Trinh, T. Minh-Ha (1989). ‘Difference: A special Third World Women Issue.’ In: Woman,
Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
It must be odd
to be a minority
he was saying.
I looked around
and didn't see any.
So I said
Yeah
it must be.
- Mitsuye Yamada, "Looking Out" in Camp Notes
"where has obedience led her? At best, to the satisfaction of a "made-woman," capable of achieving as high a mastery of discourse as that of the male establishment in power."p.79
"How many, already, have been condemned to premature deaths for having borrowed the master's tools and thereby played into his hands?" p.79
"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." p.80 (Audre Lorde)
Define aphasia: inability or impairment in producing speech.
The policy of "separate development"
"they work toward your erasure while urging you to keep your way of life and ethnic values within the borders of your homelands." p.80
""difference" is essentially "division" in the understanding of many." p.82
"it is difficult for us to sit at table with them (the master and/or his substitutes) without feeling that our presence, like that of the "native" (who happens to be invited) among the anthropologists, serves to mask the refined sexist and/or racist tone of their discourse, reinforcing thereby its pretensions to universality." p. 83
"It is, indeed, much easier to dismiss or eliminate on the pretext of difference (destroy the other in our minds, in our world) than to live fearlessly with and within difference(s)." p.84
"the historical analysis is nothing other than the reconstruction and redistribution of a pretended order of things, the interpretation or even transformation of documents given and frozen into monuments." p.84
"The understanding of difference is a shared responsibility, which requires a minimum of willingness to reach out to the unknown." p.85
""Why do we have to be concerned with the question of Third World women? After all, it is only one issue among many others." Delete "Third World" and the sentence immediately unveils its value-loaded cliches." p.85
"Feminism, as Barbara Smith defines it, "is the political theory and practice that struggles to free all women. . . . Anything less than this vision of total freedom is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement."" p.86
The sense of specialness
"One gives "special care" to the old, to the disabled, and to all those who do not match the stereotype of the real wo/man." p.86
"I am tolerated in my difference as long as I conform with the established rules. Don't overstep the line." p.87
"Specialness as a soporific soothes, anaesthetizes my sense of justice; it is, to the wo/man of ambition, as effective a drug of psychological self-intoxication as alcohol is to the exiles of society." p.88
"Now, i am not only given the permission to open up and talk, i am also encouraged to express my difference. My audience expects and demands it; otherwise people would feel as if they have been cheated: We did not come to hear a Third World member speak about the First (?) World, We came to listen to that voice of difference likely to bring us what we can't have and to divert us from the monotony of sameness." p.88
"Eager not to disappoint, i try my best to offer my benefactors and benefactresses what they most anxiously yearn for: the possibility of a difference, yet a difference or an otherness that will not go so far as to question the foundation of their beings and makings" p.88
The question of roots and authenticity
"To persuade you that your past and cultural heritage are doomed to eventual extinction and thereby keeping you occupied with the Savior's concern, inauthenticity is condemned as a loss of origins and a whitening (or faking) of non-Western values." p.89
Define execration: something you might yell angrily.
"Today, planned authenticity is rife; as a product of hegemony and a remarkable counterpart of universal standardization, it constitutes an efficacious means of silencing the cry of racial oppression. We no longer wish to erase your difference, We demand, on the contrary, that you remember and assert it. At least, to a certain extent." p.89
"Mitsuye Yamanda, a second-generation Asian American, relevantly remarks: "our white sisters ... should be able to see that political views held by women of color are often misconstrued as being personal rather than ideological. Views critical of the system held by a person in an "outgroup" are often seen as expressions of personal angers against the dominant society. (If they hate it so much here, why don't they go back?) ...."" p.90
Infinite layers: I am not i can be you and me
"A critical difference from myself means that I am not i, am within and without i. IIi can be I or i, you and me both involved. We (with capital W) sometimes include(s), other times exclude(s) me. You and I are close, we intertwine; you may stand on the other side of the hill once in a while, but you may also be me, while remaining what you are and what i am not." p.90 (WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?)
