Braidotti, The Ethics of Sexual Difference: The case of Foucault and Irigaray

In this chapter, Grosz addresses the relationship between images, metaphorical representations of the feminine and feminist discourse and practice in the terms of power and strategy. Using the concept of ethics in contemporary philosophy specifically its importance in post modern philosophy and the theorizing of the subjective, Grosz juxtaposes Foucault and Irigaray’s basic concepts of alterity and otherness. Alterity is a major theme of post modern philosophy because of the problematization of structures of subjectivity. Grosz sees the women’s movement as one of the primary sources for the dislocation of the rational subject. This echoes our class discussion and previous readings on the invisibility of woman, the void ascribed to the feminine and the purpose of feminist theorizing to speak woman, redefine subjectivity into non-patriarchal, plural terms that include woman.
The most important difference between Foucault and Irigaray is how they theorize sexual difference. Clearly Irigaray has theorized an ontology based on the concept of fundamental sexual difference that is constitutive of the human experience, it’s the starting point. Foucault, as a male philosopher speaking within the patriarchal masculine ontology discusses the constitution of the subject within the confines of sexual sameness. This fundamental disconnect between theories weights the feminist argument of sexual difference by highlighting Foucault’s perspective of society not including invisible women and leaning toward the dominance of masculinity.
Foucault’s work takes place in three phases. First, the analysis of the type of discourse that claims the status of science which leads him to the critique of the role that the “knowing subject” plays in the history of western philosophy. Secondly, the constitution of the subject through “dividing practices” like exclusion, separation and domination within oneself as well as towards others. Lastly, he takes on the question, what is sexuality and by what means do we all become sexual subjects? Overall his work brings out the highly sexed rules that govern philosophical discourse and how phallogocentric discourse is a specific political and libidinal economy that assigns the sexes to precise roles, poles and function to the detriment of the feminine.
We all know the quick on Irigaray. What I found most important about the difference of the presentation of Foucault and Irigaray was that Foucault is a theory and Irigaray is an action. Grosz presents Foucault as problematizing and deconstructing society but Irigaray is adding to the feminist project, in other words her work is useful, active, and consequential.
This was a breaking moment for me on sexual difference. Up until this point, I’ve been able to understand the idea of fundamental sexual difference as lived. While reading this chapter I connected the importance, the meaning behind sexual difference and its usefulness politically and ontologically.

Questions:
Why Foucault and Irigaray?
What do you think the most important difference/similarity is between these two prominent, might I say royal, theorist?

Sexual Difference As a Nomadic Project

Braidotti starts by describing the nomadic condition (of sexual difference) as a "new figuration of subjectivity in a multidifferentiatied non hierachichal way" (62). Before talking about the "new difference," she first focuses on the "old difference" in European history that was/is "predicated on relations of domination and exclusion," which led/leads to "entire categories of beings [being identifiable as] disposable" (63). This patriarchal mode is monolithic and not subject (excuse the puns) to subtle manipulations by marginal groups.

Briadotti explores three categories, or "phases," of nomaic subjectivity, which are not dialectical or hierachical nature. Acting as conceptual operators of difference between (men and women), among and within (women), these "phases...can coexist chronologically and each and every one continutes to be available as an option for political and theoretical practice" (73). Here Briadotti is insistant that this concept be thought of as spacial-temporal map of the becoming-subject that can be "entered at any level and at any moment" (73). This still sounds fractal to me...

Difference between men and women

Phallocentric symbolic order.

Men = rational self

Women = irrational other

yada yada

Difference among women

"...this recognition of a common condition of sister hood in oppresion cannot be the final aim; women may have common situations and experiences, but they are not, in any way, the same. In this respect, the idea of the politicas of location is very important" (77). Here Briadotti is calling for a "theory of recognition of the multiple differences that exist among women" (77). Using such a theory can allow for a multiplicity of female identities to situated differently, coexist and still communitcate within a common condition of sisterhood.

Difference within each woman

Each female subject is a "multiplicity within herself...in an imaginary relationship to variable like class, race, age, sexual choice" (79). The female subject is fractured within herself. Because of this internal splintering, she is always in flux (Heraclitus style), always in a state of becoming. This phase is linked to Kristeva's notion of the "inner, discontinuous time of genealogy" (81).

"The nomadic subject I am proposing is a figuration that emphasizes the need for action both at the level of identity, of subjectivity, and of differences among women. These different requirements correspond to different moments, that is to say, different locations in space, that is to say, different practices. This multiplicity is contained in a multilayed temporal sequence, whereby discontintuities and even contradictions can find a place" (84).

