Intimate Touches: Proximity and Distance in International Feminist Dialogues

Author(s): Sara Ahmed

Source: Oxford Literary Review , 1997, Vol. 19, No. 1/2, Knowedge, Learning and
Migration (1997), pp. 19-46
Published by: Edinburgh University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44122457

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Intimate Touches: Proximity and Distance in International
Feminist Dialogues

Sara Ahmed

An otherness barely touched upon and that already moves away

(Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves)

30th of August, 1995.

To begin with this date is to install, at least temporarily, intimacy

at the level of the individuated subject. Rather an odd beginning you
may think. A date? What is so 'individuated' about a date? Dates
are public, they announce the ordering of time as a series of
(repeatable) events. Yet the public ordering of time makes sense in
relation to the personal stories we create: 'On this date I... Do you
remember when we... That is when you.... ' The relation between the
public ordering of time and the (apparently) private re-ordering is
determinate and unstable. The public ordering depends precisely on
not 'belonging' to the individual subject (there must be a consensus
on how we measure our lives - these 'rules' must pre-exist
individuation), and yet only makes sense though being inhabited,
that is, through being given animation as life.

30th of August, 1995.

So why does this date announce intimacy, at least in the first

instance, as belonging to the individuated subject? I must make
another announcement: this date is my birthday. Here is a date that
I (feel like I) possess. It belongs to me. Indeed, it belongs only to me
- birthdays are never shared as such. They are unliveable as
shared.1 The singularity of the personal pronoun - 'it is my
birthday today' - conceals the unspeakable - that various others
(whom I do not know) claim and possess that date as the indicator
of their identity and origin. The birthday announces my presence as
an event that both carries a trace of the past (30th of August 1969,
this-day was the day of my birth), and is in-the-present (to-day is

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 20 Oxford Literary Review

my birth-day). 'Birth' and 'day' - here

constructs itself in relation to the tempor
'now'.
But although the intimacy of the birthday appears as a form of
self-possession (there I was, here I am), it becomes meaningful only
through acts of recognition by others. Oh what a shame, to be alone
on one's birthday. How fearful, how sad. Being alone on one's
birthday becomes readable as a sign of loneliness, of a lack of
friends and intimates. On this day/ date, I receive presents and
cards from friends and family. I have a party at my house and feel
the anxiety and pleasure of the event taking place to celebrate my
birthday - of being the 'reason' for this coming-together. So the
intimacy of the day of the birthday as a private day can take place
only through recognition usually received by those others whom we
see as our intimates. The date becomes liveable for me and them as
my -day.
So I dance around thinking, this is my day. And we take comfort
in assuming that the feeling 'this is my day' is repeatable: it must
be repeatable if we are to think of having a future. I am special,
here and now. I will be special again. Birthdays convert the
impersonality of dates into the intimacy of that which must belong
to me (privation). Birthdays hence confound the opposition between
private and public, even as they become liveable through it.

August 30th, 1995.

This date must repeat itself. It cannot be confined to my birthday

even through the apparent individuation of my memory work. The
workings of memory itself installs my sense of self (my-self as the
realm of privacy) by evoking what exceeds my life, what takes place
through the very public order of remembering. For this day was the
beginning of the UN conference for Women in Beijing. I remember
thinking at the time how pleasurable it was to share my birthday
with an event that may help create a space for international
feminism. It was a thought deeply embedded with irony. My relation
to this event which gave a form (forum) to international feminism
was structured through the (fantastic) privacy of the 'birthday. The
irony is perhaps more instructive than it may appear on the surface.

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 Sara Ahmed 21

For it may sugge

international fem
fantasies of how w
intimate relationsh

August 30th, 199

It is the day - th
it is my birthday)
'international fem
'international feminism' is, for me, a fantasy that is partially
mediated through images of the UN conferences for Women. In the
days before my birthday, I imagined all those women travelling and
the difficulties of their movement in face of the restrictions on visas
- the restrictions that were well documented in the mainstream
British press as a sign of the impossibility of any democratic space
being made possible within China.2 The travelling, the movement
from and to, the in-between space which is no space, the stories that
are narratable before the event could take place as such. I
fantasised about all those women getting there. Those women not
getting there.
If a politics of intimacy is about getting close enough to speak to
each other (the determination of the event as a 'coming-together'),
then does international feminism involve intimacy precisely in the
necessity of over-coming the distance between us ? Or perhaps this is
a fantasy - a fantasy that if we get closer, then we are less far
apart. Distance is not reducible to physical distance; it also implies
the impossibility of simply being-together or being-as-one. As such,
any fantasy of intimacy as an over-coming distance would make
impossible an intimate relation: it would violate an-other by
assuming her place. My own fantasy of how I 'belong' within the
imaginary space of international feminism (how I am doubly
'touched' by the sharing of the private day with the public date/
event) has the danger of such violence. Getting closer does not, then,
abolish the distance which installs the very necessity of the event
of getting closer in the first place (the distance and division between
the women who depart-arrive-depart- arrive...).

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 22 Oxford Literary Review

Indeed, this 'coming together' in one sp

dialogue - a speaking to each other whic
and embedded in institutions. Intimacy
allowed. But does that institutional sett
setting out what can and cannot happen? A
in which international feminism can ta
meetings' that constitute the value and i
feminism across (national) spaces? I was unable to go to the
conference. You know this already; I was constructing a different
sort of event. But I imagined, fantasised about the chance meetings,
the glances that were not legitimated in the 'proper events' of the
conference. What chance meetings took place? What intimate
moments became possible at lunch or over coffee? How does the
singularity of these secret meetings3 relate to the political process
of forming material coalitions?
Institutions cannot and do not fully 'colonise' spaces. The 'beyond'
is always 'within' - the inside and outside don't fit together to form
'discrete spaces'. The 'face-to-face' encounters beyond the formalised
spaces of the conference rooms or workshops are thus not within or
outside institutions; they neither fully escape or fully inhabit their
limits. Indeed, the spatial dynamics of institutions took an
interesting turn at Beijing. The division between the official and
unofficial conferences (Non Governmental Organisations - NGO's)
was secured by being set up in different spaces. Or, more
specifically, the unofficial conference was relegated to the margins
(Huairou) with stories of infectious diseases, of lesbian parades, and
women stripping off in public spaces, establishing the danger of this
event (as a danger to both public morality and health), and the
'need' to protect the centre (Beijing) from it.4 The route between the
two conferences was a difficult one to take, and it was one some
were not allowed to take. So being there was not simply a matter of
Being-There, of arriving in, or inhabiting, the institutional 'space'
allocated to 'international feminism'.
Intimacy is hence not simply foreclosed or enabled by the creation
of public spaces which legitimate feminist dialogues as a matter of
international political concern. It will be the argument of this paper
that re-thinking the role of intimacy in the creation of international
feminist spaces is of fundamental importance. This re-thinking will

