Making Equals: Classical Philia and Women's Friendship

Making Equals: Classical Philia and Women's Friendship
Author(s): Ivy Schweitzer

Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2, Women's Friendships (2016), pp. 337-364
Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.
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Ivy Schweitzer
Making Equals: Classical Philia

and Womens Friendship
The absence of women, the presence of the question, reveals that

women call into question the constitutive myths.
Anne Norton, Reflections on Political Identity1
The recent burgeoning of films and texts about friendship with

the Other, especially among women in global cross-cultural relation-
ships, raises important questions about the nature of affiliation: can
womens cross-cultural friendships sidestep or even undo the effects of
male domination and Western imperialism, or do they reinscribe them?
Does friendships basis in affect offer an alternative to liberal and neolib-
eral notions and practices of power? These affiliations are being labeled
dissident, but what are the politics of such relationships, when dissi-
dent derives from the Latin to sit apart and philia, the Greek word
for friendship, means dear, own and a tendency towards?2 Schol-
ars of the long philosophical discourse on friendship in the West note
that in classical thought, friendship was characterized as ethical, public,
1. Anne Norton, Reflections on Political Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-

versity Press, 1988), viii.
2. See, for example, the collection of essays forthcoming from University of
Illinois Press titled Dissident Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism, and Trans-
national Solidarity, edited by Elora Chowdhury and Liz Philipose, which
explicitly takes it cue from Leela Gandhis work.
Feminist Studies 42, no. 2. 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 337
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
3. Penelope Anderson, The Absent Female Friend: Recent Studies in Early

Modern Womens Friendship, Literature Compass 7, no. 4 (2010): 243. See
also her more extended study, Friendships Shadows: Womens Friendships
and the Politics of Betrayal in England, 16401705 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni-
versity Press, 2012).
4. See, for example, Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans.
Pierre Joris (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1988); and Jean-Luc Nancy,
The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1991).
Ivy Schweitzer 339
of thinking. Using the writing of Aristotle and Cicero, Derrida reminds

us that friendship already inhabits the heart of the political, but insists
that it is infested with modernitys liberal, nationalistic, and solipsis-
tic logic of political similitude that excludes the Other. Understand-
ing Aristotelian philia as homophilic and androcentric, not to men-
tion asymmetrical and improbable, Derrida pronounces friendship a
disaster.5
Taking up this position, Gandhi proposes an alternative form of friend-
ship derived from her reading of Epicurean philoxenia or guest-friend-
ship, a Greek form of sociality that explicitly welcomes the stranger and,
in Gandhis reading, opposes Aristotelian philia by embracing affective
singularity, anarchist relationality, and other-directedness as well as
the dangerous opening of the self to strangers that Derrida explores in
his meditations on hospitality.6 I applaud Gandhis refusal to dispatch
friendship altogether, her search for an alternative to masculinist and
neoliberal regimes of sameness, and her mobilization of friendship as
an affective relationality that resists fusion or abstraction. Still, I want
to open up her binaristic reading of the classical tradition. In this essay,
I offer a friendly recounting of friendship theory grounded in classical
thought, especially Aristotles, that serves as background for sketching
some of the central issues facing womens friendships in feminist and
transnational contexts. I focus on the theme of equality, the source of
classical friendships homophilia, reading it as a site of utopian potential
particularly hospitable to dissident groups such as women and feminists.
Although, as we will see, feminist notions of friendship acknowledge its
ambivalence, difficulty, and even failure, it remains a salient, potentially
subversive form of affiliation.
A Brief History of Friendship

The most striking revelation in the discursive history of friendship is its
primacy as an affiliative mode and its public and political basis for civic
5. Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Sicle Rad-

icalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2006), 29; Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins
(London: Verso, 1997), 296.
6. Gandhi, Affective Communities, 2930, 20. See Jacques Derrida, Of Hospi-
tality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel
Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
340 Ivy Schweitzer
community. The modern obsession with individual selfhood and sexual

