The construction of feminine political identities. A feminist reading from the lacanian left
- Autores: Alicia Valdés Lucas
- Directores de la Tesis: Carmen González Marín (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid ( España ) en 2020
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Fernando Broncano (presid.), Sonia Arribas Verdugo (secret.), Fabio Vighi (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Humanidades por la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
- Materias:
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
- Resumen
How are oppressions and hierarchies constructed? How does inequality between men and women spring? Are women the only subject, or the main subject, under submission in a gendered hierarchy? Why does an inequality spring when another inequality seems to have been overcome? The present dissertation attempts to illustrate how feminine political identities have been constructed in a world characterised by a breach between men and women, white people and people of colour, productive work and reproductive work, migrants and nationals.
To explain how people inhabit reality, we have attempted to apply Lacan’s theory of sexual positions to how political identities have been constructed in Europe. Thus, as we will argue over the dissertation, by articulating a topology able to illustrate how reality is constructed, we aim to show how two different spaces, which provide the subject with different ontological statuses, are constructed through discursive operations to frame and limit the grounds upon which subjects may construct their political subjectivities.
To analyse how political subjectivities are distributed unequally among people, we believe that we need to go beyond current political theories that override intersectionality. Thus, to avoid a biased analysis, this dissertation departs from a feminist methodology that aims to situate political identities and analyse them from an intersectional approach.
It is from this last point of view that our dissertation looks at identities. Identities are situated and so is intersectionality. Nevertheless, although we believe that gender is not the main axis of oppression, we sustain that the ideal subject of European androcentrism is man as a male subject constructed around the notions of heterosexuality, urbanity, cisgenderism, ableism, and racism. As we will attempt to illustrate and demonstrate during this dissertation, although gender is not the strongest neither the only element of oppression in Europe, we believe that subjectivities are femininized or masculinised as to fit in the dichotomic and hierarchized system of patriarchy. This way, we understand the feminisation of poverty and its subsequent distribution of precarious ontological statuses in two different ways. On the one hand, it defines the process through which women suffer more than men the consequences of economic crises and invisibility in political and economic agendas. On the other hand, we understand the feminisation of poverty as the process through which poor people are dominated and infantilised in the same characteristic manner that women have suffered infantilization and domination from men over European history. Thus, to understand this double lecture, we understand that, for a feminist political strategy, gender, sex, and sexual orientation are not enough variables to understand political processes. Instead, we believe that a new variable needs to be introduced: The sexual position.
The concept of sexual position was developed by Lacan in the early 1970s in his Seminar XX. For us, the introduction of the concept of sexual position completely problematizes and poses elemental questions for certain branches of feminism that have already taken the institutions, and functions as the main element to understanding intersectional identities as situated. As Evans perfectly defines in his Lacanian dictionary For Lacan, masculinity and femininity are not biological essences but symbolic positions, and the assumption of one of these two positions is fundamental to the construction of subjectivity; the subject is essentially a sexed subject. ‘Man’ and ‘woman’ are signifiers that stand for these two subjective positions (S20, 34).
For us, slightly differing from Lacan, masculinity and femininity are not biological essences but they do have bodily consequences. In other words, beauty cannons or sexual violence are targeted towards specific bodies, not just any body. Nevertheless, we find Lacan’s articulation of sexual difference very interesting and fruitful for situated intersectionality. Coming back to Lacan, he affirms that identification with masculinity or femininity depends on the subject’s relation with the Symbolic. If we understand that the European Symbolic supposes certain systems of oppression such as the ones mentioned earlier—racism, cisgenderism, sexism, ageism, ableism, etc.—we can infer that the sexual position of a subject, his or her femininity or masculinity, derives from the position it occupies within this intricate network of oppressive structures. In other words, it depends on how the subject is articulated in Symbolic identification. Thus, from an intersectional position that evaluates both oppression and privilege, that is to say, from a position of situated intersectionality, we could say that a cis-hetero white upper-class urban woman takes the sexual position of man while a black cis-hetero male refugee occupies the feminine sexual position. In this sense, it is not gender either biological/assigned sex what defines your vulnerability or your life as livable, but the sexual position you possess in relation to a Symbolic order.
