dialogue that cannot be shut up, and that individuals must be persistent in asking questions.

Boggs reflects, “Our ideas and actions will be judged on their merits in relation to advancing humanity, regardless of class,” creed, race, gender or sexual preference. Democracy is an ongoing process and not just attributed to elections every four years.

By choosing a language of extremes that are easily slandered and branded improperly through media’s propaganda, those who want to “fight together for a cause” whether it is Marxism, socialism, anarchism, or any other Left fraction, we limit our audience by hyper focusing on terminology. Our energies of organizing fail the attention spans and listening ears of Tea-Bag Rights as well as those claiming to be neutrally passive, accepting the current corporate political economy.

If we hyper focus, we increase the defensiveness and deafness of those super-patriotic or merely apathetic to the current crisis. “What we need to do,” shouts Grace at 96 years of age, “is to instead encourage groups of all kinds and all ages to participate in creating a vision of the future that will enlarge our inclusive humanity in devising concrete programs which we can work on together” (Boggs).

Looting is not the answer, and perhaps it is an immediate release of impulse, but it only makes the challenge harder. We do not want to be a Cool Hand Luke, someone who makes one petty crime, and wastes valuable energy sitting behind bars.

Grace’s friend Ping Ferry said, “It is not necessary to succeed in order to strive.”

LEFT IDEAL: OUTSIDE MICRO-IDEOLOGY:

The Right and the Left are not the problem, it is the Corporate Elite, dividing and mis-informing. Too often the misinformed are labeling the Left as Socialist, Anarchist, or Liberal Hippy. More often than not, the lack of understanding about each philosophy leaves displaced anger towards what is not true. The basic principle of Lefts, no matter which ideology they follow, and not limited to the three mentioned, is that freedom and justice for all protects and nurtures all individuals regardless of race, creed, gender, sexual preference, and religion.

Like the misunderstanding of religions world wide, the common principle of all religions is: don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t cheat, love your neighbors, love your family, and respect each other. Somehow over time, principles all get fucked up by a few individuals that claim that his definition of what his action represents is symbolic for an entire political or religious belief.

Corporate Greed feeds off of the misunderstandings between two groups that have been too busy fighting one another than to focus on the main neglecting unaccountable culprit.

Throughout the 1940’s, CLR James, Grace Lee Boggs and Raya Dunayevskaya, were nearly inseparable as they discussed Marxism and Human Rights amongst a conservative-polarized society of McCarthyism. They had each experienced different forms of racism and persecution. During the 1940’s it was rare to see an educated black man from Trinidad, an educated Jewish woman, and an educated Chinese-American woman all walking down the streets together discussing politics. While today, this can be quite common in most cities. These were voices from the Left, who theorized and activated their energies toward the Civil Rights Movement, the Labor Rights Movement, and the Women’s Rights Movement, which are all inclusive to Human Rights and dignity.

Grace Lee Boggs later in her career alongside her husband James Boggs, an activist as well, stated: “Our goal was to create the kind of organization in which women are equal to men and every member is developed into a theoretical and practical leader, participating in creating the ideas and prepared to lead struggles at a community level.”

“Every statement was a challenge to the reader to transcend the victim mentality that impedes us from making the moral and social choices necessary for our survival and health of our inclusive community”(Boggs).  Black, White, Asian, Muslim, or Other who use race or religion as an excuse for crimes towards others is not a goal of the Left or Right, but is a fearful escape of distressed individuals. In truth social evolution is inevitable. Complex societies have to accept in the growing globalized world that we are not alone, we were never alone, others were here before us, they have been here all along, come join us.

Our old identifications with how we understand our self and others need to be re-thought and strongly re-understood. Sometimes the ideology of Marx and other important Left idealists are outdated in today’s struggle, and sometimes some of the theories that have been misinterpreted by the Right, can actually help both polarities with a new eye of understanding. Some of Gramsci, Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, and Mother Jones’, etc. unique voices are quite important beyond the time period that they came from. Their hard struggles were made to benefit the betterment of society beyond corporate and imperial control, and the tendency to resort to fascism by those who have power and fear of losing their command smear and intentionally undermine the Left goal.  Especially, when the same Corporate Elite control the mainstream media. Never just follow one form of media, read and listen to multiple sources.

Raya Dunayevskaya reminds us that the Woman’s Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Movement are actual human struggles toward freedom and need to be more than just ‘auxiliary’. These rights are important for all of us legal and illegal, nationally born or over in a country we are bombing. The first fighters of both struggles were Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, powerful black women who after freeing themselves from slavery, dedicated their lives to free all men and women from slavery.

In order to change and transform the world we have to first administer self-interrigation and transform and change ourselves. The History of America is not the History of Freedom, and if we claim that the prior is about freedom, we have to bring into our history all the crimes that our government and corporations have committed with no justification towards Native Americans, African-Americans, Women, and inclusive of all our overseas ventures that crippled freedom in most regions of the world, too many to list.

