SE01 E05: Purity, Impurity, and Separation
Anna -
So that's good. Okay.
Got it. Got it. Okay. I'm going to hit “record” on the doohickey.
Kristin - There's that intro music again.
Anna- There it is. Yes, that's right. Well, welcome to Thinking Bodies: a feminist philosophy podcast. Hi, Kristin!
Kristin- Hello, hi!
A- Oh, hello. We're both so excited!
K- I know we're so excited. We didn't figure out who was going to say hi first.
A- We can say it together.
K- That's true.
K- Western philosophers have separated the mind and body. Here on Thinking Bodies, we are pulling on the threads that have always held them together. To do this, we crowdsource voice clips, to discuss works in feminist philosophy that deserve more attention. Our podcast collages with these clips as a feminist DIY experiment.
A- And I love experimenting with you, Kristin, but maybe feminist experiments are inherently things we do together.
K- Together, there it is again, a do-it-together podcast.
There it is again. I’m Anna Mudde. I’m on the Lands of the nêhiyawak, Anihšināpēk, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda peoples, of the Michif/Métis nation, also called Pile of Bones.
K- And I'm Kristin Rodier recording today and Amiskwaciwâskahikan, homelands of the Plains Cree, the Woodland Cree, The Beaver Cree, The Ojibwe and the Métis. Also called Beaver Hills House.
Adriana & Brooke 1:43
My name is Adriana Rincon Villegas. My name is Brooke Rudow.
1:49
A- We've got a landmark here, Kristin. This is the last experiment in our experimental season one. So we're thinking about what's to come.
K- I know we do have to think about what's to come, and possibilities are open if you ask me.
A- Absolutely Yeah.
K- We've been thinking about maybe contributors who have or would like to be on the podcast could help us with sort of curating our episode collage.
A- I'd love that.
K- Yeah. Coming forward with an idea of who might want to submit clips, and sort of we could work together on that. I was thinking of it sort of as a guest editor, how you guest edit a journal, but it's here. It's like you're guest-producing a podcast. So as far as I'm concerned, season two holds all kinds of possibilities.
A- Yes, all kinds of possibilities. And if you want to know what we're thinking about and planning so far for season two, you can find us on social media. We left off last time, foreshadowing our entrance into social media, and we have now entered.
K-Yes
A- We have entered into social media, and hopefully, soon, we will have someone else very hard at work, putting together some short videos for us, and soon they will be up, and you'll be able to have a sense of what pieces we're thinking about looking at for next season.
K- That's right. I actually have some podcast reflections that I wanted to start us off with.
A- I do too, but please go ahead. That would be amazing.
K- So, sort of thinking of our Season One wrapped. I have a new respect for people who create and release podcasts on a regular basis. Yeah.
A- Oh my gosh.
K- I had no idea the amount of behind the scenes labor involved. Most of the time, you know, I'm just clicking through, consume, consume, and it's all free. You know, there's some ads, but, you know, you're just sort of consuming, consuming. Even with an experimental approach, right? Not especially regimented. This is a lot of planning and labor so yes.
A -Yeah. So much respect. That's such a good thing to note, and I wanted to note that I have a new appreciation for Kristin, who really keeps us on track and really motivated through all of that behind-the-scenes labour. So thank you so much, Kristin, because it really is true. There's so much behind-the-scenes labor involved even in this sort of experimental mode. And I just appreciated that so very much.
Kristin 4:30
Well, now I sound like I'm fishing for compliments, but I. I actually. You know, same. Same to you. But, you know, I was going to make a joke, basically, that, like. I definitely have a side of my brain that works well on project management, and for my Ph.D., believe it or not, I read a lot of life-hacking books. Lots of books on habit and willpower and, training yourself, getting things done. You know, what?
Anna 5:04
Yeah.
Kristin 5:04
It warped me in some ways, but it made me better in others.
Anna 5:10
I'm sure that's right.
Kristin 5:11
That's how power works now, isn't it?
Anna 5:14
That’s right. Thank you, Atomic Habits.
A- Our piece today is from María Lugones, called Purity, Impurity and Separation. From 1994. Lugones was an Argentinean feminist philosopher educated in the U.S. in the 1970s. She died in 2020 and left a really sizable hole in philosophy and a really beautiful, important body of work. She taught philosophy in, largely, women and gender studies for most of her career in the U.S.
Kristin 5:50
Yes, this article is Purity, Impurity and Separation. I think a lot about purity. You know, purity culture, I think, is something that has entered a bit of a popular discourse thinking about dominant forms of Christianity. You know, sort of sexual purity, and I feel like this is such an important concept, and it seems like Lugones has been, you know, successful, I think, in proliferating suspicion about purity.
Anna 6:21
Oh, that's a beautiful way to put that. Yes. Yeah.
Kristin 6:24
Like even now, I hear people say, you know, that's an exercise of purity politics, and that's not a good thing, right?
Anna 6:32
Right? Yeah.
Kristin 6:33
So it's a way of naming a move of domination, within political organizing. You know, it kind of is a shutdown.
Anna 6:43
Yeah.
Kristin 6:43
Alexis Shotwell, who was on our first episode, has an entire book of feminist philosophy from 2016 entitled Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times.
Anna 6:55
Go read it. It's fantastic!
Kristin 6:55
So if you're interested in Lugones, go read Lugones, go read Shotwell, go read lots of stuff in our citations and our show notes. Alexis's book works with the central idea that really resonates with Lugones' work, which is the idea of our fundamental complexity as irreducible.
Anna 7:17
Oh, yeah. Yeah. And this is a beautiful part of this paper, which we'll get to. Lugones has another really highly influential paper from 1987 called Playfulness World Traveling and Loving Perception, and many people who've read Lugones will have read that piece. There, she argues that among women, love is the ground of solidarity, and it's required for an adequate recognition of plurality and so plurality difference among and within groups of women.
Kristin 7:51
Hmm. Hmm.
Anna 7:51
And there's a sort of preview in that article around the idea of unity as a form of domination.
Kristin 8:00
Hmm.
