Irina Aristarkhova
Cyber-Jouissance: An Outline For A Politics Of
Pleasure
Cyber-politics
Subjectivity
and Pleasure
Our Body
Born Together
Russian
jouissance?
Bibliography:
In this work I am attempting to outline a politics of pleasure
for/as Russian
(cyber)feminist(s). Mainly I base my apporoach on Foucaut's
"ethics of the self"
and Irigaray's "ethics of sexual difference", also
influenced by works of Judith
Butler, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Sadie Plant, Lou
Andreas-Salome and
Russian cyberfeminists, especially Alla Mitrofanova. My main
argument is that
cyberspace can be explored and created as a source of pleasure
for and among
women, as a means to share female genealogy based on embodied
subjectivity, and
that would imply an invention of new forms of politization.
Cyber-politics
Cyberspace is as much a web of power relations as other spaces,
and it plays out existing
gender politics. In his work on commucative action, Habermas
applied democratic liberal
principles to the realm of communication, suggesting that there
can be a future with an
"equal access to communication". Foucault is strongly
against such utopian futures: "The
idea that there could exist a state of communication that would
allow games of truth to
circulate freely, without any constrains or coercive effects,
seems utopian to me. This is
precisely a failure to see that power relations are not something
that is bad in itself, that
we have to break free of. I do not think that a society can exist
without power relations, if
by that one means strategies by which individuals try to direct
and control the conduct of
others. The problem, then, is not to try to dissolve them in the
utopia of completely
transparent communication, but to acquire the rules of law, the
management techniques,
and also the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self, that
will allow us to play these
games of power with as little domination as possible"
(Foucault, 1996: 446-7).
I would like to stress a need for such new forms of feminist
power games, and argue that
cyberfeminism is in a special position here. Cyberspace as a
political place which is new,
still in the process of establishing itself and controlled
differently from, say, Academia, is
and can be effectively used for feminist politics. It is also
necessary to stress here that
politicization of cyberspace can benefit from already existing
spaces of established
relations by women and among women - arts and feminist political
activity, for example.
Now we must politicize cyberspace by creating possibilities for
new relations of force, that
change the face of power, "showing its potentialities no
less than its dangers". To say that
cyberspace is just a residue of the late capitalist economy, or
that virtual reality is
dangerous for feminism since it reproduces patriarchal imagery
and full of male fantasies,
would only mean that feminism is poorly conceived by such
critics, and power is always
evil for them. On the other hand, if we consider cyberspace as a
flow of unrestricted
desires or unconscious, where one can build a cyber-society
without power and
domination, we put ourselves into another trap: it implies that
to "avoid reality of power"
(which is bad and polluted) is to "get free" from it in
virtual reality, which is good and
innocent, that corresponds to libertarian utopia. Thus, sooner we
understand that we
cannot "avoid" power relations in cyberspace, sooner we
start using it for our purposes.
We must try and reduce the potential of domination implied in
power relations, and
employ it as a means for inventing new forms of female
subjectivity, based on a politics of
pleasure.
Why politics? For Foucault 'the political' is not something
external to what underlies
elementary relations, which are "neutral" by nature.
"All relations of force imply power
relations, which can be referred to the political sphere of which
it is a part, both as its
effect and its condition of possibility." To say that
"everything is political" is to
acknowledge this presence of relations of force and their
immanence to the political field.
We must try to avoid two common responses to the political
domain: it should not be
crushed in individual guilt (self-flagellation, like "each
person is responsible for
everything", we are accomplices to all evil in the world,
etc.) or displaced by general
theories - all this derives from the market economy, capitalist
exploitation, or rotten
human nature/society, etc. "Political analysis and critique,
for the most part, have to be
invented", just as strategies of modifying these lines of
force and making out of them
something new. Thus, instead of defining our political
"position" that would always be in
old political terms, we have to "imagine and to bring out
new schemas of politicization"
(Foucault, 1996: 211).
