Susan Friedman: mapping feminism and the cultural geographies of encounter

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

[Originally published on a weblog called “What Is Liberalism?”]

I’ve been reading Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (copyright1998) which was written by Susan Stanford Friedman. The book was recommended to me by my friend Emily. I’ve been enjoying the ambition of the book and the broad synthesis of theoretical work that Friedman attempts. At first I felt the book lacked sufficient concrete examples of what was under theoretical discussion, which I thought was due to its academic audience. This a limit of my intellect, but I’ve an easier time with theories presented to me as historical narratives or as theories backed with a clear depiction of what problems the theory might help solve. Nevertheless, the book explores topics such as identity and how much our ideas about identity have shifted over the last 40 years. Location and place play a larger role in how theoreticians like Friedman think about identity than they did 40 years ago. This is exciting stuff. I’m posting here some of the passages that grabbed me. I hope I’m understanding these passages, though I imagine it helps to participate in some classroom discussion of this work. This is a blog, so I’m going to rely on the blogosphere to provide classroom discussion. I’ve offered examples that these passages inspired in my head. To the extent that my reading of this work is off, I hope others will correct me.

I started writing this weblog post in June, but then I decided to wait till after I could contact the author of the book. I sent her this email:

08:11 PM 6/7/2005 -0400: I’ve been reading and enjoying your book “Mappings.” I was about to write a short note about it and post it to my weblog. I was also going to note, in passing, my one quibble with the writing, which is the lack of concrete examples. I’ve written, but not yet posted to my weblog, the sentence “Pages go by without encountering a sentence that begins with the words ‘For example'”. I also note that this is perhaps fair, since I am probably not part of the target market for your book. I’m not in school, I’ve been out of college for 18 years, and I did not study literature when I was in school. I’m a computer programmer, and friends of mine told me that I’d enjoy your book, so I’m reading it. I surmise that the primary target for your writing is probably students, for whom concrete examples, if any are needed, can be provided in class (and perhaps the search for them can be part of classroom discussion?). Before I post my note to my weblog, I thought I’d write to you and ask if my surmise is generally correct. Is it reasonable to say you write more for an academic audience than a general audience? My thanks if you find time to answer this.

She wrote back with the most gracious email I’ve ever received from an author. With her permission, I reproduce her email here:

Jun 7, 2005 9:45 PM:
Dear Lawrence: I am endlessly flattered that you are reading and enjoying Mappings!!! I’d be delighted for you to post something about it on your weblog, and feel free to be as critical as you like. I prefer debates.

I will try to answer your question about audience and what you experienced as a lack of examples. I didn’t think of the book as primarily for students. I thought of my first audience as an “academic one”, by which I mean people who do research, teach, and study as students. However, I also hoped that some people long out of school but interested in the ideas in the book might pick it up and find it useful too. I try hard to make difficult and complex ideas and theories easy to read, accessible, and a pleasure to read. This is very difficult to do, I think, especially when the fields I work in have become so specialized. I don’t think they are any more specialized than the sciences or social sciences. I doubt I could read and understand at all stuff in your field, computers! However, writing about questions of identity, and about literature and film, ought to be comprehensible to people outside universities. So I keep trying, but I am sure that I am not always successful.

Another audience I had in mind was people in other countries, especially outside Europe and America. It has meant a great deal to me to get such an enthusiastic response in places like Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, India, Lebanon, Dubai, and Argentina as well as Italy, the Netherlands, and Great Britain–all places where I have lectured about these ideas in recent years. Mappings will appear soon in Chinese–what a thrill! People outside the U.S. really respond to the book’s main idea about the importance of place and location.

