All language subtitles for Radical Thinkers The Art- Sex and Politics of Feminism Tate Talks

good

evening hello and welcome to this

evening's event titled radical thinkers

the art sex and politics of feminism my

name is Sandra Sova I'm the curator of

public programs here and it's my great

pleasure to introduce this evening which

coincides with the launch of the latest

set of the radical thinkers series

published by

Verso this set has a specific focus on

feminism and is intended as an

intervention into current feminist

discourse with four key texts of

contemporary relevance including books

by Lin sear Juliet Mitchell Sheila Ro

boam Michelle Barrett and Mary

McIntosh tonight we're joined by Lin

Sega whose book straight sex has has

been uh recently republished as part of

this latest series and by Professor

Gisela pollok to critically cons

consider the legacies of feminism in

relation to the feminist politics of art

sex and work and their enduring

relevance to contemporary struggles 40

years ago feminist thinkers and artists

interrogated the role of women as

workers and producers and the

representation of women in art what

happened to the new worlds of

possibility promised by the women's

Liberation and second way feminist

movements of the 20th century these will

be some of the questions that we'll be

exploring this

evening now this evening's chair is

Sonia Boyce Sonia is a British Artist

living and working in London she came to

prominence in the 1980s with works that

spoke about race and gender and has gone

on to have an international reputation

for creating works that encourage

spontaneity and

collaboration Sonia is currently a

professor of Fine Art at middle sex

University and chair of Black Art and

Design at University of the Arts London

I'd also like to introduce our speakers

this

evening uh we are joined by ly sear Who

anniversary professor of psychology and

gender studies in the department of

Psychosocial studies at burbeck College

how many books include out of time the

pleasures and perils of aging and

straight sex rethinking the politics of

pleasure that this event is focusing on

she co-wrote beyond the fragments

feminism and the making of socialism

with Sheila roboam and Hillary Wayne

Wright and uh the first Speaker of this

evening will be grisela pollok who is a

professor of Social and critical

histories of Art and director of the

center for culture analysis Theory and

history at the University of Leeds known

for her consistent exploration of

feminist Theory and culture analysis her

recent Publications include after effect

after image trauma anesthetic

transformation published in

2013 and visual politics of

psychoanalysis also published in

2013 now to mention a few words about

the format of this evening we'll start

with each of our speakers giving about

15 to 20 minute

presentations uh and this will be

followed by an in conversation and at

about 7:40 or so we'll open the floor to

questions from the audience uh after the

event which we aim to conclude at 8

you'll have a chance to purchase books

by both of our speakers and have them

signed so please join us in the adjacent

f for that and finally I'd like to thank

vesto for their ongoing partnership with

us and for making events like this one

happen and possible so thank you and now

please join me in welcoming our first

Speaker this evening which is Gisela poo

thank you

thank you very much and uh it's uh um

thank you to Verso thank you to the Tate

and uh for this opportunity to join in

celebrating the republication of Lynn

seagull's

Book now at what stage does a historical

event become a memory a cultural

memory and therefore become subject to a

politics of

remembrance and also of Mis

remembrance now that I am of an age to

be an individual with memories of

political events that shaped me

intellectual when I was much younger I'm

intensely aware of a disjuncture with

the

present this disconnect Falls between

what feels to me like a continuous

thread that weaves the ever richer cloth

of feminist work and thought and what

what seems to those engaging now with

feminism as an ism as an object lodged

in the past to be an object of contested

memory so here this evening we're in the

middle of this

dilemma there's a substantial audience

interested enough to spend a Monday

evening to witness the relaunch of a

text written in the

1990s so like Freud I am pondering to

myself and wondering what does an

audience

want of me of Lynn of Sonia of art

politics maybe it's because it's got sex

in the title which is always a

winner and is feminism something vivid

enough despite its considerable age to

draw you

here now if we were to imagine ourselves

coming together in 1945 for instance and

looking back to an event that

occurred uh 45 years before we would

find ourselves thinking about what

happened around

1900 a completely different era so if we

imagine from 1970 to

2015 we're similarly straddling half an

era half a century and as far as my

seconde students are concerned at

present their entire lifetime lies

between the moment that Lynn's book was

published and the moment they encounter

my talking about it now such banalities

of time gaps as such

my contribution to this evening's

discussion about radical thinkers in

time concerns a profoundly um urgent

question I'm just going to turn this

timing

on it's not going to work uh a

profoundly important uh problem that

takes two forms one is that feminism has

been delivered to the present as a bad

memory I don't just mean that in the

sense of being something of a nightmare

where people say thank thank God that's

all gone now but it's a poorly

constructed memory and this is part in

part the work of those who actively wish

to get rid of feminism but much more

problematically the bad memory of

feminism is uh the product of feminists

themselves they have created a memory of

feminism through stories narratives

formulations and so forth that I

consider to be destructive of the

present and indeed the future

potentiality of what feminism represents

a struggle for dignity and safety of

those who live variously and differently

and even agonistically under the sign

woman in relation not only to non- women

but also to other women so who else but

feminist teaches their students that

they were generations and waves of

feminism who else endlessly repletes

cliches about essentialism and

constructivism who else plays activism

off against theoretical

institutionalization ation it seems to

me it's time that we analyze and I mean

that

psychoanalytically the deadliness that

this that repeatedly betrays the

radicality of feminism and its attempt

to make the sign woman and the political

collectivity that that word dares to

invoke a radical Force for change in the

world so I choose to counter the

tendency for what I see feminists acting

out phallocentric as destructive form of

feminine difficulties with

intergenerational connection and I'm

going to use two resources tonight

offered by two think uh forms of radical

Thinking by women who preceded or had no

truck with our history of feminism as

radical thinking the first is Hannah

arent writing of the crisis in education

that she witnessed in the United States

in the early

1960s Hannah aren concluded Ed an essay

of that title crisis in education with

the following formulation of what I

understand as

transgenerational thinking that defines

a

nonfamilial relation of older and

younger people who encounter each other

in the field of

Education Hannah arant writes this

education is the point at which we

decide whether we love the world enough

to assume responsibility for it and by

the same token to save it from the ruin

which except for Renewal except for the

coming of the new and the young would be

inevitable an education too is where we

decide whether we love our children

enough not to expel them from our world

and leave them to their own devices nor

to strike from their hands their chance

of undertaking something new something

unforeseen by us but to prepare them in

advance for the task of renewing our

common

world now I want to draw an initial

distinction from this statement between

transgenerational work and political and

education work it is too towards

building a common World whose antithesis

op is oppression Injustice and inclusion

exclusion and on the other hand the

institutionalization of some kind of

canonical

knowledge the latter might be defined in

Raymond Willam terms is a selective

tradition that effectively pre-shaped

the present and hence determines the

limits of the

future if our ambition is the Deep

democratization of just Society through

a long-term historical Endeavor with all

its setbacks and its renewals we

nevertheless need some

institutionalization of our histories of

thought within that endeavor and it's

here I wish to place the issues of

transmission and as it were academic

institutionalization of the project we

call

feminism I suggest that feminism Falls

between trauma and memory between the

shock of its claim for the right to

revolt and the belated and often

inadequate forms of the inscription of

that Revolt Intercultural

memory this includes both the lack of

any inscription and the problem of false

inscription and in that gap between

trauma and cultural memory feminism

always also o Falls between remembrance

a sense that it happened at all back

then and iconography its translation

into images icons narratives

representations gossip representation

always selectively constructs the

insertion of feminism to cultural memory

or Remembrance in ways that continuously

Mark the traumatic nature of feminism to

the culture in which it happens and to

those who call themselves feminists and

to women in general

it is an undigestible force a shocking

force a force for profound change that

takes a de makes a demand of those who

engage with it and its Force passes

through stages of adjustment sometimes

mainstreaming sometimes not without ever

exhausting what I call its everpresent

virtuality so rather than the tired and

debilitating and endlessly repeated

attempts to wash feminism away as a

series of ways aves or to trap it in the

endless stories of angry daughters

protesting against overpowering

generational

mothers an idea actually initially put

forward by Rebecca Walker in writing of