The mere bickering between Left and Right, or the narrow political debate to the corporate owned Democrat and Republican base, is not going to make social change if we do not understand why we believe what we believe, and come to terms with our own limitations.

President Obama is not a Socialist, by far. Previous limiting labels to freedom of speaking about freedom do not make people anymore than stereotypes. The line by Coleman Young comes to mind, “If being for human rights makes me a Communist, then I am a Communist.” Or as Bernard Shaw, the famous play-write concluded, “Christianity in truth is Socialism, because Jesus’ belief and life-style was socialistic. He fought for the poor, believed that materialism was unhealthy, and felt everyone was equal in his eyes regardless of sex or race.”

The Left believe in a more hybrid approach to reality. The Left web out in diverse directions because they don’t all have the same hyper focuses: Environmentalism, Labor Unions, Anarchism, Socialism, Hippy-love, End War, Stop Hate, Gay Rights, Responsible Adults making Responsible decisions, and more and more.  Of course there are always exceptions that take matters into their own hands and brand direction-ing as fundamentalism.

Our Government is not Left or even Right, it is controlled by a Corporate Elite who lobby with greed to make sure that they are protected while everyone else suffers during hard economic times. The previous Presidents regardless of Democrat or Republican have never made significant policy decisions to support our communities without the significant push from outside the government. Laws for Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, have only come to our society from movements of passionate people shaking up the system and demanding change.

What the Left understand, is that, change is inevitable. Conservancy does not work in a world where human beings of all backgrounds are now, with the technological boom and global market system, more interconnected than ever before.  We just have to remember to be Responsible, not just for ourselves but towards others, in the way, we want to be treated.

LEFT: SOLITUDE OR FAILED DIVIDE:

The Left remains continually divided. This is not just a notion of party politics. How often in the end it still is a lot of talk. I have been to sessions ranging from Women's power in Capitalism, Development in Africa, Jobless in America, Labor Rights, the Theatre of the Oppressed, and Socialist Groups to Anarchists. Though the theme of solidarity is expressed, I don't get to see much bridging between movements, team building, interacting with the use of music and other social artistic activities that create a sense of togetherness that creates enough fuel. Protests in the US end after a few hours and dwindle with micro-focal points. It just may be that my expectations are too high.

Following meetings of organizations that catch my eye from time to time, the meetings appear to be usually a small core member presence and myself. Not many followers. Some have been the Socialist Women's Network, and the Marxist-Humanist Group. I had noticed the same evolution that divides the Left as I saw in Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington DC. Each group tends to hyper focus on one lead revolutionary or writer, and it becomes their creed: Che, Castro, Trotsky, Marx, Mao, Chomsky, Dunayevskaya or other. When they get so micro-focused, it makes it harder for them to unite with other Left movements outside of ideology. This micro-focus leaves Labor and Postcolonial voices isolated. It is reminiscent of the larger issues of postmodern society.

For most Postcolonial writers like Edward Said, Postmodernism fails to activate motion, this is true for the Left as well. According to Ziauddin Sardar, Postmodernism is nihilism. It is an excuse to in-action and accomplices barbarism; “Postmodernism emerges as a worldview conjured from the pathological necessity of the West to define reality and truth as its reality and truth,” as the only acceptable truth (Sardar).

Postmodernism insists on a plurality of the world in cultural discourse, as much as Modernism had, but the political economic theory, exclusively from the bourgeois liberal corporate democracies insist on a one-world trading and production system. This forbidden acceptance leaves former colonies and poor communities in developing nations as well as the poor in wealthy nations dominated and manipulated by a false belief system. Many Left groups try to change this nihilism and false belief. They want to awaken the passive postmodernists who are cynical, but they get distracted in micro-disputes of whose theory is singularly best.

Those in power are claiming the power to shape a particular future that is best for themselves, which is exclusive and Columbus-like, denying others the right to state-formation, identifying formation, and determining social movement. Divide and conquer is their preferred plan. This can be the limits of a two-party political system that avoids the true Left. Making the false belief that the Democrats are actually far left is a lack of scope. They tend to be merely in the center, and also keep getting dragged slowly to the Right, because there is actual movement in conservative groups that unifies this conservancy.

Edourard Glissant focuses on the Poetics of Relation, in which the power of experience is imposed upon through the shock of elsewhere. The location of where individuals and populations experience external hegemonic or resistant forces tremor with terror acts. Remember, Imperial colonizers terrorized weaker cultures into submission with their ruthless tactics more so than radical individuals who committed single acts against larger institutions and structures historically. But media is selective, as with the notice that in the last ten years, major terrorist attacks have come from fundamentally Right focused reactions on either side of the globe, regardless of religion, and regardless of state-terror or individual-terror.

