Diana Myers’ Gender
in the Mirror is an eloquent, insightful, and sustained plea for feminists
to adopt a new, or perhaps more accurately, radically intensify an existing
method of combating sexism. The book is an unusually continuous whole—much like
an extended essay: all of its chapters, while covering diverse thematic
materials, nevertheless bear directly on Myers’ central thesis. Additional,
more substantive and uniquely valuable aspects of the book will be discussed
below, followed by a critical evaluation.

Myers’ central thesis concerns what she refers to as
cultural "figurations." Figurations are the internal representations
of cultural schemas. The author maintains that cultural figurations generate
the internal oppression that sustains the status
quo. Her view is that feminists should attack the cultural figurations
themselves head on. "Feminists", Myers writes, "have discounted
the power of the figurational detritus of patriarchal culture too
long."  She acknowledges the
importance of "progressive institutional changes", e.g., equal
opportunity, family-friendly workplaces, battered women shelters, and welfare.
Nevertheless, these changes "cannot do the whole job." (189). Such
changes must be supported by "a feminist discursive politics aimed at
making imagery available to women that would help them shed the bonds of
internalized oppression." Concretely, feminists should identify oppressive
figurations and put forth counter-figurations that will challenge, and thus aid
in overcoming, the oppressive ones.  In
Myers’ view, oppressive figurations, which serve above all to frustrate women’s
"agentic needs"(189) must be replaced by non-oppressive figurations.
The author is, thus, extremely clear in delineating her main focus: undoing
internal oppression. Because intense focus on internal oppression might lend
itself to the (in this case incorrect) charge of victim-blaming, Myers stance
is, it seems to me, admirably forthright and courageous.

A unique feature of Myers work is that in addition to
providing detailed analyses of extant oppressive figurations, some of which
will be discussed below, she provides realistic suggestions for viable
counter-figurations and means of disseminating the latter.

Consistently with Myers’ view that oppressive figurations
"impede female autonomy", her book opens with a discussion of agency.
The author navigates this issue in terms of feminist voice theory which
"must furnish an account of how one gets in touch with oneself and finds
one’s voice" so that women can stop "lip-synching the ominous
baritone of patriarchy" (17). Towards this end, Myers provides an
interesting and useful annotated list of agentic skills in order to
"provide feminist voice theory with a credible epistemology and to
articulate an implicit theory of autonomy" (20). The list includes
introspection, memory, communication, imagination, analytic, self-nurturing and
other skills.

In Chapter Two, "The Rush to Motherhood: Pronatalist
Discourse and Women’s Agency," Myers calls into question "culturally
transmitted mythologies of rapturous motherhood" that "subsidize this
blithe refusal to reflect" (34). The culturally transmitted figurations in
question here are those that compromise women’s agency by occluding the option
of having no children and imposing powerful negative sanctions on those who do
opt for no children. Such figurations and sanctions generate the "blithe
refusal to reflect," i.e., to consider all options rather than view
motherhood as inevitable. Myers’ incisive prose clarifies: "…
pronatalist discourse… harnesses highly directive enculturation to
unconscious processes and protects the resulting psychic structures from change
by codifying them…in standard-issue…self-narratives "(46).

Chapters Four (The Family Romance: A Fin-de-Siecle
Tragedy) and Five (Lure and Allure: Mirrors, Fugitive Agency, and Exiled
Sexuality) are the conceptual and discursive central chapters of the book.

The title of Chapter Four alludes to the Freudian paradigm
of familial relations focusing on its implications for girls. Myers maintains
that "both feminist therapists and advocates for victims of sexually
abused girls have reason to develop alternatives to the family romance"
(78); moreover, "it is time to displace the family romance and to replace
it with tropes that support feminist emancipatory aims" (80). These quotes
should convey to readers of this review the ambition for and determination to
achieve liberation that animates Meyers’ passionate prose.

Meyers subjects the entire recovered memory debate and its
implications for Freudian theory to intensive analysis. In the evolution of
Freud’s version of the family romance, the fantasy life of girls, according to
Myers, is viewed as dominated by fantasies of incestuous love, then incestuous
seduction, then sadistic incest. Meyers’ aim in this chapter is to move beyond
the recovered memory debate that is mired in the: "’Did it happen, or
didn’t it?’"(79) construal. This debate is an inevitable consequence of
the family romance figurations and results in terrible suffering for women who
may have no option that would enable them to determine whether or not they were
actual victims of incest. Meyer’s concludes, however, contrary to some
feminists, that "Feminist analysis and activism cannot dispense with
memory" (90). Therefore, Myers concludes, feminists must work towards
eliminating the trope or figuration known as the family romance. She writes,
"…if this trope were taken out of circulation, there would be no more
reason to doubt memories of childhood sexual abuse than there is to doubt
memories of affectionate paternal nurturance"(92). (Readers of this review
should be aware that Myers’ discussion in this chapter, which I have
drastically truncated, is extremely nuanced and very scholarly. It is an
excellent and unique contribution to the recovered memory debate.)

In Chapter Five, Meyers’ brings to the fore the trope of
the mirror that gives the book its name. In this fascinating and brilliant
chapter, double the length of any other of the book’s seven chapters, using the
myth of Narcissus as an extended trope Myers meticulously analyzes the
devastating effect on female agency of culturally constituted figurations of
female narcissism and the historical representation of these figurations in
images of women and mirrors. 
Summarizing her discussion of the history in western culture of
psychological and artistic representations of women’s narcissim, Meyers points
out that

Woman-with-mirror images and narratives of feminine narcissism collapse
the self into the mirror. The representation…is not psychologically
differentiated from that which it represents—the woman. Unlike Narcissus, who
believes he is in love with a beautiful, submerged other, women are positioned
to believe that they will perish if the image in the glass disappears. (123).

