*IRIGARAY V QUEER ECOFEM*

1NC v Queer Ecofem

The 1AC participates in the myth of heteronormativityheterosexism does not exist because
culture is hom(m)o-normativethe privileging of sexual relations above social relations
leaves intact the culture of a universal male subjectthat destroys the possibility for the
feminine

Jones 11 lecturer in philosophy at the University of Dundee (Rachel, Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy, Key
Contemporary Thinkers, Polity, p 183-188)//ED
Irigaray does sometimes make comments in her later writings which seem to give
heterosexual relations a certain kind of privilege: these comments are problematic not
only in themselves, but because they are out of keeping with the philosophy of sexuate
difference that her work unfolds. Thus, in what follows, I will argue that we need to
hold the notion of sexuate difference apart from both heterosexual relations and from
sexual difference where this is understood as a question of sexual orientation. It is
sexuate difference, not heterosexuality, which has ontological (and, as we will see in the next chapter, ethical)
priority in Irigaray's thought. This priority raises questions of its own, particularly with regard to the relation between sexuate difference and race, to which I will also
return in the next chapter. However, here I want to show why I think the charge of heterosexism is misplaced insofar as
Irigaray's notion of sexuate difference is not necessarily or inherently hetero-sexist. I will do
so partly by insisting on the continuity between her earlier and later texts and the importance of reading the latter firmly in light of the former. Broadly speaking, I agree with
Gail Schwab on this issue when she notes that 'what Irigaray is talking about is not heterosexuality, but sexual difference', and that this is 'not at all the same thing'/5
Nonetheless, I think there are important lessons to be learned from this debate, partly because
responding to it helps clarify some key aspects of Irigaray's thought; and partly because
it serves as a humbling reminder of the risks we inevitably take - of generating new
exclusions, or inadvertently reinforcing old blindspots - whenever we seek to address
questions of difference. In some ways, the attention which Irigaray pays to heterosexual
relations throughout her work is completely understandable, and indeed, necessary.
Precisely because heterosexual relations have operated as the most intense (and
destructive) site for the reproduction of patriarchal norms, it is not only legitimate but
imperative that we make every effort to reframe these relations in terms of an encounter
between two (sexuate) subjects, instead of one (male) subject and his 'other'.7f' Thus, while criticizing
what she sees as an (unnecessary) hardening of the sexuate into more fixed (heterosexual) relations in some of Irigaray's later writings, Penelope Deutscher observes that:
Irigaray's ideal for the reconstruction of relations between the sexes should not be decontextualized. Because the feminine has been
accorded the position of lack and atrophy in relation to the masculine, she considers that male-
female relations must be reconceived as a cultural imperative. The imperative for this reshaping derives from this
historical context, rather than from a global privileging of heterosexual and heterosocial interrelations in an Irigarayan politics.77 The claim that Irigaray
goes beyond refraining male-female relations in non-oppressive ways, to become
oppressively heterosexist herself, is not only troubling but surprising, given that, as Grosz
notes, Irigaray's work repeatedly affirms 'the necessity of women exploring their
sexualities, bodies, and desires through their corporeal and affective relations with
other women.'78 Such an affirmation is found in Irigaray's response to Freud on female homosexuality: 'what exhilarating pleasure it is to be partnered with
someone like oneself. With a sister, in everyday terms. What need, attraction, passion, one feels for someone, for some woman, like oneself (S, 103). This positive emphasis on
relations between women continues throughout her later works, including those most associated with the heterosexist charge: in J love to you, for example, Irigaray
foregrounds the urgency of articulating 'woman's relationship to herself, women's relationships among themselves, and especially the relationship between mother and
daughter' (66). As we have seen, the cultivation of such relations is vital to effect a shift from a horizon
in which women are reduced to the 'other' of the male subject (and hence to the other of
the Same), to one in which they can see themselves as similar yet different to other
women, and hence as belonging to their sex without losing their singularity. Perhaps the most
famous essay in which Irigaray explores such female-female relations is 'When Our Lips Speak Together', examined earlier in this chapter. Of all Irigaray's
works, this is the one that is usually seen as the most explicit celebration of erotic relations between women. In its images of sensuous touch and 'two lips kissing two
lips', its rhetoric affirms the fecundity of lesbian pleasure and desire (TS, 210). Nonetheless, as indicated above, I would still read this essay in terms of a more general
affirmation of female auto-affection, and hence as primarily concerned with woman's relation to her own sex:
whether that sex is manifest in her own body, that of the mother, or the loving bodies of
other women. While these bodies are always uniquely different from one another, what
matters here is that a woman can take up a relation to her own sex - to the many
different ways of being female -without having to define herself against a male norm.
Thus, Irigaray seeks figures for a distinctive female morphology while recognizing that
no two women will embody that morphology in exactly the same way.79 The affirmation of lesbian
erotics takes place within this wider project of forging figures for an autonomous female subjectivity and desire. Conversely, such a figuring of female specificity is essential for
erotic relations between women to be articulated in ways that do not involve mimicking the heterosexual norms that have hitherto been governed by male subjectivity and
desire. As Grosz puts it, Irigaray's explorations of female intimacy imply 'the possibility of women loving each other as women, not as male substitutes'.80 This brings us to a
crucial point brought out by Grosz's essay, 'The Hetero and the Homo: the Sexual Ethics of Luce Irigaray'.81 For Irigaray, our existing culture
is not hetero-normative: on the contrary, the problem is that the hetero-geneity of
hetero-sexual relations has yet to be adequately thought. Instead, male-female relations
are firmly embedded in a hom(m)osocial order that takes the male subject (le homme) as norm
and ideal. As Whitford sums up, pointing to a critical difference between Irigaray and Butler, 'what Judith Butler identifies as a heterosexual matrix, Irigaray sees as a
patriarchal hom(m)osexuality'.32 And as Irigaray herself notes, 'it's essential not to confuse ... this
ideological and cultural hom(m)osexualite with the practice of homosexuality'.83 As we have seen
in previous chapters, for Irigaray, western culture is typified by the ways in which woman's
'otherness' is recognized not in terms of an autonomous female specificity but only
insofar as she is 'other' to the male subject, reducing her to an other of the Same. This
hom(m)osocial order is of course not particularly welcoming of male homosexuality - as
Grosz notes, from an Irigarayan perspective: 'the oppression of gay men may well be a consequence of the male homosexual openly avowing what is in fact implicit, and a
social norm, for all patriarchal forms of exchange. The male homosexual says and does what remains unspoken, a disavowed condition of social functioning.'64 But
within a hom(m)osocial culture, the position of the lesbian is doubly disavowed: not
only because she breaks with the patriarchal norms which define women according to
their sexual and reproductive relations with men, but because this culture lacks the
resources to articulate women's love for other women in terms of their female
specificity (see 5, 101-4). Insofar as the call for a culture of two is a call for women to be
recognized as subjects in their own terms, it is the condition for women to love one
another as women - whether this involves lesbian eroticism, sisterly friendships, collegial support, or mother-daughter relations. Cultivating
the difference between the sexes makes it possible for there to be female/female
relations that are not based on male/female ones. This is why it Ls crucial to read Irigaray's later work on relations between the
sexes in terms of her earlier and primary demand for the cultural recognition of female autonomy and specificity. For Irigaray, the possibility of
any positive relation between the sexes - where 'positive' implies a relation which
allows for genuine difference between them - is conditional upon woman finding the
terms with which to relate to herself and to articulate her (female) specificity in ways
that no longer define her against man. As Whitford summarizes: 'For exchange to take
place between the two terms of sexual difference, there must first be two terms.'35 Irigaray's later
investigations into the question of how two sexuate subjects might listen and speak to each other are thus centrally informed by the answers she has already begun to develop
to her earlier question, 'what if the "object" [woman] started to speak?' Far from reinserting an existing heterosexual norm,
Irigaray's demand for a culture of two seeks to displace an existing hom(m)osociality in
favour of a heterosexuality (and het-erosociality) that has not yet existed, and that
would allow for two, different but non-opposed, subjects. Such a culture would make
space for the heterogeneity of female and male homosexuality, such that both could be
cultivated without either being modelled on the other, and without either coming to
constitute the violently repressed 'other' that is always required when one subject seeks
to attain the status of the universal. A further key point which needs to be added here is that, as others have noted, for Irigaray, the sexuate is
not the same as the sexual,86 where the latter is understood as referring to one's sexual 'object' choice (and which Irigaray is seeking to reconfigure as erotic relations between
desiring subjects). Thus she insists that: 'it's important not to confuse sexual choice with sexual difference.
For me sexual difference is a fundamental parameter of the socio-cul-tural order; sexual
choice is secondary. Even if one chooses to remain among women, it's necessary to
resolve the problem of sexual difference. And likewise if one remains among men.'87 By
prioritizing our existence as sexual (in the sense of sexuate) subjects, Irigaray is in no
way seeking to prescribe our sexuality, that is, whether we are hetero-/homo-/bi-
sexual, though a philosophy of being as two would require a rethinking of all of these
categories (as well as their intersections with transgendered, transsexual, and intersexed
individuals). As we have seen, there are a number of texts in which Irigaray does focus specifically on refiguring woman's sexuality; but as we have also seen, this
refiguring of woman's pleasure is never separable from the wider project of rethinking woman's relation to herself as well as the processes through which she is constituted as a
woman, that is, as a sexuate female subject. Irigaray's main concern is not with sexual orientation, but with
releasing woman from the phallocentric tradition in which all modes of sexuality are
defined in relation to one and the same sex. A culture of two sexuate (male and female)
subjects leaves it entirely open what the sexual preferences of these subjects might be -
as long as they are no longer modelled in ways that take a male body and subject as the
universal norm. Thus, while one way in which sexuate subjects can relate to one another
is in sexual (i.e. erotic) relations, the call for a culture of sexual - in the sense of sexuate -
difference is much broader than this and involves the recognition of two different kinds
of beings - male and female - regardless of their sexual preferences. As Heidi Bostic argues, one of the reasons
Irigaray's project is sometimes misconstrued is because of 'a misunderstanding of this privileging of the relation between men and women': Nowhere does Luce Irigaray make
the claim that someone of the other sex must be my life partner. Love between men and women need not mean a sexual relationship.... In fact, Irigaray encourages us to theorize
love 'within social relations and with cultural mediations' instead of simply within the 'immediacy' of genital sex. ... Irigaray suggests that we all, regardless of sexual
orientation, must learn to love across the lines of gender in order to build a new social Order* While I think that the privileging of the male-female couple in texts such as I love
to you is sometimes more problematic than this suggests, nonetheless, I agree with Bostic that Irigaray situates the necessity of
reworking the male-female relation within a much wider project. The relations between
men and women that need to be transformed are not merely sexual, but also civic, legal,
cultural, familial, political and professional. For this to happen, the relations between
public and private, particular and universal, nature and culture will also need to be
transformed: for men and - differently - for women. Only then will women be able to
participate actively in a social order in which they are fully recognized as both desiring
and political subjects.