desire has obscured the fact that throughout the ancient world and up
through the early modern period, friendship represented the highest
ideal of ethical, political, and social development in the human sphere.
Writers championed friendship, rather than the ties of family, arranged
marriage, or romance, viewing it as free from natural or biological obli-
gation, social coercion, institutional regulation, and the alleged derange-
ments of erotic love. As a voluntary, nonsubordinating affiliation, friend-
ship typically implied parity, symmetry, spirituality, and self-affirmation
through a rational form of desire and free choice rather than hierarchy,
physicality, and self-loss or self-dilution through irrational and uncon-
trollable passion or forced alliance. Plato considered friendship synony-
mous with the very activity of philosophy, which he defined as reasoning
together, while Aristotle asserted that ties of friendship, because they
define what is just, precede and are necessary for justice.7 Of course, a
Greco-Roman understanding of friendship is different from the narrower
modern view. By the time Aristotle delivered his great ethical treatises,
he had inherited and systematized a long tradition of thought about phil-
ia.8 The pre-Socratic philosopher Pythagoras understood friendship as
the essential harmonic quality of the cosmic sphere.9 Other early think-
ers employed the word in several related ways: to designate the mem-
bers of ones household; to describe unrelated people of equal status and
comparable virtue whom one loves; and to invoke a cross-generational
relationship known as philoxenia or guest-friendship.
On the first meaning, Aristotle believed that friendship ties origi-
nate in the household, his model for the polis, which is the public civic
arena of the state that in ancient Athens was restricted to elite male citi-
zens. Aristotle links types of friendships found in households between
parent and child, husband and wife, brother and brother with different
political forms, although, significantly, he never mentions the relations
7. Plato, Lysis, in Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship, ed. Michael Paka-

luk (Cambridge: Hackett, 1991), 1; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Books VIII
and IX, trans. Michael Pakaluk (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 8.1.1.
8. For the ancient context of friendship doctrine, see Pat Easterling, Friend-
ship and the Greeks, in The Dialectics of Friendship, ed. Roy Porter and Syl-
vana Tomaselli (New York: Routledge, 1989), 1125.
9. Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Way of Life: Text, Translation, and Notes, ed.
John Dillon and Jackson Hershbell (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1991), 227.
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.
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.
Ivy Schweitzer 343
The third meaning of friendship, based on the writing and prac-

tice of the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341270 BCE) and his Greek and
Roman followers, significantly diverged from this trend, understanding
friendship as primarily communal, a network of support that included
women and sometimes slaves more properly called fellowship.16 Epi-
curus was building on the notion of guest friendship that existed along-
side ideal friendship as a practice of ritualized hospitality and gift-giv-
ing extended to strangers and travelers. In the Iliad, for example, Homer
tells the story of Diomedes, an invading Greek, and Glaucus, a Trojan
defending his homeland, who meet in battle and realize through a series
of recognitions that because their grandfathers were guest-friends, they
are also bound by this affiliation.17 According to scholars, the extensive
networks of guest-friendship that linked upper-class families within
ancient Greece and beyond formed the foundation upon which the hier-
archical Greek city-state or polis was superimposed.18 Thus, classical
philia reserved a space within it for embracing difference, strangeness,
and otherness, but always within certain clearly defined bounds and
through ritualized scripts that did not necessarily include intimacy or
affection. Historically, at least, philoxenia was not an alternative to the
homophilic language and practices of philia that Gandhi proposes, but
was part of its ideological system.19
By the time of Socrates, philia emerged as a personal connection dis-
tinguished from the exchange relations of marriage and commerce and
vitally concerned with the moral character and disinterested actions of
the friends.20 Aristotle rejects as asymmetrical the pederastic friendship
depicted in Platos dialogues, a regulated set of pedagogical and erotic
relationships between young boys of the ruling class and older men who
shaped them into citizens. Commentators take Aristotles emphasis on
16. Tim OKeefe, Epicureanism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010),

148.
17. Homer, Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking, 1990), 6. 119282.
18. Easterling, Friendship and the Greeks, 15.
19. For a discussion of philoxenia that situates it as part of classical friend-
ship, see Vanessa Smith, Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific
Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
20. David Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 123. See also Horst Hutter, Politics as Friendship:
The Origins of Classical Notions of Politics in the Theory and Practice of Friend-
ship (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1978), 2555.
344 Ivy Schweitzer
symmetry to mean that he understood self-love as the best model for

the love of another, while recognizing that his notion of selfhood dif-
fers significantly from modern conceptions. Beginning with sense per-
ception, Aristotle turns outward to the ethical and social, rather than
proceeding from self-awareness, as in the Cartesian notion of subjectiv-
ity, which turns inward to the personal and introspective.21 He believes
humans could achieve self-awareness and self-fulfillment only indi-
rectly through mediation by another.22 In the Magna Moralia, Aristotle
offers the analogy of the mirror: And so, just as when wishing to behold
our own faces we have seen them by looking upon a mirror, whenever
we wish to know our own characters and personalities, we can recog-
nize them by looking upon a friend.23 In De amicitia, Cicero concurs,
although again in a metaphorical mode that the man who keeps his eye
on a true friend, keeps it, so to speak, on a model of himself.24
Gender, Dissidence, and Difference

With the exception of Pythagoras who admitted women to his academy,
all of these thinkers conceived of the friendship dyad as exclusively male,
predominantly elite, and frequently military.25 Although Aristotle cites
the self-sacrificing love of a mother for her child as the model of altruis-
tic philia in which loving and wanting good for the other is more import-
ant than being loved and wanting good for oneself, he excludes women
from the category of philoi, believing them constitutionally incapable
of a fully rational, appetite-controlling intellect. For Cicero, the weak-
ness of women and their need for protection from, rather than spir-
itual mutuality with, men prevent their inclusion in such a lofty enter-
prise.26 Not surprisingly, all of the emblematic stories that popularize
the nobility of friendship involve men: Achilles and Patroclus in Homer;
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.
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
27. Michel de Montaigne, Of Friendship, in Other Selves, 19093.

