For a feminist glance materialist on the queer.

Source: http://www.cairn.info

Exchanges between a radical feminist and an anti-masculiniste man

Here an unusual dialogue in which questioner and questioned does not cease interchanging their roles. Conclusion of the woman like man, the thought known as “queer” challenges them, but also disturbs them and they explain the reasons here of them.

Léo Thiers-Vidal: For you, is the queer defined against feminism?

Sabine Masson: I really see in the center of the queer a new manner of rejecting the binary categories of sex, just as a new problematization of sexualities which put these categories at the challenge. The queer returns to “a whole of speeches and practices associated with the transgression with the borders with the difference of the sexes and heteronormativity. […] To be queer […] it is to mix the kinds [1]”. From where the weight in the theory queer of the post-structuralist criticism of the concept of kind against its increasing tendency to merge with “sex” and leaving in the shade the practices and speech du/sur the body breaking this correspondence [2]. This critic of the kind joined that of the heterosexuality: the analysis of the masculinity and femininity was structured around the social acceptance of the heterosexuality as the standard of the human relations [3]. The theory queer sets up against any essentialism of the categories, by its insistence on the performatif aspect of the practices of the body and the speech asserting “to choose its kind [4]”. The queer mark thus a strong rupture with feminism, since it very strongly relativizes the idea of one lived common to the women. A question which appears too often last to me under silence it is: with which feminism or which use of the kind the queer does break it? It is generally of “academic feminism” or canonized kind the “[5]”, within a Anglo-Saxon context which integrated theoretically and politically feminist criticism.

L.T. - V.: From which does the queer compared to feminism come according to you?

S. Mr.: Firstly, I think that the theory queer finds an origin in the criticism of hétérosexuelle oppression and the recent history of the social movements: through the alliance of part of the lesbians to the gays - following their oppression/marginalisation in the feminist movement - in a fight against a company homo/lesbophobe and the control of the body and the life of the homosexual people reached of the AIDS [6]. The queer also protested against the ideological aspects of hétérosexuelle oppression, in particular against the perception hétéro-centered of many the feminist studies and theories. I also think that the queer is resulting from the context more specifically theoretical and arts person of the North-American post-structuralism, which insists on the fragmentation of the categories and the analysis of the speeches which are referred to it. These currents find an inspiration philosophical central in the analysis foucaldienne of the speech, in what it normalizes and fixes the behaviors (hétéro) sexual, and produced capacity. This one is based on the rejection of a design of the capacity like “binary and total opposition between the dominators and dominated [7]” and encourages with “the self-criticism of the identities and speech which we adopt like part of N ^bone fights [8]”. More largely, I place the queer in a vast ideological context marked by the rejection of the analysis in terms of social reports/ratios and which presupposes the end of modernity, the classes, the Utopias, work, and now: kind! It is not chance if the queer is distinguished from the gay studies and lesbians and the “policies of the identity”, which stressed since the beginning of the Seventies on the defense of the rights of the homosexual ones, and passes to the analysis of the language and the speeches which produce a knowledge and practices around the sex [9].

S. Mr.: Radical feminist thought, perceived like “anti-guy”, or of the queer, which does seem to you relevant for a male work on the oppression of the women?

L.T. - V.: One of the principal lessons that my implication with radical feminists and lesbians taught me is to become aware of my sociopolitic position, specific and structural of man heterosexual and his implications psychological, epistemological, sociopolitic impossible to circumvent [10]. My participative education with the male domination enables me to have a perception and action misogynist, tools of dominating, and a privileged material place. My education towards and assimilation of the heterosexualite/sociality completed this social position of dominating. Feminism materialist functions inter alia like a mirror reflecting my material position of privileged person, opening the eyes and the tripe to me on the lived related one to the subordinate positions according to the axis of kind then of race, of class… It provides tools of concrete, applicable analysis and fight immediately in my lived of the social reports/ratios of kind and whose effectiveness to me is assure day after day. Without this materialism, it seems impossible to me to act with relevance against the oppression of the women by the men. The thought queer on the other hand does not return me towards a privileged position but encourages by the stress which it lays on the performativity, sexuality, the discursive one, to believe itself independent of the social structures. As if I could go towards where good seemed to me, and that quasi any transgression of the hétéronormatif order symbolic system was politically relevant. As if we were all the free atoms flying over kind, heterosexuality and oppression of the women by the men. That is not likely too much to render comprehensible with the men that it is rather a restriction of our capacity and room for maneuver which would be necessary…

What worries me seriously, it is to see reappearing a male claim “pro-feminist” making use of criticism queer of the subject “women” to minimize or reject the concept of social group “men [11]”, therefore of genrée oppression. The will to show the existence of several oppressive axes and the need for thinking them simultaneously are transformed here into negation of a homogeneity of the men quite material and real with respect to the women: violences, appropriation and hétérosexuelle/social exploitation, domestic exploitation, epistemic androcentrism… This political negation (that one had already known in his Marxist version pointing of the finger the famous middle-class women [12]) is reinforced by the nearly exclusive stress laid by the thought queer on the registers of analysis discursive, literary or identity who leave me an impression of lightness, of play. Where thus did the bases of feminism pass? An young man discovering the stakes sex/sexuality/kind through a grid of reading queer does not risk, in my opinion, to become aware of the rough, fundamental and omnipresent violence which the men with the women inflict throughout the world. He is not likely either to include/understand in what the co-education of kind is a place of permanent violence for the women, from where the illusion to be able to take part on one level in the feminist fights and studies and not since a social position and a problems point of view of, of dominating.

