Between Races and Generations: Materializing Race and Kinship in Moraga and Irigaray

SABRINA L. HOM

Juxtaposing Cherre Moragas Loving in the War Years and Luce Irigarays Speculum of the Other Woman, I explore the ways that sex and race intersect to complicate an Irigarayan account of the relations between mother and daughter. Irigarays work is an effective tool for understanding the disruptive and potentially healing desire between mothers and daughters, but her insistence on sex as primary difference must be challenged in order to acknowledge the intersectionality of sex and race. Working from recent work on the psychoanalysis of race, I argue that whiteness functions as a master signier in its own right, and as a means of differentiation between the light-skinned Moraga and her brown-skinned mother. Irigarays concept of blood deepens Moragas account of her healing and subversive return to her mother. The juxtaposition of Moraga, Irigaray, and contemporary psychoanalysis of race can allow for a necessary revision of Irigarays psychoanalysis that acknowledges the ways in which sexual difference is indexed by race and sheds new light on her account of the motherdaughter relation.

In this work I read together the work of psychoanalytic feminist Luce Irigaray; poet, playwright, and Chicana philosopher Cherre Moraga; and psychoanalyst of race Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks in hopes of developing a more accurate account of the workings of race within Irigarayan psychoanalysis. My juxtaposition of Irigarays analysis of the motherdaughter relation in Speculum with Moragas autobiographical account of her relation to her mother in Loving in the War Years is facilitated by Irigarays and Moragas shared interest in blood and the maternal, as well as a background of increasingly rich work on the psychoanalysis of race and sex. I will argue that Moragas work demonstrates the ways that Irigarays observations regarding the motherdaughter relation and the political signicance of blood are enhanced and transformed through the added dimension of
Hypatia vol. x, no. x (Xxxxx 2012) by Hypatia, Inc.

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racial analysis. By thinking through the ways in which race is materialized and embodied, we can articulate better anti-oppressive strategies that take materiality and embodiment into account. Throughout this text I will describe sex (and, by extension, race) as real and material. I will make particular use of Irigarays conception of blood as a resilient material principle of connection and ethical implication that exceeds patriarchal determination and binarism. I will take both Irigaray and Moraga as non-determinist materialists, and I will argue that, read together, they offer a compelling and useful account of such a materialism. Despite debates over whether to take Irigaray as a realist or as a strategic essentialist, I am persuaded by Alison Stones interpretation that Irigarays work presses us to move beyond what has become a sterile standoff in feminist studies between essentialism and social construction in order to revalue the material as active and formative, or, as Stone puts it, as having its own distinct but non-determinative rhythm (Stone 2003; 2006). Working through Irigaray (with certain caveats) can lead to a fruitful return to and revaluation of the material and the body in feminist theory. Moragas attention to the racially and culturally indexed bond between herself and her mother can similarly allow for a non-essentializing return to materiality in discussions of raced experience, and, specically, consideration of the ways in which race is transmitted through and materialized through kinship, or blood.1 Although Irigarays overt statements on race have, to date, been uniformly disappointing (Deutscher 2002), her status as a philosopher and psychoanalyst who radically revises psychoanalytic practice in order to theorize difference makes her a promising but incomplete resource for feminist and race theorists. Irigarays account of the motherdaughter relation is rendered incomplete and inaccurate by her neglect of racial difference; this failing demonstrates the inadequacy of a theory like Irigarays that takes race as politically and ontologically secondary to sex. Moragas account of the struggle attending her own mixed-race identity (she is, as she describes another mixed woman, queer in both worlds [Moraga 2000, 201]) amply demonstrates the navete of Irigarays most signicant and overt prescription for abating racial and ethnic prejudice, the formation of biracial and bicultural families (Irigaray 2002, 133). I hold that Irigarays analysis remains promising, but in order for her work to contribute to contemporary anti-oppressive theory, Irigarayans must understand the ways in which her unsatisfactory analysis of race and class limits Irigarays work, and make race and class central to their own philosophical practice. I juxtapose Irigaray and Moraga because Moragas account dramatizes the way in which Irigarays theory is embedded in white experience, and because, despite the lack of racial analysis in Irigarays writing, her work nonetheless engages with Moraga in a conversation about power, desire, and resistance between mother and daughter, particularly in her attention to materiality and in the concept of blood.