Over the decade of the 1970s, Lacan develops what we consider are the tools for a sexuated reading of reality. Over this dissertation, we will introduce and contextualise our theory of sexual position and feminist politics in the theoretical movement of the Lacanian Left. We will also attempt to illustrate how the operation of the assignation of sexual positions in politics is a discursive operation through which subjects and reality itself are sexuated to construct a hierarchical political order with ontological consequences.
However, we need to clarify that the introduction of this new variable does not conceal neither intends to hide oppressions that spring from gender violence, homophobia or sexual violence. We are aware that cisgender women face higher rates of violence than white cisgender heterosexual men, and that they face obstacles when they try to develop normative lives. Nevertheless, we affirm that when we are facing the issue of developing feminist economics or politics, feminists need to look at political subjectivities by adding the new variable of the sexual position.
Along the first part of the dissertation, we will attempt to develop a new feminist approach towards politics. Nevertheless, the proposal we offer towards the re-articulation of the feminist approach towards politics is addressed to the feminist European movement. That is to say, we depart from the misconception that certain branches of European feminism have towards the idea of woman as a political subject and tries to open up a debate and offer a solution towards the creation for a more inclusive and intersectional subject of politics. The reason why we do not engage in how our proposal may be applied from a decolonial point of view is not that Lacan or feminism cannot work as a base upon which to articulate a strategy for those identities, but because the author of this dissertation, as a white cisgender woman, lacks the knowledge to articulate a decolonial response to an oppressive system that privileges me.
As a way to develop our feminist approach to politics, we depart from the affirmation that every historical time is articulated around different structures and elements that conform an ontological discourse whose social bonds result in what we call reality. This reality is the field upon which politics take place. As we will show over this introduction, the construction of reality implies its delimitation. Such delimitation produces the emergence of a frame upon which politics, understood as the struggle for hegemony takes place. This dissertation attempts to demonstrate that this delimitation of reality is the product of the imposition of a Master Signifier that cancels out any difference between the structures and subjects that can be found within the limits of reality, and the imposition of a second Master Signifier in charge of establishing a chain of equivalences between the signifiers that are excluded. These two Master Signifiers have a dichotomic relation that produces a homogenization among the subjects that remain under each of these empty signifiers but also a radical heterogeneity between both groups of subjects. This double process produces the classical Schmittian antagonistic relation between enemy/friend, which functions as a political strategy that uses antagonism as an instrument to maintain reality as the desirable option.
Although these ideas have been sketched and developed in different ways by several authors that can be framed within what Yannis Stavrakakis calls the Lacanian Left, we aim to add a feminist dimension to the Lacanian Freudian turn by developing an androcentric and ethnocentric critique to politics.
Thus, by departing from the intricate relation between language, subjectivity, and discourse, we aim to show how the two Master Signifiers of dichotomic political relations correspond to the signifiers of masculine and feminine. Thus, the framing operation of reality is a process through which reality is sexuated by the imposition of two sexual positions that correspond to two different ontological statuses. The signifier that represents what inhabits reality is the signifier masculine, while the signifier that represents what remains outside of reality is feminine. To hold the masculine position allows the subject to enter in politics, consequently, politics, as the struggle for hegemony, is an androcentric biased process.
To see how this sexuation process takes place, we first need to establish the historical frame upon which we develop our analysis. We believe that the development of sexual positions consists of two stages. The first stage corresponds to a hierarchization of sexual positions, such hierarchization is focused on praising the masculine position and the stigmatization of the feminine position. Nevertheless, it is in the second stage that we find the decisive point, the exclusion of the feminine from reality. Although, as we will attempt to illustrate in the second block of this dissertation, the stigmatization of the feminine can be traced as early as in Ancient Greece, we believe that the highest point of such process, as well as the total exclusion of the feminine, is to be found in Modernity. Although multiple authors discuss whether we may speak of postmodern times and how to classify different stages of Modernity, we have decided to develop a chronological division of Modernity that illustrates how the hegemony of the Master Signifier masculine takes place.
To address such a complex topic, we have divided the dissertation into two different parts. The first part consists of the main development of our theoretical corpus, and the second part applies our methodology to the study of the construction of woman’s identity in European Modernity.