her relationship to her mother Alice

Walker and her

generation I think we should understand

feminism as a project destined to divide

the field of which it is in

effect what does that

mean let me introduce the political

theory of agonism

which

suggests that the struggle for democracy

is constantly fissured by the emergence

of new conflicts that themselves become

possible and creatively so as a result

of the preceding moves without the very

concept of women in the world unite as a

performative invocation of an entirely

new political subjectivity the nature of

the specific divisions between women as

women might have remained foreclosed

behind the political vocabularies that

were indifferent to gender or

sexuality and the gendered specif

specificities of classed and colonized

as well as racialized violence so had we

not first called for this notion of

woman the issues which we now confront

which see that this is a Fed field would

not themselves even have risen to the

level of

acknowledgement agonism posits conflict

as a dynamic and inevitable dimension of

the continuous work for democracy so

instead of plotting generations and

waves we might better read feminist work

as creative and radical precisely in so

far as it continuously throws up

conflicts that become visible precisely

because of working through another one

instead of complaining that euroamerican

women's movement was too white and

middle class or too straight which it

was and actually was not because there

were always women of every uh and class

and sexuality involved so instead of

that and instead of the notion that a

new generation arose to correct the

mistakes of the first generation we

perhaps could understand that um the uh

feminism appeared the agonism of class

sexualities racialized and geopolitical

difference are the Dynamics that became

articulable and necessary on the ground

indifferently opened up by the conflict

that first appeared will be seemingly

undifferentiated called for a movement

in the name of women so what I take from

this is a radical understanding of how

to envisage the nature of the

transformative work for change agitated

by the ever emerging agitating wrongs

and demonstrating disagreements that

generates Politics as new forms and new

modes of

subjectivization this abolishes the idea

that we can divide the political from

the aesthetic the active from the

reflective the social from the

subjective in a vocabulary I borrow from

Jack ra ronier we can understand the

process of democracy is an act of

political

subjectivization that disturbs the

police order by polemically calling into

question the aesthetic coordinates of

perception thought and action this is

how of course art politics sex become

part of

feminism this is not consensual it is a

condition I quote of contention that

implements various forms of dissensus

and dissensus is aisia in the kind of

attempt to moderate to organize social

conflict in a kind of legislative way

and what we have to do instead is

confront I quote the established

framework of perception thought and

action with the inadmissible with a

political subject with a changed form of

subjectivity that resists and also

disturbs and therefore also is a subject

of

Desire now in struggling therefore to

refuse the negative force of famili or

generational thinking and to Foster this

political Dynamic of transgenerational

transmission in Hannah Ain sense of

sharing a love of a common world with a

belief in the inevitable newness of the

natality the novelty of human beings

ever creative as they come forward to

change the world how can we understand

the role of feminist thinking in forging

a democratic

subjectivity so by way of a slightly

long conclusion I want to introduce

Susan Stuart Steinberg's fascinating

reading of the political thought in

psychoanalysis in her reading of Anna

Freud the daughter of a famous father

whose task it was to institutionalize

her father's intellectual Legacy not as

freudianism but as

psychoanalysis Anna Freud was not a

mother she lived a long life in a

long-term relationship with another

woman they both dedicated themselves to

the repair of children whose World

psyches were damaged by political F

Violence by War trauma by separation and

bereavement and Anna Freud's achievement

is defined by Susan Stewart as a

politics sorry as imp

Fidelity to understand this we need an

artwork and a digression into the

politics of fidelity itself writing of

the installation Circa 1968 by in 190 to

2004 by Mary Kelly in which she reworked

an iconic image of 196 68 in the felt

residue from a domestic tumble dryer and

was animated by a pulse of light noise

Rosalyn Deutch

writes in her theater of not forgetting

a reference to the key idea of fidelity

Kelly used a material that serves the

philosopher Alan Badu as a metaphor for

the event light the event says Badu is

like a flashing supplement that happens

to a situation it burs burs forth as if

into flame and gives off light which

disappears leaving a trace in the

situation a kind of after image that

refers back to the vanished event and

guides the subject's

Fidelity so the flash of the event

leaves to a trace that creates an after

image that guides she or he who would

remain faithful to an event an event

that only becomes itself in those

persistent acts of fidelity and she who

is faithful to that that event becomes

through the continuous work with the

event what she to make she becomes what

she becomes and the event itself becomes

what it becomes so far from feminism

being something in the past it is what

we perpetually make it in a f Fidelity

to an event of its traumatic shock

another quotation both Fidelity to the

event and left Melancholy remember the

past and write history but unlike

triumphalist historical narratives in

which emancipation leads to resolution

Kelly's history is written in the tense

of the future anterior an order of time

in which reimagining never ends

theorizing the future anterior as the

time of personal history laon once wrote

what is realized in my history is not

the past definite of what was since it

is no more and even the present perfect

of what has been in what I am but the

future interior of what I shall have

been for what I am in the process of

becoming for Freud the significance of

formative infancy lies in the

unconscious archiving and its potential

for traumatic return traumatic return

sorry flashing up in secondary instances

which become the only actualized and

always the belated sites of formative

events that when they happen happen too

early to be understood and leave

effective after images which then incite

Perpetual Fidelity far from endlessly

locating the present in causes locked in

the past the force of the past enters

into the present which becomes the

moment of the past in its realization

linking instances in conjunctions that

are potentially regressive or

potentially and unpredictably

transformative so finally deuts says

this laon's description of personal

history recalls Walter benin's

philosophy of political history

the historian as Benjamin F famously

wrote does not reconstruct the past as

it really was but bringing the past and

present into a constellation seizes hold

of memory as it flashes up at a moment

of danger Kelly thus mixes Badu and

Benjamin two philosophers of The Flash

and of revolutionary not forgetting for

love songs the work you see there the

woman's Liberation cannot be

distinguished from the Transformations

it under goes in the hands of a new

generation and perhaps most importantly

in both Generations

fantasies now I find this formulation

very helpful those who claim to know

have known the past cannot claim its

Truth for themselves its being is in the

hands who of those who make something of

it afterward Le in a movement of

deferral and Fidelity yet there is a

traffic between different spots in time

a mingling of fantasies projective and

retrospective far from instituting the

fam familiar model of generations that

supersede each other we need to have a

historical understanding of colliding

temporalities and co- inhabited

fantasies that are both alive at the

same time although starting from

different experiences and places the

past is in part framed by fantasies of

the past to which that gives rise these

fantasies are intergenerational edle

inevitably we're formed in that but they

can become politically

transgenerational in the manner that har

Hannah Arin proposed they may be in

Conflict but they are always doubled

themselves for each generation is always

fantasizing about another's missing

past so let me now turn finally to Anna

Freud and impire Fidelity to

close Anna Freud talks about the problem

of envy to get us closer to impire

Fidelity and politics two different

kinds of affects envy and anxiety

underpin the respective formations of

femininity and masculinity according to

Anna's father Freud Sigman Freud the

affect of Envy infamously associated

with the hated concept of penis envy the

affect of Envy which is the fate of

femininity unhappy role in the

patriarchal symbolic can however I would

contest be productive and

creative Envy enables the feminine

subject or any other a pressed subject

to resist the status quo to be

perpetually unhappy with it to want to

be what she is told she is not and to

use the potentialities of cross

identification to have or even be what

she

wants a certain kind of psychic

flexibility a kind of transgendered

imagination becomes possible amongst the

envious when they turn it to political

ends on the other hand I'm afraid to say

the typical masculine subject is Frozen

by anxiety because if he becomes other

than he imagines himself to be he might

be subjected to loss or Worse mutilation

he would become something less woman

Freud remarks however that this limits

the masculine subject in that adopting

I'm quot in a feminine attitude in men

is actually an extremely valuable thing

for many

situations now classical political

Theory considers Politics as a place

free from affect for affect is

considered in itself feminine and placed

apart from the

political what steuart Steinberg will

argue is that which is exiled to the

feminine this affect and particularly

the affect of Envy is paradoxically the

Bas basis for the condition of modern

