Reflection on Judy Taylor's Erotics of Cruelty presentation
On Thursday I went to a presentation at University College. Judy Taylor, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Women's Studies, presented “Hurts so Good: The Erotics of Cruelty in Feminist Memoir Projects.”
Here's the abstract: Adrienne Rich's essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence"
(1980) is arguably one of the most salient contemporary treatises on women's relationships with one another. Calling for a reconceptualization of women's intimacy, Rich asked feminists to render the lesbian continuum more apparent by amplifying the myriad types of sustaining relationships women have with one another. While Rich's essay has reached canonical status, feminists for the most part have not obliged her request, leaving in tact categorically narrow understandings of lesbianism, and a-political, a-sexual notions of women's friendship. More common than homage to sustaining love among women has been a type of feminist memoir project that details a myriad of cruelties among women and girls. In literature and fine art, essay and social science research over the last 30 years, feminists lament this cruelty, diagnose its causes, and propose a feminist transformation in friendship. In this paper, I analyze the intellectual and emotional work such projects do. Rather than theorize the erotics of friendship, they make visible an erotic of cruelty among women. Such work implicitly 'queers' women's friendship by illustrating the romantic quality of drama among women and their complex desires to ravage one another. In these narratives, feminists lick their wounds, at once denouncing and reveling in being victimized by other women, appearing to derive pleasure from the aggression they find in themselves and other women. Such admissions complicate but ultimately extend Rich's utopian vision of women's friendship.
Taylor noted that rather than being broadened and adopted as Rich suggested, that the term "lesbian" has "gone out of fashion," to be replaced by "queer."
Personally, I find that women still identify as lesbian, but they're no longer the only visible queer females. Women who aren't lesbian, and whose claim to the term would be highly contested (women like me), are now visible as queer. Added to this are lesbian women who choose to identity as queer in solidarity with these women. Queer has been a popular identity term partly because lesbian, rather than being broadened, became narrowed, and defined in exclusive terms that pushed even many lesbians to re-identify. Some lesbians view the adoption of queer as a de-politicizing of lesbianism. I disagree; I see it as a different politics, not a depoliticization.
As one observer notes, the pairing of erotic with cruelty is pretty archetypal. The unusual element Taylor sees in feminism is the extent to which the dynamic among women has been a focus of memoir. Feminism has taken on the project of revolutionizing not just male-female relations, but relations among women. Third wave feminists, she observed, deconstruct their own relationship dynamics with the same tools they use to analyse patriarchal exploitation.
I think Taylor's obervation about third wave feminists is true. I see this deconstruction as necessary because of the recognition that our oppression is not limited to sex, but is multiplied and compounded. Sexism isn't limited to discrete categories; there's elements of the dynamic of the Feminine Other in racism, for example, or classism. Thus, women's community isn't experienced as a zone free from oppression ("safe" space) and its power dynamics need to be deconstructed.
Her paper looked at three elements of the erotics of cruelty 1) it was based on the politics of recognition; 2) it was produced communally; and 3) surviving it was experienced as feminist capital.
1) Recognition: Taylor drew on Jessica Benjamin's analysis that recognition allows the self to realize its agency. By implication, then, the refusal to recognize is also a refusal to affirm agency. Taylor argued that feminist memoirs present these moments of recognition - achieved or refused- as pivotal. She used the example of Audre Lorde's writing about a black librarian's refusal to meet her eyes. When we are not seen, or refuse to be seen, by those in the position to see us most fully, there is a rejection which feminist memoir writes of as betrayal.
She notes that these writings are highly romanticized. The intensity of friendships are like epic romances. Taylor described these friendships as training for monogamy. Memoirs of betrayal evoke the language of heartbreak and sexual jealousy to describe the ending of a friendship, or being displaced for another girl (or worse) a boyfriend. She read some examples and also mentioned the phenomenon of giving and taking back pieces of jewellry of the "best friends forever" type.
I know my own friendships with particular women have been difficult precisely because they feel like sexual relationships, even though they were never sexual, perhaps because they were so intimate and intense. It may be that their lack of sexual expression is what gives them their ongoing power to me. I sometimes wonder if certain friends would have been so inflential for me if I'd just gotten it out of my system with a quick fuck.
