Introduction: From Ecology to Elemental Difference

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. C. Burke and G.C. Gill, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993, 5. Hereafter ESD.

²Ibid., 6.

³There is perhaps a similar critique of neoliberal management of difference in Lorde and Irigaray. Pertinent to this project, as I will explain below, is the question of whether Lorde's powerful denunciation of the pornographic, which she distinguishes from the erotic, includes queer feminist anti-racist crip porn such as that discussed in the excellent volume The Feminist Porn Book. Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young, The Feminist Porn Book: the Politics of Producing Pleasure, New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2013. Hereafter Feminist Porn. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984, 54. Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Geneaologies, trans. G.C. Gill, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, 5. Alexis Shotwell, Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011, 120 n12.

⁴Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

⁵ ESD, 5.

⁶Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, 104.

⁷Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, 46, 220–1 footnote 4. Hereafter Time Travels. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, 13. Hereafter Volatile Bodies.

⁸ Time Travels, 221 footnote 4. As Irigaray puts it, “The culture that is put in place is a culture of the domination of matter, of the sensible, through a construction and a logic that are above all mental. One could say that the logos is the technique that Greek man defined and utilized in order to appropriate the world without wondering about the fundamental human alienation and exploitation that were thus put in place. Without the logos, the technological universe that is ours would not have become possible … .” Luce Irigaray, “There Can Be No Democracy without a Culture of Difference”, in Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, ed. A. Goodbody and K. Rigby, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011, 195. Hereafter “Democracy”.

⁹For a critique of the concept “environmental”, see Ted Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Nature, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009, 6. Irigaray's critique of Merleau-Ponty in The Ethics of Sexual Difference begins with her interest in the flesh precisely as Toadvine explores it. Irigaray however departs from what she sees as a harmony and continuity-across-difference of bodily morphology in his account. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, 103ff. Irigaray seeks instead what Rachel Jones in this volume calls “differentiation without separation” (10), a phrase which Jones borrows from Alison Stone, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity, New York: Routledge, 2012. Rebecca Hill in this issue will interpret the interval as the plurality of milieus of fundamentally different bodies, comparing the works of Irigaray and Jakob Von Uexküll. Nevertheless, two of the relatively few works on Irigaray's ecological-politics appear in a volume on Merleau-Ponty: Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy: Dwelling on the Landscapes of Thought. Edited by Suzanne L. Cataldi and William S. Hamrick, Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.

¹⁰Myra J. Hird, “Digesting Difference: Metabolism and the Question of Sexual Difference” Configurations 20, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 213–37, 216.

¹¹Ibid.

¹²Claire Colebrook, “Sexual Indifference”. Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Open Humanities Press. 2012. Web. 28 May 2014.

¹³Ibid.

¹⁴Rachel Jones, Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy, Malden: Polity, 2011, 232.

¹⁵This is a claim Irigaray makes in her contribution to this volume. Elsewhere, Irigaray explains this term “neuter” or neutral, which she has used throughout her career to mean undifferentiated or forced anonymity, as relation in sameness, in which any seeming differences can be measured quantitatively. Recently she has argued that the presumption of neutrality does two things in fact. In addition to arbitrating between quantitative differences, it hides and represses qualitative differences so that democracy as government established for (of course oxymoronically) neutral bodies alone (or bodies that coordinate even if temporarily according to a presupposed neutrality) can function. Irigaray, “Democracy”, 195.

¹⁶Salamon, 128.

¹⁷In other words, it is not that Irigaray gives a wrong account of bodily specificity; it is that she provides a limited account. To augment her fecund insistences, no amount of footnoting could do justice to this line. But two helpful articulations come to mind: the work of Ignacio G. Rivera and Eli Clare. For an introduction to performance artist, filmmaker, sex educator, lecturer, and activist Ignacio G. Rivera see Tristan Taormino. Interview with Ignacio Rivera, Sex Out Loud. Voice America, July 6, 2012. Web. 28 May 2014. For an introduction to poet, scholar, environmentalist, and activist Eli Clare, see Eli Clare, “Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies: Disability and Queerness' Public Culture 13, no. 3 (2001): 361. See also Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, Cambridge: South End Press, 2009. Clare's insistence on what he calls “irrevocable difference” is on my reading elemental difference. Ibid., 363.

