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Ivy Schweitzer
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338 Ivy Schweitzer
exclusively masculine, and elite. Given this categorical exclusion, are all
womens friendships by definition dissident in relation to the predom-
inant discourse? In a survey of recent scholarship on womens affiliation
in Renaissance England, Penelope Anderson not only finds evidence of
womens friendships, but also characterizes them as an intervention in
political discourse through an appropriation of public rhetoric.3 Like
others before and after them, these women adapted public, classically
derived ideals and practices of friendship in a bid for gender equality
that challenged both the dominant understanding of friendship and the
androcentric political landscape. To apply this recognition more broadly
to contemporary womens cross-cultural affiliation and understand its
interventions and political stakes, we need a more comprehensive his-
tory of friendship as cultural discourse and ideological tool.
Contemporary scholars are increasingly mining the ancients for
insights into the postmodern conundrum of subjectivity, affiliation,
and community in transcultural and transnational contexts. For exam-
ple, Leela Gandhi styles her introduction to a study of nonconformist
cross-cultural friendships in the fin de sicle as a Manifesto with the
subtitle Anticolonial Thought and the Politics of Friendship. Her choice
of manifesto significantly ramps up the rhetorical heat, signaling that
she is offering not just an introduction to her study, but a bold declara-
tion intended to interrupt the way we think. This paradigm shift involves
a turn or re-turn to friendship in terms borrowed from the ancients. By
contrast, many influential contemporary philosophers, such as Georges
Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean-Luc Nancy (though, significantly, not
Michel Foucault; more on this later) turn away from friendship, empha-
sizing its difficulty, discontinuity, and even impossibility.4 Gandhi cites
Jacques Derridas important work in the 1990s, which builds on this line
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Ivy Schweitzer 339
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340 Ivy Schweitzer
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Ivy Schweitzer 341
of brother and sister or sister and sister (the exclusions pointed out by
Derrida). The most historically influential is the philia of comrades, dis-
played on the battlefield, where friends live together, share everything,
and are willing to lay down their lives for each other. This philia is based
on the friendship of brothers, an affiliation Aristotle associates with
the political structure of democracy, one of his least favorite forms of
governance.10 The philia of brothers underlies a long tradition of rad-
ical democracy captured in a slogan from the French Revolution that
became the motto of the French Republic: libert, galit, fraternit. But
as Derrida argues, the brother/friend of this tradition seems to belong
to a familial, fraternalist and thus androcentric configuration of politics
beset by the double exclusion of women from cross-gender and female
friendships.11
The second meaning of philia as a private affinity dominates its his-
tory and is the closest to our modern conception. Aristotles understand-
ing of this form is actually quite broad and universal, recognizing and
ranking different forms of interpersonal friendship one scholar iden-
tifies nine different kinds.12 These can be egoistic or altruistic, encom-
pass class and gender differences, and even include slaves. Two lesser or
instrumental types are friendships that produce something useful, such
as cooperation, and friendships that produce pleasure, such as leisure
and companionship. Above these Aristotle sets what he calls (depending
on the translation) perfect or virtue friendship, which I will call ideal
friendship, an intrinsically valuable, ongoing activity, which might
include utility and pleasure, but whose end is the realization of individ-
ual human potential or happiness, as well as the generation and main-
tenance of the highest good of all the polis.13
10. Michael Pakaluk, Political Friendship, The Changing Face of Friendship, ed.
Leroy S. Rouner (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994),
197213, 208. This version is enshrined in the perennial war buddy films
and films set in the classical period such as Gladiator and 300, all aimed at
young male audiences.
11. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 27879; his emphases.
12. Paul Schollmeier, Other Selves: Aristotle on Personal and Political Friendship
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 11315.
13. Suzanne Stern-Gillet, Aristotles Philosophy of Friendship (New York: State
University of New York Press, 1995), 4246.
