wrobert at
Because that's what Levi-Strauss is arguing, and when you engage in the argument that there is this kind of social symbolic, whether through Levi-Strauss or through Lacan, you are pointing to this kind of argument.
^^^^ CB: I agree that Levi-Strauss makes this argument, but I'm just saying I'm not making that argument here. It's in _The Elementary Structures of Kinship_. Also, the argument I'm making here does not point to Levi-Strauss's argument on exchange of women. By the way, Gayle Rubin, who wrote a famous paper on this issue, and is a famous lesbian liberationist theorist you mention below, was a student in Sahlins 1972 theory class at the University of Michigan, in which I first learned Levi-Straussian structuralism from Sahlins. She used to talk about the paper in class as she was first writing it then. We were classmates. You could say I was right there at the birth of Rubin's idea.
Also, as I mentioned in my last post, exchange of women is immediately and simultaneously exchange of men. A group of women "circulatting" one by one among a group of men is simulteneously a group of men circulating one by one among a group of women. Just depends on one's interpretation. In other words, I have a critique of Levi-Strauss. But that is not the issue here.
Another side logical point, that might be sort of unexpected out of the "exchanging women" model, polygamy is actually a group of women exchanging one man among them. He goes from one woman to the next. They are exchanging him. He is _not_ exchanging them , because there is no other man to exchange them with, by definition. So, power is actually in an exchanged one not in the exchangers. Men exchanging a woman would be polyandrous, or one women having many men. She as the exchanged one is seen as having the power there. Power is in being exchanged not in exchanging, the exchang_ed_ ,not in the exchang_er_
^^^^^
The feminist argument (the tradition that comes out of Rubin) has consistently argued that this naturalization is in fact a way of naturalizing certain social structures of power. This isn't originated with Butler, but it is continued in her work (while being critiqued and examined itself. For this work look at the Wellek lectures, Antigone's Claim, which has the longest engagement with the argument in her work.)
robert wood
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