I argue here that the ground for such new forms of politicization
in cyberspace most
effectively can become an embodied female subjectivity. It has
been suggested by many
that the notion of an embodied subject and female identity is
ultimately essentializing and
totalizing, especially for cyberspace. It is, if we look for a
solid ground and do not take
into account sexual difference. However, we do not need
definitions in order to "become",
for these can restrict such inventions of ourselves. We need,
rather, new practices to seek
new pleasures, based on the ethics of sexual difference. In this
process we do not look
for any kind of "true" identity based on our sex, it is
not an individual liberation of our
desires or some kind of inherent sexual energy. It is a political
social choice, albeit a risky
one, in balancing within a particular disposition of power
relations, which are not stable or
given, with an aim of modelling and inventing. There is no
"true feminine self" to be
discovered:
"I think there is a danger in thinking of identity and
subjectivity as quite deep and quite
natural and not determined by political and social factors. The
psychological subjectivity
that the psychoanalysts deal with - we have to be liberated from
this kind of subjectivity.
We are prisoners of certain conceptions about ourselves and our
behaviour. We have to
liberate our own subjectivity, our own relation to
ourselves" (Foucault, 1996: 298).
The word "liberate" here refers to "liberate
from" [essentialized self], not "liberate towards
[essentialized self]". What does it mean for women, who are
not even subjects, as Lacan
and Irigaray argue? If for Lacan there is not much to be done,
since he sees this order of
things as the law (Lacan, 1982), for Irigaray, on the contrary,
there is an urgency to
change this situation, if the human/female genre is to survive at
all (Irigaray, 1987). For
her women are not yet subjects. Sexual difference has to be
developed within an ethical
relationship, where difference is recognised in its own right,
without a relation to any kind
of sameness. In order to liberate ourselves, we have to create
different kinds of political
and social factors, according to Foucault, not to look for
definitions of our natures.
Irigaray takes psychoanalysis in the same direction, showing that
"women are prisoners of
certain conceptions of themselves and their behaviour",
paraphrasing Foucault, and she
charges psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan in endorsing
"female prisons" which they
accurately describe. Only through establishing social and
political links between
themselves women can create their own subjectivity, and an ethics
of difference, not
sameness, must be a very important aspect of this process.
Subjectivity
and Pleasure
Irigaray in "Je, tu, nous" (1990, 1993) shows that the
topic of sexual difference can not be
reduced to the issues of sex and sexual act, as it has been done
so far. It is about
subjectivity understood as an intersection of our embodiment and
the world. In this sense
virtual reality is not virtual as in non-real, it is a space for
creation of very real links,
origins of new relationships, range of new pleasures. Probably,
cyberfeminists were the
first openly political communities in cyberspace to play out
their differences into new
forms of cyber-organizations without programmes and restrictions,
which invite other
people for collective pleasure, which is not l'un(e). We are
obviously "making it work"
and "inventing new games" of power relations in
cyberspace. In doing it, we move
beyond our cultures of sexualization, we "desexualize"
pleasure, being fully aware that it
is necessarily (though not exclusively) a political gesture:
"For thousands of years, we
have been made to believe that the law of all pleasure is,
secretly at least, sex. ... It was
this codification of pleasure by the "laws" of sex that
ultimately gave rise to the whole
arrangement of sexuality. And this makes us think that we
"liberating" ourselves when we
"decode" all pleasure in terms of sex finally brought
into the open. Whereas we should be
striving, rather, toward a desexualization, to a general economy
of pleasure that would
not be sexually normed" (Foucault, 1996: 212).