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 Sara Ahmed 23

not only challen

(impossible) obje
coalitions). It wi
nature of intimac
as it is clearly de
public arrangements and only insofar as it is identified with
closeness (proximity) over distance. In trying to perform this double
dis-placement, I will thread together the following narratives. I will
examine representations of the UN conference within the
mainstream British media; some literature on intimacy in social
psychology; the discussions of how feminism does and can get
translated across spaces by Chandra Mohanty and Gayatri Spivak;
and the status of the 'we' in the auto-biographical narrative My
Place by the Aboriginal writer, Sally Morgan and its intimating of
a radical ethnography.

Intimacy?

Intimacy and international feminism? Already one senses a

difficulty. How can the forging of material coalitions in order to
address the global oppression of women involve intimacy? To make
this connection is already to problematise received understandings
of the nature and function of intimacy which assumes that it
'belongs' to a specific (private) sphere of life. In some sociological
literature on intimacy, the starting point is the taken-
for-grantedness that 'we' (as social beings) can easily differentiate
our intimate relations from our non-intimate relations. Hence,
Luhmann in his consideration of 'love' as a 'generalised symbolic
media' suggests that 'there is an everyday awareness of the
difference of highly personal, intimate social relations and those of
an impersonal, externally motivated nature.'5 In others words, we all
know the difference embedded in intimacy and seek to 'reproduce'
it by searching for forms of communication which enable 'love'.
There is a temporal confusion implicit in Luhmann's account. He
argues, 'the experience of this difference stabilizes the need for
forms of communication suited to it and reproduces the search for
them'.6 Here, the difference of intimacy is both assured (already
given) and yet must be re-produced through the subject's agency

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 24 Oxford Literary Review

(through 'searching' to reproduce the

the difference always so assured? Can
experience itself confirms the differ
impersonality? Is not the slippage from
both social crisis and instability (for exa
distinction between friend and strang
our lives)?
This slippage may move beyond the kind of narrative of intimacy
offered by John Shotter in Cultural Politics of Everyday Life , where
he discusses the movement and shifts from intimate talk and 'public
talk'.7 But that movement is inscribed as a failure of intimacy; when
intimacy breaks down, then 'public' talk begins, with its emphasis
on accountability and justification. However, the slippage from
'intimate' to 'non-intimate' (and vice versa) should not simply be
seen in terms of 'if not one, then the other.' Rather the confusions
around 'who' or 'what' are our intimates may at certain moments
call into question the very criteria we use to distinguish intimacy.
We cannot, that is, simply assume that the difference between
intimacy and impersonality maintains itself in an 'everyday
awareness'. This may mean, for example, re-thinking how our
relations with so-called public institutions may not always be
defined against our 'intimate' relations with specific and embodied
others. Indeed, if intimacy has no proper object, then it may have no
proper 'symbolic form'. Rather, it is the subject of negotiation which
is not already fixed in advance. If intimacy 'must' be reproduced,
then it is always subject to being reproduced differently, that is, to
being inscribed in ways that may surprise us, and may question its
designation as 'belonging' in specific (private) spheres of life.
Luhmann's account implies that intimacy only makes sense insofar
as it has referential value, that is, insofar as it can refer to a
discrete set of social relations. On the contrary, we can conclude
that what it means to be in an 'intimate relation' cannot be
exhausted or designated through the codification of 'intimacy'
In social psychological accounts of intimacy, there is an em
on the subject as a normative given. That is, intimacy is def
terms of what the subject needs (to be a subject). Steven Du
Relating to Others writes, 'We need merely to reflect for a mo
on the sources of our greatest pleasure and pain to appreciat

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 Sara Ahmed 25

nothing else arou

in the course of p
Intimacy is linked
the subject from
intimacy as a way
need to survive a
'modern' urban life. Desmond Morris in Intimate Behaviour hence
concludes, 'Unhappily, and almost without our noticing it, we have
gradually become less and less touchful, more and more distinct,
and physical untouchability has been accompanied by emotional
remoteness. It is as if the modern urbanitě has put on a suit of
emotional armour and, with a velvet hand inside an iron glove, is
beginning to feel trapped and alienated from the feelings of even his
nearest companions'.9 I will come back later to the identity which is
constructed between 'emotional' and 'physical' intimacy in this
passage. What I want to point out here is how intimacy is positioned
as something inherent to the potentiality of the human subject (the
'velvet hand' is defined as the subject's interiority) which, if denied,
leads to both alienation and entrapment. The positioning of intimacy
as an inherent 'need' inscribes intimacy as the normative condition
of 'humanness' itself. This is perhaps another way of saying, 'we all
need to be loved'.
The normative function of such accounts of intimacy (their
construction of a model of what it means to be human) often works
through an emphasis on primal needs. The subject's need for
intimacy is here a matter of a primal scene - that original moment
of being-in-the-womb. The original intimacy with the mother is then
painfully lost through separation (birth) - a loss which the subject
can only endure through substitution, through attempting to recover
the primal intimacy in other (familial and sexual) intimate
relations. Morris, in his discussion of the 'intimacies of the womb' ,
writes 'these, then, are the first real experiences of life - floating
in a warm fluid, curling inside a total embrace, swaying to the
undulations of the moving body and hearing the beat of the pulsing
heart'.10 Here, the primacy of intimacy involves a fantasy of
closeness and proximity to the mother. Intimacy is positioned as a
closeness which constitutes the absorption of one being by

