Unknown Speaker  00:03
That's testing one two. I would like to introduce an important participant in today's conference, one whose strong support of feminist scholarship has continued to make so much possible for all of us. I am very honored to present to you the President of Barnard College, Dr. Jacqueline Matt Feld.

Unknown Speaker  00:43
Good morning. All of us at Barnard are just delighted to welcome you to the sixth annual conference, the scholar and the feminist. I must tell you that every year, Jayne Gould, who is our indefatigable head of the Barnard Women's Center, and the proud mother of these conferences, goes to bed after the latest, most successful one ever. And for several terrifying hours, she tosses and turn overwhelmed by questions. And every year they are the same three questions. First, she asks J. Is it possible that there is anything left in the world to discuss? What do we do for an encore? Second, she says, Have you seen the new cost of index, the cost of living index? What will we do to get enough money to put it on next year? And finally, she says, if the Legion continues to grow at the rate it has for the last year, where will there be space at Barnard. Now, so far, I have it on good authority that ultimately Mrs. Gold does fall asleep. And somehow every year within a few weeks, sometimes days and once in a while even ours, one of the many scholars and feminists of Morningside Heights, who are of course the members and the friends of the members of the executive committee of the bartered women Center has an exhilarating aha experience, or has an awareness of annoying persistent doubt on a topic of infinite important or makes one more perplexing observation and with that low next year's conference has been conceived and goes into gestation in the planning committee. So far, then two questions are answered regularly every year. But the third the question is space for our growing audience. Plagues not only Jain gold, but me. And therefore I will begin the conference by asking that if any of you has a friend or relative in the kreski, or Olin Foundation, who would love to give us an auditorium that would seat at least 1200 with perfect acoustics. See me afterwards. This year we've gathered to discuss and to explore together the ways in which several manmade disciplines which purport to treat of the human condition, assume, observe, interpret, or even institutionalize differences between men and women, between women and men. If we are very fortunate, in the course of this day, we may find through our discussions, some small fault in the tough crust of the ancient attitudes toward human difference in general, and toward differences between the six sexes in particular. And if we find that fault to be in the right place, it is conceivable that through it, we may introduce change, close enough to the center of things to make a difference. For it is, after all our desire, both as scholars and as feminists, not merely to understand, but to make a difference, to bring about change. We are here today, in large part because at some level, each one of us believes that only if many of us band together and join actively in our quest. Is there any hope that we shall one day find in the thickest The darkest thicket of the human mind, the elusive reason for difference to be defined both as unlikeness and distinction, and also as conflict and disunity. And we know that even such insight as could be gleaned about that would not in and of itself affect the metamorphosis of conflict and disunity into harmony and union as the second meaning of difference.

Unknown Speaker  05:38
It lies after all, in the biological nature of our species, that freed from the tyranny of instinct. We separately and collectively strive all our lives, to make sense out of the unending variety of all that our senses record. We are as it were, born as taxonomists, we classify we name we compare. And it is not only plants and animals, but also people, perhaps, perhaps, in only in order to limit the infinitude of individual difference, which would threaten to isolate us in our personal lives, and overwhelm our ability, even partially to comprehend or assign meaning to all that enters into our human consciousness in lifetime. One ultimate purpose then, of all of us who as scholars, and feminist strive to understand will be to transform then the perception of difference, so that the human race may at last outlive that primitive destructiveness that attributes fixed characteristics to each sex, and assigns positive and negative values to each. There is Alas, nothing in history that suggests thinkers and doers in our generation will succeed in this endeavor, where so many kindred women and men before us now dead once reason so cogently, and debated so hotly with their contemporaries, for social acceptance of the necessity that civilization depends upon our willingness to break the bonds of irrational fear, hatred and negation of whatever is other. Whatever is not self. We inherit from them, however, the happy responsibility to ourselves, and to those who will come after us to keep alive the recognition of that miraculous spectrum of difference within each sex, and between the sexes, and to celebrate its fullest expression. In every decade, there will be individuals who seek confirmation and companionship in their efforts to transcend the false easiness of categories. And the two simple answers of theory not substantiated by the set sensors in every decade, therefore, scholarship and feminism need to be conjoined as they are today, so that we carry forward the promise of a higher order of human existence. I welcome you to Barnard and to this conference. And I wish for you all a clearer sense of what we must overcome if we are to make our visions the new reality for the race.

Unknown Speaker  08:59
Before introducing our morning speakers, I'd like to say a few words about the thematics of this year's conference. Each of our past conferences has focused in different ways on the process, product and function of feminist scholarship. These conferences reflect in a dramatic way, the phases of consciousness through which we, as feminists have passed from the original emphasis on the commonality of the female experience, to the recognition that if we are to give form to a new vision, we must constantly examine every cultural presupposition as we explore the possibilities of comprehending, communicating, and ultimately changing our experience. integral to this process of seizing our own self conception is the theorisation process itself. The conference planning committee, whose meetings constituted a kind of conference in themselves, began its discussions this year with an interrogation of theory. These discussions centered around two facts that we, as feminist critics perceive and conceptualize the world differently from men. And that there is a growth of constructive internal debates among feminists, both within and across disciplines as to why this perception is different. Now, if there's anything that we can all agree upon, I think it is that women are not men. Or can we, as Nancy Miller put it, in one of the many position papers that contributed to the formulation of this conference, that apparently neutral distinction is anything but innocent, in that Western culture has proven to be incapable of thinking not the same as, without assigning one of the terms a positive value, and the other a negative. The response to difference on the part of women varies. There are those who exalted by embracing a certain biology and a certain eroticism. There are also those who deny it, or rather seek to diffuse the power of difference by minimizing biology and emphasizing cultural coding. On some level, these responses are saying, woman would be the same as if only a third strand states, like the first group, that women are indeed different from men. But for feminist reasons, they add, women are also better than men. This group's reasons would not be biological, but socio cultural as outsiders and nurturers women do things differently and better than men. Well, at this point, it seems impossible to think difference, without thinking it either aggressively or defensively. But think it we must, because if we don't, it will continue to think us, as it has since Genesis at the very least, over and above, or perhaps below this spectrum of responses to difference. The theoretical question persists. Is there a way to think outside the patriarchy determined same other subject object dichotomies, diagnosed as the fact of culture by Simone de Beauvoir 30 years ago, and still avoid the absence of women? In other words, do we want to continue reorganizing the relationship of difference to the same through a dialectics of valorization? Or is there a way to break down these overdetermined metaphors, which continue to organize our perceptions of reality.