Takes out the revolutionary potential of the Affqueer theorys focus on performance
undermines efforts at material change and denies agency
Weedon 99 Chair of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University (Chris, Feminism, theory, and the
politics of difference, p.123-124)//ED
Butler's focus on gender as performance and citation has, however, provoked strong criticism from radical feminists. Radical lesbian feminist Sheila
Jeffreys, for example, interprets much recent postmodern feminism as part of what she
terms a 'return to gender' exemplified in the 'lesbianandgay' theory of Judith Butler,
Diana Fuss and others. She argues that these postmodern theorists have invented 'a
harmless version of gender as an idea which lesbians and gay men can endlessly play
with and be revolutionary at the same time' (Jeffreys 1996: 359). For Jeffreys this marks a
dangerous depoliticization. She argues that feminists of the 1970s and 1980s were
'engaged in the task of eliminating gender and phallocentric sexuality' (p. 362). This
involved moving beyond the power relations of patriarchy. Not only does
postmodernism declare this project impossible, it reinstates a version of gender which
Jeffreys sees as 'depoliticised, sanitised and something difficult to associate with sexual
violence, economic inequality [and] women dying from backstreet abortions' (p. 359). In
lesbian culture, Jeffreys suggests, the postmodern return to gender is evident in the
1980s rehabilitation of 'role playing and lipstick lesbianism' which Jeffreys sees as far
from subversive, as helping 'to shore up the facade of femininity' (p. 366). Rather than
constituting a political challenge to heterosexist patriarchy, Jeffreys sees ideas of
performative gender, celebrated by feminist queer theory, as a form of liberal
individualism: Post-modernist lesbian and gay theory performs the useful function of
permitting those who simply wish to employ the tools and trappings of sexism and
racism to feel not only justified but even revolutionary. Lesbian role-playing, sadomasochism, male gay
masculinity, drag, Madonna's mimicry, her use of black men and black iconography, Mapplethorpe's racist sexual stereotyping, can be milked for all
the pleasure and profit that they offer in a male supremacist culture in which inequality of power is seen as all that sex is or could be. The
enjoyment of the status quo is then called 'parody' so that it can be retrieved by
intellectuals who might otherwise feel anxious about the excitement they experience.
For those post-modern lesbianandgay theorists who have no interest in taking their
pleasures in these ways, the ideas of radical uncertainty, of the utopian or essentialist
nature of any project for social change, provide a theoretical support for a gentlemanly
liberalism and individualism. (p. 374) This reading of queer theory draws attention to the
dangers inherent in postmodern approaches to difference that do not pay due attention
to the hierarchical relations of power which produce it. Feminist Critiques of Poststructuralism and
Postmodernism Post-modernism is intent on all these things, in particular in disengagement
from the self (so that we will enjoy abuse of the body and not object to sadomasochism in all its forms); in a denial of our
shared experience (so that we will not experience the joy of solidarity, of sisterhood, of community all of which are enhanced by
diversity); in disengagement from political practice (so that we will become fragmented communities, committed to
nothing but violence and the same old abusive uses of power, crossdressed or not); to the fragmentation of society (so that we
will not assume any commonality with women from other countries or cultures or other times; again we will lose our history); to the
silencing of all peoples because of the erection of artificial centres (so that we in the southern
hemisphere, on the rim of the Pacific or anywhere not deemed the centre, will never be able to assume others know anything about us at all; or those of
us called epileptic, schizophrenic, or whatever newly invented label, will feel the same). (Hawthorne 1996: 496)