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 26 Oxford Literary Review

an-(m)other. Intimacy is hence defined

defined against distance and separation
Immediately one must begin to question
to the mother which is evident in this acc
one can question the inscription of the fetus as an already
constituted subject (being-in-the-womb is defined as providing the
'first real experiences')11 Such a narrative positions subjectivity as
prior to the separation which is constitutive of both symbolic and
social fields. If we are to introduce pregnancy as implicated in the
construction of the subject's 'experiences', then the subject in
question is surely the mother. Does the 'experience' of pregnancy
invite a discourse on intimacy? I would not attempt to answer such
a question which assumes the transparency of 'experience' as a
category. However, one can begin to re-write the narrative of
intimacy-as-proximity which is implicit in this account by thinking
of how pregnancy may figure in relation to embodiment. The 'fetus'
rather than inhabiting the woman as a discrete subject, is both part
of the woman's body, and yet other. As such, the fetus is 'embraced'
by the woman precisely insofar as it constructs a division and
otherness within the woman's body. Is the fetus inside or outside the
woman's body? The impossibility of answering this question without
neglecting the instability of the boundaries of the woman's body is
instructive. It suggests that pregnancy introduces an 'otherness'
within embodiment that cannot be fully relegated to the outside. If
pregnancy invites a discourse on intimacy, then it may do precisely
by suggesting that closeness or proximity is constituted through
rather than against such otherness and distance. One can begin to
question the account of intimacy as a matter of the primal need to
be close to an-(m) other, precisely by re-figuring pregnancy as a
particular relation to otherness rather than the abolition or
over-coming of otherness. Intimacy cannot then be identified with
(the need for) proximity over distance, but constitutes a certain way
of holding the two together - where one's closeness to an-other does
not constitute the absorption of the otherness of the other.

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 Sara Ahmed 27

Touch?

Desmond Morris in Intimate Behaviour constructs the relation

between physical and emotional intimacy in terms of an identity
(where physical remoteness equals emotional remoteness). Hence
intimacy is made reducible to physical touch: To be intimate mean
to be close, and I must make it clear at the outset that I am treating
this literally. In my terms, then, the act of intimacy occurs
whenever two individuals come into bodily contact'.12 In other words,
intimacy is reducible to the physicality of touching an-other's skin.
However, does (or can) touching an-other's skin involve the abolition
of 'distance'? What I want to begin to do here is to try and
problematise the reduction of 'touching' to closeness.
In the first instance, a simple homology between 'the emotional'
and 'the physical' cannot suffice. Touching, that is, cannot be
understood simply in terms of a closeness that joins the emotions
and body (by overcoming all forms of distance) into a unified Being
(with). Such a model begins with a model of two (two subjects which
are separated as distinct beings) and ends with One. We can think
rather of 'touching' itself as métonymie, as bringing together
domains of the subject which exist in proximity to each other, but
which are irreducible to each other (such as 'the emotional', 'the
physical' etc.). The instability that this engenders is implicit in the
very ambiguity of the word 'touch'. 'Being touched' points to both
being affected or moved by the presence of another (as in the
phrase, 'I was touched by her concern'), and coming into physical
contact with another ('I touched her arm in gratitude'). Those two
meanings are irreducible to each other, and exceed each other.
Touch therefore can involve the physicality of a bodily contact, and
it can involve being moved or affected, though neither liait' its
meaning. There is a sliding across the varying levels of meaning in
which touch comes to figure. Rather than thinking of touching as
two Beings made into one, we can think of touching as the 'more
than one' that is constitutive of the touchability of subjects. In other
words, there is never a single Being that pre-exists 'being touched',
that is, that pre-exists being ' moved ' by , and coming into contact
with , others. As a result, 'being touched' does not over-come the
distance which separate others (as discrete beings). Being touched

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 28 Oxford Literary Review

suggests becoming closer to each othe

the division of self-other may take p
does not abolish the division as such.
desire and affectivity (being touched),
which re-form rather than over-com
animation. Is intimacy , then , a re-nam
The re-forming of the relation betw
touch is suggestive. Touching may provi
way of framing 'the encounters' betw
finally to the question of the 'inter' in
Kristeva calls for a politics of touch in r
not seek to solidify, to turn the other
thing. Let us merely touch it, brush
permanent structure'.13 Touching, as a t
other, involves a movement closer to an
that other, rendering its otherness an object. The movement
towards, in touch, is always already a movement away. If the
distance that constitutes both the necessity of touch, and the
impossibility of touch binding an-other to its place, can be
understood as the distance and inter(val) between feminisms, then
we could ask, how might 'intimate touches' re-work the encounters
that may take place in the interval, in the very space which is no
space?

International feminism?

But, then again, how can this re-thinking of intimacy and touc
in terms of a proximity which does not over-come, but animate
borders between self and other relate to the substantive issues
introduced by such an impossible term as international femini
Is this simply an attempt to de-politicise international feminism
rendering it simply a matter of localised encounters between
embodied subjects? Is there not much more at stake? I am
attempting to introduce 'intimacy' to the scene of international
feminism in order to re-think how feminism can render 'cultural
difference and distance' a point of entry for dialogue rather than a
problem. I will suggest that it is a politics of 'getting closer' to