Perhaps this is in part where my assumption that beautiful women are evil comes from; the connection between attraction and rejection. Of course some of it comes from also having had such vehement arguments with such hot women. Is it a sexual displacement? Perhaps. Yet they were also terribly wrong, and it's hard to ignore that.
2) Communality: Taylor noted that displays of rejection and humiliation take place in public, and are highly dramatic.
It brought to mind a dozen of the cruelties I've seen women inflict on other women since elementary school. It also made me think of all those girl gang/women in prison movies, and their similarity to living in women's residence.
Taylor noted the memoirs often tell about the difference between friendship in private and friendship in public, and the "I'll be your best friend but we can never be seen together" theme recurrs.
I see both the danger and the protection offered by a public arena. In some cases the public setting merely exaggerates the shame and embarrassment, and the tormentor's delight. Yet sometimes, when I sense the tormentor would rather have their actions secret (whether domestic violence or a series of cutting emails), I find the public venue provides witness, if not protection itself.
3) Surviving: Taylor noted that having survived these betrayals and rejections is taken as a source of pride and treated as feminist capital, or, as a right to sing the blues.
Some of my own experiences with Dyke March or Sapphismo have left me feeling as if I've survived a war or a series of political purges. I don't know how others view this kind of experience, but it has left me with a sense of maturity and having "come of age." I think this is tied to the public nature of these erotic cruelties. Rather than the solidarity Rich wanted to see in women's friendship, we seem to have settled for a solidarity of survivorship. I know that it seem easier to bond with women over our shared cruelty at the hands of other women than over our shared love of women, which often seems particular or indefinable.
Taylor speculates that the cruelty directed toward other women originates in anger at oppression redirected. This seems possible to me - I've often noted that we seem to lash out at one another when we can't or won't lash out at the real source of our frustration.
So... the problem of recognition leads to efforts to dominate within public space. I'm not sure where we go with that. Maybe the check-in portion of support groups is in part an effort to diffuse that by enabling recoignition. Yet as I found in the Monday Night Lesbian group, even this can be ineffective as recognition, since so often people see what they want to see.
Here's the abstract: Adrienne Rich's essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence"
(1980) is arguably one of the most salient contemporary treatises on women's relationships with one another. Calling for a reconceptualization of women's intimacy, Rich asked feminists to render the lesbian continuum more apparent by amplifying the myriad types of sustaining relationships women have with one another. While Rich's essay has reached canonical status, feminists for the most part have not obliged her request, leaving in tact categorically narrow understandings of lesbianism, and a-political, a-sexual notions of women's friendship. More common than homage to sustaining love among women has been a type of feminist memoir project that details a myriad of cruelties among women and girls. In literature and fine art, essay and social science research over the last 30 years, feminists lament this cruelty, diagnose its causes, and propose a feminist transformation in friendship. In this paper, I analyze the intellectual and emotional work such projects do. Rather than theorize the erotics of friendship, they make visible an erotic of cruelty among women. Such work implicitly 'queers' women's friendship by illustrating the romantic quality of drama among women and their complex desires to ravage one another. In these narratives, feminists lick their wounds, at once denouncing and reveling in being victimized by other women, appearing to derive pleasure from the aggression they find in themselves and other women. Such admissions complicate but ultimately extend Rich's utopian vision of women's friendship.
Taylor noted that rather than being broadened and adopted as Rich suggested, that the term "lesbian" has "gone out of fashion," to be replaced by "queer."
Personally, I find that women still identify as lesbian, but they're no longer the only visible queer females. Women who aren't lesbian, and whose claim to the term would be highly contested (women like me), are now visible as queer. Added to this are lesbian women who choose to identity as queer in solidarity with these women. Queer has been a popular identity term partly because lesbian, rather than being broadened, became narrowed, and defined in exclusive terms that pushed even many lesbians to re-identify. Some lesbians view the adoption of queer as a de-politicizing of lesbianism. I disagree; I see it as a different politics, not a depoliticization.
