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We always have to ask one question: the "difference" of whom from whom, and in the name of what?
Women: Women are part of another culture, the culture of silence. Acknowledging that women's values are more likely to promote the so urgently needed culture of peace. Women are seldom found among the decision and policy makers who send people to war. Women frequently make up both the rank and file and the leadership of peace movements.1 (http://www.wmich.edu/com455/alternate.html)
"Why have there been no great woman artists ?" asks Linda Nochlin and answers herself that "because women are incapable of greatness." (Nochlin, Linda "Women, Art and Power, and other Essays";Thames and Hudson 1989)
Jean Baudrillard writes :
What is produced with the romantic turn, at the turn of the 19th century, is on the contrary the putting into play of a masculine hysteria and, with it, of a change in sexual paradigms that once again must be reinserted in the more general and universal context of a change in the paradigms of otherness.
During this hysterical phase, it is to a certain extent the femininity of men that is projected onto women and that shape them as ideal figures of likeness [ressemblance]. Romantic love is no longer about winning over a woman's heart, or about seducing her. It is rather a matter of creating her from inside [de l'interieur], of inventing her, either as a realized utopia (an idealized woman), or as a "femme fatale", a star, which is yet another hysterical and supernatural metaphor. This is the entire work of the romantic Eros: he is the one who has invented such an ideal harmony, such a love fusion, almost an incestuous form, between twin beings (woman as a projected resurrection of the same, and woman who takes her supernatural shape only as an ideal of the same), an artifact from now on destined to love, that is to say destined to a pathos of ideal likeness [ressemblance] of beings and sexes, a pathetic confusion that replaces the dual otherness [alterite] of seduction. The entire erotic machinery changes meaning/direction [sens] because the erotic attraction that once came from otherness [alterite], from the strangeness of the Other, now shifts to the side of the Same, to the side of similarity and likeness [ressemblance]. Auto-eroticism? Incest? No, but rather a hypostasis of the Same. Of the same that eyes the other, that invests and alienates himself in the other. But the other is never more than the ephemeral form of a difference that draws me closer to the I [me rapproche de moi]. It is also the reason why, with romantic love and all its current by-products, sexuality draws nearer to death: it is because sexuality is getting closer to incest and to its own destiny, even if it is banalized (for it is no longer a question of a mythical or tragic incest; with modern erotism we are only dealing with a diverted form of incest, that of the projection of the same into the image of the other, which is the same thing as a confusion and a corruption of all the images).
Finally, it is the invention of a femininity which renders women superfluous, the invention of a difference which is nothing more than a diverted copulation with one's double. In the final analysis [au fond], any encounter with otherness [alterite] is made impossible (by the way, it would be interesting to know whether there has ever been a hysterical counterpart to this phenomenon from the feminine side in the construction of virile and phallic mythologies. Feminism is in fact an example of hystericization of the masculine by women, a hysterical projection of their masculinity which follows exactly the hysterical projection by men of their femininity in the mythical image of a woman).
In short, in this extrapolation process of the Same in the production of the Other, in this hysterical invention of the sexual other as a twin brother or sister (if the issue of twinning is so up-to-date, it is because it reflects this very mode of libidinal cloning), there is a progressive assimilation of the sexes which goes from difference to a lesser difference, and from there to a visual inversion and non-differentiation of the sexes which, in the last analysis, turns the sexual function into something totally useless. In the cloning process, useless sexual beings will be reproduced. They are useless since sexuality is no longer necessary to their reproduction.
The real woman seems to disappear in that hysterical invention of femininity (but she has many more ways to resist that), in that invention of sexual difference whereby the masculine side is from the beginning the privileged pole and through which all the ideological and feminist struggles will be doomed to reconstruct either that very privilege or that unreconciled difference. But, at the same, the so-called masculine desire also becomes, through the same invention, completely problematic since it is no longer able to project in an other its own image, and thus to become purely speculative. All this nonsense about the phallus and the sexual privilege of masculinity must also be re-examined. There is a sort of transcending justice in this process of sexual non-differentiation, a justice which drives both sexes to inexorably culminate in total non-differentiation where they lose their singularity and their otherness [alterite]. This is the era of Transsexualism where all the struggles linked to sexual Difference are perpetuated well after any real sexuality or any type of real otherness has disappeared.2 (http://www.ctheory.com/a33-plastic_surgery.html)
In this era of feminism, the question of creativity and gender has become politicized. the impulse to create is always, at least in part, an effort to compensate for the frustration of that most powerful and archaic human wish based on the universal identification with the mother of early childhood: the wish to give birth to a child of one´s own.
Postmodernist feminism calls for a multiplicity of female voices, so feminism itself does not become hierarchical. Women have historically operated outside systems of hierarchy.
What is the solution? Well, there is none to this erotic movement of an entire culture, none to such a fascination, to such an abyss of denial of the other, of denial of strangeness and negativity. There is none to that foreclosing of evil and to that reconciliation around the Same and his proliferated expressions: incest, autism, twinning, cloning. We can only remember that seduction lies in not reconciling with the Other and in salvaging the strangeness of the Other. We must not be reconciled with our own bodies or with our selves. We must not be reconciled with the Other. We must not be reconciled with nature. We must not be reconciled with femininity (and that goes for women too). The secret to a strange attraction lies here.3(Ibid)
Yet it seems that in today´s world all is not well in the contemporary scene of plurality, heterogeneity and diversity. Micro-narratives of class/race/and gender have replaced macro-narratives of women's subordination across cultures, societies, and historical periods.4 http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/COE/EPS/PES-Yearbook/94_docs/BENHABIB.HTM
The Guerrilla Girls
The Guerrilla Girls are a group of women artists and arts professionals who make posters about discrimination. Dubbing ourselves the conscience of the art world, they declare themselves feminist counterparts to the mostly male tradition of anonymous do-gooders like Robin Hood, Batman, and the Lone Ranger. They wear gorilla masks to focus on the issues rather than our personalities. They use humor to convey information, provoke discussion, and show that feminists can be funny. In 10 years they have produced over 70 posters, printed projects, and actions that expose sexism and racism in the art world and the culture at large. Their work has been passed around the world by kindred spirits who consider themselves Guerrilla Girls too. The mystery surrounding their identities has attracted attention and support. They could be anyone; they are everywhere.5 (http://www.voyagerco.com/gg/)
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