¹⁸Arun Saldanha, “Reontologizing Race: The Machinic Geography of Phenotype”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 (2006): 21. Elemental difference is perhaps what Falguni Sheth denotes as “the real” which becomes, together with a “perceived degree of threat”, “the unruly”. Toward A Philosophy of Race, Albany: State University of New York, 2009, 67–85.

¹⁹Loree Erickson, “Revealing Femmegimp: A Sex-Positive Reflection on Sites of Shame as Sites of Resistance for People with Disabilities”, Atlantis 31, no. 2 (2007): 42–52. Loree Erickson, “Out of Line: The Sexy Femmegimp Politics of Flaunting It!” in Feminist Porn.

²⁰This last being Buck Angel's self-description. Tristan Taormino, “Havin” Buck for Breakfast’ The Village Voice, August 30, 2005. Web. 28 May 2014. Irigaray suggests that our society is not in fact one of bodily autonomy-affirming individuality, but one in which “the body itself is assimilated to a good of which the owner is not always the man or the woman to whom the body really belongs', insofar as violence directed at incalculable difference “a pure and partially arbitrary violence” increases (“Democracy”, 196). In order to bring about a necessary process of individualization as an affirmation of bodily difference and not a denial of precise bodily necessities, legislation must “start again from the person's right to exist in his or her singularity, and from the duties toward himself or herself as a person and toward other persons respected in their differences, that is to say from duties regarding coexistence”, (“Democracy”, 197). This would be to “put the accent back on the respect for life rather than on the ownership of goods' (“Democracy”, 198).

²¹Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, 67.

²²Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. She argues that this is what allows for the interpretation of the torture and sexual assault that occurred at Abu Ghraib in 2003–4 as an embarrassing accident. Puar reflects in the final pages of the book on the power of the tension between “constructivism as a social force”, and forwarding the “relationships of the biological to the discursive, the organic to the nonorganic”, 210. Why not see social construction as an affective, imperfect “thing power”? Jane Bennett. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010, 14, 1–19. Hereafter Vibrant Matter.

²³Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, New York: New Press, 2010.

²⁴Clare, “Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies: Disability and Queerness,” 363.

²⁵Ralina Joseph, Transcending Blackness: From the New Millenium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial, Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

²⁶It is of course the fields of Feminist Studies and African American and Ethnic Studies more broadly, the legal categories of gender and race, not sexuation and raciality themselves, that Crenshaw argues must now be forced to recognize that they have ignored the bodies in whose lives the wrongs that such traditionally one-dimensional fields and legal terms aim to address are exponentially operative. Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics', University of Chicago Legal Forum 139 (1989): 139–67.

²⁷Penelope Deutscher, “Between East and West and the Politics of Cultural Ingénuité: Irigaray on Cultural Difference”, Theory, Culture, & Society 20, no. 65 (2003): 65–75. Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Deutscher cites The Wretched of the Earth and “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox, New York: Grove Press, 2004. Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, 269–311. Relevant for this issue is a recent piece: Gayatri Spivak, “Lie Down in the Karoo: An Antidote to the Anthropocene”, Public Books, June 1, 2014. Web. 2 June 2014.

²⁸Maybe attention to the elemental in Irigaray can make sense of what is so right about Lynne Huffer's recent re-reading of Irigaray's queer feminist lips: for Huffer, it is not in a search for ethical foundation that Irigaray re-imagines some specific flesh. The lips are rather part of “a historically situated project of ethical desubjectivation within the modern episteme of ‘man’ as the sexual moral subject” (47). An erotic aesthetics of further non-normative bodily singularities could further unseat the rationality of ethics. Lynne Huffer, Are the Lips a Grave?: A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

²⁹Luce Irigaray, In the Beginning She Was, New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, 32–3. Luce Irigaray, To Be Two, New York: Athlone Press, 2000, 69–70, 106. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, 133.