democratic

subjectivity quote Freud's great

contribution to political theory is to

have reintroduced affect into the

mechanisms of power not simply as that

which must be contained but as the site

where social and political relations

originate Freud posits of the origins of

democratic subth as opposed to

hierarchical subjecthood that's to say

hierarchical would be parents and

children always seeking as opposed to

the Democratic subject Hood which is

everybody's in the nursery together so

Freud posits of the origins of

democratic subject which is modern

subject one effect that he views as

crucial for the social contract Envy

Envy lies at the root of both Freud's

theory of democracy and his theory of

gender construction for Envy in gender's

political subjectivity through a series

of cross

identifications thus in Freudian fantasy

of the social contract the male

Democratic subject I will argue is a

woman who acts like a man the

feminist into this complex argument

comes Anna Freud's own contribution and

her position is one who comes after the

founding gestures of her father who

created new ways of thinking

subjectivity and the political yet she

had to negotiate effectively and

intellectually some of the

contradictions and anxieties that arise

from The Challenge of Fidel ity she had

to secure the spirit of the creative

initiating radical gesture when it

became

institutionalized not merely as her

father's work but as psychoanalysis as a

historic event in the world I'm

shadowing this historical case of the

issues a the of politics affect

institutionalization and continuation

with the as yet unthought memory or

Unwritten histories of feminism in which

I find myself like glin complexly placed

as a woman thinker of a certain age and

a certain historical

formation has feminism be in been

institutionalized th by those who behave

merely as its rebellious daughters and

what is the fate of those who are

imagined now as troubling mothers rather

than merely older thinkers why do we

write out stories in disabling

displacement rather than creative

agonism how might we imagine ways of

relating laterally and generationally

Beyond the idolized and heterosexual

family Paradigm that at once rehearses

the heteronormative modeling modeling of

sexual difference but also theoretically

and psych psychically denies any poit

politicizing or creative space either to

the maternal or to the filial feminine

is all affect edle in the last instance

or are there other resources in psychic

life which we could mobilize for a

politics that's not modeled on the edle

prefigurations of Parental Authority and

catastrophically constituted sexual

difference I other ways to think women's

political

subjectivity that involve that involves

willful

transgendering as opposed to negative or

positive idealization of an imagined

good

mother let us turn to one final return

to Anna

Freud one way into the Nexus of politics

sexual difference in affect is through

Freud's relation to his daughter Anna

Freud who became her father mother's

contested successor did so by becoming

the carrier of a node of problems and

anxieties within the psychoanalytical

movement itself gender and feminine

sexuality the transformation of the

envious child into a democratic subject

but above all the handing down of

authority and knowledge from one

generation to to the next in some ways

we might hear the extraordinary

parallels between the not of tensions

within the psychoanalytical movement and

the KN of tensions within the feminist

movement which with psychoanalysis I

would position as the twin hence related

and perhaps Waring traumatic events of

massive political significance to The

Human Condition that took place in the

20th century both feminism and

psychoanalysis were ruptured and

reshaped by the 20th Century's major

events the enactments of genocidal

racism the invention of a fundamentally

dehumanizing political uh anti-politics

of

totalitarianism and the long and AG

ganizing struggle against colonialism

that produces decolonization and the

postcolonial what is feminism's relation

to debt to forgotten or forgotten

obligation to the memory and Trauma of

colonialism the concentration and the

genocidal was feminism an after effect

effect or after effect of this potential

destruction of humanity that must now

engage in impire Fidelity to its own

evolving projects with an an open and

critical mind towards its endless

virtuality yes I've got one sentence

left that remakes the legacies of the

imperfect but sharable past a basis for

continuous work in a direction that

these of these flawed but create that

these flawed but creative others began

to plot out hence I think we come

together to think once again about art

politics sex and feminism but these are

the questions of life and human life and

Democratic life that feminism is still

in the process of posing not yet with

answers but with your help and

continuation there may be some thank

[Applause]

you let just get rid of this they thanks

for all those wise words Gisela and uh

it's lovely to be here in the Red Room

the star our chamber at the Tate so

thanks to the talks organizers and to

Vero for organizing this and

republishing my book so to feminism and

the politics of pleasure which I talk

about in straight sex following on from

Griselda agonism challenge

contention start talking about sex today

and soon soon enough trouble looms and

looms large unless we stick to jokes or

gender cliche agreement is usually hard

to find and not just amongst

feminists though we certainly face very

special problems trying to tie the

protein complexity and intangible nature

of intimacy and desire to any sort of

feminist sexual politics this was never

just a mother daughter Affair though

it's often enough presented itself as

that we challenged and we fought with

each other all the time from day one

as straight lesbian black Jewish and any

number of other identities um came to

the for particularly with the success of

women's Liberation although it wasn't in

fact feminists but willham Reich who

first talked about sexual politics back

in the

1930s criticizing the repressiveness of

of Bourgeois sexual morality which

doubled a sexual

hypocrisy he talked about that while

watching the rise of fascism in Europe

and seeing he thought some ties between

the two his sex pole papers aimed to

free sexuality from the constraints of

religious moralism and compulsive

patriarchal monogamy while seeing this

as only achievable after the end of

capitalist exploitation with the coming

of

socialism times change and then again as

giselda said its traumas return turn for

certain massive sexual hypocrisy and

double standards if not fortunately then

too much Rising fascism helped

inaugurate women's Liberation at the

close of the

1960s at long last talk of sexual

Liberation not punitive moralism was

bubbling up everywhere especially around

women young women very young women often

suddenly apparently free to FL

our sexuality as never before though in

a rather peculiarly childlike and

frivolous way it

seemed I arrived in London in 1970 when

the optimistic hedonistic Oho resolutely

youthful oriented culture of swinging

London was still evident everywhere that

teenager Twiggy right well Twiggy there

she was looking just like a child in

adult drag displayed mouth open sucking

her thumb or riding her baby scooter had

been lead she'd been the leading fashion

icon for the previous four years in the

1960s though she was now retiring having

reached the grand old age of 20 thus if

to be young then was very Heaven it had

many pitfalls for women youth being so

very fleeting and women above all girls

needing to stay Forever Young keep young

and beautiful as Eddie Canto once cred

we'd soon know how much they meant it

for sure many of us young women then

were eager to partake of the new sexual

Freedom that came along with the

consumer oriented swinging 60s a time of

Full Employment increased wages imagine

all that and by the close of the decade

for some of us youthful Rebellion we

took to the streets or were more more

active between the sheets and were more

active Between the Sheets liberated or

partly so by the marketing of the oral

contraceptives pill having sex and

flating it rather than guiltily hiding

it was the single main way some young

women in the 1960s felt we were

rebelling against parental and middle

class Norms thus fashion entrepreneur

Mary Quant for instance proclaimed in

1969 making lots of money as she was now

that there is the pill women are the sex

in charge she's standing there defiantly

with her legs apart I'm very sexy she's

saying I feel provocative but you're

going to have a job to get me you've got

to be jolly marvelous to attract me of

course she had to be a teenager well I

think Quant was wrong about most women's

sexual confidence back then including

and perhaps especially teenagers

whatever our youth bber miniskirts or

parted legs for despite all the

flaunting of young women's sexuality the

1960s remained overall a

quintessentially male decade once out of

our teens it was the association of

woman with mother and domesticated

Conformity which the radical world I

entered as a young woman abhor I was

already 20 when I arrived here in London

the so-called angry young men the 60s

celebrated were all tough immoral

anarchic male Heroes like those in Alan

sililo Saturday night Sunday morning or

crazy Outsiders as in the film Morgan or

else ethereal love objects like Dylan's

Sade eyed ladies waiting at home for Bob

to return Street Fighting Man

workingclass Heroes were battling women

and any constraints of domestic IC

responsibility along with those other

authorities moreover those of us who

were part of the radical left in student

movements civil rights and anti-vietnam

activities especially at the end of the

1960s confronted an even more explicit

sexism in the underground press with its

Pinups and psychedelic porn which was

can be seen especially in the May 68

graffiti some of it now um

well you can see this one perhaps uh it

was something put out in May 68 um where

women very much Remain the prey of those

male sexual radicals some comrades from

the occupation are going to come and

[ __ ] me violently judging by their

practice that is the violent [ __ ]