Part one, A Cognitive Map for Sexuation, starts with a brief introduction to central elements and ideas of Lacanian psychoanalysis to develop our feminist and critical reading. This part focuses on an explanation of a Lacanian theory of discourse from a feminist perspective. In order to clarify—as much as it may be possible—Lacanian theory, we aim to develop a cognitive map that will allow us to visualize in a clear way how the exclusion of the feminine as a necessary step to create a masculine finite reality within which hegemony of the masculine is established. This first part is divided into different chapters to simplify and make accessible the understanding of Lacanian theory. In this part, we develop the idea that reality is founded by a specific discursive structuring operation and that such operation relies on the establishment of two main Master Signifiers that separate the Real from Reality to set the ground for hegemonic struggle. What we argue along these sections is that the framing operation of reality operates at two different levels; by preparing the grounds for hegemony—at an ontic level—and by delimiting the subjects that may engage in such hegemonic struggle—at an ontological level. The feminist turn here corresponds to the fact that we observe that these Master Signifiers correspond to the signifiers masculine and feminine, which transforms the process of construction of reality into a process of sexuation of reality. Thus, this part focuses on how spaces for inhabitancy are created, and how inhabitancy of different spaces implies an unequal distribution of ontological statuses concerning politics. On the other hand, after analysing the ontological consequences of discursive operations, part one focuses on explaining how struggles for hegemony take place at a discursive level. To do that, we analyse how reality possesses the structure of the Borromean knot and how discursive operations locate different empty signifiers as to create an illusion of finitude and harmony to shield reality from the possible threats that the Real may pose.
Part two, Some Notes for a Genealogy of an Exclusion: The Sexuation of Reality, focuses on the application of our discursive analysis to the most significant historical events of European Modernity. We thus, aim to illustrate how the imposition of the Master Signifier masculine implies a process of androcentrification through which the masculine subject is placed as the standard and ideal until it becomes the hegemony and unique desirable subjectivity. On the other hand, the imposition of the Master Signifier feminine implies the progressive exclusion of feminine elements, and subjectivities from reality and, therefore, from politics.
This second part departs from the feminist critique to the Aristotelian division between matter and form, as a division that operates excluding women from Reality, and consists of a bibliographic review of different works characterised by a critique to androcentric epistemology and ontology. Furthermore, we aim to analyse how processes such as the witch-hunt, the establishment of the marriage contract, and the wage contract, also imply the imposition of two unique ontological statuses in order to inhabit Reality while a third ontological status, that of non-being, of ex-sistence, denies political subjectivity to feminine subjects. This section aims to illustrate how the feminine—understood as elements that have been socially constructed as not belonging to the masculine—has been stigmatized as non-valid and/or excluded from what we call the prevailing reality. We thus analyse how ontological and epistemological discourses have constructed an androcentric structure conformed of two spaces, centrality: the valid and masculine, and the periphery: the non-valid and non-masculine. By focusing on the works developed by Carolyn Merchant and Karl Stern we aim to demonstrate how the difference between matter and form, and the traditional binomial of women and nature produce what we call androcentrification, a process through which the centre of Reality is monopolized by the masculine while the feminine is left out to its periphery until it is finally expulsed to the Real. This final expulsion takes place with the hegemony of the Cartesian subject that begins with the Scientific Revolution.
Lastly, as a way to conclude, the dissertation ends with a brief chapter in which we develop the conclusions over how feminine identities, specifically women’s identity, are constructed in European politics. Furthermore, in this chapter, we will also include the element of alienation as a mandatory and necessary element for the configuration of a masculine reality. Thus, we here speak of alienation as a multi-level process that implies bodily, political and economic alienation. The first alienation takes place within the subject is a bodily alienation, it separates mind and body as two different elements. It also has an interpersonal effect, alienation works by alienating our bodies from other bodies, which also affects how we relate to structures. Thus, bodily alienation results in the total alienation of bodies and what is outside of them. Furthermore, this last chapter that briefly outlines how feminist municipalism with a feminist community currency may configure an economical-political proposal able to subvert the alienation characteristic to androcentric systems. Finally, the dissertation opens up the possibility to think of feminist politics as politics that take place in what Fernando Broncano has denominated “intermediate spaces”. Spaces where everyday-life can be placed at the centre of political decisions, spaces where the second person (you), can replace the antagonistic relationship of we against them.
Thus, this dissertation aims to open up a new way of reading Lacan and, more importantly, a new field to understand feminism as an intersectional political praxis.
