There is a complex relationship between gender construction and patriarchal relations of power. Prior to the development of an adequate set of theories, feminists could only rationalise these inequalities by drawing upon explanations of biological differences. In the late 1970s poststructuralist and postmodern theories of culture offered feminism more complex understandings of women's oppression and the representation of 'natural' femininity (Pollock, 1977; Cowie, 1977, 1978). Central to these developments was Sigmund Freud's proposition of the unconscious. This developing relationship between feminism and postmodernism around psychoanalytic theory is problematic. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that some feminist theory began to draw productively upon poststructuralist (especially Lacanian) theories of the unconscious in order to gain an understanding of patriarchal culture's workings.
The psychoanalytic work of Freud placed gender and gender formation at the very centre of the formation of the patriarchal subject. Whilst few feminists had sympathy for Freud's theories, his contribution to a developing theory of gendered subjectivity was immense (see Mitchell,1974). In France a new current of psychoanalytical theory emerged which has influenced both feminist cultural theory and creative production practices, in film and photography for instance.
It is to the work of Jacques Lacan (who radically challenged the biological determinism of traditional Freudianism by developing poststructuralist theories of language) that many feminists have been drawn. Briefly, Lacan's reworking of the Castration/Oedipal complex proposed a distinction between the penis as an organ (Freudian) and the phallus as a sign (Lacan, 1968). He also theorised a more fluid path to the formation of a gendered subject. This reworking offered a 'logical' rather than biological explanation of patriarchy whereby it is not the having or not having of the physical penis which organises gendered subjectivity under patriarchy, but rather the way in which its presence or absence (lack) functions as a signifier; that is, the way in which subjects can make sense of sexual difference is by their possession of the 'sign' (phallus) of patriarchal power, which allows them to place themselves within the symbolic order of patriarchal culture ñ the so-called Law of the 'Father'. Thus male fear of castration and of the 'lacking' woman is a fear of the loss of that power which the phallus as signifier and 'maker' of language promises to men.
Lacan also proposed that this moment (the acquisition of language and entry into patriarchy) was only the final stage of a series of moments in which the subject is formed. It is to these 'early' stages that feminists looked, for they suggest that, if the child starts to become aware before entry into patriarchy, then a different type of awareness of self and other must exist - one prior to the symbolic structure sketched above. In the theorisation of visual culture, it was Lacan's proposition of 'the mirror stage' (1976) which was of specific interest (see Metz, 1975; Mulvey, 1975), because this moment was based on specular rather than 'spoken' relationships. This is the moment when the child misrecognises an image of itself as its self, structuring all further misrecognitions of images as reality (the Imaginary in Lacanian terminology). Also of significance is that this is the moment when the child begins to recognise itself as separate from the mother and realises it must split from her. However, as Kaplan notes, 'the child/adult never forgets the world of the Imaginary, and he/she continues to desire, unconsciously, the illusionary oneness with the mother he/she experienced' (1991:30). It is this proposition, that the child clings to those heady pleasures of the 'bliss' of pre-Oedipal fusion with the mother, that has been central to the development of a theory of visual culture. Lacan believed that the child never forgets its illusionary oneness with the mother or the 'jouissance' that this moment entailed ñ a moment before the intervention of paternal law which requires both the control of 'self' and the denigration/abjection of the feminine (mother) and the pleasures associated with her emotions, feelings, love.
In visual terms, feminists applied these theories to identify the ways in which patriarchal culture naturalises its relationships of power through its symbolic representations of women, as well as exposing how the unconscious of patriarchal culture structures the very forms these representations take. So, for example, Mulvey demonstrated how the visual style of classic Hollywood film is closed and fixed, rather than open, and is marked by the conventions of realism which 'hide' the processes of signification and are structured around male scopophilic pleasures (or fears). Over the last twenty years such feminist theoretical developments (e.g. Kuhn, 1985; Pollock, 1988; Nochlin, 1989) have 'demonstrated the comprehensively patriarchal nature of culture ñ its institutions and ideologies of production and reception, its regimes of representation, and its formal and textual characteristics' (Wolff, 1990:68).
