Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Terry Threadgold, Anne Cranny-Francis, Terry Threadgold, Anne Cranny-Francis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000257076
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Feminine/Masculine and Representation provides a much needed introduction to a number of challenging issues raised in debates within gender studies, critical theory and cultural studies. In analysing cultural processes using a range of different methods, the essays in this collection focus on gender/sexuality, representation and cultural politics across a variety of media.

1
Introduction

Terry Threadgold

Reversing dichotomies ond the semiotics of the Lie

It occurs to me that when we formulated the title of this book in 1986, when we reversed the dichotomy masculine/feminine, when we put the feminine in front, on top of the bar, we were suggesting that the masculine might be defined in terms of the feminine, instead of the usual phallocentric definition of the feminine always in terms of the masculine, the other, what she is not. We were trying to make the taken-for-granted nature of the usual dichotomy visible, legible.

We also did something counterproductive. We merely reversed the terms, leaving the dichotomy, the opposition, potentially intact: we did not necessarily redefine the two terms in their specificity and their difference, their autonomy. Nor did we suggest that there might be more than two terms to be considered, that this binarism might be a quite arbitrary division into two of what is actually a continuum. Such are the dangers of speaking, meaning, writing, inside phallocentrism. Phallocentrism, located in all our dominant malestream Western ways of thinking and talking about and making our world, is a discursive and representational construction of that world in binary terms such that one term is always regarded as the norm and highly valorised, while the other is defined only ever in relation to it and devalorised. Thus: masculine/feminine, rational/irrational, active/passive and so on.

If we start with one of the dichotomies which structure phallocentrism then we are always already in a double bind. We can either reverse it or try to neutralise its effects or insist that the two terms are independent. What we cannot do it seems is to free ourselves from its implications—in this case, that there are just two things, masculinity and femininity, and that they exist in some kind of relationship. Somehow we have to try to start somewhere else, to speak, mean and write outside these limitations on what can (is possible/is allowed to) be spoken, meant and written. That is one of the things that many of the contributors to this book are trying to do.

In constructing feminine/masculine as a reversal, however, we remained inside the relationship the dichotomy implies. And as well we told a lie … the kind of lie that representation always is. Representation—making something appear, to stand for something else, which exists—is real. But does it, is it? What we can say of representation we can also say of signs. ‘Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything that can be significantly taken as substituting for something else’ (Eco, 1976:7). This something else does not actually have to exist and it does not have to exist in the way in which it is represented as existing. Representation is always a process of signification, of semiosis, of meaning-making, but, like the sign, representations (which in fact are signs) can be ‘taken’ as referring to something else, something ‘real’, outside signification, something which was not made but is. This is how a process of construction, of making meaning, comes to be interpreted as reference, referring to something that already exists. It is how representations come to be taken as realities. It is the very problem that Carole Pateman (1988) is struggling with when she argues for the need to understand how it is that slavery has come to be interpreted as freedom in Western civil and capitalist societies.

Semiotics aims to understand this thing that is called representation. This is why Eco (1976:7) defines semiotics as the ‘discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie’. The paradox of the ‘lie’ is that once structured it may be read as, and thus become, a new ‘reality’. The construction of the world and the making of meaning go hand in hand.

It is important to realise that this talk of ‘lies’, and the whole knotty problem of the relationship between representation and what we think of as reality, is not the old marxist false-consciousness argument in a new guise. There is no sense of semiotics as a ‘science’ or master knowledge which can somehow get at the ‘truth’ ‘behind’ other people’s lies. All representations, including semiotics itself, that is including theories and knowledges, are ‘lies’ in this sense of constructions, fictions. Some writers actually use the terms narrative or story to talk about representations. Thus Lyotard (1984) spoke of the great cultural narratives of marxism and psychoanalysis, Carolyn Steedman (1986) wrote of the ‘stories’ (that is, the other constructions) of women’s lives that cannot be told within those narratives, and Carole Pateman analyses the ‘stories’ of the social contract that circulate in social and political theory. There is no single ‘truth’, only different constructions, different representations, some of which are read as ‘fact’, some as ‘fiction’, depending on the way they are functionally contextualised and by whom and in whose interests.

What we have is a world constructed in and through discourse, meaning and representation, and the people in that world are constructed in the same way. The semiotic and psychoanalytic and post-structuralist and now feminist story that rewrites the liberal humanist and capitalist narrative of individualism sees subjectivities, too, as a function of their discursive and bodily histories in a signifying network of meaning and representation. This means, among other things, that there is no way for those subjects ever to be outside that network as ‘objective observers’. The ‘knowing’ subject of ‘science’ is no longer one of the characters in these new stories. In them subjectivities are always inside and sometimes struggling to be also outside the signifying processes and practices of/in which they speak.