Sabrina L. Hom

BLOOD, RESISTANCE,

AND THE

MOTHERDAUGHTER RELATIONSHIP

IN

LUCE IRIGARAY

The motherdaughter relationship is always a difcult site for differentiation for Irigaray, and as her work progresses she maintains an interest in the relation between mothers and daughters but no longer takes this as an ethical relation, a status she reserves for relations across sexual difference. Already, in Speculum, the motherdaughter relation is marked by the lack of differentiation between mother, daughter, and the general maternal function; a central thesis of Speculum is that phallogocentric culture gives women little means or opportunity to develop strong, individual egos because they are instead identied through the men they are associated with (and whose names/identities they take on) and by their assimilation to a uniform function of mothering and nurturing. The central problem between mothers and daughters, then, will be that of nding a means of differentiation so that each can distinguish herself from the maternal function and begin to develop individual subjectivity. Given that Irigaray takes mother daughter relations to be characterized by a lack of otherness, and that she takes the primary ethical problem of our time to be that of learning how to accept the difference of another who is already other, it is not altogether surprising that she does not take the motherdaughter relation to be paradigmatically ethical. Although I will not offer a full analysis of Irigarays heteronormative inclinations and their pitfalls here (see Winnubst 2006), I note that her focus on sexual difference as the sole source of ethical or transformative difference dramatizes the lack of racial and class analysis in her account. Moragas account of her relation to her mother will argue for the necessity of an analysis that recognizes and theorizes racial difference between women, including mothers and daughters. Irigarays analysis of the repression of difference, and its return, begins in Speculum of the Other Woman with Freuds account of motherhood. Motherhood for him is determined through womens healthy and proper desire for the phallus that is to say, for a son. It is important to note that Irigaray takes Freud to be largely correct in posing a desire for the penis as being at the heart of healthy female subjectivity in contemporary Western culture: after all, she will suggest, if the phallus determines greater social status, better economic position, greater freedom, and a stronger sense of self, who wouldnt want it? Similarly, she assents to Freuds account of a more painful and tortuous development toward adult sexuality and subjectivity in the little girl than in the little boy: the little girl, he says, is obliged to turn away from her rst object of desire, the mother, whereas the little boy is not; the little boy is differentiated from the father through the Oedipal law that determines him as a distinct and independent self, whereas women, neither named nor numbered in patriarchal families, struggle to differentiate themselves from their mothers and indeed, from an impersonal maternal function, This socially determined desire for the phallus and lack of differentiation, however, is neither truly necessary to female subjectivity nor precisely

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maintained in Freuds account. Irigaray points to a curious moment in Freud where he describes the little girls desire for a penis/baby as evinced in her affection for her baby-doll. He never, however, species the gender of the baby-doll, leaving open the curious possibility that the little girl might desire a little girl of her owna desire that cannot be accounted for under the logic of maternal desire as the desire for a penis. Instead, Irigaray observes, Freud repeatedly expresses surprise at recurring evidence for a deep, prior, and enduring attachment of the little girl to the mother. He writes in his lecture entitled Femininity that our insight into this early, pre-oedipal phase in girls comes as a surprise, like the discovery, in another eld, of the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization behind the civilization of Greece (cited in Irigaray 1985, 64); Freud here casts the motherdaughter attachment as intransigently mysterious, as lost and as unintelligible as the Minoan language. Irigaray takes Freuds repeated surprise at this frequently established fact as evidence that some repression, some enforced forgetting, underlies our ignorance of this prehistory of motherdaughter attachment. Analyzing Freuds surprise and his stubborn insistence on forgetting this motherdaughter attachment, Irigaray observes that the little girls desire for a little girl of her own gives the lie to the central logic of Freuds account of sexuality (an account that is premised on the phallus as the only object of desire and indeed, the only sex.) What recurs in the little girls play is a desire that is not founded on the phallus but that instead evinces independent desire between the mother and daughter. Furthermore, Irigaray writes, these forbidden games (Irigaray 1985, 77) allow for a playful or ludic relation between the little girl and the mother: rather than undifferentiated unity with the mother or a violent disavowal of the mother (where both of these Freudian options represent merely a return to an undifferentiated maternal function), the little girl at play engages in a mimed rehearsal, repetition, re-presentation of her relationship to beginnings and to reproduction (77), which allows her to recognize and renegotiate her relationship to the maternal even as she plays between differentiation and unity. Irigaray observes, then, signs in this form of play that some trace of value or desire remains that is temporally prior to the logic of the same; that this desire recurs, in the symptom of surprising play, after the imposition of the logic of the same; and that this play creates the possibility of relations between the mother and the daughter that challenge the Freudian logic by which the phallus is the one and only occasion for desire.

THINKING BLOOD The theme of a dangerous resurgence of that which is prior to and excluded from a logic of the same recurs in Irigarays account of blood, also in Speculum. In