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 Sara Ahmed 29

others, that will ena

move the political t
Such a shift will move 'international feminism' beyond the
'universalism-cultural relativism' divide that has troubled the
setting of agendas in its very emphasis on the importance of
engagement. (I am not trying to make any ludicrous claims that
'becoming intimate' as feminists will resolve the problems facing the
world's women.) This 'trouble' was certainly clear at Beijing. On one
level, it was a 'trouble' that enabled the disappearance of feminist
issues from the reporting of the conference in Britain. Much of the
media attention was spent discussing the conflict between the US
and China - with concern expressed within the States about
China's 'appalling' human rights record (a concern that led to the
question: should Hillary Clinton speak at the conference?).14
Likewise, the Chinese Foreign Ministry was reported to have
complained about such criticisms, to have suggested that they were
a way of attacking 'traditional values'.15 Here, 'women' appeared and
disappeared as an object in an exchange about who was entitled to
speak of 'human rights'.
Furthermore, the attention to China's 'brutality' was clearly
expressed by many Western feminists. For example, Suzanne Moore
writes, 'many other people have expressed reservations about the
Beijing conference, the chief one being that it is held in Beijing.
China is hardly known for its commitment to free speech or to
women's rights'.16 One must make a point here, about how one
speaks of 'the other' in order to construct 'the self - that is, how
the focus on the abuses in a culture other to one's own is one way
of authorising one's own culture (and one's own entitlement to speak
of such rights abuses). One needs then to reflect upon how the
setting up an international feminist agenda could involve the
authorising of the power of Western feminists to define and set the
terms. The use of 'rights discourse' within the conference agenda
hence became a question of divisions; who has the 'right' to
authorise what constitutes 'women's rights' as 'human rights'?
Rights discourse easily slides into a universalising politics -
definitions of universal human rights hence involve particular
(Western and male) construction of 'the human', while 'women's

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 30 Oxford Literary Review

rights' may also involve a particular (

'women'.
Chandra Mohanty has provided us with one of the most important
critiques of 'universalism' in Western feminism. Mohanty discusses
the way in which Western feminism has used universal categories
to understand gender relations: categories which have actually been
derived from their own experiential frameworks. Such feminist
approaches often proceed through producing 'third world women' as
objects of knowledge: 'An analysis of "sexual difference" in the form
of a cross-culturally singular, monolithic notion of patriarchy or
male dominance leads to the construction of a similarly reductive or
homogeneous notion of what I call the "third world difference"'.17
Here, the third world woman is interpreted in terms of a Western
understanding of gender oppression: the representation of her as a
victim of a universal patriarchy positions the Western feminist
subject as an authority, while taking the West as a reference point
for understanding different forms of power relations. In this way,
Mohanty argues that Western feminism's universalist models
reinforce a colonial relation.
But what Mohanty concludes through this informed analysis is not
that Western feminists should become cultural relativists. On the
contrary, the focus of her article is on the need to make decision
about issues of politics and justice across different cultural
formations - and one has to go beyond the issue of a division
between inside (West) and outside (Third World) given that
differences and antagonisms are internal and constitutive of any
given cultural formation. She argues that such a politics of alliance
- where collective judgements become possible though are not
assumed - can only take place through giving up the rhetorical
force of universalism.18 A sensitive and contextualised approach to
cultural specificity and difference would lead the Western feminist
away from a politics of universal judgement (which Mohanty rightly
sees as a self-affirming politics) and towards a politics where
judgements are made possible only through specific engagement.
Furthermore, it is through this process of engagement that
Western feminists could begin to hear the voices of women resisting
those 'other' cultural traditions. This would mean giving up the
assumption that the international feminist relation is definable only

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 Sara Ahmed 3 1

as a dialectic between teacher/ master (the Western feminist) and

pupil/ native informant (the Third World woman). Indeed, Western
feminists may be surprised by what they hear, and a dis-placement
rather than simply an affirmation/ consolidation of normative views
could become possible. Rather than speaking for those 'other' women
by identifying other cultural traditions as signs of a universal
patriarchy, Western feminists could unlearn the violence of
'universalism' (where the West becomes conflated with the
universal) and hence learn to speak to, and hear, different wom
Rather than assuming universality, international feminism cou
forge alliances made possible by a (necessarily unequal, but
nevertheless surprising) dialogue between different women. The act
of giving up universalism may enable a different kind of ethical
relation between subjects (differently and unequally positioned by
the international division of labour) which is based on a more
mutual engagement. Indeed, the possibility of a more mutual
encounter depends on acknowledging the power differentials that
make absolute mutuality or correspondence an impossibility. The
emphasis on 'engagement' is here not a refusal to recognise the
power relations that frame such encounters between woman, but a
call for such an engagement to animate the self-other relations. In
other words, through engagements, Western feminists could be
moved or touched by others whom they cannot represent.
Such a model of 'engagement' may re-figure the place and role of
intimacy in international feminism. On the one hand, we can see the
universalist rhetoric of some Western feminism involves a refusal to
become intimate; it judges from afar by reading ' the other' as a sign
of the universal . Mohanty comments, for example, on how Western
feminists have read 'the purdah' (veil) as a sign of women's
oppression, and how this reading refuses to engage with the
complexity and the historically specific contexts with which the
'purdah' acquires meaning.19 There is no attempt here to get close
enough to see the contradictions and ambivalence which structure
how the purdah comes to be lived - sometimes as a means for
resistance - at different times and places. Likewise, Lama Unu
Odeh argues that 'a veiled woman is neither this nor that. She could
shift from one position to another'.20 The refusal to enter into a
relationship with 'the veiled woman' is, for Odeh, a refusal to

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 32 Oxford Literary Review

recognise the multiplicity of the veile

other becomes fixed as an object and s
become-more-intimate.
However, universalism could also be read as a fantasy of
intimacy-as-closeness. For, at one level, reading the Veiled woman'
as an oppressed woman who is sexually controlled involves a fantasy
that one can inhabit the place of the other, that one already knows
what 'the other' means (and therefore needs). Or, to put it
differently, the emphasis on the universal wrong of 'the purdah'
(and the assumption of women's right as the right 'not to wear the
veil'), involves the fantasy that one can 'get inside the skin of the
other' (and speak for her). This fantasy of intimacy assumes here
that the language of universal rights has got ' close enough ' to the
truth of the other's (well) Being.
But equally, cultural relativism is problematised by this call for a
politics of getting closer (rather than closeness). Cultural relativism
assumes distance and difference in order precisely not to take
responsibility for that distance and difference. By assuming that one
already knows the difference , the self and other relation is held in
place. Such a politics, whereby the Western feminist simply refuses
engagement with the other, hence does not move the Western
feminist into unlearning (beyond the unlearning of her right to
speak), nor does it move the other from its position as always
already the other.
In contrast, a politics of becoming-more-intimate is a politics bound
up with responsibility - with recognising that relations between
others are always constitutive of the possibility of either speaking
or not speaking (so, for example, the Western feminist is already in
a relation with 'the third world woman' given her implication in the
international division of labour - she does not withdraw from that
implication by refusing the privilege of speech). We are, so to speak,
right in it. Beginning from this 'in-it-ness', a politics of more
intimate engagements, gets closer in order to allow the difference
between us, as a difference which involves power and antagonism,
to make a difference to the very dialogue between self and other.
Here, the difference between us, necessitates the dialogue, rather
than disallows it - a dialogue must take place, precisely because we
don't speak the same language.