Unknown Speaker  13:42
We are beginning to hear echoes on this side of the Atlantic, of certain new French feminism's, which are addressing precisely these questions, but in ways fundamentally different from ours. It's true, I tend to hear French echoes better than others. When Jane gold asked me to be Academic Coordinator of this conference, I doubt if she realized how important would be the fact that I spend my life walking the tightrope of contradictions between the French and American feminist stances. As Elaine Marx has put it, American feminists emphasize the oppression of women as sexual identity. Certain French feminists investigate the repression of woman as difference and alterity in the signifying practices of the West. To quote marks, we raise consciousness by speaking to and working with each other. They explore the unconscious through writing. That is to say, we use words like autonomy, and power. They use words like fun Hello centrism, and that word for pleasure which defies translation zuv sauce. Many American feminists tend to reject the French feminist writing as impossibly elitist, grounded in a philosophical tradition, essentially different from our own. The French feminists, on the other hand, often reject American feminism, as hopelessly bound up in the very categories of phenomenology, they are attempting to explode. As I see it, it is precisely at the sensitive point of contact between American feminist thought, a primarily ethical discourse as prescription for action and a certain French emphasis on the human subjects, inscription in culture through language, that we can avoid the neutralization of the question of difference. I would just add this. We now know that the inscription of woman into the discursive truth of the dominant order is not subversive to that order. We are becoming more acutely aware of the positions from which we speak, and the uses to which our words are put. The positing of difference as a problematic by and for feminists has high epistemological and political stakes. It couldn't have been done even 10 years ago. It is perhaps related to a larger historical shift away from Hamlet's founding question, To be or not to be the anguished. Who am I? Towards that fundamentally 20th century question, who is speaking? This conference has indeed been organized as a space for a multiplicity of voices, investigating difference in very different ways. But this multiplicity of voices is also a common voice, one which crosses cultural, political, and linguistic boundaries, a constantly renewed voice, a strong voice, which in spite of, or perhaps because of differences, we'll continue to reject the metaphor of woman as a detour to a man's truth. Today, we will begin exploring difference from psychoanalytic political, and linguistic perspectives. This morning, we will hear from Nancy choto, professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and author of the important book, the reproduction of mothering. Nancy will explore difference relation and gender in psychoanalytic perspective. Our second speaker is just that Fayol professor of French literature and theatre at the University of Toronto, who will investigate the powers of difference. And our third speaker will be Monique Vitti, Ik, well known French writer and feminist speaking on the straight mind. This afternoon, we will explore in more depth the specific relationship between language and difference with a linguist poet and literary critic. And finally, in the afternoon workshops, you are all invited to explore all of these differences at length with writers, theorists and activists.

Unknown Speaker  18:44
Before I give the floor to Nancy choto, I would just like to express my personal gratitude and thanks to the absolutely untiring and dedicated Jayne Gould and Janie Kretzmann of the Barnard Women's Center.

Unknown Speaker  19:11
A personal note of thanks to the ever patient and supportive Nancy Miller, and a great big thanks to the incredibly hard working and open minded members of this year's conference planning committee. They put up with a lot. All of these people were essential to the process of bringing this conference together. I am now very pleased to introduce our first speaker on difference, Nancy childre.

Unknown Speaker  19:52
I want to talk about differences between women and men. But to start by saying something about differences among women In which I'm not going to address. When we talk about differences among women, we see that these are all very significant for feminist theory and practice, but they remain concrete differences analyzable in terms of specific categories and modes of understanding, we can see how differences among women differences of class, race, sexual preference, etc, are socially situated, how they grow from particular social relations and organization. But my understanding of differences it's been posed today is, by contrast, a more absolute and abstract and irreducible notion. It is assumed to involve questions of the essence of gender differences between women and men, each scene is an absolute category, entering into and composing a male dominant social organization of gender. What I want to suggest is that gender difference is not absolute, abstract or irreducible, it doesn't involve an essence of gender. I want to show that gender differences and the experience of difference just as differences among women are socially and psychologically created and situated. In addition, I want to suggest a relational notion of difference. Difference in gender do not exist as things in themselves, they are created relationally in relationship, and we can't understand difference apart from this relational construction. Psychoanalysis by providing a history of the emergence of perceptions of different separateness and differentiation in childhood clarifies for us many of the issues involved in questions of difference and is a particularly useful arena in which to see the relational and situated construction of difference in gender difference. Moreover, psychoanalysis provides us an account of these issues as general psychological issues as well as issues with specific relation to gender. I'll talk about two aspects of perceptions of different separateness and differentiation and their emergence. First, I'll talk about differentiation or individuation, and how that is created relationally in the first me, not me division in the development of the eye or the self, I'll suggest that we have to understand this differentiation in relation to other aspects of development, that it is not synonymous with difference, and that it has particular implications for women. And secondly, I'll talk about the way the difference in gender difference are created differently for men and women in different relational contexts for girls and boys. So first, I'll talk about differentiation generally, when psychoanalysts talk about differentiation or separation, individuation, and what they mean is that a child is born originally with what's called a narcissistic relation to reality, that is, it perceives, and experiences what we see to be not AI as or not the child is part of itself. There's a lack of differentiation between the subject or self and the object or other, between inside and outside. The child experiences itself as merged with and continuous with the world in general and with its mother or its caretakers in particular differentiation, or separation individuation that is coming to perceive a demarcation between the self and the object world, coming to perceive the subject or self, as different from differentiated from or separate from the object to other is one of the first tasks of infantile development. It involves the development of ego boundaries, that is a sense of personal psychological division from the world and of a body ego, a sense of the permanence of one's physical separateness, and the predictable boundedness of one's own body of a distinction between inside and outside.