Sabrina L. Hom

The Eternal Irony of the Community, she works through Hegels account of Sophocles Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus and his mother Jocasta; in the eponymous play her brother Polynices has died trying to conquer the city of Thebes, and her uncle has decreed that, as a traitor, Polynices should be denied proper burial. Antigone resists what Hegel calls human law (Hegel 1977, 267), the law of the state, in recognition of a separate and opposed divine law that obliges her to perform the gendered work of burying her brother. After Hegel, Antigone is commonly taken to exemplify the potential for individuals to oppose the logic of the state in absolute terms her resistance is not determined or limited by Creons law but instead is founded in another law that is truly beyond the logic of the state (and such resistance, if it is indeed possible, will clearly be salient to the project of resisting legally and culturally produced racial injustice). Irigaray exceeds Hegel in arguing, based on the language in which Antigone insists she must care for the son born of the same mother, that Antigones resistance is inspired not by sisterly loyalty per se but as a continuation of her mothers desire (Irigaray 1985, 217). This genuinely other means of resistance is founded on a principle of maternal identication and desire that she calls blood, a material-semiotic gure representing both the material and the ethical principle bonding the daughter to the mother. This uid principle of connection and nourishment is necessary to the polis (the body requires blood just as every political formation relies on some framework of kinship), but controlling and ordering the polis requires that unruly ows of blood be clotted or dispersed. Hegel claims that, in the aftermath of historical conict represented by Antigone, the divine law is subjected to the human; nonetheless it remains in womens kin attachments, leading him to describe women as the everlasting irony of the community (Hegel 1977, 288): necessary foundations of the community whose interests are always in an uncomfortably tense relation to the ends of the community as a whole. It must be noted that, in this understanding, although we should expect to see the rhetoric of blood appropriated to oppressive political ends, blood inherently exceeds and potentially undermines any logic that attempts to appropriate it. Blood as a metonym for kinship in fact has such a specic and polysemic meaning that it cannot be simply translated into literal phrasing. Shared blood refers to a shared constitutive substance, what a contemporary reader might be inclined to categorize as genetic ties. More than mere genes, however, the shared substance of blood also refers to the robust materiality of bodies in relation and to the nurturing and constitutive relation of gestation, in which the esh of one body generates another. Since blood, like sex, represents a set of embodied imperatives such as those for nourishment, nurture, and embodied connections to others (as in gestation), Irigaray positions it in the Real. I, like Irigaray, will use the gure of blood to conceptualize embodied connections, in this case gestational kinship. Although I argue that the concept of blood is not applicable only

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to genetic relations or to gestational relations, the relation of a gestational mother to her child is perhaps the most straightforward example, given its overt connection to the Real. This relation necessarily originates prior to the imaginary or symbolic phases of development and as such is governed by its own distinct rhythms and logic; this is the connection at which Freud repeated expresses surprise and confusion. The gure of blood, however, must not be taken as exclusive to biological kinships. Blood may also refer to shared culture or solidarity between persons of a shared ethnicity, for example. As Moraga points out, although family and kinship are often assimilated to patriarchal, white-supremacist, and heterosexual norms, this does not exhaust the meaning of kinship, which may also serve as a powerful and non-essentialist site of resistance: Family is not by denition the man in a dominant position over women and children. Familia is cross-generational bonding, deep emotional ties between opposite sexes and within our sex. It is sexuality that involves, but is not limited to, intercourse and orgasm. It springs forth from touch, constantly and daily. The ritual del beso en la mejilla and the sign of the cross with every coming and going from the home. It is nding familia among friends where blood ties are formed through suffering and celebration shared. (Moraga 2000, 103) As above, it is important to note that the concept of blood, although necessarily material, does not map directly to any reductive conception of kinship (for instance, kinship as genetics or heteronormative family ties) but rather may refer to a wide array of embodied connections. Kath Weston, for instance, has written of the unexpected and subversive potential of blood donation to rework ones sense of kinship or belonging; in her example, the shared substance of blood is uid, productive, and intriguingly resistant (resisting, for instance, both racism, as all blood is red-blood [Weston 2001, 157], and one-world utopianism, as blood is not universally transferrable but varies by type). Care relations and sexual intimacy are both distinctly embodied, material relations; both spawn ethical obligations, for example, for dignity and respect, and both at times generate kinships. Although I will focus on the example of a gestational mother and her daughter, I do not mean to exclude other forms of enduring substantial connection from the gure of blood. In fact, it is the messy and unpredictable tendency of bodies to entangle and exchange, to depend and desire, that makes master narratives of racialized blood so unstable. The theme of disruptive kinships that refuse the violent breaches demanded by the law of the master signier recurs in the work of Moraga and in that of psychoanalysts of race such as Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks.