Nomadism calls for "multiple female feminst emodied voices," located in transient, shifting spaces and times to use complex forms of action that respect contradiction and complexity without drowning in them....

Q: How does the transient becoming multiple female feminist, become solid and visible enough to participate in collective action?...and for how long? Does that "crystalization" then negate the nomadic-ness of the identity in question?

(Inhuman) Forces

Unfortunately, pages 192 and 193 were missing from the reading. I dont give an account of those pages.

Grosz begins by tracing out the relation of non-subjective forces to principles of pleasure and desire. Here she takes a very much molecular approach to both ideas, introducing a notion of forces which is composed of particles and which is pure movement without direction. This initial distinction is made in alignment with Nietzsche, employing the notion that it is forces which continually constitute and destroy subjects and not the other way round. From there Grosz goes on to ask how forces can be read in relation to pleasure and desire. Her answer is that both pleasure and desire are the registrations of the movement of forces. These are the sensory receptors of something which is operative outside of them. Thus by the time the subject can feel a desire or pleasure, already those forces have had their impact upon that subject.
Grosz points out that for Foucault, there is an intersection of force in the form of power with pleasure as that which both induces participation in channelings of pleasure and that which produces resistances to the power which has consolidated technologies of pleasure.
She goes on to discuss a Deleuzian conception of pleasure. Unfortunately these are the pages which are missing.
Grosz's conclusion based on these two views is that the goal of feminists should not be to consolidate a politics surrounding the use of pleasure or concerning desire. Rather, the attempt should be to all ow the human to "liberate from its own orbit" the imperceptible forces which together compose pleasure and desire. Thus the engagement of groups in alternative sexualities should not be read as itself directly or necessarily political but instead as creative. The participation in an outlawed sexuality can then viewed as productive of a new assemblage which will itself reconfigure the subject. These new formations of subjectivity will then continuously realign with new formations of pleasure and desire, ever- reconfiguring, ever reconstituting a subject who remains always changing and thus always elusive of the grasping clutch of power systems.

The Force of Sexual Difference

This text aims at disturbing and displacing the politics of identity through theorizing sexual difference as an ontological force. Grosz suggests a theoretical move in order to develop and ask new kinds of questions concerning:

not the body – but messy biology, matter, materiality
not ideology – but force, energy, affect
not gender – but sexual difference

To provide alternative approaches and forgo a reduction of ontology to epistemology (which she believes structuralism and poststructuralism is guilty of) she turns to Deleuze’s work on “the outside” and Irigaray’s project of sexual difference.

Grosz Interpreting Irigaray’s Notion of Ontology and Sexual Difference:

* A transformation of ontology entails a transformation of our conceptions of epistemology, and vice versa. How we understand space and time transform our conceptions of matter, subjectivity, and politics. A reconfiguration of subjectivity will dramatically change our understanding of space and time.
* Sexual difference should be seen as a constituting difference preexisting entities, rather than a difference between entities.
* Irigaray does not seek the “real” woman beyond patriarchy – she wants to counter male domination, challenge conceptual systems, and allow for ways to think, read, and write otherwise. She wants to open up the position of knowing subject to the occupation of women.
* Sexual difference exists in virtuality, as a future anteriority, because it is impossible to specify in advance what will come out of the installment of sexual difference.
* Sexual difference entails an ontology that cannot be understood as self-identical but must be composed of difference and engaged in becoming.
* This difference comes out of the central ontological difference between time and space.
* The challenge facing feminism is to articulate a future in which futurity itself has a feminine form. This may render the feminine obsolete or the object of profound or inhuman becomings.
* This defines an ontology of becoming where time is privileged as a repressed or feminized condition of the world, conceived of in terms of the preeminence of an undeterminable, incalculable future. A subject is never what it is; it is always in the process of becoming something else.

Grosz notion of time as a force of differing leads her to consider the works of Darwin, Nietzsche, Bergson and, most importantly, Deleuze. Through them she gives a schematic characterization of time as 1) an active force forward 2) the underlying, inherent principle of the transformation of objects/space 3) the never changing force of variation 4) a singularity underlying the multiplicity of changing things 5) the outside in which other forces impinge on each other 6) an enduring past which can be illuminated again and again through the active work of the present.

Such an understanding of time is important to feminist theory, writes Grosz, since it supersedes the past and the present and enables us to access the untimely. It allows us to envision a future unlike the present without being able to specify in advance what it entails. It is the investment in the power of the leap that makes feminism a project without end. Feminism as processes and becomings will ensure that difference continues to be made.

