Unbecoming: Queer Negativity/Radical Passivity

Abstract

Beginning with the injunction to ‘lose your mother’ and building towards a conclusion that will advocate a complete dismantling of self, this chapter explores a feminist politics that issues not from a doing but from an undoing, not from a being or becoming woman but from a refusal to be or to become woman as she has been defined and imagined within western philosophy. We will trace broken mother-daughter bonds towards an anti-Oedipal feminism that is nonetheless not a Deleuzian body without organs. This feminism, a feminism grounded in negation, refusal, passivity, absence and silence, offers spaces and modes of unknowing, failing and forgetting as part of an alternative feminist project, a shadow feminism that has nestled within more positivist accounts and unravelled their logics from within. This shadow feminism speaks in the language of self-destruction, masochism, an anti-social femininity and a refusal of the essential bond of mother and daughter that ensures that the daughter inhabits the legacy of the mother and, in doing so, reproduces her relationship to patriarchal forms of power.

It goes without saying that to be among the callous, the cynical, the unbelievers, is to be among the winners, for those who have lost are never hardened to their loss; they feel it deeply, always, into eternity. (Kincaid, 1997, p. 3)

Utopias have always entailed disappointments and failures. (Hartman, 2008, p. 46)

Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world’ woman caught between tradition and modernity. (Spivak, 1988, p. 306)