Terror and territory may have similar roots, in the relation they have to location, but by displacing our stance, or deterritiorializing our mental control mechanism, we can start to reclaim our own semblance. In an interesting parallel to Irigaray’s expression of changing language, Edourd Glissant’s poetics involves elusive rambling.

“Practice does not proceed without rambling, because rambling is an absolute challenge to narrative” discourse (Glissant). One who is Errant challenges the universal uprooted exile, creating a poetics of relation varying from the dominant narrative transforms meaning and this risk, is the opportunity to realize new potentials. Activating thought destabilizes the standard passivity of someone else’s imposed/chosen universal (Glissant). 

“Solitude must fight isolation. Many failed in their adventure because they did not know that. Solitude, like solidarity, is a relative of freedom; but isolation is snake food” (Patrick Chamoiseau). With Patrick Chamoiseau statement we can denote that with each micro-group on the Left in solitude can focus on multiple variables. This is a turn of perspective from nihilism and division, to utilizing the division for distracting the dominant voices.  

Perhaps this source of power, allows each group to feel comfortable and strong in their core. Perhaps there is more here than I first thought. One just might utilize this opportunity to avoid isolation.

Anyway, I am sure you noticed that I am a tough critic. But Barbara Ehrenreich in her notorious book, Nickel and Dimed, states: “there is no quick fix here – no one measure or piece of legislation that will set things right and retire the working poor,” no matter how hard they work. “Someday of course – and I will make no predictions as to exactly when – they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they’re worth. There’ll be a lot of anger when that day comes, and strikes and disruption. But the sky will not fall, and we will all be better off for it in the end” (Ehrenreich). The Left will be supportive or in the way when this does happen. But perhaps, their leadership will finally untie and unite. 

Philosophy: Kristeva, Irigaray, Cahun, and Feinberg (2):

A curious truth of Opacity: “outside time, with neither a before nor an after, neither true nor false; subterranean, it neither judges nor postulates, but refuses, displaces and breaks the symbolic order before it can re-establish itself” (Kristeva). Luce Irigaray does not want to lose women-ness, but wants to reinvent the minds capability to look at both genders more uniquely. Julia Kristeva seems to want to break both gender tropes, and break into just being for the sake of being. Similar to Judith Butler’s undoing gender, Kristeva observes and confronts the symbolic order that masquerades and reconciles that maternal time associated with motherhood and linear time associated with political and historical time, these objects of a social contract, are subordinate to an archaic myth.

            The Surrealist photographer, Claude Cahun is a key example of this rebellion. Claude Cahun, as a Jewish woman during World War II, fought the flimsy line of separation where humans were killing and discriminating other humans on the basis of belief, image, and difference. Her artwork represented gender displacement, the archaic myth of gender. Her subjects were gender chameleons, standing and positioned in androgynous or sexually exaggerated poses. She walked the barriers between French and German dominant ordinances. Her stance on the existence of a third gender represented in her photos waged challenges to both cultures. Cahun, as Marcel Duchamp had also challenged in his creation of an alter-ego Rrose Selavy, attempted to displace the French understanding of human potential during a time when Nazi dehumanization threatened all life of diverse identity outside of a totalitarian control.

            Let us not be fooled by words, perspective goes beyond rhetoric, who to understand this best but children, who have not yet been fully trained, and are “in fact capable of withdrawing cathexis from imaginary representation” (Kristeva). It appears that Luce Irigaray focuses on a separate-but-equal approach, accentuating and highlighting the differences, but making equality-in-law and balanced in voice within political and social decisions. Yet as with segregation in American schools in the 1960’s, separate but equal seems to always lead to turbulence in a competitive harsh society, unless additional variables are placed, and according to Irigaray we would need a new thought-process to comprehend the dual identities.

            However, hybrid varieties beyond two polarized images would add to the disallowing a universal definition, which Irigaray does not address.  As with the notion of transgender identity, that Leslie Feinberg discusses in her novels, “I tried to mesh two parallel worlds as a child – one I saw with my own eyes and the one I was taught. … Each person should have the right to choose between pink or blue tinted categories, as well as all other hues of the palette. At this moment in time, that right is denied to us. But together, we could make it a reality” (Feinberg).  

            Beyond the existential choice that Feinberg describes, Kristeva focuses on the semantics and semiotic controls that the average limited consciousness cannot decipher without cracking the surface. One needs to peal back the mask of the masquerade. Irigaray focuses on not-one-but-two, because the female identity and sexuality cannot be conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters and the male notions of self. Yet for Kristeva, the notion of ‘Woman’ is negative and she finds it essential to breakup the false construct as much as ‘Man’ is a false construct, and even further the associated construct of ‘Minority’ remain skewed to depreciating fallacy. One truth Kristeva iterates is the necessity to break the symbolic order before we can re-establish a beyond-identity-being.