Now, for your great question about examples. I don’t think academic writing should ever be without examples. In fact, I like to explain to social scientists that my “data” are “texts”–novels, poems, films, essays, popular culture, etc. So from my point of view Mappings is full of examples–all the readings of writers, films, and so forth. But I think what you may have noticed is something I wasn’t quite aware of. I think that you may read pages and pages without a “for example,” because I tend to have a section on “theory” and then a reading of a text as an extended example. So, I use rather lengthy interpretations of books like Gloria Anzaldua’s essay-poem Borderlands, or June Jordan’s personal essay “Report from the Bahamas,” or Anna Deveare Smith’s play Twilight, or Neil Jordan’s film Crying, or Mira Nair’s film Mississippi Masala as the examples that help explain and also establish the general claims that I make (just to cite a few examples from Chapters 2 and 3). I see these texts as the “data” I have collected and analyzed in relation to my general hypotheses. I am using some of the language of the scientific method because I don’t think science and literary/cultural studies are as far apart in method as many people think they are. Does this make sense?

Anyway, thanks for asking! And I’d be delighted to see what you decide to write. Thanks again for taking the time to write .

Best wishes, susan

The pattern that she suggest (alternating chapters focused first on theory and then on application and example) now stands our clearly. I feel embarrassed about not having seen the structure of her book till she pointed it out to me.

There is an exciting quality to this book. Friedman has the broadest possible view of feminism, and she is ready to celebrate every branching variation of this intellectual tradition. One gets a sense of that from the opening (from page 1):

I begin this book of feminist mappings with a meta-critical excursion, a series of reflections on gender and identity, on where we have been and where we are going, especially as we head past the millennial divide into the twentieth-first century. By “we”, I am speaking most directly of and to the collectivity of academic feminists who make up the divergent and polyvocal feminisms of higher education. But I also mean to include by implication the larger collectivity of the progressively minded whose intellectual projects and political commitments parallel and intermingle with those of academic feminists.

Friedman’s view of feminism is an inclusive one. Right from the start, she seems ready to take in all the academic work of the last 40 years and grant it the legitimacy of a careful listen:

I am also much aware that the collectivity of differences gathered in such a “we” contains a sometimes difficult mix of different intellectual generation – from those who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s (like myself), on through those who emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s, to those who are graduate students today, necessarily building up the evolving work of the their elders, but eager to move on and beyond prior questions, frameworks, and paradigms. “We” includes the graduate students and new assistant professors who are expected to know all the transformation in literary and cultural studies of the past thirty years at the same time that they hone the newest cutting edges of knowledge. It also includes the older generations who, having experienced and contributed greatly to these transformations, must try to make themselves anew, to keep up with the ever-changing terrains. Some days, there seems to be no rest for the weary – the anxious graduate student, the burned-out professor. But other days, the new geographies of literary studies provide ever-expanding horizons for travel and growth.

Friedman is not interested in picking a petty fight over who has the correct party line regarding feminism. She has, instead, a curiosity about the diversity of views which all take for themselves the name of “feminism”. She is also reaching for a new synthesis. The work done in the 90s is different from the work done in the 70s. If feminism grew out of the white middle class of America, it has since been taken up by non-whites, by non-middle-class, and by non-Americans. Feminism looks different, it keeps changing, with each new group that takes it up as their own.

It is in this spirit of a multidimensional “we” that I make the argument that the future of academic feminism involves moving beyond gender, involves, to be more precise, recognizing and intensifying shifts that have already begun taking place in part because of what I am calling the new geographics of identity.

A focus on the new geographics is an attempt at a grand new synthesis, bringing together many disciplines:

I attempt with the term geographics to crystallize momentarily a new, rapidly moving, magnetic field of identity studies. Interdisciplinary in scope, this new field represents a terrain of common concerns and rhetoric that crisscross boundaries between the humanities and social sciences, between so-called essentialist and constructivists, between identity politics and coalitional politics. I am stuck by the centrality of space – the rhetoric of spatiality – to the locations of identity within the mappings and remappings of ever-changing cultural formations.

To understand why this might be new, or have new importance, one needs to understand the debates that academic feminists were having previously, in the 1980s:

I invoke here Elain Showwalter’s 1984 identification of two highly influential and broadly defined feminist critical practices for the 1980s: first, gynocriticism, that is, the historical study of women writers as a distinct literary tradition; and second, gynesis, a term she borrowed from Alice Jardine to suggest theoretical readings of the feminine as a discursive effect that disrupts the master narratives of western culture. During the 1980s, gynocriticism and gynesis sometimes clashed, each of its proponents often dismissive of the other.