As one observer notes, the pairing of erotic with cruelty is pretty archetypal. The unusual element Taylor sees in feminism is the extent to which the dynamic among women has been a focus of memoir. Feminism has taken on the project of revolutionizing not just male-female relations, but relations among women. Third wave feminists, she observed, deconstruct their own relationship dynamics with the same tools they use to analyse patriarchal exploitation.
I think Taylor's obervation about third wave feminists is true. I see this deconstruction as necessary because of the recognition that our oppression is not limited to sex, but is multiplied and compounded. Sexism isn't limited to discrete categories; there's elements of the dynamic of the Feminine Other in racism, for example, or classism. Thus, women's community isn't experienced as a zone free from oppression ("safe" space) and its power dynamics need to be deconstructed.
Her paper looked at three elements of the erotics of cruelty 1) it was based on the politics of recognition; 2) it was produced communally; and 3) surviving it was experienced as feminist capital.
1) Recognition: Taylor drew on Jessica Benjamin's analysis that recognition allows the self to realize its agency. By implication, then, the refusal to recognize is also a refusal to affirm agency. Taylor argued that feminist memoirs present these moments of recognition - achieved or refused- as pivotal. She used the example of Audre Lorde's writing about a black librarian's refusal to meet her eyes. When we are not seen, or refuse to be seen, by those in the position to see us most fully, there is a rejection which feminist memoir writes of as betrayal.
She notes that these writings are highly romanticized. The intensity of friendships are like epic romances. Taylor described these friendships as training for monogamy. Memoirs of betrayal evoke the language of heartbreak and sexual jealousy to describe the ending of a friendship, or being displaced for another girl (or worse) a boyfriend. She read some examples and also mentioned the phenomenon of giving and taking back pieces of jewellry of the "best friends forever" type.
I know my own friendships with particular women have been difficult precisely because they feel like sexual relationships, even though they were never sexual, perhaps because they were so intimate and intense. It may be that their lack of sexual expression is what gives them their ongoing power to me. I sometimes wonder if certain friends would have been so inflential for me if I'd just gotten it out of my system with a quick fuck.
Perhaps this is in part where my assumption that beautiful women are evil comes from; the connection between attraction and rejection. Of course some of it comes from also having had such vehement arguments with such hot women. Is it a sexual displacement? Perhaps. Yet they were also terribly wrong, and it's hard to ignore that.
2) Communality: Taylor noted that displays of rejection and humiliation take place in public, and are highly dramatic.
It brought to mind a dozen of the cruelties I've seen women inflict on other women since elementary school. It also made me think of all those girl gang/women in prison movies, and their similarity to living in women's residence.
Taylor noted the memoirs often tell about the difference between friendship in private and friendship in public, and the "I'll be your best friend but we can never be seen together" theme recurrs.
I see both the danger and the protection offered by a public arena. In some cases the public setting merely exaggerates the shame and embarrassment, and the tormentor's delight. Yet sometimes, when I sense the tormentor would rather have their actions secret (whether domestic violence or a series of cutting emails), I find the public venue provides witness, if not protection itself.
3) Surviving: Taylor noted that having survived these betrayals and rejections is taken as a source of pride and treated as feminist capital, or, as a right to sing the blues.
Some of my own experiences with Dyke March or Sapphismo have left me feeling as if I've survived a war or a series of political purges. I don't know how others view this kind of experience, but it has left me with a sense of maturity and having "come of age." I think this is tied to the public nature of these erotic cruelties. Rather than the solidarity Rich wanted to see in women's friendship, we seem to have settled for a solidarity of survivorship. I know that it seem easier to bond with women over our shared cruelty at the hands of other women than over our shared love of women, which often seems particular or indefinable.
Taylor speculates that the cruelty directed toward other women originates in anger at oppression redirected. This seems possible to me - I've often noted that we seem to lash out at one another when we can't or won't lash out at the real source of our frustration.
So... the problem of recognition leads to efforts to dominate within public space. I'm not sure where we go with that. Maybe the check-in portion of support groups is in part an effort to diffuse that by enabling recoignition. Yet as I found in the Monday Night Lesbian group, even this can be ineffective as recognition, since so often people see what they want to see.