presumably their theories must be truly

radical well this was the sort of

atmosphere then which would produce

women's Liberation um Sheila robotm

someone else whose work is um being

published in the radical thinkers series

by um Verso was the only woman on black

dwarf then and she summed up much of the

mood oh yes we've got it much of the

mood of the moment when um she wrote in

the essay in 1969 which was the first

women's issue which black dwarf had

contained she wasn't allowed to edit it

being a woman but um she was allowed to

write a lot for it and um for once she

said the predictions of uh this magazine

came true 1969 really was the year of

the radical woman and as she wrote there

men you have nothing to lose men have

nothing to lose but their chains I won't

read it all out but she's saying you'll

no longer have to um uh creep around

sniggering at women but you'll be able

to have more open and loving and and

free relationships with women that I'm

saying was the mood that was present in

that first surge of women's Liberation

at the close of the 1960s and the first

women's groups be began meeting just

then in Britain in

1969 and women were very much wanting to

talk about sexuality but in all the ways

missing from what was present in the

underground pre underground press what

was there in men's sniggering talk what

they wanted to talk about was the pain

and anxiety still there over our

fertility and right to choose to have or

not to have children in our dislikes of

the pinup saturating the alternative

press in men's fears of women's growing

Independence and particularly our sexual

autonomy and of course in problems

around child care this was the mood that

produced the first commercially

successful British feminist magazine

spare rib in

1972 it was both a product of the

counterculture against as well as a

reaction against it as Marsha r one of

its first editors uh would later

write so as I concluded describing this

moment at the close of the 60s um in my

um opening chapter in straight sex I say

saying yes to sex was still seen as a

part of our Liberation but it had to be

a feminist or liberated type of

sexuality with or without a man thus

women of my generation moved on from

seeing sex as Liberation to seeking

liberated sex so then I had some

pictures of us what all right there that

was the first women's Liberation March I

attended okay

liberated sex there's the difficulty how

on Earth really were we going to talk

about that were we going to find

that it seemed to grow harder not easier

as the years passed women's Liberation

began conf

enough think clitorus was how the

well-known American feminist Alex Kate

Schulman summed up feminist thinking on

sexuality in

1971 it's again and I noted in my second

chapter the liberated orgasm in her

popular book burning questions of 1978

Shan had one young feminist mentioned

the three

non-negotiable conditions for good sex

plenty of dope three hours minimum and

Cony

Lingus so that was her notion of

liberated sex moreover despite the

fearful impediment she herself has faced

Schuman remained largely optimistic and

po positive about her loving

relationships with men ever since

despite her late husband um um getting

early onset dementia and this even

though she would later right of

attending a feminist meeting at the

close of the

1970s where all agreed that sex had

changed for them often for the better

more orgasms for instance um but

nevertheless yes they were often unhappy

in

love so feminists 40 years ago were also

especially skeptical about the idea of

True

Romance seeing it as wedded literally to

men's power in those patriarchal nuclear

families we've been trying to escape

from many of us were searching for

Alternatives however for many feminists

that first flush of feminist confidence

in building a new world closer to our

heart's desire whether in the office the

kitchen or the bedroom was stifled by

many things but especially by Rising

awareness of the prevalence of men's

violence against and sexual Co coercion

of women it was also weakened when we

observed the abiding resilience of the

fellow Centric or male cented nature of

almost all our images and iconography of

sex even once we'd got rid of the

blatant Pinups in left

Publications and it was hard to think

outside of these traditional framings

however much we urgently tried to

rethink and refashion them and introduce

new words and then again any simple

feminist search for Independence parity

and control in our relationships with

men came up against something else which

is the inescapable contrarian of sexual

passion like it or not and we didn't

some level of confusion and contention

was quite inevitable if straight women

were to Wade our way through the Sea of

sexual contradictions we seem to face it

would lead at least some feminists

especially here in the UK to turn to

psychoanalysis in the footsteps of

Juliet Mitchell as we began to explore

sexuality

as a crucible of contradictions and

misunderstandings especially between men

and women I joined that Trend Juliet

Mitchell whose first feminist text is

also being reissued in this series this

Verso series expressed some of this when

she was interviewed by spare rib in the

early 1980s discussing the study group

she attended addressing sexuality and

sexual difference a sort of of panic

starts in the mind she said we found

when we go to talk about it we just

don't know what sexuality is

anymore how difficult is this how

difficult it is if we're not sure

anymore quite how to talk about

sexuality and our own desires When The

World At Large likes to pretend it knows

all too much about what sex is who

should practice it and

how this is all the more crudely evident

in the ever expanding sexual Marketplace

in the commodification of sexuality and

bodies and media Fashions and fix and

fixations targeting precisely sexual

fears and

longings moreover things didn't get

easier for us as the conflicts within

feminism heightened during the so-called

Sex Wars of the

1980s great thank you leading feminist

figures fought over the very meaning of

feminism some wanting to place

heterosexuality at the core of feminist

politics reducing men's power overall to

male sexuality and then reducing male

sexuality to violence thus Katherine

McKinnon like her fellow American

anti-pornography campaigner Andrea Doran

insisted that there was no way even to

imagine

any passionate Harmony between women and

men in the current terms of

intimacy what looks like love and

romance in the liberal view Katherine

McKinnon wrote looks a lot like hatred

and torture in the feminist

view given the still prevailing

iconography of straight sex some found

their views

persuasive and although proposed by a

minority of revolutionary feminists

Rouse over the Primacy to be given given

to men's violence against women as the

not a but the overriding cause of

women's subordination was what dealt the

death nail to any future annual

Gatherings of women's Liberation in

leads in

1977 giving up [ __ ] for a woman is

about taking your politics seriously

they

argued many of us disagreed but we did

stop talking about sexual pleasure if we

were straight women

and it's certainly true that obler

climate was beginning to undermine all

forms of radical politics in the 1980s

under Margaret Thatcher both feminism

and the left there were also these were

also the years when HIV and AIDS began

to return fear and danger to sexual

Arenas especially for gay men and also

when the serial sex murder murderer

Peter suck Cliffe was roaming the

streets in and around Leeds for over a

decade he murdered women on the streets

and the police were completely unable to

find him despite many people pointing

directly to him but he didn't fit the

police's police's notion of who was a

murderer because he was a married man

and looked rather like them thus as the

sex Wars raged during the

1980s it seemed um too dangerous even to

discuss the ways in which sexuality

itself both women's and men's were often

steeped in fantasies involving the

eroticization of power and submission

instead and importantly feminist

research focused on issues of safety

especially for young women which I um

report in that feminist research on

sexuality that comes from a book edited

by um Janet Holland called the man in

