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Women, Culture, and International Relations, by Vivienne Jabri and Eleanor O’Gorman (eds.)
3. Explorations of Differences in Normative International Relations
Late modern feminism faces a multitude of challenges as it confronts conditions within global political and economic structures that differentially impact upon women, enabling some—primarily those located in the West—while constraining the majority of all those deemed “other,” that vast expanse of a space named “nonwestern.” The inequalities of the global politico–economic arena, coupled with manifest diversities in the lived experience of women that transcend the signifying divides of state or region, highlight the dilemmas that confront feminist theory and praxis, which for so long has sought to establish shared experiences and commonalities as the foundation stone for the universal emancipation of women. Women, or even feminists, can no longer claim to “speak with one voice,” or respond as a unity, to the clarion call of a sisterhood at large. Thus bereft of its universalist aspirations, the challenge to feminism is highlighted daily with images of violence perpetrated against individuals named women, with socioeconomic conditions that confine primarily women and children within the poverty trap and with continuing exploitative practices that deny equal access to the public sphere for women.
Such structural inequalities that continue to define the present order must be juxtaposed with the increasing globalization of all aspects of social relations, generating a changing, multilayered contextualization wherein the global comes into direct confrontation with the local. The global public space has come to constitute an arena of contestation, where the excluded and marginalized struggle to acquire voice against a context of increasing abstraction of systems of knowledge and power. This global public space is also the location of migration, exile, and individual movements traversing bounded territories and identities. The narratives of self that emerge from such complexity highlight the proximities of the local and global, past and present, so that fragmentation and the reordering of time and space relations suggest a move away from a singular, unchallenged locatedness. 1
This complex interplay of the local and the global has clear implications for the construction of subjectivity and for our conceptions of the public spaces within which enactments of judgment and responsibility, the constitutive elements of moral agency, take place. How then does feminist theory respond? More significantly for the context of this chapter and others in the collection, is there a form of ethicality that we might label feminist and that focuses upon difference as the formative moment of a late modern discourse that seeks to reimagine the political spaces available to us?
The aim of this chapter is to explore the notion of difference and to problematize subjectivity as the baseline from which we could rewrite an ethical position for feminist theory and praxis. Drawing from major voices in poststructuralist and postcolonial discourses, I aim to articulate a normative position that takes into account questions of self–constitution and self–transformation as the baseline from which we may begin to reimagine both the agency of women and the political spaces that surround the diversity of women’s lived experience. Arguing against the care and justice dualism that so permeates feminist ethics, I suggest that style and self–understanding are the formative moments of a late–modern subjectivity that is responsive to its constitutive other. What is therefore articulated is a form of aesthetic ethicality that interprets the individual as a location of multiple “textual selves,” 2 and that suggests a form of feminist ethics that recognizes the plurality of the self and the plurality of cultured subjectivity. This would entail a move beyond a singular definition of woman, or of feminism, suggesting instead a discourse of dissent that has a multiplicity of locations and styles, each with its differential set of enablements and constraints.
The first section of the chapter provides a brief evaluation of how feminist discourses on ethics have dealt with the question of difference. I show that a formulaic addition of culture to gender fails to account for the complexities of subjectivity and the multiple narratives that constitute the self. In attempting to establish a theoretical discourse on the question of identity and the challenge of fragmentation, the second section of the chapter concentrates specifically on the complexities of culture and cultural agency. Here we see an argument against originary conceptions of subjectivity, suggesting in place of such certainties the view that identity refers to a complex interplay of articulations of self and the typifications that constitute the self within social continuities. The refigurations of self that emerge across time may come to have manifest implications for the redrawing of the political and ethical domains of social existence. Using this as a point of departure, the final section aims to restyle the ethical subject in feminist discourse through the use of Judith Butler’s reading of sex and gender as “corporeal stylization.” The point of connection between Butler’s approach to gender and the view of identity in terms of strategies of selfhood is a Foucaultian conception of ethics as the cultivation and transfiguration of self. The form of aesthetic ethics that emerges is finally illustrated through the use of the installation, and particularly the work of a Palestinian exile, Mona Hatoum, as a form of artistic expression that incorporates the themes of fragmentation and restylization as modes of dissent and subversion.
The Domain of Feminist Ethics and the Universalized Self
Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak, in an early essay on French feminism, asks the question, “What is the constituency for an international feminism?” She moves on to state that however significant the difference between French and Anglo–American feminisms may be, these must remain superficial compared with the seeming chasm that separates our discourses in a late modern West from all locations named “nonwestern.” In Spivak’s terms, “I see no way to avoid insisting that there has to be a simultaneous other focus: not merely who am I? But who is the other woman? How am I naming her? How does she name me? Is this part of the problematic I discuss?” 3 These are questions central to the concerns of this chapter, which seeks, along with others within feminist discourse, a form of critical ethicality that focuses on self–understanding and self–construction at one and the same time as our constructions of the other. This constitutes a form of vision that from the outset recognizes the dual sense of the ontology of moral agency as located both within the self and the self’s relationship with its constitutive other. The other form of “double vision” is one Spivak suggests is the defining character of French feminism, where feminism is seen as both against sexism and for feminism. But can we claim one form of feminism, or must we realize that our discourses are always situated within a wider societal realm constituted by local institutional, discursive, and normative continuities that defy any universal ethic, any singular construction of woman, and (ultimately) a singular conception of liberation or emancipation?
