Feminisms

First Wave – 19th century to 1950 (basic rights) Second Wave – 1960-1980 (further rights) Third Wave – 1980-2008 (queer, race) Fourth Wave – 2008-? (technology)

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990) “If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a disappointed homosexuality?”  “If there is something right in Beauvoir's claim that one is born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification.” 

Hélène Cixous, "La – Feminine" (1976) As dreamer and fantastic with double libido, voyager of several existences, she renounces none of her primitive liberties or those to come, all her sources of pleasure and all her means of acquiring pleasure persist in all forms which put them out of reach of the rivalry principle. As linguist the freedom with which she crosses several unconsciouses to transmit the secrets and powers of a soul in another tongue and of a body in another in which to grow and transform without restraint. And as artist of love, her knwoing-pleasure overflows her individual activities (psychical, cultural, historical) in the direction of the other: she has an unconquerable propensity to unite, join, connet together desires, languages, unconsciouses which the exigencies of Truthverility, communications and indwarfstry threaten to transform into sickness, and shelter them at the height of life.

Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (1969) The word "politics" is enlisted here when speaking of the sexes primarily because such a word is eminently useful in outlining the real nature of their relative status, historically and at the present. It is opportune, perhaps today even mandatory, that we develop a more relevant psychology and philosophy of power relationships beyond the simple conceptual framework provided by our traditional formal politics. Indeed, it may be imperative that we give some attention to defining a theory of politics which treats of power relationships on grounds less conventional than those to which we are accustomed. I have therefore found it pertinent to define them on grounds of personal contact and interaction between members of well-defined and coherent groups: races, castes, classes, and sexes. For it is precisely because certain groups have no representation in a number of recognised political structures that their position tends to be so stable, their oppression so continuous.

Valerie Solanas, S.C.U.M. Manifesto (1967) Niceness, Politeness, and `Dignity': Every man, deep down, knows he's a worthless piece of shit. Overwhelmed by a sense of animalism and deeply ashamed of it; wanting, not to express himself, but to hide from others his total physicality, total egocentricity, the hate and contempt he feels for other men, and to hide from himself the hate and contempt he suspects other men feel for him; having a crudely constructed nervous system that is easily upset by the least display of emotion or feeling, the male tries to enforce a `social' code that ensures perfect blandness, unsullied by the slightest trace or feeling or upsetting opinion. He uses terms like `copulate', `sexual congress', `have relations with' (to men sexual relations is a redundancy), overlaid with stilted manners; the suit on the chimp

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1990) In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man. Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements... Civilized man conceals from himself the extent of his subordination to nature... But let nature shrug, and all is in ruin. Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture. Feminists grossly oversimplify the problem of sex when they reduce it to a matter of social convention: readjust society, eleminate sexual inequality, purify sex roles, and happiness and harmony will reign. Here feminism, like all liberal movements of the past two hundred years, is heir to Rousseau.

Donna Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (1984) “The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity.”  ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’

Xenofeminst Manifesto (2005) Angellica’s Lament APHRA BEHN Had I remained in innocent security,  I should have thought all men were born my slaves,  And worn my power like lightning in my eyes,  To have destroyed at pleasure when offended.  —But when love held the mirror, the undeceiving glass  Reflected all the weakness of my soul, and made me know  My richest treasure being lost, my honour,  All the remaining spoil could not be worth  The conqueror’s care or value.  —Oh how I fell like a long worshipped idol  Discovering all the cheat.  Xenofeminst Manifesto (2005) XF seizes alienation as an impetus to generate new worlds. We are all alienated – but have we ever been otherwise? It is through, and not despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of immediacy. Freedom is not a given–and it’s certainly not given by anything ‘natural’. The construction of freedom involves not less but more alienation; alienation is the labour of freedom’s construction. Nothing should be accepted as fixed, permanent, or ‘given’–neither material conditions nor social forms. XF mutates, navigates and probes every horizon. Anyone who’s been deemed ‘unnatural’ in the face of reigning biological norms, anyone who’s experienced injustices wrought in the name of natural order, will realize that the glorification of ‘nature’ has nothing to offer us–the queer and trans among us, the differently-abled, as well as those who have suffered discrimination due to pregnancy or duties connected to child-rearing. XF is vehemently anti-naturalist. Essentialist naturalism reeks of theology–the sooner it is exorcised, the better.

Angellica’s Lament, Aphra Behn Had I remained in innocent security, I should have thought all men were born my slaves, And worn my power like lightning in my eyes, To have destroyed at pleasure when offended. —But when love held the mirror, the undeceiving glass Reflected all the weakness of my soul, and made me know My richest treasure being lost, my honour, All the remaining spoil could not be worth The conqueror’s care or value. —Oh how I fell like a long worshipped idol Discovering all the cheat.

Alison Fell, Pushing forty Just before winter we see the trees show their true colours: the mad yellow of chestnuts two maples like blood sisters the orange beech braver than lipstick Pushing forty, we vow that when the time comes rather than wither ladylike and white we will henna our hair like Colette, we too will be gold and red and go out in a last wild blaze