If I understand this right, women’s enforced social roles justifies treating literature written by women as its own unique tradition. This is called gynocriticism. Gynesis has a different emphasis, it looks to the ways in which male/femaleness gets embedded into the language, and changes over time, and sees this as undercutting some of the most important narratives by which Western culture understands itself.

Whether distinct or intermingling, gynocriticism and gynesis have shared an emphasis on sexual difference and a privileging of gender as constituent of identity. For gynocriticism, the existence of patriarchy, however changing and historically inflected, serves as the founding justification for treating women writers of different , times and places as part of a common tradition based on gender. For gynesis, the linguistic inscriptions of masculine/feminine – indeed, languages’ very dependence on gendered binaries – underlie various feminist unravelings of master narratives and discourses.

Friedman offers a critique of both approaches:

[Gynocriticism and gynesis] foregrounding of gender has also produced certain blindnesses that have left them seriously out of step with advances in theories of identity and subjectivity concurrently developing in many different fields, including feminism itself, multiculturalism, postcolonial studies, post-structuralism, gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, cultural studies, anthropology, political theory, sociology, and geography. My aim in this chapter is to chart these advances, articulate the challenges they pose for gynocritical and gynetic feminist criticism, identify emergent forms of feminist criticism currently developing in tandem with these advances, and caution against the potentially dangerous loss of feminism’ distinctive political project and energy. I want ultimately to suggest that moving beyond gender does not mean forgetting it, but rather returning to it in a newly spatialized way that I call locational feminism.

It was a victory for feminism, and for women, when gender became recognized as a subject deserving serious study in universities. Friedman is aware of the dangers of now downplaying its significance. I assume she feels that women’s studies are now solidly established in the universities, and no longer need to defensively justify themselves. Or perhaps she feels that the only way for women’s studies to remain relevant is to constantly move forward and mature.

Such movement “beyond” gender is unsettling, if not dangerous. After all, it has been the pioneering breakthrough of academic feminism to establish gender as a legitimate framework for intellectual inquiry. This achievement did not come easily, and more to the point, the existence of this new field is under constant threat of erasure or marginalization in an academy beset by institutional downsizing and attacks from without. Nonetheless, the shift beyond the strongly privileged focus on gender is well underway, producing major theoretical and pedagogical breakthroughs of its own. New positional, locational, spatial – that is, geographical – concepts of identity have fostered this evolution in academic feminism. In charting and reinforcing this change, I will focus particularly on the case of feminist criticism, suggesting by implication that other fields within academic feminism are experiencing parallel transformation.

Feminism must grow or die. Even when under threat from constant budget cuts, feminism in the academy can not be afraid to criticize where it has been in the past and to move onto new things. And one of the new things is a new way of defining identity.

One of the most exciting ideas that I got out of this book is the new definition of identity as a historical place:

Rhetorically speaking, geographics involves a shift from the discourses of romanticism to those of postmodernity, with a stop in between for the metaphorics of early-twentieth-century modernism, whose emphasis on split selves and fragmentation looks back to the discourse of organic wholeness and forward to the discourse of spatialized flux. Instead of the individualistic telos of developmental models, the new geographics figures identity as a historically embedded site, a positionality, a location, a standpoint, a terrain, an intersection, a network, a crossroads of multiply situated knowledges.

A sense of self defined this way appeals to me. Our sense of self is shaped by where we are born, who our parents are, who our friends are, what the status level of our race is compared to others, what the status of our nation is compared to others. We form our sense of self through narratives, some small scale, some large scale. The story of how our parents met and fell in love, or failed to, becomes part of our identity. The story of how our nation formed, or was conquered by outsiders, becomes part of our identity. We are a moment in history, formed by the larger and smaller stories of that history, the big waves and the smaller waves combining as sound waves might combine to make a symphony, or a cacophony. And history is not static, the present constantly rewrites the past. The meaning of the 1960s was completely rewritten by the reaction of the 1980s. In 1968 a young idealist might have thought they were on verge of creating the world’s first working utopia, by the middle of the reaction of the 1980s the uprising of the 1960s began to look like another failed attempt of visionaries to break past the bounds of bigotry and class constraints. Who I think I am today, in 2005, is probably different from who I’ll think I had been in 2005, when I look back from 2010. To give a simple example, all of us have hopes for our careers and our love lives, and these hopes inform our sense of self, and after the passage of some years, when we know how much our hopes came to fruition or met with defeat, our sense of our past true potential is altered, and it alters our estimate of our current potential as well.