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 Sara Ahmed 33

But a more ethica

the dialogue itself
but allows a movem
place by respectin
does not and cann
possibility of 'speak
violence of the epis
is always framed
what can I tell her?
terms of the temp
being touched: 'An
moves away'.21
An emphasis on t
involves refusing to authorise the other's speech through the
language of universal rights. Engagement means opening oneself to
the presence of an other. It means letting oneself get close enough
to be touched or moved by an-other. Such movement may take us in
unexpected directions: it may lead to the forming of surprising
coalitions; it may animate the borders that divide us. But
engagement also means a recognition of distance. It means
recognising the alterity of the other that cannot simply be over-come
through proximity, and the impossibility of 'rights talks' fully
embracing the other. Speaking to each other is here a way of getting
closer which is irreducible to communication (knowledge is not
simply transmitted from one to the other). Speaking to, in the inter-
of inter-national feminism, needs to be understood as a form of
touching: a 'getting closer' which does not grasp the other, by
assuming her otherness is knowable or even known, but moves the
relation between embodied others in the very necessity of moving
away.

Close readings?

Intimacy as engagement with an other - a proximity which reveals

a distance - is not simply a question of two persons (the
face-to-face of the encounter). Intimacy is also a question that must
animate our reading and translation of each other's texts. In order
to think through how such a politics of intimacy might make a

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 34 Oxford Literary Review

difference to reading-as-translation,
translation of Mahasweta Devi's texts i
Here, Spivak formulates a model of et
other per se, but of the subaltern woma
various privileged categories of othernes
postcolonial) within Western knowledg
Spivak clearly argues for the necessit
'cultural relativism'. Translation (and
figure for engagement. It involves pr
intimate reading may here by a reading
which caresses its forms with love. It re
afar and to fix the text as a discernible
that closeness or proximity, which avoids the distanciation of
universalism, does not constitute the merging of one with the other.
The idea of translation simply as proximity to the other, implies
that in engagement (or mutuality) the subject and the other merge,
becoming one. While the line between the translator and the text
becomes unstable in proximity , it also constitutes the limits of
translation and the violence of the difference that cannot simply
move across. Here, issues of reading and translation can be
understood in terms of opening oneself up to the (impossible) touch
of an-other.
In the context of Spivak's work, translation and reading as forms
of engagement do not involve the rendering present of the subaltern
woman. Rather, there is something which does not get across,
something which is necessarily secret. It is the 'secret' that
constitutes the ethical dimension of Spivak's work. Ethics becomes
for Spivak, 'the experience of the impossible'.22 The impossibility of
ethics is negotiated through a singular encounter with the subaltern
woman. A meeting. A secret meeting which is also a gift in that it
resists the structure of an exchange. The meeting does not have a
proper object which moves from one to the other. Rather, the
meeting is yet to be determined as such. Spivak suggests that any
collective and political struggle must be supplemented 'by the
impossibility of full ethical engagement'.23 It is only though such
mutual engagement that the secret can be revealed. In other words,
it is only through becoming intimate that the impossibility of
intimacy (as absolute proximity or closeness) can be traced at the

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 Sara Ahmed 35

level of political st
named as such he
impossibility that
Significantly, th
takes place throug
as embodied subjects - who are differentially positioned in an
international division of labour. One has a speech which is
authorised - an Indian feminist who works in America - one
whose speech is being authorised for the reader of English throu
the other's translation. I see this encounter as working at the
of the personal, affective realm of embodied subjects. It is throu
their meeting that a gift is offered, a gift which caresses the h
of the reader, of myself as reader, as I touch the pages. Through
fractured and divided embodiment of the subaltern women,
impossibility and necessity of a just encounter becomes imagined
a result the impossibility of a full ethical engagement is re-n
as the impossibility of love.24 Such an impossibility is precisely
affect of an engagement which moves us, and yet which cannot '
us across f (to the other).
In the afterward, the secret encounter - the encounter which
necessarily reveals and conceals - becomes the scene of global
justice. Spivak writes: T have, perhaps foolishly, attempted to open
the structure of an impossible social justice glimpsed through secret
encounters with singular figures; to bear witness to the specificity
of language, theme, and history as well as to supplement hegemonic
notions of a hybrid global culture with the experience of the
impossible global justice'. 25 Here, social justice is traced as an
encounter between the singular subaltern woman and the global -
between the singularity of her embodiment and the international
division of labour in which she is positioned as producer and native
informant. Such a positioning of the subaltern woman suggests the
necessity of collective political struggle - but a struggle which must
begin with secret encounters if it is to avoid re-producing that
position: that is, if it is to avoid the (violence of) speaking for the
subaltern woman. By tracing the impossibility that 'she' can be
translated into knowledge (the something that does not get across,
that secret), the intimate touch of such a collective engagement
avoids positioning the subaltern woman as native informant.

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 36 Oxford Literary Review

The impossibility of ethics - and the

at once concealed and revealed by eth
then, through the particularity of b
particularity, already bound up in an
division of labour. Any demand for resp
is hence already a demand to challeng
and authorisation which bind an-other to a certain place (the
subaltern woman does not speak). In other words, a concern with
the particular other (who is spoken for) is also a demand for a
consideration of what ethical procedures (how to read, act, speak,
listen etc.) would enable a more mutual and responsible
engagement. Such an engagement would not be fixed as an
exchange; it is her future (her as the future) which surprises us,
which forces us to move away.

