to Marxist-feminists, and Deleuze and Guattari:

"Let us take one of the commonplaces of the Marxist-feminist criticism of psychoanalysis, the idea that its insistence on the crucial role of the Oedipus complex and the nuclear-family triangle transforms a historically conditioned form of patriarchal family into a feature of universal human condition: is not this effort to historicize the family triangle precisely an attempt to elude the 'hard kernel' which announces itself through the 'patriarchal family'--the Real of the Law, the rock of castration?"

This sort of a collective response to ideas brought up by Bumpkins, CA92075, morefuntocompute, and snaggle regarding identity of the female, appropriation of negation, and the role of the avant-garde therein.

There were two points that struck me kinda hard, both on page 159 of the Haraway reading:

1. Feminism practice is the construction of this form of consciousness; that is, the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not.

2a. To be constituted by another's desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the labourer from his product.

2b. ... Feminists' consciousness of the non-existence of women, except as products of men's desires.

On the Q. of agency, I'm not sure that I follow Benhabib's characterization of the cross-purposes (initially mistyped 'cross-porpoises') at which she locates postmodern and feminist theory. Or, to put it another way, I'm not sure that I buy into her account of postmodern nonagency, which seems - to me, anyway- at least a little reductive.

I am very interested in Haraway's call for a reconstitution of the ways in which we organize ourselves as an act of political transgression - and moreover, recentering of the marginalized in postmodern space. Haraway encourages us to name the fictionalization of the 'identities' to which we currently cling as our social markers, then to move past these constructed delineations. In calling for an oppositional unity constituted by "affinity, not identity" (p. 154), she is asking us to reposition ourselves against history, to bring forward that which has been systemically neglected.

Morefuntocompute and I are presenting on Monday, and we were hoping to start an online discussion about these readings that can be carried over to class. It may very well fail. (Read more.)