Kristeva, Zimbabwe and women

There is a different place for women within a culture that has more of a place for the pre-Oedipal. As Kristeva’s work implies, the devaluation of the pre-Oedipal mode for the sake of ego-centred consciousness is also a devaluation of the feminine. This might explain why, in the culture I come from, the feminine was less devalued than in it is in your or my present culture: The pre-Oedipal self and the ego self were in tandem, and not with one in submission to the other. (Ego domination of the pre-Oedipal field of selfhood implies ego-inflation and a de-sensitisation to the realm of fantasy, interconnectivity and the imagination.) So with the domination of ego, a kind of narrowing of experience occurs, and the feminine is structurally excluded from that. Hence, even though it is the ground of being itself, it is heavily repressed by ego-consciousness and deemed not to exist.

And you and I, too, as representatives (in the mind of these narrow egoists) of the feminine, are deemed to have a kind of unreality about us — whether our behaviour is primarily ego-based or otherwise. The logic of excluding the pre-Oedipal realm from the realm of reality goes so far as to exclude women from it, too, it seems.

In Zimbabwe, women are economically and culturally oppressed in general, but they still represent a greater psychical reality for the societies, paradoxically, than do women in the West.