Anna 8:00
So in the piece that we're looking at for today, she develops the idea of plurality by talking about human beings as multiplicitous, and mestizaje or comprised of “parts” that are inextricably mixed together. I use parts there in scare quotes because as we'll see, the parts talk becomes really important.
Kristin 8:21
Exactly.
Anna 8:22
The idea is that we can think of ourselves in parts sometimes, but actually, those parts are always mixed together in ways that affect all of the parts and that we can't actually pull apart. So we're mestizaje, and we'll come back to that term later.
Most of us live with social meanings that are complex. You're not simple! What is it like when important parts of you are reduced to only one of the parts about you? So many of us know ways of living that are different, multiple, and complex. So what is it like when the knowledge of those ways of living are rendered unintelligible in the dominant culture? Many who have relocated from one cultural context to another are familiar with this. While you might experience moving between contexts, often there are parts of the self that have to be separated to conform or to survive. How does the forced separation between parts of the self function to reinforce oppressions? What is it like to live like to live between and across groups, that social categories insist are different and separate? María Lungones writes that we are multiplicitous. Does that resonate with you, or do you prefer to think of yourself as neatly distinguished or distinguishable parts?
Kristin 9:48
Yeah. I'm really interested in this article. It's deep. It's complex. There's a lot going on, but it's also big oppression theory.
Anna 9:59
Yeah.
Kristin 9:59
You know, it's really taking a look at how forms of domination perpetuate. What are their tools,
how do they work within grooves of society
Dog playing with toy sound in the background
to reinforce domination and, you know, then it also goes to what to do about it.
Anna 10:25
Yes, I encountered Lugones as a graduate student, and so I'm really… I'm really excited to do that deep reading today because Lugones has actually been really personally and philosophically important to me. She sort of appeared with another philosopher, Charles Mills, at this really pivotal time for me. And I often say – among other things – they sort of gave some methodological cues to me about how one might proceed. But they also – both Mills and Lugones – articulate things about how whiteness operates in ways that, at the time, I didn't yet have language for and didn't have philosophical strategies to invoke to deal with them. And so I really read Lugones’ very, very seriously and in that capacity. So I'm really excited to to dig into this with you today.
Kristin 11:20
It's so interesting how all of the pieces that we've talked about so far–talking about these pieces of feminist philosophy have always brought up the question of philosophy.
Anna 11:33
Yeah.
Kristin 11:34
Which, inherently is connected to practices in the discipline. So it's so interesting to me that you're finding these amazing tools in her work, at the same time, it's making you sort of say, “Oh, maybe there are things I want to do in philosophy.”
Anna 11:52
Right.
Kristin 11:52
So it's also part of your story.
Anna 11:54
Yes, they were a particular kind of calling back in to philosophy for me because they gave some critical space. Yeah. Which is, I think maybe not unusual for those of us who sometimes find orthodox philosophy challenging in various ways.
Kristin 12:13
I didn't feel called in. I just stayed out of spite.
Anna 12:16
Yes! Or out of spite! “We will not let them have it!”
Kristin 12:26
I’m joking! Maybe only half. Anyway, you know, I found this piece challenging and just to go back to what I was saying, it was, again, challenging because I was thinking about how my training in the discipline has been. Trained up this part of me that is also a lover of purity in the way that Lugones is talking about.
Anna 12:47
Me, too.
Kristin 12:48
You can't in the discipline of philosophy without taking on some of this this this lover of purity who, you know, wants to make sense of things, wants to divide things into categories and concepts. And, you know, I'm reading things that are you know, some of the things in this article are expressed, in Spanish, in vignettes and metaphor and story, you know. But then I was also thinking about the sort of double standard around the fact that, like this is a lot of what existentialism is like. Different formats and genres, you know, like philosophy, actually do have a lot of different genres going on.
Anna 13:24
Yeah.
Kristin 13:25
But the tools tend to be sort of what's the central argument, What's the thesis? There's a sort of critical posture that isn't useful, and that is also in this case and that is also tied to that, to that lover of purity, that logic of purity. So I had to just kind of think about how I was resisting that urge, you know, and then noticing that training in myself.
Anna 13:51
Yes. And that's I think that's maybe a really beautiful thing that Lugones and some other philosophers, too, but certainly, Lugones solicit in us the sort of noticing ourselves in a particular way and then noticing what we can do in response to that, noticing what problems that throws up for us and also what it is getting us, which may or may not be things that we want to have in the end. And so, yeah, this piece is really complex, and it's really rich María Lugones work is characteristically this way, and it does begin with, and alternates between writing and English and writing in Spanish. It also begins with a description of making mayonnaise, which that is unusual in philosophy. Even informs a philosophy that uses different kinds of styles and modes. I think this may be the only instance of making mayonnaise in a philosophical context, which is amazing.
Kristin 14:57
That’s good for me because I want to talk about cooking all the time
Anna 14:59
Yes, I was going to say, you probably think about mayonnaise and philosophy much of the time. So I gather. An amazing cook. Yes. But it's also about subjectivity, which is something that I spend a lot of my work thinking about. I think about subjectivity as a way of thinking about very basically, all the kinds of things there are in the world. What kind of thing is a human being? And specifically, what are we formed and shaped In the world to do? And also to think like, how are our ways of thinking, which even in philosophy, we often take to be sort of not something we can ask questions about. But I think a lot about subjectivity because I think it's really interesting to notice the ways in which we think in certain ways as opposed to others. And so a lot of my thinking about subjectivity, I guess, involves some objectivity. How do you think about subjectivity, Kristin?
Kristin 15:58
I think a lot about habit. And so, how is it that the things that we become used to then become spontaneous in us?
Anna 16:05
Right.
Kristin 16:05
Right. And so you do things out of habit in good ways and bad ways and so on. But, those things are trained up by, you know, our environment, by structures. Language is a big part of that. But when I think about subjectivity, I think a lot about experience. Sort of self-understanding, self-consciousness, what it's like to be the kind of beings that we are.
Anna 16:32
Yeah.
Kristin 16:33
And that's not homogeneous.
