Spivak on French feminism.

My two grandfathers died in their fifties and thus my grandmothers lived as widows for three decades. Something similar was the case with my mother's maternal grandmother. On balance they lived full lives- perhaps somewhat fuller lives than if they'd had to look after hubby. Thus I was puzzled to find that Gayatri Spivak, who is some twenty years older than me, writing as follows- 

"The woman as widow, by the general law of sacred doctrine, must regress to an anteriority transformed into stasis."

But since girlhood is 'anterior' to womanhood and since being a baby is anterior to being a girl, this means that the widow, by sacred doctrine, must first turn into a carefree little girl before attaining 'stasis' as a baby.  

In other words, the widow's lot was stagnation and a terrible feeling of self-hate.

Plenty of people stagnate and hate themselves. I suppose a widow who loses all means of economic sustenance may feel very unhappy with her lot. But, if this isn't the case, there are a lot of things she can do to occupy her time.  Spivak's own mother spent almost five decades as a widow. By her daughter's account, she got plenty out of life and gave back much more. 

This is not to say that widowhood was considered a blessing. The truth is, the widow was inauspicious unless she had sons in which case she was likely to be the matriarch of the family. Indira Gandhi wasn't exactly a shy and retiring lady. Moreover, since men tended to die before women, it was more likely than not that a wife who had survived child-birth would spend some portion of her life as a widow. 

Is there some hidden, psychological, reason that Spivak has a horror of widowhood and a fascination with 'suttee'? 

Consider the following anecdote from 'French Feminism in an International Frame' (which can be briefly summarized by saying the thing was retarded. French women only got the vote in 1945 some 14 years after Ceylonese women did).

I am walking alone in my grandfather's estate on the Bihar-Bengal border one winter afternoon in 1949. Two ancient washerwomen are washing clothes in the river, beating the clothes on the stones. One accuses the other of poaching on her part of the river.

Spivak means that one of them has usurped a spot normally used by the other. Neither was 'poaching'. They were washing clothes, not fishing.  

I can still hear the cracked derisive voice of the one accused: "You fool! Is this your river? The river belongs to the Company!"- the East India Company, from whom India passed to England by the Act for the Better Government of India (1858); England had transferred its charge to an Indian Governor-General in 1947.

Mountbatten was White and remained as Governor-General till 1948.  

India would become an independent republic in 1950.

It was previously an independent dominion.  

For these withered women, the land as soil and water to be used

this was also the case for the land-lord. 

rather than a map to be learned

a map does not contain any water or sand. Only kids in school need to 'learn maps'. 

still belonged, as it did one hundred and nineteen years before that date, to the East India Company.

Nonsense! The Company did not claim ownership of anything. It merely held the 'Diwani' or right to collect taxes. In India, ponds or tanks may be privately owned. Rivers are not. 

I was precocious enough to know that the remark was incorrect.

Even if these women really used the word 'Company' rather than 'Sarkar' the remark was correct enough. The dhobin who complained didn't own the river. The other lady was being witty. It is possible that there were stories still current about the fabulous wealth accumulated by those who worked for 'John Company'- e.g. the Tagores. The joke here is that a simple washer-woman is giving herself the airs and graces of a 'Nabob'. 

It has taken me thirty-one years and the experience of confronting a nearly inarticulable question to apprehend that their facts were wrong but the fact was right. The Company does still own the land.

No. The Government may have the right to tax owners of land or to impose conditions on its usage.  

I should not consequently patronize and romanticize these women, nor yet entertain a nostalgia for being as they are.

Spivak should not dream of becoming a washer-woman. Why not aim to become a fish?  

The academic feminist must learn to learn from them, to speak to them, to suspect that their access to the political and sexual scene is not merely to be corrected by our superior theory and enlightened compassion.

Why? What good can the academic feminist do to dhobins or vice versa?  

Is our insistence upon the especial beauty of the old necessarily to be preferred to a careless acknowledgment of the mutability of sexuality?

 Old women frequently turn into gay young men. Sexuality is terribly mutable- right? 

What of the fact that my distance from those two was, however micrologically you defined class, class-determined and determining?

