11 12 2000
Andrea Hapke: answer to Irina Aristarkhova (Translation from Russian)


Dear Larissa, Irina, Irina, Valentina and Jana.

Hello from Berlin at night. I am glad that You've, Larissa, succeeded to enter the discussion ­ welcome! ­ and I am glad that our discussion really has begun. It is very entangled, so that the thoughts and answers are floating in the head, and it is hard to decide where to start.

Dear Irina Aristarkhova. First I would like to react to Your letter from saturday because it seems to me that my letter evoked some misunderstandings. I am sorry that I haven't distinguished clearly whom I am addressing.

""but it bothers me that you write your texts and interviews as if these hierarchies wouldn't exist at all, as if there wouldn't be the necessity to think about them any more."Andrea, please explain, is this relating to my texts, and if yes, which ones and where?"

This of course wasn't referring to You, but to Irina Aktuganova and Alla Mitrofanova.I understood that - answering to their texts - I probably explained my understanding of feminism in a too reduced and biased manner. Biased in the sense that I am also reacting to tendencies of my surroundings, especially in gender studies seminars. As I have been enthusiastic about deconstruction for long time (in the understanding of Derrida and Butler), I am beginning to perceive that they use their theories: talking only about constructs, questioning these constructs, and stop looking at these constructs and at their realisations under real circumstances. In conversations it often seems to me that being constructed means it doesn't exist (complicated sentence in Russian!). Women do not exist? The Woman does not exist! And there are many different women and they cannot be found in that existence which is being perceived by the Woman. Be they lesbians, women who have not given birth, women with beards ... but such examples are not even neccessary: no real woman does fit in this scheme. There is not even the need to see that this scheme of the Woman is constantly changing. On the one hand it is changing because the collective imagination is changing, and maybe also because of the fact that existences are becoming visible which haven't been visible until now. This also is an ambiguous process, because they begin to be visible and at the same time they are being produced and marginalized or/and occupied.
And the process of differentiation starts from the beginning again... not all lesbians are the "Lesbian".
But I have learned that for myself I can escape such definitions, but in concrete contexts I am being perceived and in that sense discriminated as exactly "Her". Therefore - and because I see similar processes concerning others in other contexts - I am insisting on terms like "hierarchy" and "discrimination" even in this sense.
Deconstruction and the space of mind (and of activity? for a long time deconstruction has rather been blocking me - I am afraid), which is being disclosed by it, means to me, first of all, the possibility to understand that nothing is given and determined by God or Nature, and, in the next step, to see a chance in shiftings. And this also means to bear ambiguity.And this brings me back to the topic of our communication. Where it would as well be good to look at concrete contexts. I agree with You that maybe it is not worth talking about feminism and cyberfeminism in essential. But it is neccessary to talk about concrete situations, about how cyberspace is influencing our lives.
But interesting there weren't any answers to Jana, who tried to write about this topic as it seems to me.
But I will have to continue tomorrow, as it is becoming too late at night now.

Good night or good morning,
Yours
Andrea.


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