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PANEL DISCUSSION 2
Tejaswini Niranjana
I’d like to point to how certain common themes in your thought-provoking papers relate to the earlier presentations. I am impressed with the way your papers show how childhood and maternity discourses–present in colonial and in patriarchal discourse–get reproduced in discourses of primitive, modern, and postmodern women. You also do a fine job in showing how self-representation should not be narrowly construed–Malaysians, for example, do not only write about themselves–and that the ‘marginal’ or ‘other’ standpoint can be viewed as a ground for crafting a range of distinctive representational strategies.
Lisa Bloom
I want to ask Trinh Minh-ha a question. I was intrigued by your notion of an undetermined threshold space, where there is a kind of difference that is not opposition. You’ve spoken of difference as opposed to psychological conflict, something that appears in your films as a certain sameness. People feel that perhaps your films are too tranquil; there are no cracks. But by not having those cracks don’t you set up a certain kind of enigma, and isn’t that the position of women in the dominant culture?
Trinh Minh-ha
Yes. I guess the line is very fine. One can easily fall on one side or the other. In my case I would point to the fact that we use the word “cracks” differently–when you say that the film is tranquil, there are no cracks. Certain people find that the film is not smooth enough; that it is playing too much. I have the feeling that the cracks that you are pointing to reflect precisely the notion of conflict that I’ve been talking about. The cracks that I would find necessary to bring out appear as a filmic language that is not smooth or slick. The transition, let’s say, from one shot to the other would be made visible and the whole work of making that film would come out.
I will give a precise example (from “Naked Spaces=Living is Round”) of this working of difference within the film. People have reacted against the fact that I use certain statements from one ethnic group in another ethnic group. But I was not just blurring the two. I purposely put one statement of one ethnic group in another ethnic group. But I recognized the making, that kind of weaving by having little subtitles, almost footnotes, in the film to tell you that this is a different ethnic group. Some people are so used to seeing a title as denoting “this-is-where-you-are” that even when you use it as a footnote it is interpreted the same way. The same thing happens with the notion of time in the film, since I deal with a different notion of time. The reaction immediately is that the film brings out the romantic timeless notion always attributed to these societies. The time element in the film is bothersome; people get annoyed with it. The length is two hours and fifteen minutes, for a non-narrative film. One is aware of the time because of the limits usually put on film: a documentary film is 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes, and a narrative film is usually two hours. To go beyond that, while aware of audience expectations, involves a conscious choice. So the element of time is brought out. It is not something that is erased, nor is it practiced as the kind of timelessness you can recognize in other works.
Donna Haraway
I have a question for Aihwa Ong: The last years of feminist writing seem to me a very complicated and international kind of production that looks for all kinds of ways to get at contradiction and agency in relation to women, and to hold simultaneously true what are otherwise considered contradictions. Different national contexts are visible in the writings of Luce Irigaray and Cherrie Moraga, both of whom, in fact, write out of more than one national context. Aihwa, there is your own connection to Euro-American feminists. We are really concerned here with women’s multiple kinds of expressivity not easily caught by any of the disciplines, genres, or practices. Women’s studies as a discipline in many ways is premised on the inability of marxism or sociology or theories of modernity and development or any of the social sciences to grasp these senses of subjectivity, connection, and agency in the world. I am hearing both of your talks as ways of arguing similar things: the dialectic or the inherent difference with the same and visa versa; the sense of the complicated agency of the factory women caught by development (feminist or marxist) discourse and in fact squelched by it. But I also hear a trope in feminist discourse that appears to be against other feminisms. And this is becoming more and more a problem for me. As feminism develops, becoming broader and longer and shared among lots of other people, there is a kind of oppositional discourse set up within feminism as if one’s positions about complexity were in opposition to prior feminists who fixed women’s identity essentially. But I think this is historically not true, and in fact, again part of an othering, part of a way that academic discourses work by othering recent previous discourses. So I guess what I’m asking is how to keep both the edge of one’s criticism without reproducing a history that others other feminists.