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342 Ivy Schweitzer
Ancient writers assert that such friends of the highest order choose
each other according to the elemental principle cited by many that like
attracts like. Thus, a requirement of ideal friendship is a likeness or
similarity of elevated status, virtue and, implicitly, maleness. Aristotles
definition has dominated the long philosophical and popular discourse:
a friend is another self or a second self (philos allos autos), such that
equality and likeness is friendship, and especially the likeness of
those alike in virtue.14 This vision of dyadic friendship and its impli-
cations for republican politics completely captivated Aristotles Roman
redactors, who largely ignored the variety of friendships Aristotle theo-
rized. Around 44 BCE Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman statesman and
philosopher, composed De amicitia, a dialogue extolling the friendship
of his father-in-law Gaius Laelius, a general and statesman trained in
Stoic philosophy, and his recently deceased lifelong friend Scipio Afri-
canus. In this famous dialogue, which shaped discussions of friendship
for centuries, Cicero mentions and dismisses the lesser friendships of
utility and pleasure practiced by ordinary people, spotlighting and
reifying Aristotles ideal and its male heroic exemplars: And I am not
now speaking of the friendships of everyday folk, or of ordinary people
although even these are a source of pleasure and profit but of true and
perfect friendship, the kind that was possessed by those few men who
have gained names for themselves as friends. Echoing Aristotles formu-
lation, Cicero adds an awareness of the metaphoricity of the phrase and
extends its logic to embrace the veritable merger of the pair, a motif Euro-
pean writers would later seize on and enshrine: The true friend is, so to
speak, a second self...they become virtually one person instead of two.
Such friendship is not only rare but its perfection transcends time and
space: Friends are together when they are separated...and a thing
even harder to explain they live on after they have died, so great is the
honor that follows them, so vivid the memory, so poignant the sorrow.15
14. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 9.4.29; 8.8.12. For a catalogue of the ancient
sources for these common ideas, see the first two entries in Erasmus,
Adages Ii1 to Iv100. The Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 31, trans. Margaret
Mann Phillips (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 2950. They
are Amicorum communia omnia (Between friends all is common) and Amici-
tia aequalitas. Amicus alter ipse (Friendship is equality. A friend is another
self).
15. Cicero, De amicitia, in Other Selves, 7611, 7.23, 6.2021, 4.15.
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Ivy Schweitzer 343
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344 Ivy Schweitzer
21. Stern-Gillet, Aristotles Philosophy, 1516, 2223. See pp. 3758 for a detailed
discussion of Aristotles unsystematic ideas on selfhood.
22. Pierre Aubenque, On Friendship in Aristotle, South Atlantic Quarterly 97,
no. 1 (Winter 1998): 2328.
23. Aristotle, Magna Moralia, in his Metaphysics, vol. 2, trans. Hugh Treden-
nick and G. Cyril Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1935), 2.15.7.
24. Cicero, De amicitia, 7.23.
25. Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Way of Life, 259.
26. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 8.12.19, 8.11.16. Cicero, De amicitia, 13.46.97.
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Ivy Schweitzer 345
Nysas and Eurylas in Virgil; Alexander the Great and Hephaestion, both
students of Aristotle; the Pythagoreans Damon and Phintias (aka Pyth-
ias); Jonathan and David of the Old Testament. The word virtue, one
of the defining requirements for ideal friendship, captures this gender
specificity, since its Latin root vir translates as man.
As the modern age dawned, the French philosopher Michel de Mon-
taigne wrote passionately about male homosocial friendship and just as
passionately excluded women and also homosexuality from its sacred
precincts. To reinforce friendships importance, he placed his famous
essay De lamit (On Friendship), a tribute to his enduring bond with
the deceased writer La Botie, at the very center of his collection Essays
(1603), a work that came to define the self-consciousness of modern
subjectivity. Citing the common agreement of the ancient schools on
the unfitness of women for the highest form of friendship, Montaigne
extols ideal friendship as the ultimate act of an unconstrained will. Such
friends are not merely bonded, as in Greco-Roman thought, but fused
and confused; their souls mingle and blend with each other so com-
pletely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it
again. There is also a rapturous, erotically charged, and consuming vio-
lence in this ineluctable force, which, having seized my whole will, led it
to plunge and lose itself in his; which, having seized his whole will, led it
to plunge and lose itself in mine, with equal hunger, equal rivalry. Such
force is antithetical to the feminine, he argues: The ordinary capacity
of women is inadequate for that communion and fellowship which is
the nurse of this sacred bond; nor does their soul seem firm enough to
endure the strain of so tight and durable a knot.27
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word friend
shares an Indo-European root with the word free, which is the verb
to love.28 In ideal friendship, equality of rank and similarity in virtue
are supposed to ensure disinterested choice: loving the friend for him-
self, not for what he can do for you. But to be equal is not to be the same.