Anna 16:39
Yeah! It varies so much between us. Yeah. And actually that sort of turning back to oneself when reading someone like María Lugones is a really nice instance of subjectivity practice, I think. Sort of. Subject to any capacity. Yeah. So I thought we could maybe pull on some of the threads here. And I'm really conscious that doing that is going to tend toward the thing that Lugones was warning us about. That's the levelling out and simplifying of what's complex and multiplicitous. Let's try with the logic of purity. So Lugones describes her experience, in her words, as a Latina in the United States, and she describes this as an experience of a dominant way of perceiving and ordering or making sense of the social world that is present in white Anglo practice in American culture. And she experiences that, she says, as having her multiplicity and complexity sort of handled or managed or controlled.
Kristin 17:49
That fundamental assumption of human beings as multiplicitous is. I guess. And that if that's a big change.
Anna 18:04
Yes.
Kristin 18:04
From a sort of mainstream liberal.
Anna 18:10
Autonomous.
Kristin 18:10
Philosophical tradition.
Anna 18:11
Yeah.
Kristin 18:12
Where you have a unitary self.
Anna 18:15
Yes.
Kristin 18:16
You have a unitary self. It's a self knower.
Anna 18:19
Yeah.
Kristin 18:20
And, you know, the self is transparent, and they're they're not marked by culture, gender, race, class. There's this kind of empty subject, and there's no multiplicity. If there is, it needs to be eradicated
Anna 18:34
Right.
Kristin 18:35
And left behind, parcelled out to become the self that you should value,
Anna 18:41
Right?
Kristin 18:41
You know, and when she talks about feeling handled, managed, and controlled, I really thought about sort of physically being stopped, and, you know, I was thinking about how important a piece like this is. I could see how this piece would be important to revisit and reanimate, given the sort of uses of the U.S.. Mexico border. Right now. And what a flash point, what a violent flashpoint that is. And to try to unpack these tools of racism that are really fueling elections. So, yeah, it's just really interesting to talk about having her multiplicity handled.
Anna 19:26
Handled? Yes. Managed. Yeah. Or ordered? Organized.
Kristin 19:31
Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.
Anna 19:32
Yeah. And organized for her. Not by her, but for her. So if we, if we sort of try to locate Lugones as she locates herself, we can say that she's an Argentinean lesbian feminist philosopher who, as I said before, worked in the US and who is a subject of multiplicity, living under the logic of purity, both U.S. colonial, white supremacist, queerphobic, misogynistic logics of purity. But also the logics of purity as they operate within academia generally and in philosophy.
Kristin 20:09
That's right. In the article, I thought she really laid it out as kind of she's explaining and exploring the conceptual world of purity.
Anna 20:19
Yes.
Kristin 20:20
I think this is really important because we have to say that it's a conceptual world.
Anna 20:24
Yes, Yes. That's right.
Kristin 20:25
That gets translated into domination and force. It's not naturally arising.
Anna 20:31
Right. And it requires domination, of course, because it's not naturally arising.
Kristin 20:36
And this conceptual world of purity, especially, I think, is addressing questions of theorizing the social world. Which is characteristically really difficult. You've got individuals, you've got groups, you've got structures, organizations, you've got all kinds of interacting forces. And to try to understand, handle, and manage that through the concepts that have to be pure is part of this domination.
Anna 21:10
Yeah. And I love philosophers who talk about the ways in which we live concepts. And this is a really nice instance of this. But what you're talking about is really important because the logic of purity is, she says, a philosophical and political strategy. Right? It's active. So it's not just a way of making sense that is sort of detached from the world, or perceptual alone. It's a way of making sense of the world. That is to say, making organizational sense of the world and managing differences.
Kristin 21:45
You know, this actually reminds me of what Catherine Clune-Taylor was saying in our last episode on Kirsty Dodson's work.
Anna 21:52
Yeah.
Kristin 21:52
You know that there were parts of herself, her gender, her blackness, her queerness, her fatness, all of these fragmented parts. She couldn't bring them into philosophy classrooms, but always knew that these aren't experienced as fragmented, these aren't given as fragmented. That's an active fragmenting. Right! They've been fragmented.
Anna 22:20
The idea there, though. That's right. Is that the logic of purity operates by trying to make each of us in certain ways, clearly and homogeneously one thing and not another. And so that feeling like you have to isolate parts of yourself as they are understood through the logic of purity and then cut them off to do things like enter spaces like philosophy classrooms and be legible and make sense to other people that that really is the logic of purity operate and actively like it. That's a really good example. Yeah. Yeah.
Kristin 23:01
Yeah. And it's not something everyone has to do.
Anna 23:03
Absolutely not. No, that's right.
Kristin 23:05
But it's also something that not everybody has done to them in a way.
Anna 23:09
Right? That's right. Yeah.
Kristin 23:11
It's active, but it's it's it's internalized.
Anna 23:14
That's right. Yeah. And if you never experienced having to move or separate parts of yourself when you're kind of moving between different spaces, it's probably very difficult to know that you are or might be multiplicitous. And you can easily sort of imagine yourself–can easily think of yourself because it doesn't feel like imagining and easily think that you are a sort of pure, simple, clear viewer of the world, just as it is, without having to notice even that you might show up differently in different spaces under different contexts. And that's part of why Lugones describes the logic of purity as that active form of perception. She calls it a vantage point, but it's also an active form of control and domination that tries to categorize and dichotomize, multiplicitous of subjects. So to perceive the world through a meztizaje lens is to also resist and refuse the logic of purity. Right. So not just being a multiplicitous subject, but taking that up
Kristin 24:20
Totally.
Anna 24:20
And knowing that about yourself and thus knowing that the logic of purity is operating around you.
Kristin 24:29
And, you know, well, we'll talk about this closer to the end. But what I love about this piece is that it talks about the power of impurity. The ways in which we can lean into our multiplicity actually shakes loose some of that vantage point.
Anna 24:47
I think that's something that I really love in contested philosophies, which is sort of using the knowledge of people who are marginalized as important tools and skills. I think Adriana's voice clip would be a really lovely addition to our conversation here. So you ready to hear that now?