Unknown Speaker  24:02
Differentiation requires physiological maturation. But this maturation isn't enough differentiation happens in relation to the mother, or to whoever is the child's primary caretaker. It develops through experiences of the mother's departure in return and through frustration, which emphasizes the child's separateness and the fact that it doesn't control all its own experiences and gratifications. Some of these experiences and gratifications come from without others from within. If it weren't for these frustrations for these disruptions of primary oneness and gratification, the child wouldn't need to begin to perceive the other or the outer world is separate, and not an extension of itself. Developing separateness therefore, involves in particular perceiving the mother as separate and as not me, where once we were an undifferentiated, symbiotic unity. So differentiation then isn't given from birth and it doesn't emerge simply from the individual. It develops in relationship and it's developed, defined relationally I am not you. Moreover, you are the other becomes differentiated. Also, differentiation involves perceiving the particularity of the mother or primary caretaker in contrast to the rest of the world. Now, from a psychoanalytic point of view, differentiation of me and not me is necessary for a person to grow into a functioning human being. And it's also inevitable since experiences of departure of this continuity and handling feeding, where one sleeps, how one's picked up and by whom, of a total of a lack of total relational and physical gratification, these kinds of disruptions are inevitable. But for our understanding of difference in the connection to differentiation, there are several important elaborations beyond the both necessity and desirability of differentiation. And I'd like to talk about some of these dender elaborations. First of all, in most psychoanalytic formulations, and in most formulations of development, the mother or the outside world is simply the other or not me, one who does or doesn't fulfill an expectation. This perception arises from the infant's cognitive inability to differentiate self and object world. For the infant there exists no difference between my desires for love and satisfaction, and those of my primary love object, an object of identification, and the self here is very clearly the growing child. This assumption that the self is the growing child has consequences for what we think of as a mature and adult self. Differentiation separation disruption of the narcissistic relation to reality, are developed through learning that the mother is a separate being with separate interests, interests and activities that don't always coincide with just what the infant wants at the time. They involve the ability to experience and perceive the object or the other the mother in aspects apart from its role. Its sole relation to the ability to gratify the infants or the subjects needs and wants, they involve seeing the object as separate from the self and separate from the self needs. So adequate separation or differentiation involves not simply perceiving the separateness or the otherness of the other, but it involves perceiving their subjectivity as well. This interpretation implies that true differentiation or true separateness can't be simply a perception and experience of self other or presence absence, it precisely has to involve two selves. Two presences two subjects, recognizing the other as a subject is possible only to the extent that one is not dominated by felt need, and one's own exclusive subjectivity. And such recognition enables appreciation and perception of many aspects of the other person of their existence apart from the child or the selves.

Unknown Speaker  28:17
The understanding that separation or differentiation involves not simply perceiving the otherness of the other, but their selfhood or subjectivity as well is consequential not only for the development of one's own selfhood, but also for perceptions of women. Hence, it seems to be absolutely essential to a feminist appropriation of psychoanalytic conceptions of differentiation. If the child or the psychoanalytic account only takes the viewpoint of the infant as a developing self, then you get the mother only as an object. Perceiving the particularity of the mother, however, must involve in courting the mother her own selfhood. This is a necessary part of the developmental process. Though it's also often resisted and experienced only conflictual ly and partially throughout life perceptions of the mother move between perceiving her particularity and selfhood and perceiving her as a narcissistic extension are not separate other whose sole reason for existence is to gratify wants and needs. And there are very few accounts, which recognize this particular stance towards the mother. And I just like to read you my favorite account when which I love to cite because it seems to me it was written in the late 30s, and it's an unintended idli marvelous proto feminist statement of the infantile origins of the adult perceptions of the mother as an object. Most men and women, even when otherwise quite normal, incapable of an adult altruistic form of love, which acknowledges the interest of the partner, retained toward their own mother's this naive egoistic attitude throughout their lives. For all of us that were Main self evident that the interests of mother and child are identical. And it is the generally acknowledged measure of the goodness or badness of the mother how far she really feels this identity of interests. Now, these perceptions, in a sense, this dehumanization, as a product of infantile development, is somewhat inevitable as long as women mother, and it's one reason why I always advocate equal parenting is a necessary basis of sexual inequality of sexual equality. But I think that it's very important for women, even within the ongoing context of women's mothering, to liberate ourselves from such perceptions, both in our personal emotional lives, which is very difficult as much as possible, but certainly in our theorizing in our politics. A second elaboration of psychoanalytic accounts of differentiation requires us to understand the affective or emotional distinction between differentiation and difference. Difference in differentiation are of course related to each other and feed into one another because distinction or division, in some sense, has to imply difference. But it's possible to be separate or differentiated without caring about or emphasizing difference without turning this cognitive fact into an emotional, moral or political one. In fact, it seems to me that assimilating difference with differentiation is defensive and reactive a reaction to not feeling separate enough. It involves arbitrary boundary creation and an assertion of hyper separateness to reinforce a lack of security and a person's sense of their self as a separate person. But you can be separate from and similar to someone at the same time, for instance, and recognizing their subjectivity and humanity as you recognize your own. Or, in the case of a woman, a woman who can recognize her similarity or commonality or even continuity with her mother, because she's developed enough of an unproblematic sense of self. The distinction between differentiation or separateness and difference relates to a third consideration, which I think is even more significant to our assessment of difference in gender difference. Much psychoanalytic theory has centered its account of early infant development on differentiation, but I'd like to suggest that there are other very important ways of looking at the development of self other important and fundamental aspects to the self. And to suggest that the mean not me, division is not all there is to me. Separation or the mean not me, division looms larger in our psychological life and theoretically to the extent that these other aspects of the development of self are not stressed. Some psychoanalytic theory shows that the development itself is not primarily the development of ego boundaries and a body ego. Rather, there has to develop a central core of the self a sense of continuity of experience, that enables the emergence of the AI as a continuous being with an identity. And this more internal sense of self or AI is not dependent on differentiation or separateness or difference from the other. It emerges through an experience of continuity which the mother or caretaker helps to provide, and through not having to continually react to and ward off environmental intrusions and not being continually in need.