L.T. - V.: What brings the queer as a radical feminist to you?

S. Mr.: The principal contribution of the thought queer to feminism, in my eyes, it is that she criticizes the invisibilisation of (hétéro) sexuality and the reproblématise. If the radical feminist theories often highlighted the bonds between the appropriation/exploitation of the women and the constraint at the heterosexuality, nevertheless little theorized the heterosexuality as system of social organization indétachable of the analysis of the patriarchate. Feminism, even radical, leaves thus overall intact the “imaginary heterosexual [13]”, in particular in certain studies on the sexual division of work [14]. From a materialist point of view precisely, this manner of thinking the kind - and not the “hétérogenre [15]” - without thinking sexuality, saves too the ideology and the capacity related to the hétérosexuelle standard. In this direction potentially, I find the queer inspiring on the question of the articulation of the axes of being able. Another aspect which stimulated me in the thought queer, it is that it makes attentive with “the always possible essentialisation” of the concepts, in particular that of kind. Is this only because the word lends itself to it well or rather because any concept is threatened by this type of slip? I lean for the second solution. This criticism can thus be used for to us to track the distortions and diversions of N ^bone clean concepts. That recuts an always useful reflexion on the question of institutionalization of feminism and the studies kind, and on its possible ideological skews.

S. Mr.: Does criticism queer of the identity policies inspire to you tracks for the question of the male identity?

L.T. - V.: It seems to me that the thought queer and the feminist thought materialist agree up to a certain point on the sex question/kind: neither one nor the other are simply natural, obvious, out of the political field and social. If they can agree on the fact that the “biological” sex is a production political allowing the oppression of the women through the hierarchy hétérosociale/sexual, and that the kind is anything else only one social construction thus transformable, they do not seem to agree on the political objectives of this transformation. The thought queer points out to me the analyses in terms of social roles of sex: if it gave up the concept of base biological, it obliterates in a comparable way the question of the capacity, social hierarchy [16] and interests which justify the adoption of a dominant identity [17]. It is not, for example, so much the binarity of kind which revolts me that the fact that it results from oppressive acts and falls under a continuum of violence. In my eyes, the male identity is anything else only the specific human form which the current oppression of the women by the men takes from where my relative absence of interest for a “transgression or resignification” of the male identity. In other words, that does not interest me to see multiplying various masculinities since those will express only various ways of exploiting and to oppress the women. Oppression sauce macho, gay, transgenre, genderfuck, vanilla-S/M…? Not thank you!

Thus, on the side of the men, the awakening of the oppressive social position often leads to assert another masculinity. It however seems to me that we have (contrary to the social groups oppressed for which the identity claim remains a question of survival) to make a way towards the refusal of identity genrée thus the abolition of the male identity. This abolition can only pass besides by the installation of other social reports/ratios abolishing the kind gradually and creating new human relational ingredients. The Utopia of the not-kind seems much more radical besides to me than the creation of new “post-identity” receipts, using ingredients entirely marked and structured by the oppression of the women by the men.

L.T. - V.: On your side, how formulas you a feminist criticism materialist with the theory queer?

S. Mr.: What disturbs me more it is that I see there the disappearance of the question of oppression (kind, race, class) and of the social reports/ratios. Fluidity, even the unreality of the kind, and the possible dissolution of the identities by the performativity visualize the change starting from against-cultural individual acts [18]. The critic materialist appears essential to me on this point: the effect of a diversion or a reapproriation of the categories remains limited by its social context and history. This last precisely disappears from rhetoric queer, however clearly allusive with a North-American urban environment. After one year of work of ground with Indian women in Mexico, I feel real a faintness in front of the open shift between the fight of these women for basic rights and the interpretation of practices S/M like the end of the kind! The immense entry “queer” flat puts the relations of being able and divergent constructions of the sexual identity according to the race or the kind [19]. To reject any reference to the social categories and groups, to lay the stress on their heterogeneity and impossibility of generalizing, it maintains also a myth from the point of view “nowhere [20]” which contributes to the invisibilisation of the capacity. Another aspect that I reproach the queer, it is that it makes the dead end on the contributions of radical feminism and the radical lesbianism. The disconnection between sex and kind is already in the middle of the analysis materialist of the patriarchate and allows us to think the variety of associations or diversions possible between sex and kind. As for the radical lesbianism [21], its criticism of the heterosexuality as basically interdependent system of the patriarchate is worth a double marginalisation to him: in the queer and feminism.