³⁰For an excellent introduction to eco-feminist readings of Irigaray, see Terri Field, “Is the Body Essential for Ecofeminism?”, Organization & Environment 13, no. 1 (2000): 39–60; and Christopher Cohoon, “The Ecological Irigaray?”, in Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, ed. A. Goodbody and K. Rigby, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011, 206–14. While Greta Gaard's queer ecofeminism does not draw on Irigaray, her addendum to ecofeminist sexuate dimorphism is crucial. Greta Gaard, “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism”, Hypatia 12, no. 1 (1997): 114–37.

³¹Helen Fielding, “Questioning Nature: Irigaray, Heidegger and the Potentiality of Matter”, Continental Philosophy Review 36 (2003): 1–26. Stacy Keltner, “The Ethics of Air: Technology and the Question of Sexual Difference”, Philosophy Today 45 (2001): 53–65. Ann V. Murphy, “The Enigma of the Natural in Luce Irigaray”, Philosophy Today 45 (2001): 75–82. Astrida Neimanis, “Feminist Subjectivity, Watered”, Feminist Review 103 (2013): 23–41. Astrida Neimanis, “Thinking with Matter, Rethinking Irigaray: A ‘Liquid Ground’ for Planetary Feminism”, unpublished manuscript courtesy of the author.

³²Alison Stone, Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

³³Ibid., 224. Stone's citation is from Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, trans. S. Pluháček, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

³⁴The essay was composed in 2013–14. I wrote and sent the interview questions as a block to Luce Irigaray in April 2013, and she responded to them in writing in the remainder of 2013.

³⁵Luce Irigaray, In the Beginning, She Was, New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, 160.

³⁶It is only one mode. Another is the caress. See Cynthia Willett, Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities, New York: Routledge, 1995, 35–47. Cynthia Willett, The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001, 123–54.

³⁷Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press, 2008, 1–23.

³⁸As Joshua St. Pierre and Jay Dolmage provocatively put it in an unpublished manuscript, courtesy of the authors: “Crip voices snicker at poststructuralist anxieties, for hearing ourselves speak is a winding detour through the body. Our speech is différance”. See also Joshua St. Pierre, “The Construction of the Disabled Speaker: Locating Stuttering in Disability Studies” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 1, no. 3 (August 2012): 1–21. Jay Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2013.

³⁹Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Geneaologies, trans. G.C. Gill, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, 3. Hereafter SG.

⁴⁰Ibid.

⁴¹When Irigaray uses the term “specificity”, I understand this to mean articulating a singular body. Irigaray's terms are not biological. Biologically, “specificity” means connected with species or a species or population, but specificity in Irigaray's work suggests the impossibility of the identification of a species.

⁴²There is also however in Irigaray an inability and unwillingness to divide a body up into supposedly discrete organs, some of which are sexual and some of which are not. This is perhaps precisely what leads to passages that concern Alison Stone in her contribution to this issue: it seems that Irigaray understands bodies too holistically to isolate the sensations of this or that organ. I am grateful to Katja Pettinen for helping me to think along these lines.

⁴³Fiona Morgan, “Dr. Joycelyn Elders, former U.S. Surgeon General”, Indy Week, June 24, 2008. Web. 3 June 2014. Tristan Taormino. Interview with Joycelyn Elders, Sex Out Loud. Voice America, November 1, 2013. Web. 6 June 2014.

⁴⁴ Feminist Porn.

⁴⁵ SG, 3.

⁴⁶Though some might argue that what Herrlee Creel calls “contemplative” Daoism examines precisely this. Herrlee G. Creel, What is Taoism?: And Other Studies in Chinese Cultural History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970, 5.

⁴⁷Although one could also argue that agrilogistics is either ironically or precisely synonymous with distinguishing the supposedly discrete thing (including other animals) from the human.

⁴⁸Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

⁴⁹See Luce Irigaray, To Speak is Never Neutral, trans. Gail Scwab, New York: Routledge, 2002, 230, 252.

⁵⁰Mallory, Chaone, “Val Plumwood and Ecofeminist Political Solidarity: Standing with the Natural Other”, 14, no. 2 (2009): 3–21. Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, New York: Routledge, 2002.

⁵¹ Vibrant Matter, 2.

⁵² ESD, 6.

⁵³ Volatile Bodies, 19.

⁵⁴Hasana Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011, 174.