Friedman does an excellent job of summarizing that fluidness, for people and peoples:

Moreover, this geographic discourse often emphasizes not the ordered movement of linear growth but the lack of solid ground, the ceaseless change of fluidity, the nomadic wandering of transnational diaspora, the interactive syncretism’s of the “global ethnoscape,” or the interminable circuitry of cyberspace. Its mobile figurations adapt the landscapes of accelerating change, the technologies of information highways, and the globalization of migratory cultures.

Friedman points out that we discover identity mostly in relation to other things. She suggests that often, comparing a culture to another culture or a person to another person, the question to be asked is which aspects are the same, and which are different? To understand the following passage, I had to look up the word “liminal”. An entry I found through Google offered this definition: “A term favoured particularly by post-colonial critics, and which refers to the thresholds, boundaries and borderlines of binary constructions (black/white, masculine/feminine, Englishness/Irishness). These oppositions are often false, producing blurring and gaps which might be exploited in order to deconstruct these oppositions.”

This dialectic between differences and sameness is embedded in the double meaning of the word identity itself. Identity is constructed relationally through difference from the other; identification with a group based on gender, race, or sexuality, for example, depends mostly on binary systems of “us” versus “them,” where difference from the other defines the group to which one belongs. Conversely, identity also suggests sameness, as in the word identical; an identity affirms some form of commonality, some shared ground. Difference versus sameness; stasis versus travel; certainty versus interrogation; purity versus mixing: the geographics of identity moves between boundaries of difference and borderlands liminality.

I have the impression that Friedman is excited by the new frontiers that are opening up for intellectual adventure. I very much admire her emphasis on the polyvocal and contradictory nature of identity:

Mirroring these directional movements, the new geography of identity is polyvocal and often contradictory. Its metaphorics, now sweeping many different fields within and outside of literary studies, has been influenced especially by postcolonial studies, for which the issues of travel, nomadism, diaspora, and the cultural hybridity produced by movement through space have a material reality and political urgency as well as figurative cogency. But the intellectual genealogy of this geographical figuration centers in the different discourses of identity and subjectivity that have developed over the last three decades as effects of late-twentieth-century political and cultural change.

Identity is full of contradictions. It is shaped in part by belonging to a group, but most of us belong to many potential groups simultaneously. When I think about my identity, it strikes me that the number of ways that I might group myself with others is nearly infinite. Think of the many ways that I might use the word “we”:

We Americans have invaded Iraq.

We Krubner’s used to take a family vacation every summer.

We whites enslaved the blacks.

We coffee drinkers need to get our fix.

We Europeans drove the Indians off their lands.

We writers learn more from reading than by listening.

We were in our car yesterday and it broke down at the side of the highway, due to a failed fuel pump.

Those are all true groupings. Each has its influence on my identity. I myself am polyvocal, I have one sense of self when I’m depressed and another when I’m happy. And group identity, then, must be exponentially more complex than individual identity, polyvocal because of the number of people involved, each of whom probably has an internal polyvocal voice, changing all the time.

Then there are, as Friedman has mentioned, the conquests and the colonizations of identity. Others may want us not to be what we are but to be what they need us to be. We become, then, in part, the narratives that others force upon us. We may speak of small scale stories: sometimes it is the husband convincing the wife that they are a happy couple, which is his preferred narrative of their marriage. We may speak, too, of large scale stories, of a whole group having their collective narrative colonized by an outsider. We might examine the case of France invading Senegal, and eventually teaching the Senegalese to see themselves as the French see them, and then, afterwards, the Senegalese struggling to remember their own views of themselves, or perhaps trying to find a new synthesis of their old views and the French views. Thus new group narratives are born, amid disagreement, amid displacement, amid a particular place and time, polyvocal from the beginning.

