Irigaray notes that when her mother goes away, the little girl does not do the same things as the little boy. She does not play with a string and a reel that symbolise her mother. Because she and her mother are of the same sex, her mother cannot have the object status of a reel. Instead the little girl is distressed. She plays with dolls – a different kind of object from the reel. She dances, ‘this dance is also a way for the girl to create a territory of her own in relation to her mother’. In her dance she spins around de-stabilising existing connections between herself and her place, making new ones between herself and her (m)other. She creates ‘a vital subjective space open to the cosmic maternal world, to the gods, to the present other’.1

Irigaray’s notion of the daughter spinning to make room between her and her mother, resonates strongly for me. I imagine being five again spinning round and around in the middle of a room. Only stopping when the furniture, walls and floor begin to revolve around me, when everything around me slips out of place. . . 

*** 

I have found those words of Irigaray so inspirational, for so long, that is hard now to consider them critically. I have come to take for granted that, for me, the state of ‘de-stablization’, my slipping of ‘out of place’, is a positive place to be. Why? Because I have connected letting go with liberation and assumed that my spinning is transformational, that by turning and being turning I can create future possibility, make no place into a new place to be. But for how long? The giddiness and the freedom of letting go that spinning offers can only last for so long. I, for one, cannot maintain myself in this place that turns me as I turn, that makes me feel so disorientated. As I suggested at the beginning, of this piece, the Paris conference got me thinking, differently, about myself and my work, about my almost uncritical belief in the utopian horizon of French feminist theory. But I know now there are difficulties with giving and with being out of place. Instead I realise that I need to take, to tale place, for myself, if only for so long. 

Taking place. 
How to take place? 
Who to take place from? 
How to give place back? 
How to take place? (but only for so long)?

Publication Details: ‘Taking Place, but only for so long’, Doina Petrescu (ed.) Altering Practices, (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2006).

1 Luce Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous: towards a culture of difference, London: Routledge, 1993, p.59.