No. It was biologically defined. Spivak wasn't related to either. Moreover, even if she had turned into an elderly gay man, she would have heard the same thing. 

How, then, can one learn from and speak to the millions of illiterate rural and urban Indian women who live "in the pores of" capitalism,

India was Socialist, not Capitalist, when she wrote this.  

inaccessible to the capitalist dynamics that allow us our shared channels of communication, the definition of common enemies?

Capitalist dynamics are not required for this. In India plenty of women- including the then Prime Minister- would talk to those elderly women so as to solicit their votes.  

The pioneering books that bring First World feminists news from the Third World are written by privileged informants and can only be deciphered by a trained readership.

There were no such books then or now. Spivak began her essay by mentioning a Sudanese feminist who was highlighting the especially horrific type of clitoridectomy performed in her country. What would have been helpful would have been fatwas from leading Maliki jurists acquainted with relevant medical research. Sadly, this was easier said than done and the prevalence of FGM in Sudan is still about four times as high as in Saudi Arabia.  

The distance between "the informant's world," her "own sense of the world she writes about," and that of the non-specialist feminist is so great that, paradoxically, pace the subtleties of reader-response theories, here the distinctions might easily be missed.

This is certainly true of Spivak who did not understand that when her great-aunt hanged herself while menstruating, it was to protest her father's decision not to get her married as custom required. Spivak pretended the girl was actually part of a terrorist cell and that she 'performed an act of resistance without an infrastructure that would make [society] recognise resistance'. In other words, she decided to hang herself so as to resist the temptation to assassinate the Viceroy, defeat the Imperial Army, and proclaim a Socialist Republic. Sadly, nobody recognized this was the case because Anglo-Bengali Feminist theory had not yet developed an infrastructure which could correctly identify menstrual blood as signifying resistance to the impulse to inflict defeat upon the Royal Navy and place a nice washer-woman on the throne of Engyland. 

It is certainly true that stupid Western academics can write stupid shite about foreign countries (Spivak mentions Kristeva's crazy book about Chinese women) but stupid Bengali academics can always beat them at their own game. The joke is that Mamta Bannerjee, who is ten years younger than Spivak, had already begun her ascent when this was written. 

As soon as one steps out of the classroom,

one gets a proper job and starts to become a grown-up 

if indeed a "teacher" ever fully can,

they can concentrate on doing the job they are paid to do rather than pretending to be engaged in some sort of revolutionary politics.  

the dangers rather than the benefits of academic feminism, French or otherwise, become more insistent.

There is no great danger in boring stupid shit.  

Institutional changes against sexism here or in France may mean nothing or, indirectly, further harm for women in the Third World.

What harmed women in the Third World also harmed men there. This had to do with low productivity and agricultural involution of a Malthusian sort.  

This discontinuity ought to be recognized and worked at.

No. The thing didn't matter in the slightest. So what if Kristeva had shit for brains?  

Otherwise, the focus remains defined by the investigator as subject. To bring us back to my initial concerns, let me insist that here, the difference between "French" and "Anglo-American" feminism is superficial.

Nope. Anglo-American feminism played a vanguard role- e.g. that of Annie Beasant in the British Trade Union movement and then later as the head of the Home Rule League in India. The French were playing catch-up. One consequence of women getting the vote was that legal prostitution was done away with.  

However unfeasible and inefficient it may sound, 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?

This doesn't matter in the slightest. Who am I? has to do with figuring out your own capabilities and preferences and making a success of your life. By showing what can be done, others similar to you or those with similar aspirations have a 'mimetic model' or else can simply say 'Look, so and so has done this and that means I can too.' Thus if people can see successful female Prime Ministers in Israel, Sri Lanka and India, then people start to ask why their own country should not have a female head of Government.  

How am I naming her?

This question shows a childish mentality. 'Magical thinking' assumes that knowing the name of a demon gives you power over that demon. But there are no demons.  

How does she name me? Is this part of the problematic I discuss?

No. Spivak is merely saying 'White women are horrible. I'm not White and thus everybody should listen to me because of suttee, thugee and agarbatti.'  