28. Oxford English Dictionary, online at http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition
/english/friend.
346 Ivy Schweitzer
to offer each person the same or equivalent opportunities and rights. In

this way, equality presumes differences and dissymmetry. In her psy-
choanalytically inflected meditations on identity, for example, Diana
Fuss notes that assertions of likeness actually imply a non-coincidence:
To be like the other is to be different from the other, to be precisely not
the same. Politics, she concludes, thus emerges not out of sameness
but out of the non-coincidence between self and other that gives rise to
a desire for an illusory sameness.29 Ciceros frequent qualifiers in his
echoing of Aristotles key formulations suggest his recognition that the
second self is a figure of speech, an aspiration tinged by a desire for sim-
ilarity, coincidence, and harmony. In this light, we can understand ideal
friendship as a deep-seated fantasy of similitude, even merging, and a
desire for a realm free from the commercial relations of exchange.
Thus, classical philias central assertions implicitly acknowledge
the inevitable differences between persons and the shadow cast by eco-
nomic interests. Both have to be overcome by free choice, virtue, and
affection. Not surprisingly, when we delve into the iconic stories, we
find that all of the emblematic pairs held up by ancient and early modern
writers are dissimilar in some respect. The archetypal bond between
Achilles and Patroclus depicted in the second part of the Iliad provides a
revealing example. Learning of Patrocluss death, Achilles mourns him
in the warmest term, calling him philos hetairos, dear comrade...the
man I loved beyond all other comrades, / loved as my own life. Through
frequent citation, Homers famous pair reinforces philias persistently
homosocial, suggestively homoerotic, thoroughly masculine, and often
military character. According to Nestor, however, Patroclus was not Achil-
less equal in lineage or strength.30 A few years older, Patroclus was
adopted into Achilless household as a youth and eventually became Achil-
less squire.31 It is the love and loyalty between them that occlude these
differences in rank, depicted by Homer as taking a telling material form.
Angry at Achilless refusal to fight, Patroclus wrings permission to don
29. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers: Readings on Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and

Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995), 19n27.
30. Homer, The Iliad, 18.9496, 11.93940. Critics argue that Achilless role in
the victory of the Greeks was driven largely by his need for revenge for the
death of his friend.
31. Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World, 40; Stern-Gillet, Aristotles Phi-
losophy, 16.
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.
348 Ivy Schweitzer
describe a crucial moment of misidentification in the infants psycholog-

ical development, that mirrors notoriously lie and distort.35
At issue is a problem feminist theorist Martha Minow calls the
dilemma of difference.36 If we argue for the inclusion of women in ideal
friendship on the basis of their theoretical equality with (mirroring of,
being the same as) men, we reinscribe masculine norms and ignore dif-
ferences that characterize many womens realities. As deconstruction
teaches us, simply reinscribing women into the discourse of the dominant
order may not change or subvert that order. Arguing for and privileg-
ing sexual difference has often implied womens inferiority and a harm-
ful ignorance of racial/ethic, cultural, class, and sexuality differences
among, between, and within women. But Western culture finds it dif-
ficult to think about what is different or not-the-same without creating
a hierarchy that disparages and subordinates what is different. If ideal
friendship is to be a useful tool for feminist practice, we need to consider
the question Simone de Beauvoir asked over half a century ago: Is there a
way to rethink the androcentric dichotomies of sameness and difference,
subject and object, self and other in order to revalorize differences? To
put this question in more contemporary terms: Can we redefine equal-
ity not as sameness but as a utopian horizon, an evolving parity or equity
that rests fluidly or contingently on the embrace of differences?37
Despite its categorical exclusivity, the core elements of ideal friend-
ship appealed to women, mystics, non-elites, and dissident groups,
who appropriated, adapted, and transformed its rhetoric. For example,
friendships emphasis on virtue and equality attracted early Christian
thinkers who shifted the ancients emphasis from rational desire and
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).
Ivy Schweitzer 349
shared virtue to affective affinity and spiritual intimacy. Jesus echoes

