Matrilineal Writing: Letters from Sweden and Wrongs of Woman

Abstract

If the relationship between female-embodiment and writing is (under patriarchy) one of disturbance and fracture, then women’s writing (under patriarchy) is caught between incoherence/silence and imitation (of masculinist forms). And it is an imitation at great cost, for as a direct condition of it, women are ‘exiled from themselves, and lacking any possible continuity/contiguity with their first desires/ pleasures, they are imported into another economy, where they are completely unable to find themselves’. (Irigaray, 1995, p. 135) Walker has argued that this occurs when, in writing, women participate in the ‘violent foreclosure’ of the maternal body grounding signification. For Irigaray, however, the repressed syntax of femininity (and hence a women’s writing that would not be limited to the failures of the ‘Athenic’ mode) cannot be defined: ‘what a feminine syntax might be is not simple or easy to state’, and ‘the syntax and the meaning remain to be found’. (Irigaray, 1995, p. 135) Irigaray’s hints at the ‘other syntax’, nonetheless, offer a starting point for considering Wollstonecraft’s mature works, and Walker’s notion of ‘writing with the mother’ offers the alternative ground from which to posit a Matrilineal writing.

Consequently, it is in language, not in anatomy, that my gendered subjectivity finds a voice, becomes a corpus, is engendered. It is in language as power, that is to say, in the politics of location, that I as ‘she-self’ make myself accountable to my speaking partners, you, the ‘she-other’ fellow feminists who are caught in the web of discursive enunciation that I am spinning as I speak. You, the ‘she-you’, like me, the ‘she-I’, are politically engaged in the project of redefining the gender that we are. The language cracks under the strain of this excessive genderization; the personal pronouns cannot sustain the interpersonal charge required by the feminist project. Something in the structure of the language resists; how can you express adequately what is lacking from or in excess of existing parameters? How does one invent new ways of thinking?

(Braidotti, 1992, pp. 187–8)