It is important when trying to relate to our
"womanness" not to ask questions like "Who
am I?" or "What is the secret of my desire?" We
better ask "What relations, through
femininity, can be established, invented, multiplied and
modulated"? (Foucault, 1996:
308). Here femininity is not reduced to any kind of "truth
in sex", but rather is seen as an
opportunity to create multiplicity of relationships. We must use
it not as "a form of
desire", but as "something desirable". Foucault
says of relations between men that there
are no words, no terms, no institutions that can embody intimate
relationships between
them. At the same time he insists that men are much more
privileged in their social life
than women. Here we recollect words of Irigaray on female
genealogies and their cultural
absence in misogynistic and matricidal imagery that founds our
societies. There is an
urgent need for female relations, ties and friendships outside
"allowed" spaces. What is the
pleasure for women in 'being together'? Share our time, our
ideas, our experiences? To
share our grief, knowledge and confidences outside institutional
relations that construct us
in patriarchal cultures? These are not easy questions, and cannot
be answered by utopian
female essence. We have to be careful not to celebrate our 'being
a woman' as there are
many differences among women that have to be acknowledged. While
creating new spaces
for ourselves, for example, a cyberspace, we must work not so
much on liberating our
desires, but rather to create and look for new pleasures, that
will make a way to new
desires and new selves. Foucault and Irigaray warn us against the
common ideal of a
'fusion of liberated identities' that implies a possible
digestion of or a violence against the
Other.
This pleasure-seeking is not some irresponsible 'enjoying
oneself'. In this sense it is a call
for a responsible enjoyment and is not an "operation of the
superego", as Slavoj Zizek
argues. Zizek says that contemporary society is characterized by
even enjoyment -
seemingly the pure and exclusive pleasure of the subject in
reality pre-determined by the
influences of the superego which demarcates certain pleasures as
more or less pleasurable.
And the question here is if the operations of the superego in a
patriarchal society follows
the parameters set by it, is there any hope that there would be
an adequate allowance for a
female pleasure - especially since the management of female
jouissance as the 'necessarily
unmanageable' has been one of the primary anxieties of many
cultures? Firstly, no one
here refers to the possibility of 'pure pleasure'. There is no
"jouissance" outside 'a political',
though it cannot be reduced to an only political dimention and
that is its strategic strength.
To assume that our all pleasures are pre-constructed, is to miss
the point of 'productive
power' and that resistance 'comes first'. Second, as Foucault has
shown in his "History of
sexuality" (Foucault, 1984a), in our societies there has
been much more governmental
investments and normalizations in the realm of desire and its
embodied forms, than in the
domain of pleasure, that makes pleasure more amenable for a
political (feminist)
intervention and strategic resistance. Invention of new pleasures
is not 'safe', as nothing
can be 'completely safe' and it is not an issue here at all, but
rather seems more effective
and promising for feminist politics and female subject
inventions.
Women's space-time was used to build the house of Being, as
Irigaray shows in her
analysis of Heidegger (Irigaray, 1983). If women are to become
subjects, they will be
different from male subjects, they will redefine for themselves
the meaning of subject-
position. Women cannot be anchored in a house of the Father, God
or another man - they
disappear there, they are sacrificed in closed spaces. As
Margaret Whitford stresses, for
Irigaray women are always becoming, but it is not an empty
repetition, it is an
evolvement. They are nomadic subjects (Irigaray, 1985; Braidotti,
1993), moving in
accordance with their rhythms. If men achieve a passage from
sensible to intelligible, from
mortal to immortal in the rhythm of fort-da game, discussed by
Freud, Lacan, and
Derrida, "which gives them enclosure of the movement in and
out, to and from, from the
highest to the lowest"(Whitford, 1991: 164), women cannot
use this rhythm, that
corresponds to male subjectivity, though Freud and Lacan claim
its sexual indifference.
Here sexual difference should be put in the centre of subject
development. So far women
had nothing for themselves, with the choice to become like men,
or to jump into abyss of
being without any limits. Irigaray speaks of the urgency to
create such grounding axis for
women, that will allow them to move freely as nomadic subjects.
This axis will allow their
movements from hell to heaven, without being fixed or being lost:
"What [women] do
need is to stand centred about their own axis, an axis which
passes microcosmically from
their feet to the top of their head, macrocosmically from the
centre of the earth to the
centre of the sky. This axis is present in the iconographic
traces left by traditions in which
women are visible. It is on this axis that women find the
condition of their territory, of the
autonomy of their body and their flesh, and the possibility of an
expanding jouissance"
(Irigaray, 1987: 114).
