POSTMODERN THEORY AND THE SUBIECï OF FEMNSM

by Natalie Kristina Baydack

A thesis submitted to the Department of Political Studies in conformity with the requirernents of the Degree of Master of Arts

Queen's University Kingston. Ontario, Canada April 1998

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The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimes reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son pemission. autorisation. This thesis examines the relevance and utility of postmodern perspectives on subjectivity to feminist theory. In feminist theory today there is widespread agreement that the univenal humanist su bject, dong with dl pnnciples of integrity . autonomous selfhood and continuous identity over time, are nothing more substantial than discursive products of repressive patriarchal regimes. and so can have no relevance to feminism. This thesis argues, to the contrary, that feminist theory cm only proceed from a standpoint informed by humanist principles and values. Whereas the posmodem critique of the universal, transcendental subject of hurnanism is certainly warranted, it is a senous mistake to conclude, as many feminists have. that al1 appeals to abiding identity and subjective autonomy are therefore illegitimate. The thesis considers exemplary positions within three main strands of postmodem feminist theory. It concludes that Uisofar as both post-gender theory and sexual difference theory rely on an explicitly post-structuralist framework, and in particula. on a highly problematic, anti-realist conception of language as exclusionary structure, the y cannot constitute a suitable theoretical basis for feminism. On the one hand. post-structuralist feminist theory deprives feminism of its epistemological ground by insisting on the wholly linguistic, and therefore illusory, character of identity. On the other, it assirnilates political agency to the same linguistic structures which produce identity, and in the process elhinates any meaningful conception of women as active agents of change. Materialist feminism, by contrast, departs from the post-smicturalist totalization of language toward a more useful account of subject formation and resistance. Materialist feminism theorires a dialectical relationship between subjects and their world, thus connecting the identity "women" to concrete women as real, histoncal beings. and retaining for feminism its epistemological ground. Furthermore, by insisting that subjects constantly renegotiate the forces of construction even as they are constmcted by them, materialist feminism allows subjects some measure of subjective autonomy and reflexive critique. The thesis concludes, therefore, that feminist theory and politics can only coherently proceed on the basis of a materialist outlook which refuses to sever itself completely from the humanist tradition. The wnting of a Master's thesis is frequently a long and taxing project. and the present effon is no exception. I would like therefore to thank those people whose various contributions have been indispensable to its successful completion. I am most grateful to my supervisor. Eleanor MacDonald, whose trenchant criticisms and comments throughout the writing process have helped me to refine and clarify my position. Without her invaluable support this thesis would have been a very different one indeed. I would also like to thank the members of my defence board, including Sue Hendler, Christine Overall. Phi1 Goldrnan, and Margaret Littie, for their many insightful questions and suggestions, as well as my fellow gaduate students at Queen's. particularly Greg Millard and Mike Krywy, for the countless informal but stimulating conversations which forced me to clariQ my arguments. Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter One Post-Gender Theory ...... -9

Chapter Two Sexual Difference Theory ...... 33

Chapter Three Materialist Feminism ...... 58

Conclusion ...... 71

Bibliography ...... 76

Vitae ...... 8 1 Introduction

It has become increasingly evident, from recent discussions in philosophy and political theory, that not only has the universal subject of humanist discourse suffered an irreversible collapse. but that humanist rhetoric itself is languishing under the weight of a concerted anack against its most fundamental values and presuppositions. It seems to me - and here I corne out very much opposed to present trends - that feminists should not embrace these developments unconditionally. To be sure, the latter has itself made significant contributions to the demise of the humanist subject. nie supposedly universal subject of humanism. feminist theory has for some tirne insisted, is not universal at dl. Quite the contrary. it is a specifically male subject attempting to pass itself off as representative of a general humanity. But even as earlier feminists denounced the false universalism of the humanist subject. their critique was motivated by an essentially hrimonisr belief in the equality of al1 human beings. Indeed, feminist demands for the recognition of a subject "women" were prernised on the assumption that women were pan of a comrnon humanity, al1 of whose members, secondary differences and particular circumstances notwithstanding, were equally deserving of dignity and respect. In recent years, however. postmodem perspectives on subjectivity have thrown the notion of a common humanity irseif under suspicion. In keeping with this development, a substantial body of feminist theory has gone well beyond the original argument for women's inclusion in a general subject to expose the "maleness" of the humanist enterpise as such. The very subject position to which earlier feminists aspired is now widely judged always to bear the imprint of an exclusionary and repressive paaiarchal regime. Indeed, the discovery that the rational, autonomous subject of hurnanism is nothing more substantial than the product of patriarchal power relations has been largely responsible for its demise. The humanist subject - a subject which, according to its postmodern critics, invariably stands outside culture and history and surveys the world from some neuaal and transcendental perspective - is really nothing but a cultural artifact. discursive product or linguistic effect.' The notion that there is something about us that evades the reach of power. that there is something called a "self' whose autonomy and capacity for reflexive critique are not, in the end, sirnply the transient effects of power relations, is now regarded as hopelessly naive, if not in fact insidious. For such appeals to autonomy and reason. so the argument goes, depend on a pemicious "rnetaphysics of presence" whose deconstmction has been energeticaily caried out by a formidable series of anti-Enlightenment thinkers beginning with Nietzsche and continuing through Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. These thinkers have demonstrated that the notion of a self- identical being with a stable existence pnor to culture and language is the merest of illusions. and have taken this insight as their cue to dispense with ail principles of integrity. autonomous selfhood. and continuous identity over tirne. Whereas humanist thinkers. therefore, shared a profound faith in a general humanity whose members were united. despite their differences. in their status as equal and autonomous beings. postmodem perspectives on the "constructed subject" and the "tyranny of identity" unfailingly direct Our attention to the "difference" which that universal category forecloses. Feminist theory. as 1 have already said, has not been immune to this postmodem assault on the Enlightenment legacy. A body of postmodem feminist theory has emerged which. in the most general ternis. is concerned to expose the power relationships which underlie Our seerningly natural systems of representation; to have done with metaphysical substance by reconceptualizing subjectivity as discursive product or linguistic effect: to stress the limitations of change at the material level and correspondingly. the need for discursive, linguistic. or "syrnbolic" transformation; and to promote "difference" at the

I~heposunodem critique of the humanist subject tends to overlwk signifiant differences in the way that subject is theorized by humanist philosophers. ffite Soper (1986. 146-7) points out that the socialist humanist subject, to take one exarnple, is certainly not a "transcendental" one, insofar as it is detennined by ib conditions of existence. But even though its actions are not aiways transparent to it, it is nevertheless a conscious political agent whosc decisions and actions have a decisive effect on the course of history. Soper points out that postmodernists typically deny the validity of thinking of persons in this way, on the grounds that the meaning of our consciousness and our experiences is mercly the surface effect of determinations exercised outside our comprehension and beyond our controt expense of universal ~ategoriesand totalizing political snategies. But it would be a mistake to think that postmodem feminist theory constitutes anything more than a very loosely unified body of work. It is possible to distinguish between, on the one hand. posunodem ferninisms influenced by the specifcally pst-snunuralist problematization of subjectivity. and on the other, materialist feminisms which have assirnilated certain post-s~cturalist insights without necessarily being propelled to the exueme conclusions to which its most enth usiastic proponents are driven. The former category - post-structuralist feminism - holds that al! perceptions, concepts and truth-claims are constructed in language, dong with the corresponding subject-positions which are likewise no morc than shifting epiphenomena of this or that cultural discourse. Within this general outlook two opposing suands can be discerned, the first of which seeks to demonstrate that not only is the universal humanist subject an Unposter, but that generalizing appeals to the identity "women" display a similar brand of impenalizing logic and are likewise unacceptable. From the post-gender perspective, feminist appeals in the name of women are ontologically mistaken and politically reactionary, insofar as the binary gender opposition is a repressive imposition of paûiarchal discursive regirnes which ought to be resisted.? These feminists seek to subven the discursive mechanism which imposes coherent gender identities and envision an eventual world in which genders and sexualities would proliferate. The second wing of post-structuralist feminism, on the other hand. insists just as adarnantly on the need to preserve a universal category of women, even as it characterizes that category as inherently fragmented, multiple. and ultimately undeftnab~e.~ Theorists of sema! difierence focus on "woman" as the "unrepresentable" of a monolithic masculine discourse. and conceive the task confronting feminists as a quest to register the ineffable feminine in symbolic terms other than those goveming masculine representation.