Greek and Roman thought by valuing friendship over marriage or kin-
ship, but expands it by routing the love of his band of male disciples for
each other through his sacrificial love for them: This is my command-
ment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath
no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.38 Sev-
eral important medieval writers expanded this line of thought.39 These
transformations opened believers to a broader fellowship of the faith-
ful, to a brotherhood with all humanity, and commanded them to love
their enemies, forms of non-dyadic affiliation completely at odds with
classical ideal friendship but similar to the philoxenia that shapes Epi-
curean thought.
The Christian reconfiguration of friendship solidifies another cru-
cial shift in emphasis that renders it especially useful for feminist think-
ing. In an account of his great friendship with the recently deceased
Octavius, Marcus Minucius Felix, a 3rd century CE Roman lawyer, com-
bines Aristotelian notions with the spiritual intensity of Montaigne: He
himself glowed with such a love for me at all times, that, whether in
matters of amusement or of business, he agreed with me in similarity of
will, in either liking or disliking the same things. You would think that
one mind had been shared between us two. Felix particularly savors the
memory of Octaviuss relentless attempts to convert their friend Cae-
cilius, a skeptic pagan. Describing how he seated himself between the
two disputants to arbitrate their heated debate, Felix says: Nor was
this a matter of observance, or of rank, or of honor, because friendship
always either receives or makes equals.40 By insisting that receiving
equality of rank and status is only one of the conditions for the flower-
ing of friendship, Felix pries opens the exclusivity of dyadic ideal friend-
ship. If a spiritual, ethical, or temperamental affinity makes those who
experience such a bond into equals, then friendship itself can become a
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.
350 Ivy Schweitzer
means of producing equality across differences. It can become a figure

for democracy and for the commons that found it.41
Ideal friendship continues to be an important model of affiliation
in the early modern period, but not without challenges to its androcen-
trism and elitism. In her study of English Renaissance friendship, Laurie
Shannon finds that same-sex amity, from amicitia, the Latin transla-
tion of philia, defined as one soul or mind in two bodies, emerges from a
powerfully normative homosocial bias in literature and social practice
that served to critique, compete, and coexist with heterosocial and hier-
archical norms of affiliation such as romantic love, marriage, erotic rela-
tions, and familial ties. According to her research, language instruction
in Latin featured Ciceros De amicitia as a gateway text doing double
service as a model for both grammatical and moral imitation, making
it among the most commonly learned Latin texts in the Tudor era.
With William Caxtons printing of John Tiptofts English translation of
De amicitia in 1481, the aristocratic ideal of classical friendship spread
to men in all social ranks, who devised a powerful culture of friendship,
discerned by historians through double portraits, ritualized gift-giving,
and shared gravestones, and to aristocratic women as well as women
from the educated middle ranks.42
Friendship as a horizontal relationship of equals gained new impor-
tance in the Age of Revolutions, with the overturning of monarchies and
inherited structures of power. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as
Adam Smith in his treatise The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) revised
the classical ideal of friendship into a disinterested notion of sympa-
thy and affection, practiced in a social sphere that was separate from the
interested transactions of the marketplace. However, a trend emerging
in early modern culture began to eclipse the public and political charac-
ter of homosocial friendship. Writers such as John Milton began apply-
ing the terminology of classical friendship to heterosexual marriage,
redefining marriage as a form of spiritual companionship that required
relatively equal partners. While this gave wives a means of potential
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.
Ivy Schweitzer 351
parity with husbands, it also helped recenter marriage as the dominant

form of social affiliation, creating a powerful lens of heteronormativity
that occluded the public prevalence of homosociality for both men and
women.43
By the nineteenth century, we see different classes and ethnic
groups mobilizing friendship in divergent ways. Womens friendships
become more prominent, especially in the novels of this period, but crit-
ics dismiss them as sentimental. Working people take up the discourses
of friendship and fraternity as vehicles for revolutionary organizing, and
middle-class reformers tout the benefits of befriending the needy as
a way of connecting across class differences.44 Finally, however, in the
face of liberal individualism, privatized domesticity, and the normativity
of heterosexual marriage, friendships power as a model for public civic
community and a salient cultural concept wanes.
The late twentieth century, however, experiences what historian
Alan Bray calls a crisis of friendship, a turning point in which elective
relationships reappear as essential ingredients in the ongoing develop-
ment of identity and as vital, politicized, and often subversive modes of
affiliation attendant with the rise of movements that decenter the bio-
logical family and heterosexual marriage: feminism, queer politics, and
some versions of postmodern and postcolonial theory.45 Feminist and
queer activists celebrate the emergence of families of choice in which
friendship is the salient form of social affiliation providing an alternative
to hierarchical and potentially oppressive communities of fate.46 In an
interview conducted in 1981, cultural historian Michel Foucault touts the
radical potential of homosocial friendship as a relational system that,
operating slant-wise across the various power lines of society, could
yield a culture and ethics that foster the formation of new alliances
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.
352 Ivy Schweitzer
and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force.47 Fueling what we

now call the affective turn, scholars are excavating the buried histories
of friendship, especially the friendships of women.
Womens Friendship and Feminism

