The generosity of feminism

Australian Feminist Studies

Volumn 12, Issue 26, 1997, Pages 275-282

  Diprose, Rosalyn ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 26444473734     PISSN: 08164649     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/08164649.1997.9994867     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. Understanding generosity as a giving which enhances the self through the other goes beyond the English meaning of 'generosity' defined as nobility, magnanimity or liberal giving. There is a precedent for this extended meaning in French philosophy. Descartes, for example, in The Passions of the Soul, defines 'generosity' as a virtue based on the knowledge that nothing truly belongs to me and on the will to do what I judge to be best, a virtue which is the cause of rightful self-esteem and which prevents feeling contempt for others. Descartes, 'The Passions of the Soul' in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I (Cambridge University Press) Cambridge, 1985, p. 384. I am grateful to Genevieve Lloyd for directing me to this passage. That generosity involves a transformation of the self and the other without self-possession or entrapment of the other is reminiscent of the revision in French philosophy, from Marcel Mauss to Jacques Derrida, of the concept of the gift.
2. For a more detailed discussion of the gift and giving, so understood, see R. Diprose, The Bodies of Woman: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference (Routledge) London, 1994, pp. 65-72.
3. Sophocles, Oedipus the King and Antigone, trans. P. Arnott (AHM Publishing Corp.) Arlington, IL, 1960.
4. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford University Press) Oxford, 1977, pp. 266-89.
5. Sophocles, Antigone, p. 63.
6. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 284.
7. See R. Diprose, The Bodies of Women, chapter 3, for a more detailed analysis of Antigone and Hegel's account with regard to sexual difference.
8. Sophocles, Antigone, p. 63.
9. Sophocles, Antigone, pp. 78-9.
10. Sophocles, Antigone, p. 89.
11. Sophocles, Antigone, p. 86.
12. C. Mackinnon, 'Liberalism and the Death of Feminism' in D. Leidholdt and J. Raymond (eds), The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism (Pergamon Press) New York, 1990, p. 13.
13. S. Jeffreys, 'Sexology and Antifeminism' and 'Eroticizing Women's Subordination' in The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism, p. 25 and p. 133.
14. W. Stock, 'Towards a Feminist Praxis of Sexuality', in The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism, pp. 150-3.
15. B. Kaite, 'The Pornographic Body Double: Transgression is the Law' in A. and M. Kroker (eds), Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America (St. Martin's Press) New York, 1987, pp. 150-68.
16. C. Nadeau, 'Girls on a Wired Screen: Cavani Cinema and Lesbian Sadomasochism' in E. Grosz and E. Probyn (eds), Sexy Bodies (Routledge) New York, 1995, pp. 211-30.
17. White this is assumed in much of the ontology of the Western philosophical tradition, I have demonstrated the point, and those which follow, in detail in relation to Sartre's philosophy in R. Diprose, 'Generosity: Between Love and Desire', Hypatia (forthcoming), 1997.
18. S. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. Parshley (Penguin) Harmondsworth, 1972, particularly the chapters entitled 'Sexual Initiation' and 'The Woman in Love'. I have analysed Beauvoir's account of love and eroticism in more detail in 'Generosity: Between Love and Desire'.
19. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 641.
20. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 653.
21. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, pp. 666-8.
22. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 422.
23. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 417. My view that this is a positive move in Beauvoir's radical revision of Sartre's existentialism is not shared by many commentators. Jo-Ann Pilardi, for example, in an informative analysis of Beauvoir's account of female eroticism, evidences this passage as an example of how Beauvoir remains entrenched in the stereotypical view of female sexuality as a passive mindlessness which pervades the self.
24. J. Pilardi, 'Female Eroticism in the Works of Simone de Beauvoir' in J. Allen and I. Young (eds), The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy (Indiana University Press) Bloomington, 1989, p. 26. While Pilardi, in her reading of this passage, seems to equate 'abolishing singularity' with passivity, I go on to argue that this abolition of singularity (and of the mind/body distinction) is neither essentially passive nor peculiar to women but is a feature of the ambiguity of existence. Beauvoir's point is that it is this ambiguity which is often denied by men at women's expense. Debra Bergoffen, in her exceptional account of Beauvoir's philosophy of the erotic, makes this equation between the ambiguity of existence and becoming flesh.
25. D. Bergoffen, Out from Under: Beauvoir's Philosophy of the Erotic' in M. Simons (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir (Penn State University Press) University Park Pennsylvania, 1995.
26. D. Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauroir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities (State University of New York Press) Albany, 1997, p. 158.
27. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 423.
28. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. B. Frechtman (Citadel Press) New York, 1994, p. 63. Beauvoir bases this claim on the argument that the ambiguity of existence not only rests on the fact that 'between the past which no longer is and the future which is not yet, this moment when he [sic] exists is nothing' but also on the fact that as 'an object for others, he is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends'
29. (The Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 7).
30. She also uses the figure of the 'adventurer' to illustrate how independence is a ruse which denies one's dependence on others (The Ethics of Ambiguity, pp. 58-63).
31. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, pp. 66-7.
32. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 422.
33. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, pp. 418-20.
34. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 418.
35. I have borrowed this understanding of the constitution of the body subject in relation to others from M. Merleau-Ponty, 'The Child's Relations with Others', in The Primacy of Perception, trans. and ed. J. Edie (Northwestern University Press) Evanston, 1964, pp. 141-55.
36. The idea of 'sedimentation' or habit formation is developed from Merleau-Ponty's account of freedom in Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (Routledge & Kegan Paul) London, 1962.
37. For a more detailed analysis of what Merleau-Ponty's philosophy has to offer an account of erotic generosity see R. Diprose, 'Generosity: Between Love and Desire'.
38. For an account of sexual difference as a body performance see J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge) New York, 1990, and for an account of how 'sedimentation' (or one's social history) limits what you can become through this performativity
39. see R. Diprose, 'Performing Body-Identity', Writings on Dance, nos 11/12, 1994, pp. 6-15.
40. Iris Marion Young argues, for example, with reference to Merleau-Ponty's ontology, that the social objectification of women manifests in a restricted body comportment, in, for example, the way in which women throw. I. Young, 'Throwing Like a Girl', in Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Indiana University Press) Bloomington, 1990. But, as Young herself admits, it would be wrong to generalise about the relation between gender identity and comportment as such restrictions would vary with differences in race and class. I would also suggest that, as alterity is maintained within the synchronie relation to the other and as social backgrounds vary in other ways besides race and class, women's body comportments and erotic styles would be more multifarious and open to change than Young's analysis implies.
41. Or, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, freedom 'shrinks without disappearing altogether in direct proportion to the lessening of the tolerance allowed by the bodily and institutional data of our lives'. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 454.
42. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 442.