Sabrina L. Hom

VISIBILITY

AND

KINSHIP

To investigate the interrelations of the psychoanalysis of race and of sex, I will draw on Seshadri-Crooks and Gwen Bergner as gures who have worked to bring together psychoanalytic insights on sex and race and to develop an account of subjectivity that takes sexual and racial difference into account. In SeshadriCrookss words, she aims to discover the intricate structural relation between race and sex, to see how race articulates itself with sex (Seshadri-Crooks 2000, 3). This project seems particularly important at the moment; as Seshadri-Crooks points out, the genetic science of race is embattled to the extent that many well-meaning scientists and theorists eagerly afrm the empty or ctive nature of race. At the same time, as a folk concept, race has a strong hold on North American consciousness that has little to do with genetic science. The rhetoric of race gains traction through two means that are already familiar in feminist psychoanalytic theory: kinship and visibility (17). Seshadri-Crooks observes that race is attributed through two distinct metrics in American culture: visibility and blood (Seshadri-Crooks 2000, 19ff.). Although it is often assumed that presence of the visible signiers of race correspond to the locally accepted account of genealogical race, she correctly observes that disruptive misalignments of visibility and genealogy are possible. Literary and theoretical works on race-passing document the paradoxical appearance of, for instance, white-looking women who turn out to really be black (often through the discovery of a single black forebear under the one drop logic of American whiteness).2 These examples evince the instability and tension between these two means of racial identication, blood and appearance; they also remind us that, although much excellent work has demonstrated that a straightforward genetic account of racial difference is impossible (Appiah 1985; Blackburn 2000; Schwartz 2001), the metric of blood has always exceeded the science of genetics: in fact, the attribution of race through blood has always worked through social norms of kinship and racialization rather than through genetics per se. The one-drop rule, for instance, can hardly indicate persons of some imagined African genotype, but rather demonstrates that racialized kinships are identied through the social norms of race rather than vice-versa. Much like the productive tension among sex, gender, and desire that Judith Butler observes in Gender Trouble (Butler 1999), Seshadri-Crooks nds the incongruence between blood and visibility a promising site for deconstructing the concept of race itself; the inherent inconsistency of the discourse of racialization evinces its emptiness and failure. Although the metrics of racial visibility and blood are often clearly tortured and incongruent, they nonetheless produce concretely raced lived experiences (even if the racialization of these subjects is often complex or contradictory), and the metric of blood in particular has more material and social import than the argument against the genetics of race

Hypatia

acknowledges. Whereas Seshadri-Crooks holds that attention to visibility and kinship as means of racial inheritance will facilitate the dismantling of race and racialized identications from our cultural consciousness (Seshadri-Crooks 2000, 158), I will argue that it is in precisely these moments of incongruence between visibility and blood that white-supremacist norms intervene violently, often to breach blood relations. As a result, I will attempt to give an Irigarayan account of the way blood can recur disruptively, not merely to dismantle race but to heal such breaches.

RACIALIZING

THE

SEXED BODY, RACIALIZING KINSHIP

Mary Bloodsworth-Lugo argues that to claim an ontological status for sexual difference is to construct sexual difference as unmarked by race (Bloodsworth-Lugo 2007, 45); this claim is plausible only if sexual difference is taken as xed rather than dynamic, and it fails to acknowledge the ways in which race is materialized on and through the sexed body. With Irigaray and Seshadri-Crooks, I will take sex as an irreducible, ontological difference, but I will argue that it is marked and transformed through racialization. Seshadri-Crooks argues for a Lacanian conception of race that at once acknowledges the intricate relation between race and sex and recognizes important differences between the workings of the two. She acknowledges that race is not like sex in that sex is indeterminate and exceeds language (Seshadri-Crooks 2000, 4) and is in the Real, sexual difference is signicant and existent in human bodies before cultural meaning is imposed upon them, as humans are always generated on the condition of the existence of at least two sexes of human being, and always already marked by this difference. Whereas Irigaray argues persuasively that we should take sex as irreducible difference, the genesis of race in the history of colonialism attests obviously to its arbitrariness.3 As theorists like Evelynn Hammonds and Sander Gilman demonstrate, race is attributed through sexed means such as the miscegenation taboo and the myth of black hypersexuality (among other means) (Gilman 1985; Hammonds 1994). We should note, then, that Seshadri-Crooks agrees with the rst clause of Irigarays notoriously problematic claim in I Love to You that sexual difference is an immediate natural given ... the problem of race is a secondary problem (Irigaray 1995, 47). It is the second claim, that race can then be analytically separated from sex and subordinated as a problem, that fails to comprehend the ways that racialization morphs the sexed body. Seshadri-Crooks argues that race should be understood both as functioning through sexual difference and as a consolation for the disappointments of sex (or, more precisely, that whiteness is a consolation for the disappointments of masculinity) (Seshadri-Crooks 2000, 43; 59).4 Seshadri-Crooks and I follow theorists such as Lacan in taking phallogocentric and racial dominance to be rooted in