QUESTIONS: How are ontology (of becoming) and epistemology linked in Grosz way of thinking? In what ways does theorizing sexual difference as an ontolgical force avoid reducing ontology to epistemology? How come sexual difference is said not to exist at the same time as it is said to be consitutive? Why is sexual difference, as an ontological force (beyond the realm of subjectivity and identity politics), in need of theorizing feminist subjects in order to come forth?

The Future of Female Sexuality

Kinsey, who sought what Grosz calls a taxonomic (to me a word which recalls the similar ‘taxidermic’) view of human sexuality, is the target and subject of this essay.
His mission affirmed “it was only science, in its disinterested search for truth, that could rid of us our prejudices and assumptions” concerning human sexual behavior (pg. 198). This selection awakens the contemporary philosophical audience to suspicion.

Each of the theses of the essay are accompanied by a destruction via paralepsis of Kinsey’s works.

We are told: “my goal is not a philosophical critique”, “I am not really interested in undertaking an epistemological analyses”, nor “psychobiography”, nor “ [Kinsey’s] scientific contributions to knowledge”, nor his connection to “the tradition of the science of sexuality”.

These brief expenditures of breath are plenty to knock down the straw discourses of an easy target, and we become free to examine the impulse that created them.

Grosz IS interested in “what [Kinsey’s work’s] implications for an understanding of the radical future of female sexuality”, an “ontological approach: the desire to know everything about a mysterious and unknown object”, to “detach [his work] from their assumed context in sexology”.
To make Kinsey “an event”.

The second section heading’s tone of colloquial whimsy brings our suspicions to a climax:
“Five Great Things About Kinsey”.

What are they?

1. First person reports are important, and statistical empirics are problematic, and just plain hard besides.
2. He did not seek a “generic mode of sexuality”; “he sought difference”.
3. He did not limit his subjects selection on religious or moral grounds; he sought a full range of sexual activities.
4. He understood that sexuality is “a cohesive series of disparate responses to various external triggers”. Or, that conceptual banner beloved by the postmodern crowd, “a complex confluence of forces”.
5. He did not oppose the two sexes or see them as a couple (he did not explicitly binarize).

The wacky thing about him, Grosz points out, is that despite his recognition of the chaotic factors involved, he saw sexuality as something essentially knowable.

Here’s pointless side-note (those who are in a hurry are referred to the next line break):
I’m coining my own rhetorical term. I’ll call it ‘polynomy’ until I can talk to a classics scholar. Grosz practices it with exuberance and subtlety. Polynomy:
Repetition of a name (in this case, Kinsey) in situations where a pronoun, its antecedent not yet violated, would grammatically suffice, in order to create a kind of tacit nya-nya-ny’-nya-nya effect (his name seems to occur at least 4 times per page throughout).


“The Science of Sex”

Kinsey contributed to what Foucault called “the specific pleasure of the true discourse on pleasure”.

His method, with its fondness for large numbers, made sex extensive rather than intensive. His (or more properly I should say ‘its’, as Kinsey is taken as the ‘Kinsey-event’) statistical “cover of objectivity” (pg. 205) itself runs up against a variety of problems, where the tangible record of who-does-what-to-whom-and-how-and-how-much intersects with the phenomena of lived experience.

Grosz elaborates this point. Sex is messy, and it’s hard to tell when it’s really going on, and KE relied on the orgasm as a punctuating event to count when it has been accomplished. Kinsey admits a certain distrust of the female orgasm in statistical matters, but decides, “there seems no better unit for measuring.. sexual activity.” (pg. 206).

Interviews, though invaluable for some reason, often potentially involved the projection of fantasy (anticipating Foucault’s observation).

The reintegration of the psychology/physiology dualism proved highly problematic.

A crucial articulation of the problem this causes occurs on pg. 207:
“The point of numerical analysis is that anything can be calculated, but the calculation is not a neutral activity: IT TRANSFORMS WHAT IS A CONTINUITY INTO COMPARABLE UNITS, IT IMPOSES THE FORM OF THE UNIT ONTO ALL PARTICULARS, it is transformational of quality into quantity.”

Grosz seems to be problematizing the numbering of anything, as numbering involves collapsing individual units into masses with which they must be in some way identical. Numericity, as it seeks to unit groups through shared qualities (and, I would add, this is only possible by opposing, making corollary those qualities that differentiate them from some quality shared by a different group) entails the destruction of individual difference.