?~e~resentativeof the pst-gender position are theorisü such as Judith Butler ( 199 la; 1993), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick ( 1990). and Monique Wittig ( 1980: 198 1 : 1985). 3~eministsadopting a sexual difference penpedive include Rosi Braidotti (199 1; 1994b), Htléne Cixous ( 1976). Luce Irigaray ( I985a; 1985b). and Alice Jardine ( 1985). It is not difficult to see. even fiom this btief summary. why both post-gender and sexual difference feminisms have been accused of devoting inordinate attention to what

Kate Soper calls the "metaphysical underpinnings of gender relations" (Soper 199 1, 104) at the expense of the material, the historie, and the culturally specific. Hence the inclination of the third strand of posunodem fernini~rn.~Whereas post-structuralist feminism in both its guises displays a consurning preoccupation with questions of language and symbolic representation. materialist ferninists emphasize the discursive construction of the subject as a historical material entity multiply organized across variable axes of difference. In other words. rnaterialist feminists take senously the postmodem problematization of the subject as a self-identical being while nevertheiess rejecting the post-smicturalist totalization of languag. Notwithstanding the impressive advances postmodernism has made into feminist theory, 1 do not want to exaggerate the extent of its successes. Many feminists continue to judge the association of ferninism with postmodernism an uncornfortable one? The concem, for example, is frequently expressed that in emphasizing difference at the expense of general categones, "feminisrn as theory [pulls] the rug from under feminism as politics" (Soper 1990. 234). Feminist politics, after all, is essentially a collective endeavour concemed with advancing a "general clairn for the recognition of the specifici~of female interests" (Felski 1989, 70). A postmodem perspective which cdls into question the very existence of a class of women, and which insists only and everywhere on difference. engages in a highly abstract form of theory which cannot be rnuch use to a feminist politics whose arena of intervention is the real world. Such a perspective ignores the incontrovertible reality of women's oppression in patnarchal societies and precludes the kind of analysis that enables us to identify those societies as pamarchal in the frst place. In

4~aterialiscferninists inciude Teresa de Lauretis (1984: 1986b) and Rosemary Henncssy ( 1993). 5~orcriticai asscssments of posunodem feminism. sce. for example. Alison Assiter (1996). Seyla Benhabib (1995). Rita Felski ( 1989). Pauline Johnson (l994), Kate Soper (1986; 1990; 199 1). and Allison Weir (1996). Some of these critics oppose postrnodern feminism generdly conceived while others are specifically concemed to target pst-stmcturalist feminism. short, if the subject "womcn" is a thorough-going cultural fiction, if women do not exist and "demands in their name oniy reinforce the myth that they do" (Alcoff 1988,420). then

feminism loses its epistemological ground and, by logical extension, its very raison d'être.

On this view. feminist theory, if it is to rernain coherent, must retain some notion of a subject "wornen" which is not finally reducible to power relations and whose ernancipation is the goal of feminist politics. Related to these concerns is the suspicion that women's agency is seriously jeopardized by the postmodem reconceptualization of subjectivity as a discursive product or Iinguistic effect. In particular, it is far from clear how a subject whose very sense of self is a social construct can retain the critical and self-reflective capacities that politicai agency seems to presuppose and require. Of course. postmodemism rejects the very notions of reflexive autocritique, moral judgement. self-willed choice and reasoned argumentation as discredited categories of an outdated humanist tradition. The subject as source of knowledge and meaning, as possessor of a certain moral autonomy or capacity for critical reflection, is ueated by postmodemists as an oumght illusion which serves merely to reproduce the status quo. Yet for many critics this tendency to interpret subjectivity, moral agency and resistance as consisting finally in nothing but power relations is wholly unacceptable. It is one thing to recognize that the subject is not a self-evident given of consciousness. and for that reason does not embody a pure source of knowledge and meaning, but it is quite another to assume that the subject, and self-consciousness, are therefore rnerely the epiphenomena of discursive structures of domination. Feminist theory, on this view, must retain some minimal notion of critical reflexivity as a capacity of human subjects, lest it wind up affïrming a reductive "ontology of power" (Kogler 1996.28) that is just as extreme as, and no less problematic than, the humanist belief in metaphysical presence. These, then, are some of the debates presently under way within feminist theory consequent to the adoption, by a significant number of feminists. of a postmodem perspective on subjectivity and resistance. Or perhaps 1 should Say "perspectives". for as 1 have already suggested, there are in fact several. And this bnngs me. finally, to the question which motivates this thesis: can feminist theory proceed on the assumption that the demise of the humanist subject, and of humanist values in general. is an event to be uncritically acclaimed? More specifically. I wonder if any of the various postmodem rearticulations of the subject of feminism suffice from the point of view of a feminist theory and politics comrnitted to effecting social change - at the symbolic and material Ievels - in the name of women. The question is. 1 think, an important one. insofar as feminism.

which as a critical theory and oppositional movement aspiring to wornen's emancipation has its roots in an undeniably humanist past, seems now on the verge of rejecting that past altogether. Indeed, postmodem feminism is liable to dispense with the entire legacy of hurnanist thought without so much as a backward glance. But this manoeuvre is only made

possible by a persistent tendency, on the one hand. to treat humanism as if it were a monolithic and static body of thought. and on the other, by a deeply-rooted ref!isal to appreciate that postmodem theory is incoherent in the absence of an appeal to the hurnanist values which it imagines itself to have so decisively overcome. I have proceeded, then. via an analysis of each of the three categories of postmodem feminism - that is to Say, post-gender feminism. sexual difference feminism, and materialist feminism - which 1 outlined above, although 1 am fully aware that these categones are artificial and certainly not impermeable. Furthemore, because I have Limited space for discussion. and obviously cannot do justice. in this thesis. to the work of every feminist theorist who might conceivably fall into one or the other of these categones. 1 have restricted the scope of my considerations to a number of feminists whose work best exemplifies the premises and arguments typical of these various perspectives. 1 am not. of course. oblivious to the danger which this methodology presents. How legitimate is it to draw general conclusions about. Say, post-gender feminism as a avhole on the basis of an examination of the work of a single post-gender theorist? The risk of glossing over intemal disagreements between, to use the sarne example, post-gender feminists, is nonetheless a

nsk which 1 am prepared to accept. In Chapter One, therefore, i devote rny attention to Judith Butler. who is without a doubt the pre-eminent advocate of the post-gender position

and whose work owes a great deal to Foucault and Derrida. In Chapter Two 1 compare the work of Luce Irigaray's theory of sexual difference. a perspective which takes its direction

prirnarily from Lacanian psychoanaiysis. with Rosi Braidotti's Deleuzian variation on the the sexual difference theme. Finally. Chapter Three considers the materiaikt feminism of

Teresa de Lauretis, and is followed in the usual fashion by a Conclusion summarizing my arguments. In constructing my argument 1 have drawn on the work of several feminists, and here 1 should single out Kate Soper, Rita Felski, Allison Weir and Alison Assiter, whose collective work does not amount to a coherent theoretical perspective in itself. but whose astute critical insights into postmodern feminist theory have nevertheless been

indispensable to rny argument.

The question at stake in al1 this, if 1 may reiterate. is whether postmodem feminism

as any of these theorists present it is at al1 adequate from the point of view of a feminist theory and politics whose pnmary objective is social transformation in the name of women.

In contemplating this problem 1 have pursued two main lines of inquiry, both of which were foreshadowed earlier in this Introduction over the course of my brief discussion of

criticai responses to postmodem feminist theory. 1 have wanted to know. first, whether the theory assens an episremological grolrnd for feminisrn, and second, whether it provides feminists with an adequate account of women's ugency. Of course. postmodemists are apt to perceive my concern with issues of this kind as evidence of a retrograde nostalgia for

humanist pnnciples and values, to which 1 cmonly respond that if I continue to engage with the hurnanist tradition, it is not mere "nostalgia" which motivates me, but a conviction that critical feminist theory is only possible from a standpoint infomed by distinctively humanist values and presuppositions. This conviction, as it tums out. is what underlies my deep suspicion of post-

structuralist feminism in both its post-gender and its sexual difference incarnations, as well as my belief that feminist theory is better off pursuing a matenalist path. Whereas Butler.

Irigaray and Braidotti seem driven by a belief that feminist theory. to be h-uly subversive. must effect a radical break with everything that has gone before it, de Lauretis refuses to deny the continuing relevance of humanist principles to feminist theory. She does not, for example, take postrnodenùst insights into the discursive construction of the subject to mean that subjectivity is therefore the locus of an illusion. Rather, she theorizes a dialectical relationship between subjects and their world. so that, for exarnple, the term "women" is not mereiy a discursive constmct or linguistic effect, but is also a term whose concrete referents are real-life women as agents of change. and who construct themselves anew even as they are consmicted by forces beyond their control. And in theorizing this dialectic

she makes room for a theory of women's agency which does not reduce that capacity to a side-effect of differential power relations or of language in its structural integrity. The strength of her position, therefore. lies in her attempt to theorize women as active subjects capable of critically reflecting on and practically intervening in their world. So if I do not, in the end. corne out unequivocally in favour of either a postmodemist or a humanist

perspective in feminist theory, but certainly opposed to a post-structuralist one. it is because 1 believe that we are better off combining postmodernist insights into the social construction of the subject with humanist ideals of autonomous selfhood. And if it is remarked. in response to this suggestion. that 1 have clearly not yet managed to exaicate myself from outdated humanist assumptions. then 1 will be obliged to respond that as a feminist. my prirnary concem is not so much theoretical purity, but social change in the narne of women. Chapter One: Post-Gender Theory

In the Introduction 1 identified two strands of postmodem feminist theory whose explicitly post-str~lctlrralisr stance on questions of subjectivity and political agency is. 1 think, problematic. On the one hand. theorists of sexual difference seek to preserve a

universal category of women - even as they define that category as fragmented, plural, and ultimately undefinable in perceived opposition to the specifically "masculine" humanist subject - while on the other, post-gender theonsts contend that not only is the universal humanist subject a masculinist fraud. but geeneeralizing appeals to the identity "woman" betray a sirnilarly unacceptable brand of totalitarian logic. Nonetheless post-suucturalist ferninists are united in their determination to sever themselves unerly from the ideals, values. and principles of humanist philosophy. and indeed to underline their own dienation from the sociocultural arrangements and practices to which those ideals and pnnciples have given rise. In their single-minded mission to effect a thorough-going break with humanism. however. post-structuralist feminists invariably eut themselves adrift from the urgent political and social struggles in which the women's movement is necessarily engaged. The relevance of their work to feminist political practice is therefore a matter of considerable doubt, Judith Butler. who is witbout question the pre-eminent advocate of the post-gender position and whose brilliant and controversial arguments have provoked widespread and impassioned debate, is a case in point. Undertaking to subven the notion that "there is some existing identity. understood through the category of women, who not only initiates feminist interests and goals within discourse, but constitutes the subject for whom political representation is pusued" (Butler 199 1a, l), Butler argues that gender attributes are not the expression of an abiding or substantive identity. On the contrary, gender is a cultural construction whose operation produces biological "sex" and retroactively establishes it as natural and inevitable in the interests of patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality. In short, the category of "women" is a fiction produced by the very discursive regimes that subsequently invoke it as the natural foundation of theu own clairn to legitimacy. Therefore feminist appeals to a universal female subject called " women" can only be self-defeating. Indeed, at her most exû-eme, Butler declares that feminist politics can not only do without a universal category of women. but cm in fact gain new strength by getting rid of it.