Indeed, it is the absence of such unfeasible but crucial questions that makes the "colonized woman" as "subject"

sadly there were no 'colonized women' anywhere and thus these 'crucial questions' were utterly foolish.  

see the investigators as sweet and sympathetic creatures from another planet who are free to come and go;

they may indeed have been 'sweet and sympathetic'. Also they might lend you some money.  

or, depending on her own socialization in the colonizing cultures, see "feminism" as having a vanguardist class fix, the liberties it fights for as luxuries, finally identifiable with "free sex" of one kind or another. Wrong, of course. My point has been that there is something equally wrong in our most sophisticated research, our most benevolent impulses.

But 'academic feminists' have no fucking power. Their research and their impulses didn't matter in the slightest. In a footnote, Spivak explains ' 'To take the simplest possible American examples, even such innocent triumphs as the hiring of more tenured women or adding feminist sessions at a Convention might lead, since most U.S. universities have dubious investments, and most Convention hotels use Third World female labor in a most oppressive way, to the increasing proletarianization of the women of the less developed countries'. I suppose Spivak was 'proletarianized' by the US academy. So was Kamala Harris's mother but she was doing a type of research from which all women benefited. 

Male and female sexuality are asymmetrical.

No. What is asymmetric is 'reproductive investment'. Women invest more in birthing and raising an infant and thus are more choosy. Furthermore, if women can control fertility there may be an 'externality' such that it is in the interest of the State- or Society at large- to subsidize young mothers. There is nothing wrong is using econometrics to make policy recommendations in this regard.  

Male orgasmic pleasure "normally" entails the male reproductive act-semination.

Men wank a lot. That's perfectly normal.  

Female orgasmic pleasure

may involve wanking 

(it is not, of course, the "same" pleasure, only called by the same name) does not entail any one component of the heterogeneous female reproductive scenario: ovulation, fertilization, conception, gestation, birthing.

It is believed that orgasms are good for all these things.  

The clitoris escapes reproductive framing.

No more so than the penis.  

In legally defining woman as object of exchange, passage, or possession in terms of reproduction,

there has never been any such 'legal definition'.  

it is not only the womb that is literally "appropriated";

It isn't appropriated at all. I was not handed my wife's womb by the Registrar who officiated at my Wedding.  

it is the clitoris as the signifier of the sexed subject that is effaced.

I can assure you, it wasn't at all. Pussies demand to be petted.  

All historical and theoretical investigation into the definition of woman as legal object-in or out of marriage;

are crap. Where women could be owned as property, men too could be owned. If vaginas were appropriated so were the rectums of rent-boys.  

or as politico-economic passageway for property and legitimacy would fall within the investigation of the varieties of the effacement of the clitoris.

I suppose catamites complained that their penises were being effaced- unless they received a reach-around.  

Psychological investigation in this area cannot only confine itself to the effect of clitoridectomy on women.

Or castration on men. It has been suggested that male circumcision reduces male sexual pleasure. I don't believe this is true.  

It would also ask why and show how, since an at least symbolic clitoridectomy has always been the "normal" accession to womanhood

not for Hindus or European Christians. 

and the unacknowledged name of motherhood,

Motherhood is acknowledged by our calling Mummy, Mummy.  

it might be necessary to plot out the entire geography of female sexuality in terms of the imagined possibility of the dismemberment of the phallus.

Necessary to whom? Lorena Bobbitt?  

The arena of research here is not merely remote and primitive societies; the (sex) objectification of women

or men. Homos like looking at naked dudes. So do some women.  

by the elaborate attention to their skin and fagade as represented by the immense complexity of the cosmetics, underwear, clothes,

Men don't wear underwear or clothes. Aftershave does not exist.  

advertisement, women's magazine, and pornography networks, the double standard in the criteria of men's and women's aging;

What fucking double standard? Try being a fat, balding, middle-aged man.  

the public versus private dimensions of menopause as opposed to impotence,

Menopausal women are named and shamed. They are forced to dress in sackcloth and ashes. Nobody makes fun of an impotent man. Nor do women ever suggest you have a tiny dick. 

are all questions within this circuit. The pre-comprehended suppression or effacement of the clitoris relates to every move to define woman as sex object,

rather than an item of furniture. Did you know Vance fucks his sofa? That's because it was once a Muslim woman from Iran. This shows he is in the pay of the Ayatollahs.  

or as means or agent of reproduction- with no recourse to a subject-function except in terms of those definitions or as "imitators" of men.