Sabrina L. Hom

the specular; sexual and racial hierarchies depend largely on visible differences, always read as lacks. In classical psychoanalytic thought, the woman is always marked by the nothing to see, the visible lack of a phallus. Sexual difference offers an inferior other that promises to shore up the male ego, but since the spectacle of castration is simultaneously anxiety-producing (as castration looms as a threat to masculinity) and mysterious (since the female sex is marked not by a lack but by a genuine difference, one that may not be immediately visible but that is nonetheless present as a troubling excess to the phallic system), sexual difference is not fully successful as a means of assuring male wholeness and value. Where language necessarily fails to capture the excess of sex, racial differentiation and the logic of colonialism promise to present an other who can be wholly mastered. Although the phallic ideal of power and hardness is ultimately impossible to sustain even for a man, whiteness is posited as a new form of specular assurance. Here whiteness signies precisely the wholeness, value, and purity that, as Irigaray argues, the imperfectly at mirror of woman fails to project (Irigaray 1985). Femininity represents lack because to specular logic women have nothing to see; the enigma of the female sex, however, which would be better said to exceed the gaze, can of course be reappropriated as a threat to phallic specularity. The rhetoric of race as visibility, however, promises an unambiguous visual signier of inferiority in the other; the inadequacy of the non-white subject is to be immediately and fully disclosed to the eye.5 Rather than taking race as a secondary adjunct or perfect analog to sex, Seshadri-Crooks argues that whiteness functions as a master signier in its own right, signifying civilization, dominance, reason, beauty, value, wholeness, and purity. This argument demands that psychoanalytic feminists theorize race as well as sex, and that that these differences be theorized intersectionally rather than assimilated to a single axis of hierarchy (that is to say, a logic of the same). Clearly the addition of an other so-called phallus to the hierarchy of sexual difference is transformative to the work of post-Lacanian theorists like Irigaray; as with the recognition of other axes of difference, the hierarchy and array of subject positions produced therein are greatly multiplied and complicated. At least in our time, cognizant of our colonial location, we cannot speak of women, for instance, or of relations between men and women, without recognizing that race and sex together shape these in ways that exceed Irigarays account. Although many axes of difference similarly index the eld of sexual difference, probably few will do so as deeply as does race, which at least in the current understanding has a stronger claim than, say, class to be in the body not only as a visible mark but as a heritable quality in the blood.6 This, after all, is the truth of any conventional description of racial passing: he may look and act white, but hes really notthat is to say, one or both of his parents were non-white, and this characteristic is inherited in his blood if not on his skin. Hence the importance of the rhetoric of purity as an element of whiteness (Haney-Lopez 2006);

10

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this rubric is sometimes used to disavow and disinherit the children of mixedrace relationships under the one-drop rule, at other times to juridically whiten mixed children (see Lawrence 2003). At any rate, it functions, along with the miscegenation taboo, to make sense of the otherwise obscure truth of blood that is, in the colonial context, always already mixed. These legal conventions, along with the tortuous discourse around authentic race in the blood, demonstrate that racialization is dependent on controlling and rationalizing blood. To these incisive accounts of the co-constitutive but heterogeneous character of race and sex, I add a specic observation of the means by which race is interposed on and inscribed onto sexed bodies through a renegotiation of kinship. Although the workings of the purity rubric of race vary depending on context, there is a widespread element of disciplining and, often, breaching blood relations. Race moves through the blood, but the integrity of the signier often demands breaking the bonds of blood, whether in the painful dramas of passing and estrangement detailed by Adrian Piper (1996) or in the systematic denial of Indian status and residency on reserves to First Nations women in Canada who married white men, and to their children (Lawrence 2003). In the latter case, kin relations that predate colonial racialization (for instance, the varied means by which First Nations bands attribute band membership through kinship) are strategically disrupted and rewritten precisely as a means of both inventing and controlling indigenous people as a race. Maintaining the logic of race in the face of intermarriage, race mixing, and mismatches between visibility and kinship demands that, as in the case of intermarried First Nations women and their children, unruly kin relations be dissolved by legal or social necessity. The logic of race, then, is legitimized and materialized through blood, but this demands strategic disavowals of blood.

RACE

AND

DIFFERENCE

BETWEEN

GENERATIONS

Seshadri-Crooks and Gwen Bergner read the formative gures in the psychology of race, such as Frederick Douglass and Frantz Fanon, as chroniclers of the formation of black male identity. Drawing on both Freudian and Lacanian analysis, they each argue that the accounts of racial identity-formation found in works like Douglasss biography and Fanons analyses can be fruitfully read as raced rewritings of Lacans structures of subject-formation: for instance, Bergner proposes the famous scene in Douglasss autobiography of a young Douglass witnessing the jealous slavemaster whipping his aunt Hester (whose transgression was to have a sexual relationship with a slave man) as a culturally and historically specic variation on the fantasy of the parents intercourse that occasions the Oedipal crisis (Bergner 2005, 22ff.). Signicantly, here the structure of subjugation to the law of the father is not just a universal structure of subjectivity but a trauma specic