Identity politics cmonly result in the unwitting reification of existing gender relations - an outcome utterly antithetical to feminist aims - whereas a tnily subversive feminist politics would expose the purely normative and provisional character of gender ontology and enable a "radical proliferation" of gender configurations beyond the customary two.

In this chapter 1 want to demonstrate the inadequacy of Butler's theory on two counts. In refusing. Fust, to gant any kind of a reality to the identity "woman" beyond a discursive one, she eliminates any convincing grounds for deploring the exercise of patriarchal power and, by extension, deprives ferniiiist theory of its epistemological ground. At the sarne time, her extreme social constnictionisrn prevents her from providing more than a bleakly mechanistic theory of women's agency.

Rather than searching for the ongins of gender or the inner truth of female desire. Butler sets out to provide a genecllogy of gendec to expose, that is. the mechanism whereby subsequent effects surreptitiously appear as prior causes in the interests of phallogocennism and compulsory heterosexuality. It would be dificult to exagprate the central role that Foucault's work plays in this enterprise. The task of the genealogist. Foucault explains, is to ask "under what conditions, and in what forrns can something like the subject appear in the order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each type of discourse. what functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules?" (Foucault 1984. 118). Genealogy deprives the humanist subject of its role as originator and reveais it to be itself the eflect of a discursive economy of power. Foucault writes: "it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, corne to be identified and constituted as individuais. The individual. that is, is not the vis-à-vis of power; it is, 1 believe, one of its prime effects" (Foucault 1980, 98). If modern power is primarily productive rather than repressive, then it is misguided, not to mention politically ineffective, to invoke a subjectivity beyond the reach of power and to employ a vocabulary of liberation and oppression. Now. feminist anaiysis has for its coherence and rhetorical force relied until recently on precisely this opposition between oppressor and oppressed that Foucault is detennined to deny. But this apparent discrepaiicy has not prevented feminist theorists, Butler foremost among them, from enthusiastically importing the Foucaultian framework into feminist theory. These feminists are keen to demonstrate the wholly normative and contingent quality not only of existing gender attributes and relations, but of sexuality and the body themsdves (Soper 1993, 3 1). Indeed. once embarked on the genealogical path, it becomes virtually impossible to allow that there might be any prediscursive element whatsoever to human subjecbvity, sexuality, and corporeal existence. Where Foucault has proved particularly useful, from the postmodem feminist point of view. is in his rejection of the psychoanalytic postulate of a natural or instinctual body repressed by cultural practices. Foucault argues that in fact there is no naniral body against which culture exerts its influence. There is no body "before the law", no materiality or ontological independence of the body outside of the normative process of its construction. Hence his clairn that

...the notion of "sex" made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements,biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere: sex was thus able to function as a unique signifier and as a universal signified (Foucault 1990, 154).

...sex is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internai element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies and their matenality, theK forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures (Foucault 1990, 155). For Foucault, sex is not a straightforward fact or enduring property of the body. but is in fact produced in the service of the social regulation of sexuality. artificially uniting a vanety of unrelated bodily functions and subsequently posturing as interior and causal essence. It is therefore mistaken to suppose "that by saying yes to sex, one says no to

power" (Foucault 1990, 157). The upshot is that the body has no ontological status outside of the specific discursive regirnes which constitute it: and any appeal to a prediscursive or natural body whose inner auth is repressed or distoned by culture is sirnply testimony to the effective deployment of that same insidious power. Political transformation. accordingly. far from liberating the "natural" body from repressive cultural practices, is a function of the proliferation of configurations of power and sexuality (Butler 1987a. 2 19). These rather grim insighü are the point of departure of Butler's genealogical deconstruction of gender. Following Foucault, Butler unequivocally rejects any conception of the body as natural. The concept of nature, she thinks. does not refer us

unproblematically to a realm that remains safely extemal and pnor to culture. On the contrary. "nature" is a cultural construction arbitrarily employed in order to impart an air of inevitability and legitimacy to social conventions and noms. It is an idea "generated and sustained for the purposes of social control" (Butler 199 la, 125). In fact Butler tums out to be even more unrelenting than Foucault in her deconstruction of the natural body. WhiIe Foucault o@zcially wants to argue that there is no "sex" that is not produced by discursive power. she pointedly observes, his vague alllisions to "bodies and pleasures" and to a "prediscursive libidinal multiplicity", as if these represented the locus of resistance to culture per se. indicate that he harbours an "unacknowledged emancipatory ideal" (Butler 1991a, 94-7). Unfortunately for the coherence of her own critique, Butler will have none of these sentimental appeals to bodies before the law. Butler supplements her Foucaultian critique of the natural body with the notion that heterosexuality is a normative institution that requires and produces the ostensibly natural fact of sex as its legitirnating ground. The distinction between sex and gender, a distinction formulated by earlier feminists to dispute the pernicious notion that biology is destiny . appears on close inspection to be no distinction at dl. Opposing the biological intractability of sex to the relative cultural variability of gender obscures the fact that sex is itself discursively produced as prior to culture, as politically neutral medium on which cultural meanings are inscnbed, precisely in order to conceal and perpetuate a particular set of power relations. Gender, Butler argues, "ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of rneaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception): gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established" (Butler 199 la, 7). Against those for whom the body's natural and irreducible matenality is the necessary foundation for feminist practice, Butler argues that sex is gender al1 along.

Sex is an "ideal construct" materialized by regulatory norms in the service of the heterosexual imperative. Feminism, lest it inadvertently prop up the very systems of power that it explicitly condemns, rnust cure itself of the "illusion of a mebody beyond the law" (Butler 1991a. 93). A truly subversive feminist politics must devote its energies to exposing the idea of the natural body as a consmiction and to offenng a set of strategies for configuring bodies to contest the hegemonic power of compulsory heterosexuality (Butler 199Ia, 125). Now, although Butler insists that bodies have no ontological status apart from the normative process of their construction. she nevertheless argues that bodily materialization proceeds at the price of certain violations and exclusions. She emphasizes that "matter irself is founded through a set of violations" (Butler 1993.29). Elsewhere she writes that the "discursive ordenng and production of bodies in accord with the category of sex is itself a materiai violencefgin its imposition of a dudity and a uniformity on bodies in order to maintain reproductive sexuality as a compulsory order (Butler 1995a. 52). What is more. this rnaterialization operaies according to an "exclusionary maaix" that produces. through a set of foreclosures and radical erasures, a domain of excluded bodies as the necessary outside of "hnrlits that matter" (Butler 1993. 16). The production of culturdly intelligible subjects requires the simultaneous production of a domain of "abjecteci beings" who, in failing to identify with the normative phantasm of sex, also fail thereby to qualify as fully human subjects. The same discursive power that seeks to establish causal lines of connection among biological sex, culturally constituted genders, and the expression of both in sexual desire. in other words. also produces discontinuous or noncoherent genders. Their own constnictedness notwithstanding, these "unthinkable" bodies "corne to bound the 'human' as its constitutive outside, and to kaunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticulation" (Butler 1993, 8). This tenninology of violation and exclusion is highly problematic. On the one hand, Butler daims that sex is a "constitutive constraint" without which "we would not be able to think, to live. to make sense at all" (Butler 1993, xi). But in asking us to view whar is constructed (and, 1 might add. what is constructed by means of a "violation") as indispensable. Kate Soper points out, "Butler is surely close to capsizing her fûndamental project - which is to get us to see certain 'constitutive constraints'. notably the living and thinking of the body as sexed. as merely normative and contingent" (Soper 1995a. 1 18- 19). On the one hand, then. if materiality cannot be thought apart from power in its formative and constituting effects, as Butler would have it, we are at a loss to comprehend what precisely is violated when matter is founded. It makes no sense to argue on the one hand that the rnaterial has no ontological status apart from the normative process of its construction, and to employ on the other a vocabulary of violation and exclusion to describe that process. To characterize the materialization of bodies as a violation is to presuppose something pnor to power that is violated by it - it is to hint at authentic bodies repressed or distorted by power. On the other hand, Butler is adamant that abjected bodies are not extemal to the discursive regime that persecutes them. But if these bodies are only experienced in vinue of the nom, then their potential to disnipt that nom, it seems to me, is severely circumscribed by their own normative status. In arguing that constructed noncoherent genders are subversive, Butler attributes a different kind of normativity to noncoherent genders than she does to culturally intelligible subjects - a differential treatment for which she offers no explmation. And in fact, Kate Soper argues that Butler's analysis "aades on an untheorized asymmetry.... whereby lesbian desire is allowed to figure in some obscure way as more spontaneous and 'authentic"' (Soper 1995a. 120). The point is that Butler equivocates on the question of the normative: "unthinkable" bodies are apparentiy not normative in the way that "culturally intelligible" bodies are normative. Butler is anxious to assure us that she does not mean to deny the material reality of anatomically discrete bodies. Bodies are of course fully material, but their materiality cannot be dissociated fiom the regdatory noms that govem their materialization: The body posited as prior to the sign, is always posited or signified as prior. This signification produces as an effect of its own procedure the very body that it nevertheless and simultaneously clairns to discover as that which precedes its own action. If the body signified as prior to signification is an effect of signification, then the rnimetic or representational status of language, which claims that signs follow bodies as their necessary rnirrors, is not mirnetic at dl. On the contrary, it is productive, constitutive. one rnight even argue pe~ormtive, inasmuch as this signifying act delimits and contours the body that it then claims to find prior to any and al1 signification. (Butler 1993, 30). It would be simplistic to think that Butler views matterithe body as nothing but a linguistic effect, for her argument is. more subtly."that there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the sarne timt a further formation of that body" (Butler 1993, 10). Language constitutes the boundaries of the body, such that "language and matenality are not opposed. for language both is and refers to that which is matenal, and what is materiai never fully escapes from the process by which it is signified" (Butler 1993, 68). But as Kate Soper remarks, this line of argument nevertheless effaces a distinction between the matenal and linguistic orders that needs to be observed (Soper 1995a. 1 19). While we must certainly acknowledge that we cm have no access to the material world except through Our representations of it in language. and while we must likewise admit that those representations will necessarily be partial and inadequate to grasp the full reality of the material world, this is not the same as claiming that there is no ontological distinction between that materiality and our representations of it. Against Butler, we musr surely affm that the material does in hct remain ontologically independent of Our efforts to conceptualize it. even as we recognize that al1 arternpts to refer to the extra-discursive

