16/07/2019
Masculine Discourse // Ashtanga Yoga
When I wrote my PhD I was criticised for not being critical enough. I embraced Luce Irigaray's words and wrote according to them. Like her my gesture was to seek harmony and understanding between myself and the other. I was able to engage critically with her work, but this gesture was one of not tearing apart, but one to ensure our mutual becoming and learning. Funnily enough the criticism came from women themselves who had wholeheartedly adopted the patriarchal way of engaging academically which did not embody the logic of the feminine.
That said, I understand anger, and I think spiritual communities to their detriment try to repress anger, or criticism. Personal experience is prioritised over and above healing, the larger picture, social justice and evolving our practices and teachings so they embody and articulate women’s relationship to the divine and spiritual life.
Yet anger is an emotion and needs to be felt and used to generate change - but how we express anger is important to our practice. As women many of us inherently know a different way of relating to that of the masculine. The way we, as women might engage in dialogue can change the shape of the conversation that is being had. I have done so much emotional labour for men, and other women whose "buy in” to patriarchal structures, teachings, systems of yoga and ways of engaging in dialogue is creating and has created harm.
The debates rage. Behind it lies those who speak, those who do not and those whose emotional labour creates the possibility for dialogue. Yet SHE remains sublimated and forgotten and men continue to dominate the narrative.
Man’s search has, in complex ways, both excluded and incorporated the maternal feminine. The sublimation of the maternal feminine leaves us a women alienated in our own world, yoga traditions and spiritual life. Worse still discussions of the maternal feminine, her sublimation throughout time is seen as ‘unspiritual’. This is because pointing out s*xual indifference (lack of subject position for women) and its manifestation in social practices may be deemed ‘dualistic’ and thus irrelevant. In this way we can see that nonduality, as a philosophy within a phallologocentric institution, can serve, in subtle and complex ways, to silence women.
We need women’s voices, not voices which seek to dominate, to explain away or to be led by the masculine. Women who have discovered themselves beyond the confines of what our society, yoga traditions and religions have provided us by ways of self definition. To embody the way of love women need a subject position and the space to engage in dialogue beyond masculine discourse. Women please speak, we need your voices, we need men to remember the destruction and violence that might be inherent in their teaching, their words, their transcendence...
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“The problem of the s*xuation of discourse has, paradoxically, never been posed. Man, as an animal gifted with language, as a rational animal, has always represented the only possibly subject of discourse, the only possibly subject. And his language appears to be the universal itself. The mode(s) of predications, the categories of discourse, the forms of judgement, the dominion of the concept…have never been interrogated as determined by a s*xed being. If the relation of the subject speaking to nature, to the given or fabricated object, to God the creator, to other intraworldy existants, has been question in different epochs of history, it has never seemed, still does not seem to call into question that apriori: that this is, still and always, a matter of a universe or world of man.” Luce Irigaray
