1 :: GENERAL INTRODUCTION
gender identity in the wider frame of families and communities. Her general claim
that women mother in order to recapture an intensity of feeling originally experienced
in the mother/daughter relation has been especially fruitful. For such a claim
connects in Chodorow’s work to a wider social explanation of gender alienation and
oppression. Women’s emotional lives are drained and empty since men are cut off
from interpersonal communication and sexual intimacy. From this angle, the desire
to have a child is, in part, rooted in the repression and distortion of the current
gender system. Against this backdrop, Chodorow argues for shared parenting as a
means of transforming the current gender regime.
A similar focus on the mother/daughter relationship is to be found in the writings of
the French philosopher Luce Irigaray. Like Chodorow, Irigaray is out to analyze the
deeper symbolic forces that limit or constrain women’s autonomy and power. Unlike
Chodorow, however, Irigaray proposes a more formalistic or structuralist thesis.
Taking her cue from Lacan, Irigaray contends that woman is, by definition, excluded
from the Symbolic Order. On this view, the feminine cannot be adequately symbolized
under patriarchal conditions. As Irigaray (1985: 143) argues:
there is no possibility whatsoever, within the current logic of
sociocultural operations, for a daughter to situate herself with
respect to her mother: because, strictly speaking, they make
neither one nor two, neither has a name, meaning, sex of her
own, neither can be ‘identified’ with respect to the other.Similarly, the French psychoanalytic feminist Julia Kristeva (1984) argues against
the patriarchal bent of the Lacanian Symbolic Order, to which she contrasts the
‘semiotic’ – a realm of pre-Oedipal prolinguistic experience, consisting of drives,
affects, rhythms, tonalities. According to Kristeva, semiotic drives circle around the
loss of the pre-Oedipal mother, and make themselves felt in the breakup of language
- in slips, silences, tonal rhythms. These semiotic drives, she suggests, are
subversive of the symbolic Law of the Father since they are rooted in a pre-Oedipal
connection with the maternal body. The subversive potential of the semiotic is thus
closely tied to femininity, and Kristeva devotes much of her psychoanalytic work to
the analysis of motherhood and its psychical consequences.
Most recently, the development of a social theory of identity has been transformed
by the writings of the American feminist post-structuralist Judith Butler. Butler
seeks to debunk the work of theorists, such as Chodorow, who appeal to women
as a foundation or basis for feminist theory and politics. She argues that notions of
‘identity’ or ‘core gender identity’ serve to reinforce a binary gender order that