“In the process he lost what is sexual about sexual behavior,” and retained an accountancy of his own constructions- the orgasm as marker of a sex act.

We should seek an ars erotica rather than a scientia sexualis (echoes of Susan Sontag).

It is likely that female sexuality is inherently uncountable, and possibly male sexuality as well (reconfigured). The current configuration of female sexuality, being wholly intensive to the point of merger with all other activity (“the impossibility to distinguish between the sexual and nonsexual” pg. 210), makes the extensive discourses incomprehensibly irrelevant.

Grosz asks, “can it be that male sexuality.. is the origin of the number itself?” The tangibility of male sexuality actually causing the virtual identification of objects, not the other way around? Not that female sexuality is indescribable, but that it does not correspond to a masculinist schema of knowledge.

The moment of first-person collection in KE project was the opportunity for ars erotica, a recognized experimentation (engagement with the discourse in the first place being a sexual event).

So, “what is the radical future of female sexuality?” (213). In understanding the fundamental indeterminacy of sexuality. And it may consist in part in a certain distrust of identity politics, as they involve tabulation of past events and intelligibility relying on those events.

It is not the elusiveness of female sexuality, but its openness to any examination that makes it radical.

“This is its radical quality: not that it is unknowable, but that it is unknowable through any particular discourse or method.” (213).

The future of female sexuality is “the acknowledgment and celebration of [its] openness.”

Elizabeth Grosz, “The Time of Thought”

Part I: Introduction
In the introductory remarks to this chapter, Grosz asserts her interest in political and intellectual practices. She asks, “How can new models of thought, new intellectual practices come into being?” (155) Specifically, she asks questions about how to think the future, how to transform both philosophical and feminist theory, which Grosz argues intersect in their interests in ontology and epistemology. Although philosophy has traditionally excluded women, Grosz declares the need of feminist theory to investigate and use philosophy to its advantage, especially where philosophy/theory is brave, risky, and innovative. Grosz describes the theories of Deleuze and Irigaray as such theories.

Part II: Deleuzian concepts
For Deleuze, theory is not a unified system composed of arguments. Rather, theory/knowledge is made up of concepts which themselves are not “unitary or singular” (158), but always multiple. Concepts attempt to answer questions, which are occasioned by historically locatable, singular events (which can be natural, cultural, or political). The question/problem cannot necessarily be solved, but “enacted, lived through, negotiated” (160). Concepts/solutions arise at the same time questions are determined, and thus contribute to ideas and thought. Thus theory and practice flow into each other, “each [as] a mode of the other’s proliferation” (162). [for a summary of the concepts, see 1-4 on pages 161-162]

Part III: Irigaray and sexual difference
Grosz distinguishes two kinds of feminist theory: the first kind is that in which feminism is temporary, the second in which feminism is eternal. Feminism is temporary when it aims to overcome the oppression of women. In other words, once women have gained equality with men in economic, political, and legal realms, feminist goals will be fulfilled. Thus in this view, feminism is a temporary project.
Feminism is eternal when it posits sexual difference, such as the work of Irigaray. This kind of feminism seeks “the entire restructuring of the symbolic order, of the social apparatuses, including language, forms of knowledge, and modes of representation” (163). In other words, since everything up till now has been phallocentric, only one part of sexual difference has been represented. Irigaray argues that the other perspective (that of woman) has yet to be articulate and advocates for a “revolution in thought” that would reconsider and transform everything (all fields and disciplines) (165).
Deleuze and Irigaray “meet” in that their concept/solution will transform and continue to transform theory/action in unknown ways, but in ways that will be multiple (at least two) and continual.

Part IV: Solutions?
Grosz concludes with four suggestions/solutions (?) for feminist theory and politics:
1) Feminism should not necessarily be centered around struggles for the recognition of women in various groups. Instead, “it may be understood as the struggle around the right to act and to make according to one’s own interests and perspectives, the mobilization and opening up of identity to an uncontained and unpredictable future” (167).
2) Feminism should seek actions which generate transformations that are not necessarily linked to individuals, groups, or organizations.
3) Sexual difference should be recognized as a factor in all human affairs.
4) Feminism should produce concepts that “welcome and generate political, conceptual, and artistic experimentation” (168).

Questions: What do you make of Grosz’s shift in emphasis in feminist theory from a project-based, temporary entity to an eternal process of transformation? What dis/advantages do you think this entails for feminist projects?