Auto-ethno-graphies?

I now want to move from the question of intimate readings - of

readings that get close enough to initiate a movement away - to
the question of writing and intimacy. One might think that the
obvious place to begin would be with auto-biography: a writing of
'the intimate' realm of the 'my-self . What would it mean, we could
ask in light of Spivak's work on the 'translatability' of the subaltern
woman's writing, to read such writing as auto/biography? Is it here
- in the question of the writing of one's life - that one could get
close enough to hear the subaltern woman, to be touched by her
speech? Would it be possible to read her auto-biography as a gift
that cannot be reduced to the colonial and gendered exchange? Is
there a potential for a gift, in which the other no longer confirms the
auto-biographical gesture (the my-self-ness of writing) as the
violence of individuation?
But, then again, reading the auto-biography of an-other, does not
that install the fantasy of intimacy as 'getting inside the skin of the
other'. Would not such a reading, assume that 'we' can simply hear
her story and so witness a truth that was lacking? But
auto-biography is irreducible to the intimating of the self-in-writing.
On the contrary, it is auto-biography's movement outward and
across from any individuated fantasy of being-in-the-world that is

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 Sara Ahmed 37

so important. Auto
simply exist as su
with others who c
may suggest how i
a realm of belongin
Indeed, Ramala Vi
Ethnography , with
and ethnography
writing of the self intrudes into a writing of the other. The
confusion, of course, resides over what is the 'proper object' of
writing. As one 'proper objecť is set up as constitutive of a discipline
(auto-biography as the self, ethnography as the other) then what it
excludes and designates as other-to-itself necessarily remains
internal and constitutive of its limits. In auto-biography, 'others'
inflect the self, rendering it impossible to designate this story as 'my
story'. Interestingly, Visweswaran argues that: 'the confluence of
race and gender is one juncture at which boundaries of a newly
emergent ethnographic genre are burst by personal narrative; that
the rhetorical devices of "objective" ethnography are somehow
inadequate to deal with the difficulties and contradictions of writing
about race'.27 This image of 'bursting' is easily reversible: one could
discuss how any personal testimony on the intersection of race
necessarily brings into play the outward movement implicit in the
writing of 'otherness'.
Such a confusion of what is the proper object of writing in the
'bringing together' of auto-biography and ethnography is clearly
evident in Sally Morgan's My Place. That confusion poses the
centrality of 'intimacy': how does the relation between 'self and
'others' come to be determined as a relation of proximity? As Ken
Gelder points out, 'Sally Morgan who collects that information, is
not only intimate with her informants, she is related to them: no
ethnologist could be more at home with her subjects, and it is
doubtless this collapsing of the difference between ethnographic
discourse and the other that has made My Place so popular'.28 1 read
My Place when I was still at school in Adelaide. It was a text that
really affected me, that caused me to think again about some of my
ideas about Australian history and my own relation (as an Asian
immigrant) to the 'racialised form' of Australian community. As an

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 38 Oxford Literary Review

auto-biographical text by a young Abo

personal testimony that calls into questi
that are central to the fantasy of how
The violence which is unspeakable is trac
of becoming intimate with one's (lost
something other.
My Place presents itself as an alternat
it is conventionally received. It also presents itself as an
auto-biographical account of Sally Morgan's discovery of her
Aboriginal identity; her attempt to re-trace the past that was lost
through the 'not telling' (or the erasure) of the past by others. She
was not told about being Aboriginal: Tor the first time in my fifteen
years, I was conscious of Nan's colouring. She was right, she wasn't
white. Well, I thought logically, if she wasn't white, then neither
were we. What did that make us, What did that make me? I had
never though of myself as being Black before'.29 However, Sally still
has to 'find out' what it means to be Aboriginal. This narrative of
discovery of a past involves a community. It involves speaking to her
family who tell her their stories. Sally becomes the subject of the
text as an Aboriginal woman only through hearing others speak and
re-tracing their partial and fractured stories. The story of assuming
a lost Aboriginality in this sense involves a collective memory which
forms the materiality of the text itself. The act of remembering
through engagement with others creates the present identification
as one that lives for the future of a dis-placed community. Crucially,
then, the story involves becoming intimate through engagement
with others whom one is already, in some sense, close to, and yet
apart from.
The act of 'discovering Aboriginality' becomes then a story not of
truth but of love. The process of remembering involves a form of
closeness and proximity to each other in order to deal with the
tragedy of 'the stolen generation'; the generation of half-caste
Aboriginal children who were taken away from their mothers and
introduced into white communities as part of a policy of
assimilation. This policy (which constituted the sanctioning of
miscegenation) involved the assumption that eventually all traces
of Aboriginality (as Blackness) would be erased from the faces of
Australia. In speaking to each other about the history of enforced

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 Sara Ahmed 39

separation, the ge
silencing. But it is

It took several m
and, during that
became very clos
Although she'd
she still couldn't
and sisters. Consequently, I found myself
communicating it to them in bits and pieces as it
seemed appropriate. It was, and still is, upsetting
for us all. We'd lived in a cocoon of sorts for so long
that we found it difficult to come to terms with the
experiences Mum had been through.30

Here, the sharing of stories is like the breaking out of a cocoon of

assumed whiteness. That 'breaking out' constitutes a form of
closeness arrived at through the pain of loss. The act of sharing
allows the re-forming and trans-forming story of a 'we' which had
been made impossible, which had become erased from the surface of
any living community. Passing for white was an enforced policy
against Aboriginal people which divided generations of mothers and
daughters from each other. Resistance is enacted through the very
proximity of speaking to each other about the pain of this passing.
That proximity, that love, joins Sally's T to others, forming a
tenuous but creative 'we'.
The 'we' doesn't constitute the smoothness of the narrative; it
doesn't abolish the distances and divisions. The narrative becomes
increasingly disjointed as it attempts to forge the links of a new
community. Sally, as a narrator, wants other members of her family
to tell their side of the story. We then have incorporated into her
narrative My Place , the stories of these other Ts', told in the first
person singular. The Ts' within her T do not emerge through
appropriation or absorption. The reader passing through, gains a
sense of the discontinuities between subjectivities that informs the
force of the community. Through narrating the act of speaking to
each other, the reader is reminded that the 'we' itself is
unnarr atable beyond the disjointed patching of Ts' whose status in