The neutralization of sex and ignorance of difference guarantees extinction and genocide
ensures constant destruction of all which is considered non-masculine
Irigaray 91, Luce Irigaray (born 3 May 1930) is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist,
psychoanalyst, sociologist and cultural theorist. (Luce, The irigaray Reader, p.33)//ED
Even a vaguely rigorous analysis of claims to equality shows that they are justified at
the level of a superficial critique of culture, and Utopian as a means to women's
liberation. The exploitation of women is based upon sexual difference, and can only be
resolved through sexual difference. Certain tendencies of the day, certain contemporary
feminists, are noisily demanding the neutralization of sex [sexe]. That neutralization, if it
were possible, would correspond to the end of the human race. The human race is
divided into two genres which ensure its production and reproduction. Trying to
suppress sexual difference is to invite a genocide more radical than any destruction that
has ever existed in History. What is important, on the other hand, is defining the values of belonging to a sex-specific
genre. What is indispensable is elaborating a culture of the sexual which does not yet exist, whilst respecting both genres. Because of
the historical time gaps between the gynocratic, matriarchal, patriarchal and phallocratic eras, we are in a sexual position which is
bound up with generation and not with genre as sex. This means that, within the family, women must be mothers and men must be
fathers, but that we have no positive and ethical values that allow two sexes of the same generation to form a creative, and not
simply procreative, human couple. One of the major obstacles to the creation and recognition of such values is the more or less
covert hold patriarchal and phallocratic roles have had on the whole of our civilization for centuries. It is social justice, pure and
simple, to balance out the power of one sex over the other by giving, or restoring, cultural values to female sexuality. What is at
stake is clearer today than it was when The Second Sex was written
Our alternative is to reconceptualize Being through recognition of sexual difference
Focus on sexual difference shatters the white Eurocentric tradition. Our alternative questions
the foundations of western thought without reiterating the economy of sameness, which
subjugates the feminine
Braidotti 97 Professor of womens studies at Unvi of Utrecht (Rosi, Comment on Felski's "The Doxa of Difference": Working
through Sexual Difference Signs 23.1)//ED
Contrary to Felski's claim that sexual difference contributes to concealing issues of ethnicity and multiculturalism and
therefore to perpetuating the power and discourse of the Same, I would argue that both "mainstream" and feminist theorists of
difference have contributed to laying bare the Christian, white, Euro-centered core of
phallogocentrism. In undoing the logic of negation that structures dialectical thought,
they have also dis-assembled the geopolitical specificity of Western discourses and
especially of philosophy. Theirs is the philosophical generation that, in proclaiming the "death of Man," also marked the
implosion of the crisis of European humanism. This project of in-depth critique of humanism is an attempt to dis-engage difference
from negativity. Do keep in mind the fact that the notion of "difference" goes to the heart of the
European history of philosophy. As a foundational concept, it has been colonized by
hierarchical and exclusionary ways of thinking; as such it has played a constitutive role
in European fascism and colonialism. It is a concept that functions as a pseudo-
universal, predicating its monological unity in a set of binary op-positions-such as
male/female, white/black, active/passive--that posit asymmetrical power relations
between its terms. Because the history of difference in Europe has been one of lethal exclusions and fatal disqualifi-cations,
it is a notion for which critical intellectuals since the poststructural-ists have chosen to make themselves accountable. I think we -
critical intellectuals based in Europe- consequently need to think through difference, through
its imbrication with violence and power, its complicity with totalitarian practices and
fascist interpretations. To become accountable for such a history requires means of
revisiting it, acknowledging it, and understanding the complicity between "difference"
and "exclusion" in the European mind-set. This is a deconstructivist strat-egy that consists in rereading
difference in such a way as to dislodge it from its disastrous history: it is like a repeated attempt at purging this notion of its most
poisonous aspects, to sever its links with power and domination. The mimetic strategy de-essentializes differences and reduces
them to processes by which power and/as discourse are produced. The aim of this deconstructive process is to disengage difference
from its tra-ditional attributes, so that to be "other-than" may stop meaning "being-less-than." This task is made all the more urgent
and necessary in the historical moment known as postmodernity, which, read in terms of the crisis of European humanism,
coincides with the shift of geopolitical power away from the North Atlantic in favor of the Pacific Rim and especially South-east
Asia. Gayatri Spivak (1992) raises the suspicion that the many dis-courses about the "crisis" of Western humanism and more
specifically post-structuralist philosophy may actually reassert some universalistic posturing under the pretense of specific,
localized, or diffuse intellectual subject-positions. My line on this is quite different. I think that this shift in geopolitical
power becomes both confirmed and theorized in philosophies of difference in terms of
the decline of the Euro-centered logocentric system. Philoso-phers such as Deleuze (1978), Derrida (1997),
and Cacciari (1994) have provided critical accounts of the decline of European hegemony. They ar-gue that what makes European
philosophical culture so perniciously effec-tive is that it has been announcing its own death for more than one hun-dred years.
Especially since the apocalyptic trinity of modernity-Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud- the West has been thinking through the historical
inevitability and the logical possibility of its own decline. Instead of plunging into nostalgia, it is to the credit of poststructuralists
that they take the opportunity of this crisis to challenge the power of logo-centric discourse. Especially Derrida and Deleuze
denounce the ethnocen-tric Western habit that consists in passing off Europe as the center of the world, confining everyone else to a
huge periphery. They do so by pro-viding an in-depth critique of how the classical notion of "difference" is complicitous with
negation and exclusion. They also offer positive counter-practices of difference as something other than "being-less-than.' Both
"mainstream" and feminist philosophers of difference concentrate their cri-tique on the vision of the subject that constitutes the
Norm (the Same). Deleuze summarizes Him effectively as "masculine; white; heterosexual; urbanized; speaker-of-a-standard-
language; property-owning; rationalist" (1978, 154). This vision of subjectivity is the poststructuralists' main target of criticism. On
this point, I agree with Cornel West that there is a convergence between the discourse of the "crisis" of
the West within poststructuralism and the postcolonial deconstruction of imperial
whiteness (1994, 125). They share a common focus that does not erase the dissymmetries
between the respective positions but rather lays the grounds for the possibility of an
alliance between them. Anthony Appiah (1991) reminds us of the need not to confuse the "post" of postcoloniality with
the "post" of poststructur-alism but to respect instead their specific historical locations. Moreover, feminists are in a very
good position to know that the deconstruction of sexism and racism does not
automatically entail their downfall. Speaking as a feminist antiracist poststructuralist, however, I also wish to
stress both the convergence of these lines of critique and their necessary intersection over the issue of political subjectivity, identity,
and sexual difference. In the specific case of the critique of European ethnocentrism, I think a
poststructuralist feminist perspective leads us to discuss quite seriously the grounds on
which we postulate European identity. Identity is not under- stood as a foundational
issue, based on fixed ,God-given essences- of the biological, psychic, or historical kind. On the contrary, identity is taken
as being constructed in the very gesture that posits it as the anchoring point for certain
social and discursive practices. Consequently, the question is no longer the essentialist one--
What is national or ethnic identity?- but rather a critical and genealogical one: How is it
constructed? by whom? Under what conditions? for which aims? As Stuart H all (1992) put it: Who is
entitled to claim an ethnic or national identity? who has the right to claim that legacy, to speak on its behalf and turn it into a policy-
making platform? This interrogation results in the myths of essentialized identity being
exposed and exploded into questions related to entitlement and agency that rotate
around the issue of cultural identity. The political phenomenon that is the European Union amplifies these issues:
insofar as the European integration project seals the decline of the individual nation states and their regrouping into a federation, it
intensifies the question of entitlement to citizenship. The question can then be raised: Can one be European and black or Muslim?
Paul Gilroy's work (1987) on being a black British subject is indicative of the problem of citizenship and blackness emerging as
contested issues. The corollary of this phenomenon is also, however, the emergence of
whiteness as a critical category. Ruth Frankenberg argues that structured invisibility has been the very source of the
power of whiteness and has contributed greatly t o confusing it with normality( 1994, 6). One of the radical implications of the
project of the European Union is the possibility of embedding and embodying whiteness, therefore giving a specific location, and
consequently historical embeddedness or memory, to whites. Finally, it can racialize our location, which is quite a feat because, until
recently in Europe, only white suprema-cists, Nazi-skins, and other fascists actually had a theory about qualities that are inherent to
white people. Like all fascists, they are biological and cultural essentialists. In this regard, my own strategy as a citizen of the
European Union is to claim European identity as a site of historical contradictions and to experience it as the political necessity to
turn it into spaces of critical resis-tance to hegemonic identities of all kinds. My own choice to rework white-ness in the era of
postmodernity is , first, to situate it, denaturalize it , and to embody it and embed it and, second, to nomadize it or to destabilize it ,
to undo its hegemonic hold. Being a nomadic European subject means to be in transit but sufficiently anchored to a historical
position to accept responsibility for it. I want to argue that the radical theories of difference that have
emerged in European philosophy and especially the practice of sexual difference
contribute to a critical analysis of the naturalization of difference as a mark of
pejoration. This process entails a critique of the ways in which European philosophy
contributed to the structured invisibility of the ethnocentrism of white Europeans. It
thus pursued a metaphysical illusion of self-representation that concretely resulted in
the disembedded and disembod-ied pursuit of "purity," "objectivity," and "neutrality" as
ideals. Philosophy is made especially accountable for the ways in which it contributed
both to theorize hierarchical differences and to disqualify large sectors of the population
(the many "others") from the exercise of discursive power. True enough, "race" does not play a central
role in these theories of difference, except in the specific case of imperialism, but cultural identity, ethnicity, nationalism, and
religion do, as do colonialism, fascism, and anti- Semitism. I have argued therefore that the poststructuralists' critique
of the processes by which, in European philosophy, difference has been essen-tialized,
naturalized, and turned into a mark of pejoration echoes the calls for radical
embodiment of whiteness and for accountability by whites for their own racialized
privileges. I also want to argue that this is not a suffi-cient but a necessary condition for a dialogue between the poststructural-
ists and the postcolonial and multicultural perspectives that have emerged especially but not exclusively in feminism.