Very true. Ladies giving birth are felt to be imitating Donald Trump.  

The woman's voice as Mother or Lover or Androgyne has sometimes been caught by great male writers.

But they habitually chopped up their Mummies or Wives or Mistresses and turned them into pieces of furniture.  

The theme of woman's norm as clitorally ex-centric from the reproductive orbit is being developed at present in our esoteric French group and in the literature of the gay movement.

Some Sudanese lady Sociologist, attached to a Saudi Arabian university,  told Spivak that she had written a 'structural functionist' dissertation on FGM in her country. I suppose she was part and parcel of a generation who hoped charismatic theologians like Al-Turabi could use their influence to get rid of superstitious customs while preserving social cohesion and solidarity. Sadly, getting rid of Nimeiry or the coup of 1989 was not able to achieve all that had been hoped for. Still, it is bizarre that Spivak got it into her head that some intellectuals were interested in clits and this might cause the East India Company to take away rivers from elderly washerwomen. 

But Structural Functionalism? Where "integration" is "social control [which] defines and enforces ... a degree of solidarity"?

Structural functionalism is 'a framework for building theory that sees society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability'. The Sudanese lady was showing that the aim of the existing system could be better achieved without causing so much suffering to women. This was a few years before the ruling Socialist party (which imposed Sharia law in 1983) was overthrown. Women hoped that a rational interpretation of Islamic law would improve their lot. 

Where "interaction, seen from the side of the economy," is defined as "consist[ing] of the supply of income and wealth applied to purposes strengthening the persistence of cultural patterns?"

I suppose Spivak had got it into her head that Talcott Parsons was a Fascist.  

1Structural functionalism takes a "disinterested" stance on society as functioning structure. Its implicit interest is to applaud a system-in this case sexual-because it functions.

It should have applauded anarchy.  

A description such as the one below makes it difficult to credit that this young Sudanese woman had taken such an approach to clitoridectomy: 

'In Egypt it is only the clitoris which is amputated, and usually not completely. But in the Sudan, the operation consists in the complete removal of all the external genital organs. They cut off the clitoris, the two major outer lips (labia majora) and the two minor inner lips (labia minora). Then the wound is repaired. The outer opening of the vagina is the only portion left intact, not however without having ensured that, during the process of repairing, some narrowing of the opening is carried out with a few extra stitches. The result is that on the marriage night it is necessary to widen the external opening by slitting one or both ends with a sharp scalpel or razor so that the male organ can be introduced.'

So, this Sociologist at a Saudi university was hoping for piecemeal reform. First adopt a milder form of the thing and then get rid of it entirely. 

In my Sudanese colleague's research I found an allegory of my own ideological victimage:

In Bengal, women were forced to remove their brains and hand them over to the East India Company.  

The "choice" of English Honors by an upper-class young woman in the Calcutta of the fifties was itself highly overdetermined.

East India Company owned all the rivers. Since Calcutta has a river, it followed that East India Company could force Spivak to 'choose' English Honors rather than a degree in something useful.  

Becoming a professor of English in the U.S. fitted in with the "brain drain."

No. Spivak borrowed the money to get her to the US. Also, East India Company had already confiscated her brain.  

In due course, a commitment to feminism was the best of a collection of accessible scenarios.

Because she didn't have a dick. Also, because Indians were classed as 'Caucasian' at that time (which is why Kamala Harris's mother is described as such in her birth certificate) Spivak couldn't claim to be Black. (I should explain, back then 'Indian' meant people from the First nations. Spivak wasn't trying to pass herself off as Pocahontas.)  