""I" is, therefore, not a unified subject, a fixed identity, or that solid mass covered with layers of superficialities one has gradually to peel off before one can see its true face." p.94
"Despite our desperate, eternal attempt to separate, contain, and mend, categories always leak." p.94
"Authenticity as a need to rely on an "undisputed origin, " is prey to an obsessive fear: that of losing a connection." p.94
"things may be said to be what they are, not exclusively in relation to what was and what will be (they should not solely be seen as clusters chained together by the temporal sequence of cause and effect), but also in relation to each other's immediate presences and to themselves as non/presences." p.94
The female identity enclosure
"All deviations from the dominant stream of thought, that is to say, the belief in a permanent essence of wo/man and in an invariant but fragile identity, whose "loss" is considered to be a "specifically human danger, " can easily fit into the categories of the "mentally ill" or the "mentally underdeveloped."" p.95
"If feminism is set forth as a demystifying force, then it will have to question thoroughly the belief in its own identity." p.96
To try and provide a theory of what the female identity is, and how understanding it will provide the key to understanding the "special qualities" of writing by women, begs the question, does the female identity vary from the male model?
"The constant need to refer to the "male model" for comparisons unavoidably maintains the subject under tutelage. For the point is not to carve one's space in "identity theories that ignore women" and describe some of the faces of female identity... but patiently to dismantle the very notion of core (be it static or not) and identity." p.96
""Wo-" appended to "man" in sexist contexts is not unlike "Third World," "Third," "minority, " or "color" affixed to woman in pseudo-feminist contexts." p.97
Third World?
Define pernicious: having a harmful effect
"Thus, if "Third World" is often rejected for its judged-to-bederogative connotations, it is not so much because of the hierarchical, first-second-third order implied, as some invariably repeat, but because of the growing threat "Third World" consistently presents to the Western bloc the last few decades." p.98
"there no longer exists such a thing as a unified unaligned Third World bloc." p.98
"What is at stake is not only the hegemony of Western cultures, but also their identities as unified cultures. Third World dwells on diversity; so does First World. This is our strength and our misery. The West is painfully made to realize the existence of a Third World in the First World, and vice versa." p.98
"More recently, we have been hearing of the Fourth World which, we are told, "is a world populated by indigenous people who still continue to bear a spiritual relationship to their traditional lands."... Often ill at ease with the outspoken educated natives who represent the Third World in debates and paternalistically scornful of those who remain reserved, the dominant thus decides to weaken this term of solidarity, both by invalidating it as empowering tool and by inciting divisiveness within the Third World-a Third World within the Third World." p.99
"It is, apparently, inconvenient, if not downright mind stretching [notes Alice Walker), for white women scholars to think of black women as women, perhaps because "woman" (like "man" among white males) is a name they are claiming for themselves, and themselves alone." p.99
"Woman" and the subtle power of linguistic exclusion
"Definitions of "woman," "womanhood," "femininity, " "femaleness, " and, more recently, of "female identity" have brought about the arrogance of such a sham anatomical curiosity-whose needs must be "satisfied"-and the legitimation of a shamelessly dehumanizing form of Indiscretion." p.100
"The Body, the most visible difference between men and women, the only one to offer a secure ground for those who seek the permanent, the feminine "nature" and "essence, " remains thereby the safest basis for racist and sexist ideologies." p.100
"The search and the claim for an essential female/ethnic identity-difference today can never be anything more than a move within the male-is-norm-divide-and-conquer trap." p.101
Lorde "to imply . . . that all women suffer the same oppression simply because we are women, is to lose sight of the many varied tools of patriarchy." p.101
Subject-in-the-making
In order to shatter social codes, Julia Kristeva says that women need to assume "a negative function: reject everything... definite, structured, loaded with meaning, in the existing state of society." p.102
"sexual difference has no absolute value and is interior to the praxis of every subject." p.103
The "Phallic principle" "in one part of the world... does not necessarily apply to the other parts." p.103
"feminist practice can only be negative, at odds with what already exists so that we may say 'that's not it' and 'that's still not it'" p.103
Ethnicity or womanhood: whose duality?