A2 Perm 2NC
The alt is a distinct opposing approach
Braidotti 11 contemporary philosopher and feminist theoretician. (Rosi, Nomadic Subjects : Embodiment and Sexual
Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (2nd Edition), New York, NY, USA: Columbia University Press, 2011. P172-173)//ED
The debate between sexual difference and gender theorists in the 1980s resulted in a
polemical opposition that led to two quite comparable forms of reductivism: on the one
hand, an idealistic form that reduces everything to the textual and, on the other hand, a
materialistic one that reduces everything to the social. These led to two extreme versions of "essentialism"
(de Lauretis 1988; Schor 1989; Fuss 1990; Braidotti 1992; Grosz 1991). It seems to me that, beyond the polemic, one of the
points of real, that is to say, conceptual difference between the two camps is in the question
of how to identify points of exit from the universalism implicit in the patriarchal or
"phallologocentric" system and from the binary way of thinking that characterizes it.
Whereas sexual difference theorists argued for a process of working through the old
system, through a strategy of "mimetic repetition," gender theorists resorted to the
"critique of ideology." This resulted in the investment of the "feminine" pole of the
sexual dichotomy, respectively, to create different meanings and representations for it,
and through it, as to what it means to be human. On the other hand, it led to the
rejection of the scheme of sexual bipolarization in favor of a desexualized and gender-
free position in doing gender. In other words, we come to opposing claims: the argument that
one needs to redefine the female feminist subject, which is reiterated by sexual
difference theorists, is echoed by the contradictory claim of gender theorists that the
feminine is a morass of metaphysical nonsense and that one is better off rejecting it
altogether in favor of a new androgyny. Not surprisingly, these positions also imply quite
different theoretical understandings of female sexuality in general and of female
homosexuality in particular (Cixous 1987; Wittig 1973).