S. Mr.: Does criticism queer of the heteronormativity challenge you as an heterosexual?

L.T. - V.: Again, it is still near the radical lesbians that I continue to draw the most theoretical and political confrontation. As, my work consists before very arranging with the women the close, concrete relations in such way as to be able asymmetry is reduced, for example through the not-cohabitation (reinforcing symmetrical the assumption of responsibility of the house work, the not-invasion of the personal space of the women, the explicit choice of the meetings), but also the not-monogamy (crossing short to the exclusive appropriation, reinforcing emotional independence and the relational alternatives for the women). But the lesbianism as government scheme for the abolition of the kinds requires much more than this “enlightened” installation of the heterosexuality: end of the hétérosexuelles relations as such. However, on this level, it is clear that I do not have (still?) agreed to lose certain privileges in terms of emotional, social and sexual access to the women. But it is well in these precise political terms that I continue to formulate me the stakes sex/sexuality/kind and that the political malleability of the various human registers imports me: homosexuality interests me insofar as it represents an alternative to a crucial sphere of the oppression of the women. As for the related questions with the not-monogamy, the bisexuality, the S/M or sexual work [22], they not interest me as “post-identity transgressions or resignifications” but like possible tools of déconstruction of the oppression of the women in its sexual/relational dimensions. And although sexuality is one of the crucial places of the oppression of the women, it would not have to be forgotten that the oppression of the women by the men is far from being limited to this field of lived human…

S. Mr. and L.T. - V.: To summarize, if the thought queer challenges us in his questioning of the heteronormativity, it disturbs us insofar as:

1. It disconnects kind from sex, but neglects the fact that the kind is a political system of organization of human as oppressors and oppressed.

2. It treats the discursive dimension of the heteronormativity like fundamental, and not its hierarchical social structures.

3. It on-visibilise sexual dimension with the detriment of other dimensions like the genrée division of work, the domestic exploitation, etc, as well as the other axes of oppression of race, class, continent…

4. It misses radical Utopia basically and accentuates above all the individual modes of action to the detriment of modes of collective action for the abolition of the kind. •

 

[*] Respectively doctorante in sociology and doctorand in political philosophy.

[1] C. Saint-Hilaire, “Crisis and change of the device of the difference of the sexes: sociological glance on the bursting of the sex category”, in D. Lamoureux, limits of the sexual identity, Editions of the Stir, Montreal, 1998, p. 24.

[2] J. Scott, “The milllenium phantasy”, Symposium der Hans-Sigrist-Stiftung year der Universität Bern: “Gender, History and Modernitiy”, 1999.

[3] J. Butler, Turbid Gender. Feminism and the subversion off identity, Routledge, New York, 1999. R. Dunphy, Sexual Politics. Year introduction, Edinburgh university near, 2000.

[4] C. Holy Hilaire, “the paradox of the identity and to become-queer to it subject: new stakes for the sociology of the social reports/ratios of sex”, sociological Research, 1999/3, p. 58.

[5] C. Ingraham, “The heterosexual Imaginary: Feminist Sociology and Theories off Gender”, in S. Seidman (eds), Queer Theory/Sociology, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996.

[6] See in particular D. Halperin, Holy Foucault, Oxford university close, New York-Oxford, 1995; R. Dunphy, Sexual Politics…, COp cit.

[7] Mr. Foucault, will to know (History of sexuality), Gallimard, 1976, p. 124.

[8] Sawicki, in R. Dunphy, Sexual Politics…, COp cit., p. 26.

[9] S. Seidman (eds), Queer Theory…, COp cit.

[10] L. Thiers-Vidal, social Reports/ratios of sex and capacity. A comparison between the radical feminist analyses and engaged male analyses, memory of DEA Women/Kind, Geneva/Lausanne, 2001.

[11] D. Welzer-Lang, And men? To study the men to include/understand the changes of the social reports/ratios of sex, file of enabling, Toulouse, 1999.

[12] C. Delphy, To think the kind, volume 1, Syllepse, 1998.

[13] C. Ingraham, “The heterosexual Imaginary… ”, Article cit., p. 168.

[14] In particular at D. Smith, The Everyday World ace problematic, Northeastern university near, Boston, 1987.

[15] C. Ingraham, “The heterosexual Imaginary… ”, Article cit., p. 167.

[16] S. Jackson, “To theorize the kind: the heritage of Beauvoir”, New feminist questions, vol. 20, n° 4,1999.

[17] See R.W. Connell, Gender and power, Polity near, Cambridge, 1987.

[18] E. Glick, “Sex positive: feminism, queer theory, and the politics od transgression”, Feminist review, n° 64, spring 2000; R. Dunphy, Sexual Politics…, COp cit.

[19] D. Halperin, Holy Foucault, COp cit.; T. of Lauretis, “Queer Theory: lesbian and gay sexualities. Year Introduction”, Differences, vol. 3, n° 2,1991.

[20] S. Bordo, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and gender-scepticism”, in L.J. Nicholson, Feminism/postmodernism, Routledge, New York, 1990, p. 140.

[21] See in particular Mr. Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, Beacon near, Boston, 1992.

[22] C. Monnet and alii, Beyond the personnel. For a staff policy ACL, transformation, Lyon, 1998; G. Pheterson, the prism of the prostitution, Harmattan, 2001.