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 40 Oxford Literary Review

the narrative cannot be rendered equiva

through this impossibility; it becomes a fo
ofthat which cannot merge into one.
So here, in the unspeakable gaps between
gets reconstructed as a politics of resistan
a concealment, but a revelation that there
that opens up the future. This re-creat
community and collectivity occurs thro
speaking to each other, of hearing each
closer hence involves the bodily intensit
involves 'being touched'. However, the gest
not abolish the distance, rather, it bec
Getting closer involves not simply the aff
but also the physicality of touching, of
and Nancy began to cry. Soon, we were
we were all just managing to hold ou
ambiguity of this last sentence is instr
suggests being able to maintain self-con
keep oneself from falling apart, or being
But the use of the plural opens out ano
gives a living form to the 'we', suggesting
they are managing to hold themselves tog
through 'holding'. The tension in meanin
the 'I' and 'we' suggests the importance of
of intimacy offered here. On the one hand
the distance amongst others, and each
self together. On the other hand, touching
such that together they form a 'body^ whi
or the other. Touching hence involves th
which hold others apart (by bringing them
involve its collapse. Touching each other both separates, as it
creates a 'body-in-excess', a body whose form is beyond the skin that
seems to hold the individual body apart.
Indeed, this animated relation between the 'I' and the 'we'
embedded in narrating the event of touch, is central to My Place. In
some sense, claiming the authorial T for the Aboriginal woman can
only involve giving it up as the origin of the text: her story can only
be told through the recognition of the immersion of the T in a 'we'.

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 Sara Ahmed 41

The author, then

between T and 'we
Such a division is
Of course, though
However much My Place provides an alternative to Australian
history and the ethnographic construction of Aboriginality as other,
it also admits to its own limits, to the 'secret' which it cannot speak
of. For Nan, Sally's grandmother, must take her secrets to the
grave: 'Well, Sal, that's all I'm gunna tell ya. My brain's no good, iťs
gone rotten. I don't want to talk no more. I got my secrets, I'll take
them to the grave. Some things, I can't talk 'bout. Not even to you,
my granddaughter'.32 Here, even the intimacy of 'being related' is
not enough for a complete story. There are secrets which simply
cannot be named. Sally admits knowing, 'she would never plumb
them'.33 For the reader, Nan's admission of this impossibility of
telling is also an acknowledgement of the incompleteness of My
Place itself. It is an acknowledgement that we, as readers, cannot
get close enough to 'know' the truth about the story. We are
prevented from reading the text as if it were 'a native informant'.
The movement towards (we get closer, we hear more) and away (we
get close enough to find out there are secrets) animates our relation
to the text. The movement between proximity and distance (through
proximity, distance) renders the process of reading My Place one
which installs an intimacy that confounds and unsettles the reader.
What cannot be said, throws away any security, unsettles that
fantasy that we can know and represent the story for ourselves.
Touched by the text, the other presents itself without being
presented as such.
The ethics of reading My Place as beyond the opposition between
the auto/biographical and the ethno/graphic takes us to a different
model of authorship. The author is not here as an intentional
subject who 'owns' the story and legislates on our behalf. Authorship
is only possible as such through giving up the realm of property: by
opening out the writing of the self to an-other whose secret one
cannot possess. In other words, the speech acts that are always
addressed to an-other are engendered through the necessity and
impossibility of claiming an T (I speak to you only insofar as I do
not know). Here, speaking is a form of being touched - a 'coming

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 42 Oxford Literary Review

into contact with each other' that lacks au

but that is bound up with feelings, desire
I am reminded, here, of Shoshana Felm
Felman writes: 'As readers, we are witn
questions we do not own and do not yet
summon and beseech us from within th
Felman suggests that one does not have to
in order to bear witness to it.35 My Pl
witness to a truth which it cannot poss
this as auto/ethno/graphy, is also in th
reader is beseeched into an impossible ac
what we witness is the unrepresentable: an unrepresentability
which does not necessarily lead to over-representation (the enigma
which demands that we keep looking), but to a recognition of the
limits of what can be got across (we cannot claim ownership of our
reading). Witnessing which lacks authorisation as knowledge can be
understood as the 'opening ouť of touch - being touched and
summoned by an event which cannot be secured as the ' truth ' that
stands before us.
Here, to become an author and reader of a story is to withdraw
from the authorisation of the story through possession of the other.36
Reading the writing of an-other constitutes the relaying of a gift: it
is a gift that is received by the author (from Nan) and then received
by the reader (from Sally). But the gift is also, at the same time, a
secret. What moves the relation between others in My Place is hence
irreducible to an exchange; what moves and touches us, in the
singularity of our engagement, remains secret. The secret
determines the impossibility of knowing the place from which the
other begins to speak. Getting closer - the intimate touch - hence
enables the relation between writer, text and reader to become
animated - an animation that is precisely the force of the secret in
the unsettling of knowledge, communication and ownership.