Unknown Speaker  33:20
This development of what's called a true self involves a particular set of internalized feelings about others in relation to the self, which these include developing a sense of agency, and the ability to affect others in the environment, a sense of one hasn't been ENT, inhibited by over anticipation of one's needs of being accorded one's own feelings and a spontaneity about these feelings a sense that one hasn't had feelings projected onto one, and a general feeling of fit between when one's needs and wants and the needs and wants of the caretaker. So the sense of agency is the result of caretakers who don't project experiences or feelings onto the child, and who don't let the environment impinge indiscriminately. So this it's as this sense of agency them which is one basis of the inner sense of continuity and wholeness grows out of the nature of the Parent Infant relationship. There's another important aspect to internalize feelings about others in relation to the self that is, that a certain capacity or sense of wholeness develops through an internal sense of self in relationship with another. And in this context, the fairness the presence of the primary parenting person becomes an internal sense of their presence say an internal sense of the presence of the mother or of another who is caring and affirming. This suggests that the central core of self is internally a relational ego, a sense of self and good relationship, the presence or absence of others, their sameness or difference, then becomes something that is not a question of whether I exist or not. The sense of agency of a true self that doesn't develop reactively of a relational self or ego core and an internal sense of continuity of being are fundamental to an unproblematic sense of self and the basis I would suggest of both autonomy and spontaneity, an unproblematic sense of self and doesn't depend only or even centrally on how separated or how differentiated one is. Although the extent of confidence separateness certainly affects and as part of the sense of self. However, the more secure the central self or the central ego is, the less one has to define oneself through separateness from others. separateness or differentiation becomes a more defensive secondary criterion of the strength of the self, though certainly, it's a criterion that many women experience quite profoundly. But it suggests that separateness from the mother defining oneself apart from her and from other women is not the only or final goal for women's ego strength or autonomy. So before I move on to male female difference, you might wonder why I'm discussing this. So generally, I'd like to reiterate what I think we learned as feminists from this general inquiry into differentiation. First, we learned that differentiation or separateness emerges in relationship it's not given. Second, we learned that to single out differentiation is the core of a notion of self may be inadequate, and it's certainly not the only way to discuss the emergence of self or what constitutes a strong self. Finally, we learned that essential important treatment of an attitudes towards mothers attitudes that enter into attitudes towards women more generally emerge in the earliest differentiation of self. These attitudes often unwitting and a precipitate of early development. And an unconscious sense of self may be more fundamental in determining of psychic life than more conscious and explicit attitudes towards sex differences. That is, insofar as differentiation or separation are developmentally problematic and given women's mothering, the mother who is a woman becomes and remains the other or an object she's not accorded autonomy or selfness. on her side. I'll talk about gender difference now. We're not born with perceptions of gender difference, these emerged developmentally in the traditional psychoanalytic view however, although we're not born with these different these perceptions when sexual differences first seen it's got self evident value, a girl perceives her lack of a penis knows instantly she wants one defines herself and her mother as lacking inadequate castrated, a boy knows instantly that having a penis is better and he fears the loss of his own.