Anderson's Post on Derrida's Politics of Sexual Difference

Derrida's Politics of Sexual Difference: Ontology and Equivocation-A matured political or theoretical commitment must be capable not only ofdefending itself from the external, but also from its own internal paradoxes.-Feminism must be aware of itself in this light; it necessarily involves limits: "To present a position, to provide a strategy, to make specific claims, is always to exclude, to deny and to problematize other, competing positions." (60)
-Derridean deconstruction (and postmodern theory generally) poses difficultchallenges to feminism: challenges to status of subversion, position ofsubordination, and possibility of transgression.
-In response to the reconceptualizations that these challenges demand many feminists have clung to humanist and enlightenment values or naturalist and essentialist commitments.
-Grosz suggests that in the light of deconstruction feminism should recognizethat the desire for clear-cut positions, answers, and unequivocal boundariesand certainties may no longer be tenable.
-Crucially, "deconstruction provides a way of rethinking our common conceptionof politics and struggle, power and resistance by insisting that no system,method, or discourse can be as all-encompassing, singular, and monolithic as itrepresents itself." (61)
-the implication of this being that not only must feminism realize its own internal conflicts and disagreement, but it must also realize that patriarchy is not an abslutely homogenized thing, and not without its own fissures, paradoxes and flexibilities.
-Deconstruction involves a double affirmation in which by affirming the worth of feminism, there is an implicit affirmation of the system it pushes itself away from, patriarchy.
-Grosz notes this involvment despite opposition with examples such as feminist discourse's dependence on male dominated institutions, feminist self help programs that must negotiate with patriarchal institutions for funding, and implications of Western feminism in neocolonialism.
*Importantly, Grosz will be careful to say that Derrida is not addressing anerror in feminism that can be corrected, and that therefore he is not voicing acritique of feminism. Rather, he is articulating a challenge that is inherent toits very existence. It is always already implicated in the Law that it aims tosubvert. This challenge speaks to the core of feminism.
-"This assertions of complicity, while it is not a claim of conscious collusion, nonetheless refuses the idea of a space beyond or outside, the fantasy of a position insulated from what it criticizes and disdains." (62)
-Grosz then begins a review of feminist critiques of Derrida's work.
-Rosi Braidotti claims that Derrida is part of a trend in contemporary theory to use woman as a metaphor to challenge the validity of truth, knowledge and subjectivity, and that this comes at a price for women's concrete social struggles.
-Grosz response is to question the implicit distinction between metaphorical or figurative woman or women from 'real' women. She states that real women are indeed the product of systems of representation and inscription, and that assertions of 'real' women somewhere before or beyond representation will slide into essentialism.
-Alice Jardine's critique is that the danger in deconstruction is that it attempts to occupy all specific positions while committing to none; it speaks as both man and woman without making real allegiances.
-Margaret Whitford on the other hand critiques Derrida for not speaking in his voice, for hiding his real position by occupying other texts and in so doing masters feminist discourse.
-Grosz responds by contesting the fixity of position implied in these critiques. She states that "his position only emerges as such within the structure of citationality or iteration, as one provisional destination of the cited text." (66)The point here is that his aim is not to occupy all fixed positions or to hide his own under blankets or reference; rather it is the mobile, citational character of his reading and his writing that lend flexibility to all the positions he considers.
*Part of Grosz's response is to question the stability and know-ability ofpositions at all. She seems to identify a certain reactivity in feminist callsfor a pure and uncontestable position for either the woman or the man. Thisresponse gets articulated in language, as she affirms that "language itself isthe endless possibility of speaking otherwise." (68)
-Following her treatment of various Feminist critiques of Derrida she moves onto consider what he actually has to say on the matter of sexual difference. Shedoes this in the way Derrida's writing facilitates, through an engagement withhis reading of other thinkers.
-The first engagement is with Heidegger and Dasein (the existential Beingparticular to human beings). Dasein is construed in Heidegger's thought as apriori and primordial, thus outside or beyond the reach of sexual difference.This gives it a neutrality through negation. It is untethered, made impartialthrough stripping away the a posteriori, the experiences of life. Derrida wantsto assert that this neutrality is in fact a potency, one in which Dasein is notasexual and negatively stripped of differentiation, but the predifferentialfont of both sexes.
*This section on Heidegger and particularly these thoughts of Dasein as carrying sexual difference from a negation or undifferentiation into a potent originary position which becomes the positive source of differentiation is, in my own opinion, the most philosophically important point in this essay.
-Grosz goes on to engage Derrida's treatment of both Levinas and Neitzsche. Themethod employed by Derrida is the same as it was in the case of Heidegger.Grosz asks a question that merits repeating: "Can there be an ethics between menand women that does not rely upon or presume a common or neutral ground that thesexes (or races) share, a ground that ethics fills?" (75)
What do you make of the implications that this essay involves for feministtheory and feminist struggle?Are the deconstructive conceptions of complicity with the system being assaileduseful? Do they help us refigure our engagements? Or do they constrain thoughtand action? What is the use of deconstruction beyond its own intellectualintegrity?

