This essay by Lottie Kent won Third Prize in the prestigious Woolf Essay Prize held annually by Newnham College, Cambridge, open to all girls in the UK currently in Year 12.
Is there a difference between the ‘creative
power’ of men and that of women?
“Gender
is the repeated stylisation of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly
rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of
substance, of a natural sort of being…” – Judith Butler!
 |
| Virginia Woolf |
“For
women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the
very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so
overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself
to pens and brushes and business and politics. But this creative power differs
from the creative power of men”
Virginia
Woolf, too, seems to reference an enforced congealment of gender roles – with
patriarchy as the coagulating agent, like platelets to the oppressive wound.
She suggests that gender discrimination has stirred the gradual build-up of a
‘creative power’. This ‘power’ is women’s, and it is so saturated because
women’s relegated social position has never allowed them to ‘harness’ it to the
‘pens and brushes and business and politics’ that only men have had access to.
But is the notion of relegation here at all relevant when we are considering
the differences between the ‘creative power’ of two gender categories? It is
evident that patriarchy is a social universal; its cross-cultural stability and
typology is remarkably unvaried. Where societies and institutions exist, almost
inevitably institutionalised gender oppression will too. It inescapably impacts
upon social norms in every vein of life, so that we are both consciously and
unconsciously products of it. And yet, many would argue that patriarchy has
always existed insofar as essential gender
differences have always existed. Binaries in kinds, they would say, are
what allow the oppressive/oppressed dichotomy. So it is, then, that when we ask
ourselves if the ‘creative power’ of the oppressed woman ‘differs’ from that of
the oppressive man, we must consider this: is the governing factor in our
apparent gender differences our historical existence as beings responsive to
the social norms of patriarchy, or are these differences essential aspects of
the human self – existing separate of socio-political and historical contexts?
But
we still need to decide what ‘creative power’ is. Certainly, given the context
of the statement, it would seem that Woolf was mostly interested in the
historical imbalance of power between men and women. Arguably, she was casting
light over epochs of systemic incarceration, and their inevitable effect upon
women’s freedom - their power – to be
creative. Woolf was not necessarily pointing out essential differences in
creativity between the genders; she wasn’t even arguing that living in
oppressive frames affects the creativity of marginalised groups. No, to Woolf,
creativity was probably a personal characteristic of individuals. The only
aspect of the creative existence that systemic oppression can affect is our relational
freedom to express creativity (and, consequently, our freedom to capitalise on
it, and to be publicly praised for it). And indeed, there have long been
historical ‘walls’ that have separated those for whom creative freedom is a
given, and those whose creativity has been ignored and discouraged. If we
believe that Woolf is endorsing all of these ideas in her statement, then the
truly important notion here is power.
Creativeness in individuals is unchanging. Where the indigenous religions of
African slaves were suppressed in America’s Deep South, Christian spiritual
music grew up out of the cotton fields. In systematically attempting to
de-Africanise the black workforce, white enslavers did not rid these people of
their personal creativity, but they simply reduced their creative freedom. In
this way, it is not unlikely that an oppressed group of people will reassign
their creativity to ensuring their survival. When African slaves began to sing Christian
spirituals, they were primarily expressions of faith and emotion, but they were
also a means of proving (or pretending) their assimilation to white American
culture. Likewise, women have hidden their creativity indoors for so many years
because it was the only choice they had under the normativity of Patriarchy. But
this does not mean that their creativity was in any way reduced; rather, it was
merely reassigned to a repressed mode of expression. By this line of reasoning,
Woolf was not focussing on essential gender differences, but the effect of
subjugation on a group of gendered individuals – creative women.
However,
what if she was focussing on these
differences? It certainly wouldn’t be
inconceivable that Woolf endorsed the notion of gender essentialism. Ideas of
traits specific to, and altering as dependent on, gender (understood as sex)
were commonplace at the time she was writing. Indeed, in the paragraphs that
follow this very mention of ‘creative power’, Woolf insists we ought to ‘bring
out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities’ between genders2.
She even proposes that ‘nothing would be of greater service to humanity’ than
were we to discover ‘other sexes’. In promoting fundamental categorical
variations of this sort, she is not celebrating individuality on a personal
level, but merely endorsing apparent essential differences between genders,
just on an egalitarian plane. Perhaps when she writes that the ‘creative power’
of men and women ‘differs’ she means to say that this is an essential aspect of
our binary existence, just like the rest of our dualistic characteristics. This
would be such that we could replace ‘creative power’ with ‘creativity’ and she
would insist upon the same essentialism. Therefore, Woolf means to rejoice in
the differences in order to reject
all discrimination on the basis of them; that is, she looks to dismantle
patriarchy by working from within the gender binary. A Room of One’s Own is not an essay that works to reject the
imposed fundamental differences between men and women. It is a gynocritical essay
that argues for emancipation within
the organic model of hetero-normativity. The ‘room’ that Woolf requires for
women is, as such, still inside the normative house.
