Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. page 101
The relation of aggression to, and mastery of, the other can be seen in feminist identifications. For example, in 1981 bell hooks described how: “as I moved from one women’s group to another trying to offer a different perspective, I met with hostility and resentment. White women liberationists saw feminism as ‘their’ movement and resisted any efforts by non-white women to critique, challenge or change its direction.” (1981: 190)
hooks’s description of the aggression and hostility that greet her reveals the other side of feminist identifications. hooks describes imaginary perceptions of commonality that construct the feminist subject as ‘white’ and women of ‘colour’ as an other to the white feminist. When the ‘other’ insists on her difference, she is met with the aggression of an imaginary identification that seeks to master difference and reduce it to identity. Typically of the next feminist generation, Chambers (1995: 27) and Jee Yuan Lee (1995: 209) identify the aggression and fixity of such imaginary identifications as one of the most difficult problems facing the third-wave reconstruction of feminism. However, Lee also points out that an acknowledgement of the multiple axes of oppression is crucial to the contemporary rearticulation of feminist politics (1995: 211). Because an imaginary relation to the other refuses to acknowledge the politics of the differences between women, it prevents that rearticulation. … Without such a recreation, feminist politics will enact the imaginary mastery of an other which reproduces the social relations of power that enable a subject to enact that mastery. That reproduction does not challenge the operation of power within the feminist movement.
In its refusal to recognize the politics of power within the feminist movement, imaginary identification condemns feminists to reproducing rather than resisting those politics of power. 102
A feminist identification that operates in the imaginary order thus reproduces the violence of contemporary social relations. It imagines the feminist movement as the relation of a woman to another identical to herself, rather than as formed in the negotiated relations between women.
That woman treats her relation to other women with all the contempt that power gives – the power to refuse another’s subjectivity. An imaginary feminist identification, which leads a subject to refuse the particularity and specificity of another subject, condemns her to participating in ‘the same falsely universalizing pretensions as the masculine knowledge’ (Lennon and Whitford 1994a: 3). In an identification in the imaginary register, ‘feminism’ shifts from being an identificatory object to being an object of idealization. It renders the discourses of feminism in the singular, feminisms as feminism, and the many feminist subjects as a universal ‘feminist’ subject. It fixes feminism in the narcissistic gaze of a subject, who is able to gaze at others in this way because the social order gives her the power to do so. Such an act of aggression and mastery militates against an ethics of mutual recognitions.
Without a recognition of the difference of an other, a feminist subject cannot have an ethical relation to that other. An ethical relation is not possible because the other is denied its existence as other and as such can exist only as the subject desires it to. Reciprocal relations require two subjects, not one. The other woman is not allowed to be herself, but only to reflect the self of the powerful subject.
Imaginary identifications constitute the possibility of the recognition of, and relation to, others because they form relations between subjects. However, in the relation of self to other women, there also needs to be recognition of the alterity of the other woman. She must be recognized not only in her similarity and commonality but also in her difference and non-identity.102