the head saying that young women don't

easily have a language around to talk

about sex that helps them in their

relationships with men as well book

after book was published on the cultural

scaffolding of rape the extent of rape

and the way in which coerciveness seems

to be tied in some way to normative

Notions of masculinity assertiveness men

being um being forced by their uh huge

sexual desires into um um needing to

assert themselves in um sexual relations

with with

women meanwhile though while this very

negative um Trend what or pesimistic

trend on uh paying attention to rape and

violence and the difficulties of

transforming the language of sexuality

seem to be totally surrounding the

heterosexual world talk of desire and

pleasure

reappeared but it reappeared somewhere

else with the

renew renewed surge of confidence in

defiant dissident sexuality in gay and

lesbian writing from the

1990s the Vigor and joy so I could have

another um slide now the Vigor and joys

of queer Theory raced in onto academic

platforms throughout the 19

90s aligned at least for a while with

the noisy protests of act up and other

activist campaigns demanding government

action around HIV and AIDS I can

remember when the only big

demonstrations we went on in the 1990s

seemed to be all around and importantly

around HIV and AIDS and all the writing

on sex was being written in particular

by gay men and also by some so-called

sex positive lesbians this time citing

the words of Judith Butler Eve Sedrick

Leo bani and others queer Scholars and

activists could draw upon the lifelong

legacies of Freud's polymorphously

bisexual infant ignoring all the ways or

rejecting rather all the ways in which

psychoanalysis had been used normatively

um by certain psychoanalytic

writers and this use of Freud was added

to Michelle fuko's questioning of there

being any stable or unitary notion of

sexuality at all whatever our gender or

sexual

orientation pleasure has no passport no

identity card Fuko said hoping to detach

the body and its Pleasures from our

understandings of gender and anatomical

difference um that was um slide 13 I

don't know if that was um oh yes we're

not quite up to that yet but we're

getting close to it it's drawing upon

both was drawing upon both

psychoanalytic theory and critical

theory that I dared in straight sex to

return again to all those questions we

had raised in the first passionate years

of women's Liberation to Hope again to

develop a positive sexual politics that

could include women all women St and

lesbian as well as gay men and any other

forms of sexual

dissidence given all we know about the

easily shaken yet solid P centrism of

the symbolic order all we know about the

androcentrism of discourse around

sexuality and

subjectivity given what we had learned

about the problematic ways of men

determined to Shore up their

entitlements to the insecure mantle of

masculinity how was it going to be

possible I ask in straight sex to

develop loving pleasurable and

responsible sexual relationships um

around heterosexuality or indeed any

form of

sexuality well one begins of course by

questioning not by affirming as I saw

McKinnon and dwen and certain um radical

feminists as doing by questioning rather

than affirming all the traditional

assumptions around gender and around the

Absurd active passive divide that

constructs what Judith Butler called the

heterosexual

Matrix it is desire

itself it is desire itself which

threatens um to render any one of us

helpless whether man or woman um however

fragile or secure our hold on power

elsewhere and whatever our gender or

sexual

orientation indeed what happens in

actual consensual sex I suggest in

straight sex looking at fiction looking

at poetry looking indeed at at at

clinical accounts of just all that we

can find about the actual nature of

sexual interactions what we find is that

they don't collapse down into that

binary of male female active passive

everything fitting together in that

normative

way in love relations in sexual

relationships of any uh long imp

passionate sexual relationships we are

all vulnerable as Judith Butler said

says in undoing gender addressing the

Perils of Desire yes we're up to the

Perils of Desire let's face it we're all

undone by each

other and if we're not we're missing

something if we're not it's not such an

exciting and passionate thing after all

if we don't feel endangered by the

potential loss of um the person we

desire if this seems so clearly the case

with grief it is only because it was

already the case with desire okay I am

finishing in two minutes in an earlier

brief meditation on the risks of Love

She suggests love is not a state a

feeling a

disposition but an exchange uneven

fraught with history with ghosts with

longings that are more or less legible

to those who try to see one another with

their own faulty vision and that's what

I feel I pick up when I read anything

that actually turns me on around desire

or sexuality for sure we all need to

face up to the strange unruliness of

Desire surely for instance it's not only

sex workers who know that that what men

want as often as not is to be sexually

passive of course what men do not want

is for women and even less for other men

to know this that's the sort of thing I

write a lot about in straight sex

knowing this however is one thing and

confronting violence in the World At

Large a significant part of it but only

a part of it men's abuse and sexual

coercion of women is another thing I

don't ever want to ignore the latter

just as like Joan Nestle I don't ever

want want to forget the former it is

possible to play with power in fantasy

in erotic

relationships although that was once uh

forbidden to us it is possible um and

that does not need to interfere with our

ways of fighting the systemic violence

in human institutions and Human

Relationships so evident everywhere near

and

far indeed the letter is such hard work

sometimes we need some escape from it in

perhaps our incorrect uh

fantasies and if we don't have some idea

of the difference between the psychic

life of desire and the routine endemic

social violence all around us will not

really know much about either about

either sexuality or about violence

that's what I point out in straight sex

thank

[Applause]

you um a couple of things hi I'm Sonia

by the way um many apologies for running

late not being able to introduce

properly

um so when I was when I was asked to um

whether I might consider chairing this

session um it was one of three or four

requests that I was getting in the same

week about feminism about desire um

about radical thinking and it made me

wonder what's going

on why now what what is it that why why

is this question being kind of thought

through now

um so I wanted to start to for us to

kind of think about that and then the

other thing that um occurred to me when

specifically with with with this with

this talk um uh and discussion a

question of heterosexual sex and I

frowned and thought Oh

no why would we be doing

that um and I it set up all sorts of

questions for me thinking about how the

debates why why is it so difficult to

talk about heterosexual sex as a

feminist um and I I I think we should

really maybe talk about some of those

things

um

history with both of with both of your

talks the question of History looms very

large and I was very taken Gisela with

this question about Fidelity and loyalty

and faithfulness to the Past in some way

and wonder what does that mean for us

now you know you talk about almost

almost like the past as an archive in

which we can project into the future and

I kind of wonder what what future you

you you can see

there is that a good start do you think

you start I start oh why now you know

there's been

a really interesting Resurgence of

feminism for about 10 years for instance

in London in 2004 so exactly 10 years

the radical feem the feminists in London

the feminists in London started to meet

and why I made that slip of radical

feminism actually was because Finn McKai

who's just written a book on radical

feminism was a key voice in that and a

key mover and Shaker in getting that

going and the main thing she wanted to

revive and did revive successfully and

importantly was um the Take Back the

Night marches and that had been very

controversial within um uh late 70s '