"Difference does not annul identity. It is beyond and alongside identity." p.104
"many women of color feel obliged to make between ethnicity and womanhood: how can they? You never have/are one without the other. The idea of two illusorily separated identities, one ethnic, the other woman (or more precisely female), again, partakes in the Euro-American system of dualistic reasoning and its age-old divide-and conquer tactics." p.104
"The pitting of anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles against one another allows some vocal fighters to dismiss blatantly the existence of either racism or sexism within their lines of action, as if oppression only comes in separate, monolithic forms." p.104
Ivan Illich's distinction between gender and sex "calls attention to possibly one of the most pernicious hegemonic distortions on which nearly every anthropologist's study of the so-called sex division of labour among the "non-literate" people (and by extension, the "bi-cultural" natives) has rested: the fundamental assumption that gender is only a (primitive, underdeveloped) form of sex role." p.105
"With such a differentiation in mind, the concept of gender may be said to be alive, open enough to deal with both differences between and differences within entities, while the concept of sex reduces the interactions between men and women to an even exchange or a mere opposition of identities." p.106
"Thus, to simply denounce Third World women's oppression with notions and terms made to reflect or fit into Euro-American women's criteria of equality is to abide by ethnographic ideology... which depends on the representation of a coherent cultural subject as source of scientific knowledge to explain a native culture and reduces every gendered activity to a sex-role stereotype." p.106
"A fundamentally "pure" (unmediated) export of or import from the dominant countries, it indirectly serves the cause of tradition upholders and provides them with a pretext for muddling all issues of oppression raised by Third World women." p.106
"Standardization continues its relentless course, while Tradition remains the sacred weapon oppressors repeatedly hold up whenever the need to maintain their privileges, hence to impose the form of the old on the content of the new, arises." p.106
The Gender controversy
Ivan Illich: "while under the reign of gender women might be subordinate, under any economic regime they are only the second sex." p.107
Delphine Yeyet: "In a subsistence economy, men are obliged to earn their livelihood in cooperation with women without exploiting them. In a monetary economy, however, the thirst for comfort and profit pushes men to exploit women and chase them from the domains of political and social action" p.108
"A gendered life-style implies that non interchangeable men and women work together for the survival of their community." p.108
"The notion of gender is pertinent to feminism as far as it denounces certain fundamental attitudes of imperialism and as long as it remains unsettled and unsettling." p.113
A clear division between genders can be useful. "It sheds another convincing light on the fact that sexism is no more inherent in the masculine gender... than in the feminine gender, and when we say, for example, that the subjugation of women takes on a universal face only within a "male-biased" perspective, we are aware that we still judge this perspective in a sexist (not gendered) perspective." p.113
"Gender, reduced to a sex-determined behaviour, serves to promote inequality in a system of production, exchange, and consumption where "the woman" according to Jean Nzaou-Mabika, "has little opportunity to take the initiative and to exercise her creative ability. The least manifestations of a desire for change in ancient practices is regarded as an intolerable rebellion."" p.114
"In today's context, to defend a gendered way of living is to fight for difference, a difference that postpones to infinity and subverts the trend toward unisex behavioral patterns. The story of gender-as-difference is, therefore, not "the story of what has been lost" (Illich), but the story of that which does not readily lend itself to (demonstrative) narrations or descriptions and continues to mutate with/beyond nomenclature." p.116
Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
It must be odd
to be a minority
he was saying.
I looked around
and didn't see any.
So I said
Yeah
it must be.
- Mitsuye Yamada, "Looking Out" in Camp Notes
"where has obedience led her? At best, to the satisfaction of a "made-woman," capable of achieving as high a mastery of discourse as that of the male establishment in power."p.79
"How many, already, have been condemned to premature deaths for having borrowed the master's tools and thereby played into his hands?" p.79
"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." p.80 (Audre Lorde)
Define aphasia: inability or impairment in producing speech.
The policy of "separate development"
"they work toward your erasure while urging you to keep your way of life and ethnic values within the borders of your homelands." p.80
""difference" is essentially "division" in the understanding of many." p.82
"it is difficult for us to sit at table with them (the master and/or his substitutes) without feeling that our presence, like that of the "native" (who happens to be invited) among the anthropologists, serves to mask the refined sexist and/or racist tone of their discourse, reinforcing thereby its pretensions to universality." p. 83
"It is, indeed, much easier to dismiss or eliminate on the pretext of difference (destroy the other in our minds, in our world) than to live fearlessly with and within difference(s)." p.84
"the historical analysis is nothing other than the reconstruction and redistribution of a pretended order of things, the interpretation or even transformation of documents given and frozen into monuments." p.84
"The understanding of difference is a shared responsibility, which requires a minimum of willingness to reach out to the unknown." p.85
""Why do we have to be concerned with the question of Third World women? After all, it is only one issue among many others." Delete "Third World" and the sentence immediately unveils its value-loaded cliches." p.85
"Feminism, as Barbara Smith defines it, "is the political theory and practice that struggles to free all women. . . . Anything less than this vision of total freedom is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement."" p.86
The sense of specialness
"One gives "special care" to the old, to the disabled, and to all those who do not match the stereotype of the real wo/man." p.86
"I am tolerated in my difference as long as I conform with the established rules. Don't overstep the line." p.87
"Specialness as a soporific soothes, anaesthetizes my sense of justice; it is, to the wo/man of ambition, as effective a drug of psychological self-intoxication as alcohol is to the exiles of society." p.88
"Now, i am not only given the permission to open up and talk, i am also encouraged to express my difference. My audience expects and demands it; otherwise people would feel as if they have been cheated: We did not come to hear a Third World member speak about the First (?) World, We came to listen to that voice of difference likely to bring us what we can't have and to divert us from the monotony of sameness." p.88
"Eager not to disappoint, i try my best to offer my benefactors and benefactresses what they most anxiously yearn for: the possibility of a difference, yet a difference or an otherness that will not go so far as to question the foundation of their beings and makings" p.88
The question of roots and authenticity
"To persuade you that your past and cultural heritage are doomed to eventual extinction and thereby keeping you occupied with the Savior's concern, inauthenticity is condemned as a loss of origins and a whitening (or faking) of non-Western values." p.89
Define execration: something you might yell angrily.