In A Room of Ones Own, published in 1929, Virginia Woolf famously
commented: I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading
where two women are represented as friends.48 It is telling that such as
assiduous reader of Jane Austen and the Bronts could ignore the female
friendships they describe, but the impression was widespread. Sociol-
ogist Pat OConnor finds that until the mid-1970s, womens friendship
was systematically ignored, derogated and trivialized within a very wide
variety of traditions (including history, anthropology, sociology and psy-
chology). Scholars tended to dismiss friendships between women as
trivial or gossipy, or as an immature stage in normal female psycho-
sexual development whose goal they assumed to be heterosexual attach-
ment. The fulfillment women derived from heterosexual romantic
love supposedly supplanted their need for female friendship. This trend
reached a pseudo-scientific nadir in the work of Lionel Tiger, a Darwin-
ian behaviorist who argued that women were genetically programmed
to bond with their children, not one another.49 Furthermore, the general
consensus on gendered patterns of affiliation that did emerge demeaned
womens attachments by characterizing them as inward-facing and pas-
sive: women were said to practice face-to-face friendships that involve
talking and sharing, while men were said to practice side by side friend-
ships that involve doing activities such as sports or war.
To understand what happens when friendship discourse meets
feminism requires that we examine the complex career of the concept of
difference. Looking back in 2002 on almost a quarter century of feminist
identity politics, Chicana theorist Gloria Anzalda observed: Twen-
ty-one years ago we struggled with the recognition of difference within
47. Michel Foucault, Friendship as a Way of Life, in Ethics: Subjectivity and

Truth, vol. 1, Essential Works of Foucault 19541984, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans.
Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New Press, 1997), 13638.
48. Virginia Woolf, A Room of Ones Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jova-
novich, 1957), 88.
49. Patricia OConnor, Friendships Between Women: A Critical Review (New York:
Guilford Press, 1992), 911.
Ivy Schweitzer 353
the context of commonality. Today we grapple with the recognition of

commonality within the context of difference.50 The context of com-
monality that characterized the early years of the womens liberation
and feminist movements derived from women putting their energies
into analyses of differences in power and position between women and
men as a result of sex roles enforced by patriarchy, a focus that assumed
a general unity among women and underplayed differences between
them. This presumption of commonality, naive at best, informed the
thinking and activism of radical feminists such as Shulamith Firestone
and the Radicalesbians. At the same time, some writers, including Anz-
alda, perceived the multiple oppressions suffered by women of color,
Third World women, and working-class and lesbian women and theo-
rized a notion of interlocking systems of oppressions that exacerbate
the effects of sexism and pit women against each other. An example of
this intersectional approach is the Combahee River Collectives State-
ment, issued by a group of Black lesbian socialist feminists in 1977 who
formed a separate Black feminist group in 1973 after feeling that outside
reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the [feminist] move-
ment itself have served to obscure our participation. Their commit-
ment to intramural love for ourselves, our sisters and our community
formed a politics that influenced an important thread in feminist think-
ing on affiliation and coalition building.51 Still, a dominant trend of the
early years presumed and championed commonality among women.
In her introduction to The Future of Difference, Hester Eisenstein
explains that early feminist activity focused on analyzing differences
between women and men, believing that dismantling those differences
was the surest means to social equality. A parallel impulse sought to
minimize differences of racial and ethnic identity, class, marital status,
maternity, and sexual orientation between women, in the belief that
these differences had been manipulated, even created, by androcentric
society in order to separate women from each other. Some believed
50. Gloria Anzalda, (Un)natural Bridges, (Un)safe Spaces, in This Bridge

We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, ed. Gloria Anzalda and
AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2002), 23.
51. The Combahee River Collective, The Combahee River Collective State-
ment, in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New
York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983), 275.
354 Ivy Schweitzer
women would be united by a mythical sisterhood produced by the pro-