Adriana25:06
Everyone. My name is Adriana Rincon Villegas I am Colombian. I am currently an assistant lecturer in the political science department at the University of Alberta. My research at large explores state power, particularly how the power of law is gendered, racialized and colonial. And that's where I found the work of María Lugones. So if I wanted to to describe the work of Lugones, particularly purity in purity and separation, I'll tell you that it gives me a sense of connection, not only connection with the academic community that is also interested in studying unequal power relations but also in a deeper, more personal level. And that's what I want to talk about today, how it resonates with me as a Latina American woman, a feminist, a Spanish speaker, migrant.
So there was this turning point in my life that made me deeply aware of these dual worlds. I am navigating. It was migration when I migrated to the US to do my graduate studies, and of course, here I took from a position of privilege, which, in a way, I want to compare with the experience of anyone else. But the thing I remember the most when I arrived in the US in 2013, was how automatically and urgently I abided by the rules of purity. What I mean by this is that I closely observe the behaviour of my classmates. Their social expectations, their interaction sessions, and their interactions in class, outside class. My first thought, my first originally was to camouflage, to to make all those elements of my own existing identity invisible. I remember having this overwhelming feeling of shame about my accent. And my newly learned English skills. And I think this process of communicating or living in a second language transformed me as look on its face into these dual subjects. That was made of little pieces that were very complex, and contested. So this duality was comprised of the visible part of my identity. I was quickly learning how to behave here in the global North or how to exist on a hidden piece of my identity. A space of navigation, if you will, that had my Spanish-speaking Colombian self.
So for me, ideas of purity and separation were definitely normative, and these brought me to states of a lot of confusion and anger. But I studied to be able to articulate this confusion. because I found certain non-hegemonic narratives in academia that provided me with the tools for challenging my own assumptions about what it means to be myself in a totally different language with totally different social expectations. my own, and like my new experience with impurity as resistance as, Lugones says, once I encountered Decolonial, feminists started to read the article, and, of course, María Lugones and I embarked on a process of embracing what Lugones calls their multiplicity. Instead of fragmentation. So instead of trying to leave different pieces of my identity, I am learning how to embrace this contradiction, these mestizaje. That is the space I come from on the wonders of the possible wonders of my imperfection. And I think this is going to be a lifetime goal, experience, and journey. But is it worth it? Thank you very much for this opportunity.
Kristin 30:10
Wow, Adriana, my colleague! Isn't that great?
Anna 30:11
Yeah! Amazing!
Kristin 30:13
Um, I really loved how she's really good at narrative. And that really kind of takes you almost on the journey of the article.
Anna 30:23
Doesn't it? Yeah.
Kristin 30:24
Right through a personal experience. One thing I was thinking about was spaces
And I think a lot of us always sort of observe behaviours and try to fit into a certain extent, but Adriana did a really good job of explaining the shame. And the way that this was sort of normative to hide. So, it's not just about being different. What am I going to do with my difference? It's it's got an evaluation, and then a person can really look to those decolonial texts, to communities, to forms of resistance, and to kind of embrace multiplicity, but also love what Adriana is like. “That's a lifetime journey” right? I really love frameworks of resisting oppression that understand temporality because I feel like there's often this epiphany version of liberation. And then I realized that was a bad thought to have.
Anna 31:41
Right? Yup.
Kristin 31:41
And so then the truth set me free, you know, and I just don't think we're constituted that way to return to subjectivity. I don't think we're constituted that way. And therefore, that's not what's going to help us change. And then there's also the added social and structural and systemic dimension that this lover of purity, just because you kind of become wise to it, doesn't go away. So, wow. Yeah, really great, great, great contribution.
Anna 32:15
Such beautiful work with that idea that we might have to keep learning even ourselves, as is suggested here is such a really like deeply knowledgeable skillful idea and thing to know.
Kristin 32:35
But let's let's shift gears and go to sort of a touchstone metaphor or story.
Anna 32:43
Let's talk about the mayonnaise. Can you talk to us about the mayonnaise? Yes, please.
Kristin 32:49
I'll probably read the first bit, and then we'll stop in the middle then.
Anna 32:52
Please do. That's great
Kristin 32:53
Okay, so. She writes “I am making mayonnaise. I place the yolk in a bowl, add a few drops of water, stir and then add oil, drop by drop. Very slowly as I continue stirring. If I add too much oil at once, the mixture separates. I can remember doing the operation as an impatient child, stopping and saying to my mother, Mamma la mayonesa separada in English, one might say. The mayonnaise curdled.”
Anna 33:30
Oh.
Kristin 33:31
Mayonnaise is an oil and water emulsion like all emulsions. It is unstable when an emulsion curdles. The ingredients become separate from each other. But that is not altogether an accurate description. Rather, they coalesce towards oil or toward water. Most of the water becomes separate from most of the oil. It is instead a matter of different degrees of coalescence. The same with mayonnaise. When it separates, you are left with yolk oil and oily yolk.
Anna 34:09
Yes. Yes, you are. And it's very and it's very sad when that happens so frustrating. Yes. Yeah.
Kristin 34:18
So I like this because she's using the curdling of an emulsion as a contrast to split separation. The contrast between curdling the mayonnaise where you have oily yolk and yolky oil is when you're separating the yolk from a white egg. Right. You split the egg into two parts, and if a little bit of yolk gets into the white, you have to fix that.
Anna 34:47
Start again. Yeah, that's right. And so the logic of purity works on that split separation model, she says. Right. So that you have a pure yolk and a pure white. And those are understood as unified, each of them all the way through. So the white is unified with itself, the yolk is unified with itself, they're each themselves homogeneous and the curdling by contrast. Involves right? Yolky oil and oily yolk
Kristin 35:22
Yeah.
Anna 35:23
Or this kind of. Yeah, she says coalescing which is beautiful.
Kristin 35:26
It's impure,
Anna 35:28
Here. Yeah. By that standard, Yes. Yeah.
Kristin 35:32
The contrast between the yolk and the egg white, I guess, is that you start with an egg and then fragment it.