In French literary theory, écriture féminine was evoked as a possible way of recalling the suppressed 'maternal' and as a strategy for disrupting the rules and conventions of the patriarchal symbolic (in the work of Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray for instance). In literary terms écriture féminine is based on the idea that 'literary forms can be radically altered in order to accommodate and express women's experience' (Wolff, 1990:67). As a form of experimental writing, its impetus is to inscribe femininity at the moment of reading through its 'difference' from patriarchal/masculine forms. It does this through 'play, disruption, excess, gaps, grammatical and syntactic subversion, ambiguities; by endless shifting register, generic transgressions; by fluid figurative language and myths. They are anti-authoritarian, questioning, unsettling' (Wright, 1992:75). Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray promote a more essentialist perception of écriture féminine by 'writing from the body', drawing upon female sexuality and libido. Julia Kristeva (1984) proposes a subtly but significantly different relationship between écriture féminine and the pre-Oedipal which she terms the semiotic chora. For her the gender of the producer is not the issue. She discusses the potential of poetically disruptive uses of language in relation to some modernist male writers and to the visual abstractions of some male artists, who have been 'able to evade the apparently monolithic control of the symbolic' through 'texts which are produced from rhythms and pulsions of the semiotic chora ñ the pre-linguistic, pre-Oedipal experience' (Wolff, 1990:74).
Kristeva perceives the semiotic chora as structural - that is, its 'role' is to first make a space in which language (as the underpinning organisation of social-symbolic interaction) can then work. The recalling and momentary revitalisation of this semiotic chora in itself is potentially disruptive to the patriarchal symbolic because it ruptures the latter's normality by recalling a different, pre-linguistic, pre-symbolic sense of self in which the mother of the Imaginary (feminine), and feelings associated with her, are central and compelling rather than peripheral and debased. These 'feelings' (bodily drives, rhythms, pulsions, pleasures, bliss) are never lost and their memory is held precariously in check by the patriarchal symbolic. They can be seen to rise to the surface through cultural forms in different ways. For instance they have been retrieved in readings of artistic work where their resisting quality may be 'accidental' - e.g. in readings of the 19th century photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron (see Mavor, 1996) or the abstract works of Helen Frankenthaler (Pollock, 1992). Feminist cultural theorists have exposed the way in which these memories remain to 'trouble' patriarchy, revealing how cultural practices and stories (films, rituals, fairy tales, myths) replay the moment of patriarchal culture's formation in which the possibilities of 'difference' are continually abjected and repressed (Kristeva, 1992; Creed, 1993; Warner, 1994).
Kristeva believes that the subject can gain access more readily to the semiotic chora through creative, musical, poetic practices or even just through vibrant use of colour (Kristeva, 1980). She sees these possibilities as already having their origins in the semiotic chora, recalling a more fluid, plural and less fixed perception of meaning and self which reactivates feelings lost in the patriarchal 'rational'. However, Kristeva also makes it clear that the 'feminine' semiotic chora is not something outside or beyond language. She states, 'if the feminine exists, it only exists in the order of significance or signifying process, and it is only in relation to meaning and signification, positioned as their excess or transgressive other that it exists, speaks, thinks (itself) and writes (itself) for both sexes'. Thus it is 'different or other in relation to language and meaning, but nevertheless only thinkable within the symbolic' (1986:11). Thus postfeminist interventions that wish to rupture the patriarchal symbolic by recalling this lost 'feminine' cannot assume some form of privileged access to it which will unconsciously show itself in the text or image. Instead a more conscious attempt at manipulating the symbolic, which has been made possible by an informed knowledge of its workings, has begun to emerge; I am thinking of the later photographic works of Cindy Sherman, Helen Chadwick's art pieces and, in cinema, Jane Campion's 1993 film The Piano. This may allow postfeminist creative practices to rupture the patriarchal symbolic for their own ends, by calling up resisting and troubling memories of something 'different', something troubling and contesting from the margins.
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