Our Body
The fact that we are bodies has been productively used by
feminists but only recently the
notion of the body has been allowed into feminist theory in its
own right. I argue that in
her use of the body morphology, Irigaray is much more political
than reductive or
essentialist as many have claimed (Shcoor, 1989; Christian, 1989;
Moi, 1985). Actually
she is not reductive at all if we take into consideration her
entire body of works. To
ground the creation of female subjectivity in a shared
corporeality among women can be
read as a strong political gesture. It is a move towards a
possibility of incarnated ethics
of sexual difference and respect for female subject position. It
does not mean to reduce
women to their so-called sexual organs. It does not suppose that
"anatomy is destiny".
However, it stresses the importance of embodied political action
(Foucault claimed that
only what touches the body can be considered political) for the
project of feminism.
Today more and more male philosophers try to take on "female
place of enunciation", in
order to shake foundations of the modern subject. One of the
famous examples here is
Derrida's deconstructive use of the 'feminine' in
"Spurs" (Derrida, 1978). For Irigaray,
"there is nothing new about man wanting to be both man and
woman", since "as soon as
something valuable appears to be coming from the side of women,
men want to become
women" (quoted in Whitford, 1991: 131). Men claim that they
suffocate in cultures which
they have built for themselves. They want to become women to help
themselves, though
they still express no need and no respect for living women, only
for "simulacrum".
However, this attempt means nothing more than another kind of
refusal to give space to
(sexual) difference of the Other. These philosophers try to be
both - men and women,
thus, to be One and the Same, to annihilate sexual difference,
and not to see or hear living
women around them. On the contrary, Irigaray thinks that the best
what they can do for
women and for themselves is to openly acknowledge their male
subject positions, as men,
and thus, to leave women the space for creation of their own
subjectivities. However, this
requires "letting go" of a (visible) mastery over
discourse that is not an easy move for a
male subject: "...the 'masculine' is not prepared to share
the initiative of discourse. It
prefers to experiment with speaking, writing, enjoying 'woman'
rather than leaving to that
other any right to intervene, to 'act' in her own interests"
(1985: 157). Any politics of the
subject is rooted in its corporeality since indeed the body has
been the main focus of
productive power. The bodily dimension of subjectivity is also
effectively expressed in
Foucault's notions of governmentality and biopower (Foucault,
1984b; 1994: 582-83,
728-29, 785, 213-18, 38-389).
Irigaray also stresses the importance of a body and its
potentialities for friendship and
amorous exchange among women and between women and men, which can
be very
affective (meaning that it involves the potential for expressing
themselves emotionally) and
effective for cyberfeminists. Women's destiny is unknown unless
women speak and live
through it themselves. Unless they speak as women, for women and
men, openly, creating
a space for the Other to enter and exchange ideas, dreams,
pleasures, lives. For Irigaray it
is strange if woman claims that she does not write as a woman,
but as a neutral (person).
There is no neutral - it conceals him, the Same. It means she
feels uncomfortable to be a
woman, she suffers in culture where woman is not. She wants to be
a man, to be human,
to be neutral. Who is she, asks Irigaray, if not a woman?
"Not to contribute to making
language and its writings sexed is to perpetuate the
pseudo-neutrality of those laws and
traditions that privilege masculine genealogies and their codes
of logic" (1993: 53).
Women must learn how to love themselves and each other, if they
want to become, to be
born. Pleasure is about the body. When Irigaray grounds the
creation of female
subjectivity in the body and its morphology, the most effective
way to relate to it is not to
see it as an essentialization of women. On the contrary, it is a
political move, since it is the
body that allows us to live and love as women, and share it
between ourselves.