"Today, planned authenticity is rife; as a product of hegemony and a remarkable counterpart of universal standardization, it constitutes an efficacious means of silencing the cry of racial oppression. We no longer wish to erase your difference, We demand, on the contrary, that you remember and assert it. At least, to a certain extent." p.89
"Mitsuye Yamanda, a second-generation Asian American, relevantly remarks: "our white sisters ... should be able to see that political views held by women of color are often misconstrued as being personal rather than ideological. Views critical of the system held by a person in an "outgroup" are often seen as expressions of personal angers against the dominant society. (If they hate it so much here, why don't they go back?) ...."" p.90
Infinite layers: I am not i can be you and me
"A critical difference from myself means that I am not i, am within and without i. IIi can be I or i, you and me both involved. We (with capital W) sometimes include(s), other times exclude(s) me. You and I are close, we intertwine; you may stand on the other side of the hill once in a while, but you may also be me, while remaining what you are and what i am not." p.90 (WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?)
""I" is, therefore, not a unified subject, a fixed identity, or that solid mass covered with layers of superficialities one has gradually to peel off before one can see its true face." p.94
"Despite our desperate, eternal attempt to separate, contain, and mend, categories always leak." p.94
"Authenticity as a need to rely on an "undisputed origin, " is prey to an obsessive fear: that of losing a connection." p.94
"things may be said to be what they are, not exclusively in relation to what was and what will be (they should not solely be seen as clusters chained together by the temporal sequence of cause and effect), but also in relation to each other's immediate presences and to themselves as non/presences." p.94
The female identity enclosure
"All deviations from the dominant stream of thought, that is to say, the belief in a permanent essence of wo/man and in an invariant but fragile identity, whose "loss" is considered to be a "specifically human danger, " can easily fit into the categories of the "mentally ill" or the "mentally underdeveloped."" p.95
"If feminism is set forth as a demystifying force, then it will have to question thoroughly the belief in its own identity." p.96
To try and provide a theory of what the female identity is, and how understanding it will provide the key to understanding the "special qualities" of writing by women, begs the question, does the female identity vary from the male model?
"The constant need to refer to the "male model" for comparisons unavoidably maintains the subject under tutelage. For the point is not to carve one's space in "identity theories that ignore women" and describe some of the faces of female identity... but patiently to dismantle the very notion of core (be it static or not) and identity." p.96
""Wo-" appended to "man" in sexist contexts is not unlike "Third World," "Third," "minority, " or "color" affixed to woman in pseudo-feminist contexts." p.97
Third World?
Define pernicious: having a harmful effect
"Thus, if "Third World" is often rejected for its judged-to-bederogative connotations, it is not so much because of the hierarchical, first-second-third order implied, as some invariably repeat, but because of the growing threat "Third World" consistently presents to the Western bloc the last few decades." p.98
"there no longer exists such a thing as a unified unaligned Third World bloc." p.98
"What is at stake is not only the hegemony of Western cultures, but also their identities as unified cultures. Third World dwells on diversity; so does First World. This is our strength and our misery. The West is painfully made to realize the existence of a Third World in the First World, and vice versa." p.98
"More recently, we have been hearing of the Fourth World which, we are told, "is a world populated by indigenous people who still continue to bear a spiritual relationship to their traditional lands."... Often ill at ease with the outspoken educated natives who represent the Third World in debates and paternalistically scornful of those who remain reserved, the dominant thus decides to weaken this term of solidarity, both by invalidating it as empowering tool and by inciting divisiveness within the Third World-a Third World within the Third World." p.99
"It is, apparently, inconvenient, if not downright mind stretching [notes Alice Walker), for white women scholars to think of black women as women, perhaps because "woman" (like "man" among white males) is a name they are claiming for themselves, and themselves alone." p.99
"Woman" and the subtle power of linguistic exclusion
"Definitions of "woman," "womanhood," "femininity, " "femaleness, " and, more recently, of "female identity" have brought about the arrogance of such a sham anatomical curiosity-whose needs must be "satisfied"-and the legitimation of a shamelessly dehumanizing form of Indiscretion." p.100
"The Body, the most visible difference between men and women, the only one to offer a secure ground for those who seek the permanent, the feminine "nature" and "essence, " remains thereby the safest basis for racist and sexist ideologies." p.100
"The search and the claim for an essential female/ethnic identity-difference today can never be anything more than a move within the male-is-norm-divide-and-conquer trap." p.101
Lorde "to imply . . . that all women suffer the same oppression simply because we are women, is to lose sight of the many varied tools of patriarchy." p.101
Subject-in-the-making
In order to shatter social codes, Julia Kristeva says that women need to assume "a negative function: reject everything... definite, structured, loaded with meaning, in the existing state of society." p.102
"sexual difference has no absolute value and is interior to the praxis of every subject." p.103
The "Phallic principle" "in one part of the world... does not necessarily apply to the other parts." p.103
"feminist practice can only be negative, at odds with what already exists so that we may say 'that's not it' and 'that's still not it'" p.103
Ethnicity or womanhood: whose duality?