The domain of feminist ethics is framed by a dualism between what Gilligan refers to as an “ethic of justice,” identified with a Kantian ontological project of autonomous personhood, as opposed to an “ethic of care,” the ontological project of which is centered on the relational self. Those, like Carol Gilligan, who espouse the latter suggest that the justice perspective is inherently masculinist, whereas care is associated with the lived experience of women. 4 The justice–care dualism parallels in form the normative project in international relations, constructed as it is around a Kantian–Hegelian opposition that has come to identify the cosmopolitan–communitarian divide. 5 This latter debate is founded upon a contending ontology of moral agency, with a Kantian, predetermined self, largely male, rational, and autonomous, critiqued by Hegelian conceptions of the self as communally constituted, realizing individuality within the public realm of civil society and state, confined to a male citizenry and built upon the exclusion of women. This ontological dualism came into sharp focus with the publication of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice and subsequent communitarian critiques of the deontological liberalism that formed the focus of Rawls’s Kantian–inspired ideas on the construction of a just society. 6
One of the most influential texts in feminist ethics is Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, which forms the baseline from which other feminist conceptions of moral agency derive. The central premise of this text is that the moral agency of women is situated in a so–called ethic of care, which is defined in opposition to the abstractions of a Kantian–inspired ethic of justice based on autonomous, rational individuality. Gilligan, a developmental psychologist, seeks to challenge Lawrence Kohlberg’s moral developmental theory, claiming for women a “relational self” whose moral judgments are framed by affectional ties rather than by conceptions of justice based on the impartiality of a Kantian categorical imperative. Where Kohlberg defines an ethic of care as expressing an inferior subjectivity that he associates predominantly with his female subjects, Gilligan’s claim, while not challenging the Kantian conception of the self, is that the ethic of care must be defined as equal and complementary to an ethic of justice.
Gilligan’s association of an ethic of care with the lived experience of women has been effectively challenged on epistemological and ontological grounds and does not merit further consideration in this chapter. 7 What is important to highlight, however, and as Kimberly Hutchings’s chapter in this book illustrates, is that Gilligan’s formulaic account of the relationship between gender and moral agency has, despite the controversies associated with the early work, opened a space for a feminist discourse within a traditionally male–centered domain. 8 A second element that is more relevant to this chapter is Gilligan’s more recent texts on the constitution of women’s moral agency. The central focus of this work is the concept of “narrative” and the constitutive impact of gender as well as other societal factors in the formation of “moral voices.” 9 In seeking to move beyond an absolutist discourse, Susan Heckman, using Gilligan as baseline, suggests that we should be concerned with the plurality of moral voices rather than with the one voice that an ethic of care would advocate. 10
Recent feminist reconstructions of moral theory seek to formulate a concept of moral agency that is both constituted by the discursive and institutional continuities of local situations and is capable of resistance. Drawing upon what she labels as the “postmodern subject” and using Wittgenstein’s notion of a language game, Heckman articulates a position that, in significant respects, moves us away from the uniformities and implicit essentialisms associated with the relational self as the subject of the care perspective. The “discursive subject” that emerges from Heckman’s Foucaultian–inspired account is one that is “both resistant and discursively constituted,” 11 where each act of resistance is also an act of self–creation: “At any given time we find ourselves confronted with an array of discourses of subjectivity, scripts that we are expected to follow. We can accept the script that is written for us or, alternatively, piece together a different script from other discourses that are extant in our particular circumstances.” 12 This capacity for a rescripting of our narratives is not expressive of the enlightenment premise of autonomous, rational individuality but is rather a mode of recreation emergent from a plethora of discursive practices that surround the individual. Using the Wittgensteinian notion of a language game, Heckman defines feminism itself as a language of resistance emanating from a set of localized subjectivities. She identifies Gilligan’s “care voice” as a
distinct moral language game rooted in the particular experiences of most women in our culture. The logic and justification of this language game are different from that of the justice voice, but, as with the justice voice, the criteria of rightness are internal to the language game. The difference between the two moral discourses can be attributed to the fact that the “form of life” experienced by most women in our culture is distinct from that of men. 13
The significance of Heckman’s reformulation of the ethic of care lies in its recognition that moral voices are constituted differently in accordance with the positionality of the subject. However, the central problem with Heckman’s approach is its failure to problematize subjectivity and self–understanding, so that it retains the foundational position that there is an already–existing identity through the category of “woman”—or one based on race and another on culture. The implication is that there is already a defined (and therefore unproblematized) subject of feminism or of ethics, a subject of culture, and so on. Such a restatement of what is essentially a communitarian position, with an ontology based upon what MacIntyre labels the “situated self,” 14 fails to account for the complexities associated with the self’s capacity to negotiate the borderlines of ascribed affinities or cultural and gendered significations.
The other problem with Heckman’s valiant effort to rescue Gilligan is that it seems to reiterate the dichotomous representations that associate the public and rational with masculinity, whereas that deemed private and emotive continues to constitute femininity. Moreover, the subjects associated with these categories are, respectively, men and “most” women. The “game” of the public is seen to be distinct from that of the private; the rational/autonomous self excludes and is excluded from the private realm; the lives of most women are, almost by definition, distinct from those of men. The paradox of first claiming a Foucaultian, creative “discursive self” only for this self to be so easily categorized is all too apparent. To simply suggest “a multiplicity of moral voices constituted by race, class, culture, as well as gender” 15 is to recognize a constructed difference among these social categories but to fail the creative self engaged in a constantly shifting articulation of these differences. It is furthermore an unreflexive naming of individuals that denies them their space, their subjectivity, their creativity.