There is not virtual reality prior to/without our bodies and
those relations of force that
our embodiment allows to pass through. To see cyberspace bodiless
is as much a political
choice as to see it embodied. Instead of seeing cyberspace as a
place "free of a body" and
its politics, where one can (at last!) take a relieve from that
non-ideal (overweight,
digesting or ageing) materiality, we can give back this
somatophobia to Western reason.
We can politicise cyberspace as a place where our bodies meet,
not by extending
themselves in our dreams into wires, but by typing, massaging our
hands in-between,
smiling in front of the screen, enjoying words and responses from
each other, that embody
our pains and pleasures, deriving from new encounters, relations,
sensations,
friendships. These intensities contribute to a creation of our
female subjectivities, that are
ours and corporeal. In this case this meeting that we are in
today gives us another, new
kinds of sensations, possibilities of new pleasures and
developments, that are not a break
from or extension of virtual reality we are working in, but
another form of embodiment,
that is full of potentiality of pleasure. We are pleased in being
here due to various reasons
and despite of so many more other reasons. We are pleased in
being in cyberspace with
women and as women, though it is not all unproblematic: Irigaray
through her analysis of
European philosophy and sexual order that it represents, shows
that "women's
relationships with their mothers and daughters and with each
other" have been traditionally
sacrificed to the patriarchal economy and that "all the
norms of existing culture and
society ...rest ... on the separation between women"
(Whitford, 1991: 182-183). It
makes clear why a shared sociality and joined symbolic work
between women - as it is
expressed in virtual space as one of such spaces - is highly
political, since it creates
pleasures of women and for women, also making visible female
lines and genealogies of
creation. For us our differences are becoming another source of
mutual pleasure, that we
are discovering, and not a matter to absorb.
Born Together
"The amorous exchange represents in the most corporeal and
the most intimate terms
Irigaray's vision of the new world, deploying the
erotico-transcendental vocabulary of
mysticism, and the language of the imaginary body." It links
together the carnal and the
transcendental. "It attempts to emerge from the immobility
and stasis (death) of the
solipsistic male subject to the mobility and fertility (life) of
the couple. ... The amorous
exchange, it will be argued, is a fantasy of exchange in general,
the basis of human
society." (Whitford, 1991: 168)
There is no fixed "you" in Irigaray's texts. 'You' is
always changing, it is mobile, nomad,
fluid. The relation and articulation of female identity is
possible outside his house since we
do not need solid ground to express ourselves. We do need a
ground, rigidity kills us,
stops our movements. Our bodies do not have fixed contours, they
know flows and
wetness and multiplicity without disappearance or horror. We do
not need to leave the
body in order to become fluid and fly in cyberspace. It is ours
"by nature" of its
multiplicity and by the fact that women assemble computers with
their eyes, fingers, and
their life. In 1977, just a few years before "Manifesto for
Cyborgs" by Haraway
(Haraway, 1991), Irigaray said: "We must learn to speak to
each other so that we can
embrace from afar. When I touch myself, I am surely remembering
you. But so much has
been said, and said of us, that separates us.
Let's hurry and invent our own phrases. So that everywhere and
always we can
continue to embrace. We are so subtle that nothing can stand in
our way, nothing can
stop us from reaching each other, even fleetingly, if we can find
means of communication
that have our density. We shall pass imperceptibly through every
barrier, unharmed, to
find each other. No one will see a thing. Our strength lies in
the very weakness of our
resistance. ... Although we can dissimulate perfectly within
their economy, we relate to
one another without simulacrum. Our resemblance does without
semblances: for in our
bodies, we are already the same. Touch yourself, touch me, you'll
see. ...You? I? That's
still saying too much. Dividing too sharply between us: all"
(1977, 1985: 215-16, 218).
We should not look here for a coercive attempt to reduce an
existing diversity among
women to the same essence, based on commonly seen sexual organs
or what is perceived
to be common experiences. Rather, it is an attempt to create a
space for a positive
encounter between women as women not by nature, but by our
decision to face and think
through sexual difference. I argue it is effective to see it as a
positive feminist strategy,
based not only on a (powerful) critique of existing situation,
but also that seeks new types
of pleasure in becoming a woman. To become a subject without a
need to transmute the
body of a woman who is not yet existing, means to become a female
subject. It is an
invitation to be born together, to be women and subjects, to
leave for ourselves a body
which experiences pleasure from this process. To-gether. More
than one, not identical,
and still - we.