*IRIGARAY V BLACK ATLANTIC*
1NC v Black Atlantic

The Aff misreads historythe rape of black women at the behest of white men is
the real origin of slavery and colonialism it was the precondition for the invention of race as
a legal category, allowing the whites in institutional settings to appropriate the reproductive
potential of the black bodies for profit. Thus, the control of womens bodies is the
precondition of the social expression of racism.
Martinot 07 (Steven, Motherhood and the Invention of Race, Hypatia 22.2)//ED
Let us return to the moment in 1662 when the matrilineal servitude statute and the first prohibition of
sexual relations between English and African persons, two laws solidifying the
differential categorization of English and African peoples, were passed. The title of the
act was Negro Women's Children to Serve according to the Condition of the Mother
and it read: WHEREAS some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or free, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand
assembly, that all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to
the condition of the mother. And that if any [End Page 87] christian shall commit fornication with a
negro man or woman, he or she so offending shall pay double the fines imposed by the
former act. (Hening 1809, 2:170) The second part, the ban on what we now call miscegenation,
clearly failed in its purpose, since a long series of ever more severe similar statutes
followed it. Prior to 1662, though there were religious bans, there were no secular restrictions on (heterosexual) marriage; however, longer servitude was imposed on both men and women bond-
laborers who married. Making intimacy between Africans and English a crime implied that such
relations were all too common for elite taste or interest. Otherwise, why bother? The colony was not a
democracy; law was used to create social norms, not to express them. Winthrop Jordan has argued that the English brought an
antipathy to people of color with them when they crossed the ocean, which the prohibition on mixed marriage reflected (1977, 4). However, a cultural antipathy would have minimized mixed marriage, rendering
official prohibition unnecessary; yet even this law did not stop the practice. Broader laws and enhanced
punishments followed. Indeed, a 1681 statute shifted the punishment for bond-laborer intermarriage to the plantation owner who allowed it, thereby increasing the social pressure
against such mixed relationships by aiming higher on the social scale to curtail them. The act's first part, which established matrilinearity
and stipulated that children of indentured English would follow their mother' s
contractual release date, symbolized the Colonial Council's decision to shift its
plantation labor force to Africans and move swiftly toward perpetual servitude for
Africans. The law's focus was clear: it was designed both to enhance plantation wealth
through the potential childbearing capacity of African women and to extend the
commodification of the African people through sexuality deployed in the interests of
wealth. English bond-laborers working alongside Africans did not benefit from this
measure and they could not escape its effects. The differentiation imposed on
motherhood initiated an extension of the juridical difference between bond-labor and
free labor to a definition of African and English as social categories, through the
categorization of women. The statute violated the fundamental English legal principle
of patriarchal descent. In this respect, it represented a severe identity crisis in the colony
posed by the presence of Africans to English society. In order to remain purely English,
colonial society had been, from the beginning, insular with respect to indigenous
communities, excluding them after failing to enslave them. The decision to shift the
labor force to Africans not only disturbed that insularity but also created a dilemma
between the colony's desire to hold people in perpetual servitude as capital and its
desire to preserve its moral stature (as civilized). Reversing the English common law of descent, in which children had inherited the status of
the father, freed the plantation owners somewhat [End Page 88] from this dilemma. Servitude could be considered under the heading of patriarchal domination rather than in conflict with patriarchal right. The
English could abjure any release date for African bond-laborers and still feel good about themselves. Thus, the law both nudged the colony toward
a slaveholding system and opened a fracture of identification between the colony and
England. Yet the identity crisis this moral dilemma posed had already made an earlier
appearance in the colony. In 1630, an Englishman named Hugh Davis was whipped for
having sexual relations with a "negro" (Hening 1809, 146). At the time, his act violated no
prohibitory law. The record states that Davis was whipped "before an assembly of Negroes and
others," though the number of African bond-laborers held in the colony was still small. His offense, "defiling his body" by "lying with a
Negro woman," only violated religious doctrine ("bodily self-defilement"), though his
punishment occurred under secular authority. The case thus resides at the interface
between religious and secular governance. The report's prioritization of the "Negro"
contingent in the audience is puzzling. If the general purpose of punishment were
deterrence, then the report would imply that the Africans were its target. But how
would punishing the Englishman accomplish that? Were the Africans being instructed in the Christian concept of bodily defilement by
witnessing the damaging of a Christian body? Perhaps the Africans were using sexuality as a way of transforming or alleviating their condition, just as the settlers had told them they should use baptism and
conversion to Christianity as a means to freedom. If the purpose of the punishment was to dissuade the Africans
from sleeping with the English, why whip the English partner? Perhaps Davis had raped the woman and her compatriots
filled the audience to see him punished, but nothing suggests this. Also, in the seventeenth century, the assaulted woman was
generally the one punished for presumably having misused her sexuality. Nothing in this case was reported
about what happened to the woman. If she was punished, it was probably with greater severity; but the council minutes do not mention it. Indeed, had Davis sexually assaulted her, he would probably have been
commended for having thus kept a woman in her place. On the contrary, given the colony's subsequent failure to write an antimiscegenation statute that worked, the encounter between this English man and the
unnamed African woman can be construed as one of mutual attraction. We are left to conclude that the punishment was
primarily designed to create fear among English men against sleeping with African
women. In light of the elite's apparent intention to disassociate English and Africans, the report's terseness must have been strategic. Though the Africans were
to be prohibited as a site of sexual desire (the actual content of Davis's punishment), that focus was to be
disguised by emphasizing the African component of the audience in punishing the
Englishman. The punishment's purpose then was an instrumentalization of Africans for
the purpose of keeping the English in line, [End Page 89] reconstituting English social identity as
a form of social control. That is, the arcane politics of this event, occurring without
authorization of law, revealed a political crisis, the elite's inability to rule traditionally in
the face of the social heterogeneity African presence posed; this ad hoc differential
categorization of English and Africans was the elite's primary response. In this sense,
the matrilineal servitude statute's explicit focus on African women was a direct
continuation of this process of identity creation. And the structure of politico-cultural identity that is revealed in this process would be repeated
not only in the promulgation of matrilineal servitude status but also in the criminalization of Regina McKnight's personhood. Because the mixed children of free
women would be free, the focus on African women had to be augmented by an
antimiscegenation provision regulating the sexuality of free English women. Any
children of free English women by African men would be free, and thus in conflict with
the elite desire to hold all Africans in bond-labor. Thus, English women were to be
carefully monitored to insure against this possibility and punished for transgression.
The penalty was only a fine, but the inability to pay it resulted in indentured servitude.
In effect, this law not only renarrativized (and redefined) African motherhood as
economic production to enhance plantation wealth but also renarrativized English
motherhood as "cultural production." That is, English women were disciplined to
embody the social purity of the colonial project. The overall effect of this double
renarrativization was a category division between English and African mothers. African
women were more directly imprisoned as property by the profitability of their labor
and their childbearing capacity (Roberts 1997, 24). They were both robbed of their womanness as
persons, and robbed of their personhood as women, dismembered by sexuality turned
against motherhood and motherhood turned against sexuality. And though all bond-labor women were vulnerable to
sexual assault, the matrilinearity statute invited assault against African women by legitimizing it in advance as an augmentation of plantation wealth. Indeed, according to Kenneth Stampp, breeding farms for
African women were later created at considerable profit (1956, 245). Furthermore, under fully codified slavery, motherhood would again be turned against bond-labor women as a control mechanism: less
supervision was required for women with small children to care for or nurse. Roberts explains how contemporary campaigns to turn mother and
fetus against one another reflect a direct inversion of what slavery instituted. Whereas
under slavery African women were punished for not producing children, recent policies
toward women of color, such as forced sterilization or forced abortion, punish women of color for
producing children (1997, 40). Roberts cites cases of positive drug tests used to charge the pregnant woman with child abuse rather than drug abuse in order to force her to choose
between aborting and going to jail (181). Both policies, although decreed three hundred years apart, [End Page 90] reflect white patriarchal claims on the fetus. But they are
deployed differently in pitting a woman's childbearing capacity against her own
personhood (152). While in the seventeenth century, black women were instrumentalized
for the production of children as a stage in the construction of a white racialized
identity, in the twenty-first century, they are to be rendered nonproductive for the same
purposes. As a black woman, Regina McKnight is of no concern to a state focused on her reproductive capacity; her children are similarly of no concern to the state except as instruments for
controlling McKnight as a black woman. In both cases, black women's biological generativity is denigrated to a form of political instrumentality indexed not by sex but by race, and in which their children are to
be used against them. What threads its way from the founding of slavery to the "war on drugs" is a
structuring of white male instrumentalization of women that varies in content but
exhibits the same forma form contrived in the seventeenth century that resurfaces
even up to the present. For nominally free English women threatened with punishment
for bearing free Afro-English children, an obligation was imposed to aspire to a social
status defined by female sexual discretion. Their comportment was thus given iconic
(rather than economic) value in requiring that they not be sexual beings, while still
bearing children that the colony could certify as wholly "English." This narrative of propriety exists for white "southern
womanhood" (at least as male mythology) well into the present era (Dollard 1949, 136).5 The colony's demand for black women's obeisance also rendered them a different form of property across the category
differential established between English and African women. Both English and African women were reduced in different
ways to controlled breeding stock: one the producers of property and the other the
producers of heirs to that property. While matrilineal statutes legitimized the sexual
violation of some, antimiscegenation law violated the legitimacy of sexuality for all (Roberts
1997, 41). In summary, in order for English women's bodies to become sites of sexual purity, African
women's bodies had to become culturally hypersexualized. English women became the
desexualized site of validated motherhood through the reduction of African
motherhood to the status of capital. Sexuality and motherhood were thrown against
each other in opposite ways, marking a disparate fracturing of the being of English and
African women. In short, women and womanly being were deployed to shift a prior
juridical distinction between the English and the Africans to a bio-economic plane. And
through this fracturing of women, society was divided categorically; English and
African were rendered socially incommensurable with one another. Herein was born
the incommensurability that the concept of "race" sought to naturalize, revealed in full
relationality. Yet contrary to the myth of "naturalized" race, it is the hegemonic group
that remains dependent on those it dominates for its ability to define and redefine itself
through them. [End Page 91] The birth of American whiteness and national identity converge across and through the race-marked bodies of women. Ultimately, the embodiment of sexuality in
women of color in order to withhold sexuality from English women rendered sexuality as such an extension of the market, and the bond-labor market an extension of sexuality. The "color coding" of sexuality
produced a sexualization of color, which augmented the emerging "color coding" of labor. While the matrilineal servitude statute's explicit
purpose was to reduce women to different forms of productive resource, it also
transformed the gender identity of men. On the one hand, African men and women were reduced
to different forms of capital, that is, people held as productive resources for the benefit of plantation profitability. English men, on the other hand,
found themselves conscripted to guard English women's chastity. If masculinity's
definition of itself is contingent upon its own definition of femininity, then any attempt
to redefine female identity will shift the definition of male identity. In trapping
themselves in the role of holding English women to racialized standards for sexual
purity and propriety, the English men's sexual choices were severely reduced, precisely
because it reduced them to policing and surveillance functions. That is, the reduction of English women to chaste breeders
of a pure race at the same time reduced the possibilities for English men. An English man found himself having to marry the
desexed signifier for propriety and the cold purity of ancestry, rather than a warm
woman. And it was in these terms that the dissevering of all women, race-marked through specularized black women as forbidden objects of desire, incited a history of white male sexual transgression.
In sum, Africans and African Americans were transformed into mediations of the property
relations between English men, while all women (English and African) were conscripted to mediate
the relation between English men and their property. Property relations were rendered
inseparable from gender relations, not simply with respect to inheritance or a division of labor, but as a proprietary
categorization of people that would later be canonized as "race" and nation. In the McKnight case, the
state's proprietary relation to motherhood was inseparable from the poor labor conditions it fostered, as well as its racialized instrumentalization of women. Its formal instrumentalization of black women, and
thus of black people in general, through an imposed criminalization, remains as essential today for the social coherence of white society as it was in the seventeenth-century colony. It is not just
that pragmatic racism allows the white state to discipline black women's bodies in ways that
Roberts documents. Black women's suffering is immaterial to the state. Instead, it acts to
instrumentalize black women as the mark of propriety for the reconstructed coherence
of white society and white racialized identity.