It is therefore not enough to simply suggest, in a gestural salute to multiculturalism, that gender oppression differs depending on cultural context or that norms are associated with the contextualities of the local. Feminists have come to recognize that gender intersects with race, class, sexual orientation, and other modalities of discursively constituted identities. To claim for women a distinct moral voice—the ethic of care—is to strive for epistemological and ontological certainties, a form of systematized morality that has its foundational moment in gender. There is a sense in which this form of feminist discourse has substituted one foundation (reason) with another (gender or community) in an attempt to impose ordered explanations of why it is that the individual has the capacity for judgment and responsibility—a capacity to extend care and offer assistance to those less advantaged, to the imprisoned, to the tortured, to the excluded and marginalized. The feminist ethicality this chapter formulates argues against any singular foundational purpose to moral action, suggesting instead an acknowledgment of the ambiguities, spontaneities, and complexities that surround political identities and moral actions.
Cultural Subjectivity
The form of feminist ethics articulated in this chapter seeks to move the terms of debate so that we are no longer encumbered by the transcendental category called woman. It seeks a problematization of subjectivity where dissent may have a multiplicity of locations, each recursively constituted by these locations, while asserting a transformative capacity that is situated in contingent daily encounters. This is a feminism with a borderline shifting identity, recognizing its diasporic existence, its exiled position within that space of negation. It seeks no singular definition—as woman, feminist, mother, lesbian, lover, intellectual, peasant, worker, artist. Rather, it shifts within the interstices between these signifying categories, being at one and the same time reconstituted by and transformative of boundaries it does not respect. This is a feminism of the dissident. It does not seek conversion to a realm of true believers, those group affiliates whose wont is to pounce on dissent and difference. This is finally a feminism that does not seek a sisterhood at large or a constituency for an international feminism. Rather than drawing up parallels of experienced oppression, it seeks to celebrate that location of creativity wherein resistance takes place, where the dissent of the singular voice is articulated.
Feminist theory and praxis has sought to incorporate difference—the multiplicity of locations that constitute women’s lives—through an acknowledgment of its own particular location within a western spacio–temporal setting. There is, however, a sense in which these locations remain unproblematized through discursive renditions of gender and culture, as if these are singular conceptual categories that easily situate the individual with respect to the social continuities that surround her/him. A move away from such singularities would place the focus of attention on the multiple sites of political presence and to inquire into practices of exclusion. As pointed out by Homi Bhabha:
What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These “in–between” spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself. 16
Bhabha asks, “How are subjects formed ‘in–between,’ or in excess of, the sum of the ‘parts’ of difference (usually intoned as race/class/gender, etc.)?” 17 To inquire into culture’s “in–between” is to reject any notion of difference or of identity as pregiven categories into which individuals may be typecast, for such would be a negation of alterity and a denial of the different positionalities that may exist within culture, race, or gender. What captures interest here is not so much the idea that movement across time and space produces complex arrays of experience beyond the point of origin, as Bhabha would suggest. What is pointed to in this chapter is, rather, the call for a refocusing of attention upon the moment where articulations of difference emerge, for it is such moments that point to the complexity of the subject as being always what Julia Kristeva would refer to as the “subject in process/on trial.” 18 To therefore simply add culture to gender in some formulaic gesture toward difference is to preclude any discussion of the processes through which the self is constructed or of the political consequences that emerge from one mode of representation as opposed to another.
A complex array of memory, myth, symbolic orders, and self–imagery come to constitute the lifeworld of the situated individual. These constitutive aspects of the self are not necessarily articulated within social interaction but form a backdrop that enables the individual to go on and provide meaning in the daily encounters of situated individuals. Any articulation of a sense of self provides a marker and a continual reaffirmation of the locations the individual occupies in relation to structures of “signification” and “domination.” Any such articulation is also at one and the same time a moment of interpretation wherein the individual or subject elaborates a form of “positionality” within the complex matrices of signification and power that constitute society. 19 Whereas articulations of identity constitute strategies of selfhood, the typification of the individual points to particular specifications that define the self through dominant social norms and symbolic orders. The mutually constitutive relationship between self–expressions and representations of the self suggest processes through which constructions of self and other emerge. 20
To focus on those moments of self–expression and articulations of identity is by no means a reiteration of the self–contained, autonomous entity of Cartesian thought but rather a recognition that such moments constitute a capacity to move beyond the limits and confines of a conforming social order and the discursive and institutional constraints that constitute society’s preference for classificatory control. Related to this is the view that the self situated within the continuities of social life is also recursively implicated in the reproduction of its discursive and institutional norms. It is this duality between self and society—one constitutive of the other, each action and utterance within daily encounters being both situated within and reconstitutive of the wider realm of meaning—that poses a challenge to any discourse that seeks universal legitimacy. 21 What emerges is a form of self–understanding situated within societal formations that are constitutive of the self but at the same time are subject to individual reflexivity and interpretative capacity.