Identicality between people does not exist, even for those of the same
gender, class, and ethnic background. Equality is our attempt, in the
social and political realms, to put aside differences temporarily in order
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346 Ivy Schweitzer
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Ivy Schweitzer 347
his friends immortal armor and, entering the battlefield, terrifies the
Trojans who mistake him for Achilles. That this armor fits him per-
fectly, making him indistinguishable from Achilles, expresses in phys-
ical terms the special consonance of their minds and hearts. By con-
trast, when Hector, the foremost Trojan warrior, kills Patroclus, strips
the famed armor from his body and puts it on, he requires divine inter-
vention from Jove and Mars to fill it.32
This story illustrates my central point about ideal friendship: the
love of these comrades not only makes them equal on a spiritual level, it
also renders them interchangeable on a physical level. Sameness is the
asymptotic end of claims to equality. Early friendship discourse reveals
a desire for and reverence of equality as a marker of horizontality and
justice that slips into a fiction or illusion of sameness through the narra-
tive trope of doubling. Over and over, the exemplary stories register this
persistent scenario: when a supplicant mistakes Hesphaestion, who was
taller and more imposing, for his lifelong friend Alexander the Great,
the king supposedly remarked: My lady, you made no mistake. This man
is Alexander too.33 Cicero cites a Roman version of the Greek tragedy of
Orestes, who was sentenced to death for killing his mother, captured with
his philos Pylades, and brought before a king who did not know which
man was Orestes. Thereupon, Pylades declared that he was Orestes, so
that he might die in Orestess place.34 Damon and Phintias, though
different in age and position, are similarly interchangeable. In several
Shakespeare plays, wives mistake a friend or twin brother for the hus-
bands they have lived with intimately for many years.
This slippage has profound consequences for others. When dra-
matic plots of twinning, doubling, substitution, and mistaken identity
embody moral or temperamental similitude as physical interchangeabil-
ity, the mirror functions to further exclude women, as well as people of
color from friendship with elite white men, whom they cannot physically
mirror. Physical differences become ontological ones. Mirrors, however,
do not show us our identical selves, but ourselves reversed. We know
from fairy tales, as well as from Jacques Lacans use of the mirror to
32. For these two incidents, see books 16 and 17 of Homer, The Iliad.
33. Quintus Curtius Rufus, The History of Alexander, trans. John Yardley with
notes by Waldemar Heckel (Hammondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1984), 46.
34. Cicero, De amicitia, 7.24.
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348 Ivy Schweitzer
35. Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed
in Psychoanalytic Experience, in crits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 39.
36. Martha Minow, Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Ameri-
can Law (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 21.
37. Joan Scott provides the now-classic theoretical statement of this dilemma,
how it played out legally in the divisive 1979 Sears case, and how decon-
struction offers an alternative approach in her essay Deconstructing Equal-
ity-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Femi-
nism, in Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 3250. For an extended
feminist conversation on this dilemma, see Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler,
Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, eds., Feminist Contentions: A Philosoph-
ical Exchange (New York: Routledge, 1995).
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Ivy Schweitzer 349
38. John 15:1213. Holy Bible, King James Version (Cleveland: World Publish-
ing Company, n.d.).
39. See Aelred of Rievaulx, De Spiritali Amicitia, and Thomas Aquinas, Summa
Theologia, in Other Selves, 129184.
40. Peter Kirby, The Octavius of Minucius Felix, on the website Early Chris-
tian Writings, chaps. I, IV, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/octavius
.html.
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350 Ivy Schweitzer
41. For examples and elaboration, see Ivy Schweitzer, Perfecting Friendship: Pol-
itics and Affiliation in Early American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2006).
42. Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Con-
texts (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 55, 2728, 24.
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Ivy Schweitzer 351
43. For an account of this trend, see Thomas Luxon, Single Imperfection: Milton,
Marriage, and Friendship (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2005).
44. Barbara Caine and Marc Brodie, Class, Sex and Friendship: The Long Nine-
teenth Century, in Friendship: A History, ed. Barbara Caine (London: Equi-
nox Press, 2009), 22378.
45. Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 2. For
an example of popular psychology, see Lillian B. Rubin, Just Friends: The
Role of Friendship in Our Lives (New York: Harper and Row, 1985).
46. Ray Pahl, On Friendship (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 3, 5.
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352 Ivy Schweitzer
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Ivy Schweitzer 353
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354 Ivy Schweitzer
52. Hester Eisenstein, introduction to The Future of Difference, ed. Hester Eisen-
stein and Alice Jardine (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987),
xvixvii.