Aihwa Ong
I think that Minh-ha touches something that is extremely important that I failed to articulate for myself, which is this constant sense of being always on both sides continually. But because of the silence on the other side, the fact that voices are not heard from the other side, I feel that one has to turn the tables around and look at feminists as the other for a change. But beyond this whole discussion about othering and so on, is the point that I’m trying to emphasize which is that people in different societies have different visions of themselves and views that should be taken in their own terms. The use of certain dichotomies is a problem that feminists have inherited, along with other things in the social sciences, in Western knowledge of the non-West. But it’s not so much the non-West vs. Western feminisms as a matter of looking at different people in their own ways in terms of their own history.
Trinh Minh-ha
Is that question also for me, Donna?
Donna Haraway
Yes. It’s kind of a general puzzlement.
Trinh Minh-ha
I would answer with a notion of difference which does not allow that kind of opposition. I was mentioning earlier that sometimes it’s useful to dichotomize just for analytical purposes, which is what I start out doing by pointing to certain, let’s say, contexts of identity that only understand difference as opposition and then move on to contexts of difference which are not submitted precisely to the laws and interdiction of otherness. What is presented is the consistent necessity to point to the difference, so that feminism does not become, for example, a monolithic kind of block but retains the voices without necessarily creating separatism or division.
Donna Haraway
There is a kind of funny joking structure almost to this whole set of issues. Since World War II, in the history of feminisms and other women’s discourses that don’t want to name themselves, I see an ongoing complaint about binary opposition??an effort to somehow locate binary opposition in the other, contradictorily and often not ironically, though quite often it should be. And I think Marilyn Strathern is puzzled about some of these same issues when she asks, kind of jokingly, about whether feminism is “postmodernist” or not. Who gets that status label? And she ends up saying that feminist discourse is defined by its field of referentiality, relationality, and sometimes its oppositional attempts. What holds it together is not a set of dogmas, not a set of ontologies, not a set of taxonomies, but this ongoing referentiality, sometimes efforts to exclude one another, and failures to get away with it because the other folks will have none of it–or they’ll be perfectly happy to be excluded thank you and move on. It’s a very fluid map. But the map keeps intercepting and building interesting geometries. It seems to me Strathern’s latest work is an effort to describe geometries of feminist discourse in ways that do not get caught in oppositional and taxonomic modes. What excited me about your work, Aihwa from the beginning is that it worked that way.
So I guess I want to affirm that I think this does characterize feminist discourse and that it’s one of its resources for thinking about anti-colonialism. And I want to affirm that most of feminist discourse is not caught up or pinned by developmentalist and essentialist logic, or at any rate it has many ways to get out when it gets into it. I think I’m expressing a hope as much as a descriptive fact.
Trinh Minh-ha
There are many ways of approaching the question of binary opposition–many terms one can use. I mentioned earlier a to-and-fro movement. I would take an example of the famous Yin and Yang sign–the sign of a circle with an S in it. Yin and Yang are understood by many people, especially Western people, as let’s say, male and female principles or passive and active principles. Well there’s a whole notion of dualities not implied in the Yin and Yang sign, precisely because of its S shape instead of just a line dividing the two sides. Talking about that line I come to another term which comes back very often in feminist writing: the in-between zone which for me is very different, let’s say, from what has been called the middle way. The middle way is understood as something which is a compromise, a stand between two positions. So the tendency to push toward the extreme by someone placed in the middle is always looked at rather pejoratively. And this is particularly true, for example, of Asians, who are often charged with standing in the middle way. But, in fact, this question of middle way can be understood differently just like the S of the Yin Yang sign. This is precisely the place where you don’t have the two boundaries next to you, and in that sense it is almost a no boundary kind of position. It’s here that many of the writings of feminists on these in-between zones become relevant; here we meet on many levels.