Focusing on the race-marked body obviates the gendered body: the denaturalization of the
relationship between mother and child is the precondition for the creation of socialized racial
hierarchy. We have the better sequencing argument: sexual difference shapes our
understanding of whiteness, not vice versa
Martinot 07 (Steven, Motherhood and the Invention of Race, Hypatia 22.2)//ED
Another element of the 1662 statute needs to be fleshed out. For the colony of Virginia, a historical gap still
had to be traversed between the social differentiation of women and the concept of race.
A second step across this space was provided by the antimiscegenation law passed at
the same time as the matrilinearity statute. As Eva Saks argues, this antimiscegenation law
represents the "power of legal language to construct, criminalize, and appropriate the
human body itself" (1988, 39). Not only is the law consistent with the ethos of slavery but it
is also essential to it. The principle that heritage is definable by statute means that it forms part of the system of
entitlements characteristic of property. In codifying sexuality, antimiscegenation law politically links
the forcible control of bond-labor bodies with the morality and social identity
implicated in the codification of slavery. It thus serves a political purpose beyond the
merely economic interests of the elite. On the one hand, as we have seen, an allegiance among
English men was demanded by the prohibitions on interracial relations. On the other
hand, antimiscegenation law served to prevent intimacy between African women and
English men that might lead an English man to take a protective stance toward an
African woman. In both respects, matters of property trumped matters of personal
relationship. A similar cultural norm was imposed on English women. In 1664, the
Maryland colony published a denunciation of "freeborn English women [who] forgetful
of their free condition and to the disgrace of our nation do intermarry with Negro
slaves" (Alpert 1970, 195). English women were thereby instructed to embody allegiance to the
colony ("nation"), and its evolving system of slavery. If a "freeborn" condition can be
"forgotten," of course, then it must be other than innate; instead, it is granted by male
governance as a privilege and open to future review. With a discursive sleight of hand,
Maryland conflated the "natural" condition of being freeborn with the social separations
invented by the statute. U.S. history is rife with this same conflation. The Declaration of
Independence performs it in its delimitation of universal "inalienable rights" to "white men" by failing to proclaim the abolition of
slavery. When the U.S. Constitution says "We, the people of the United States," it presupposes the natural preexistence of a people
who can so identify themselves by property, race, sexuality, and gender, though they exist only as defined by that constitution. In
effect, the definition of a socially defined condition as "natural" exhibits continuity in U.S.
society. Ultimately, this conflation would appear in the eighteenth century in the definition
of race as biological. Through the original division of women along color lines, a boundary was constructed within
plantation culture between desexualized English propriety and African-American sexualized productivity. [End Page
93] Sociopolitical control of bodies was then "naturalized" in the cultural evolution of a
concept of race; that is, the underlying biology of motherhood, seized and denatured
juridically by the colonial state, was renaturalized as a different hierarchical (racial)
"biology" by eighteenth-century naturalism and codified in the newly emerging biologically based
human sciences as race. Through this extended process, the ever-intensified bans on mixed relationships
after 1662 (that did not express a "racism" which had not yet been conceptualized) were integral to the eventual
invention of race, the production of racism, and the subsequent construction of
"American" as a national identity. Eventually traversing the complicated cycle of paranoia, social solidarity, and
normalization of violence, this division of women was a critical aspect of the English arriving at a
self-identification as white. Race does not exist as a biologically determined natural
hierarchy of peoples; whites invented racial hierarchy and, as white, made themselves
supreme and hegemonic. But before society could be racialized, it had first to be
transformed through the instrumentalization of women. In particular, before race could
become race, it had first to become a property of property (Saks 1988, 50). And today, the ever
increasing state control over black motherhood can be understood as a reracialization of
state and society.
The neutralization of sex and ignorance of difference guarantees extinction and genocide
ensures constant destruction of all which is considered non-masculine
Irigaray 91, Luce Irigaray (born 3 May 1930) is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist,
psychoanalyst, sociologist and cultural theorist. (Luce, The irigaray Reader, p.33)//ED
Even a vaguely rigorous analysis of claims to equality shows that they are justified at
the level of a superficial critique of culture, and Utopian as a means to women's
liberation. The exploitation of women is based upon sexual difference, and can only be
resolved through sexual difference. Certain tendencies of the day, certain contemporary
feminists, are noisily demanding the neutralization of sex [sexe]. That neutralization, if it
were possible, would correspond to the end of the human race. The human race is
divided into two genres which ensure its production and reproduction. Trying to
suppress sexual difference is to invite a genocide more radical than any destruction that
has ever existed in History. What is important, on the other hand, is defining the values of belonging to a sex-specific
genre. What is indispensable is elaborating a culture of the sexual which does not yet exist, whilst respecting both genres. Because of
the historical time gaps between the gynocratic, matriarchal, patriarchal and phallocratic eras, we are in a sexual position which is
bound up with generation and not with genre as sex. This means that, within the family, women must be mothers and men must be
fathers, but that we have no positive and ethical values that allow two sexes of the same generation to form a creative, and not
simply procreative, human couple. One of the major obstacles to the creation and recognition of such values is the more or less
covert hold patriarchal and phallocratic roles have had on the whole of our civilization for centuries. It is social justice, pure and
simple, to balance out the power of one sex over the other by giving, or restoring, cultural values to female sexuality
Our alternative is to reconceptualize Being through recognition of sexual difference
Focus on sexual difference shatters the white Eurocentric tradition. Our alternative questions
the foundations of western thought without reiterating the economy of sameness, which
subjugates the feminine
Braidotti 97 Professor of womens studies at Unvi of Utrecht (Rosi, Comment on Felski's "The Doxa of Difference": Working
through Sexual Difference Signs 23.1)//ED
Contrary to Felski's claim that sexual difference contributes to concealing issues of ethnicity and multiculturalism and
therefore to perpetuating the power and discourse of the Same, I would argue that both "mainstream" and feminist theorists of
difference have contributed to laying bare the Christian, white, Euro-centered core of
phallogocentrism. In undoing the logic of negation that structures dialectical thought,
they have also dis-assembled the geopolitical specificity of Western discourses and
especially of philosophy. Theirs is the philosophical generation that, in proclaiming the "death of Man," also marked the
implosion of the crisis of European humanism. This project of in-depth critique of humanism is an attempt to dis-engage difference
from negativity. Do keep in mind the fact that the notion of "difference" goes to the heart of the
European history of philosophy. As a foundational concept, it has been colonized by
hierarchical and exclusionary ways of thinking; as such it has played a constitutive role
in European fascism and colonialism. It is a concept that functions as a pseudo-
universal, predicating its monological unity in a set of binary op-positions-such as
male/female, white/black, active/passive--that posit asymmetrical power relations
between its terms. Because the history of difference in Europe has been one of lethal exclusions and fatal disqualifi-cations,
it is a notion for which critical intellectuals since the poststructural-ists have chosen to make themselves accountable. I think we -
critical intellectuals based in Europe- consequently need to think through difference, through
its imbrication with violence and power, its complicity with totalitarian practices and
fascist interpretations. To become accountable for such a history requires means of
revisiting it, acknowledging it, and understanding the complicity between "difference"
and "exclusion" in the European mind-set. This is a deconstructivist strat-egy that consists in rereading
difference in such a way as to dislodge it from its disastrous history: it is like a repeated attempt at purging this notion of its most
poisonous aspects, to sever its links with power and domination. The mimetic strategy de-essentializes differences and reduces
them to processes by which power and/as discourse are produced. The aim of this deconstructive process is to disengage difference
from its tra-ditional attributes, so that to be "other-than" may stop meaning "being-less-than." This task is made all the more urgent
and necessary in the historical moment known as postmodernity, which, read in terms of the crisis of European humanism,
coincides with the shift of geopolitical power away from the North Atlantic in favor of the Pacific Rim and especially South-east
Asia. Gayatri Spivak (1992) raises the suspicion that the many dis-courses about the "crisis" of Western humanism and more
specifically post-structuralist philosophy may actually reassert some universalistic posturing under the pretense of specific,
localized, or diffuse intellectual subject-positions. My line on this is quite different. I think that this shift in geopolitical
power becomes both confirmed and theorized in philosophies of difference in terms of
the decline of the Euro-centered logocentric system. Philoso-phers such as Deleuze (1978), Derrida (1997),
and Cacciari (1994) have provided critical accounts of the decline of European hegemony. They ar-gue that what makes European
philosophical culture so perniciously effec-tive is that it has been announcing its own death for more than one hun-dred years.
Especially since the apocalyptic trinity of modernity-Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud- the West has been thinking through the historical
inevitability and the logical possibility of its own decline. Instead of plunging into nostalgia, it is to the credit of poststructuralists
that they take the opportunity of this crisis to challenge the power of logo-centric discourse. Especially Derrida and Deleuze
denounce the ethnocen-tric Western habit that consists in passing off Europe as the center of the world, confining everyone else to a
huge periphery. They do so by pro-viding an in-depth critique of how the classical notion of "difference" is complicitous with
negation and exclusion. They also offer positive counter-practices of difference as something other than "being-less-than.' Both
"mainstream" and feminist philosophers of difference concentrate their cri-tique on the vision of the subject that constitutes the
Norm (the Same). Deleuze summarizes Him effectively as "masculine; white; heterosexual; urbanized; speaker-of-a-standard-
language; property-owning; rationalist" (1978, 154). This vision of subjectivity is the poststructuralists' main target of criticism. On
this point, I agree with Cornel West that there is a convergence between the discourse of the "crisis" of
the West within poststructuralism and the postcolonial deconstruction of imperial
whiteness (1994, 125). They share a common focus that does not erase the dissymmetries
between the respective positions but rather lays the grounds for the possibility of an
alliance between them. Anthony Appiah (1991) reminds us of the need not to confuse the "post" of postcoloniality with
the "post" of poststructur-alism but to respect instead their specific historical locations. Moreover, feminists are in a very
good position to know that the deconstruction of sexism and racism does not
automatically entail their downfall. Speaking as a feminist antiracist poststructuralist, however, I also wish to
stress both the convergence of these lines of critique and their necessary intersection over the issue of political subjectivity, identity,
and sexual difference. In the specific case of the critique of European ethnocentrism, I think a
poststructuralist feminist perspective leads us to discuss quite seriously the grounds on
which we postulate European identity. Identity is not under- stood as a foundational
issue, based on fixed ,God-given essences- of the biological, psychic, or historical kind. On the contrary, identity is taken
as being constructed in the very gesture that posits it as the anchoring point for certain
social and discursive practices. Consequently, the question is no longer the essentialist one--
What is national or ethnic identity?- but rather a critical and genealogical one: How is it
constructed? by whom? Under what conditions? for which aims? As Stuart H all (1992) put it: Who is
entitled to claim an ethnic or national identity? who has the right to claim that legacy, to speak on its behalf and turn it into a policy-
making platform? This interrogation results in the myths of essentialized identity being
exposed and exploded into questions related to entitlement and agency that rotate
around the issue of cultural identity. The political phenomenon that is the European Union amplifies these issues:
insofar as the European integration project seals the decline of the individual nation states and their regrouping into a federation, it
intensifies the question of entitlement to citizenship. The question can then be raised: Can one be European and black or Muslim?
Paul Gilroy's work (1987) on being a black British subject is indicative of the problem of citizenship and blackness emerging as
contested issues. The corollary of this phenomenon is also, however, the emergence of
whiteness as a critical category. Ruth Frankenberg argues that structured invisibility has been the very source of the
power of whiteness and has contributed greatly t o confusing it with normality( 1994, 6). One of the radical implications of the
project of the European Union is the possibility of embedding and embodying whiteness, therefore giving a specific location, and
consequently historical embeddedness or memory, to whites. Finally, it can racialize our location, which is quite a feat because, until
recently in Europe, only white suprema-cists, Nazi-skins, and other fascists actually had a theory about qualities that are inherent to
white people. Like all fascists, they are biological and cultural essentialists. In this regard, my own strategy as a citizen of the
European Union is to claim European identity as a site of historical contradictions and to experience it as the political necessity to
turn it into spaces of critical resis-tance to hegemonic identities of all kinds. My own choice to rework white-ness in the era of
postmodernity is , first, to situate it, denaturalize it , and to embody it and embed it and, second, to nomadize it or to destabilize it ,
to undo its hegemonic hold. Being a nomadic European subject means to be in transit but sufficiently anchored to a historical
position to accept responsibility for it. I want to argue that the radical theories of difference that have
emerged in European philosophy and especially the practice of sexual difference
contribute to a critical analysis of the naturalization of difference as a mark of
pejoration. This process entails a critique of the ways in which European philosophy
contributed to the structured invisibility of the ethnocentrism of white Europeans. It
thus pursued a metaphysical illusion of self-representation that concretely resulted in
the disembedded and disembod-ied pursuit of "purity," "objectivity," and "neutrality" as
ideals. Philosophy is made especially accountable for the ways in which it contributed
both to theorize hierarchical differences and to disqualify large sectors of the population
(the many "others") from the exercise of discursive power. True enough, "race" does not play a central
role in these theories of difference, except in the specific case of imperialism, but cultural identity, ethnicity, nationalism, and
religion do, as do colonialism, fascism, and anti- Semitism. I have argued therefore that the poststructuralists' critique
of the processes by which, in European philosophy, difference has been essen-tialized,
naturalized, and turned into a mark of pejoration echoes the calls for radical
embodiment of whiteness and for accountability by whites for their own racialized
privileges. I also want to argue that this is not a suffi-cient but a necessary condition for a dialogue between the poststructural-
ists and the postcolonial and multicultural perspectives that have emerged especially but not exclusively in feminism.

