Introduction: The Discursive Strategies of the Marginalized

Abstract

How might postcolonial theory illuminate the psychology of female alterity? Caught between two cultures, one dominant and controlling and one passive and controlled, women suffer marginalization similar to that of the colonized because of gender difference. That is, alterity arises because of a tension between the subject and what Judith Butler has termed a “constitutive outside” that anticipates the position of the colonized within postcolonial theory. According to Butler, “The subject is constructed through acts of differentiation that distinguish the subject from the constitutive outside, a domain of abjected alterity (conventionally associated with the feminine, but clearly not exclusively).”1 So also, as members of a single culture, those colonized experience being conquered or inhabited by another culture, or they emigrate into a new and alien culture; either way, the marginalized are displaced into minor status. Raphael Patai, in The Arab Mind, defines this state precisely as one of failure of cultural identification: “Marginality” denotes the state of belonging to two cultures without being able to identify oneself completely with either. An individual becomes “marginal” if, after having been born into a culture and enculturated into it in a more or less normal fashion, he becomes exposed to another culture, is attracted to it, acquires a measure of familiarity with it…and strives to become a full-fledged carrier of it—an endeavor which, in most cases, never completely succeeds. The marginal man suffers from his inability to feel completely at ease or “at home” in either culture.…Marginal man is marginal, not because he is unable to acquire the intellectual thought processes of the culture to which he wants to assimilate, nor because he is unable to free himself of the thought processes of the culture on which he has turned his back. He is marginal because emotionally he is unable to identify with either of the two cultures.2