80s feminism for many different reasons

but you know what we have seen is a huge

I don't know if it's an upur an upsurge

but what we see is more violence

everywhere with more war um more ethnic

conflict and and inevitably accompanying

that uh more violence against women more

Violence by men against men obviously as

well but more violence against women so

you know we've all become aware once

more if we ever forgot of the extent of

rape and sexual violence and uh so I

think that's one reason to be asking all

these questions and also one reason I

hope um that as I ended we're still

going to be able to try and separate

talk about without desire and the

possibility for loving relations between

people of whatever nature from what we

need to confront which is violence on

our doorstep and further a field so I I

think that um the issue is very much

there in the air and so are all the old

conflicts around the issue which is why

for me we need to talk about straight

sex still and

importantly I'd like to take that up but

in a slightly different direction I

agree with a lot of what what Lynn is

saying and I think it's a absolutely

spot-on question my sense of it and why

I was s of formulating it in the way

that I was formulating it

is sort of two sides of it one is that

it's as if it's not that people are

going back to feminism but in some sense

it becomes a different kind of resource

because I think what women of the

generation of the time today are meeting

is a different configuration of some of

those similar issues so it's not a

continuity there's something else um and

I find the conversations that I have

particularly with young artists and

Young art historians and students sort

of trying to thinking about it at the

form of Education that I encounter which

is that we we kind of Dodge around

things because I'm sort of aware that

the nature of the sexuality the nature

of the bodies the predominant

hairlessness of women you know the whole

uh these kind of shifts um you know

difficult to have that conversation in

one sense you know could just tell me

what's going on here but it does seem to

me that the questions are um a new

configuration of issues around desire

agency safety and the question of men

and women um that draw back to the

archive is what you're sort of

suggesting does this offer us something

and yet the same time I think the

situation is extremely different I think

the issue of the Contemporary media I

think the issue precisely because of

media and pornography that the kinds of

issues against which we protest when you

show the images were

mild right I mean I think in sense some

of the things obviously were more than

that but I mean

certainly you didn't have the level of a

pornographic representation of sexuality

as normal right you you would go and

hunt it out you might you know by some

copies of Penthouse and sort of show

pictures to your students Etc but that

was about as far as not until Andrea

walked ding you know began to publish

some of the you know still relatively M

hardcore

hardcore um porn and that you know issue

I can't read her because she seems so

into it or like well exactly but that's

so that's my feeling which is why now I

think it's not it's come back but I

think a reconfiguration of some of the

challenges are faced

and this is why I'm so stressing how

would you build the conversation between

the historical moment that led to one

articulation of the debate about women

safety and sexuality and

now so I actually I kept writing the

word safe and what what is safe and what

is

unsafe um what is it what is it that we

don't feel we're able to say or able to

do or able to visualize I one of the

things I was really very curious about

is what kinds of imagery you would both

use for your talks and I wonder to what

extent um the question of desire and

visuality for

women is a topic now is a dis is a point

of discussion now in a way that I'm

thinking back to the 80s where there was

a lot of refusal it's like you you're

either you're either in one camp or

you're in another Camp someone like dwar

in for instance um and what is it

possible to visualize now is what I I

was kind of what's safe and what's

unsafe now and I'm talking about beyond

the 9s moment of the bad girl you know

we saw a lot of exhibitions in the '90s

of bad girls and it's like well actually

is is there no other space But the good

and the bad or the safe and the unsafe I

think it comes to um I I think it's a

very good question and you know there is

one line that women particularly young

women are worse s today because it's

thought there's more sexism in the media

um women's bodies are sexualized even

younger and I've often found when

talking to audiences particularly older

women raise this a lot not so much young

women actually unless they're the

feminists I recognize but older women

rais this about you know how actually

usually criticizing young women you know

how they're all displaying their bodies

and wearing high heels and you know

exposing all their flesh and uh

so I have thought very much about the

question where the young women are

actually worse off today and I

absolutely don't think they are first of

all because we have such a language of

safe and responsible sexuality that came

out of the 1980s and 1990s and

discussions around um HIV and AIDS

because surely in sex education today

people are talking about safe

responsible sexual engagement at least I

hope they are not in the US where they

deny uh won't allow any sex education

but in our schools I hope and I think

because sometimes I'm asked along there

there is more talk about that and

so you know that you can't generalize at

all about what the situation would be

for young women if we're talking about

young women but I do um you're not just

talking about young women I'm talking

about now so that's all of us that are

in I think we have a larger language net

to draw upon in trying to discuss it

more openly that's the main thing I'd

say although of course everyday routine

sexism is everywhere but we have these

words we know what sexism is we can at

least discuss

it but I think I think your question

Sonia is really interesting about

Absolut the image and the thing is I

think this for me is there's a

difference between what is what we're

trying to talk about in terms of sex

sexualization when we talk about um

girls and young women and you know the

whole kind of media over sexualizing but

we we're not specifying what concept of

sexuality that represents compared to

what it seems to me the feminist

discourse was actually to say what is it

what would happen if we actually tried

to rethink sexuality from a point of

view in which is not kind of compulsory

heterosexuality for the reproduction of

species you know we've got the wonderful

article by Gail Rubin which you know

argues that the actual repression of

women's sexuality is Central to

constructing the notion of men and women

and the sort of you know the family is

the central prise because you have to

effectively take the sexual agency away

from one part of the sort of sexualized

human condition and say you don't have

the right to choose your part partners

and so so one sense if you go back to

your things the historic trauma of of

the women's movement made possible

because of the contraceptive pill was to

say okay what is women's sexual agency

outside of the notion of the vamp who

always gets killed off or disfigured or

has to be you know married off you know

movies how many movies do you watch you

does an attempted it and then you're

either dead or married as a solution to

the the thing so what is it and of

course we haven't really thought about

this question about you know uh the

whole kind of related to the question of

uh people claiming right to sexual

agency outside of the framework of being

sexualized I.E you know disabled people

who are rep not represented in the

classic Concepts or older people or you

know all sorts of elements of that so it

seems to me that we actually haven't got

very far with a certain thing we've been

sort of brought back and trapped

in a certain kind of image and I think

your your point about how what would be

the images of it so I mean there's a

certain amount of debate in kind of

feminist art and film Theory which would

be something like you know that actually

this um you know lifting your skirts and

saying you know I'm sexual because I'm

showing you my body is actually not a

signifier of of you know women's

sexuality that it might be displaced

into um Rhythm and time and duration and

different ways of signifying it and

that's a certain amount of artistic

exploration

around how you would convey an you know

kind of a feminine

erotics that isn't then either straight

or or queer but is what is it to be a

sexual

agent rather than to be caught in saying

I'm sexually attracted to X or I do y

you know what what is a sexual being in

in in the feminine I and I think that's

still an

open question can I make one small point

though well When We Were Young neither

feminists nor anyone else Ever Raised

the question of sexuality in relation to

disability or what we now call slow

Learners we know what they used to call

them or um or older women we just didn't

we assume that it disappeared you know

and that is being raised you know by

artists in films in writing like my last

book um uh out of time and so again you

I'd say we have more language to discuss

it we have more images to look at even

though of course you know we've got

everywhere to go we've got so far to go

but I I see starts that Beginnings that

make me feel more optimistic that we can

continue the

discussion that's still it's always just

beginning as I say you know where sex is

there trouble looms and and so we just

have to keep working at it I think and

not close it down that's

all I think that might be a good moment

in which to kind of open up the

discussion and see oh straight away can

we get

a

microphone here in the one two three

four hi um thanks for the really

interesting provocations um one thing

that I'm really fascinated by as well is

this um notion of the trans

transgenerational conversations and also

um the ways in which these kinds of

discourses are rearticulated over time

and one thing that I've I've not yet

quite um found out for myself is why

particularly um feminists emerging in

the

1970s um why for them uh why

psychoanalysis because I think that's

something that's changing over time and

it's not something that um I use for

example and um I think it's it's

something that you see less in in in

women emerging post 70s and 80s

particularly so why

psychoanalysis

you taking it separate questions do you

want to answer that

first um I'm quite happy to answer that

I mean um in in a book I edited called

psychoanalysis psychoanalysis and the