Aihwa Ong
I’d like to respond to Donna. I agree with what you said about Strathern’s attempts to talk about what is essentially a very fluid situation, different feminist discourses intersecting and moving apart and so on. But when we talk about a dominant trend in recent feminist literature on non-Western women, in Africa or Latin America or Asia, the discourse that I talk about in my paper is one that is most institutionalized, most well funded. There are all kinds of career reasons why we fight, consciously or unconsciously. Feminists and nonfeminists are channeled into that kind of perspective. It is a question of power, and once one contextualizes these discourses one can’t deny the real authoritive position of scholars and feminists. I do place myself in that position even though I am really in-between, standing on the S of the Yin and Yang, because I feel myself always moving back and forth. I think that one cannot deny the responsibility that we are embedded in unequal relationships. And we do often talk about other people from a dominant position, rarely from a subordinate position. Feminists have to admit to that too.
Wendy Chapkis
Hearing the discussion about the borders of identity really hit me today because of a book I wrote about a year ago called Women and the Politics of Appearance. One of the things that the book tried to do was bring in all the differences in the category “woman”–raising experiences of women in other cultures as well as in Europe and America and other non-European American cultures. All of that was very enthusiastically received by the British publisher. Those were all differences that made us one; we are still all women. I got a letter today where the differences hit the wall. They asked me to please take out the interview with the transsexual because, after all, this is really not a woman. It’s amazing. She said that lesbian feminist bookstores in England would not stock the book if this interview is in it. And that I either have to take it out or I have to make clear that author and publisher do not make the assumption that a transsexual is a woman, that we do not take what he or “she” has to say either at face value or as having the same value as the evidence of a woman. They said there should be quotation marks around the she and that I should make clear that I don’t actually think that a transsexual is a woman. And I’m sure you don’t, says the publisher, but this needs to be said for our market. So while I agree with Donna that there is flexibility in feminism and we’re struggling with polarities, they are still there. We have more and more space that we are trying to be inclusive in and we’re trying to include our differences within racial groups and within national groups and within classes. But everybody hits the wall at some point.
Debbie Gordon
I was thinking about the importance of institutional location in relation to what Donna was saying. As a feminist, more and more I feel compelled to know something about people’s institutional and disciplinary location, because I’m going to get a different sense of feminism if I read feminist development studies grounded in sociology and policy making, for example, than if I read lesbian feminist poetry written by women who aren’t tenured faculty. The places we struggle and resist in relationship to different institutions are also something that we need to know more about when we speak with one another. Our disciplinary and academic locations are part of the context we need to be sensitive to. Otherwise, we run the risk of mistaking the most well?funded of feminist discourses for all of feminism.
Roberto Rivera
A comment for Aihwa Ong. I was very interested in the second part of your paper on women factory workers in Malaysia and your implication that they were actively engaged in the construction of a subjectivity, although you granted that controls of the body, position, posture, discipline, etc. were very much in appearance. Now I wanted to ask you if you knew of the works of two women who take a similar perspective but would like to be recognized as political economists. Patricia Fernandez Kelly and Lourdes Arguelles are studying the phenomenon of the maquiladoras on the border, the assembly plants that employ mostly Chicana and Mexicana workers and the phenomenon of networking and so forth. They themselves would like to be recognized as political economists, using in very important senses the marxist categories that you have described as essentializing and reductionist. I was wondering if you were familiar with their work?
Aihwa Ong
Yes, I know Patricia Kelly but not Arguelles. I think there is a gap between intentions and action. I am basically criticizing political economy, particularly the tradition of an unfolding rationality, of conditions that were set forth in a kind of liberation at some point in linear history. That is part of what I am criticizing when I say that feminists have inherited the same tradition as the male dominant discourses. The point I’m trying to emphasize is what Albert Memmi said about people who have been recently decolonized. They are so passionately involved in repossessing themselves–emotionally, psychologically, physically, socially, politically–they are not, perhaps, yet interested in international kinds of agendas. I’m trying to put all this in historical context. Feminists who are living in a different kind of historical situation will have to understand how to hold back while other people recover their own history. What is missing here is a dialogue between feminists here and feminists elsewhere that is not asymmetrical, articulated in terms of Western categories and explanations. For example, I agree with what Donna said earlier this morning about the whole fixation on autobiographies. There are different ways of knowing, and for us autobiography is just one more well-intended unconscious imposition of a Western method of getting at information that doesn’t cohere.