That is a paradox about which Teresa de Lauretis has much more to say (1987:24–26), and there are many things in the above that require further definition and explanation. But these are the issues that this book and the voices to be heard within it are debating and constructing as they speak, for, to quote Eco again (1976:29) one cannot speak about the way people speak and mean without affecting, sometimes perpetuating and sometimes changing, the way they do it. The explanations will evolve as they, and I, attempt to grapple with the problems.

I want to carry on a little longer about this business of representation and reality. We need to talk more too, about this ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, this positioning of subjects who speak/write and hear/read. These are, it seems to me, some of the singly most difficult concepts for those who are ‘outside’ semiotic and post-structuralist debates to come to terms with. They are difficult because they run counter to all our commonsense knowledge on the subject, and often, as Tagg (1988) has shown with respect to Roland Barthes, counter to our most profound personal desires.

Let me return to the issue I was discussing above—that of making meanings and then taking the meanings one has made to be reality. When semioticians, post-structuralists, or feminists (and they have much in common with respect to these issues) declare that there are no ‘facts’, that there is no one single ‘truth’, no ‘reality’ that has not been constructed, the commonsense response tends to be in the order of ‘stub your toe on that brick and you’ll know about reality’ or ‘if you’re poor and hungry you know what reality is’. And, as I will argue later, these responses are not so far removed from the theoretical responses that one finds in the ‘hard’ and even social sciences to the kinds of questions I am dealing with here. They are responses that take the form of constructing dichotomies, setting up oppositions, between theory or metalanguage and the ‘real issues’ of politics and class, or between ideology (usually now in the sense of systems of knowledge or belief, but still related to consciousness) and ‘real’ structures like the economy, government and so on. These are realisations of oppositions that are still more fundamental to phallocentric discourses such as fact/fiction, mind/body, material/immaterial. There are many things happening here, but among these the continuing effects in the discourses of these sciences of the representation/reality problem and of the tendency for meaning-effects to be discounted as irrelevant are paramount.

The problem is that no one takes language, or rather semiosis, the processes by which meanings are made in a social system, seriously. This is hardly surprising. Our entire educational process, and the institutions of mainstream linguistics (see Poynton this volume) and philosophy continue to foster and perpetuate a view of language that is ‘realist’, ‘referential’ and ‘malestream’ (Pateman and Gross: 1986). It is a view of language that continues to argue, against all the evidence to the contrary (see Robyn Rowland 1988:chs 1, 2 for a discussion of similar persistences of malestream knowledges, in the face of all the evidence, in biology and science) that meanings inhere in words, that there is a ‘true’ meaning to be recovered from language, that language is a container for meanings which it transmits un-problematically from sender to receiver (and of course sender and receiver are universal, unsexed, ungendered, male?) Language ‘refers’ to a reality which pre-exists it. People take no part in all of this. Such are some of the dominant metaphors (Reddy: 1979). Little wonder that we think we ought to be simply able to ‘say what we mean’ or that we believe ‘we know what we mean’ or that we think we are ‘in control’ of the meaning process.

The issues are extremely complex and to some extent require a massive deconstruction of the whole malestream linguisitic edifice, something semiotics and post-structuralism and psychoanalysis have been doing for the last twenty years or so, but that is in some ways much more effectively done from within linguistics, as Poynton’s chapter in this volume demonstrates. That whole long labour cannot be repeated in the space of this introduction, and it has to be said that the institutional edifice of malestream linguistics shows hardly a crack as a result of this concerted onslaught, but it is something that all of us who work with the questions and debates that centre around sex/gender and representation need to be familiar with. I have written at length about these questions elsewhere (Threadgold 1987a, 1987b, 1988a). Suffice to say for the moment that what is at issue here can be viewed metaphorically as a problem of labour and forgetfulness. Rossi-Landi (1973:6ff.) locates the problem in the product/process (or system/use) dichotomy which permeates product- or system-oriented work in the social sciences (and is in fact constructed in and through that work). Cate Poynton (this volume) gives an account of the effects that the product/system, process/use binarism has had in the construction of contemporary mainstream linguistics. Speaking subjects who labour to make meaning inevitably change the system as they work: once the meanings are made they are viewed as ‘products’ and the processes by which they were produced are forgotten. It is at that point that the ‘product’, which in this case we might characterise as the representations we have been talking about, ‘takes on a sort of apparently autonomous, monstrous life of its own’ (Rossi-Landi, 1973:62) and is capable of subordinating ‘the capital constituted by the linguistic workers, the speakers, to itself, so that all individuals are, as it were, spoken by it’.