In arguing against discourses that assume a pre–given subject, Butler illustrates the relationship between politics and inquiry into subjectivity when she states: “To claim that politics requires a stable subject is to claim that there can be no political opposition to that claim. Indeed that claim implies that a critique of the subject cannot be a politically informed critique but, rather, an act which puts into jeopardy politics as such.” 22 The move away from a unified, originary notion of subjectivity does not deny the presence of the subject or the processes through which the subject negotiates its presence within the complexities of social life. Nor is there a rejection of the place of identity in what constitutes agency and politics and the multiplicity of ways in which the space of the political is drawn and redrawn. In view of the continual processes through which we interpret and redesign our spacio–temporal locations, or the different ways in which we retrace our histories, identities come to form what Stuart Hall refers to as a “politics of location,” incorporating both mobilization and contestation. 23
A politics of location conventionally conceived in the discourses of international relations would situate the self within the boundaries of the sovereign state just as a discourse of origins would locate the self in relation to an ethnic or cultural community contained within the construct “nation.” Practices deemed to belong to the terrain of the political would thus be so only if contained within the signifying boundaries of state and/or nation. If, however, we conceive of the state and nation as merely hegemonic discursive constructs, we come to recognize the multiple sites of political presence and the complex array of spheres within which contestation and transformation may take place. The discursive hegemony that locates self–identity in relation to the state or nation emerges from a point of intersection where the positionality of the individual is defined through structures of domination and is continually constituted in relation to networks of meaning and normative expectations. 24 This point of intersection that comes to constitute the positionality of the self is, however, also a site for contestation and selection, where nonconformity is at its most visible and self–creativity, or self–refiguration, the ultimate expression of agency.
Identity is therefore constructed through discourse from a fund of interpretative possibilities, some of which, like national identity, come to constitute a dominant, hegemonic mode of discourse; but others actively express nonconformity and dissent from any homogenizing influence. Identity is always manifest in a linguistic public space, where the routine of daily encounters must be juxtaposed with the transformative moment of selection and contestation. In place of the certainties expressive of modernity’s hegemonic/disciplining discourses, where the self is categorized within a form of “cultural totalization,” 25 I am arguing for a recognition of identiational fragmentation and the reordering of time and space relations. As Hall points out, “Identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions. They are subject to radical historicisation, and are constantly in the process of change and transformation.” 26 The “narrativization of the self” is constructed within discourse and is produced “in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies.” 27 Such narratives of the self are therefore always set against and constituted through modes of representation drawn upon and recursively reconstituted in the utterances and expressions of selfhood.
If we are to make the move away from representations of the subject as singular and unified, we come to recognize the fragmentation of subjectivity and therefore a rejection of singular representations of locatedness. What emerges is a form of multiplicity where the narratives and memory traces of the past merely form part of a complex collage that constitutes the lived experience of the individual. The narratives of the self come to derive from a complex interplay of past and present, the local and the global, where no singular representation has authoritative standing. In a statement that has manifold resonances for any feminist discourse that seeks to simply add culture to gender, Bhabha suggests that the “representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre–given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition.” 28 There is, within a globalized setting, a sense in which there is an “on–going negotiation” where narratives of self are very much located at the borderline of a retraced history and a resignified present. The cultural hybridity that emerges from such “interstitial agency” allows articulations of difference without “an assumed or imposed hierarchy.” 29
The predominant project that frames postcolonial discourses is the theme of “crossing over,” where the defining moments of “interstitial agency” include hybrid subjectivity, reinscriptions of history, and the refigurations of narratives of self that may no longer be confined within singular representations. 30 For Bhabha, the postcolonial perspective as a mode of analysis “attempts to revise those nationalist or ‘nativist’ pedagogies that set up the relation of Third World and First World in a binary structure of opposition.... It forces a recognition of the more complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed spheres.” 31 What Bhabha calls the “in–between” of culture is also reflected in Edward Said’s concern with processes of displacement and migration, articulating the position of the exile as existing in a “median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old, beset with half involvements and half detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, an adept mimic or secret outcast on another.” 32 In seeing a parallel in experience between the exile and the outcast, Said’s project has been concerned with challenging exclusionary practices through highlighting the life of the exiled intellectual as standing outside of unifying representations and defying simple identiational categories, projecting a self that is multiply positioned and resistant to a unifying conformity. The in–between location of cultural hybridity comes to represent a “diasporic habitation,” 33 threatening monolithic representation of the past and, in so doing, interrupting the givens of the present.
Such a rewriting of identity has implications not only for how feminist theory deals with difference but also for how we may reconceptualize ethics. Taking the themes outlined above as a starting point, I outline in the next section a restylized ethics that takes as its point of departure the problematization of subjectivity and refiguration as its defining elements. What emerges is a form of ethicality that takes account of difference and that does so through an acknowledgment of what Foucault terms the “aesthetics of experience.”
Restyling the Ethical Subject in Feminist Discourse
In developing a conception of feminist ethics that takes account of difference, I am arguing for an ethical and praxiological discourse of dissent. 34 In so doing, I am arguing that the formative moment of any such discourse is the problematization of subjectivity and the construction of self. These are elements emerging from a recognition that the self is multiply located, capable of forms of reinscription and refiguration that defy easy categorization or any complicitous engagement with gestures of recognition or representation. While structures of domination may have differential impact on the lived experience of individuals—constraining some while enabling others, promoting the cause of some while ensuring the invisibility of others—there is a sense in which the self emerges in and through such structures, being constitutively implicated in the reproduction and transformation of such continuities. The self is continually signified through the regulatory practices in society—as citizen, as gendered, as sexual being, as deviant, or other form of signification. These become, as Butler points out, the “multiply contested sites of meaning” that hold a possibility for disruption and subversion. 35 In a statement that has resonances for the restylization of feminist ethics this chapter calls for, Butler states,
The very complexity of the discursive map that constructs gender appears to hold out the promise of an inadvertent and generative convergence of these discursive and regulatory structures. If the regulatory fictions of sex and gender are themselves multiply contested sites of meaning, then the very multiplicity of their construction holds out the possibility of a disruption of their univocal posturing. 36
Just as sex and gender are multiply contested sites of meaning that open out the possibility of dissent, so too any singular or originary constructions of cultural identity become the sites through which the self retraces her or his mode of being.
