Alice Walker's Africa: Globalization and the province of fiction

Comparative Literature, Fall 2001 by George, Olakunle

In Postcolonial Representations. Women, Literature, Identity (1995), Francoise Lionnet discusses the complexity of the problem of genital mutilation and the inadequacy of liberal-humanist responses to it. For her, the practice of genital mutilation is a powerful test-case for feminist postcolonial criticism because it sometimes involves the woman's "voluntary" choice. Lionnet analyzes some French legal cases concerning immigrant women who seem (or claim) to have willingly put their female children through the ritual, in violation of French law protecting children from abuse. Lionnet reads excision as a ritual by means of which the cultures concerned discipline the female body by excising the clitoris-that is, the part of female genitalia that is construed as being anatomically and subjectively analogous to the penis. Excision is in this reading an inscription of culture on nature, a denaturalization of the body that thereby subordinates it to the imperative of socialization. At the same time, Lionnet argues that only by recognizing that excision is structurally analogous to practices of policing the female body in Western societies can the cultural critic adequately represent and critique the practice without undermining the subjectivity and agency, the sense of self and human dignity, that would make an otherwise normal and loving mother put her daughter through the procedure, even in violation of French law.12

A related concern with the subjectivity of the subaltern woman governs Gayatri Spivak's justly celebrated essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" which reads the contending discourses of European imperialists, on the one hand, and Indian culturalists, on the other, on the practice of sati or "Widow-burning." Spivak argues that both contending patriarchal discourses efface the specific subjectivity of the sati herself in a way that makes the tracing back of that subjectivity in academic discourse impossible-so long as the recovery is posed as restoration of some unmediated native subjectivity. For her, the clash in the logics of the discourses that either admire the woman who self-immolates or seek to save her from ignorance bear out Jean Francois Lyotard's concept of the differend-that is, "the inacessibility of, or untranslatability from, one mode of discourse in a dispute to another" (Spivak, "Subaltern" 300).13

For Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, however, the "choice for the concerned feminist analyst ... if formulated as Gayatri Spivak does, as one between subject-constitution (`she wanted to die') and object-formation (`she must be saved from dying'), is a paralysing one" (19). She proposes two moves that need to be taken to pay due respect to the humanity of the sati as agent, rather than simple victim of tradition or abstract object of discourse. First, she suggests that greater attention should be given to the practice as a signifier of pain, suffered and endured for cultural reasons, by real people who feel and think. Such a move enables a second shift, namely, the shift from viewing the sati as victim, to viewing her as active bearer of a particular, context-specific, subjectivity. This allows criticism to avoid situations where, in her words, "'victim' and 'agent' are adopted as exclusive and excluding labels for the female subject," or where "victimhood is equated with helplessness and agency with self-sufficiency" (35). For Sunder Rajan, "Sati, rape, and genital mutilation, for instance, are forms of oppression different in kind (if not in degree) from wearing the veil or getting a divorce: questions of choice may be inserted in our understanding of the female subject and her social context in the latter instances, when to do so in the former would be regressive as feminist politics" (35). In other words, Sunder Rajan is urging that we view pain in the sati as a discursive affect by means of which she is subjectified. To the extent that the subject is never fully in control of her determinations, the issue of her "voluntary" accession of the pyre is ultimately beside the point. Yet, it is within the predication of this subjectivity-with its inevitable misrecognitions-that the individual thinks, feels, and acts. Oppression is in this instance interlinked with agency. The condition in which the subject becomes a person and inscribes her agency is both enabled and constrained, delimited by the terms of the oppressive cultural order.