Unknown Speaker  37:41
But clinical and theoretical writing since Freud suggested another interpretation of the emergence of perceptions of gender difference, one which reverses the perception of who experiences greater trauma, although it retains the claim that gender identity and the sense of masculinity and femininity develop differently for men and women. These accounts suggests that core gender identity and masculinity are issues for men and bound up in the masculine sense of self in a way that they're not for women. Core gender identity here is a cognitive sense of self that one of gendered self, the one is male or female, and it's established in the earliest years. concomitantly, with the developed establishment of a sense of self. Later evaluations of the desirability of one's gender and of the activities and modes associated with it, or of one's own sense of adequacy at fulfilling gender role expectations are built upon this fundamental gender identity, they don't create or change it. Most people develop an unambiguous core gender identity, but because women mother, the sense of maleness and men differs from the sense of femaleness and women, it's more conflictual, and more problematic. Underlying are built into male core gender identity is an early nonverbal, almost somatic sense of primary oneness with the mother, an underlying sense of femaleness that continually, usually unnoticeably but sometimes insistently challenges and undermines the sense of maleness. Thus, because of our primary field, femaleness and oneness and identification with his mother, a boys and a man's core gender identity itself, the seemingly unproblematic cognitive sense about being male is an issue. A boy has to learn his gender identity as being not female and not mother subsequently, again, because of the primacy of the mother in early life, because of the absence of concrete available male figures of identification and love. Learning what it is not to be masculine is also defined as not feminine or not women only. Because of core gender identity problems and later problems of adequate masculinity, it becomes important to men to have a clear sense of gender difference of what is masculine and feminine, and to maintain rigid boundaries between these boys and men come to deny feminine identification within themselves and deny those feelings they experiences feminine feelings of dependence, relational needs, and emotions generally, they come to emphasize differences, not commonalities or continuities between themselves and women. For a girl by contrast, core gender identity is not problematic in the sense that it is for boys. It's built upon and doesn't contradict her primary sense of oneness and identification with her mother, and it's assumed easily along with her developing sense of self. A girl may later learn to doubt the value of her gender and her gender identity, but she doesn't come to doubt its existence. Girls grew up with a sense of continuity and similarity to their mothers a relational connection to the world. For them differences not originally problematic or fundamental to their psychological being or identity. They don't define themselves as not men are not male, rather, as I who am female. Girls and Women may have problems with their sense of continuity and similarity, as I suggested earlier if the sense is too strong, and they don't have a sense of separate self, but these problems are not inevitable products of having a sense of continuity and similarity because selfhood doesn't have to depend on the strength and the impermeability of one's ego boundaries. Nor are these questions bound up problems bound up with questions of gender, they're bound up with questions of self. So men's and women's understanding of difference in gender difference has to be understood in the relational context in which these are created, in their respective relation to their mother who's their primary caretaker love, Object and Object of identification, and who is a woman in a sexually and gender organized world. This relational context is profoundly different for girls and boys in a way that makes difference in gender difference central for males, one of the earliest most basic male developmental issues, and Knott central for females. It gives man a psychological investment in difference that women need not have.

Unknown Speaker  41:57
Because men have power and cultural hegemony in our society, a peculiar thing happens to these experiences. In earliest development, according to the psychoanalytic account, it's very clear that men are not women. It's not the case developmentally that women are not went men. But men have used their cultural hegemony to appropriate and transform this original experience so that culturally both in everyday life and in theoretical and intellectual formulations, men have come to define maleness as that which is basically human and to define women as not men. This transformation is I think, first learned in and helps to constitute the Oedipal transition the cultural, affective and sexual learning of the meaning and valuation of sex differences. But we must remember that this transformed interpretation of difference and interpretation learned in the Oedipal transition is a product of masculine cultural hegemony and power and a defensive outcome of masculine developmental conflicts, it's not inevitable, given other parenting arrangements and other arrangements of power between the sexes. It's imposed on earlier developmental processes and is not the deepest unconscious route of either the female or the male sense of gender itself. We must remember that it's especially insofar as women's lives and self definition are oriented toward men, the difference becomes more salient for us as does differential evaluation of the sexes. Insofar as women's lives and self definition are oriented towards ourselves. As well as our psychological and cultural experience and interpretation of gender or sexual difference are created through psychological social and cultural processes and through relational experiences. It suggests that we can understand gender difference relationally and situationally as part of a system of asymmetrical social relationships embedded in the inequalities of power, in which we grow up as selves and as men and women. Our experience and perception of gender are processional produced developmentally and in our daily social and cultural lives. Feminist theory must have a liberatory intent and possibility thus we must continually insist that and understand how ideologies of difference ideologies which define us as women ism and as men, how inequality itself are produced socially, psychologically and culturally by people living in and creating their social, psychological and cultural world. To speak of differences difference, as a final irreducible concept to focus on gender differences a central reifies and denies those processes which create the meaning and significance of gender reifies and denies relations of gender by seeing men and women as qualitatively different kinds of people, rather than seeing gender as precessional reflexive and constructed by seeing gender differences as permanent rather than created and situated. I would suggest them that we certainly need to understand how difference comes to be important. Cultural and psychologically how its produced is salient and how it reproduces sexual inequality. But we shouldn't appropriate differentiation and separateness or difference for ourselves and take it as given. feminist theories and feminist inquiry based on difference are focused on demonstrating difference or doing a feminism a disservice buying if you will, the defensively constructed masculine models of gender that are presented to us as our cultural heritage rather than creating feminist understandings of gender and difference that grow from our own politics, theorizing and experience. We will now hear from our second speaker shows that Fair Isle

Unknown Speaker  46:13
Well, I would just like to say that I'm not here as a representative of the French feminist movement. And I'm not speaking as such, mainly, can you hear? lifted, said, Okay. Well, mainly because the French feminist movement in France and the theory which underlies it, are very complex. I'm going to try to walk the tightrope Alice Jardine was talking about, between the American and French approaches to feminism. In a recent discussion on the relationship between history and psychoanalysis, the French historian Michel de secto, asserted that theorizing always needs to Savage, the savage in the West has always been the women simultaneously present and absent, present when absent, and all the more absent when she's there. She's needed so that her difference can pass as a confirmation of man's natural superiority, and his birthright to be the best. Why should he cross the seas in order to find proof of the reality of his strengths and violence, his savage, the woman is here, very close, present and speak speechless, to take upon herself the full weight of that violence, inhabiting such structures as can only exist through her being repressed. She's a savage, whose existence is denied in its authenticity, and its originality. As far as it doesn't support her conquerors claim she is, but at the same time, she's not she is, in fact, because she's not her only space being that narrow fringe linking her to her oppressor. Only that link makes her live, makes her exist for the other, and acknowledges her difference. But this is an illusionary recognition, since it depends on an originary oppression, which recognizes her in her difference, only that which sets her apart from her oppressor, that which sets as a standard as a norm that is as value, the very being of her conqueror. Here's the stronger, which means that he holds every right, including that of telling her about herself, that of telling her who she is, and what she wants. This is the right offender zurple, who claims all knowledge for himself, and proceeds to set limits for her to interpret for her her own body and sexuality. syncs to that vicarious knowledge, his own assertions will become hers, his silences will become hers as well, thus silencing a part of herself for which there is no place in his economy. This indeed, this is indeed what produces a type of political economy, which Spears itself the burden of taking difference into consideration. That is a politics of repression, whose scope women only begin to understand what is difference then from that perspective, if not radical disregard of the other, the other being one, while I am nothing, difference in that perspective receives the status of a necessity, as is evidence in the function if is in the functioning of capitalist societies which need their marginals, blacks, Arabs, Jews, hippies, or punks, as antidotes as a reassurance of their own survival. I'm quoting here ln six TOS the book the body of strangeness must not disappear, but its tracks must be tamed, it must be returned to the Master, master and slave, conquer and savage. Such other reductive dichotomies through which the relationships of difference have always been perceived in our Aris Ditalion West.