"Difference does not annul identity. It is beyond and alongside identity." p.104
"many women of color feel obliged to make between ethnicity and womanhood: how can they? You never have/are one without the other. The idea of two illusorily separated identities, one ethnic, the other woman (or more precisely female), again, partakes in the Euro-American system of dualistic reasoning and its age-old divide-and conquer tactics." p.104
"The pitting of anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles against one another allows some vocal fighters to dismiss blatantly the existence of either racism or sexism within their lines of action, as if oppression only comes in separate, monolithic forms." p.104
Ivan Illich's distinction between gender and sex "calls attention to possibly one of the most pernicious hegemonic distortions on which nearly every anthropologist's study of the so-called sex division of labour among the "non-literate" people (and by extension, the "bi-cultural" natives) has rested: the fundamental assumption that gender is only a (primitive, underdeveloped) form of sex role." p.105
"With such a differentiation in mind, the concept of gender may be said to be alive, open enough to deal with both differences between and differences within entities, while the concept of sex reduces the interactions between men and women to an even exchange or a mere opposition of identities." p.106
"Thus, to simply denounce Third World women's oppression with notions and terms made to reflect or fit into Euro-American women's criteria of equality is to abide by ethnographic ideology... which depends on the representation of a coherent cultural subject as source of scientific knowledge to explain a native culture and reduces every gendered activity to a sex-role stereotype." p.106
"A fundamentally "pure" (unmediated) export of or import from the dominant countries, it indirectly serves the cause of tradition upholders and provides them with a pretext for muddling all issues of oppression raised by Third World women." p.106
"Standardization continues its relentless course, while Tradition remains the sacred weapon oppressors repeatedly hold up whenever the need to maintain their privileges, hence to impose the form of the old on the content of the new, arises." p.106
The Gender controversy
Ivan Illich: "while under the reign of gender women might be subordinate, under any economic regime they are only the second sex." p.107
Delphine Yeyet: "In a subsistence economy, men are obliged to earn their livelihood in cooperation with women without exploiting them. In a monetary economy, however, the thirst for comfort and profit pushes men to exploit women and chase them from the domains of political and social action" p.108
"A gendered life-style implies that non interchangeable men and women work together for the survival of their community." p.108
"The notion of gender is pertinent to feminism as far as it denounces certain fundamental attitudes of imperialism and as long as it remains unsettled and unsettling." p.113
A clear division between genders can be useful. "It sheds another convincing light on the fact that sexism is no more inherent in the masculine gender... than in the feminine gender, and when we say, for example, that the subjugation of women takes on a universal face only within a "male-biased" perspective, we are aware that we still judge this perspective in a sexist (not gendered) perspective." p.113
"Gender, reduced to a sex-determined behaviour, serves to promote inequality in a system of production, exchange, and consumption where "the woman" according to Jean Nzaou-Mabika, "has little opportunity to take the initiative and to exercise her creative ability. The least manifestations of a desire for change in ancient practices is regarded as an intolerable rebellion."" p.114
"In today's context, to defend a gendered way of living is to fight for difference, a difference that postpones to infinity and subverts the trend toward unisex behavioral patterns. The story of gender-as-difference is, therefore, not "the story of what has been lost" (Illich), but the story of that which does not readily lend itself to (demonstrative) narrations or descriptions and continues to mutate with/beyond nomenclature." p.116
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