Responding to the Accusation of Nonbeing

I originally was going to discuss the implications of Doane's writing on larger feminist aims in a broad way, but Ioana has provided a great framework within which I can offer my position with more clarity. She offered in her post the following notion:

"...the feminist denunciatory/deconstructing discourses of the past decades have by no means solved the problem, but converted the mentioned lack into incapacity. The “liberated” (non-)subjects cannot produce autonomous symbolic representation that Doane hopes for either. "

Ioana brings up a common argument brought against post-modernist thought-- that such persistent deconstruction produces a sort of discursive paralysis.

I think, that the feminist discourse of deconstruction has been anything but unproductive in its deconstruction of the "woman" and "man." (Note: I think that Ioana's assertion that feminism is fixated on the "in one go" decimation of "woman" with no attention to "man" [leaving him "intact"] does not hold up in light of the body of work present on the deconstruction of man in feminist literature. Also, on a theoretical level, even if a feminist work is in the end fixated on "woman" identity, the unravelling of "woman" inevitably comments upon and deconstructs "man"-- such is the specific relationship of our gender dualism.) The accusation of paralysis does not seem to hold up to empirics, which offer examples of female liberation as directly proceeding from feminist theory (sexual empowerment, marriage redefinition, reproductive rights, etc.).

I find no reason to consider feminism as a means of perpetuating female subjugation. Feminism's "disempowerment" of women by stripping them of their "woman" status seems absurd, as feminism does not leave women without new status/labeling/"subjectness." I would argue that the act of critique creates a new space which in itself offers a definition for women.

The work of Doane, in my view, provides an important deconstructive analysis of gender, which I find by no means to be self-defeating or perpetuating female disempowerment. As for its alleged paralyzing effect, I argue that to not discuss this dynamic would be a far more immobilizing position.