From: "jakki kate gunn spicer" <spice005-AT-gold.tc.umn.edu>
Subject: Re: Text Discussion//Rosi Braidotti
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 95 17:36:31 -0500


I had always read these potentially troubling moments you point out, Debra, as 
being B's attempt to grapple with "real-life" politics, or "real life" women.  
although she does claim an affinity with Delueze and Guattari, she also 
distances herself from them insofar as she sees them as appropriating "the 
feminine" or the "minoritarian" etc.  i believe Irigaray has chastized D&G for 
the same thing, although perhaps not so directly, eg: "Now a crisis breaks out, 
an age in which the 'subject' no longer knows where to turn, whom or what to 
turn to, amid all these many foci of 'liberation,' none rigourously homogeneous 
with another and all heterogeneous to his conception... So now man struggles to 
be science, machine, woman...to prevent any of these from escaping his service 
and ceasing to be interchangable." (speculum, 232)

i think there is generally a tension in (pomo) feminism and Irigaray as well 
between the drive towards the de-stabilization of the subject and of the 
phallocratic economy (whatever its form), and the need to maintain some notion 
of woman/women, because of the ever present danger of whatever difference that 
might be created/written/constructed/established being appropriated and subsumed
by the same.  i agree that irigaray maintains this tension much better than 
braidotti, but it seems to me that it is some form of this tension that B is 
trying to address.

Jakki Spicer
CSDS, U of MN


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