Sabrina L. Hom

11

to this historical moment. At a key moment in the development of masculinity and the mapping of the male sexual morphology, then, Douglasss experience is specically indexed by the intervention of white privilege. Obviously the slave system has already intervened catastrophically, since, as Bergner points out, Douglass does not know who his father is (though he suspects the master) and has been violently separated rst from his mother and then from his grandmother/caregiver (this, of course, is another example of racialized severing of kinshipsboth of heterosexually-dened and other forms of embodied kinship). Bergners argument is that the structures of subject-formation play out in historically specic ways, and in our context these are always raced. I want to continue Bergners project of reading biographical and theoretical accounts of subject-formation through psychoanalytic accounts of sexual difference and race, in this case through a reading of Moragas La Guera. Irigarays work can shed light on aspects of Moragas work that a more traditionally Lacanian reading cannot: on the motherdaughter relation, particularly through the gure of blood that Ive already mentioned; and, through blood, on Moragas attachment to sexual and racial difference as a site of resistance and a resource for survival. As I will argue, however, Irigarays account of the motherdaughter relation is also transformed through the presence of racial difference between the two. In La Guera, Moraga describes a motherdaughter relationship that is, from the beginning, marked by racial difference. As the light-skinned daughter of a brown Chicana mother, Moraga is groomed to assume white privilege from the start. With light skin and her Anglo fathers last name, she inhabits a space in patriarchal and white-supremacist hierarchies that allows her greater privilege and mobility than her mother: she is, her mother hopes, cut off from the history of deep poverty that her mother can remember in her blood. To reinforce this position, Moraga says, everything about my upbringing, at least what occurred at the conscious level, attempted to bleach me of what color I had (Moraga 2000, 43); signicantly, her mother refuses to teach her the Spanish language that she speaks to her own kin. Moragas poor Spanish recurs in her autobiographical writings as an obstacle to renewing her connection to her mothers kin and to other Chicanas. Such conscious attempts on the part of parents of color to whiten their mixed-race children, as well as the tension between blood and surface experienced by the child, appear frequently in accounts of mixed-race experience; this sort of passing should be understood not merely as a negotiation, often intentional, of the visible and performative cues of racialization but also as a deliberate negotiation of the norms of kinship and racial heritability. Moraga sympathizes with her mothers motivation to confer white privilege on her daughter, even as she resists it. The text makes palpable that white privilege and closely related educational privilege will offer the daughter a better chance of survival and dignity than her mothers life as a poor, brown Chicana

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with a middle-school education, semi-literate in English. In fact, its clear that Moragas mother has survived largely under the aegis of white men like her childrens father. Whereas for Freud, and in Irigarays interpretation of the logic of the same, the daughter never fullls the mothers desire for the phallus, Cherre Moraga, la Guera, the light-skinned child, can hope to possess the whiteness that her mother has only precariously and second-hand. As such, the light-skinned little girl is desired and valued, albeit not as much as the light-skinned son (Moraga 2000, 82). This introduction of differentiation and desire transforms Irigarays account of motherdaughter relations; I would argue that we should understand these relations as always necessarily raced in a postcolonial context. In Moragas account, unlike the undifferentiated mothers and daughters of Irigarays text, difference is already present between the two womenthe mark of difference is as evident at the birth of la Guera as is the sexual difference between a mother and son. Since both desire and differentiation are always already present between the mother and daughter of different (visible) races through the master signier of whiteness, it becomes clear that Irigarays account of the dangerously undifferentiated union of mother and daughter is in fact specic only to instances where race is not at play between the mother and daughtermost especially where race is invisible, as is symptomatic of whiteness in North America. As Patricia Hill Collins points out, white feminist analysts tend to focus on the liberatory project of differentiating oneself from the mother and attaining autonomy, but white womens family relationships are not necessarily representative of the experience of women of color (Collins 2000, 47).7 Moragas analysis, and an understanding of racializations dependency on breaching kinship bonds, helps to account for the racialized harm that is often embedded in the motherdaughter relation, as well as the way that the master signier of whiteness introduces desire between the mother and daughter independently of sexual difference. In a move that is strikingly similar to Irigarays own account of blood, Moragas account demonstrates the way that disruptive and non-normative desire and kinship between mother and daughter can create unexpected desire (the desire, here, for the non-white female body); although Irigaray does not theorize or acknowledge this desire, it contributes to her account of the disruptive capacity of blood. Clearly Irigarays account of motherdaughter relations is troublingly ignorant of the signicance of racial difference here, and, although this ignorance does not render her claims useless, it is necessary to broaden and rethink her account of this relation and its potential for political resistance in light of the way that race transforms sexed bodies and relations. The racial difference and desire between the mother and the daughter in Moragas account open the way for an ethical relation under Irigarays denition: it is necessary for mother and daughter to work toward a relation across differenceone that neither poses insurmountable difference between the two kindred women nor reduces away their real and meaningful differences. For Moraga

