Through its exploration of the trauma particular to exile, Hatoum's work develops a critique about women's multi-dimensional oppression within violent political circumstances. Hatoum's work reveals how women are, in the words of McClintock, "[e]xcluded from direct action as national citizens," and "are subsumed symbolically into the national body politic as its boundary and metaphoric limit." [13] These mutual exclusions and incorporations become even more extreme in "pathological geograph[ies] of power." [14] The placelessness of exile allows for insight into women's symbolic place and political placelessness in postcolonial and transnational politics. One must stress that women's "place" or "placelessness" cannot be easily imagined or unproblematically assumed, particularly from the West's privileged vantage point. In the last thirty years, feminists have questioned Western feminism's representation of women's lives in "other" parts of the world, particularly as emblems of pity and objects of research through which feminist scholarship builds and justifies its body of knowledge. Mohanty argues for the necessity of seeing feminist scholarship within colonialism's discursive terrain of power and oppression, as it has obscured the "heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question" for an implicit, unexamined universalism. [15] Again, Mohanty is trenchant about the imaginary dialectics at work in western feminism's construction of the "'average third world woman'":
This average third world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and her being 'third world' (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound domestic, family-oriented, victimized, ect.). This, I suggest, is in contrast to the (implicit) self-representation of Western women as educated, as modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions. [16]
The fictional construction of the "'average third world woman'" relies on the assumption that women embody trauma; it also helps solidify the corresponding fiction of western women's freedom and control, prized possessions belonging to the enlightened. Though they are cited all too often, I think Jacques Lacan's theorization of ego formation in "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the 'I' as revealed in psychoanalytic experience" and "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis" helps to delineate the scenario Mohanty describes. [17] Lacan theorizes the mirror stage as a threshold through which the subject passes from the amorphousness of the imaginary into the recognizable syntax and cultural forms of the symbolic order. Crucial components of the mirror stage and the ego developments that follow from it are misrecognizing an image of the other as the self, and then aggressively defending the self against that other, which has become the unstable foundation of the unconscious. Following the formulations of these well-known texts, and their outlining of identification, binary opposition, misrecognition, and aggression as the core components of the Lacanian imaginary, one might claim that as feminism shifts and expands to meet its various and transnational forms, it finds itself at within the imaginary's"'structural crossroads,'" which Frederic Jameson describes as an "optional multiplicity of insertions of the subject into a relatively fixed symbolic order." [18] Of course there is a wide gulf between psychoanalysis' theorization of the individual subject and the various collectivities and practices identified with feminism, and I don't want to suggest that feminism exists in a pre-symbolic and therefore infantile state, but since feminism is at work finding and opening threshold spaces in which its various manifestations can enter into and change previously successful incursions into the patriarchal symbolic order, Jameson's description of the imaginary applies to this essay's feminist claim for Hatoum's work. Since feminists have been working to form ethical relations to others while undermining the assumptions of western feminism's centrality, which means undoing or surpassing the misrecognition of third-world woman as the feminist self, analyses of the imaginary may enrich feminism's continued development and applicability. In his discussion of the imaginary's role in the subject functioning within the symbolic order, Jameson writes,
we may suggest that Imaginary thought patterns persist into mature psychic life in the form of what are generally thought of as ethical judgments—those implicit or explicit valorizations or repudiations in which 'good' and 'bad' are simply positional descriptions of the geographical relationship of the phenomenon in question to my own Imaginary conception of centrality. [19]
Jameson emphasizes the narcissism of the imaginary, its false and divisive designation of others on a map in which all roads lead to the "I." The questioning of subjectivity and perception inspired by Hatoum's work, which strives toward ethical coalitions that are not based upon the imaginary's alienating force and Manichean binaries, can contribute to a critique of the structures informing western feminism.
Ranjana Khanna's "Ethical Ambiguities and Specters of Colonialism: Futures of Transnational Feminism," outlines the conceptual impasses of contemporary feminist thought and practice and emphasizes how crucial ethics are for feminism's transnational futures. The conscious scrutiny of the West's imaginary construction of the third world woman, exemplified by Mohanty's "Under Western Eyes" has resulted in a greater attention to women's contexts, places, and positions. Critiques of this kind have also "resulted in paralysis, or a rather self-satisfied navel gazing on the part of some who agonize about how to be ethical when it comes to dealing with gender politics outside of one's own context." [20] Transnational feminism finds itself caught between particular historical contexts and an unexamined western universalism; as a result, feminist coalitions are threatened. [21]
Drawing from feminist theory's deconstruction of the sex/gender binary, Khanna stresses the difficulty involved in positing "woman" as a coherent identity category. [22] But because women can potentially "be put in the same position because of gender," there is a strategic need for unity, and yet, as Khanna writes, "this possibility of exploitation produces a prostration before the narrative of exploitation." [23] Khanna's hesitancy about "prostrat[ing] before the narrative of exploitation" aligns with Mohanty's critique of the construction of the third-world woman as victim. However, it is with critical caution that Khanna reiterates this "narrative of exploitation" as the imaginary cohesion of a feminist "we" because it leads to the possibility of arriving at the ethical questions fundamental to feminism's development: "How does one respond to another, and how does one address conflict with an end in sight that allows for transnational feminism and scholarship?" [24]
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