Following
this, Myers presents, with pictorial illustrations, a fascinating discussion of
counter-representations or refigurations of women-with-mirrors by women artists
Mary Cassatt, Carrie May Weems, performance artist Orlan, Claude Cahon, and Sam
Taylor Wood.  Myers’ interpretation of
Cassatt’s Women in a Loge is by
itself  reason enough to read the
book.  Myers concludes her interpretation
as follows: "Spacially and psychologically repositioning the mirror in
this way refits woman-with-mirror imagery to serve as a vehicle for
simultaneously portraying the value women place upon intellectual stimulation
and their repudiation of narcissistic frivolity" (130). Concluding this
chapter, Myers writes: "…if women are to achieve authentic narcissistic
agency, culturally recoding women’s narcissistic subjectivity is vital, and
feminist artists are showing the way" (146).  

 CRITICAL
EVALUATION

In the first paragraph of this review, I expressed the
view that it would be incorrect to evaluate Myers’ concern with undoing
internal oppression as victim blaming. I meant to indicate thereby that
internal oppression is a reality and that developing processes and methods of
undoing both present and future internal oppression is essential for any
liberatory theory and praxis. Myers’ book is a major contribution to this task.

However, in the effort to constitute an efficacious
liberatory praxis, it is obviously important to investigate the processes in
and through which cultural figurations become internalized and thus constitute
internal oppression. Myers assumes, correctly, that such processes of
internalization occur; her book is about creating, promulgating, and
disseminating alternate tropes that will enable internalization of liberatory
counter-figurations. Here again, Myers assumes the existence of processes of
internalization of cultural tropes. However, she apparently does not see these
processes themselves as potential sites of resistance, or even of comprehending
the nature of these processes as an aid to resistance. At least nowhere in the
book, with one exception, does she suggest this, even as a research program.
The exception is Myers reference to the work of  LaPlance and Pontalis, who characterize original fantasies
related to infantile sexuality as taking the form "of skeletal,
impersonal, present-tense scenarios….[which] facilitates psychological
assimilation of these fantasies" (quoted by Meyers, p. 84).  This statement alone is pregnant with
meaning and potential in discerning the processes of internalization. Interest
in originary processes of psychological assimilation also leads towards a
philosophical-psychological perspective and attitude like that of Husserlian
phenomenology.  Moreover a perspective
like that of Husserlian phenomenology can preclude charges of relativism. Such
charges can be brought against Myers’ perspective in that merely substituting
one set of internalized cultural figurations for another does not ground the
philosophical, political, cultural, ethical, or psychological preferability of
one over the other.  While Myers does
discuss reasons why she believes that certain figurations are non-oppressive
while others are oppressive, the reasoning does not necessarily inhere in the
internalization, even if, as Myers maintains, agentic skills leading to willed
emotional investment are deployed in the internalization process.  In other words, though Myers calls seriously
into question solutions emanating from liberalism, she does not, on the other
hand, clearly aver that what is needed is a total
transformation of society.  How else can
figurations that figure as liberatory praxis maintain their directedness
towards liberation unless directed also towards total transformation?   

In her discussion of the cultural figurations and their
internalized representatives that cluster around the psychoanalytic phrase
"the family romance," Myers confines her discussion of psychoanalysis
to Freud. This is problematic for it removes from consideration a nexus of
ideational directions that could shed light on the nature of agency.  For contemporary psychoanalysis, for example
the relational view of Mitchell, Aron, Benjamin, and others, the movement from
the seduction theory to fantasy embedded in psychic reality does not rule out
or diminish the role of both father and mother in the etiology of neurosis.
This in itself holds out the possibility (actually the process is already well
under way in clinical theory) of refiguring the family romance.  Parental failure does not necessarily take
the form of overt or covert seductive acts or more attenuated sexually tinged
behaviors; psychological abuse, in the form, e.g., of persistent demeaning and attacks
on the self of the person can generate such fantasies of incestuous seduction
as well.

What is missing from Freud but very much present in
contemporary psychoanalytic clinical theory is this: since Freud placed little
importance on parental failure in his conception of the etiology of mental
disorders, he did not recognize that a good outcome in therapy requires that
the client recognize, become aware of, the impact on her of parental failure.
It is in and through this recognition that the client can recover her agentic
self.  Or, put another way: it is
crucial to address the extent to which oppressive cultural figurations are
sustained, not only in and through the occlusion of options and suppression of
reflection;  in addition to, and in
collusion with these,  it is necessary
to recognize that the person, under severe adverse pressure, performs an act of
inner assent to the demands on her produced by parental failure: this act of
inner assent is coeval with self-blame.  

These caveats notwithstanding, Gender in the Mirror is a very, very, fine treatise that should be
widely read and discussed.

 

© 2003 Marilyn Nissim-Sabat

 

Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Ph.D., M.S.W., Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy,
Lewis University, Romeoville, IL , Clinical Social Worker, private practice
in psychodynamic psychotherapy, Chicago, IL, Member Executive Board, Assoc. for
the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry

Categories: Sexuality, Philosophical, Ethics