The Feminine Aporia

 

 

She represents precisely the one who is outside of the system, excluded from the system;

and, being excluded from the system, the woman represents this excess,

this break, this absolute transcendence.

 

                                                          -Jacques Derrida -

 

 

 

In his article, Gender, Daniel Boyarin develops what can be called the feminine aporia:  the irresolvable, twofold formalization of the feminine as what is either masculine or effeminate.  The woman is either masculinized into spiritually pure and intellectual male or effeminized, which  encompasses such traditional androcentric notions as ‘dependent’, ‘passive’ and ‘receptacle’ (whether for the penis or embryo).  The masculine feminine is nothing more than the masculinized woman, an Athena who, fully formed, springs forth from the head of Zeus, the patriarch; she is born from the masculine mind, the presumed ‘essence’ of the masculine itself.  In this formalization the feminine has actually become masculine, the feminine body is abandoned for the masculine mind.  The masculinized woman does not bear children and remains a virgin – the feminine is associated with the body and the masculine with the mind.  Conversely, the effeminate feminine is woman in her ‘true’ or ‘essential’ nature, she is embodied and so despiritualized and deintellectualized.  As Katherine Young in From the Phenomenology of Religion to Feminism and Women’s Studies observes, “reason and mind have been associated in Western thought with maleness and superiority, whereas body and emotion have been associated with femaleness and inferiority”(29).  The feminine is not equal to the masculine insofar as it is feminine, woman must thus masculinize herself, she must become a man, if she desires ontological and hence social, economic and political equality.       

 

I would like to explore the nature of this aporia with which Boyarin concludes his article, I would like to take his conclusion as an opening and beginning for thought.  An aporia, a ‘being pathless’, signals an opening for thought and its horizonal infinitude, it reveals the vast and rich planes of potentiality.  What does this aporia tell us about the ontology of the feminine and its potential? 

 

In The Sex Which Is Not One Luce Irigaray writes: “Whence the mystery that woman represents in a culture claiming to count everything, to number everything by units, to inventory everything as individualities.  She is neither one nor two.”  Woman is somehow mysterious, she somehow eludes the categorizing and forceful individualizing of an androcentric culture; she is not one and therefore cannot be formalized as such.  However, what makes her not one also makes her not two, since, as we’ve seen, the feminine is aporetic, it is an irresolvable twofold formalization of the masculine and the effeminate.  Yet, doesn’t a woman have to be ‘someone’, either one of the twofold either/or formalization?  Doesn’t she have to be either a masculinized or effeminate individual, doesn’t she too ultimately have to be one, even if only under the coercion of an androcentrism?  Perhaps we can reorient the question by asking ‘can woman really ever be essentially and so entirely one to the exclusion of the other of the either/or formalization?’   

 

 

  An aporia always locates itself in the realm of potentiality, which is oblivious to the forces that actualize and delimit its power.  Thus, a woman who has been masculinized in actuality is still effeminate in potentiality, the feminine intellectual is still embodied in potentia.  Herein lies the immense potentiality of the feminine aporia: the subversive mystery of woman.  Whereas man is always one, always formalized as autonomous individual under coercion of a self-created, self-imposed androcentrism, woman is two in potentia.  She can be simultaneously one and two, because the feminine functions on the level of potentiality.  Woman is multifarious, chimerical.  She cannot be formalized, categorized and controlled as easily as the man and so she becomes ‘excess’.   As Derrida says, “She represents precisely the one who is outside of the system, excluded from the system; and, being excluded from the system, the woman represents this excess, this break, this absolute transcendence.”  Woman can simultaneously be intellectual and child bearer, mind and body; more significantly, she can create both spiritually and physically, whereas man cannot.  This is why the body has been denigrated from time immemorial, why the female body and its sexuality have always been so subversive and so violently veiled.  The feminine aporia reveals that woman has the potential to be both female and male.  Herein lies the primordially subversive being of the feminine: woman is self-othering, whereas man is self-same.  Whence arises the omnipresent reality that women tend to be other oriented and men self oriented.      