Anna 35:42
Fragment. Yeah.
Kristin 35:43
And that's why we talked earlier about things being fragmented.
Anna 35:46
Yeah.
Kristin 35:47
So they've been made to be into parts, whereas the oily yolk yolky oil kind of gives us these two in-between states and shows us multiplicity.
Anna 35:59
And there are ways to bring that back together. Right. When that happens, we don't want the we don't want the mayonnaise to curdle. But there are, in fact, things we can do that will bring the mixture together in ways that. Require a purity or fragment. Lugones is pointing out that we are not simple, homogeneous things. We are raised, for example, racialized, but we're also sext and gendered. We live in particular cultures, often more than one at a time, and we live in classes within those cultures. And race, sex, gender, culture and class are inextricably tied to what our bodies can do.
Kristin 36:43
Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.
Anna 36:45
They're inextricably tied to the languages we speak and read and write
Kristin 36:48
Hmm.
Anna 36:49
And the languages we speak with, but also the languages we think with and all of those are dependent on what part of historical time our lives inhabit where we're born and where we move to within our lifetimes.
Kristin 37:04
So, as our communities connect us to, you know, our parts of ourselves and our communities are also used to distinguish us from others. Right? All of these are intertwined in ways that are particular to each of us. Right. I'm thinking about how this is actually connected. I'm thinking about how we make distinctions.
Anna 37:27
Yes.
Kristin 37:28
Right and how there are different kinds of things that are subject to different kinds of distinctions. Right. You can distinguish the egg white from the egg yolk, but, you know, can you distinguish the parts of yourself that are white from the parts of yourself that are a woman? Right.
Anna 37:47
Yes. With which part of me is the white part or which part of me is I'll make my pinky finger the white part and my left eyebrow. The woman part. Yes.
Kristin 37:56
Yeah. So it just sort of seems like we need to always be like Lugones makes me think that we need to be thinking about the kinds of things we're talking about as well,
Anna 38:05
Right.
Kristin 38:06
you know, in the kinds of things we're talking about our subjects. And if we pay attention to them in certain ways, if we understand their experiences, we just kind of get as a fundamental ontology multiplicity.
Anna 38:22
Right? Yeah.
Kristin 38:23
And that's where we're starting from. And that contrasts with this idea of the kind of man of reason that we've been talking about this whole season.
Anna 38:34
Yes. Yeah. And that's very common to talk about in feminist philosophy. Right. This idea that there is. Yes. The right kind of knower, which means the right kind of human being. And the man of reason is someone who is thought to be very rational–maybe purely rational, objective, is often sort of thought of as. Interestingly, or shall we say disembodied or the body doesn't matter. And here Lugones also describes him as someone who thinks of himself as ahistorical and post-cultural without culture.
Kristin 39:16
The post-cultural thing really gets me.
Anna 39:19
It's so peculiar. Yes, some of us are outside of culture. Or beyond culture, maybe.
Kristin 39:25
Yeah.
Anna 39:25
Yes.
Kristin 39:26
And so
Anna 39:26
Yeah.
Kristin 39:26
on that definition, what is culture?
Anna 39:30
Yes.
Kristin 39:30
You know, if only some people have it. How could you know? So, I think her point here is to think about the realm of the political and who's considered a full citizen.
Anna 39:40
Right? Yeah.
Kristin 39:41
Right. Whose citizenship is centred on political theory. Whose forms of subjectivity. I want to. You know, kind of say what kinds of autonomous beings have the wherewithal and the trust and the ability to come up with how we're going to socially organize ourselves, Right? And that person has to have no culture. What? So they have to be because whatever culture comes in, it's kind of tainting their citizenship.
Anna 40:13
Right.
Kristin 40:13
And so she talks about these two things as a kind of codefining in the negative, right? So if you're a full citizen, you don't have any culture. If you're a culture to being, then you can't really be a full citizen. Right. And that means that you don't have access to, you know, affecting political reality.
Anna 40:32
Right.
Kristin 40:33
Your concerns are in the past. They're static. They're marked by your culture. You know, they're they're nonpublic. Right. The public-private distinction here is really important. Leave all that at the door. Right. The way that
Anna 40:47
Thats right.
Kristin 40:48
Even Adriana was saying. Right. Camouflage.
Anna 40:54
To camouflage. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And yes. Part of what Lougones is saying is that for some of us, right? Some of us can at least in some situations, experience ourselves not as camouflage and culture, but as actually being post-cultural or uncultured. We experience ourselves as not really showing up in ways that make us particular, whereas others of us, it seems, cannot show up except as. Cultural historical particular queer embodied.
Kristin 41:28
Hmm.
Anna 41:28
Right and. So these questions about how that works are really important to ask here.
Kristin 41:34
Yeah. Actually, we have a quote here from the Lugone..
Anna 41:37
Lovely. Yeah.
Kristin 41:38
She writes, “Part of what is funny here is that people with culture are people with a culture unknown by full citizens.” Right. Because if they do it, it wouldn't be.
Anna 41:50
It wouldn't be culture. That's right.
Kristin 41:51
Okay, Sorry. Back to the quote. “culture of people culturally transparent is worth knowing. But it does not count as culture. The people whose culture it is are post-cultural. Their culture is invisible to them and thus non-existent as such. cultural full citizens mandate that people with the culture give up theirs in favour of the non-existent invisible culture.”
Anna 42:23
Camouflage to invisibility. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Kristin 42:26
“So it's a peculiar status. I have culture because what I have exists in the eyes of those who declare what I have to be culture, but they declare culture only to the extent which they know they don't know it, except as an absence that they don't want to learn as a presence. And they have the power not to know. So it's very weird. Furthermore, they have the power to order me to cease to know. So as I resist and know, I am both visible and invisible, visible as other and invisible as myself. But these aren't separable bits. As I walk around, as both others and myself resist classification”, Wow.
Anna 43:16
Only the culture of people culturally transparent is worth knowing. But it does not count as culture.
Kristin 43:24
That's worth revisiting.
