Julia Kristeva argues that the symbolic realm is patriarchal, so the ‘feminine’ is an otherness that cannot be named. Femininity lies within what
she calls the semiotic and is closely linked to the maternal (Kristeva, 1982). Most psychoanalysts follow Jacques Lacan in using the term ‘symbolic’ to refer to all forms of signification (Oliver, 1997: xv). The symbolic for Kristeva refers to grammatically systemized verbal language or equivalents (for example, deaf sign language), while the semiotic refers to something beyond the linguistic, to the rhythm and intonations through which bodily drives are expressed in ways relevant to meaning without having meaning themselves. Semiotic does not mean the science of signs, as it does for Saussure (see Chapter 4). For Kristeva (1980a; 1980b), the symbolic is one part of the signifying process, inseparable from the other semiotic part. She is building on Freud’s notion of drives that push us towards satisfying our desires for sex, death and so on. Freud (for example, 1910) thought that these drives had to be repressed in order for civilized society to be possible, however, he also noted that they would ‘slip’ out in verbal mistakes, jokes and subconscious fantasies. Kristeva suggests that such drives are discharged in non-linguistic ways and in fact that we have a bodily drive to communicate. Drives are not simply bodily or biological to her, being neither ‘natural’ nor symbolic but acting between bodily experience that cannot be put into words and a structured symbolic system based on words. The symbolic aspect provides structure so that we can make sense of our experiences to ourselves and to others. The semiotic motivates communication but threatens the symbolic and the symbolic provides stability in order for communication to take place. Thus there is a dialectic between the semiotic and the symbolic which is crucial to the signifying process.
Kristeva characterizes the relationship between the semiotic and the symbolic as highly gendered in casting sexual difference as masculine superiority versus feminine lack. She argues that the notion of the semiotic provides some space for the expression of a femininity that is not an essence, but constructed via non-linguistic or extra-linguistic processes. This is quite radical in connecting the biological aspects ofthe body with the social aspects of language, to help explain how the feminine becomes abject. As Grosz (1989: 70) explains, abjection is ‘the subject’s reaction to the failure of the subject/object opposition to express adequately the subject’s corporeality and its tenuous bodily boundaries’. Abjection is about fearing becoming an object of disgust (and therefore a non-subject) by breaking bodily boundaries. One way Kristeva has of explaining the importance of abjection is to turn to the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas. In Purity and Danger (1978) Douglas sets out how social divisions are maintained via notions of bodies that pollute. Particular types of bodies are thought filthy if they are seen as without proper boundaries. Fluids that break out from bodily boundaries — for example faeces, blood, milk, sweat, tears — are dirty because they are ‘matter out of place’. Kristeva argues that menstrual blood in particular signifies the
danger of sexual difference, the otherness of women. However, excrement is defiling because it threatens to remind us of the way maternal authority was exercized, above all, through potty training. This authority, unlike the paternal law bringing the infant into the symbolic, shapes the body as a territory, through prohibitions. Symbolic law operates partly via separation from the maternal and the bodily. Identity and language are supposedly achieved, if you believe Freud and Lacan, by separating oneself from the mother and achieving some distance from one’s body. Rituals surrounding pollution — especially menstrual and excremental — draw attention to this boundary between (feminine) bodies and language, and perhaps even shift it. The system of ritual exclusions of the maternal and the bodily, therefore becomes central to the signifying order. The feminine is both excluded from and necessary to meaning. However, femininity remains inexpressable within the structured symbolic, according to Kristeva’s logic. Only as a kind of background presence, ‘speaking’ mutely through the body, do women really seem to exist.
Although the attempt to put women and their bodies back into theory is welcome (see Chapter 5), Kristeva’s account of women as a kind of semiotic hum within systems of representations is very limiting. How can women actually ‘say’ anything about themselves, how can feminism, which has relied so much on rational arguments, be possible if that is so? Kristeva (1981) finds feminism negative and instead recommends a dissolution of binary identities, but assumes that women’s position ‘outside’ the symbolic renders them passive and unable to achieve such a dissolution (Grosz, 1989: 67). Such an approach is the result of her uncritical adoption of psychoanalysis and its assumptions that femininity is an inferior, castrated subjectivity (Grosz, 1989: 63-5). Psychoanalysis assumes that men are ‘normal’ and women are lacking. Feminists criticize Freud’s theory for thinking in ways that are phallocentric (organized around the phallus — the symbol of the penis) because he assumes that ideas about the penis are central not just to male identity but to female identity. With all these problems, why then has Freud been so influential?
What was arguably important about Freud was that he actually tried to think about differences between men and women at a time when many thinkers ignored women’s experiences altogether. He also tried to think about the way we give meaning to our anatomy, which allows recognition of the importance of social processes. He thought that we learn to be feminine or masculine through early interactions with significant others. His ideas about the unconscious are also crucial to his continuing influence. He thought the unconscious was a part of the psyche involving what individuals repressed in order to conform to social norms of how to behave. This argument implies that learning what it means to be a woman or a man is not a matter of consciously thinking that you desire your mother or father and so on. Freud is
trying to tell a story about the way unconscious fantasies — desires we are not aware of in direct ways — might shape our gender identity. However, when he said that anatomy was destiny he did imply that the way gender was shaped was more or less ‘fixed’ by your particular anatomy. For example, he thought that not having a penis meant being feminine and that meant accepting an inferior position in the world. He thought that if women tried to behave ‘like men’ it was because of penis envy and they needed to have therapy to enable them to properly take on a feminine identity. He was a product of his time in valuing men, their bodies and ways of doing things, more highly than women.