The form of self–understanding that emerges from and engages with the disruption of dominant sites of meaning encompasses as its constitutive elements both creativity and critique. A Foucaultian conception of self–understanding is one that recognizes the social constitution of the self as an entity located and defined within a complex array of discursive and normative structures, but one that is at the same time both malleable and creative. 37 Self–understanding implies a recognition of the social norms implicated in the constitution of the self and the capacity of the embodied self to move beyond the limits of social discourse and normative expectations. Foucault’s turn to the subject in his later writings, and specifically in the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, 38 is an acknowledgment that although the subject may be a product of the disciplinary continuities that constitute society, there is here also a reflexive entity, somehow aware of the plural subjectivities instantiated in everyday interaction and in locales of self–expression that defy conformity.
Foucault’s subject encompasses critique and creativity. Characterizing this “critical ontology” in language that has clear reflections in the postcolonial discourse already discussed, Foucault calls for a “limit attitude” that moves “beyond the outside–inside alternative” locating the self firmly “at the frontiers” where the pre–givens of whatever is deemed universal and necessitous are recognized as contingent and arbitrary. Such a “practical critique” becomes a basis for a “possible transgression,” a transformative moment that defies limits and boundaries. The transgressive moment emerges in a certain cultivation and stylization of self wherein the self sees herself or himself as a “work of art.” 39 What we see, therefore, is a trajectory in Foucault’s corpus from the technologies of discipline to the technologies of self, and it is the latter that define Foucault’s thought on ethics and that I argue are central to a reconception of feminist ethics in terms of the aesthetics of existence.
What primarily concerns Foucault in his conception of ethics in terms of the cultivation of self as a work of art; and central to the form of discourse I wish to develop in feminist ethics is the juxtaposition of what he calls the “moral code” and the “aesthetics of existence.” 40 Where the former refers to the regulative rules of social life, the latter points to style as the expressive moment of transgression and transfiguration—the self–forming activity that not only subverts categorical notions of identity but also allows an expression of difference that is beyond systematization or even certainty. In summarizing Foucault’s position on ethics, A. Davidson points to the centrality of style to the form of aesthetic ethics that is apparent in this discourse:
Foucault thought of ethics proper, of the self’s relationship to itself, as having four main aspects: the ethical substance, that part of oneself that is taken to be the relevant domain for ethical judgement; the mode of subjection, the way in which the individual establishes his or her relation to moral obligations and rules; the self–forming activity or ethical work that one performs on oneself in order to transform oneself into an ethical subject; and, finally, the telos, the mode of being at which one aims in behaving ethically. 41
Difference emerges from the particular combinations of each of these elements, where such difference expresses a “style of life” that “gives expression to the self’s relationship to itself. To indicate what part of oneself one judges, how one relates oneself to moral obligations, what one does to transform oneself into an ethical subject, and what mode of being one aims to realize is to indicate how one lives, is to characterize one’s style of life.” 42 Style comes to express that moment of creativity that takes the individual beyond the regulative rules of the moral code toward a transformation of her or his mode of being. Such individuality is not expressive of the Cartesian self of logocentric reason but, rather, one located around an aesthetic subjectivity having a capacity for a redescription and reinvention of the lifeworld—a capacity made possible through a form of poetic ingenuity that even defies the rules of language and comes to create a mode of being that proclaims difference in the face of a conforming social order. As C. Venn points out, the subject envisaged here is a “Dionysian being whose will to power seeks not dominion over others but a form of plenitude—epiphanic perhaps—through the ecstatic and sublime experience of the artistic, inventive transfiguration of oneself.” 43
How does this translate into a form of feminist ethics that takes account of difference without denying difference its moment of emergence? In seeking to move beyond any foundationalist principles, Butler’s approach to feminism starts from a Foucaultian conception of the subject and moves to reinscribe a subversive form of politics centered on notions of articulation and performance. As I will indicate, Butler’s work on identity, subjectivity, and the body comes to inform and complement the postcolonial discourse I outlined earlier.