Roberto Rivera
But let me just say one more thing. Rigoberta Menchu’s I, Rigoberta is in a sense an autobiography, but it forces us to correct our view of the genre in important ways. Likewise, in my own reading of Kelly and Arguelles I see an effort precisely to put the Chicana workers within a global context. And if you read the work of Lourdes Arguelles and what she is doing at the micro political level of networking with the women that are domestic workers in San Diego, and commute back and forth across the border, you see how all these things are included in the account so as to do something about the status of those women. Kelly and Arguelles are very self-conscious of these practices. So I think it would be unfair to say that they use a political economic, marxist, essentializing or reductionist technique. As with autobiographies, we can redo our ideas of how political economists function and do things by looking at the practice of individual people. That was my point.
Aihwa Ong
Well, I wasn’t talking about all feminists, and in fact I was trained as a political economist. I’m trying to go beyond that.
Sarah Williams
I wanted to ask about the different notion of difference that Trinh Minh-ha introduced. It seems true that the notion of difference as oppositional clearly predominates in political discourse and in academic discourse. But in areas of everyday life, do you see examples of the notion of difference that you were talking about?
Trinh Minh-ha
I think it always operates in our lives, although maybe in fragments. Let’s say you are in a relation where you are very close to a person. Can you talk about that person whether that person is present or absent? If you happen to overhear someone talking about that very close person there is always a moment when you feel how odd it is to hear a conversation about that person. This is the kind of difference that is separation. But when you come to a point when you can’t really talk about that person, but can only talk as if the person is there whether she is present or absent, then for me that notion of difference in relationships is already closer because this other can never remain an other. It is a part of you also.
Mira Kamdar
This is addressed to Donna Haraway and Trinh Minh-ha. I just think it might be important to recall that the notion of difference is already always assigned to the feminine by those people in postmodern European philosophy who have sounded a notion of difference in opposition to oppositional European metaphysics. The assigning of the place of difference to the feminine has been very clearly brought out in a recent book by Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Figures of Women in Modernity. I’m wondering how, as feminists speaking about difference and in a place which has already been assigned to the feminine, what kind of irony has that made?
Trinh Minh-ha
The problem is certainly very acute. As I said, one can always fall on one side or the other and that is our strength and our misery because there is no way to work outside it. For me it comes back to the statement about the bush that is given to the Black man and that the Black man takes back. Difference is not only brought out by poststructuralist theories; it’s also brought out in many other cultures, and the notion of difference differs with other cultures. It has been debated very strongly in feminist writing whether these feminist writings come first or the poststructuralists come first and who influences whom. But I wouldn’t accept any appropriation of a term like difference, for example, to any kind of authority. Nothing that has been used by the dominant culture should become a form of censorship or an object of rejection. And in that sense we are still bouncing back and forth within the same framework, except that we are in an oppositional relationship. Whereas if you take back a certain notion and open it up and do it differently, then you blur that oppositional relationship.
Aihwa Ong
Minh-ha, can you talk about that in terms of a particular culture or historical situation? I’m trying to see this in an ethnographic context. I’m just not sure of difference because we’ve been discussing it in a kind of transcultural sense and then there is this reference to French literature and postmodernism. For example, in Vietnamese culture is there an indigenous sense of difference that somehow helps to illustrate what you are trying to say?
Trinh Minh-ha
Looking for an illustration is always a danger. I can mention, for example, a saying by an African man: that a man should never see the dark corners of another man’s house. For me that is also pointing to a notion of difference that in this context would most likely be read merely as a question of enigma, the guarding of a certain enigma, whereas in the other cultural context it has other connotations that one has to look into. And I would say this applies to each one of us in the sense that when we talk, instead of expecting that someone will immediately understand the codes of our language, we sense that there is a language we have to learn from each person. That is another notion of difference.