This article documents our collaborative ongoing struggle to disrupt the reproduction of the coloniality of knowledge in the teaching of Gender Studies. We document how our decolonial feminist activism is actualised in our pedagogy, which is guided by feminist interpretations of ‘wonder’ (Irigaray, 1999; Ahmed, 2004; hooks, 2010) read alongside decolonial theory, including that of Ramón Grosfoguel, Walter D. Mignolo and María Lugones. Using notions of wonder as pedagogy, we attempt to create spaces in our classrooms where critical self-reflection and critical intellectual and embodied engagement can emerge. Our attempts to create these spaces include multiple aspects or threads that, when woven together, might enable other ways of knowing-being-doing that works towards disrupting feminist complicity with coloniality in the Australian context.
Luce Irigaray argues that the way to overcome the culture of narcissism in the Western tradition is to recognize sexuate difference and to refigure subjectivity as sexuate. This article is an attempt to unpack how Irigaray's philosophical refiguring of love as an intermediary works in this process of reimagining subjectivity as sexuate. If we trace the moments in Irigaray's philosophy where she engages with Hegel's dialectic, and rethinks this dialectical process via the question of sexual difference and a refiguring of love, a clearer reading of her work as groundbreaking and ultimately refiguring our (Western) ontological structures becomes possible. Consequently, if we do not understand Irigaray's radical reformulation of love, we will miss her larger ontological project and fail to properly appreciate her comments on other types of difference-for example, differences of race, tradition, religion. This article argues that as we begin to appreciate the ways in which Irigaray refigures both love and thought as the intermediary, an intermediary that fundamentally disrupts phallocentric binary logic, we can begin to imagine how refiguring the most intimate human experience of love can lead us toward the realization of an ethical political community in which difference in all forms is nourished.Luce Irigaray argues that the emergence of an autonomous feminine subjectivity supported by an appropriate feminine imaginary and symbolic would enable us to establish a culture of sexuate difference and a "new era of History" (Irigaray 1996, 64). 1 For this to happen, we must, as sexuate subjects, pass through our own narcissism and recognize that we are always in relation with the other. In doing so, we call into question the omnipotence of the (masculine) individual subject in a culture of narcissism that, according to Irigaray, founds and structures the Western tradition. Irigaray recognizes that the structures of the imaginary and symbolic are crucial for subject formation, but she reimagines autonomous feminine subjectivity according to a different symbolic/imaginary economy, in which the feminine subject would enter culture without sacrificing the relation with her sexuate body. 2 The imaginary/symbolic
Commemorating Epimetheus, a text by a collective known as Les Amis (which translates as "the friends"), honors Epimetheus, one of Prometheus's lesser known brothers. Similar to the way in which ancient Greek discourse has been critiqued by numerous authors for its oft-embraced polarities, Prometheus and Epimetheus are set up as mythological binary figures-that is, two brothers with names that speak to different callings: respectively, "he who thinks before" and "he who thinks after" (3, 2). This book, then, is a commemoration of the past as much as of Epimetheus, remembered brother who "thinks after" the ways of the Earth, sharing in "the memory of what has been […] so as to care for the present and the future" (2-3). What is particularly compelling about this telling is the language of the text, rendered in English by S. Pluháček and reminiscent of works by Luce Irigaray such as Elemental Passions. The authors have shattered the logos of the early Greeks by preconceiving such poets as Heidegger, Irigaray, and Derrida. Knowing little about the source text has the potential of being a distraction. However, the possibility that the authors "thought before" the likes of the aforementioned philosophers presupposes the problem of chronology. Might we, then, also read this text as a pre-originary story of ancient discourse? That is, in the "thinking before" of he who "thought after"? This, indeed, is the question. Acknowledging the innocent beginnings of agricultural existence (indeed, in Heideggerian terms, the opening of a clearing in which to dwell) and the divinity of everyday love (in Irigarayan terms, the presence of dialogue , indirection, and silence), the authors evoke Epimetheus, hearkening back to the "earlier ways of our being-in-the-world" (14). Such a "time before" implicates space for non-agricultural wanderings. As the authors indicate, our "current lovelessness" suggests there exists at our core a fear of wandering (25). The themes of sharing, caring, meeting, dwelling, and loving are presented to commemorate Epimetheus's wisdom on these matters-and, are carried out beautifully so. But what might all of this mean for a land that has gone a different way, toward a "Promethean desire to no longer be dependent upon the earth" (17)? Indeed, both the timeliness and timelessness of this text offer hope. For, as these authors (and our other pre-originary poets) ask, "Is not the future the coming of the startlingly unexpected, the unknown-indeed, the unknowable and that which cannot be expected?" (77). Herein, the fearless wanderings of Epimetheus "think after" and upon the ways of the Earth, prior to such things as profit, property, boundary, and appropriation. Within his kind of thinkingafter, however, thankfulness and care embed themselves. Certainly, the différance projected herein conveys a sense of care that both "differs" and "defers," suggesting creative play as we come to terms with "(the worlding of) [our] world," our "knot of existence so firmly tied together" (45, 93). Would that we could make such...
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