Over the past few years, it has been my distinct pleasure to have the uncommon experience of being an ideological minority in almost every crowd with which I identify myself. Granted, most of this has to do with the fact that many of these groups come with a large, robust list of stereotypes that most people are only happy to perpetuate for lack of, I don't know, not Googling to see that there are myriad manifestations of evangelical Christianity (for example). If I were Carl Sandberg and an egotist, I'd catalogue a list of all the areas in which I remain, for the majority, an enigma -- I am short on time, however, so you're all spared.
Still, it shocked me more than it should have when a dear friend (who should know better by now) expressed some small measure of disbelief last weekend.
"Wait," he said, "you mean you
still call yourself a feminist?"
Oh, but I was quick: "Why wouldn't I?"
And he: "Well. I don't. Huh. [Pause.] What's a feminist?"
When Helene Cixous -- forgive the lapsed accents and makeshift dashes -- introduced the theory of
l'ecriture feminine into the realm of literary theory, she was responding to years of Freudian theory that based the ability to create a text and meaning in biology. Jacques Lacan said famously, "the Woman is Not All. The Woman is a Lack, an Absence, a Void." Trust me, this stuff gets even more painful -- if I had a dime for every time I had to read the phallus was really The Pen of the Symbolic, only to turn the page and find a drawing of the two side by side in case I hadn't quite caught that, and even the capital "I" is phallic, don't-you-know, just look at it standing upright on its own -- and most of the time, what feminist theorists can't get over is how galling it is that the Freudians got away with describing as "Void" what they simply hadn't taken time to understand.
Cue the smarmy music. Then cut it. This isn't a treatise about feminism or literature or the Symbolic, although I could go on about all of those. This is simply to say that what's appealing about feminist theory, what reaches beyond all of the obvious reasons to be "feminist" (the wage gap, the use of rape as war weapon, the worldwide epidemic of domestic abuse
, ad infinitum), is the way Cixous drew a line in the sand and then threw herself across it. Lacan said the Phallic represented the Symbolic, the Godhead, the sublime? Fine, said Cixous. Let him. But he'll be missing the point, which is that all of those things -- our entire human attempt to explain away what's beyond us (see
Tower of Babel) -- live in a realm beyond language. They live in the Void, in the Absence, in the Limitless -- in the places we can't go, can't seem to reach with words, but spend our lives trying to understand. And so yes, inasmuch as feminism continues to stand for our own awareness that humanity has not yet fully comprehended the divine, I am a feminist.
I took a break from writing here because two things happened at once: my audience exploded, and I couldn't remember why I started this site. I remember now.