53. Ibid., xx, xix.
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Ivy Schweitzer 355
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356 Ivy Schweitzer
even sexual passion. Calling for the creation of a feminist politics based
on...an ideal of friendship that empowers women in their own right,
not as the extensions, possessions, or dependents of men, Raymond
argues that womens friendships are not merely personal and private
bonds, but a form of social and political power, a power that, at its deep-
est level, is an immense force for disintegrating the structures of het-
ero-reality. In this analysis, feminism is not about womens equality
with men, but womens equality with each other and their best Selves.57
Similarly, Mary Hunts Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friend-
ship (1992) locates womens friendship at the center of a radical theol-
ogy whose power has been kept from women and men (the latters inclu-
sion being a marked difference from Raymond) by a patriarchal order
threatened by the idea of women who are independent of men. Hunt
goes beyond Raymonds worldly separatism in making explicit the
socially and spiritually revolutionary potential in womens friendships
to point the way beyond heterosexist patriarchy for everyone.58 Both
of these studies were influenced by the work of Mary Daly; and it is not
surprising that, like Daly, they fall into a reductionist notion of sister-
hood, ignoring the effects of inequalities in racial identity, class, sexual-
ity, and status that emerge when women relate, ally, and organize across
those differences.
It was women of color and lesbian theorists and activists who led the
way in exposing the inequalities built into the notion of sisterhood and
engaging in dialogues about the history of differences among women
that affect friendship and collaboration. Two writers whose work is cru-
cial to this history both published key texts in 1980 as the debates over
differences engulfed feminist movements. Lesbian poet and activist
Audre Lorde is well known for her collection of essays Sister Outsider,
published in 1984, which contains the essay Age, Race, Class, and Sex:
Women Redefining Difference delivered at a colloquium at Amherst
College in April 1980. Lorde begins her reframing by locating wom-
ens attempts at affiliation within the conditions of patriarchal capital-
ism: Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity
57. Janice Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affec-
tion (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1986), 9, 13.
58. Mary Hunt, Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship (New York:
Crossroad, 1992), 52.
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Ivy Schweitzer 357
59. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing
Press, 1984), 115, 12223.
60. Ibid., 123.
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358 Ivy Schweitzer
61. Judith Taylor, Enduring Friendship: Womens Intimacies and the Erotics
of Survival, Frontiers: A Journal of Womens Studies 34, no. 1 (2013): 93. See
also Taylors article in this special issue, Beyond Obligatory Camarade-
rie: Girls Friendship in Zadie Smiths NW and Jillian and Mariko Tama-
kis Skim.
62. Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 19791985 (New
York: Norton, 1986), 62. Noting the similarity in generational conceptions,
Heather Love speculates that the discourse of ideal friendship has flattened
the real affective complexity of this bond. See Heather Love, Feeling Back-
ward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2007), 75.
63. Taylor, Enduring Friendship, 101.
64. Love, Feeling Backwards, 81.
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Ivy Schweitzer 359
65. Judith Halberstam, Shadow Feminisms: Queer Negativity and Radical Pas-
sivity, in her The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2011), 12346; Taylor, Enduring Friendship, 96.
66. Tom Roach, Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of
Shared Estrangement (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 9.
67. Taylor, Enduring Friendship, 9495 (italics in original).
68. Lorde, Sister Outsider, 104.
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360 Ivy Schweitzer
in Black and White Feminist Perspectives by Gloria Joseph and Jill Lewis
in 1981; Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism
and Racism by Ellen Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith in
1984; A Conversation about Race and Class by Mary Childers and bell
hooks in 1992; and, most recently, a dialogue between cross-gendered
friends who explicitly wrestle with the inheritance of Aristotelian philia,
Combating Racialized and Gendered Ignorance: Theorizing a Transac-
tional Pedagogy of Friendship by Philip Olson and Laura Gillman in
2013, to name just a few.69
The most important dialogue for this study is Have We Got a
Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism, and the Demand
for The Womans Voice, by Mara Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman,
which first appeared in Womens Studies International Forum in 1983. The
ground-breaking form of this essay, freed from the conventionally con-
strained alternating interview mode adopted by Rich and Lorde, sig-
nals a conceptual breakthrough. Beginning In a Hispana voice and in
Spanish, the essay immediately plunges the monolingual English reader
into a foreign linguistic world, enacting the essays central demand that
white feminists enter the communities of women of color and listen to
them without preconceptions. Thus unsettled, the essay then proceeds
in English, which the writers acknowledge as a borrowed tongue for
one of us, and alternates among an array of voices in different registers
and moods, sometimes singular, sometimes plural, sometimes unprob-
lematically, sometimes not. Finally, after outlining in excruciating
detail just how incomplete women of color appear to white women
when abstracted from their communities, the Hispana voice says, The
only motive that makes sense to me for your joining us in this investi-
gation is the motive of friendship, which she defines as the practice of
a non-imperialist feminism that seeks to create a non-coerced space
for dialogue. Such an undertaking is very difficult and time consuming
69. Mary Childers and bell hooks, A Conversation about Race and Class, in
Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New
York: Routledge, 1990), 6081; Philip Olson and Laura Gillman, Combat-
ing Racialized and Gendered Ignorance: Theorizing a Transactional Peda-
gogy of Friendship, Feminist Formations 25, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 5983.