image um transition feminist

perspectives um exactly that question

why and I mean there's there's a range

of answers offered to people right I

mean but this in one sense is as I was

trying to suggest I I twin it with with

feminism and since it's a particular

kind of major event of the 20th century

that asks a certain question it's the

discourse in which you can pose

questions in which the object is

subjectivity fantasy desire right you're

not going to find that in Marx you're

not going to find that in durkheim in a

certain sense that's that's the The

crucial thing um certainly as far as the

question of the visual in the image it's

also one of the most powerful discourses

because it poses the question of why we

look what we look for what is the sort

of the the eroticization of the field of

vision as well as the sort of the

anguish of our sense that we're looking

for something in art so I mean it has a

huge implication for what why we even

look and what we're looking for and what

the image does for us so I mean I think

those are just two simple bases that I I

see is you know impossible to proceed

without but it's not exclusive I think

that you're absolutely right to raise it

as a generational issue actually and

there's so much more to say about uh

transgenerational conversation and it's

so wonderful to see people of different

ages here listening to us old ladies uh

just older thinkers and um what I have a

character category you know when we

wanted to complicate our thinking about

sexuality because in the very beginning

women feminists were still reading

Masters and Johnson and that's where we

got Notions of the liberated orgasm and

you know you just had to as I said have

uh you know basically more foreplay and

so on and more canalingus and everything

would be all right you know you had to

get the techniques right and we knew

that just really wasn't enough we might

be having more sex and even having more

orgasms but we were still unhappy in

love uh and you know before fuku was

around and before we were reading

critical theory we were aware of

psychoanalysis and some of the

complexities that Freud brought in and

in particular I mean Juliet Mitchell

from the 60s you know was absolutely

reading Freud putting it out there her

book psychoanalysis and feminism

published in 1974 you know is

introducing us if we hadn't already been

introduced to Freud some of us like me

had been aware of Reich and so on you

know psychoanalysis was in the air both

to be attacked by feminists uh and also

as a possible resource and that's always

been so actually feminism and Freud have

always been somewhere on each other's

minds you know Juliet Mitchell says when

she went to the states people were

throwing darts at um boards with Freud's

head on them uh but meanwhile you know

other people like her were using Freud

Emma Goldman was the same Emma Goldman

back in the 20s when Freud went to the

US 20s maybe the T 10 sorry um said you

know a genius is giant has come to talk

to us you know whereas others thought

that he was diverting the struggle away

from uh women's needs so women's needs

for emancipation so there was always

that tension now I think you're right

that by the '90s and particularly with

Fuko and qu and understanding about that

a lot of people felt that they could get

enough question

of sexuality and and and its

complexities um and and confusions and

contradictions from Fuko but those of us

who had been uh earlier reading Freud

felt no there's something more around

the affect tied to our thoughts here

that take us back to psychoanalysis but

I think there is a slight generational

you know it's fashions in Academia

fashions in Academia as well and and

critical theory did tend partially to

sweep over uh psycho analysis although

people like Judith Butler particularly

via people like Lech you know not to

mention Gisela and others even I try to

try and bring them together you know try

to bring together critical theory and

psychoanalysis but I'd say that the

fashion did swing more away from

psychoanalysis knowing how normative its

uses have often been at the same time

you know as other people like Jonathan

dollmore unlike alen sinfield thinking

that you know there were uses good uses

you could make of psycho analysis so you

know it's for you all to think about

that

further thank you so much I learned so

much from your

presentations um can you put it close to

your mouth Yes I I don't think I can't

think of um a discourse that would take

us to an understanding of for example

the perverse

enjoyment

foreclosed in the violence that's done

in the name of ideals other than through

a

psychoanalysis for instance you know

that the violence that remains invariant

historically and geographically whether

it's against women or humans against

humans or subjects against subjects is

mostly done in the name of

ideals and the Horizon of that the most

extreme ethical Horizon has to be

thought perhaps in relation to a kind of

perverse unconscious

enjoyment at the same time that one's

apparently following ideals and I can't

see how one can come to an understanding

of what I've just said without

psychoanalysis for instance and I think

that has insisted say for instance in

the work of say slav

isek you know I think that is something

that he's continued to really work

on um that's the one question and then

if I can if you don't mind me sort of

coming in with something else um

recently I went to an extraordinary

debate um where two position papers were

given by the by Katherine Malibu I've

actually we've talked about this in the

last week Alan uh Katherine Malibu

talking from a position of cognitive and

um um cognitive and

neurological epen gen

epigenesis um arguing that the subject

is being profoundly

deconstructed and that psychoanalysis is

completely Obsolete and then

psychoanalysts arguing even those that

acknowledge the importance of the new

work in cognitive and neurological

Sciences acknowledge that really the

unconsciousness is and in a process of a

demise the unconsciousness we know it is

is no longer the same and they're new

bodies and new

symptoms and we have to rethink think

everything in relation to all the work

that's going on with the human posthuman

non-human kind of question in relation

to the anthropos scene and the future so

I just wonder whether you you know this

seems in terms of this transgenerational

conversation this seems to be a point of

a contemporary point that I think is

quite important and I wonder what your

take on this might

be can I can I say something to I

mean when I said you know what is the a

want there was a kind of no reaction in

the audience and I was absolutely

perplexed I thought they're going to get

that you still don't get it do you you

said all looking at me like this as if

I'm talking you know but I mean it's you

know it's the classic frauding question

what what does a woman want what do you

want and the central question that psych

analysis poses is to say wait a minute

you know relating to your question of

ideas what what is driving you okay what

is this other Dimension that's driving

you and whether or not psych analysis is

proven to be um displaceable by some

kind of you know neurological chemical

explanation which I don't think it is

the question is the one we have to ask

because it's the question that

ultimately becomes ethical and political

now Freud was a neuroscientist and he

always assumed because there isn't a God

and there isn't some kind of weird thing

you know

there's a little man in the head sort of

operating the unconscious it's got to be

explicable right it has to be something

that has a material neurological basis

all of what is just going on here but

one of the effects of the neurological

app activity is the nature of the

thought and this possibility of being

divided against yourself and asking

thought now at no level can we get rid

of the question of an unconscious either

individually which because it's the

ethical question what do I want what am

I not seeing what can't I hear what am I

failing in the sort of P projection of

myself not to recognize with with the

other and also in one sense it's the

political unconscious right there's no

evidence that I can see that we cannot

we can do without the notion of being

endlessly

Vigilant about what is really happening

that we are not in control of that is

maintained

you know structures of racism structures

of sexism you structures of VI you know

certain kinds of violence they happen

all the time

structurally and that's one of the the

legacies of the psychon analytical mode

of inquiry so I ask all the

posthumanists and the humanists and the

people who want to kind of dissolve the

subject what do you want why why is this

happening to us now now it may be that

they're really the hottest [ __ ] in town

and I'm just an old you know you know

dinosaur worrying away about things that

belong in the 20th century but the kind

of question that I can pose from that

moment of the 20th century is what are

we rushing headlong into why is academic

life and cultural life so fashion

conscious that we think well this is

over let's have something new we are a

bit humanist now we'll be a bit

posthuman what what's at stake here

right I'm happy with people loving their

dogs

absolutely Keen with species being an

all rest of Etc but in a world in which

we have not been able to secure the

safety you know of the millions of

people on this Earth from physical IM

miseration from psychological IM

miseration from the continuing

obscenity of the state that we live in

in relation to the majority of people on

this planet please could we just hang on

to this question about who is doing what

and why with some terms so I see for me

psych analysis is entirely part of the

problem of the political because we

cannot um you know indulge ourselves in

that um you know pursuit of something

that of pleasure whatever it's such a

which doesn't hold on to this ethical

question

about both what we said the sort of the

violence and that's why I was putting

such a stress on the question of how do

we produce a democratic

subjectivity right we can't get

ourselves to

want to desire the well-being of our

whether it's the dogs or but I'm

particularly interested in the human

beings Etc I do see this whole drive to

somehow make us think about neurological

stuff and dissolve the human ethical

political subject as an extremely

problematic Direction even though the

science may be right and even though it

might be extremely interesting for we

could get insight and Freud would always

be with you let's understand how the

mind works I mean when he wrote The

Theory of sexuality in 1905 he said I

know they'll find something which

explains the the the switch and five

months after he published the theory of

