A response to: ‘Intimate Others and the Othering of intimates: The gendered psycho-politics of the entangled relational’ by Farhad Dalal (Dalal, 2020)

Abstract

although I will attempt to foreground the precariousness of my position throughout, I know such gestures can never suffice. (Spivak, 1988: 271) what I find useful is the sustained and developing work on the mechanics of the constitution of the Other; we can use it to much greater analytic and interventionist advantage than invocations of the authenticity of the Other. (Spivak, 1988: 294; emphasis in original) Any response, is inevitably, always already (Althusser, 1971), an intra-action entanglement (Barad, 2007). Therefore, my entanglement with, the 'Intimate Others and the Othering of intimates: The gendered psycho-politics of the entangled relational' (Dalal, 2020) was in process before its existence and publication. In this case, the intimate Other is you Farhad Dalal (if I may, address you directly, intimately?) and your 'gendered entangled relational with the intimate Other', which is fittingly complex, because I happen to be a woman of colour and lesbian. And, yet already, my framing of who I am is fraught with problems-problems, which I attempt to explore in this response. For example, the terms 'other', 'woman', 'colour' and 'lesbian' are territorial in claiming an identity position and differentiation. My claims 969592G AQ0010.

Tangling with the four responses to ‘The entangled relational’

“…Despite me trying to make it clear in the article that I am speaking against reductive essentialisms (I have a heading to the effect), you characterize me as an essentialist: ‘the problem is that you keep resorting to essentialist representations of man/men/masculinity and woman/women/feminity’ (Nayak, 2020: 454).…”

“…You rebuke me for two interlinked reasons—that I continually collapse into essentialisms, and that I have made no mention of intersectionality. You sound both perplexed and infuriated when you ask: ‘why do you not name the Black feminist concept of intersectionality?’ (Nayak, 2020: 455). You assert: ‘your use of quantum physics to think about the entangled relational echoes new materialist and post-humanist approaches to entanglement’ and ask me: why have you not referenced the long-standing development of emancipatory frameworks?…”

“…To speak about gender in the contemporary Israeli context, is to step into two minefields simultaneously; the consequent detonations can be loud and furious. I was privileged that four colleagues (Amal Treacher Kabesh (2020), Suryia Nayak (2020), Uri Levin (2020) and Sue Einhorn (2020)) took the trouble to respond to my paper (Dalal, 2020). I respond to each in turn.…”

“…Suryia, your passionate critique invites me to address you too personally. Despite the fact that you took issue with ‘both with the content and method of the article’ (Nayak, 2020: 456), I think we can (to use your phrase) ‘shake hands’ on much more than you allow for.…”

“…You declare yourself to be ‘an anti-racist feminist, and anti-capitalist activist’—a declaration the like of which is unlikely to have appeared previously in this journal. I take your response to be a call to arms, specifically when you say: ‘the analysis of gender in your article, and in Group Analysis in general, could do with explicitly embracing the Black feminist theoretical methodology of intersectionality’ (Nayak, 2020: 453). I think that it will be news to many readers of this journal that a) there exists such a thing as a Black feminist theoretical methodology, and that b) it might have valuable contributions to make to the project of group analysis, both clinical and theoretical.…”