The radical critique Butler provides starts with the view that feminism, rather than seeking an international constituency at large—one that would simply incorporate the “other” within its terms—should remain “self–critical with respect to... totalizing gestures.” 44 Butler suggests a number of points of departure that enable this critical self–reflection. The first is the move away from identifying the enemy as singular, for this amounts to a “reverse–discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms.” She also argues against the requirement for “unity” or “solidarity” as precursors of radical political action or contestation. Efforts to build up coalitions aimed precisely to take account of difference through a set of dialogic encounters enable women to articulate different modes or forms of identity in order to shape some form of unity in the midst of diversity. However, “despite the clearly democratizing impulse that motivates coalition building, the coalitional theorist can inadvertently reinsert herself as sovereign of the process by trying to assert an ideal form for coalitional structures in advance, one that will effectively guarantee unity as the outcome.” 45 Furthermore, “the very notion of ‘dialogue’ is culturally specific and historically bound.” What is at the heart of this critique of coalitional politics is that the latter assumes “in advance that there is a category of ‘women’ that simply needs to be filled in with various components of race, class, age, ethnicity and sexuality in order to become complete.” To assume the category “incompleteness,” however, would render it a “permanently available site of contested meanings.” 46 For Butler, the “coherence” and “continuity” of “the person” emerge from “socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility” that allow certain configurations of sex, gender, and sexual desire and prohibit those that do not easily ascribe to such regulatory boundaries. Just as the body, following this Foucaultian analysis, is not a “ready surface awaiting signification,” so too “sex” becomes a “performatively enacted signification” that, “released from its naturalized interiority and surface, can occasion the parodic proliferation and subversive play of gendered meanings.” 47 And in a statement that has profound resonances for the feminist ethics I am articulating here, Butler describes her project as
effort to think through the possibility of subverting and displacing those naturalized and reified notions of gender that support masculine hegemony and heterosexist power, to make gender trouble, not through the strategies that figure a utopian beyond, but through the mobilization, subversive confusion, and proliferation of precisely those constitutive categories that seek to keep gender in its place by posturing as the foundational illusions of identity. 48
The form of subversion Butler envisages is defined in terms of performance and parody. Borrowing from Foucault’s ideas on the inscription of the body by regulatory structures, Butler argues for a redescription of gender as “the disciplinary production of the figures of fantasy through the play of presence and absence on the body’s surface, the construction of the gendered body through a series of exclusions and denials, signifying absences.” 49 The “stylization of gender” amounts to a “fantasied and fantastic figuration of the body” in the service of a “heterosexual construction and regulation of sexuality within the reproductive domain.” 50 The exclusionary signification that emerges suggests a coherence of identity that “conceals the gender discontinuities that run rampant within heterosexual, bisexual, gay and lesbian contexts in which gender does not necessarily follow from sex, and desire, or sexuality generally, does not seem to follow from gender.” 51 Given that the norm of gender so established is a mere fiction, or “fabrication,” the refiguration of this fiction through performance and parody is a subversion of the givens of identity and more specifically gender identity. Pointing to the practice of drag and cross–dressing as revealing the “imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency,” 52 Butler makes a powerful case for the subversive potential that emerges from restylization and the refiguration of gender through what is in effect a rewriting of the body.
Just as gender is a form of “corporeal stylization,” 53 so too modes of cultural expression are performative in the sense of being contingent constructions of meaning that go through perpetual displacement suggesting a “fluidity of identities” with an openness to resignification and recontextualization. The parodic performance that restyles identity disrupts notions of originality or a core of being, suggesting instead a form of “variable boundary,” which is the “body.” That identity is performative—that it is an enactment of style scripted on the body—points to the question of how certain and particular modes of self–figuration and stylization may come to disrupt hegemonic discourses that seek to domesticate or discipline the self into some form of coherent, original identity.
The self that emerges from this discourse is an expression of a Foucaultian “limit attitude,” a self–understanding that is neither inside nor outside, that occupies a liminal state, and that is as troubling in its borderline location as it is in its capacity to redraw boundaries that seek exclusion. This is a diasporic habitation of the metaphorical exile, performing and articulating a fragmented identity, the (dis)locations of which find their expressive moment in the text. 54
In an exhibition of late–twentieth–century art held in 1995 at the Tate Gallery in London and entitled “Rites of Passage,” the themes of exile, fragmentation, and self–understanding are apparent in every installation, just as the embodied self is seen as having no particular, secure location or representation. As described by Arnold van Gennep in a book, The Rites of Passage, published in 1908, the rite of passage involves three phases: separation, transition, and incorporation. It is the transition stage that Gennep refers to as the “liminal” stage, which describes the individual as being neither inside nor outside of society. As Stewart Morgan, in an introduction to the exhibition, points out, it is this liminal, transition stage that locates the works of art exemplified by artists such as Mona Hatoum, Pepe Espaliu, and Louise Bourgeois. In commenting on the exhibition, Julia Kristeva states,
My overriding impression is that we have never been in such a state of crisis and fragmentation, in terms of both the individual—the artist, and the aesthetic object. The crisis is such that not only do we have difficulty with the question of the work of art, but also the question of beauty itself seems unbearable, as does the spiritual destiny of these strange and shocking objects.... So the questions to be asked are “Why do they do this? Who is doing this? What are the experiences behind these objects, objects which work with the impossible, with the disgusting, the intolerable?” 55
The primary element of the installations included in the exhibition was a questioning of subjectivity and the portrayal of the constantly shifting boundaries between inside and outside, presence and absence. Kristeva’s concluding comment on the exhibition, “The frontiers between sign and body, inside and outside, self and other are threatened,” is especially pertinent to the work of Hatoum, which exemplifies the interstitial agency located in the in–between of culture—on the borderline, disrupting boundary—and within the work of art, articulating a form of ethicality that problematizes subjectivity and the relations with the other.
