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.
No comments:
Post a Comment