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.This position alreadyrepresents a break with normative social order.That is, normatively, maledeities take the top seats in the pantheon of gods, just as, normatively, in thisparticular society, males hold the seats of power in the public and social arena.To place a goddess in the position of the supreme deity, creator, and savior 106 renowned goddess of desirereconfigures the divine hierarchy.In terms of the normative gender arrange-ment, this placement is, in itself, a societal transgression.44Now as Cynthia Humes points out, lots of Saktas, worshipers of the god-dess, see the goddess as supreme and yet they are not transferring this ven-eration or power to ordinary women.What is the difference? What I suspectis the operative difference is precisely what gets reflected in the debate onparak%2łya and svak%2łya, the other woman and one s own wife.45The wife is typically and normatively construed as male property.This wifeis normatively expected to assimilate her identity to that of her husband, ineffect, to erase her difference, which constitutes her identity by becoming anobject, that is, male property.The goddess, on the other hand, is more like an other woman, elusive and distant.As Hegel notes in his famous discussion of the slave and the bondsman,when the slave becomes entirely object, entirely subordinated to the master,then he no longer offers a possibility of recognition for the master.It is theprocess of conquering the slave as other that ensures the psychological coher-ence of identity for the master.After the process is completed, the slave loseshis worth and subjectivity, which are what guarantee the value he has for themaster.In this sense, written into the dynamic of the relations between the gen-ders is a doublespeak.On the one hand, the voice of male authority denouncesthe witch, whose gendered difference as other cannot be mastered, and on theother hand, this denunciation is the trace, which reveals precisely an internal-ization and repression of just this desire for the unassimilable difference thatthis witch presents, and that the docile wife, who does not have her own inde-pendent voice, cannot fulfill.At this point we can adumbrate more preciselySat%2ł s two poles around the middle term between them, which is the goddess asother who walks a fine line, in her many representations, between docile con-sort, and independent woman who, on occasion, degenerates into uncontrol-lable female fury.What we should note is how the amnesia that opposes theseimages, instead of recognizing their fundamental unity, is what fuels the needfor conquest.The process of assimilating and conquering the other offers the possi-bility, in Hegel s terms, for the master to be recognized.This is the impetus ofthe transgression involving the other woman.On the one hand, the otherwoman, unlike the wife, but like the goddess, initially maintains the signof difference that woman presents.However, the process of assimilating herand erasing the difference she presents begins to be put into play with theexcitement of the conquest of the other woman.She is transgressive pre-cisely because her difference has not yet been, but will be, in the future, the other/woman 107assimilated.That is, so long as the other woman dwells in the nebulousinterior of the continuum, not clearly placed onto one pole or the other, so longas she is not conquered, not transformed into the status of object/property, sheis transgressive.And so long as she offers the incipient possibility of assimi-lation, the transgression she presents is sexy because it affords the possibilityof recognition, so at this point she is not denounced, not relegated to themarginal existence of the irredeemable witch.To go outside to the other woman is to affirm the power of the goddess,the sign of woman as difference, but yet still to distance it, not let it reach thecore of quotidian life.The goddess is all-powerful, but she is, after all, an other woman, someone one can get excited about, but not someone one hasto actually shift one s identity for.A person can worship a goddess in all sorts ofelaborate ways and never have to really listen to what she might say.In thissense, the goddess also remains a mute object.Even as she is being worshiped,the icon does not talk back.46 Rarely does she visibly make demands on aperson the way a live embodied woman does, especially in the way that a liveembodied woman with whom one resides 24/7 would make demands.47On the other hand, the practice involving the wife as Tantric partneringeniously circumvents the psychological distraction that asserts the bipolarfabrication of the docile wife and independent witch as two really distinctrepresentations.This practice with the wife reintegrates these two images intoa single form of woman, reintegrating her fragmented being into a whole, thatis, re-membering her, undoing the amnesia that split her identity.To have to acknowledge one s own wife as the goddess shifts thingsconsiderably.It entails taking seriously the desires and demands that anotherliving being voices, and not simply in a calculated maneuvering of one s owninterests that would be precisely not to see her as a goddess and could workonly with a woman/partner one would meet with only infrequently or with adisembodied goddess, who remains a mute icon.What it requires is actuallylistening to her speech.The shift suggested by the BT and GT and other texts,which involves the wife as the Tantric partner, affords a deconstruction of themale egoic identity as master of his property as wife.The wife s claims tosubjectivity are recognized.Now how is this transgressive? It entails a subversion, which strikes at amuch deeper core of our social fabric than any sort of sex with an other woman could, than any type of pornography could.It cuts at the root of thesexual order as an order of power.It allows us in our own society to see howmuch sex functions as a way of constructing identity and especially con-structing identity in relations of hierarchy and dominance.In recognizing theclaims to subjectivity that this other presents, an other who is irrevocably other 108 renowned goddess of desireby the mark of her sex, the otherwise unalterable pattern of hierarchy anddominance loses its absolute claim to being the natural order. It begins tounravel possibilities for her claims to the specific privileges that subjectivityentails.Woman and the Fifth MEarlier I noted that Tantric traditions are multiple and that their use of the FiveMs reflects diverse agendas.The choice of wife as partner in the rite of sexualunion in the GT and the BT points to the idea of woman herself as the sign ofthe transgressive rather than an idea of illicit or forbidden sex.One moreimportant element in the BT suggests a conscious appreciation of the trans-gressive as connected to the idea of woman.The list of Five Ms is altered toexplicitly propose woman, not woman as object of sexuality, but woman asgendered difference as the fifth M.As a list, the Five Ms have one characteristic that makes them a littleunusual: that the list typically does not vary across texts.Most lists we findin Tantric texts whether a list of gods or goddesses or pilgrimage sites orpractices present varying degrees of fluidity
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