If we gain our sense of selves through narratives, through the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the stories we tell others about ourselves, and the stories that others tell us about ourselves, then clearly our identity is our history and history, in the large scale sense, must also be a part of our identity. If we are taught a history that embeds within it several misogynist assumptions, then both men and women are made misogynist to the extent they accept the stories that history teaches. Feminists have interest in writing a history that is purged of misogyny. Yet what does this entail? (from page 199):

My reflections begin with the contradictory desires within contemporary American feminism revolving around the question of history, particularly what is involved when feminists write histories of feminism. On the one hand, a pressing urgency to reclaim and hold on to a newly reconstituted history of women has fueled the development of the field of women’s history as well as the archaeological, archival, and oral history activities of feminists in other areas of women’s studies outside the discipline of history, inside and outside the academy. On the other hand, there has been a palpable anxiety within the feminist movement about the possibility that our activities as feminists – including the production of our own history – run the risk of repeating the same patterns of thought and action that excluded, distorted, muted, or erased women from the master narratives of history in the first place. The first impulse is outer-directed and has channeled phenomenal energy and excitement into the interrelated projects of the de-formation of existing history and re-formation of the new histories of women and he place of gender in all cultural formations as they change over time. The second impulse is inner-directed and has applied the brakes to the new enthusiasms and in sober self-reflexivity insisted on problematizing the project of feminist history writing. With some exceptions, the reflexive impulse has found expression not so much in the field of women’s history itself as in the discourses of feminist theory and activism. Feminism, particularly as it attempts to construct the stories of its own production, is caught between a desire to act and the resistance to action that threatens to reproduce what poststructuralists like Luce Irigaray call the economy of the same.

But what would a feminist history look like? We might look at the kind of history that was taught in American high schools in 1960 and call that type of history the “Great Man” version of history. It is a type of history dominated by legendary figures: Columbus, Cromwell, Napoleon, Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, Stalin, etc. Would it accomplish much to add some women to this story? A “Great Person” version of history might be sure to emphasize the female leaders: Joan of Arc, Queen Elisabeth, Maria Theresa of Austria, Catherine the Great of Russia, etc. Since modern history balances the importance of political leaders against the importance of social leaders, would it be enough to also include some female cultural innovators? Jane Austen, Florence Nightingale, the Bronte sisters, Susan B. Anthony, Nellie Bly, Lucy Burns, Doris Lessing, etc? If all history is allegory, a story, is it possible to create a new history that doesn’t commit the crimes of the old one? If the old history left out women and 90% of the men, would a new history be any better if let the top women in and left out 90% of everybody? Friedman is aware of all the risks and still thinks that writing a new history is an exciting intellectual project:

The contradictory desires of feminists “making history” reflect the epistemological issues embedded in the double reference of the term history itself: first, to history as the past; and second, to history as the story of the past. The first meaning of history – what has happened – posits a base reality whose totality can never be fully reconstituted. The second meaning of history – the narrative of what has happened – foregrounds the role of the narrator of past events and consequently the nature of narrative as a mode of knowing that selects, organizes, orders, interprets, and allegorizes. These two dimensions of history in turn reflect the double reference to the title, “making history”. The feminist desire to “make history” entangles the desire to effect significant and lasting change with the desire to be the historian of change. As a heuristic activity, history writing orders the past in relation to the needs of the present and future. The narrative act of assigning meaning to the past potentially intervenes in the present and future construction of history. For feminists, this means that writing the history of feminism functions as an act in the present that can (depending on its influence) contribute to the shape of feminism’s future.

There’s is a chapter of the book that focuses on Virginia Woolf, but I’m going to save my remarks on that chapter till I’ve had a chance to reread some of Woolf’s work.

All in all, there is a lot in Friedman’s book that I liked. Her broad approach to the subject of identity, her attempt to synthesize much of the academic debates of the last 40 years, makes for a compact, energized exploration of new ideas.

Post external references

  1. 1
    http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0691058040/qid=1121025795/sr=1-7/ref=sr_1_7/002-0670415-4889610?v=glance&s=books
Source