require the prior delimitation of that extra-discursive realm within discourse. We need to affirm, in realist vein, that there is an extra-discursive reality out there, that some

descriptions of it are wrong, and that it is quite possible that none of Our representations will ever manage to grasp fully the nature cf that reality. The problem then. from the realist perspective, is one of distinguishing between more and less adequate representations of the extra-discursive. In Soper's words, it "is mue that we can make no distinction between the 'reality' of nature and its culturai representation that is not itself conceptuai, but this does not justify the conclusion that there is no ontological distinction between the ideas we have of nature and that which the ideas are about" (Soper L995b. 15 1). Butler's problem is her assumption that a less strictly policed sexual existence is conceivable only by denying the body any prediscunive ontological status. But in refusing to gant the existence of an extra-discursive or naturat body, and by theorizing the body instead as an entirely dixursively produced set of signifying practices. Butler denies herself, as Kate Soper cogently and forcefully demonstrates, "any basis either for justifying [her] critique of existing practice, or for defending the more emancipatory quality of the alternatives [shej would institute in its place" (Soper 1995b. 129-30). Thus when Butler argues that we can never refer to a pure body beyond discourse or "draw the Iine between what is and what is not constnicted" (Butler 1993, 1 I), she misses the point entirely. If al1 aspects of our sexual being are discursively generated in the interests of paaiarchy and compulsory heterosexuality; if we have no needs, instincts. or desires that exceed that power regime, then what justifies Butler's critique in the first place? What grounds cm there be for the conviction that "liberating" the culturally conshucted body to an "open future of cultural possibilities" (Butler 199 la, 93) is something to which we ought to aspire? Why. indeed, should we view the prospect of such destabilization with hopeful anticipation rather :han dread and fear? In short, Butler's insistence on tlie wholly arbitrary and culturally constructed quality of our sexual existence is incompatible with the emancipatory impulse of her quest to persuade us that "compulsory heterosexuality" ought to be condemned and "gender proliferation" promoted in its place. Butler offers an intense and frequently compelling critique of gender noms and of

the marginalization of lesbians and gays within heterosexist culture. Yet in her zeal to avoid the conservatisrn of biologistic accounts of the body. she cedes everything to discourse and overlooks what Carol Bigwood calls the body's "nonlinguistic silent presencing" (Bigwood 1993.47). This is a puzzling strategy. not least because there is scant reason to suppose that recognizing the culturally consmicted quality of bodies would eliminate the patterns of hierarchy, domination, and intolerance that characterize the way sexuality is presently organized.1 To recognize, moreover. that the body is not solely a cultural construction is not, as Butler fears, to claim that it is a fixed and inflexible foundation that once and for al1 determines our sexual existence. But it is to affirm that the female body and the identity "women" possess a certain historical and existentid continuity. As Maxine Sheets-Johnstone argues, it is to recognize the body as "a three dimensional living natural form that itself is the source of inscriptions - meanings ....this natural form is in fact our original semantic template; it cannot be 'discoursed' out of existence" (Sheets-lohnstone 1994, 63). She continues: ...the evolutionary body has an established identity that, however flukey its existence, circumstantial its form, or minuscuIe its life- tirne. abides over the and is part of an unbroken, continuous historical process. Constructionist theories that fail to take the evolutionary body into account not only ignore the relational ties that that historical process describes and that bind us to certain corporeal acts, dispositions, and possibilities, and to a certain related intercorporeal semantics; they also put us on the edge of an unnatural history. It is as if we humans descended deus ex machina not just into the world but into a ready-made culture, a culture that, whatever its nature. can only be the product of an immaculate linguistic conception. Indeed, short of an accounting of the evolutionary body, we are, unlike all other Living creatures, bolBigwood (1993.44) and Teresa de Lauretis (1986a. 12) make the .same point. products of gramrnatological creationisrn. (S heets-Johnstone 1994, 69) Avoiding the charge of "grammatologicai creationism", then, means affmning sume objective Iink between biological sex and gender. This is not to reinstall a fixed and etemal essence of Woman, but it is to affirm that the play of signification is not lirnitless. Meaning cannot, contra Butler, be endlessly deferred. It means rejecting the postulates that there is no natural closure to the play of signification. that al1 referentiality dissolves into a potentially limitless displacement, and that any mention of the referent is a lapse into

"rnetaphysical" thinking. It means adhering to a realist conception of language; affming. that is. that reference and the world remain constant in any altention in theory, and that. moreover, that constancy limits what cm reasonably be said about women. On this view. which I think is the only reasonable one, reality is that "which has such and such characters, whether anybody thinks it to have those characters or not" und that which mkes a différence in how we think and how we act (Peirce. quoted in Ochs 1993, 73).

The point. in short, is that the rnove toward deconstructing male and heterosexist power should not proceed from the view that Ianguage, at the expense of the material and the historical. is the sole source of meaning. Clearly it is imperative to dismaritle gender hierarchies and to defend homosexuaIity against its arbitrary persecution within heterosexist culture. But dismissing the natural body as nothing more than the artificial constmct of compulsory heterosexuality is neither necessary nor helpful to this enterprise. As Kate Soper argues (Soper 1995b. 142-3). heterosexual sex is not merely normative, but is a prescription of nature in the sense that it is requïred for the propagation of the species. By the sarne token, she continues, nature does not dictate the political persecution of same-sex relations. nor does it give us any basis for presenting these as unnatural. Nature. that is. does not enforce a politics. If Butler wants to clear the way for sexual self-expression in place of our highly regulated sexual existence, she would do well to affïrm that there are a variety of authentic or natural sexual orientations that are different from heterosexuality - also conceived as authentic - and reject the cultural policing of those orientations as depraved on those grounds (Soper 1995a, 120). For unless Butler acknowledges that al1 gender structures and sexual dispositions (including, of course. gay and lesbian ones) have some bais in natural bodies. she has no grounds for perceiving the existing order of sexuality as unjust or oppressive. It is only when we recognize that the body's organization is not entkly contingent and arbitras, that it makes sense to challenge the authority of custom and convention.

To suggest. as i am, that gender identities and sexualities have some basis in natural bodies is practically anathema in contemporary feminist theory. If my attempt to lend more weight to the body is not regarded as evidence of a sinister conservatism, it will at the very least mark me out as hopelessly derrière-garde. But even my cntics may want to admit a connection between the fernale body and the identity "woman" that is secured by something beyond the level of the signifier. Butler. of course, will have none of this. The whole point of her analysis is to expose identity as a political construction that is performatively produced and tenuously maintained: and to show. moreover. that our unquestioning acceptance of identity categories obscures from view the political process of their construction and forecloses the possibility of a set of actions aimed at dismpting the boundaries of those categories. Hence Butler's reluctance to valorize hornosexuality at the expense of heterosexuality. or to present it as an oppressed mith. Hence her apprehension when she writes: "[tlhe prospect of being anything... has always produced in me a certain anxiety " (Butler 199 1b. 13). Butler goes to great lengths to show that identity is per-$ormarive rather than substantive. Identity categories, she argues. do not represent some fixed and eiernal metaphysical essence. In fact they have no ontological status apart from the various acts and gestures that constitute their reality. Thus gender, the main target of her critique, is not to be construed as a stable identity, but as a "repeated stylization of the body. a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance. of a natural sort of being" (Butler 1991a. 33). The illusion of substance. of an intemal and organizing gender core. is perfomatively produced on the surface of the body. Butler explains that ...gender proves to be performative - that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing. though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed ....There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender;... identity is perfomatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results (Butler 199 1a. 25).