Unknown Speaker  50:25
The oneness of the master confronts the slaves, duplicity, fullness confronts the void and presents confronts absence. This difference has always been construed and perceived through that set of binary opposition's which leaves no room for an authentic difference set aside, set outside the established system as applied to women. This means simply that man has thrown upon women and upon what he calls femininity, the full weight of the difference of the sexes, the full weight of the lack of death, men makes her that double of himself, which he knows his butt, which he knows he is, but refuses to acknowledge, so that a woman doesn't become the other but his other, his unconscious, his repressed and she gets caught in the endless and enduring circle of his representation. And meshed immense self representation. Women's exists only insofar as far as she endlessly reflects back to him, the image of his manly reality inscribed in his identity, designated by a minus sign, which emphasizes her deficient being minus phallus minus power minus unity. Women is women is reduced to being like the plain surface of a plain mirror. As, as opposed to the concave mirror to which Lucy rugae refers in speculum. She has become a mere reproduction. In mere reflection. She exists as a function of what she's not receiving on her denied body the etched out stamp of the other as a signature of her void and the mark of his identity. The male ego cannot dispense with such a reflection, since it receives its existence from it in part, if not in totality. The wound has thus been transformed into the other side of the mirror, present and absent, nowhere to be found. But still here, skirting the grasp of the other, as well, as of her own. Male discourse has preyed on that elusive reality. For a long time. Men managed to convert an accident of history into her essence for Twitter's situation into a natural condition, colonized and tricked, construed as a robot, as is evidenced by the movie The Stepford Wives, women has always been man's other side, his denied, abused and hidden side, she has constantly been the embodiment of a non culture, as opposed to structures, while nonetheless essentially intent on their preservation. Society is made possible by that repression of women founded upon the negation of her difference upon her exclusion from knowledge from herself. This no doubt constitutes an alienating oppression, but there exists simultaneously a much deeper and much more devious repression, all of which bears upon the female unconscious. For the women's unconscious is the noise in the system, the defect, a surplus, which patriarchal society has always wanted to get rid of, by denying it any specificity, thus positing that same society is right to talk about it, in terms of identity and resemblance with the male model. This unconscious had to be tamed, silenced out for fear that if it were to unexpectedly return in the midst of the existing order, it would bring it would bring the machine to a deadly halt. Does women possess a soul? Such was the question addressed by the County Council of Trent and 1545. Four centuries later, that very same question is raised again, but fraught with four centuries of exploration by an expanding knowledge. Rephrase, it becomes, what the hell can we say about the women's unconscious? However, this is an illusionary question. A trumped up question is pseudo pro problem, which is swiftly pushed aside, whether by reducing it to already existing models, or by translating it into their mechanistic opposite. What is there to be said about female unconscious? Not much, if anything, that the little boys let's that the little girl is a little boy. It's funny because the Secretary has typed that the little boy is a little boy

Unknown Speaker  55:27
that the little girl is a little boy, that the black continent that woman is remains unexplored if at all explorable. And when it so happens that to women ventures in that area, it's with the arrogance of a master sole possessor of the verb. That lab comm tells her to go back underground. They don't know what they're talking about. I'm quoting Lacan, because they don't know who they are. To deny any specificity to the female unconscious, means nothing else than to deny her any right to speak up. It means denying that she can hold her own discourse by equating the recognition of the specificity of the female unconscious, with the free access to a specific discourse in the feminine mode, French feminist among whom we can cite ln six truths routinely go high and you declare close enough man and the glue group politics and psychoanalysis. Well, French feminists have this define the central focus of their struggle. It doesn't mean that defining this discourse would be the only means to fight against the existing fellow centrism. But it's certainly one of the most significant modalities of the struggle. This is probably where an American audience less familiar with Slack costs rendition of psychoanalysis, and more reluctant visa vie fraudulent views, we would be drawn to question their positions. It's probably also regarding that point, that the two approaches American and French exhibit the most significant differences. This is due to the fact that the French approach builds on theoretical foundations of a primarily philosophical and linguistic nature, whose more prominent initiators have been Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari. This implies a questioning of knowledge and of the Theo logo centric principles that underlie it. It also implies that established structures founded on the principles of identity and resemblance be shaken in the name of revaluation of heterogeneity, alternative multiplicity and difference, difference in that context is not simply defined by reference to a norm, the masculine norm, whose negative side it will be still remaining inscribed within the realm of identity, but difference should be thought of as other not bounded by any system or any structure, difference should be the negation of fellow logo centrism, but in the same in the name of its inner diversity. This is why the established discourse is rejected as essentially male, since it bears the mark of unifying dominant structure. This is also why the subject of representation is is rejected, since it posits as its origin, the very notion of resemblance. Therefore, one should not be surprised if the subversion of the existing language as it's now being carried out in certain practices in France doesn't have as it as its primary focus and assertion of the similarities between writing in the feminine mode and writing in the masculine mode, with the sole exceptions being themes, which everybody acknowledges as different. By doing so French practice differs from the American one. I'm referring here to to Mary heights book and feminine language and literature, or that by Casey Miller and Kate Swift, entitled words and women. It's therefore not surprising that no concerted effort is being made in France to inscribe in language, illusory traces, whose function would be to designate the locus of women. I'm referring here to what has been achieved by MS or her story, to do so with the in effect to play into the game of power by Sue Make once more that women has no place except in the lacunae of discourse, which allows some slight nibbling things, as long as the implicit foundations, which allow its fellow logo centrism are never put into question