1
Butler, J. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion
of Identity, Routledge Classics (2006; originally published 1990)
Irrespective
of whether Woolf was calling us to accept our gender identity as essential, her
statement on ‘creative power’ raises an important issue concerning the social
change she demands: can we ever truly liberate women from oppressive social
roles if we still accept and invest in essential distinctions in genders? Modern
feminist scholars have commonly vilified essentialism as a concept that would
only serve to hamper the movement for equality. In contrast, the feminist
philosopher Charlotte Witt argues for what she calls ‘gender uniessentialism’
in her book, The Metaphysics of Gender3.
She is quick to explain that this strain of essentialism is not the form of essentialism that most
criticisms are directed at, for this is kind
essentialism. Kind essentialism expresses the view that women and men are
kinds whose members share a defining property4. In the initial waves
of feminist thought this theory would have been used to claim that all women
share something fundamental in common, and hence provide a basis for powerful
political solidarity that was separate from, and against, men. Instead, Witt’s
essentialism aims to offer a metaphysical picture of our social existence: what
unifies and organises the various social roles we occupy (parent, academic, doctor,
friend, teacher, etc.). She argues that this unifying function is gender – it
is the ‘mega social role’ that is prior to and defines all other social roles, and
is thus uniessential to us social
individuals5. Hers is a view about the structure of social
normativity, where social normativity is comprised of the expectations,
obligations, and allowances that the various social roles we occupy bring us.
Witt believes we are responsive to and evaluated under these norms irrespective
of whether we, like Woolf, endorse them consciously or unconsciously. She
concludes by arguing that feminism should work under the notion that the gender
binary, or the engendering function, is the mega social role, but its aim
should be to deconstruct the social roles and norms that oppress women.6
Gender identity is a necessary normative principle, but it should be
egalitarian. Therefore, when addressing the notion of men and women’s differing
‘creative power’, Witt would insist that the expression of creativeness is a
principle of normative unity to which gender is still a prior definitional and
organisational social role. She would, however, argue that the social role of
women as being mild-mannered and uncreative homemakers was oppressive, and the gendered
limitations placed on women’s creative freedom should not stay as a normative principle. In this way, she would align
herself with Woolf’s impassioned spurn of contemporary norms, insisting too
that women should be on equal footing with their creative counterparts.
Yet,
is not the idea that women need some
principle of normative unity in order to exercise their practical social agency
frankly erroneous? Why is gender identity at all necessary for liberation?
Allow the pendulum of ideas to swing back to constructionism and the simple
answer is that it is not. To the
anti-essentialist’s eye, representations of physical and biological reality,
including race, sexuality and gender, are merely social constructs. Arguably,
this notion and much of the present-day work in the field of cultural studies can
be seen as shaped by the postmodern movement. And, indeed, the work of
contemporary gender constructionists has been strongly influenced by that of
postmodern feminists, who saw ‘woman’ as represented by a form of metonymic
differentiation that reproduced her oppression by excluding her from history7
– by ‘otherising’ her. The pioneer semiotician and psychoanalyst Julia
Kristeva, in particular, critiqued the concept of woman as deviant, as an
‘Other’. She rejected the category itself of ‘woman’, refusing to believe that
one can be a woman in an essential
ontological sense8, and tried to project a postmodern Subject beyond
the categories of gender. She argued that ‘the very dichotomy man/woman as an
opposition between two rival entities may be understood as belonging to metaphysics. What can ‘identity’ – even
‘sexual identity’ – mean in a new theoretical and scientific space, where the
very notion of identity is challenged?’9 Here, she alludes to one of
the cornerstones of Queer theory, a philosophy of modern constructionism: fixed
identity is redundant. And, furthermore, normative identities allow for
systemic discrimination, through rigid categorisation. Judith Butler, a prominent
queer theorist, insists that ‘gender is cultural fiction,’10 and
argues for the idea that our gender identity is nothing more than
representation, than performance. Where Witt would argue that the engendering
function is a social norm set up to respond to the essential biological need to
reproduce11, Butler would disagree that gender identity is an
expression of some sort of innate or natural characteristic. Instead, she and
many other queer theorists would maintain that in performing a gender, we are creating a gender. Hence, gender is a
representation of reality that is an arbitrary social construct. The very
nature of being ‘queer’, then, is to take on an identity entirely without an
essence.12 It was Michel Foucault who believed that, in this way, we
can attempt to debunk the regulatory spaces in which identities are formed,
reinforced and reproduced.13 He proposed that these frames,
comparable to an omnipresent disciplinary regime, are employed as a means to
maintain social control over conceptions and practices in gender and sexual
identification to guarantee that identities are suited to hetero-normativity.