But it is not merely the case, Butler continues, that languageldiscourse effectively bnngs into being that which it names. As we have already seen, the performative consrruction of coherent identities proceeds at the price of a senes of violations and exclusions. Culturally intelligible subjects. that is, are produced in language through repeated acts of foreclosure. The symbolic law that compels the production of culturally intelligible subjects also produces. as its "constitutive outside". a domain of "deauthorized subjects. presubjects, figures of abjection. populations erased from view" (Butler 1995a.

47) which returns to haunt the unity and integrity of the subjects it constitutes. Heterosexual identification, for example. takes place through an identification with an abject homosexuality. This is not to make the mistake of invoking an original or prediscursive desire. but is on the contrary to realize that the law that regulates the production of discrete gender identities requires, to remain intact, "an intelligible conception of homosexuality and ....the prohibition of that conception in rendering it culturally unintelligible" (Butler 1991a, 77). The crucial point is that the culturally intelligible subject installs its boundary and constructs its daim to integrity and autonomy through a series of repudiations. exclusions and foreclosures which persist as the permanent or constitutive spectre of its own destabilizaiiun. Discursive performativity never finally and fully establishes the identity to which it refers, because its normative force - "its power to establish what qualifies as 'being' - works not only through reiteration. but through exclusion as well. And ...those exclusions haunt signification as its abject borden or as that which is strictly foreclosed: the unlivable. the nonnarrativizable. the traumatic" (Butler 1993, 188). The signifier "secure[s] the identity of the subject over time" (Butler 1993,

153), yet its failure to produce the unity it appears to narne is the result of its "incapacity to include the social relations that it provisionally stabilizes through a set of contingent

exclusions" (Butler 1993,220- 1). Here difficulties abound. In the first place. Butler relegates homosexuality to the realm of cultural unintelligibility and unliveability while simultaneously atuibuting a subversive or even revolutionary potential to that "unintelligible" domain. More baffling still, as Allison Weir argues. is her equation of cultural intelligibility itself with violation

(Weir 1996. 1 18). Cultural intelligibility entails identity, which from Butler's perspective necessuriiy implies violation and exclusion. Yet there is realiy no way of specifying what exactly is violated or excluded when identity is asserted. Certainly Butler argues that "noncoherent genders" are exciuded from dominant culture. On the other hand, she objecü just as vigorously to gay and Iesbian identities inasmuch as they purport to stability and coherence. For Butler, it tums out, every assertion of identity is necessarily a form of exclusion and repression of difference; and this repression is a function of the way

langrrage ifseif operates (Weir 1996, 1 16- 120). Butler, Weir points out. imagines the imperializing logic of language operating to impose "identities upon nonidentity, freezing the multiplicity of possible experienct into a false unity which always fails to express that experience and that possibility in its fullness and entirety" (Weir 1996, 118). Even worse, language Ieads us to believe that the categories it creates and then pretends to discover - contrived totaiities, Butler thinks. that have only a linguistic reality - reflect a prior ontological or substantive reality. Our faith in the "grammatical formulation of subject and predicate" leads us to believe that linguistic constructions reflect the "prior ontological reality of substance and amibute" (Butler 199 la. 20). Thus sex or gender innocently appears "within hegemonic language as a substance, as. metaphysically speaking, a self-identical being. This appearance is achieved through a performative twist of language andor discourse that conceals the fact that 'being' a sex or gender is fundamentally impossible" (Butler. quoted in Weïr 1996, 120). In effect. Weir concludes. Butler is arguing that the logic of language itself produces the illusion of coherent sex identities, in the process repressing and excluding nonidentity and a theoretical infinity of linguistic possibilities, and propping up the repressive regime of compulsory heterosexuality. The central question for Butler is "How does language itself produce the fictive consûuction of 'sex' that supports these various regimes of power?" (Butler. quoted in Weir 1996, 1 16).

If Weirts analysis has any plausibility, and I think it does. then it is unclear whether Butler is arguing that identities are political constructions produced within specific disciplinary power regirnes, or if she is making the far more contentious claim that identity is falsely imposed by language itself in its ahistorical structural integrity. Part of the problem is that it is not always clear what Butler means when she uses tems like "language" and "discourse". In Gender Trouble she makes this distinction: Abstractly considered, language refers to an open systern of siens by which inteiligibility is insistently created and contested. As historically specific organizations of language. discourses present themselves in the plural, coexisting within temporal frames, and instituthg unpredictable and inad verten t convergences from w hic h specific modalities of discursive possibilities are engendered (Butler 199 la, 145). However helpful these definitions might be, the key term in Butler's analysis is "language". and not "discourse". In her view, as we've just seen, it is language itself that produces CO heren t gender identities in support of the regirne of compulsory heterosexuality, and noncoherent genders as its unthinkable outside. This argument, though. seems quite implausible. While 1 share Butler's desire to defend "noncoherent genders" against their arbitrary persecution in heterosexist culture, I think it crucial that we be clear about exactly what is responsible for their exclusion and on what basis that exclusion can convincingly be denounced. Unfortunately, the major effect of Butler's privileging of language is to naturalize and dehistoncize concrete power relations. The proposition, for example. that the "matrix of gender relations is prier to the emergence of the 'human"' (Butler 1993, 7), leaves unanswered where the gender matrix itself cornes from, and under what circurnstances it ascended to its present hegemonic status. in short, if the marginalization of gays and lesbians in our society is the result of some structurai feature of language itself. then it is difficult to see how there can be any political opposition to it. On the other hand. if it has emerged out of specific social, historical and matenal practices, we might reasonably expect to cany out an effective critique of those practices and eventually to bring about their transformation. In the latter case political opposition and social snuggle become feasible options in a way that they otherwise are not. By collapsing al1 distinctions between

language and power, by Iocating the origin of repressive regimes in the structure of language itself, Butler deprives us of any means of resisting those regimes. By equating cultural intelligibility with violation and exclusion, moreover, she renders it virtually impossible to distinguish between less and more repressive societies. Butler's conception of language is highly problernatic from the perspective of feminist politics. While it would be absurd to deny that language Unplies structure. surely it is not the case that every coherent identity is sustained by "tacit cruelties" (Butler 1993.

1 15). Surely every assertion of identity need not irnmediately be equated with repression.

violence, and exclusion. As feminists, we need to ask ourselves what or who is repressed. violated and excluded. and by what means. and to justify. moreover, why we think that

some (but not dl) violations are unjust. As Allison Weir (Weir 1996, 119) also observes. the "violation" that produces us as culturally intelligible subjects is obviously not on a par with the violation that relegates gays and lesbians to the margins of hegemonic culture. and neither is it immediately obvious that "semantic integrity" (Butler 1990.325) is to blame for either type.

Butler's objection to identity categories ultimately derives from her conviction that any concept of a continuous identity is necessarily based on a dangerous illusion of substance. She assumes that it is impossible to "be" a woman because "being" necessarily refers to a predetermined or eternal essence: On a deeper level ...a woman cannot 'be'; it is something which does not even belong in the order of being. Women is thus a false substantive and univocal signifier that disguises and pre- cludes a pnder experience internally vaned and contradictory. And if women are. to retum to Beauvoir, such a mode of becoming that is arrested prematurely, as it were, through the reduchve impo- sition of a substantializing nomenclature. then the release of wornen's intemally complex experience, an experience that would make of the very name "women's experience," an empty signification, might well become released and or precipitated. And here the task is not simply to change language, but to examine language for its ontolo- gical assumptions, and to criticize those assurnptions for their political consequences. (Butler 1987b, 14 1) Underlying these remarks is a view of language as a built-in normative order which, in its imposition of a "substantializing nomenclature" on the infinity of linguistic possibilities, disguises the fact that "women" can never be. But as AlIison Weir realizes, it is quite possible to "be" a woman if we accept that the meaning of "woman" is historically mediated and open to contestation and transformation, and if we recognize that the term "woman" already includes multiple and often contradictory meanings (Weir 1996. 120- 1). She explains: 1 can quite consciousIy believe that 1 am made, not bom, a woman, and 1 can experience my gcndered self as subject to change and diffusion, as ambiguous and complex. layered and conflicted. restrictive and enabling, shaped through identifications with and desires for others of various genders, while still experiencing myself in a meaningful way as a wornan (Weir 1996, 123). This way of understanding the problem of "being a woman" depends on the view that "women's experience" is a legitimate term, and that it has some bearing on the question of women's identity. Butler. however, under the impression that if identity is not rnetaphysical substance then it must be a purely linguistic phenornenon, cannot accornodate the category of experience in her theory. In rather reductionist fashion she equates "women's experience" with some transcendental concept of essential Wornan. She comrnits the sarne error that Robert Scholes diagnoses in Demda: she deals with the question of women's experience "by tuming it into a question of essence, whic h [sheJ can then subject to the deconstructive formula, demonstrating that there is no such thing as a purely. essentially ferninine creature" (Scholes 1989, 99). She conflates. in other words. the problem of women's experience with the question of women's essence. But we do not have to invoke an essential Woman in order to affkm the validity of women's experience. I shall have more to Say on the subject of experience in a later chapter. For now let me Say that there are conditions of existence that are experienced differently simply in vinue of what sex one happens to be, multiple identifications and particuiar circumstances notwithstanding, and that this fact is highly sig-nificant to feminist politics. For this reason we ought, I think, to approach Butler's recommendations for feminist political practice with considerable trepidation. In Gender Trorlble she proposes that feminists abandon the category of " women" on the grounds that its use reifies existing gender relations and perpetuates the regulatory regime of compulsory heterosexuality. Furthemore. identity categories work to limit and constrain in advance the very cultural possibilities that progressive politics are supposed to open up. and inevitably produce dissension and factionalization among those they purport to represent Butler asks:

Is "unity" necessary for effective politicai action? Is the pre- mature insistence on the goal of unity precisely the cause of an ever more bitter fragmentation arnong the ranks? ...Does "unity" set up an exclusionary nom of solidarity at the Ievel of identity that rules out the possibility of a set of actions which dismpt the very borders of identity concepts, or which seek to accomplish precisely that disruption as an explicit political aim? (Butler 1991a. 15) "Without the compulsory expectation that feminist actions must be instituted from some stable, unified, and agreed upon identity". Butler predicts. such dismptive actions "might well get a quicker start" (Butler 1991a. 15). In place of identity politics, she advocates a politics of coalition that does not insist in advance on identity. unity. solidarity and consensus as prerequisites to political action. The prescription that feminists ought to abandon "women" as the subject of feminism is clearly insupportable. It is distressingly evident that there are systemic and structural social features solidly in place that tend to the disadvantaging and oppression of

women. and unless we continue appealing to women as a pup, we lose Our ability to identify and oppose these features. If we insist only and everywhere on "difference", we ignore the dudistic. hierarchical nature of power in our society and leave, in effect if not in

intent, the rule of patriarchy intact. For the same reason it is necessary to affirm that feminist politics is essentially a group affair based on the idea of solidarity and common cause among women, and so is inconceivable without female subjects in whose name specific goals are pursued. The notion, then, that identity politics should cede way to a spontaneous politics of coalition that refuses, as a matter of principle. to specify its goals and objectives in advance for fear of foreclosing conflict and dismption within its own ranks is clearly absurd. What would be the point of forming such a coalition in the first place, and what could it hope to achieve? Obviously. solidarity and consensus are necessary to any viable politics. Neither need a prion be equated with terror, and both may on occasion be a sign of genuine agreement (Haber 1994,38). Rita Felski sums al1 this up concisely when she argues that "[slome form of appeal to collective identity and solidarity is a necessary precondition for the emergence and effectiveness of an oppositional movement; ferninist theorists who reject any notion of a unifying identity as a repressive fiction in favor of a stress on absolute difference fail to show how such diversity and fragmentation cm be reconciled with goal-oriented political smiggles based upon common interests" (Felski 1989. 168-9). Admittedly, Butler does eventually corne round to the view that feminists rnust, for practical reasons, continue to employ the category of women. with the proviso that identity categories can never fully describe the constituency they name, but on the contrary create and sustain that constituency. "That the category [of women] cm never be descriptive", Buùer notes. "is the very condition of its political efficacy" (Butler 1993. 221), thus conceding that feminists rnay continue to employ the category "women", but only on condition that it remain a site of permanent contest perpetually open to new significations. As we shall see in the next section, Butler thinks that it is only through "releasing the category of women from a hed referent that something like 'agency' becomes possible" (Butler 1995a. 50).

So far 1 have been questioning what justification rnight be sumrnoned to account for the cntical edge and emancipatory impulse of Butler's work, to ask why subjects who are wholly constituted by the regime of compulsory heterosexuality would ever seek to subven that regime. This line of questioning takes as its point of departure a notion summarized by

Kate Soper; namely that "critical theory. if it is to prove coherent, requires as its cornplement the subject whose feelings or moral sense are being ignored, or oppressed or

abused by the rationalities condemned in its critique" (Soper 1990. 148). Feminist theory

and politics. that is, are usually thought to require for their coherence a subject "women" existing prior to the social field, in whose name specific claims are made and specific goals pursued. Butler. viewing such a subject as complicit in the very power regimes that feminists ought to oppose, is unequivocal in rejecting it. In fact, in arguing that "gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed", she intends to dispense not only with identity but also with any notion of the subject as a substantive thing. includicg the persistent belief that assuming the subject in advance is

necessary to preserve its agency. Indeed, she has no use for humanist versions of agency - typically understood as the "capacity for reflexive mediation" - for the very reason that it is usually associated with the viability of a subject having some stable existence prior to the cultural field that it negotiates (Butler 1991a, 142-3). Convinced, then, that any appeal to the subject as possessor of a certain pre-discursive autonomy or capacity for reflection can only be a chronic liability and a "presentist conceit" (Butler 1993, 228), she sets out to show that agency may be established without recourse to a pregiven subject and without. furthemore, invoking the capacity for reflexive rnediation that is usually considered so essential a prerequisite to effective critique and political action. It needs fust to be recognized, argues Butler, that the subject does not enter the social realm with cemin features and capacities (such as the capacity for reflexive mediation) intact, and only subsequently takes on its identity through perfomative acts. The theory of gender performativity is not to be construed as sumptitiously reintroducing a willful and instrumental humanist subject, one who decides on its gender and is not its gender from the start, but on the contrary is meant to demonstrate that gender constitues as a perfomative effect the very subject it appears to express. Appearing as a subject relies on the "consistent and repeated invocation of mles that condition and restrict culturally intelligible practices of identity" (Butler 199 1a, 144-5): Where there is an "1" who utters or speaks and thereby pro- duces an effect in discourse, there is fmt a discourse which precedes and enables that "1" and foms in language the constraining trajectory of its will. Thus there is no "1" who stands behind discourse and executes its volition or wilf rhrough discourse. On the contrary, the "1" only cornes into being through king called, named, interpellated. to use the Althussenan term, and this discursive constitution takes place pnor to the "1"; it is the transitive invocation of the "1". Indeed, I can only Say "1" to the extent that 1 have frst been addressed. and that address has rnobilized my place in speech: paradox- ically. the discursive condition of social recognition precedes and conditions the formation of the subject: recognition is not con- ferred on a subject, but forrns that subject. (Butler 1993,225-6) The constituted character of the subject is. furthemore. the very precondition of agency. For although subjects are constituted by power. they are never fully constituted or constituted once and for all, but are subjected and consti tuted. compelled, that is, to cite or repeat or mime the signifier which secures identity. over and over again. Thus it is in the interval between iterations that the possibility of a subversion of identity is to be found. Agency is therefore not to be understood in terms of reflexive mediation by a thinking. willing subject. but rather is to be located within the possibility of a variation on the perfonnative citation of noms by which subjects are constituted. Indeed, the "force of repetition in language may he the paradoxical condition by which a certain agency - not linked to a fiction of the ego as rnaster of circumstance - is derived from the impossibilig of choice" (Butler 1993, 124). Thus, if "[tjhere is no power that acts. but only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instabiiity" (Butler 1 993.9). then the question of agency can be "reformuIated as a question of how signification and resignification work" (Butler 199 la. 144).

"Subversive signifying", it seems. can take two forms. In the first place, Butler locates the potential for gender transformation in the possibility of "a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politicaily tenuous constniction" (Butler 1991a, 141). Drag and other forms of gender parody. she proposes. expose al1 gendering as a kind of impersonation and approximation behind which there is no original. Now. Butler admits that parody by itself is not subversive, that there "rnust be a way to understand what rnakes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive. truly troubling. and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony" (Butler 1991a, 139). And in Bodies That Mutter she concedes that drag is subversive only "to the extent that it reflects on the imitative structure by which hegemonic gender is itself produced" (Butler 1993, 125). Nowhere, however. does she even hint at who or what, aside from the performance itself, might be doing this understanding and reflecting. She refuses to concede that a thinking subject might be at work, for to do so. she thinks. is to reintroduce a aanscendental subject. But as Allison

Weir points out, "there is no need to invoke the specter of the prediscursive '1' in order to grant the capacity of critical reflection to human subjects" (Weir 1996. 127). 1 shall retum to this. For now let me point out that in the absence of critical. reflecting subjects to initiate and appreciate it, parody simply goes unnoticed. Or rather, under such circumstances, it is doubtful that "parody" can be said to exist at dl. Altematively, subversion is to be found in "accidental failures" to repeat, in the possibility of a variation on the performative citation of noms: the "injunction to be a given gender produces necessary failures, a variety of incoherent configurations that in their multiplicity exceed and defy the injunction by which they are generated" (Butler 199la, 145). But why does the injunction to be a gender produce "necessary failures"? in her article "Imitation and Gender Insubordination", Butler refers to a "psychic excess" as the source of these occasional discontinuities. Within the intervals of the repeated gestures and acts that construct the apparent uniformity of heterosexual positionalities. a "psychic excesstferupts which compels the repehtion itself and which guarantees its perpetual failure