That is, what makes it hard for us to see that the truth-effects of signifying practices are lies, in the sense outlined above, is the fact that the labour of making meanings is forgotten. Meanings are made but they are also reified, ‘used’, ‘consumed’ and internalised (or resisted) by speaking subjects. This happens in ways that contribute to the social production of consciousness, and of self-consciousness, and of those commonsense ways of knowing and believing and experiencing that are the very stuff of the transparency and inevitability of representations. Even Roland Barthes, who spent most of his writerly life deconstructing them, was not immune to these truth-effects, as John Tagg has shown (1988:1–3). The example is helpful in many ways, not least because it involves the question of desire. Tagg explains how in Camera Lucida Barthes ‘leaves us with a poignant reassertion of the realist position’, asserting a retrospective photographic realism—the camera is an instrument of evidence—in the face of his mother’s death, and his search for a ‘just image’ of her (Barthes 1981:70). For Barthes what the photograph asserts is the undeniable truth that ‘the thing has been there’. It may be a reality one can no longer touch, but it is a reality that once existed (Barthes 1981:76, 87). With the personal and very private grief and desire this anecdote expresses we will none of us have any difficulty in identifying. But it raises again all the questions of semiosis, the lie, signification and representation that I discussed above in relation to language. Indeed what was said about language as semiosis needs to be said of all semiotic processes in whatever material medium they may be realised.

Thus, to quote Tagg again: ‘I need not point out, of course, that the existence of a photograph is no guarantee of a corresponding pre-photographic existent’, and later: ‘we have to see that every photograph is the result of specific, and, in every sense, significant distortions which render its relation to any prior reality deeply problematic and raise the question of the determining level of the material apparatus and the social practices within which photography takes place’ (p.2) and finally: ‘The indexical nature of the photograph—the causative link between the pre-photographic referent and the sign—is therefore highly complex, irreversible, and can guarantee nothing at the level of meaning. What makes the link is a discriminatory technical, cultural and historical process in which particular optical and chemical devices are set to work to organise experience and desire and to produce a new reality—the paper image which, through yet further processes, may become meaningful in all sorts of ways.’ (p.3).

It is in this sense that semioticians and others argue that there is no reality unmediated by semiotic processes. The photograph, as produced (by a labouring subject of semiosis), is not the simple reflection of a prior reality, but a new and specific reality, a two-dimensional, positive paper print from a granular, chemical discolouration on a translucent negative. This new reality is capable of becoming meaningful in certain contexts and has real effects (viz. Barthes) but because of its history as process it cannot refer to a pre-photographic reality as truth. The photograph ‘cannot deliver what Barthes desires … the repossession of his mother’s body’ (Tagg, 1988:3).

As for photography, so for language and all other forms of representation …

To return to Rossi-Landi’s monster, it is not, as Rosalind Coward (1984) explained some time ago, a question of simply seeing women (or indeed men) as being attacked, ‘oppressed’ from outside, as it were, by practices of representation. The problem is deeper than that. It is the problem that Wendy Hollway (1984:227ff.) was attempting to deal with, the problem of the investments that subjects have in complying with practices of representation, or, as Coward asks, ‘what is the lure in the heart of these discourses which causes us to take up and inhabit the female position?’ (1985:29). Of course, we do not have to, we can resist, but we can never quite escape the phallocentric libidinal economy of discursive and representational practices within which our sexed identities, our subjectivities, have been and go on being constructed. As Teresa de Lauretis argues (1987:10) the subject of feminism, and we could say also the subject of femmeninism (a term used by Kamuf, 1987 to describe the role of men in feminism), is a theoretical construct whose definition is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The problematic of ‘the feminine’ in contemporary French philosophy: Foucault and Irigaray
• 3 Modernity, rationality and ‘the masculine’
• 4 Inscriptions and body-maps: representations and the corporeal
• 5 The discursive construction of Christ’s body in the later Middle Ages: resistance and autonomy
• 6 ‘The feminine’ as a semiotic construct: Zola’s Une Page d’Amour
• 7 Deconstructions of masculinity and femininity in the films of Marguerite Duras
• 8 Cross-dressing in fiction: literary history and the cultural construction of sexuality
• 9 Homosexualities: fiction, reading and moral training
• 10 Soap opera as gender training: teenage girls and TV
• 11 Gender, class and power: text, process and production in Strindberg’s Miss Julie
• 12 Scientific constructions, cultural productions: scientific narratives of sexual attraction
• 13 The privileging of representation and the marginalising of the interpersonal: a metaphor (and more) for contemporary gender relations
• Appendixes
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index