Unknown Speaker  1:00:18
to put discourse into question is to reject the existing order. It's to renounce in effect, the identity principle, the principles of unity and resemblance which allow the constitution of this fellow centering society. It means choosing marginality, in order to designate one difference, with an emphasis on the margins, a difference no longer conceived of as an inverted image as a double, but as alternative multiplicity and heterogeneity. It means laying claim to an absolute difference, which would not be posited within the norms, but against and outside the norms. This explains why the women's quest cannot be satisfied with a mere socio economic equality. That conquest conquest implies indeed, an insufficient recognition of her specificity as women and takes the form of momentary concession, constantly threatened by your patriarchal society, which grants them to her in order to better control her. This type of equality is no doubt an necessary precondition for a profound transformation of structures. But it's in no way sufficient, for it ignores and it's principle that that oppression is but one and only one of the possible forms of oppression of women. To that oppression should be added the more insidious and more destructive repression of her unconscious. Elon seeks to says in a conversation with scattering chemo, it's possible to begin transforming the discourse only when the existence of the unconscious is taken into account, where it's negated where psychoanalysis doesn't exist, nothing changes and history is goes on. She also criticizes the present form of literary analysis of women, because the later the latter remains a thematic analysis, I'm putting in NC choose, one will work on women in such and such period. And in such and such text, in exactly the same way, as was done with blacks. This is a semantic analysis. What is more, it's a kind of fork, which refers us back to the past, which in which in almost all cases, doesn't allow a word in the present. If it's true that all problems get into a tangle in the past, it's no less true that they get unraveled in the present. This is why it's easy to reply to those who believe in the primacy of class struggle over women struggle, that in a society as deeply ugly, like a egalitarian, as one may wish it to be. Feminine problems would still subsist for what is at stake in the women's struggle is much more than simply finding their place within the exact existing values or discourses. It's the problem of a whole society, which questions its very foundation. And its right to impose its truth as uniquely true. In so doing, the problem raised by the women's movement is that of a subversion of the subject, as an entity as truth, the subject of no knowledge, but also the desiring subject, a prisoner of micro and micro politics. They invented the whole of sexuality, while cell silencing hours says Anila, Claire, if we invent ours, they will have to rethink their own. We have to invent or reinvent invent society, and thus create new values, new discourses, new words, by refusing to allow women to accede to the existing values, these masculine values which have always evaded the problem of difference. And by substituting for them our own ways of seeing, feeling and thinking. Those values should not of course, become new imposed norms, thereby reinstituting an anti system that would be as repressive even though in the reverse, they should not bring out a dictatorship without modifying the deep structures. But they should help opening up the system to the prospect of a plurality of possibilities whose recognition had been here to form Bard.

Unknown Speaker  1:05:17
A woman is a perpetual dissident, I'm quoting here, Julia Kristeva are women is a perpetual dissident, as regards the social and political consensus. She's an exile from power, and thus always singular, divided, devilish, a witch, Julia Christie vice says in full in particular woman is here to shake, to disturb to deflate masculine values, and not to espouse them, her role is to maintain differences, by pointing to them by giving them life by putting them to play against one another. So that the social system would not rigidify And so that the subject would not die, that please do Pahala, which I can translate as speaking up that please do the whole, which breaks down the ancient networks can absolutely not find its place in the established discourse infused with masculine values. Women can speak up while borrowing forms and structures from the established discourse, but only to disrupt them in her attempt to go beyond towards a different horizon. For it's true that women is lost to put Julia Kristeva, again, on the narrow fringe that separates in her word, the past aka the nuts yet from the pasola not that meaning that the woman has the position of women is always to say it's not yet what we want. And it's not that that we are looking for her practice is negative with rest with respect to the dominant structures. And this is an opening which leads the subject towards heterogeneity. It's so happens, that woman is very close to such a heterogeneity, thanks to her way of listening to her own body. ln 60s, asserts that by writing herself, women will go back to that body of hers, which up to now has been more than confiscated. And I Neva, Claire replies, there is such an overwhelming happiness in pregnancy, such an immense happiness in giving birth, I have to talk about it. Not too bad, the resource of my sex, not about the resource of my soul, my virtue, or my feminine sensitivity, but this resource of my woman's womb, of my woman's vagina, of my women senses, I have to talk about these four, it's from there only that I'm sorry for its from there only that new words will appear, which will belong to the women and originate in her. New Words sprang up from the very women who refuses to appropriate man's words and their implicit founding values. While she chooses to reinvent her relationships with society. Women will thus have the arduous task of re evaluating everything with a fresh look, her own look, stripped of envy and turn creative. She will attempt to rethink society and its values and with us join forces with the subversive work already being carried out in a number of avant garde signifying practices, whether painting, music, theatre or literature, the whole social body with us be put in question.