(Butler 199 1b. 24). This psychic excess seems to be the consequence of a sexuality that "always exceeds any given performance" (Butler 1991b, 25) - an admission which contradicts her daim that the performance is al1 there is and brings her perilously close to affirming the psychoanalytic postdate of a repressed sexuality which shc is othenvise at pains to reject. But Butler hastens to add that psychic excess must not be equated with inner depth or truth: to "locate the psyche within this signifying chah as the instability of al1 iterability is not the same as claiming that it is inner core that is awaiting its full and liberatory expression" (Butler 199 1b. 28). By now it should corne as no surprise that what "psychic excess" arnounts to, in the end. is a feature of language. For once one has attributed powers of repression to linguistic structures and categories, it is not much of a leap to ascribe powen of subversion to those structures as well. Nevertheless. Butler's attempt to remove the cntically reflecting subject from her thcory and to install the workings of language in its place is not justifiable. As Sibel irzik points out in a trenchant critique of Demda. the attempt to deconsauct hurnan intentionality depends on showing that the iterability and conventional nature of language necessarily forbid assigning intentions a significant role in the production of rneaning (hik 1990. 59). If it can be shown that this is the case. then the cntically reflecting subject does indeed drop out of the picture, to be replaced by a subject that is nothing more than a position in language. But as Irzik argues. iterability need not be seen as an obstacle to intentionality. On the contrary, it is simply a minimal condition for language to exist: "[tlhe fact that linguistic conventions precede individual subjects and are beyond their control does not diminish the role of intentions in the ways these conventions are applied" (Irzik 1990. 60). To this Burler would likely respond that what is limited by iterability is not intentionality. but its character of being conscious or present to itself. "The category of 'intention', indeed. the notion of 'the doer' will have its place, but this place will no longer be 'behind' the deed as its enabling source" (Butler 1995b. 134). But now Butler is evidently making the same mistake that Irzik identifies in Demda. Like Demda, she assumes that there are only two possible ways of conceptualizing the subject: either the subject is inside the linguistic systern, in which case it is a function instead of an origin or presence; or. alternatively, it is outside language. which requires positing its "self presence in a silent and intuitive consciousness" (Irzik 1990.64). But Irzik observes that these two cases do not necessarily exhaust al1 the alternatives. We can readily agree with the deconstructionist critique of a unified and unifying consciousness without having to abandon al1 notions of conscious identity and selfhood (Irzik 1990.65). On the other hand. if we subscribe to the theoiy that the signifier alone "secures the identity of the subject over tirne", we are hard-pressed to explain how subjects do in fact form a sense of selfhood and continuous identity. Even Butler writes: "1 bracket this '1'. but 1 am still here" (Butier 1993, 123). In a sirnilar vein, Allison Weir identifies as Butler's problem her tendency to set up false oppositions. Either there is a transcendental being which precedes doing. or there is only doing, only performance and its repetition; and in the latter case there is no mediation between the acts and the regdatory ideal (Weir 1996. 123-4). Recasting agency as signification and resignification. as the "instability of al1 iterability", leaves us wondering what qualities endure between iterations that permit the perfonnatively constituted subject to notice the variations in the repetition and the accidental failures to comply, and. eventually. to employ these to subversive ends. This is, 1 think, the cmx of the matter. A sign, after all. does not signify of its own accord; someone needs to interpret it before we can meaningfully daim that a signification has taken place. And who does this interpreting if not a criticaliy reflecting subject of precisely the sort that Butier rejects? It is not enough. then. to Say that the subject is brought into (linguistic) being through citation, that it nins the risk of transformation at every reiteration. and that therein a certain agency is to be found. Feminist theory goes seriously astray when it adopts such a

posture. for it should be clear by now that human subjects are not simply constmcted through linguistic structures. and are certainly not reducible to them. To Say as much is not to overlook the important insight that subjects are socially situated and shaped by power. but merely to insist that their constnictedness does not definitively eradicate their potential capacity to critically reflect on and practically transcend their circumstances. Of course. the possibility of a dialectical relationship between subjects and their world. according to which human subjects themselves act upon and modify the structures that constitute them through the reflexive monitoring of their actions, is one which post-suucturalist theory cannot sanction. Post-sûucturalism disinvests the humanist subject of its "transcendental" status and critical capacities only to attribue unmitigated powers of repression and subversion to ahistonc linguistic structures; it cannot imagine an intemediary position. Yet there is more than a little irony in the inability of post-structuralist thought to free itself from the kind of binary, oppositional thinking which is, after dl. the explicit target of its critique. Chaoter Two: Sexuai Difference Theory

In the previous chapter 1 drew some preliminary conclusions about the relevance and utility of post-stnicturalism to feminist theory and political practice. The gist of my arguments in that chapter was that post-structuralism cannot be much use to feminists insofar as it seeks to effect a thorough-going repudiation of humanist values and principles. Whereas scepticism in the face of attempts to fornulate an image of a common humanity is.

as Pauline Johnson rernarks, certainly warranted, the emancipatory significance of the universalizing attitude of humanisrn should not be so readily dismissed (Johnson 1994, 3- 4). In particular. a resolutely deconstructive feminism which takes as its foundation Butler's linguistic critique of identity is likely to dissipate itself into an undiscriminating affirmation of particularities and differences to the point where reality - the matenal existence of a class of women and the concrete social structures which tend to their disadvantaging - is simply overlooked. Furthemore, if feminists follow Butler in treating the humanist concepts of autonomous selfhood and reflexive critique as nothing more than incidental side-effects of the logic of identity embedded in language, then women's agency vanishes along with their identity. If the deconstruction of identity proceeds to the conclusion that the selfs autonomy is merely the surface effect of influences exercised without its knowledge and beyond its control, then women lose their position as conscious agents whose decisions and actions have a decisive effect on the course of history.

These unhappy consequences, 1 argued, are the logical result of Butler's vigorous anti-realisrn and in particular of her tendency to theorize language solely in terms of a repressive structure which excludes "difference" as it imposes identity and produces intelligible subjects. Over the course of this chapter it will become clear that the second wing of post-structuralist feminism departs from a similar understanding of language. and so is vulnerable to these sarne kinds of objections. To be sure. Luce Irigaray and Rosi

Braidoai. as theonsts of sexuai difference, seem to be embarked in a direction distinctly at odds with Butler's post-gender project. Whereas Butler wants to expose the idea of a universal femde subject as a regulatory fiction that stands in the way of progressive fem inist poli tics. irigaray and Braidotti think it imperative that feminists reclaim the

universal for women. Insisting on the ontological status of sexual difference. affirming.

that is. that sexed identity is inexmcable from women's being and not merely contingent. theonsts of sexual difference condemn the Iong-standing appropriation of the universal by the masculine and declare the urgent need for the elaboration of a "new, gendenzed universal". Strongly opposed to any suggestion that a general process of sexual differentiation relevant to both sexes is a strategy that feminists ought to pursue. they emphasize the irreducibility of sexual difference. The task confronting feminisü. from this perspective, is certainly not the overcoming of sexual difference, but rather the deconstruction of prevailing representations of the feminine so that it may be capable of representation on its own ternis. Now, while this appeal to a sex-specific subjectivity is, on the surface of things, an encouraging move, the sexual difference project ultimately hinges on a highly problematic equation of identity. subjectivity, and language itself with the masculine, against which is counterposzd a prelinguistic realm of polyrnorphous feminine desire. Thus Irigaray calls for the creation of a spacc for the expression of an ineffable feminine jouissance which remains "unsaid" in mascuIine discourse, while Braidotti, in more Deleuzian vein, redefines female subjectivity as a process of rnultiplicitous desire which expresses "pure difference" in its eternal becoming. The crucial point, however, is that both theonsts, like Butler. adopt a view of language as repressive structure. And so the various shortcornings of the post-gender position resurface in their work: on the one hand, the relevance of "woman" as (pre-)linguistic principle to the lives and experiences of women is a matter of considerable doubt, while on the other, the whole association of "woman"and "the feminine" with an inherently subversive preconceptual domain has as its primary consequence the annihilation of wornen's position as active agents of political change. In opposition to post-gender theorisa, like Butler. who seek to discredit the identity "woman" as a piece of metaphysical nonsense. Rosi Braidotti and Luce Irigaray assert the need to articulate and empower a specifically female subjectivity. Their enterprise takes as its point of departure the recognition of the subject as a corporeal, and therefore sexed, entity. Denouncing the logic of sexual indifferentiation of philosophicai discourse - a logic

which identifies the (masculine) subject with the universal - theorists of sexual difference reject the traditional vision of the subject as universal, disembodied, and gender-free. and posit as radically other a female sexed subject who stands in an asymrnetrical relationship to the masculine. In a radical critique of the foundations of Western philosophy. Lngaray