cess of consciousness-raising, which Eisenstein describes as the ideo-
logical and political conviction that women were more unified by the
fact of being female in a patriarchal society than we were divided by
specificities of race or class.52
Meanwhile, newly engaged womens studies scholars began to
recover womens lost or obscured history, which was rich in variety. In
her account of this period, Eisenstein discerns a shift by the late 1970s to
a woman-centered analysis that viewed womens differences from men
as a source of enrichment and empowerment, rather than one of oppres-
sion, and created an increased willingness to contemplate the varieties
of female experience, and a freedom to look at male experiences as differ-
ent, or even deviant. This trend, Eisenstein argues, was also a response
to the growing diversity of the movement and the need to confront
and debate issues of difference most notably those of race and class.53
A schematic and somewhat whitewashed version of the second decade of
the Second Wave feminist movement, this account nevertheless under-
scores the emergence of the notion of womens culture, of which wom-
ens friendships were an essential part. Especially for cultural feminism,
one strand within the radical feminist tradition, the celebration of wom-
ens differences from men and from dominant masculine cultural values
tended to idealize womens friendships, thereby discouraging any sys-
tematic analysis of differences.
For example, the groundbreaking historical study The Female
World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Cen-
tury America, Carroll Smith-Rosenbergs 1975 essay, documents the pas-
sionate character and frequency of lifelong intimacy between middle- and
upper-class white women in New England who had the time and educa-
tion to correspond and write about their emotional lives. Complete with
rituals that governed every important phase of womens lives, passed on
from mother to daughter, and characterized by a surprising physical-
ity and romantic intensity, these single-sex or homosocial networks
arose out of the rigid gender-role differentiation that pervaded Victorian
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.
Ivy Schweitzer 355
America and discouraged women from public action. Although they

often existed alongside marriage, these relationships had an essential
integrity and dignity that grew out of womens shared experiences and
mutual affection.54 Two years later in 1977, Nancy F. Cott augmented
Smith-Rosenbergs findings, but argued that these white, educated, mid-
dle-class New England women invented a newly self-conscious and ide-
alized concept of female friendship that was rooted in peer relations and
which, by engendering a metaphorical sisterhood, contained the pre-
conditions for organized feminism.55 In 1981, Lillian Fadermans study,
titled Surpassing the Love of Men, expanded the scope of these earlier
works, claiming that it was virtually impossible to study the correspon-
dences of any nineteenth-century woman, not only of America but also
of England, France, and Germany, and not uncover a passionate commit-
ment to another women at some time in her life. Locating the genesis
of the tradition of romantic friendship between women in the Renais-
sance period, Faderman argues that even sexually active female relations
were acceptable in some eras and in some places so long as women did
not usurp male prerogatives. However, these romantic friendships for
the most part ceased to be possible after World War I due to the new
medical knowledge of Freud and other sexologists who identified love
with sex and stigmatized lesbianism as a pathology.56
Two other radical feminist studies of womens friendship illustrate
the insight and limits of this theoretical approach. Janice Raymonds A
Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection (1986) par-
allels the philosophical tradition of male homosocial friendship defined
by Plato and Aristotle. Raymond signals this in her title, which cites
Socrates famous words from the end of Lysis, Platos only dialogue on
friendship. Although aware of the androcentrism of this model, Ray-
mond adopts it for three reasons: it elevates friendship as a superior alter-
native to marriage; its association with thinking and self-knowledge
opens these to women; and it acknowledges passion between friends,
54. Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian

America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 60.
55. Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: Womans Sphere in New England,
17801835 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 160, 201.
56. Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love
Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William
Morrow, 1981), 1517, 20.
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.
Ivy Schweitzer 357
in a profit economy, she insists. Our fears of difference keep us in our

places, supporting stereotypes and existing modes of oppression. Still,
the one difference women have been scrupulously schooled to recognize,
she argues, is their difference from men, a bitter knowledge the dom-
inant group uses to control its social subordinates. Contaminated by
the lies women have internalized over time, this model of difference is
one of the masters tools we must recognize and refuse because it does
not and cannot provide patterns for relating across our human differ-
ences as equals. The equality of women and of all persons is the founda-
tion upon which Lorde imagines building a movement and a new society.
For, she cautions, our future survival is predicated upon our ability to
relate within equality...and devise ways to use each others differences
to enrich our visions and our joint struggles.59
Eschewing the loaded term sisterhood, Lorde evokes a form of
political and social alliance and solidarity that embraces change, strug-
gle, and pain. Although she does not use the term, I would argue that
this relation is a form of feminist friendship: But we sharpen self-defini-
tion by exposing the self in work and struggle together with those whom
we define as different from ourselves, although sharing the same goals.60
The telling phrase here is sharpen...by exposing. Only by making our-
selves vulnerable to each other, subjecting our ideas and behaviors to the
test of critique, and battling with our own internalized bits of the oppres-
sor can we adequately engage in the transforming work that hones the
sense of self and purpose necessary for revolutionary action. This work
of self-transformation can only happen with others in relations of trust,
mutuality, and common purpose that imply an ethics of friendship.
The other essay that looms over the history of feminist affiliation is
Adrienne Richs Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,
written, according to the note Rich appended to the version in Blood,
Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 197985, in 1978 and first published
in Signs in 1980. In a recent reconsideration of the essay, Judith Taylor
calls it arguably one of the most formidable contemporary treatises on
59. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing
Press, 1984), 115, 12223.
60. Ibid., 123.
358 Ivy Schweitzer
womens relationships with one another.61 That is, it offered a formida-

