Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

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sexual, emotional, political desires: too demanding, he will not satisfy her. Denying
women’s desire, politically or sexually, is a male power play. Andrea Nye’s (1988)
rewriting of the Freud creation story tells of male fears of the Father’s revenge and
disinheritance from patriarchal powers: getting close to women means losing
economic and political power.
Once there was a family headed by a brutal authoritarian father who in secret
had a tendency to abuse his wife, his daughters and any women who came
under his power. Sometimes he even abused his sons. His sons were uneasy
about their father and about other men but they were men themselves.
Therefore, they knew they were supposed to respect their father and learn to
be like him. One son, however, listened to his mother, his nurse, and the talk
of other women. He became very uneasy. The women told him of crimes that
his father and other fathers had committed against women and about their
suffering. But this son was also a man. He knew that he too had to become a
father. Then he made his discovery. There was only one solution. The women
were lying, they were in love with the father and wanted to be seduced. They
had only fantasized the father’s mistreatment. Now the son knew that he had
been guilty also; he had suspected his father out of jealousy. And he repented.
Now all the sons could come together, celebrating the father’s memory and
rejoicing that the father had committed no faults. Now they could follow in the
father’s footsteps and if accusations were made by the women or by any
younger sons who happened to listen to women, the men would know what to
say (1988, p. 159).
In this way, Freud felt he penetrated the mystery of female anguish: mysterious
because women were unreal to him. Lacanian psychoanalysis also says we mean yes
when we say no: “the tension of desire hidden in the most professed horror of incest”
(1953, p. 12). In fact, the Freudian Oedipal myth warns men of the risks of loving
the mother: death as a Father, death of the King.
Suzanne Blaise has argued that the current oppression of women would not have
been possible without the death, the murder, of the mother. In Le rapt des origines
on le meurtre de la mère, De la communication entre femmes, Blaise (1988) shows
how the male murder of the mother and the massacre of the value of the female and
the maternal is continually reenacted among women. Drawing from forty years of
experience in the women’s movement in France, she shows how the original murder
of the mother by the sons has had serious repercussions for communication between
women politically and personally. She reconsiders the current divisions, impasses,
betrayals and violent denunciations among women in this light. Clearly, our
relationship to other women, to our sex, symbolically and politically, is full of
consequences for our sexuality. Blaise asks what it would mean for the personal and
collective body of women to recognize that sexual politics is also the politics of
matricide (1988, p. 11): “To possess the mother, man destroyed the woman; to
possess the daughter, he destroyed the mother” (1988, p. 10).