Anna 43:25
Yes. Amazing. I mean, this is so those of us who show up as part of among other things, right? Whenever we show up as part of dominant groups. And by that, we generally do mean something like dominant cultural groups, that is, groups where our version of things or the accounts of the world that may best suit us or that we're allowed to have are the ones that hold sway in those contexts. We become culturally transparent. She's describing what it's like to move around when you are not part of that dominant culture and when the dominant culture is insisting that you are other.
Kristin 44:09
Hmm. And this idea of, like, the culture of people culturally transparent is worth knowing. Right.
Anna 44:17
Yes.
Kristin 44:17
But they're not going to call it culture.
Anna 44:20
No.
Kristin 44:20
They're going to call it. They're going to call it the way things are.
Anna 44:23
The way things are. Yes. What we discover in the world, as she puts it. Right. So the man of reason does not make any meaning in the world. He discovers what is there.
Kristin 44:35
Hmm
Anna 44:35
And so when we're in the position of the man of reason, we are sort of taking the world in that way. I just discover what's there. And isn't it interesting that I discovered that there are all of these ways to understand people's differences and divide them up in ways that make sense to me and people like me and allow me to organize a world using that.
Kristin 44:56
I can order them and control them
Anna 44:58
Yes.
Kristin 44:58
and categorize and classify.
Anna 45:00
Yeah.
Kristin 45:01
Its not just that this idea of being acultural or something is a kind of bias that we need to correct. actually a value or a norm. So it's like for Rawls. He thinks that the best way to set up society is way that certain kind of person would set it up if they didn't know the kind of body or capacities they would have. And so what's that person like? Well, take away culture, take away body, take away time, period, take away religion, gender, anything to do with your body– all of those things are not only not necessary, but they're going to wreck the experiment.
Anna 45:53
Right
Kristin 45:53
The experiment is just society is what self-interested, rational choosers would build or design. If they didn't know who or what their bodies or talents would be. Right.
Anna 46:08
Yes.
Kristin 46:10
And so you have to imagine this person behind a veil of ignorance. And, you know, they're totally divorced from the culture. So it's actually set up that your culture and your embodiment is going to weaken justice.
Anna 46:30
Yes.
Kristin 46:30
If it finds itself in that initial position of trying to come up with basic principles for society. That's a logic of domination iff I've ever seen one. On Lugones, view, and maybe even on mine.
Anna 46:46
Yes, yes, certainly on Lugones’ view, this is just it, right?
Kristin 46:53
Yeah.
Anna 46:54
That is actually a really. Yeah. Through a Lugonesian lens. Yeah, that sort of dealing with differences through a logic of purity. Requires us to assume some position of well, of purity, of being untainted by any particularity. In fact.
Kristin 47:20
We're going to delete everything about you, and the remainder is going to be the self-interested, rational chooser.
Anna 47:27
Gorgeous. Isn't that convenient? Yes, perfect. And that's often been how philosophers think about how to do philosophy or about who can do philosophy. Last time we were talking about the person who knows. Right? The subject. The knower in epistemology. And one of the things we were saying is that traditionally right, a sort of orientation toward the subject is like, do not ask about the subject. The subject does not matter–But definitely don't ask any questions! And the ideal subject is presumed to be relatively featureless, such that we are all sort of interchangeable. This is part of how we think about objectivity in philosophy, but also in science. To be a good scientific knower, as many people think, is to be without particularity, without commitment, rational, objective, detached from what they study, and just “finding things,” discovering things in the world, and then reporting on the order that they find there
Kristin 48:31
Yeah. And I'm thinking too, about, like the self-fulfillment of the system is like self-reinforcing, I guess, because you have like. Lougones talks about the viewpoint of the lover of purity. Right. And I love that she makes it like a passion. Like you love purity. Right. It's not that you.
Anna & Kristing 48:51
Super into it
Kristin 48:51
It's a passion. It kind of contains a bit of critique already, but they take up from that a kind of vantage point outside, right, of abstraction and categorization and the more abstract outside of history, outside of the body, outside of culture, that's more objective, And so then the move that she adds there is that we then go from that viewpoint and loving purity to a kind of force of purity.
Anna 49:27
Right.
Kristin 49:28
So now we’re saying, well, this is how it should be. This is kind of like a normative origin. A force of purity becomes the urge to control.We're talking about now: domination. So historical domination, power, and ideology, how do we enact and produce what she calls a fiction of purity?
Anna 50:03
Beautiful.
Kristin 50:03
And then work backwards from that and go look at all this purity I discovered. But of course.
Anna 50:08
Yes. Yeah, exactly.
Kristin 50:09
So that's why she calls it a fiction writer I produce this fiction. But then from the vantage point of the outside, right, I go, I discovered it.
Anna 50:19
So I. I encounter a world that is challenging to understand, and I give it. I try to find some order and I sort of give it order. And then I forget that I've done that. And I think, well, look at the order that I find in the world. And that is how it is by nature. Terrific. And then as you're saying, right, that moves from a very human kind of situation where we're confused about things, and we don't know how to understand them to a system of oppression. Right. Like, that is the shift right there?
Kristin 50:53
You got me confused about things.
Kirstin & Anna 50:55
Laughter
Anna 50:56
Oh. Oh. We're just so confused. And so this. That's exactly right. Right. it's a fiction. The Man of Reason is fiction. And it's very clear to lots of people that that is fiction. But for the lover of purity, features of human beings that are identified as differences, right? However, we identified differences or things that don't fit the original unity that they've imagined existed and become quote-unquote, “parts” that can be split apart and fragmented. And then those, as we were saying about the yolk and the egg, can be taken as pure and can represent the person sort of all the way down.
Kristin 52:11
And, you know, moving on to kind of the later part of the article, this idea of being fragmented shows up in resistance politics because we find ways of organizing and there's problems of, you know, exclusion within organizing. And and so this is where we get the question of intersectionality. So how do we sort of start from a basis of we all have a lot of parts. So the way that I'm setting it up is already the problem. Right. So the question isn't that, you know, you take me, and you add four things together, and then you understand my oppression. Their oily yolk and yolky oil are there together in a multiplicitous way. So if they are taken apart, then within these groups where we're trying to do resistance, we can actually have the logic of purity operating.