ble vision of womens friendship as sustaining survival relationships
and issued the call for feminists to acknowledge and act on the central-
ity of these bonds. Taylor locates this vision in Richs discussion of Toni
Morrisons novel Sula, a story of a fierce female friendship that found-
ers on the rocks of heterosexual betrayal. Still, Richs image of female
friendship sounds eerily like the Victorian-era homosocial networks
uncovered by Smith-Rosenberg: It is the women who make life endur-
able for each other, give physical affection without causing pain, share,
advise, and stick by each other.62 Significantly, however, in her reading
of a wide range of feminist memoirs, including Lordes, from the 1980s to
2002, which she puts in conversation with Richs essay, Taylor discovers
that friendships mostly fail to respond to Richs call. Feminists across a
fairly wide spectrum of age, class, race, and sexuality find that, contrary
to Richs sentimentalized, one-dimensional vision, their feminist friend-
ships are cruel, unrecognizing, and ostracizing. The cause, Taylor sug-
gests, is the high expectations raised in Richs descriptions of a utopian
womens identification and lesbian continuum that imply an unreal-
istic ethic of care and do not account for the profound ambivalence or
resentment such obligations produce.63
The theoretical framework Taylor offers to understand this disjunc-
tion substantially shifts the notion of feminist friendship. She applies
the work of Heather Love, who, in her important study of failed queer
intimacies, speculates: Because friendship has historically been a salve
for queer forms of intimacy trouble, queer thought has generally pre-
sented friendship as trouble free.64 Taylor also finds explanation in Jack
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.
Ivy Schweitzer 359
Halberstams notion of an anti-social feminism that refuses rescue,

and refuses the lineage of femininity of which friendship is an intrin-
sic part.65 We might amend this by recognizing that it is a specific ver-
sion of sentimentalized friendship that feminists appear to refuse, not
friendship as such. Taylor concludes that feminist friendships in prac-
tice are indeed queer in the sense of refusing settled gendered assump-
tions (that all women are or should be caring of each other) and push-
ing beyond dialectical notions of identity, community, and politics, but
not in the sense that Rich had imagined. Rather, we might think of these
affiliations in the light of Tom Roachs notion of a Foucauldian friend-
ship of shared estrangement, in which betrayal is an essential part of
an experiment in an antirelational ethics that points towards a politics
beyond identity.66 It is significant that in the light of her findings, Taylor
does not dismiss friendship as a salient mode of feminist affiliation, but
rather affirms its centrality, asserting that, Within contemporary fem-
inist thought in North America there exists a persistent effort to make
the creation of a new ethic of social relations among women a central goal
of feminist movements. Serving as a counterbalance to the conven-
tional notion of feminisms overriding concern with relations between
women and men, she argues for womens friendships durability as a
theme or clarion call.67
We can see the durability of this theme in the appearance of the
signal genre of feminist friendship, the conversation or dialogue, often
in the form of a coauthored or double-voiced work. In fact, Lorde places
a transcription of an interview she did with Rich at the center of Sister
Outsider, recorded on August 30, 1979. Their dialogue begins with a dis-
cussion of poetry but ends by exposing raw feelings of misunderstand-
ing and the complex negotiations necessary when friends finally agree to
abandon what Rich calls the old bullshit of Yes, of course we under-
stand each other because we love each other.68 Many other coauthored
essays and books in a similar vein ensued: Common Differences: Conflicts
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.
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.
Ivy Schweitzer 361
and will cause white women to suffer alienation and self-disruption.70

While other feminist philosophers have embraced a heavily revised (for
sexism and classism) Aristotelian notion of ideal friendship and the
notion of community it undergirds as a way to reimagine intersubjectiv-
ity and address the critical question of the purpose and limits of equal-
ity, Lugones expands on the ideas she first explored with Spelman to
produce a feminist application that presages an important thread in the
future of friendship discourse: operating outside the dialectical notions
of subjectivity and community founded on identitarian difference.71
Lugoness most explicit treatment that engages and transforms the
terms of classical friendship discourse appears in another coauthored
essay from 1992 titled Sisterhood and Friendship as Feminist Models,
written with Pat Alake Rosezelle. An attempt to clear the ground con-
ceptually, this essay diverges from the genre I have been outlining because
the coauthors, both women of color (Rosezelle is African American),
speak from similar positions on the epistemological divide. Both reject
the false egalitarianism and demand for unconditional support implied
in white womens use of sisterhood as antithetical to their experiences
in the movement. Egalitarianism, in both its metaphorical and practical
forms, they insist, must include an awareness of and acting upon differ-
ences. Each of their cultural traditions contains terms that denote wom-
ens connections: Lugones suggests compaera as a politically inflected
word, but one that is limited to participation in a common struggle.
Rosezelle explains that sister in the Black community is a term charged
with a long history of struggle, resistance, and respect that white women
imported from the Civil Rights Movement into the womens move-
ment as the only model they had for a community that resisted male
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).
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.
Ivy Schweitzer 363
communication, a dialogue among multiple selves...fluent in the ways