What about the patriarchal order that everyday separates us?
Should we give up facing
contempt and rivalry? For Irigaray there is a danger in wasting
energy in trying to fight
with endless representations and fetishes to which female body
and women are reduced.
More effective is to use our energy for positive invention and
becoming, to help each
other to find a way back to "us" through constructed
simulations of ourselves. There was,
probably, no one who gave us so much of credit as Nieztsche, in
questioning us.
Unfortunately, he was turning his back on us in the moment of our
answer, not hearing it
and - no surprise! - resenting our silence. Irigaray uses his
brilliant questions to follow
him, to offer him love and care while exchanging words with him,
and return to him all
that is not hers: "But of your contempt (I) shall make a
thread to find my way back. In
what you vomit up, (I) shall seek out what you're giving back to
me. By interpreting your
contempt, I shall find my skin again. Washing off the disguises
of wretchedness" (1991:
26). Woman alone lives through her body, she does not need
eternity for she is alive.
Nieztsche wants to live, but he is too engaged with himself and
his history in order to start
living. He wants to, Irigaray says, replace God, and in this
gesture he denies his, specific,
body and refuses its sexual difference: "Eternity, that is
the music of one who senses and
fears decline. And, for passing beyond life and death, see how
busily he is at work at this
moment. To leave his body behind and fly away unburdened, isn't
this always and forever
the point of his creation? So, whether it be your eternity or
another, what does it matter!
Isn't it still a ghost's desire rather than a living being's? And
to transmute beyond the body?
Without stopping in this life" (1991: 27).
If we want to stop in this life, we must make (cyber) space for
ourselves full of female
corporeality as living and speaking women. Not to overcome it,
part from it or leave it
to not-ours discourses and artefacts, but to engage it, love
ourselves in it without guilt, as
Lou Andreas-Salome argued, share it with each other, and find new
pleasures thanks to its
living.
Russian jouissance?
Tina Chanter in her book on Irigaray Ethics of Eros writes that
"(O)ne of the most
memorable moments for me, in which Irigaray uses humour to make
her point, occurs in
This Sex Which Is Not One, when Irigaray is commenting on Lacan's
understanding of
women and their pleasure. ... The series of questions with which
Irigaray follows this
quotation, which I imagine her articulating with her eyebrows
raised in mock surprise,
accomplishes more than some writers could in a book"
(Chanter, 1995: 243). Lacan says
that women are not worth listening to, especially on the subject
of their pleasure, since
"they don't know what they are saying" and "about
this pleasure, woman knows nothing".
He concludes that female analysts "haven't made the
slightest progress on the question of
female sexuality". In order to understand something on
female jouissance, Lacan suggests
to "go and look at Bernini's statue in Rome, you'll see
right away that St. Theresa is
coming, there's no doubt about it" (quoted in Irigaray,
1985: 90-91). Then Irigaray puts
her famous questions: "In Rome? So far away? To look? At a
statue? Of a saint?
Sculptured by a man? What pleasure are we talking about? Whose
pleasure? For where
the pleasure of the Theresa in question is concerned, her own
writings are perhaps more
telling" (ibid.).
We do not need religious or aesthetic excuses to make nude female
statues or paintings in
order to understand female pleasure or in order to experience it,
we can leave it to those
who need it for their own intellectual / aesthetic arousal, and
for whom our words, our
thinking bodies and our open hearts are not "beautiful"
or "objective" enough. We create
our own (cyber) cultures, that will embody our lines of forces,
our live energy, and that
changes cyberspace as a feminist space too. This space is not
exclusive, it invites her and
him. May be, we have not yet existed, we are just being born,
here and now, and who else
knows so much of being born as women know? According to Sadie
Plant (1995),
technology was always a feminine sphere, a web of matrices which
are woven in particular
ways. Who else knows so much of this pleasure of creation as
ткачихи, пряльщицы, who
sees complex embroidery appearing under their hard-working
fingers? Being
cyberfeminists we should not forget those female fingers that
make bodies of our
computers all over the world, and who employed for they are women
- it means hard-
working and able, not just cheap. We know how to make knots,
webs, nets and tangles.