 

Woman can be celibate, she can denigrate her body and become a disembodied intellectual, she too can devote herself to God and the ‘higher’ intellectual pursuits, but at any moment, at the very moment that she is the masculine feminine, she is other in potentia, she is embodied.  This ambiguous being of woman is unformalizable and therefore subversive – it can only be formalized as an aporia, as a pathless unknown, which is insufficient for and so dangerous to a reductionist and totalizing system.  Moreover, it is exactly her body and its sexuality that is the stimulus and weapon of her subversiveness and the androcentric attempt to disembody her by desexualizing and veiling her body bears witness to the potential danger she possesses.  Contrary to the dominant narrative, the androcentric attempt to pacify woman and the potential possessed by her body and its sexuality did not arise because she was conceived to be feeble, but rather because she was deemed potentially subversive and dangerous.  Woman transcends the system and therefore threatens to break it, to tear it asunder.

 

As David Kinsley relates in his article, Women’s Studies and the History of Religions, the goddess T’ien Hou is worshipped and conceived differently by women and men on the South China coast.  Whereas to men “she is primarily an establishment deity, a guardian of the status quo,” women “take no part whatsoever in the public cult” – subversive enough in itself – and see the goddess as a “maternal” character who is associated with “children”(8), which is the creation of the female body and its sexuality, the very element which is non-masculine, which transcends man.

 

Kinsley’s article offers a glimpse into how women’s studies has done in a few decades what millennia of ‘men’s studies’ could not and did not do.  Women’s studies has in only a few decades subverted millennia-old traditions, revealing the sheer potential of the woman, of the feminine aporia.  As grand as this ‘revolution’ in the academy may seem, it is quite insignificant when compared to the subversive and revolutionary potential at the core of the feminine being.  What is needed is a thorough ontology of the aporetic feminine being.  Only such an ontology can reveal the immense importance of the potential that the feminine being possesses for the movement of resistance and the creation of an ethically and politically inclusive community.      

 

As is the case with the genealogy of any ancient god or goddess, there is much variation among the surviving accounts.  Athena’s story is no exception, especially given her immense importance in Greek civilization.  One story, which I hinted at above, tells of how she was born fully formed from the head of Zeus.  However, this simplistic genesis has a subversive heritage.  Zeus was smitten with the goddess Metis, a word meaning ‘intelligence’ or ‘wisdom’, who resisted him and so was pursued and finally overtaken by the king of the gods.  While Metis was pregnant, a prophecy was related to Zeus that the child born from the union of the two gods would be greater than the great patriarch himself.  Afraid for his safety and his dominance, Zeus swallowed Metis and eventually Athena was born fully formed from his head.  She sprung forth with shield and sword in hand and came to be known as the Athena parthenos, the ‘virgin’ warrior.  By swallowing Metis, ‘intelligence’, Zeus fully masculinized the female goddess and her offspring.  Athena became the virgin goddess of craft, wisdom and war and so there remained in her little trace of the feminine.  This myth reveals that the masculine violently suppressed and conquered the feminine so as to maintain its own dominance, to secure the patriarchy; that the feminine was masculinized so as to be formalized and appropriated within the system.  Yet, Athena’s genealogy also reveals that the mind and the body, intelligence and sexuality were once unified in the feminine, embodied in Metis.  We are offered an opening here through which the mind and body, intelligence and the ethical, self and other may be thought in community in the being of the feminine, in woman.  The subversive potential of the feminine, of woman, is the path through this opening.                      

 

    

 

Once there was the Great Matriarchy, the history of peoples flowed

as simply as that of plants.  Then the conceit of the drones:

a rebellion, and we had civilization.

 

                                                 – Italo Calvino -

 

~ by Babak on October 12, 2008.