Anna 53:13
Right? Yes.
Kristin 53:14
Right. You're not a proper X. You're not good enough to be X. You can't represent X. And those kinds of purity moves themselves are enacting so we can enact this ourselves, Right?
Anna 53:31
Yes. She raises this when she's talking in the article about someone we featured in one of our earlier episodes, Iris Marion Young. thinks that Iris Marion Young describes sort of the situation of feminist politics and women's projects. Very well. But she is sort of missing how to conceive of heterogeneity when we're dealing with intra group differences.
Kristin 54:05
You know, thinking about problems of feminist organizing. Right. And speaking from, quote-unquote, “a woman's perspective” about patriarchy. That's one fragmented part of the self and if you can separate to one piece that that tells us something about privilege. And so then the question becomes, well, what do we do about that logic within organizing? And Iris, Maríanne
Young is like, Well, we need to have a diversity of voices within our groups. And this is what Lugones is really suspicious of, is basically saying you're going to bring in more voices. She's like, Power is operating the whole time we're doing that, so we're actually subjecting people to, you know, different ways of being dragged down and silenced and punished and made to feel inadequate and so ashamed. You know, all kinds of things. And so we can't just think that there's going to be this smooth inclusion of diversity that the diversity is there for because it's been produced through oppression.
Anna 55:41
Right and whose account of heterogeneity is operating here? Right. That's the other sort of question. So within feminist groups, for instance, for a very long time. The dominant sort of view of what differences are going to be and who counts as too particular to give an account of what women are and need and what patriarchy is like that has gone to people who show up to themselves as transparent as right without culture or post cultural in this sense. And who are those people while they're generally white able-bodied cis women? And so. Right. This is the sort of who gets to say what counts as heterogeneous. Their even right is part of an operation of the logic of purity. Lugones is suggesting,
Kristin 56:37
It kind of reminds me of like, you know, the U.N. or, the Ministry of Women or these other forms of trying to incorporate. Quote unquote, a woman's perspective into already existing structures. You know, it's the kind of ad women in stir feminist politics right?
Anna 56:57
Yeah. The soup. The soup has been made, but you can get stirred in if you want. You
Kristin 57:02
Yeah.
Anna 57:02
want to get stirred in
Kristin 57:03
Yeah.
Anna 57:03
you want in that soup.
Kristin 57:04
Don't make your own soup,
Anna 57:06
Do not make your own soup.
Kristin 57:07
but.
Anna 57:07
That will not be okay.
Kristin 57:08
We
Anna 57:08
No.
Kristin 57:08
are willing to add you to ours.
Anna 57:11
Right.
Kristin 57:11
The right
Anna 57:11
You're welcome.
Kristin 57:12
and the right.
But yeah, so.
Anna 57:16
And you will.
Kristin 57:18
So Lugones just kind of talks about these is, as you know, strategies that also embrace complexity and and need to be resisted. And so we have to think differently about multiplicity at the outset. And you know, it kind of reminds me of this excellent quote from Audre Lorde. I come back to it over and over again. It's from Sister Outsider, where she writes, “The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations we seek to escape, but that peace of the oppressor which is planted deep within us.” So really thinking about how within ourselves, what are we open to?
Anna 58:03
Yeah. Yeah.
Kristin 58:05
Multiplicity of ourselves and of others.
Anna 58:07
And are we open to that multiplicity of ourselves, including the oppressor, which
Kristin 58:14
Yes Yes. Yes.
Anna 58:16
Right. Who? Who's dealing with that? That part. Yeah. And who gets to deal with that part? Who gets to do that work there? I think this would actually be a great place to hear from our next contributor. Are you ready for that?
Brooke 58:37
Hi. My name is Brooke Rudow. I'm. An assistant professor of philosophy and humanities at the University of Central Florida. My research is in the philosophy of technology, environmental ethics, political philosophy, and, of course, feminist theory. The work of María Lugones has had a profound effect on me. As an undergrad and as a master's student, I really wasn't exposed to any critical theory. It was only once I started my doctoral coursework that I was introduced to feminist theory, environmental thought and critical race theory. I remember reading Lugones' Playfulness, World Traveling and Loving Perception for the first time, and it completely rocked my world, it constituted a dramatic shift in the ways that I understood myself and others and my relationships with them. And as shameful as it sounds, especially given my age at that time and the fact that I had children. It was a piece that taught me to see my own mother as her own person, really for the first time in my life.
I still regularly remind myself not to perceive arrogantly, and I have Lugones to think for teaching me this important relationship insight. But after reading that work, I just could not get enough of Lugones. I bought her book Pilgrimages (2003) and devoured every word and essay that I couldn't stop thinking about was Purity, Impurity and Separation. As an undergraduate at the University of Hawaii, I was surrounded by the realities of colonization and the conflicts and complications of race and racial constructions. And yet at that time, I really didn't have the tools to understand much of anything. For example, as a surfer, I couldn't understand why I wasn't immediately welcomed out in the lineup and why certain spots felt and really were off-limits to me. I didn't realize how profoundly racist it was to feel so entitled to a place and then be angry when I couldn't go there. Lugones work generally, and Purity Impurity and Separation in particular gave me a lens through which to start working on these experiences I had had and reshape who I was in relation to them. It wasn't just theory for me, but a genuine source of practical wisdom. So much of her thought has become a guide for who I am and how I want to be in the world as as a person. Turning more explicitly to the text. One of the big theoretical takeaways is her analysis of the logic of purity and mestizaje as a metaphor of resistance. She talks about the logic of purity as an ontology that separates ordering reality into neat categories that do not mix or overlap. Mestizaje, on the other hand, is impure. It's defined by multiplicity and mixture. It resists and undermines this logic of purity and domination. And this perspective reveals that reality simply is not pure. It's messy. It's complicated, multifaceted, overlapping. It does not fit neatly into categories. It is curdled. And this isn't merely abstract theorizing. It really matters. Lives are ordered and dominated. There are material cultural and existential losses through this process of domination. Lugones points out that through the logic of purity, the social and political world, as well as human lives and relationships are defined. They are legally instantiated. They're ordered and controlled.