Hatoum’s installation, Corps étranger (foreign body), points to the liminality and marginality that defines that space of negation where the subject is neither present nor absent, where the “I” and “other” dissolve into a common space of vulnerability. Born in Beirut to Palestinian parents, resident in London since the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, Hatoum seeks in her work to reinscribe the body, her own body, as work of art. The “foreign body” exhibited in Corps étranger is Hatoum’s own, the inside of which is opened to the scrutiny of the public via a camera used in endoscopy and coloscopy. Corps étranger is a tubular room in which a video image is projected onto a circular screen on the floor. The images captured come into being as the camera enters each orifice of the artist in turn, moving into the complex landscapes of a breathing, living body. The viewer encounters the distorted imagery projected on the floor by standing inside the tubular installation. The viewer becomes part of the installation: a “pure white cylinder pierced by two slender vertical apertures through which the viewer enters” and is “embraced within a dark circular chamber and enveloped in the soft rhythms and noises that emanate from speakers enclosed in the perimeter walls.” 56 Frances Morris describes this work, in terms of Kristeva’a notion of “abjection,” as one that “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in–between, the ambiguous, the composite.” 57
There is no unity or certainty in the form of self–recognition that Hatoum describes in Corps étranger, the text upon which the artist’s body is opened out and becomes at one with a viewing public. Both are inside and outside, standing on the liminal threshold. The in–between location that Hatoum gives expression to through her art disrupts the binary oppositions of public/private, mind/body, inside/outside, presenting a parody of these constructs, shattering any semblance of boundary. In another work, a video installation named Measures of Distance (1988), the themes of exile, fragmentation, the body, subjectivity, and representations of the other are shown to be intimately related. The video shows images of Hatoum’s mother in the shower, with letters written in Arabic from the mother in Beirut to her daughter in London superimposed on the images. The voices heard on the video are of the daughter reading the letters in English and of Arabic conversations between mother and daughter. The following is Hatoum’s own description of this work:
One reason for doing this work was because whenever I watched news reports about Lebanon, I was struck by how the Arabs were always shown en masse with mostly hysterical women crying over dead bodies. We rarely heard about the personal feelings of those who lost their relatives. It is as if people from the Third World are seen as a mass or a herd and not as individuals. Of course I was also influenced by the feminist slogan “the personal is political.” The work was constructed around letters from my mother in Beirut to myself in London and a dozen slides I took of my mother under the shower. Although the main thing that comes across is a very close and emotional relationship between mother and daughter, it also speaks of exile, displacement, disorientation and a tremendous sense of loss as a result of the separation caused by the war. In this work I was also trying to go against the fixed identity that is usually implied in the stereotype of Arab woman as passive, mother as a non–sexual being... the work is constructed visually in such a way that every frame speaks of literal closeness and implied distance. The close–up images of my mother under the shower, a closeness also echoed by the intimacy of the exchange between my mother and myself, she is speaking openly of her feelings and answering intimate questions about her sexuality. Her letters in Arabic appear over her images and look like barbed wire or a veil that prevents total access to the image yet they are the only means of communication. Letters also imply distance. The sound track on the video is of me reading her letters in English, in a sad and monotonous voice which is contrasted with laughter and animated Arabic conversation that took place between us. The Arabic conversation is given as much emphasis as the English text creating a difficult and alienating situation for a Western audience who have to strain to follow the narrative. 58
There is here what Bhabha refers to as an “interstitial intimacy,” where the separation of spheres of experience into the private and the public, the past and present is questioned through an “in–between temporality that takes the measure of dwelling at home, while producing an image of the world of history.” 59 There is in Hatoum’s work an inscription of a borderline habitation, between home and the world, art and representation, art and the disruption of exclusionist and marginalizing discourses and representation. The ethical moment that emerges from this subversive work encompasses both a questioning of originary identities and modes of signification of self and other; and at the same time, it articulates difference and resistance against structures of signification and domination. The body that emerges is not the docile body, signified, framed in passivity. Proximity and distance, and the artist’s body located in a spacial and temporal in–between, are again powerfully represented in Hatoum’s work The Negotiating Table (1983). In a description of this installation, Hatoum states:
My work often refers to hostile realities, war, destruction, but it is not localized. It refers to conflicts all over the world while hopefully pointing out the forces of oppression and resistance to these forces—cultural, historical, economic and social forces. In fact, I can think of only one piece which referred specifically to the invasion of Lebanon. It was entitled The Negotiating Table, and it was more like a “tableau vivant.” I was lying on a table covered with entrails, bandages and blood and wrapped up in a body bag. There were chairs around the table and sound tapes of speeches of Western leaders talking about peace. It was basically a juxtaposition of two elements, one referring to the physical reality and brutality of the situation and the other to the way it is represented and dealt with in the West. This piece was the most direct reference I had ever made to the war in Lebanon. I made this work right after the Israeli invasion and the massacres in the camps, which for me was the most shattering experience of my life. But in general my work is about my experience of living in the West as a person from the Third World, about being an outsider, about occupying a marginal position, being excluded, being defined as “Other” or as one of “Them.” 60
What we see in Hatoum’s work is an enactment of what Foucault terms a “style of being.” The reinscription of self coupled with the critique of the present come to define a form of aesthetic ethics that places the self’s relation to self as the expression of subjectivity. Although the artistic installation may be seen as a site of subversion, the discussion raises questions relating to the subject within society at large. In particular, it points to the multiple sites in which the political comes into being, in which the excluded and the mariginalized come to refigure themselves as political actors.
Conclusion
Feminist orthodoxies on ethics and cultural difference have all too often presented a formulaic discourse, taking gender and culture as unitary representations that are then interlinked in a gestural salute to cultural awareness and feminism’s own historicity. A consequence of this is a wholesale negation of the complexities involved in the politics of location, in the constructions of self, and in self–other relations. There is, moreover, a tendency that stresses understanding the “other” as a critical moment that seeks to transcend cultural diversity. But to seek an understanding of the other, to incorporate the other within our conceptual schema, is precisely a negation of alterity and a denial of the multiform presences that define the political. Such an approach leaves the self wholly unproblematized and as such represented as sovereign, reasonable, and coherent. The western subject comes to be represented as the reference point, the standard against which all others are judged. The certainties that emerge from this mode of discourse become the basis of domination and exploitation, of violence perpetrated by the righteous against all who question. The certainties that emerge from such discourse have their baseline in a failure to problematize the self, and such unquestioning results in a singular narrative of history where the dominant subject of modernity, the western individual, remains unimplicated in the perpetuation of the domination, exclusion, and inequality now structurated in our globalized human condition.