Sabrina L. Hom

13

to recuperate a genuine and non-reductive relationship to her mother she must build a relationship across differences of race, class, language, and sexuality; as in the ethical relation between sexes, this can be accomplished only through an openness to the others difference that denies a logic of the same and posits the other as different, whole, and desirable. Difference, then, is already present between the mother and daughter, a difference that is at once violentas it marks a painful estrangement between the mother and daughterand potentially fruitful and healing. Moraga describes a deep hunger left from the severing of her connection to her mothers language and to her mothers race; her poignant language makes clear that this estrangement is ultimately the severing of a kinship and an embodied connectionone of blood, esh, and bonefamiliar to any reader of Irigaray. Moraga describes this desire as formative and constitutive of her lesbian identity, an identity that, by conferring on her another kind of poverty, nally allows her to return to the mothernot as an undifferentiated unity but as two different women brought together by blood, love, and a common experience of oppression (Moraga 2000, 44). This return not only allows Moraga to resist her bleaching by identifying with the mothers color and language, but also resists the original breach between brown mother and light daughter. Irigarays account in Speculum of the surprising desire between the little girl and the mother and the violence of dispersing the ow of blood helps us to theorize this hunger. Similarly, Irigarays account of blood, as the remnant of an alternative to phallic logic that can be a resource for womens wholeness8 and resistance, resonates with Moragas account of a return to the mothers blood that amounts to both sexed and raced healing.9

WORKING

THROUGH THE

RACED BODY

For Moraga the return to blood and to her kinship with her mother is specically raced as well as marked by Moragas lesbianism and her mothers poverty. These multiple axes of difference or poverties, in Moragas phrase, create a breach between the mother and daughter but also offer the means of a return; experiencing the enforced poverty or oppression of lesbian existence allows Moraga to nally enter into her mothers life and to recover the history and the language that is already under her skin, For Moraga this means reclaiming her kinship to her mothers family and embracing her mothers language, name, and race, but this is never a return to an undifferentiated relation with the mother; differences in education and sexual orientation enable this return, but also create enduring estrangement. The return to the mother that Moraga describes plays between closeness and estrangement, likeness and difference, and resembles the partial reconstruction of a tempestuous affair more than a homecoming.10

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Moragas return to her mother takes the form of a ludic relation that allows her to move beyond the sterile polarity of self and other. If the subject of Irigarays thought is a woman who struggles to differentiate herself from her mother, the subject of Moragas is a woman who struggles to overcome radical alienation from hers; for Moraga, her mother is othered along the lines of binaristic and hierarchical concepts of race, class, and ethnicity that determine her mother as both other and less. Each pole is an ethical failure, and one that has dire consequences for the daughters subjectivity; in the former case, the daughter is unable to develop as an individual, whereas in the latter case, the daughter copes with an amputation or loss that she experiences at the material and the cultural level. Moragas precarious return to her mother, not as a woman who is the same as she but rather as a woman with whom she can identify because of their distinct poverties, is paradigmatic of an ethical relation that is open to the other as other. In the passionate ux of this return, we see not a stable, completed intersubjectivity but rather a process of becoming in which Moraga is able to play between the ostensibly exclusive positions of indigenous and white, Spanish-speaking and Anglophone, working-class and middle-class. It is through this ludic ambiguity that Moraga is able to reclaim kinship to her mothers family while, tenuously and painfully, acknowledging kinship to her father as well. When the sundering of blood ties is obliged through the logic of whiteness, the return to blood must also be in some sense racialized. It is through the return to the mothers raced body that Moraga is able to positively inhabit a subject position of a Chicana. I mean to say that neither non-whiteness nor her female sex are understood as a lack; she is able to embrace non-white, non-male subjectivity and to desire other non-white, non-male subjects as such. What kind of lover have you made me, mother? Moraga asks in the poem La Dulce Culpa, recounting the difcult path of return that has led her to embrace a Chicana identity and the love of women through the gure of her mother, a woman who has literally tried to beat heteronormativity and white privilege into her skin: I will ght back/Strip the belt from your hands/and take you/into/my arms (Moraga 2000, 10). Moraga makes it clear that it is her passionate, embodied connection with her mother that allows her to revalue the non-male and the non-white, and indeed, she represents this shared passion as occasioning her mothers desperate attempts to prevent her rebellion: you knew it in our blood/the vision of my rebellion (8). Just as, for Irigaray, the ludic relation between mother and daughter is occasioned by the moment of desire that establishes that the woman does, indeed, have some independent value, in acknowledging and obeying her desire for the mother Moraga sets into motion this return. In Moragas case, the desire to return to the mother is multiply subversive, for her mother is marked as lacking not only along lines of sex but also of class, race, ethnicity, and formal education. Here, to desire the mother subverts not only the dominance of the phallus