Unknown Speaker  1:08:55
Such practices take place in France, in France, as well as in the United States. But it seems that France, under the influence of contemporary philosophical and psychoanalytical trends, has put an excessive emphasis on theorizing these privileged objects. Less intent on theorizing, American artist and cultural activist have however, achieved as much if not more, but it's such a subversion really possible. It appears as a model to be offered, but may not be realized, for the subject runs the risk of being lost. The task of women remains, however, to inscribe in hers in the social body, not so much difference in itself as a multiplicity of differences. And if it so happens, that she has to struggle to expose and cancel the many oppressions that bear on her or whether economist political marital, if it so happens that she at times has to make use of the masculine discourse to let herself be heard. Such steps must be considered only as moments in a struggle, beyond which a whole different set of possibilities of existence will open. I should add that not all French feminists share that point of view, some, like Katherine Kimmel or many believe that it might end up transforming women into helpless marginals while working on past repressions, a woman should not forget about the present which nurtures her innermost division for it's in the present only that a new politics can be brought about to her only belongs to difficult task to create the conditions whereby the future of difference will no longer mean a difference of futures

Unknown Speaker  1:11:21
it seems that there is a problem with the acoustics in the back of the room so we're going to take just one minute to turn off the lights and see if we can get rid of the hum

Unknown Speaker  1:11:31
in the back okay okay don't move too far because we're out excuse

Unknown Speaker  1:12:43
me You sit down please I have to say that it gives me a very great pleasure, a personal pleasure to introduce to you our third speaker, Monique V tick Thank you.

Unknown Speaker  1:14:23
I want first to say that I am not representative of what has been called New flash feminism. I am was on the side of old font feminism and as such interested in overcoming old fantasies about difference. Women are not men but without men. They will not be women. tigress, Atkinson said 10 years ago if feminist magazine illogic at all it fight for sex less society. So now I will read you for you a straight mind in recent years in Paris language as a phenomenon as dominated modern theoretical systems and the social sciences and as entered the political discussion of the lesbian and Women's Liberation Movement, can you hear me? It good? No I do not understand if you could hear me or not know

Unknown Speaker  1:15:31
where in that corner show me where you can hear the back

Unknown Speaker  1:15:39
slowly Okay, now, as we get to the to the plaza, Carlos is here.

Unknown Speaker  1:15:47
Okay. We have always problem with our school stick I don't know why, in recent years in pious language as a phenomenon as dominated modern theoretical systems and the social sciences, and as until the political discussions of the lesbian and women's liberation movements. This is because it relates to an important political field, where what is at play is power, or more than that, a networks a network of powers, since there is a multiplicity of languages, which constantly act upon the social reality, the importance of language in itself as a political stake, as only recently been perceived, but a gigantic development of linguistics, the multiplication of schools of linguistics, the advent of the science of communication, the technicality of the Maeterlinck meta languages that the science utilize, represents the symptoms of the importance of that political stake, the science of language as invaded other sciences, such as anthropology theory, which hosts psychoanalysis will account and all the disciplines which are developed on the basis of structuralism. The ensemble of these discourses produce confusing static for the oppressed, which makes them lose sight of the material cause of the whole question and plunges them into kind of a asked historic background. For these discourses produced a scientific version of social reality, where human beings are given us in variants and tortured by history, and worked by interest or class conflicts with the psyche, identical for everyone. Because genetically programmed, equally and taught by history and invoked by class conflicts, the psyche as provided to specialist since the beginning of the 20th century, a whole set of invariants the famous symbolic language which has the advantage of functioning with very few elements, since like numbers, the symbols that the psyche produces unconsciously, are few indeed, there are therefore sucio, isation and CRP very easy to impose upon the collective and even individual unconscious, and then the unconscious as a good test to automatically structure itself around the symbols metaphors such as the name of the Father, the Oedipus complex castration, the murder, or the death of the Father, the exchange of women and so forth. Or whatever is unconscious is easy to control. It's not controlled by just anybody. In the same way, mystical revelations and the appearance of symbols in the psyche, demand multiple interpretations and only specialists as a key that decodes in conscious. They are all the psychoanalyst authorised to set up the groupings of psychic manifestations, and to make the symbol emerge in its full meaning. For example, what Lacan calls the discourse of psycho analysis, and the analytical experience, both teach him what he knows. And each one of these teaching modes user one has already taught him. So this course which particularly applies to all of us, lesbians, feminist and almost experiment as those discourses which take for granted that what found society in a society is heterosexuality to develop in an apolitical field, as if anything of that which signifies could escape the political in this moment of history, and as if in what consumers politically insignificant signs could exist, this discourse of heterosexuality or plus us in the sense that they prevent us from speaking unless we speak in their terms, everything which puts them into question is at once This is regarded as elementary. Our refusal, excuse me, our refusal of the totalizing interpretation of psychoanalysis, makes the theoreticians say that we neglect the symbolic dimension. These discourses, causes Dainius very possibility, a possibility of creating our own categories. But the most ferocious action is the unrelenting tyranny that they exert upon our physical and mental selves. There is a well not nothing abstract about the four worlds that science and theories have to act materially that is physically upon our bodies and our mind.

Unknown Speaker  1:20:46
Is one of it's one of the forms of domination, it's very expression as Mark said, I would say has one of its exercises, all of your past Gnosis power and after had to deal with with it, it is one which is which says, You do not have the right to speech, because your discourse is not scientific and not theoretical, you are on the wrong level of analysis, you are confusing discourse on reality, you will discuss his name. You misunderstand this or that science is a discourse of modern theoretical systems and social science exert power well upon us. It's because it works with concepts which clauses touch us is