In questioning gendered and cultural subjectivity, and in using insights drawn from Butler’s Foucaultian analysis of gender and the politics of the body, I have sought to argue for a conception of identity as the inscription of style and the performative. The narratives of self that emerge come to encompass both critique and creativity where the self is no longer amenable to singular representation. The ethical moment defined, following Foucault, as the “critical ontology of ourselves,” seeks a re–creation of ourselves, where the constraints and limits of our present boundaries, our present narratives, are always subject to disruption and subversion through restylization.
Subjectivity comes to be seen in terms of a politics of location encompassing not only the multiplicities of the self but also the multiple locations of culture and cross–cultural relations. The spacial and temporal “in–between” of culture is a form of rescripting of the present and a retracing of the past that defy easy categorization of past and present, inside and outside. Self and other come to occupy a positionality representing a reconstituted “we,” where—as illustrated through Hatoum’s work—the artist and viewer, self and other come to be aspects within the same artistic installation. This is a contained space of a reflexive self–understanding that allows the outer space within. This is also a text placed firmly within a public space, where the private space of the self is also a public space, open to the gaze of the stranger invited in to form an integral part of the text. Critique and creativity are both present here, replacing epistemological and ontological certainty with a form of critical ethicality that seeks neither dominion over others nor a systematization of its terms in a universal discourse aiming toward an international constituency.
Endnotes
Note 1: Giddens, Modernity and Self–Identity. Back.
Note 2: See Jabri, “Restyling the Subject of Responsibility in International Relations”; and Jabri, “Textualising the Self.” Back.
Note 3: Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 150. Back.
Note 4: See Gilligan, In a Different Voice, for the conceptual distinction between “justice” and “care” as perspectives on ethics. Back.
Note 5: See Brown, International Relations Theory; and Linklater, Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations. Back.
Note 6: Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Prominant communitarian critics of the Rawlsian position include MacIntyre, After Virtue; and Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Back.
Note 7: Tronto, “Women’s Morality.” For a critical application of the care perspective to international relations, see Robinson, “Globalizing Care.” Back.
Note 8: See Jaggar, “Feminist Ethics.” Back.
Note 9: Heckman, Moral Voices, p. 19. Back.
Note 14: MacIntyre, After Virtue. Back.
Note 15: Heckman, Moral Voices, p. 163. Back.
Note 16: Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 1. Back.
Note 18: See “A Conversation with Julia Kristeva,” interview conducted by Ina Lipkowitz and Andrea Loselle, in Ross M. Guberman (ed.), Julia Kristeva Interviews. Back.
Note 19: See Giddens, The Constitution of Society, for the concept of “positionality.” Giddens refers to structures of signification as those that constitute the realms of meaning, whereas structures of domination point to the realm of power. Back.
Note 20: See Jabri, Discourses on Violence, for the conception of political identity articulated here. Back.
Note 21: Giddens articulates the notion of the duality of agency and structure in his theory of structuration. See his Central Problems in Social Theory and The Constitution of Society. For an application of structuration theory to the question of identity, see Jabri, Discourses on Violence. Back.
Note 22: Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” p. 36. Back.
Note 23: Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs Identity?” p. 2. Back.
Note 24: The “point of intersection” among structures of domination, legitimation, and signification is precisely what defines the positionality of the self, according to Giddens. See his The Constitution of Society. See also Jabri’s discussion of self–identity and the state in terms of positionality in Discourses on Violence, Chapter 5. Back.
Note 25: Bhabha, “Culture’s In–Between,” p. 58. Back.
Note 26: Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs Identity?” p. 4. Back.
Note 28: Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 2. Back.
Note 30: For an elaboration of the theme of “crossing over,” its implications for a reconceptualization of politics, and as applied to the Muslim political community, see Mandaville, “Reimagining the Umma.” Back.
Note 31: Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 173. Back.
Note 32: Said, Representations of the Intellectual, p. 36. For the implications of Said’s reflections on migration and exile in redefining moral agency, see Jabri, “Textualising the Self.” Back.
Note 33: Parry, “Overlapping Territories and Intertwined Histories, p. 31. Back.
Note 34: See Jabri, “Restyling the Subject of Responsibility in International Relations,” for the Foucaultian ethics expressed in this section. Back.
Note 35: Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 32. Back.
Note 37: Hoy, Foucault: A Critical Reader, p. 17. Back.
Note 38: Foucault, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self. Focuault’s turn to the subject is most strongly highlighted in Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” Back.
Note 39: See Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” Back.
Note 40: Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, p. 352. Back.
Note 41: Davidson, “Ethics as Ascetics,” p. 118. Back.
Note 42: Ibid., pp. 124–125. Back.
Note 43: Venn, “Beyond Enlightenment?” p. 2. Back.
Note 44: Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 13. Back.
Note 48: Ibid., pp. 33–34. Back.
Note 54: See Jabri, “Textualising the Self.” Back.
Note 55: “Of Word and Flesh,” an interview with Julia Kristeva by Charles Penwarden, reproduced in Morgan and Morris, rites of passage, p. 21. Back.
Note 56: Morgan and Morris, rites of passage, p. 103. Back.
Note 57: Kristeva, quoted in Morgan and Morris, rites of passage, p. 104. Back.
Note 58: Interview conducted by Claudia Spinelli in 1996 and reproduced in Michael Archer, Guy Brett, and Catherine de Zegher, Mona Hatoum (London: Phaidon Press, 1997), p. 140. Back.
Note 59: Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 13. Back.
Note 60: Interview conducted with Sara Diamond in 1987, reproduced in Archer, Brett, and de Zegher, Mona Hatoum. Back.
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