Class today was enraging. Forget the perfect 9 am boost to the day that was mentioned earlier. I swear I'm going to become a misogynist just out of spite.
So lets set up this discussion. This is my absurdist art class, and we have been reading selected works from Freud and a lot of random marxists and using them to analyze art. Basically its just trying use various different forms of fetish to analyze, whether it be more phallic or consumptionist in nature.
The piece today that we talked about was a selection from Luce Irigaray's This Sex Which Is Not One, more specifically her chapter on Women on the Market. Within this piece she makes a couple claims.
1. Women are commodities.
2. Men are the executors of this economy.
3. Society depends on a ho(m)mo-sexual monopoly (this wordplay will be described later)
4. Homosexuality is subversive to this order
Now a disclaimer, this book was written in 1985, so I'm really not going to place a lot of blame on the author for work that was cutting edge at the time. That, however, doesn't mean the work should be preserved from critique, or worse, exemplifed as the "truth" as done today in my class today.
The class discussion that begins on this paper really only focuses on the first two parts of the 4 main arguments I listed above. That women are dominated by a fully patriarchal order is the argument that overdetermines all the branches of the discussion. We begin talking about how this piece might be flawed in terms of its relationship with Freud. This has some interesting implications, until the professor has a little fun and picks out a student in the class who has a large beef with Freud and has raised his hand. Before allowing him to speak, Scott proclaims his argument to be such:
1. She associates with Freud therefore is flawed
2. Its not all about the penis (I happen to disagree ;) )
Not surprisingly the student concurs with Scott's depiction of his dislike for Freud, but then proclaims that he loves Irigaray regardless of her association with Freud since he is all into that "feminist inquiry stuff." Scott inquires why other author's don't get the same luxury of being cool while being associated with Freud, his reply is that "well its different since she's a woman."
"well its different since she's a woman."
Precisely where this conversation goes downhill.
Now I understand that essentialism can't be avoided in all instances, in some cases it might even be "strategic" in order for social movements to progress, but what follows is the most inept defense of the practice, and unwillingness to critically engage with a piece that I've seen at Lang.
He says that Irigaray is valuable since all social interaction can be explained via the homosexual tension between men, with women serving as the intermediary in order to keep this interaction distinctly heterosexual on the surface. An analogy made uses "Y Tu Mama Tambien," claiming that the two boys who take the cousin/aunt/whatever she is on the adventure to the beach is just an exploration of their sexual relationship with each other. This explained is that the boys can only maintain a relationship as long as their is a female sexual object to mediate their conversation, that their homoerotic desire for each other can be visibly displaced by talk of knocking up the hot bitch. After they simultaneously have their way with her (each other) and she parts way, the intermediary no longer exists, and their relationship deteriorates, highlighted by their departure at the diner/coffee shop at the end of the movie.
Now you might ask what is wrong with this well thought out example to support Irigaray's claim. Nothing in its particular application (well there are lots of things wrong with it, but this isn't the focus of my dissent), but rather in how this example is universalized to show how all women are, are objects of desire traded by men. The conversation then shifts to making this same analogy and applying it to as many movies as possible and friends we all knew in high school.
(Quick Aside: The most frustrating part of this conversation is that the class pretty much decided that the theoretical underpinnings of this piece were not up for discussion, so it made it very hard to try and voice the below theoretical objections, because it would have seemed out of place.)
The problem is brought up when one girl in the class asks the rhetorical question, "All the work seems to suggest that men are responsible for treating women as objects, its been very consistant, why can't we leave it at that?" To Scott's credit he doesn't let her get off this easy and says that one should never be done with criticism, but then there is pretty much consensus that her conclusion was an accurate one, and Scott decides we need to move on to another piece, having told me to wait with my general questions that we never got to.
I suppose I should have been more assertive (as I typically am), but I was just dismayed in the fact that I almost don't want to bother anymore. I mean they are basing the entirety of their claim off the inductive logic that since it proves true in Y Tu Mama Tambien, that a piece is theoretically sound. What about literature, film in other places besides hollywood, what about slavery where men were commodities, what about those not in the position of a white privledged CEO position, what about white colonialist women who migrated to africa, east asia, who traded in much more than in just fancy perfume why are men inherently violent, predisposed to oppression, why the fuck don't women just give up if they want to frame patriarchy as this overreaching monster they can't escape. Why aren't any of these questions legitimate inquiry to many of the students at my school? | 