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Ivy Schweitzer 361
70. Mara Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman, Have We Got a Theory for You!
Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism, and the Demand for The Wom-
ans Voice, in Women and Values: Readings in Recent Feminist Philosophy, ed.
Marilyn Pearsall (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1986), 19, 23.
71. See, for example, Lorraine Code, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and
the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991);
Mary Dietz, Citizenship with a Feminist Face: The Problem with Mater-
nal Thinking, Political Theory 13, no. 1 (February 1985): 1938; and Cynthia
A. Freeland, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle (University Park: Penn-
sylvania State University Press, 1998).
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362 Ivy Schweitzer
domination. But, she argues, they use it as if all women were alike.72
As an alternative, Lugones suggests friendship, a concept she character-
izes as neglected by everyone including feminists but embraced by anar-
chists because it is non-institutional, extra-legal, and not unconditional,
thereby testifying to what Tim Roach calls the anarchical contingency
of all relationality.73
Friendship, Lugones states, is a kind of practical love that commits
one to perceptual changes in the knowledge of other persons and to
profound transformations in self-knowledge. It is, like Aristotles defini-
tion of ideal friendship as an ongoing activity, more performance than
achievement, and it exists within a perpetual becoming, a restless mobil-
ity and possibility alive to change and transformation. While the term
practical raises the specter of Aristotles notion of utilitarian friendship
and self-interest, Lugones quickly counters by explaining that such love
takes the well-being of the other person into account by acknowledg-
ing her irreducible and ever-shifting particularities. As if referring to a
checklist of the characteristics of classical friendship, Lugones explains
that her friend is not a double, thereby rejecting the slippage towards
sameness we saw in classical friendship discourse, what Rich calls
white solipsism, making the other into a version of the self.74 Rather,
friendship across positions of inequality is itself plural, in the sense
that in doing justice to an others realities, and to our own, we must rec-
ognize the shifting multiplicity and specific logics of the locations we all
move through, an idea Lugones will elaborate into the notions of play-
fulness and world-traveling.75 Based on the belief that each one of
us is many selves, pluralist friendship necessarily requires a multivocal
72. Mara Lugones in collaboration with Pat Alake Rosezelle, Sisterhood and
Friendship as Feminist Models, in Feminism and Community, ed. Penny A.
Weiss and Marilyn Friedman (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press,
1995), 138141.
73. Roach, Friendship as a Way of Life, 13.
74. Adrienne Rich, Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism, Gynepho-
bia, in her On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 19661978 (New York:
Norton, 1976), 306.
75. See Mara Lugones, Playfulness, World-Travelling, and Loving Percep-
tion, in her Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple
Oppressions (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 38n13, where
Lugones cites Aristotle as one of the philosophers with whom she was in
conversation.
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Ivy Schweitzer 363
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364 Ivy Schweitzer
of affiliation that are not synonymous but closely aligned with an ideal
friendship of equals.78
Both of these threads turn away from a focus on individual iden-
tities and equivalence to the performance of relationality, a move from
static understandings of affiliation to fluidity, contingency, and process.
Feminists define transnational relations along similar lines. According
to Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, rapidly evolving international
communities and identities do not simply create an ideal world where
women are all the same and equal. Rather, a transnational approach pays
attention to the inequalities and differences that arise from new forms of
globalization as well as from older histories of colonialism and racism.
This multi-layered approach, they conclude, emphasizes the world of
connections of all kinds that do not necessarily create similarities (my
emphasis).79 In order to undermine romanticized notions of common-
ality through similarity, they suggest, we have to reorient our thinking
away from who we are to what we do that is, we have to reimagine
friendship as a dynamic, improvisational, sometimes improbable pro-
cess that operates outside the terms of self/other and sameness/differ-
ence and requires that we practice a form of self-exile or self-pluraliza-
tion: for Lugones, this means disruptive traveling to the others world;
for Gandhi, through Derrida, this means risking inviting the stranger
within, not just into our countries or homes, but into our selves; for
Heather Love and Jack Halberstam, this means embracing ambivalence,
betrayal, failure. Such friendship, like the philoxenia that is part of clas-
sical philia, is always dissident, paradoxically drawing near and sitting
apart, a continually restless, necessary unsettling of the utopian dream
of community.
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