Interestingly, Foucault was intensely focussed on the notion of power, and on
considering Woolf’s notion of ‘creative power’ he would probably have held that
the only way to dismantle the imbalance between ‘men’ and ‘women’ would be to
dismantle the gender binary completely. In assigning ourselves to normative
categories, we allow ourselves to be too easily suffocated by stereotypes and,
thus, systemically oppressed. Furthermore, if we believe the term ‘creative
power’ to refer to an innate characteristic, queer theory would deny that this,
and indeed any, trait ‘differs’ between (inessential) gender categories. It would insist that we could
substitute any quality or concept for ‘creative power’ and the conclusion would
remain the same – that gender has no objective bearing on the manifested
characteristics of gendered individuals. Take musical ability, take organisational
skills, take hand-eye co-ordination, and the response still stands that not one
of these notions is exclusive to one gender; and the spectrum of varying
capabilities in each area crosses all supposed gender boundaries so that every
personal characteristic transcends gender. Therefore, for queer theorists, the
idea that ‘creative power’ might be inherently
different for a woman and a man is fallacious inasmuch as the social
categories ‘woman’ and ‘man’ are arbitrary.
Therefore,
I would contend that if the ‘creative power’ of men and women’ differs, it is because
of the general effect that oppression has on a group of people, regardless of
whether they are essentially different. So, because of the specific social
position that the Western woman has occupied historically, her ‘creative
power’, whatever it may be, has been restrained by Patriarchy and the
repressive gender roles that she has had to conform to. But still, it is my
view that neither an essentially gendered difference in creativity, nor the
subconscious committal to learning and performing specific gender identities
could account for an observable difference in men and women’s ‘creative power’.
No, this difference must be the result of millennia-long systemic subjugation,
and the way all power dynamics rest themselves on the imposed divides between
kinds of beings.
This
brings me to my final insistence – that gender is inessential, but for our
society it still has an inescapable impact on identity, and
self-identification. It has been posited that humans are unable to think freely
because society prescribes so much of our identity – that a person is unable to
separate the ‘self’ from environmental conditioning.14 Woolf is
snared in this notion when she argues for the disassembly of patriarchal norms,
but is insistent that we rejoice in our natural categorical differences, and in
doing so accept them as essential and unchanging. ‘Different but equal.’ It is
a line we hear often today, trumpeted eagerly from those attempting to promote
social justice. And yet this trite masquerade of progressivism merely espouses
further inequality by encouraging us to invest in limiting and unnecessary traditional
gender roles. In truth, by investing in a constant gender identity we are
investing in cultural fantasy that only serves to shackle us. For artists in
particular, gender essentialism has repeatedly become yoke-like, and their
creativity has become concentrated on the subject of oppression. Hence, their
‘creative power’ is limited by the identities they feel they must assume.
Consider Yayoi Kusama, whose work was consumed, as she was consumed, by the
suffocating effects of sexual dominance and masculinity. Stuffed-fabric phallic
forms heavily feature in her installations of ‘infinite obsession,’15
covering floors and walls and tables and chairs. And in plastering mundane
furniture with symbols of the overwhelming oppression she was experiencing,
Kusama was not presenting some surreal, gendered fantasy. No, she was simply
illumining a contemporary truth about gender’s impression upon art, upon her
own ‘creative power.’ For, in the abiding words of Paul Klee, ‘art does not
reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.’16
Bibliography
2
Woolf, V. Chapter 5,
in: Woolf, V. A Room of One’s Own. Wordsworth
Edition (2012; originally published 1929)
3
Witt, C. The Metaphysics of Gender. Oxford
University Press (2011)
4
Witt, C. Chapter , in
Witt, C. The Metaphysics of Gender.
Oxford University Press (2011)
6
Witt, C. Chapter , in
Witt, C. The Metaphysics of Gender.
Oxford University Press (2011)
7 Appignanesi, R. and Garratt, C. Introducing Postmodernism (1999)
8 Kristeva, J (1985) as found in: Barker,
C. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice.
SAGE (2003)
9
Kristeva, J (1986) as
found in: Barker, C. Cultural Studies:
Theory and Practice. SAGE (2003)
10 Garbacik, J. Chapter 9, in: Garbacik,
J. Gender and Sexuality for Beginners.
For Beginners (2013)
12 Halperin, D. As found in: Garbacik, J.
Chapter 7, in: Garbacik, J. Gender and
Sexuality for Beginners. For Beginners (2013)
14 Barthes, R. As found in Garbacik, J.
Chapter 7, in: Garbacik, J. Gender and
Sexuality for Beginners. For Beginners (2013)
15 Kusama, Y. From the exhibition entitled
‘Infinite Obsession’ at Centro
Cultural, Rio de Janeiro.
16 Klee, P. Creative Confession. Tate Publishing (2013; originally published
1920)
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