Sabrina L. Hom

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as the signier of desire, but challenges multiple master signiers at once. This challenge functions to undermine the conceptual foundations of white supremacy and phallogocentrism, but also to redress the degrading results of white supremacy and male dominance on individual non-white/non-male subjects. In recovering the unruly desire for her mother that has persisted in the Real, Moraga is able to love other brown women and to love herself as a brown woman. In a deliciously queer take on the Oedipal drama, Moraga understands her subject position as a Chicana lesbian who loves other non-white women to be an extension of her desire for a return to her own mother; her adult desire is not a result of acquiescence to social norms (as Freud describes the development of female heterosexuality) but is instead founded on a rejection of the norms that cast her mother as inherently lacking. The ability to fully inhabit a Chicana subjectivity and to love other brown women is transmitted through Moragas embattled blood relation to her mother. The resurgence of desire for the racialized mother that is obliged by the principle of blood can provide the means for racialized subjects to resist and heal from the psychic violence of racism for the reasons noted above. This resurgence also works against the original breach or amputation obliged by the logic of whiteness, and in the process challenges the supremacist conception of race in at least two ways. First, as I have noted, Moragas desire for the mother already gives the lie to the claims of whiteness to be master signier by asserting that, despite her disprivileging, Moragas mother is desirable along the lines of some other system of value. Second, in reasserting a blood relation that has been breached in order to maintain the logic of whiteness, Moraga challenges the imposition of patriarchal and white-supremacist logic on kin relations and the crucial ction of white purity that this creates. Irigarays theory of sexual difference provides a framework for thinking the dynamic materiality underlying race; Moragas account of race transforming sexual difference complicates and enriches Irigarays account. Together these theorists provide a means of understanding of race as socially constructedthat is to say, race as having no necessary relation to the body outside a set of cultural relationsthat nonetheless leaves room for the materiality of race: race as a transformation of embodied subjectivity and blood relation. Such an understanding is necessary, I believe, if we take seriously both the potentially radical principle of blood and the ways in which motherdaughter relations are indexed by race; materiality is raced not only as an act of violence but as the potential for a return to a non-white female wholeness. The juxtaposition of Irigarays and Moragas work demonstrates both the potential of Irigarays work as a resource for thinking embodied difference and the shortcomings of any feminist psychoanalysis that neglects the ways in which race, class, and other axes of difference index both the body and the scenography that produces the subject. Irigarays work makes insightful claims about the

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development of female subjectivities on the basis of irreducible sexual difference, draws out important patterns in motherdaughter relations, and theorizes the potential for resistance in blood, but it is limited by its neglect of racial difference. Read in relation to Moragas work, it is evident that Irigarays account of irreducible sexual difference errs in taking sex to be originally and theoretically separable from race, and her attempts to explain the motherdaughter relation are, as a result, only partially accurate; we must acknowledge racial difference, along with other axes of difference, as always already present between women, creating painful and potentially creative breaches between mothers and daughters, among others. Such an emendation to Irigarays work reopens the possibility of ethical relations between women that has rarely been acknowledged in her later work and demands that we rethink Irigarays project of culturally embedded psychoanalysis and embodied feminism in light of racial differences that are imposed on the body.

NOTES
1. While materiality and embodiment have often been neglected in feminist and race theory, phenomenology is an exception; phenomenologists such as Franz Fanon and Linda Martn Alcoff have demonstrated the signicance of race in shaping bodily schemata and subjectivities (Alcoff 2005; Fanon 2008). 2. See, for example, Johnson 1990 and the excellent theoretical work thereon, especially Kawash 1996 and Piper 1996. 3. See, for example, Robert Bernasconis work on the genesis of racial categorization (Bernasconi 2001). 4. This is the case both because racial breaches of kinship obviate the incest taboo (Seshadri-Crooks 2000, 43) and for the reason discussed below. 5. This is not to say that race succeeds as a consistent and reliable visible signier, not least since, as Seshadri-Crooks argues, whiteness paradoxically attempts to represent the unrepresentable as a privileged absence of color (Seshadri-Crooks 2000, 58). Seshadri-Crooks and I agree both that race can be understood as a consolation for the failure of sex and that it necessarily fails as such. 6. Although I focus here on race and sex, I do not mean to suggest that a similar analysis of the body as morphed by other differencesclass or sexuality, for exampleis impossible. In fact, Moragas own work offers ample testimony of the intergenerational embodiment of class: for example, of poverty remembered in her blood as if it were yesterday (Moraga 2000, 43). 7. I would like to thank Linda Martn Alcoff for reminding me of this point. 8. Irigarays references to female wholeness are, as Agnes Bosanquet points out, troubling to many readers (Bosanquet 2005), not least because Irigaray uses the term

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differently in different contexts. It should be noted that when Irigaray refers to female wholeness as desirable (for example, of fullling the wholeness of what we are capable of being [Irigaray 1993, 61]), she does not refer to the totalizing universal of phallic wholeness, but rather to a subjectivity characterized by difference and becoming, where difference and becoming are not dened by or motivated by lack (or amputation, as per Fanon 2008, 119). This is, as Tamsin Lorraine puts it, the wholeness of a subject who brings herself into continual variation (Lorraine 1999, 234), and refers to Irigarays aspiration of founding valued, sustainable, dynamic subject positions outside of a logic of the same. 9. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano demonstrates the signicance of healing as a theme and a goal of Moragas work (Yarbro-Bejarano 2001, 63). 10. This is evinced in a passage in Loving in the War Years in which Moraga tearfully reconciles with her mother after a period of estrangement, only to have their reunion interrupted when her brother telephones (Moraga 2000, 94); their mothers respect for male privilege demands that she cheerfully cut off her conversation with her daughter to attend to the son.

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