Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World
Brown University
Box 1837 / 60 George Street
Providence, RI 02912
Telephone: (401) 863-3188
Fax: (401) 863-9423 [email protected]
I was in seventh grade when in English class we were supposed to learn how to debate. We would receive our assignment as “pro,” or “con” a certain issue and have a day or two to prepare arguments and counter-arguments. This is how I found myself arguing against women’s rights – at the age of 12. Running around the halls and sharing my preoccupation about the debate with all my classmates, I remember running into a genius of a friend of mine who explained to me how I could structure my argument. She and I are still in touch. She said, “I know how you can do it. Imagine this, are there cow’s rights? No. There are animal’s rights. Just the same way, there should only be human’s rights. There is no need for an extra women’s rights, as if women are not human - you know?” Pure genius. I bought it. And I sold it. It worked.
I didn’t know at the time that my friend Y. was referring to the problem about how the “woman” would forever maintain its status as the “marked,” category as opposed to the unmarked category of man. This mark is of course hierarchical and highly political. The question then is: To begin to unmark this category of the woman, does one deny its markedness or work from within that markedness, taking it for granted? How far does it get us to deny its markedness with the argument that it should not have been marked in the first place?
I find it tragic and ironic that an attempt to perhaps emancipate women turns into their further essentialization, the way Tringham and Conkey argue. Female formed figurines with pronounced breasts and buttocks have been presented as proof for the possibility of matriarchy in anthropology. Here is a strong woman, robust and nurturing, the ultimate mother, the goddess. The almost naïve expectation by presenting this figurine as the representation of matriarchy is the resurgence of woman’s social power by proving it’s possibility through its prior existence. I appreciate dearly Tringham and Conkey’s critique about how this imagery of the female goddess is a further reduction of women’s role as nurturing mothers, summarized, unfairly represented and essentialized by their reproductive qualities alone. This is reminiscent of Butler’s argument about how feminism in trying to emancipate women has constructed the legal subject of “woman,” which further subjugates women because of the limitations of the discourse within which it is constructed. All this is well. And I find these critiques truly insightful. Revelational in a tragic way, but insightful nevertheless. I can only hope to use them and let them inform me in my own research.
But I also find in these critiques an outcry against the markedness of the category of woman. The category is already marked, whether we like it or not. We need the notion of “women’s rights,” as separate from “human’s rights,” whether we like it or not. The social reality of this world still supports structural inequality between men and women. As such, operating from within the markedness of the category of women and asserting through the “goddess” narrative that there was a time when women reigned might in fact be a way to humble patriarchy in its unmarkedness today. Post-structuralism has proven very impressive in deconstructing binary oppositions in sex and gender and explicating sex as socially constructed. How much can such deconstruction reverse in terms of identifying “emic” categories, I’m not sure.