sexuality the first lecture was given

when they identified hormones which are

the

chemical Messengers right he always knew

the science would explain it but not

what it means at the level of

human you know agency subjectivity and

that's I think the still the tension for

me which is again posed deeply by

feminism I don't think we're all

academics in the audience so it might be

nice to hear from some who aren't but I

mean it's absolutely true that as

academics we're always in danger of

being caught in yesterday's Fashions and

um you know hobbling around in the wrong

theoretical attire um what I find

interesting is at present even in

Katherine Malibu and other people the

idea seems to be and was certainly

present in Freud that one day neurology

the brain would have the answers to our

questions I think exactly the opposite I

don't think that psychoanalysis so much

needs to rely upon what's coming out of

Neurology I think that whatever is

coming out of Neurology will remain

absolutely meaningless BL without a

language to talk about affect and

emotion which comes of course not just

from psychoanalysis it only comes from

psychoanalysis in so far as it's there

in the case studies and so on it comes

from literature it comes from you know

how on Earth we can find a language Rich

enough to embrace confusion and

contradiction and so on and so of course

J's writing on the perverse enjoyment of

pleasure and relating it to um um you

know the appalling violence in the world

today is very important but I mean of

course you couldn't get anywhere near

that could you from neurology or

anything like that or brain science you

know you you have to keep enriching your

language in thinking about how to

embrace complexity contradiction

confusion how to assert opposing things

at once and so on that's all I'll say

for

now

I'm aware that it's now 8:00 oh but

we've got one we've got a round up of

questions yes maybe we can have or

comments or comments I have an answer I

want to answer one of the questions you

put but I'll waitting to see if we have

any others do we have any other

questions comments there's one at the

back there oh

great always front back front back is

it racing around hello thank um thank

you very much for the the opportunity to

ask a question or um to actually put

forward a a statement um I heard you the

ladies um earlier on talking about how

the kind of reemergence of uh the

thought around feminism and and art sex

and politics and um Talk a bit more

slowly and loudly I'm finding hard sorry

sorry it's probably also an accent thing

um surely uh one of the one of the kind

of principal reasons why uh there's kind

of reemergence of thought around

feminism kind of um is the is the

internet and the and the access to um

thinking and uh and and and writers out

there I know certainly when I was doing

my art degree many many years ago um I

only really had access to certain

writers and and libraries and and women

who were actually writing about feminism

and sexuality whereas these days um you

only need to go on Twitter and in one

day you can massively educate yourself

on um all of the thinkers that are out

there both currently and in the past um

I just wanted to ask what um your

thoughts were on um kind of

intersectional thinking and um kind of

how that is relates to feminism and

certainly um sex and and politics and

art want me okay um yes you know I'm not

quite as convinced by everybody else

about the power of the internet partly

because we use it too we have all our

blogs and there's loads of feminist

blogs out there of course we're not

mainstream in the same way the media

doesn't take up what we say but we do

use it and I think about the everyday

scorn and jokes and everything about

women from my childhood you know my

father was a doctor and when a woman

gave birth to a girl he'd say better

luck next time he thought that was a

terrific joke and I mean there were

jokes everywhere on you know um jokes

and songs you know I about killing your

wife and then you marry your next one

and long for the old one again I mean

there's you know m ory can be easily

expressed in many forms and so I think

that we can be actually um overwhelmed

by the sexism of the visual and forget

you know the impact of just everyday

hideous misogyny just in jokes and

discussion that was one thing but about

the intersection I was worrying of

course thinking I should talk about race

and class and it's so hard to do that in

relation to sexuality I mean so hard

because it's complicated enough to talk

about it all but to talk about the ways

in which working class bodies black

bodies have always been sexualized in

the most demeaning of ways you know and

to say we can't possibly have an

emancipatory language of sex without

taking on board you know the continuing

effects of racism and the and but the

complexities of racism the way in which

you know the um perverse Jewish body the

swali is different from um the um

primitive manual me menial body which

the um African body was seen as you know

all this has to be tackled um as well as

you know workingclass women as as as um

who had to uh engage in uh

prostitution um maybe some of them chose

to but I would say on the whole they

have to um you know their bodies were

you know they could be basically

murdered with impunity still in the

1980s when Peter Su Cliffe was murdering

women on the stre streets the police

said he's made a mistake you know he's

murdered an innocent woman he didn't

murder a prostitute he murdered a woman

who wasn't a prostitute so you know that

all every possible hierarchy intersects

with the demeaning and degrading

language of sex so that absolutely all

has to be in there can I can I can I

also make a plea then for you know CU

one of the things that I I I I kept

thinking about in both of your talks is

yes we live with the structures of those

things but we also try to

maneuver through

around bypass and for me some of the

some of the radicalism of how you

negotiate those structures we also have

to talk about and and speak of what

strategies might we be employing I think

there wasn't you know from in terms of

my own involvement in in in feminist and

black debates was what other images can

we possibly find what other images

without there being a kind of regime the

problem is we probably won't agree of

course and some people will see this as

an empowering image say of a black woman

or a working class woman other people

say no that's a demeaning image

but that but but that we can fight over

the possibility of what something can be

absolutely yes not just how we live

within a structure but how we move

beyond that structure and I you know and

that's what I would like to make a plea

for here and that's what I feel the

question of the radical and the

political is about trying to find

another route through which to express

something that we don't feel is being

expressed I'd like to underline that

because I I just think I mean the

central point of the first book that

Rosie Parker and I wrote when we tried

to think about which which was to say

artists who are women negotiate their

situation and they produce as much

because of as despite their differential

position so it's not to say that they

were oppressed and now they're free but

everybody negotiates and the negotiation

is the complexity of artists thinking

working with materials working with

situation

and that's not predictable you have to

read each instance and you have to allow

it and I think that's the point when you

were saying what what's my sense of the

future it's that um I'm I'm you know

arguing this notion of and you know not

feminism as a past that's coming back

but that feminism is a virtuality that's

to say some element of what it promises

or potentially we can even imagine gets

realized at certain points out of

certain historical situations and people

do certain things with it and then but

that doesn't exhaust it so it's not to

be confined to what it was it's possibly

that that was just one way that it got

actualized under the pressures of both

as you the 60s and 7 and therefore there

was a kind of debate at that point which

produced this notion of what would be a

good image and a bad image and I know I

participated by that and I'm you know

times um you know not appalled or

ashamed sense but it's typical because

you know when I started writing ather

was nothing you know I was just a

graduate student you know and we just

thought we could say what we liked right

we said we said all sorts of things and

now it says you grisela Pollock said and

I said well you know I was like 23 or 24

and there was nothing you know there

were no references we just made these

you know big statements and then you

come back and you say okay no no it's

not quite right like this it's got to be

more complicated and you know people

bashed us and argued and said you've

missed out things Etc and that's what

I'm trying to get hold of this the

dynamic that comes from a sense that

there's much more to this than we have

encountered but also that where art

comes into it is different from the way

that the sort of political Phil because

there's a negotiation

around between the

imaginable and the D and the doable and

what's denounced but also what's created

and that requ requires acute attention

to what is brought into the world as our

actualizes new

virtualities uh and they're not just

instrumental in that and that's where

the sort of the

shock you know that comes from artists

suddenly making something visible for us

or picking up something so I I do think

the the negotiation and it's

not you know it's not just an either or

this is a good but so what images we

produce and you go back and you keep

rereading them you know and you say oh

my goodness now I see this is an

infinitely more powerful image I was

unable to see you know with that and I

think that's partly this constantly

suggesting that it's it's a future in

the making by a certain Act of fidelity

but also a deep criticality and that's

why I think this one F thing about this

intersectionality I think we do an

injustice to ourselves by continuing to

talk talk about race class gender I

think it closes our thinking to the

complexity of all of that and I don't

think they're all of the same

order I mean I I certainly don't because

certain questions raised by feminism

just keep slicing through every other

ones of them in ways that need to be

configured

precisely how we live it so if you just

have races to do with race and genders

to do with G in class nobody lives those

they they live them in their complex

textures and I think artistic activities

allow us to get that sense of the

density in a a certain person saying

this is how I see it from a situated

world I think at that point no more

thank you so much for your for coming

thank you for your

poers