of their own position in the racist and ethnocentric state and in the ways
of people who are differently positioned than themselves. While insist-
ing that such a notion of friendship is not utopian and must be part of a
vision of feminist community, Lugones also recognizes that it is a very
ambitious ideal, a political relation that requires a deep understanding
of racism and an epistemological dislodging of the centrality of white
selves that, she says, is probably not possible at the time.76
The last twenty-five years have seen an explosion of studies of
friendship and womens affiliation in particular, which take two major
directions. First, what Jody Greene calls friendship studies, based
on the pioneering work of historian Alan Bray, uses a queer and cul-
tural studies approach that resolutely and carefully reads the history
of friendship and the history of sexuality into, through, and across each
other.77 The other major direction focuses on studying cross-cultural
and transnational friendships, which is complicated by the increasingly
globalized world of the early twenty-first century. In a much-read essay
of 2002 by anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod titled Do Muslim Women
Really Need Saving? the bone of contention is still the very accep-
tance of the possibility of difference, now by Western war mongers
as well as Western feminists, some of whom have not considered that
the objects of their solicitude, Muslim women in Taliban-dominated
Afghanistan, might not want what we see as liberation and may not
respond to appeals for cross-cultural sisterhood or friendship. Because
these women might be called to personhood, so to speak, in a different
language, Abu-Lughod suggests that we use a more egalitarian lan-
guage of alliances, coalitions, and solidarity, instead of salvation, forms
76. Lugones, Sisterhood and Friendship as Feminist Models, 14143.

77. Jody Greene, The Work of Friendship, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies 10, no. 3 (2004): 321. For examples of works that show women explic-
itly and implicitly engaging with classical friendship doctrine and whether
to extend, revise, reject or ignore that rhetoric, see Valerie Traub, The
Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press 2002); and Lisa Moore, Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian
Landscapes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 1415.
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.
78. Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropolog-

ical Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others, American Anthro-
pologist 104, no. 3 (September 2002), 78788. See also her book, Do Muslim
Women Need Saving? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).
79. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, Introducing Womens Studies: Gender in
a Transnational World, in their An Introduction to Womens Studies: Gender
in a Transnational World, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006), xxii.

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Making Equals: Classical Philia and Women's Friendship

Author(s): Ivy Schweitzer

Making Equals: Classical Philia

The absence of women, the presence of the question, reveals that

The recent burgeoning of films and texts about friendship with

1. Anne Norton, Reflections on Political Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-

Feminist Studies 42, no. 2. 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 337

3. Penelope Anderson, The Absent Female Friend: Recent Studies in Early

of thinking. Using the writing of Aristotle and Cicero, Derrida reminds

A Brief History of Friendship

5. Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Sicle Rad-

community. The modern obsession with individual selfhood and sexual

7. Plato, Lysis, in Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship, ed. Michael Paka-

The third meaning of friendship, based on the writing and prac-

16. Tim OKeefe, Epicureanism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010),

symmetry to mean that he understood self-love as the best model for

Gender, Dissidence, and Difference

27. Michel de Montaigne, Of Friendship, in Other Selves, 19093.

to offer each person the same or equivalent opportunities and rights. In

29. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers: Readings on Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and

describe a crucial moment of misidentification in the infants psycholog-

shared virtue to affective affinity and spiritual intimacy. Jesus echoes

means of producing equality across differences. It can become a figure

parity with husbands, it also helped recenter marriage as the dominant

and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force.47 Fueling what we

Womens Friendship and Feminism

47. Michel Foucault, Friendship as a Way of Life, in Ethics: Subjectivity and

the context of commonality. Today we grapple with the recognition of

50. Gloria Anzalda, (Un)natural Bridges, (Un)safe Spaces, in This Bridge

women would be united by a mythical sisterhood produced by the pro-

America and discouraged women from public action. Although they

54. Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian

in a profit economy, she insists. Our fears of difference keep us in our

womens relationships with one another.61 That is, it offered a formida-

Halberstams notion of an anti-social feminism that refuses rescue,

and will cause white women to suffer alienation and self-disruption.70

communication, a dialogue among multiple selves...fluent in the ways

76. Lugones, Sisterhood and Friendship as Feminist Models, 14143.

78. Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropolog-

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Making Equals: Classical Philia and Women's Friendship

Making Equals: Classical Philia and Women's Friendship

Feminist Studies 42, no. 2. 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 337