Zoe's Post on Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism

In terms of questions, also consider how this piece illuminates or organizes the different approaches we’ve seen in terms of their confinement or commitment to revisiting patriarchal disciplines (psychoanalysis, physics etc)
Grosz identifies “an untheorized locus” in feminism’s “self-formation”. She identifies two major critiques of feminist theory: 1.) That feminist theory simply confirms pre-given commitments rather than objectively demonstrating them, and 2.) that feminist theory subversively re-inscribes the male dominant structures it seeks to interrogate. Both of these critiques, she says, are defined by desire for what she calls a “purity of position” (intellectual purity and social purity respectively). She uses the debate between the “so called” feminists of equality and feminists of difference to discuss the possibility of a self-reflexive critique of feminism. Does the notion of sexual difference liberate women from male categories or does it recontain women within essentialist patriarchal frameworks? She discusses four “touchstones of assesmnet within feminist theory which are taken to be “ self-evident” guidelines for analysis: essentialism, biologism, naturalism, and universalism. These ways of critiquing must themselves be interrogated
Equality feminists locate the potential for women’s liberation in the disruption of an expressive model of gender which they see as limiting the possibility of women to a fixed, biological destiny.
This second wave of feminism was characterized by a “logic of identification” which involved the disavowal of characteristics typically seen as feminine or maternal (and thus in conflict with participation the work-force). Equality feminists wanted to eliminate sexual difference, but this means:
• taking patriarchal values as something to which women should also aspire- this leaves the system itself unquestioned
• achieving equality between sexes would mean minimizing what distinguishes women from men( she cites the common disavowal of maternity in egalitarian feminists)
• the notion of equality reduces all specificities such that the oppressed and the oppressor become indistinguishable, struggles for women’s equality get reduced to a more generalized struggle for social justice- this allows men to claim that they too are oppressed by patriarchy
• even if equality between sexes could be gaurenteed, it would only be enforceable in the public and civic spheres
• Even if both sexes do the same jobs, perform the same duties etc, the social and symbolic meanings of the activities remain the same, unchallenged
In the 1980’s a feminism based in difference emerged. This notion of sexual difference is different than that which is espoused by repressive patriarchal notions in that it advocates for pure difference as opposed to difference from a pre-given norm. Patriarchal notions of gender difference are characterized by a binary structure in which one term is defined only by the negation of the other, while pure difference “refuses to privelege either term”. Difference feminism, unlike equality feminism, does not pre-supposes an acceptance of masculine values. It leaves open the possibility to reject the terms of evaluation and to “define oneself on different terms”. *The idea of difference suggests a change to the patriarchal social and symbolic orders – but this difference is easily reincorporated *Difference feminism resists the reduction of feminism to a broader humanitarian project* difference feminism safeguards women’s struggles for autonomy from being conflated with those of men*A politics of difference involves the right to define oneself on ones own terms- thereby necessitating a critique/reorganization of the structures of representation, meaning and knowledge which produce identitiesAfter laying out these two camps, the equality feminists and the difference feminists, Grosz expresses frustration: “are these the only choices available to feminist theory- an adherence to essentialist doctrines, or the dissolution of feminist struggles” she asks. Drawing on Spivak, she advocates for the notion that all politics is always already bound up in whatever it is contesting; feminism will never be pure, and she says it shouldn’t want to be. Just by orienting ourselves towards that which we seek to contest, we loose theoretical purity: she cites Spivak “You pick up the universal that will give you the power to fight against the other side, and what you are throwing away by doing this is your theoretical purity. Grosz says we need to acknowledge, not disavow feminism’s implication in patriarchal structures of power. The focus should not be on weather the politics or theory is pure, but on what it enables, how useful it is. She seems to say that the feminist movement actually draws its strength from its emersion in the system which it contests- “the ability to use patriarchy and phallocentrism against themselves” is the most powerful feminist theoretical weapon”p57. Do you agree with Grosz that the greatest power is to be able to turn the tools of a system against itself? What is to be gained by recognizing feminisms immersion in the system it aims to contest?