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

xviiiwith and parade a hysterical femininity, in our best interests of course, to help ustranscend the category of woman we somehow got into, and the neurotic idea thatwe can tell the truth. Or that we know when they’re lying. Talking, writing, tellingstories out of school: this is what we are forbidden. The Master wants to keep thenarrative to himself, and he’s willing to explode the whole structure of discourse ifwe start to talk. They don’t want to hear our stories: listening to women’s stories ofincest and rape almost cost Sigmund Freud his career before he decided that thesewere simply female fantasies of desire for the father. He probed women’sunconscious and denied our reality: his theory of human psyche and sexuality is anact of fear and betrayal. And he told us: it didn’t happen, you made it up, you wantedit, you brought it on yourself. What is the Master Narrative? That we can’t tell thetruth, we can’t tell the difference, between our rights and their wrongs. We can’t tell.The assertion that only sex is power and the arrogation of creativity to themasculine sex and the rendering of all creativity as sexual—this is patriarchalaesthetics. 5 Patriarchal passion sees violent sex as the essential creative act, evenaesthetically, through a sort of metaphysical transubstantiation. This is their romanticbelief that sex with the Master can produce the artistic spirit in the student. Malecreativity is thus born in another, her work is given depth through the violenttransgression of her boundaries. The Maestro’s magic wand, the charismatic penis, isthe conductor of true art. Great works of art can only be produced after a journeythrough violent and sordid sex which reveals and brings into being the true nature ofthe other: degradation. One can only create from pain, and sex. The superior Master,of course, creates pain in another, makes his mark by leaving marks. What is centralto the rape artist’s ideology is that matter is worthless and must be given form. His.Matter must be recreated by man. Mother must be recreated by, and as, themasculine. Mother is dissociated from creativity and communication. Flesh iscreated by the word of god, not by the body of woman. Creation requiresdestruction, one is posed only in being opposed to another, consciousness is hostileto all others. Men are hostile and creative, women are sometimes good material.For us then, to speak is difficult, and it seems we must shift from amnesia toaphasia as parts of our consciousness appear unreal to us. Loss of memory, loss ofspeech: it is as though we cannot speak and cannot remember at the same time.Being fully conscious is dangerous. Women’s memory, women’s language,women’s body and sexuality have been annulled in the patriarchal tradition whichhas feared the female sex. What we are permitted, encouraged, coerced into, andrewarded for, is loving the male sex and male sex: the bad girls are the ones whodon’t, and who thereby risk men’s rage and women’s fear. As bell hooks writes: “[m]ale supremacist ideology encourages women to believe we are valueless and obtainvalue only by relating to or bonding with men. We are taught that our relationshipswith one another diminish rather than enrich our experience. We are taught thatwomen are ‘natural’ enemies, that solidarity will never exist between us because wecannot, should not, and do not bond with one another” (1991b, p. 29).5. Fortunately, we have Audre Lorde’s (1984) vision of the uses of the erotic for connection andcommunity, work and joy.