Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

The Anglo-American and the French tradition of sexual differencefeminism both celebrate thinking with an origin in women’s lives. The notionof ‘women,’ however, that features in feminist standpoint epistemology issociological, mono-layered and hierarchically ordered (women can more or lessunproblematically answer questions about their experiences), whereas Frenchfeminism allows for a non-hierarchical, multi-layered subject modeled on thehumanities, including psychoanalysis. Braidotti famously stated in NomadicSubjects that differences exist between men and women, within the category ofwomen, and within each individual woman. 20 This is to say that whereas feministstandpoint epistemology assumed referentiality (women exist out there andcan voice their experiences) and needed ‘intersectionality’ 21 to allow for furtherdifferentiation (black women, lesbian women, et cetera exist out there), Frenchradical theorists of sexual difference such as Luce Irigaray worked from thecrisis of reason (non-foundationalism: the Subject is dead) and could constitutetheories of subjectivity that worked on difference as such (anti-representationalistdifference as affirmation, that is, difference as moving away from the constantreproduction of the Same 22 ). French sexual difference feminism differs from itsmainstream Anglo-American counterpart, because it does not straightforwardlyaccept ‘thinking from women’s lives.’ Both access to women’s experiences and thecelebratory nature of voicing women’s experiences are questioned.Irigaray has argued the following with regard to conceptualizingdifference affirmatively rather than negatively:the operation of the negative, which typically, in order to move on to a higherlevel in the process of the becoming of self [devenir soi-même] must engage selfand self in a dialectical operation, should instead engage two subjects, in ordernot to reduce the two to the one, the other to the same. Of course the negativeis applied yet again to me, in my subjective becoming, but in this case it servesto mark the irreducibility of the other to me and not my subsuming of thatexteriority into myself. Through this gesture, the subject gives up being oneand singular. It respects the other, the two, in an intersubjective relation. 2320Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York:Columbia University Press, 1994), 160–8.21Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of AntidiscriminationDoctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” The University of Chicago Legal Forum (volume1989): 139–67; Kimberlé Crenshaw, “The Intersection of Race and Gender,” in Critical Race Theory: The KeyWritings That Formed the Movement, ed. Kimberlé W. Crenshaw et al. (New York: The New Press, 1995), 357–83.22Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, [1968] 1994).23Luce Irigaray, “The Question of the Other,” Yale French Studies 87 (May 1995): 18.26