17 - Women's space and women's place in contemporary Russian fiction

Summary

Space is always suddenly bethinking itself: I am here, and here, and over there! It is forever cropping up somewhere at the back of your head. Not in front, but behind: sneaking up on you from the rear.

(Abram Tertz, A Voice from the Chorus)

TIME AND SPACE: OPPOSITION VERSUS UNION

In a recent issue of New Left Review, an article by a geographer named Doreen Massey deplores the tendency among current sociologists and cultural commentators to privilege time over space. Surveying the most influential publications that engage the time/space issue, Massey chides Ernesto Laclau and Frederic Jameson for (1) opposing spatiality to temporality in a characteristic manoeuvre of reductionist binarism and (2) depoliticizing the realm of the spatial by equating it with stasis. Massey's critique of these related conceptualizations derives in large measure from her gender consciousness, specifically her awareness that a dichotomous dualism formulated as presence and absence (A/not-A) has come under most articulate and sustained attack from feminists, whose efforts to dismantle gendered binarism are too well known to warrant exposition here.

Dichotomous conceptualization of the A/not-A variety (exemplified in the polarized gender distinctions cemented into most western thought) militates against change and, Massey correctly argues, inevitably not only prioritizes the first term of the dualism over the other, but also defines only the first positively. Accordingly, time is conceived in terms of ‘change, movement, history, dynamism’ (‘male’ categories), while ‘space, rather lamely by comparison, is simply the absence of these things’ (that is, the lack that western thought, with Freud's aid, has identified as ‘female’).