A2 Perm 2NC

1. Double Bind---Either it still links because they endorse the parts we criticize or it
severs, which is a voting issue because it denies us stable link ground and moots our
strategyVoting issue for fairness and education

2. The permutation is the link --- Their attempt to reduce all perspectives to one neatly
packaged advocacy is sexual indifference
Irigaray 80 Luce Irigaray (born 3 May 1930) is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist,
psychoanalyst, sociologist and cultural theorist. (Luce and Carolyn Burke, When Our Lips Speak Together, Signs, Vol. 6, No. 1,
Women: Sex and Sexuality, Part 2, pp. 69-79)//ED
If we continue to speak the same language to each other, we will reproduce the
same story. Begin the same stories all over again. Don't you feel it? Listen: men and
women around us all sound the same. Same arguments, same quarrels, same
scenes. Same attractions and separations. Same difficulties, the impossibility of
reaching each other. Same . . . same. . . . Always the same. If we continue to speak
this sameness,1 if we speak to each other as men have spoken for centuries, as they
taught us to speak, we will fail each other. Again. . . . Words will pass through our
bodies, above our heads, disappear, make us disappear. Far. Above. Absent from
ourselves, we become machines that are spoken, machines that speak. Clean skins
2
envelop us,
but they are not our own. We have fled into proper names, we have been violated by them.
3
Not yours, not mine. We don't have
names. We change them as men exchange us, as they use us. It's frivolous to be so
changeable so long as we are a medium of exchange. How can I touch you if you're not there? Your blood
is translated into their senses.
4
They can speak to each other and about us. But "us"? Get out of
their language. Go back through all the names they gave you. I'm waiting for you, I'm waiting for
myself. Come back. It's not so hard. Stay right here, and you won't be absorbed into the old
scenarios, the redundant phrases, the familiar gestures, bodies already encoded in a
system. Try to be attentive to yourself. To me. Don't be distracted by norms or
habits.

3. Appropriation DA the perm is founded on the logic of sameness and contradicts
difference
Trani 02 professor at the University of Lecce (Florinda, University of Lecce From the Same to the Other, Paragraph, 25)//ED
In a multi-ethnic, multiracial and multicultural society like ours, we cannot but discuss the theme of difference,
we cannot but talk about the other. The blending of races, of cultures and of customs has become
an integral part of our daily lives. For this reason, it is necessary to learn to value
differences, to learn that they must not be refused, negated or simply integrated
but, on the contrary, they must be welcomed as an advantageous counterbalance to
uniformity. Our Western tradition, however, is founded on the logic of identity, of
similarity, of symmetry. What has always been favoured by the symbolic order
characterizing our culture is sameness. And difference has invariably aroused fear;
consequently, the issue of otherness has always been evaded. Even when it has
been dealt with, it has not been correctly formulated, as the other has nonetheless
remained other in relation to the omnipotent model of the one: it has not been seen
as another being, different but possessing equal dignity. Therefore, diversities have often been thought
of in a hierarchical way.

4. Total rethinking key
Irigaray 93 Luce Irigaray (born 3 May 1930) is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist,
psychoanalyst, sociologist and cultural theorist. (Luce, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian
Gill, Cornell University Press: Ithica, p 6)//ED
A revolution in thought and ethics is needed if the work of sexual difference is to
take place. We need to reinterpret everything concerning the relations between the
subject and discourse, the subject and the world, the subject and the cosmic, the
microcosmic and the macrocosmic. Everything, beginning with the way in which
the subject has always been written in the masculine form, as man, even when it
claimed to be universal or neutral. Despite the fact that manat least in Frenchrather than being neutral, is sexed.