So, for example, what was going on in Hawaii when I started working through Pilgrimages were these questions about how to manage lands that belonged to Hawaiian peoples. The law stated that only native Hawaiians could own or occupy these lands, but. A logic of purity had legally defined Native Hawaiians as a certain set percentage of Hawaiian blood and noticed the fragmentation embedded in that language. This percentage or part is Hawaiian. This part is not so over time, as Hawaii's population grows and there are more intercultural marriages and families. This “purity” is diluted, and Hawaiian families start to lose their generational homes. We see this in the tangible material consequences of the logic of purity in the processes of domination. But if we take up Lugones as mestizaje, as a form of resistance to fragmentation and curdle Hawaiian identity, then political avenues open up for retaining control of these lands. So I think all this points to how valuable Lugones’ work is not just as a powerful theoretical framework, but as a way to navigate the political landscape, to resist, to reframe and reimagine a politics based on mestizaje rather than purity.
So, Purity Impurity and Separation continues to inform the ways that I approach philosophical problems, and I see it as relevant in some places that have been pretty surprising to me. As part of my work in environmental ethics, I've been exposed to a lot of scholarship in natural resource management and wildlife management. It's been interesting to see how the logic of purity is woven through thinking about how animals and plants are categorized into distinct species and seen as pure. So purity thinking informs a lot of negativity around hybridization has a prominent, though obscured role in conversations. Decision-making about so-called invasive species. So I think her work is going to be really fruitful in thinking through the ideological commitments at work here as well as some of the tangible environmental consequences of such a framework.
1:05:47 Kristin:
Wow. That. That was amazing. Really, really spoke to the wideness of application, the breadth of possible application. We're thinking about how split separation versus curdling and the presumed multiplicity can be translated to the political, translated to resistance. You know, thinking about that question of how the logic of purity breaks up into parts, but then also judges how many parts of a person give them entitlement to a particular land. So there are real material consequences related to that coming up with parts and fragmenting psyches, lives, bodies, and lands. Yeah, right. Families.
Anna 1:07:00
Yes. Yeah. This idea that it's think Brook’s insight that this is a source of practical wisdom, that really echoes from very different experiences and positions.
Kristin 1:08:25
And when we start with this multiplicity and the fact that we can sort of curdle away from the logic of purity, that kind of shows it for what it's trying to do.
Anna 1:08:41
Yeah, yeah.
Kristin 1:08:41
Shows that it is not always successful and so there are possibilities available and Luones gives this list of ways of curdling against the logic of purity kind of examples.
Anna 1:09:00
Yes, the practice of festive resistance. Festive resistance. I love it. Yes.
Kristin 1:09:09
Yes. So she writes “Curdling may be a haphazard technique. I recommend the cultivation of this art as a practice of resistance into transformation from oppressions as interlocked. It's a practice of festive resistance.” So there's a bunch of examples. I won't list all of them but by multi-lingual experimentation
Anna 1:09:28
What she is doing here? Yes. Yeah.
Kristin 1:09:30
Exactly. Code-switching, categorical blurring and confusion caricaturing the selves we are in the worlds of our oppressors, infusing them with ambiguity. So the caricaturing makes me think about Cindy Baker.
Anna 1:09:44
Oh, yes.
Kristin 1:09:45
Who made a mascot costume of herself.
Anna 1:09:47
Yes.
Kristin 1:09:49
And the performance art practice is called personal appearance.
Anna 1:09:52
Amazing.
Kristin 1:09:53
And so it's it's a caricature of herself.
Anna 1:09:55
Yup.
Kristin 1:09:55
Practicing trickstery and foolery. Elaborate and explicitly marked gender transgression, withdrawing our services from the pure or their agents whenever possible, and with panache.
Anna 1:10:07
And with panache.
Kristin 1:10:09
Announcing the impurity of the pure by ridiculing his inability at self-maintenance, which I find amazing. A playful reinvention of our names for things and people; multiple naming marking our cultural mixes as we move, emphasizing cultural mestizaje and crossing cultures.
Anna 1:10:30
Yes. And that moved to sort of remind the lover of purity.
Kristin 1:10:37
Hmm.
Anna 1:10:38
That you can appear to be pure and disembodied and post-cultural because a bunch of other people are literally maintaining your life. And doing that in creative ways and maybe with panache, as she says, what an amazing image. Yes. Fantastic.
Kristin 1:11:00
Yeah. And I'll, I'll offer this other quote sort of at the end of that discussion of resistance, quote, “We have been seen as threatening the univocity of a life lived in a state of purity, their management of us and their power over us. So we have been seen as threatening.” So it's kind of an ominous but joyful ending.
Anna 1:11:28
Yes. And can we encourage those threats and also find ways to leverage what is threatening? I think Lugones gives us all of these sorts of amazing possibilities and then some which we did not get to today. Alas.
But you can go and read all of Luognes’ amazing work listeners and we will provide all of that for you in the show notes. And on that note, if you would like to give us ideas or contribute to our next season, please go to our website thingbodiespod.com, as always we are looking for ideas, and we are as always looking for as Kristin said guest editors and producers for the next season were also very happy as always for the feedback and participation!
Kristin 1:12:34
Yes and also included on our website are transcripts.
Anna 1:12:45
Yes, we do.
Kristin 1:12:45
It feels like we haven't specialty told them there are transcripts, but we have transcripts!
Anna 1:12:45
We absolutely do!
Kristin 1:12:45
We have show notes. We have our concept map as usual. This one we co-mapped.
Anna 1:12:55
Okay. We'll see how that. We'll see how that goes because Kristin again as the legendary concept mapper I am but a noobie. Extra special thanks to our contributors Adriana Rincon Villegas and Brooke Rudow. All the references for what we diccuesed on the podcast today are on our website.
Our piece today is from María Lugones.
Laughter
Anna:
Okay. Woop!