The morphology of a feminist theoretical practice came clear through Jacques Derrida's critique of phallocentrism

Derrida wasn't happy that Foucault centered so much of his attention on his Jewish dick. 

and Luce Irigaray's reading of Freud.

he had a dick. He didn't understand women though, to be fair, he also didn't understand the men he swindled.  

(The stumbling "choice" of French avant-garde criticism by an undistinguished Ivy League Ph.D. working in the Midwest is itself not without ideology-critical interest.)

No. It is wholly without interest of any kind. People doing PhDs in worthless shite take an interest in stupid shite produced by French nutters because there was a time when the Americans thought Paris was the cat's whiskers.  

Predictably, I began by identifying the "female academic"

who was an academic and didn't have a dick. Spivak spent a lot of time lifting up the skirts of her colleagues and identifying them as female.  

and feminism as such. Gradually I found that there was indeed an area of feminist scholarship in the U.S. that was called "International Feminism:" the arena usually defined as feminism in England, France, West Germany, Italy, and that part of the Third World most easily accessible to American interests: Latin America.

Actually, American female medical missionaries had done a lot to raise awareness of the problems of women in Islamic countries as well as in China. The Christian influenced Taiping rebellion had banned foot-binding, but after its suppression, Christian missionaries played a big role in promoting this cause. I may mention Mary Porter Gamewell, an unmarried American, who opened a Methodist school in China in 1872.  

When one attempted to think of so-called Third World women in a broader scope, one found oneself caught, as my Sudanese colleague was caught and held by Structural Functionalism, in a web of information retrieval inspired at best by: "what can I do for them?"

The answer in Spivak's case was 'nothing. You have shit for brains.' 

I emphasize discontinuity, heterogeneity, and typology as I speak of such a sex-analysis,

one predicated on the notion that the clitoris is 'effaced' in the family though Daddy roams around with his dick out. Also he often chops pieces off his wives and daughters and turns them into furniture.  

because this work cannot by itself obliterate the problems of race and class.

It can't do shit. It is useless.  

It will not necessarily escape the inbuilt colonialism of First World feminism toward the Third.

There is no such colonialism. Annie Beasant was a First World feminist. She headed India's Home Rule League.  

It might, one hopes, promote a sense of our common yet history-specific lot. It ties together the terrified child held down by her grandmother as the blood runs down her groin

her legs. It is her groin which is being cut up.  

and the "liberated" heterosexual woman who, in spite of Mary Jane Sherfey and the famous page 53 of Our Bodies, Ourselves, in bed with a casual lover-engaged, in other words, in the "freest" of "free" activities-confronts, at worst, the "shame" of admitting to the "abnormality" of her orgasm: at best, the acceptance of such a "special" need;

Some women have multiple orgasms. Good for them.  

and the radical feminist who, setting herself apart from the circle of reproduction, systematically discloses the beauty of the lesbian body;

lots of men like lesbian porn. Apparently many women are turned on by two dudes going at it.  

the dowried bride-a body for burning-and the female wage-slave-a body for maximum exploitation.

Spivak received a wage. She was terribly exploited.  

There can be other lists; and each one will straddle and undo the ideological-material opposition.

Or it may just soil itself while trying to bite off its own head.  

For me it is the best gift of French feminism,

which had to do with the fact that lots of French females have to teach philosophy in High Schools. They don't like this and want to escape.  

that it cannot itself fully acknowledge,

viz that it is shit 

and that we must work at;

by soiling ourselves while trying to bite off our own heads 

here is a theme that can liberate my colleague from Sudan,

No. She was a sensible woman. It appears, from what I can gather, that female circumcision would be judged 'makruh' (ennobling though not obligatory) but this is a matter for scholars. Still, the fact is that many Saudi families have given up the custom. Still, one may argue that Saudi Arabia is a rich country which can do much to safeguard women whereas poorer countries may not be able to copy them in every way. No doubt Sudanese people know better than me how to safeguard their own daughters. But this would have nothing to do with crazy French academics teaching worthless shite.  

and a theme the old washerwomen by the river would understand.

They would understand that 'Company' has confiscated Spivak's brain. Mamta, on the other hand, established Lakshmir Bhandar and other cash transfer schemes for poor women and thus keeps winning elections.