What can be more political in cultures of symbolic matricide and
inferiority of female
gender than collective and public weaving?
I argue that "jouissance" is especially relevant and
appropriate as a corrective to the
Russian 'culture of suffering'. Orthodox Christianity, as it has
evolved in Russia,
traditionally stresses the importance and goodness of suffering,
especially for women, that
has been expressed in various ways in Russian culture and
society. Thus, I see the idea of
(collective) female jouissance as an even more appropriate
"strategic operation" of the
subject for Russian women that challenges ideals of "what a
woman should be" in Russia.
Do you think that our mothers, Mother-Russia and we, their
daughters, have suffered
enough? Or still it needs a bit more? Who needs? For whom? For
what? Women in Russia
seem to have fulfilled their lot of suffering. Last (?) time in
Chechnya. We must be angels
by now. And we are. We leave this world of suffering to
"become". We are cyberangels.
We use cyberspace to speak to each other "from afar",
to embrace "Others". We carry
out rites of passage between earth and sky, heaven and hell, and
it is our pleasure.
There are other spaces where women are already finding
possibilities for an embodied
politics of pleasure: art groups, friendship clubs, etc. A
limited scope of this paper does
not allow us to elaborate on them and their relation to
cyberspace. However, we can pose
some questions for a future analysis: "What differentiates
them from cyberspace? To what
extent have the potential of a feminist politics of pleasure
within / through cyberspace
been prefigured by earlier spaces / practices / discourses of
feminist pleasure? What are
there continuities and contradictions if at all?" My
experience of a participation in one of
women's organizations - Committee of Soldiers' Mothers (Moscow
brunch) - suggests that
there can be no easy answers to such questions, though it is
obvious that women in the
Committee use strategically their embodied stereotyped positions
as
"women/actual/potential mothers" to challenge the most
(literally) phallocentric
institution: an army, which Foucault considered as a heart of
modern societies, together
with prisons. Though it is not necessarily pleasure that is aimed
at in these spaces that
women create among themselves, they do feel
"to-gether", they share everyday tears and
humour and it gives them energy. It is that kind of
"de-sexualized" pleasure that was
discussed earlier. We are comfortable among ourselves, despite of
many problems and
cultural stereotypes, and we use it for highly effective and
productive resistance.
It is a political statement that celebrates power of pleasure.
This positive energy of
cyberfeminism in Russia, in joined action with other feminist
practices, creates new
forms of subjectivities for Russian women, establishing women's
genealogy in Russian-
speaking culture, leaving the mentality of suffering and violent
sacrifice to those who
needs solids. It also creates new joyful faces of feminism,
covering huge Russian
distances without repressing our differences. If women who refuse
to enjoy each other in
becoming women, want to suffer - they are being eaten alive
ritually, spiritually and
sometimes literally, meaning that their sacrifice is duly
appreciated. However, more and
more Russian women, different ethnically, generationally,
socially, make steps towards
each other - that is, towards themselves. One might live very far
from another, and usually
we have little chance to meet in a Levinas' relation
"face-to-face" (Levinas, 1980). At the
same time, post-Soviet women are said to be highly literate and
educated, and their lives
taught them to think fast and have a kind of "fuzzy
logic" so much celebrated today. What
I am saying here is that for Russian women Internet and
cyberspace provide an
opportunity to start a relation among themselves
"body-to-body" (Irigaray, 1987), that is
multiplied in other spaces and that weaves a Russian thread into
a rich colourful cloth of
world feminism today.
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