Conclusion

Some will say, this paper is not about international feminis

course, international feminism has not been my object. And ye
the question of how we can build material coalitions as feminis

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 Sara Ahmed 43

a global context th
belief that a re-t
touches' will enable
to each other if w
to', as a form of t
grasp or know th
recognition of th
distance for the very possibilities of and in speaking itself.
Universalism in feminism will not simply disappear through a
theoretical understanding of its limits. To challenge such
universalism we need a shift in how we read, how we write, in how
we build our relationships with each other as feminists, in how we
speak and listen, and in what we expect to receive from each other
in terms of knowledge. This process involves an unlearning of a
desire to represent; to speak for the other, often in the form of
protecting the other's rights. But that unlearning does not stop
there (as with cultural relativism). By taking from the differences
between us, the necessity of listening and reading more closely, by
being open to the surprise of the other's future, I may, as yet, hear
an-other speaking. I may be touched by what I hear even if, or
indeed because, what I hear remains a secret that cannot be
translated.
Such secret encounters are, for me, intimately bound up with my
relationship to feminism. As mixed-race woman, my relation with
the supposedly intimate space of 'my family is already fraught with
differences. My mother is English and my father is Pakistani. Most
of my life I have lived as part of an immigrant family in Australia.
I have only been to Pakistan a few times, although I lived there as
a young child when my mother was ill. I went for a few months
when I was 17 after finishing school. I spent a lot of time with my
Aunt who was heavily involved in politics. She was my first feminist
teacher; the first woman to speak to me about the violence of gender
relations.
The issue of how feminism can deal with differences between
women which are irreducible - beyond simply declaring that such
differences make speaking to each other impossible - has hence
been important to me, from the very beginning, from the face-to-face
of my first encounter with feminism. My Aunt is both part of my

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 44 Oxford Literary Review

family and yet other, she is both close t

speak English, but I cannot speak Urd
How to speak to each other less violently
for that desire as instructive?
How to think intimacy in this context for me is a question of how
to become close enough such that we realise we cannot inhabit each
other's skin. Intimacy is not an overcoming of distance. Yet in the
act of engagement, of getting closer, of being touched (say through
reading your text, hugging, a smile, a long chat) a trans-forming of
the borders between embodied others may, as yet, take place.

Notes

1. Or, alternatively, the event of discovering a 'shared birthday' often

comes to be felt as a 'special bond'.
2. For example, see the report by Graham Hutchings and Christopher
Munnion, 'Hillary should stick to the US, says Beijing', The Daily
Telegraph , 8 September, 1995.
3. I am alluding here to Spivak's notion of secret encounters with the
subaltern woman through which she articulates an understanding of
ethical singularity in the context of the global. This will be discussed in
detail later.
4. See the report by Graham Hutchings, 'Chinese tell conference cab
drivers the naked truth', The Daily Telegraph, 23 August, 1995.
Hutchings comments: 'Taxi drivers are said to have been told not to
accept fare from women in a state of undress, and to eject female
passengers if they attempt to strip off inside the cab'. See also the
report by James Pringle, '8 foreigners flock to China for women's forum',
The Times , 30 August 1995. Pringle comments on the use of insect
repellents 'to protect themselves from mosquito-borne Aids'. The links
between the construction of sexuality (sexual excess) and disease was
important in establishing the danger of 'foreign women' to the public
health and morality of the city. There was particular attention to the
'dangers' of prostitutes and lesbians.
5. Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy
(Oxford: Polity Press, 1986), p. 41.
6. Luhmann, Love as Passion , p. 41.

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 Sara Ahmed 45

7. John Shotter, Cultural Politics of Everyday Life : Social

Constructionism , Rhetoric and Knowing of the Third Kind (Milton
Keynes: Open University Press, 1993), p. 184.
8. Steven Duck, Relating to Others (Milton Keynes: Open University
Press, 1988), p.l.
9. Desmond Morris, Intimate Behaviour (London: Jonathon Cape,
1971), p. 11.
10. Morris. Intimate Behaviour . d. 11.
11. A feminist politics around abortion must surely displace the
definition of personhood implicit in such an account - which could
support an understanding of the fetus as a person with rights. See Sara
Ahmed, 'Deconstruction and Law's Other: Towards a Feminist Theory
of Embodied Legal Rights' in Social and Legal Studies , Vol.4 (1995), pp.
55-73.
12. Morris, Intimate Behaviour , p. 9.
13. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (Hemel Hampstead:
Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 3.
14. Stephen Robinson, 'Mrs Clinton urged not to visit China', The Daily
Telegraph , 18 August, 1995.
15. Hutchings and Munion, 'Hillary should stick to the US'.
lb. öuzanne Moore, Moreover: It s time tor all good women to be party
poopers', The Guardian , 24 August, 1995.
17. Chandra Mohanty, 'Under Wester Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourses' in Third World Women and the Politics of
Feminism , ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes
Torres (Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 1991),
p. 53.
18. Mohanty, 'Under Western Eyes', p. 69.
19. Mohanty, 'Under Western Eyes', p. 67.
20. Lama Utu Odeh, 'Post-Colonial Feminism and the Veil' in Feminist
Review , Vol.43 (1983), p. 35.
21. Kristeva, strangers, p. 3.
22. Gayatri Spivak, 'Translator's Preface' in Mahasweta Devi,
Imaginary Maps (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. xxv.
23. Spivak, 'Translator's Preface', p. xxv.
24. Spivak, 'Translator's Preface', p. xxv. Please note the difficult irony
that while I cite the translator, I have not engaged with the translated
text. The issue of authorisation must remain a troubling one for
feminist and post-colonial readers.
25. Spivak, 'Translator's Afterword', p. 197.

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 46 Oxford Literary Review

26. Ramala Visweswaran, Fictions of Fem

University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p.
27. Visweswaran, Fictions , p. 7.
28. Ken Gelder, 'Aboriginal Narrative and
No. 2 (1991).
29. Sally Morgan, My Place (London: Virago Press, 1995), p. 97.
30. Morgan, My Place , p. 307.
31. Morgan, My Place , p. 228.
32. Morgan, My Place , p. 349.
33. Morgan, My Place , p. 351.
34. Shoshana Felman, Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of
Teaching' in Testimony: Crisis in Witnessing and Literature , ed.
Soshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. xiii.
35. Felman, 'Education and Crisis', p. 15.
36. One must note here how the reading of My Place within White
Australia has authorised a discourse of appropriate(d) otherness. The
fact that My Place has been accommodated within White Australian
literary self-representation, and 'Sally Morgan' has been individuated
as the acceptable face of Aboriginality, needs to be addressed. Rather
than dismissing My Place itself, we need to recognise the potential and
irreducible danger of such reading practices in which the figuring of the
author as an individual and autonomous hero, enables the radical
contingency of the textual relation to be effaced. Here, the other can be
domesticated and appropriated, precisely insofar as it is assumed to be
known or read in the text.

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