*AFF ANSWERS*
2AC

The K is self defeating their discourse regulates essentializes women, foreclosing other
methods of representation
Butler 99 Professor of Humanities, Johns Hopkins University, (Judith, GENDER TROUBLE)//ED
For the most part, feminist theory has assumed that there is some existing identity,
understood through the category of women, who not only initiates feminist interest
and goals within discourse, but constitutes the subject for whom political representation is pursued. But politics and
representation are controversial terms. On the one hand, representation serves as the operative term within a political process that seeks to
extend visibility and legitimacy to women as political subjects: on the other hand, representation is the normative function of a language which
is said either to reveal or to distort what is assumed to be true about the category of women. For feminist theory, the
development of a language that fully or adequately represents women has seemed
necessary to foster the political visibility of women. This has seemed obviously
important considering the pervasive cultural condition in which all womens lives
were either misrepresented of not represented at all. Recently, this prevailing conception of the relation
between feminist theory and politics has come under challenge from within feminist discourse. The very subject of women is no longer
understood in stable or abiding terms. There is a great deal of material that not only questions the viability of the subject as the ultimate
candidate for representation or, indeed, liberation, but there is very little agreement after all on what it is that constitutes, or ought to constitute,
the category of women. The domains of political and linguistic representation set out in
advance the criterion by which subjects themselves are formed, with the result that representation
is extended only to what can be acknowledged as a subject. In other words, the qualifications for being a subject must first be met before
representation can be extended. Foucault points out that juridical systems of power produce the subjects
they subsequently come to represent. Juridical notions of power appeal to regulate
political life in purely negative terms - that is, through the imitation, prohibition,
regulation, control and even protection of individuals related to that political structure through the contingent
and retractable operation of choice. - that is, through the imitation, prohibition, regulation, control and even protection of individuals related
to that political structure through the contingent and retractable operation of choice. But the subjects regulated by such
structures are, by virtue of being subjected to them, formed, defined, and
reproduced in accordance with the requirements of those structures. If this analysis is right,
then the juridical formation of language and politics that represents women as the subject of feminism is itself a distinctive formation and
effect of a given version of representational politics. And the feminist subject turns out to be discursively
constituted by the very political system that is supposed to facilitate its
emancipation. This becomes politically problematic if that system can be shown to produce gendered subjects along a differential axis
of domination or to produce subjects who are presumed to be masculine. In such cases an uncritical appeal to such
a system for the emancipation of women will be clearly self-defeating.

Exclusivity claims rely on masculine dichotomies that constrict feminism to a static,
reductionist, and stunted thought
Peterson 2K Department of Political Science @ U AZ, and Associate Fellow at Gender Institute, London School of Economics
(V. Spike, Rereading Public and Private: The Dichotomy that is Not One, SAIS Review, Volume 20, Number 2, Summer-Fall 2000,
pp. 11-29)//ED
Conceptually, the structure of dichotomies (posing mutually exclusive, opposing, and
polarized terms) promotes thinking that is static (unable to acknowledge or address
change), reductionist (unable to accommodate the complexities of social reality),
and stunted (unable to envision more than two opposing alternatives).4 Because
social life is dynamic, complex, and multi-faceted, thinking that relies on
reductionist dichotomies encourages inadequate analyses. Politically, foundational
dichotomies privilege the first term at the expense of the second, and their
deployment implicitly or explicitly valorizes the attributes of the first term. Because
foundational dichotomies culture-nature, reason-emotion, subject-object, mind-
body, publicprivate are gendered, action that relies on dichotomies privileges
that which is associated with masculinity over that which is associated with
femininity.

The state can use its power to further feminist goals.
Tickner 01 , prof at the School of International Relations, USC, (J. Ann, Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in
the PostCold War Era, p. 97-98)//ED
While the relative absence of women from political institutions has led feminists, particularly Western feminists, to be suspicious of the state,
they are also questioning visions of alternative models that advocate the devolution of power up to international governmental institutions,
where often there are even fewer women in decision-making positions. Universal norms, such as
standards of human rights, articulated at the international level are also being examined for gender bias. Typically, womens
movements, which strive for what they claim is a more genuine form of democracy,
have been situated at the local level or in nongovernmental transnational social
movements. As discussed in chapter 3, feminists have stressed the importance of these movements, not only in terms of their attempts
to place womens issues on the international agenda, but also in terms of their success in redefining political theory and practice and thinking
more deeply about oppressive gender relations and how to reconstitute them. However, certain feminists have begun to
question whether womens participation in these nongovernmental arenas can have
sufficient power to effect change; while they remain skeptical of the patriarchal underpinnings of many contemporary
states, certain feminists are now beginning to reexamine the potential of the state as an
emancipatory institution. Particularly for women and feminists from the South, democratization has opened up some space
within which to leverage the state to deal with their concerns; many of them see the state as having the
potential to provide a buffer against an international system dominated by its most
powerful members. However, a genuinely democratic state, devoid of gender and other oppressive social hierarchies, would
require a different definition of democracy, citizenship, and human rights, as well as a different relationship with the international system.

The law can be used to reverse violence. There is nothing inherent in the law that ties our
hands
Butler 97 Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley (Judith, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the
Performative, Routledge: New York, p. 98)//ED
The state's exercise of this productive discursive function is underestimated in the writings that favor of hate speech legislation. Indeed, they
minimize the possibility of a misappropriation by the law in favor of a view of the law as politically neutral and malleable. Matsuda
argues that law, though formed in racism, can be redirected against racism. She
figures the law as a set of "ratchet" tools, describing it in purely instrumental terms,
and discounting the productive misappropriations by which it proceeds. This view
invests all power and agency in the subject who would use such an instrument.
However reactionary its history, this instrument can be put in the service of a
progressive vision, thus "defying the habit of neutral principles to entrench existing
power:' Later she writes: "nothing inherent in law ties our hands:' (50) approving of a
method of doctrinal reconstruction. In other words, legal language is precisely the
kind of language that can be cited into a reverse meaning, where the reversal takes
a law with a reactionary history and turns it into a law with a progressive aim.

Universalization is inescapable prefer the critical realism of the perm to formulate
emancipatory aims
Poutanen 05 Researcher, Academy of Finland, (Seppo, Critical Management Conference, interculture.fsu.edu/pdfs/pirott-
quintero%20lispector_and_cixous.pdf)//ED
The essential object of Tony Lawsons contribution to the dialogue is to show how ontological analysis in critical
realist style is able to benefit the explanatory goals (mainly meaning goals of
standpoint epistemology), and critical and emancipatory goals of feminist research.
In his first article, which he mostly uses to sketch the content of critical realism, Lawson (1999) notes general aversion among feminists towards
realism and suggests a diagnosis of this phenomenon. According to his diagnosis, effective feminist critique of groundless a priori
universalizing in research slides easily to a problematic position of opposing generalizing altogether. Lawson suspects
feminists to see realism as an ontological underwriter of all false generalizing, and
he stresses that only naive realism is prone to back misled universalizations. In
contrast, Lawson considers generalizing/universalizing (is) an inescapable part of
research and details how understanding the basic ontological nature of (social)
reality in the critical realist way can help us to attain moderately correct or justified
generalizations. Such generalizations concerning, especially, human nature, needs
and interests are, in the view of Lawson, necessarily needed in formulations of
emancipatory political aims.

Critique grounded in discourse fails it cant undermine larger power structures.
Brown 01 prof Political Science UC Berkeley (Wendy, Politics Out of History, p. 35-37)//ED
But here the problem goes well beyond superficiality of political analysis or compensatory gestures in the face of felt impotence. A moralistic,
gestural politics often inadvertently becomes a regressive politics. Moralizing
condemnation of the National Endowment for the Arts for not funding politically radical art, of the U.S.
military or the White House for not embracing open homosexuality or sanctioning gay marriage, or even of the
National Institutes of Health for not treating as a political priority the lives of HIV target populations
(gay men, prostitutes, and drug addicts) conveys at best naive political expectations and at worst,
patently confused ones. For this condemnation implicitly figures the state (and other mainstream
institutions) as if it did not have specific political and economic investments, as if it were not
the codification of various dominant social powers, but was, rather, a momentarily
misguided parent who forgot her promise to treat all her children the same way. These
expressions of moralistic outrage implicitly cast the state as if it were or could be a
deeply democratic and nonviolent institution; conversely, it renders radical art, radical
social movements, and various fringe populations as if they were not potentially
subversive, representing a significant political challenge to the norms of the regime, but rather were benign entities and populations entirely
appropriate for the state to equally protect, fund, and promote. Here, moralisms objection to politics as a domain of power and history rather than
principle is not simply irritating: it results in a troubling and confused political stance. It misleads about the nature of
power, the state, and capitalism; it misleads about the nature of oppressive social forces,
and about the scope of the project of transformation required by serious ambitions for
justice. Such obfuscation is not the aim of the moralists but falls within that more
general package of displaced effects consequent to a felt yet unacknowledged
impotence. It signals disavowed despair over the prospects for more far-reaching
transformations.