Feminism(s) Terms

Question 1

Other

Answer 1

(Beauvoir)
There is a duality of Self and Other. The Other is considered such when the One defines himself as the One. Woman is the Other, subordinated my man and alienated from herself.

Question 2

concrete situation (experience vecu)

Answer 2

(Beauvoir)
Social discriminations against women cause moral and intellectual effects so powerful that they appear natural. Men can never truly comprehend woman’s concrete situation.

Question 3

liberty

Answer 3

(Beauvoir)
Woman has always been man’s dependent, as if from a lower caste. But to decline to be the Other would mean to reject all advantages that come from allying with the superior caste of men.
Woman “has the power to between the assertion of her transcendence and her alienation as object” (50).

Question 4

female imaginary

Answer 4

(Irigaray)
It is a repressed entity. Woman has plural sexuality, finding pleasure almost everywhere. These pleasures “are somewhat misunderstood in sexual difference as it is imagined–or not imagined, the other sex being only the indispensable complement to the only sex” (This Sex 28).

Question 5

nearness

Answer 5

(Irigaray)
“Woman derives pleasure from what is so near that she cannot have it, nor have herself. She herself enters into a ceaseless exchange of herself with the other without any possibility of identifying either” (This Sex 31).

Question 6

hom(m)osexual monopoly

Answer 6

(Irigaray)
“The law that orders our society is the exclusive valorization of men’s needs/desires, of exchanges among men” (This Sex 171).

Question 7

pure phenomenality of value

Answer 7

(Irigaray)
“In order to become equivalent, a commodity changes bodies. A super-natural, metaphysical origin is substituted for its material origin. Thus its body becomes a transparent body, pure phenomenality of value” (This Sex 179).

Question 8

le toute feminine

Answer 8

(Irigaray)
The feminine “all.” The total movement of woman’s body.
“Our depth is the density of
our body, in touch “all” over. There is no above/below, back/front, right
side/wrong side, top/bottom in isolation, separate, out of touch” (Lips 75).

Question 9

language

Answer 9

(Irigaray)
Women must invent their own language. “Let’s quickly invent our own phrases, so that everywhere and always,
we continue to embrace” (Lips 76).

Question 10

sex/gender system

Answer 10

(Rubin)
All societies have systematic ways to deal with sex, gender, and babies. “Sex/gender system, on the other hand, is a neutral term which refers to the domain and indicates that oppression is not inevitable in that domain, but is the product of the specific social relations which organize it” (168).

Question 11

traffic in women

Answer 11

(Rubin)
Women have always been exchanged. This idea of trafficking, or exchanging, women defines this as social rather than biological.

Question 12

revolution in kinship

Answer 12

(Rubin)
“Cultural evolution provides us with the opportunity to seize control of the means of sexuality, reproduction, and socialization, and to make conscious decisions to liberate human sexual life from the archaic relationships which deform it. Ultimately, a thoroughgoing feminist revolution would liberate more than women. It would liberate forms of sexual expression, and would liberate human personality from the straight jacket of gender.”

Question 13

l’ecriture feminine

Answer 13

(Cixous)
“feminine writing” or women’s writing.
Using Lacan’s ideas that the structure of language is centered by the Phallus, and that language within the Symbolic Order is representational, where a single signifier is connected to a single signified, Cixous argues that the subject position of “woman” or the “feminine” is on the margins of the Symbolic, and thus less firmly anchored and controlled by the Phallus.
Comes from idea that women are incomprehensible, like when Freud defines women as “the dark continent”

Question 14

to unthink

Answer 14

(Cixous)
“As subject for history, woman always
occurs simultaneously in several places. Woman un-thinks the unifying, regulating history that homogenizes and channels forces, herding contradictions into a single battlefield” (882).

Question 15

desire

Answer 15

(Cixous)
For Cixous, there is feminine, other desire. Cixous writes that when woman is rejected to become the other, she is objectified to become ”the principle of consistency… everyday and eternal”, that makes the ”I” possible.

Question 16

other love

Answer 16

(Cixous)

Question 17

time

Answer 17

(Kristeva)
Woman is generally not attributed to time but to space. As for time, female subjectivity is especially linked to two types of time: monumental time (myths of resurrection) and clinical time/natural time (cycles, gestation, biological rhythm). These are set against linear history, where feminists sought to gain a place.

Question 18

logic of identification

Answer 18

(Kristeva)

In the imaginary realm, the child begins to negate the mother and identify with the imaginary father.

Question 19

sexual difference

Answer 19

(Kristeva)

Question 20

jouissance

Answer 20

(Kristeva)
Enjoyment, pleasure.
The maternal body locates its jouissance in femininity and maternity itself.

Question 21

pregnancy

Answer 21

(Kristeva)
Pregnancy and childbirth can be experienced as a reunion with one’s own mother. By giving birth, the woman enters into contact with her mother; she becomes, she is her own mother; they are the same continuity differentiating itself.