... its power to reduce ail others to an economy of the Same. The teleologically constructive project it takes on is always also a project of diversion, deflection, reduction of the other in the Sarne. And. in its greatest generality perhaps, from its power to erudicoce the difference between the sexes in systerns that are self-representative of a "masculine subject." (Irigaray 1985b, 74). In Irigaray's analysis, philosophical discourse is irredeemably phaliogocenrn'c. It is a system of representation in which women and the ferninine are always represented in some necessary relation to men and rnasculinity, as a lack or atrophy of the qualities charactensing masculinity. Al1 variations of subjectivity are represented according to a perspective deemed universal by the masculine. This institutes a phallic econorny. one based on sameness. oneness or identity with the masculine subject, and one in which there is no room for women to speak os women. "Women cm be represented only by means of a violence that contains them, and their differences, within masculine sameness" (Grosz 1989, 107). Sexual difference theorists, then. contend that philosophical discourse is produced from a specifically sexual position - the masculine - which remains unacknowledged as such (Gross 1987, 135). Elirninating the male body from signifying practice. phallogocentrism presents the specific attributes and interests of men as if they were universal. At the same tirne. in order to compensate for the absence of the male body, wcmen are considered the material substratum supporting male intellect. reason. and theoretical structures. In fact, the self-affirmation of the masculine logos. the masculine as sign of transcendence and immateriality. depends on the devaluation and repudiation of the feminine. on the association of Woman with maiter, nature. the body. For theorists of sexual difference. misogyny and sexist domination are not contingent or histoncally or culturally variable factors, but are on the contrary structural necessities intemal to philosophy itself. Braidotti explains: the "setting up of the male subject as the measure of

al1 things requires the positing of the woman as other-than. that is to Say as les-than, and subordinate to the main point of reference" (Braidotti 199 1. 176-7). Or, puthng it another way. the crucial tenet of sexual difference theory is "the idea that the self-legitimation of the One rests on the exclusion of the Other" (Braidotti 1991, 213). Confined to immanence and indeterminacy. to the "undifferentiated opaqueness of sensible matter" Origaray 1985a. 224). the feminine is excluded from discourse and representation. The argument here is not merely that philosophical discourse misrepresenrs

wornen. Sexuai difference theorists are much more conaoversial in their clah that the feminine is altogether absent from representation. and that this absence. furthemore. is the very foundation of signification. This line of argument owes a great deal to Lacan's account of the constitution of subjects along a sexually differentiated axis predetermined in language. In Lacan's readiiig of the Oedipal phase. we become speaking subjects by entenng into the symbolic order, a field of normativity that precedes and structures the social. The atiainment of subjectivity requires that the child break with its fantasy of undifferentiated unity with its mother and enter the world of signification and meaning by submitting to the Name-of-the-Father, the symbolic law that is the equivalent of culture itself and whose "universal signifier" is the phallus. The boy can identify himself with masculine culture by virtue of his illusory conflation of the organ (the penis) with the signifier, enabling him to compensate for the originary break with the mother and fixing him in his position as a masculine subject The girl, by contras, deprived of the empirical referent of the phallus and rnarked with the sign of lack, cannot find herself in the order of the symbolic. As the figure of the castrated Other, she is deprived of any fvted position on which to ground her subjectivity, and can only signify what is not there (Corne11 1995, 90). Indeed, woman functions as the necessary other of the phallus. its binary opposite, without which signification would be neither possible nor necessary. "Insofar". Braidotti explains. "as she is a being who is 'already castrated', wornan is sign of that part of truth (and therefore of the unconscious) which wiU forever escape the control of the sign. In not having the phallus, in knowing that she lacks 'the Whole', she is in the me - and therefore in the non-said" (Braidotti 199 1, 42). Woman, then, functions as the structural unconscious for man, whose "psychic function it is to be unrepresentable for both sexes" (Braidotti 199 1, 224). The proposition that the feminine is fated fomver to appear as the unrepresentable and structural other of a dualistic symbolic system ha. not surprisingly. been condemned by many feminists. Judith Butler. in the post-gender camp, worries that when sexual difference is undentood as a linguistic presupposition, it falsely universalizes and reifies social relations of gender asymmetry in a symbolic realm maintained at a problematic distance from sociohistorical practice (Butler, in Braidotti 1994a, 38), and consolidates, at the same time. the "cultural presumption of heterosexist hegemony" (Butler 1994, 19). Rather than conceptualizing the Lacanian symbolic as the universal foundation of al1 language and culture, Butler recommends "rendenng the symbolic increasingly dynamic" (Butler 1994, 20).1 On the other hand, neither Braidotti nor Lrigaray has any quarrel with the notion that phallogocenmsm governs and constrains the existing field of articulability, nor with the view of woman as stmcturally eccentric in relation to the existing system of l~hereis more than a little irony in Butler's othenvise trenchant critique of the Lacanian syrnbolic. in light of her own tendency, which 1 discussed ât some length in Chapter One, to dehistoricize gender by locating its origin in the structure of language. representation. But, they argue, far from accepting the inevitability of the Lacanian formulation, sexual difference "involves both the description and denunciation of the false universalism of the male symbolic" (Braidotti 1994a. 39). Where they depart radically from Lacan, then, is in their revaiorization of feminine unrepresentability as a potentiaily subversive force. Here is Braidotti: "the hue force of the feminine rests on its being the sign of silence. the non-said, absence, and therefore on the fact that women do not speak as subjectst' (Braidotti 199 1, 105). Woman is in excess of the phallic system and as such

"marks the possibility of an-other system of representation" (Braidotti 1994d. 170). Whereas for Butler, therefore, sex and gender identity are equivalent to their construction. sexual difference theory posits the radical incomrnensurability of the feminine with any of its given enunciations, locating it outside of (phallogocentric) language altogether. And this "excess", this feminine specificity that defies the phallogocentric system of representation, resides in the matter of women's embodied selves. If Irigaray argues that women always "remain elsewhere" (Irigaray 1985b. 76), Braidotti explains, it is because their specific joitissance, their sexuality. their desire, are "in fact irreducible to language. cannot be articulated by it" (Braidotti 199 1, 257). Against the phallogocentric represen tation of women's bodies as lacking, dependent. oriented toward the phallus. Irigaray proposes the image of the "two lips" as a suitable metaphor for female sexuality: Thus, for example, woman's auto-eroticism is very different from man's. In order to touch himself, man needs an instru- ment: his hand, a womants body. language..... And this self- caressine requires at least a minimum of activity. As for wornan, she touches herself in and of henelf without any need for mediation, and before there is any way to distinguish activity from passivity. Woman 'touches herself aii the time, and moreover no one cmforbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two - but not divisible into one(s) - that caress each other. (Irigaray 1985b, 24). Allison Weir observes that it is far from clear what Irigaray rneans by her association of the male body with unity, identity, and instrumental mediation, and of the female body with multiplicity. nonidentity. relationality, and connectedness Weir 1996. 96). Certainly. some feminists wony that Irigaray's explicit focus on the female body and sensual experience tends to a debilitating essentialism that perpetuates the very cultural representations of women which they are attempting to contest.? Others maintain that the charge of essentialism misses the mark. insofar as it fails to recognize that Ingaray's preoccu pation is no t the anutornicd but the mrphological body. Elizabeth Grosz. for exarnple (Grosz 1989, 1 11- 16). argues that for Lrigaray the concept of a "natural" body is meaningless, since the body is always coded. stnictured, inscnbed and given meaning socially and historically. Any reference to the "body" is always a reference to its morphology - to its social and psychical meaning. Thus the image of the two lips is in no way a tme or accurate description of wornen, but is intended to combat dominant phallornorphic representations. to clear a space for the representation of female sexuality conceived as positivity rather than as lack. On Grosz's reading, Ingaray is not descnbing a natural femininity. but instead is seeking to contest phallogocenhic representations "atthe level of culttrrul representation itself' (Grosz 1989, 1 16). Here the image of a subversive female body - woman as multiplicity. fluidity, indeterminacy. excess - appear as "the mode1 of an alternative logic, a non-repressive logic which is an alternative to the logic of the Same" (Weir 1996.96); as a metaphor, that is, for an alternative system of representation.

It is not clear. however, that Irigaray intends the image of woman as multiplicity solely as metaphor, for at times she is quite explicit in affirming an essential Woman as Other behind the patriarchal texts: "Without any intervention or special manipulation. you are a woman already" (u-igaray 1985b. 2 1 1). Now. as 1 argued at considerable length in the previous chapter. I think it eminently reasonable. and in fact necessary. to afirm that some part (however minimal) of our sexual king lies beyond the reach of culture. to affii that the female body and the identity "women" have an objective continuity that is not ultirnately manipulable by culture. What is not immediately obvious to me in [rigaray's case is why multiplicity. nonidentity. indeterminacy and so on should be regarded as specifically

3-Sce. for example. Kate Soper 11990) and Rita Felski 11989). feminine, or indeed specificaily anything. It is only if we accept. as in fact Lngaray does. the Lacanian view of language as pervasively masculine that rnultiplicity and nonidentity emerge as quintessentially feminine features. In the Lacaniui view, nonidentity is linked not only with the specificity of the female body. but more particularly with the pre-Oedipal state of polymorphous multiplicity and connectedness with the mother which precedes the subject's enay into language and identity. Here the feminine appears as the pre-linguistic realm of undifferentiated erotic pleasure, whereas language, or for that matter smicture of any kind, is seen as monolithically phallic and repressive. But surely the premise that language and identity are thoroughly repressive impositions of the phallic law is one that feminists need urgently to challenge. Irigaray. however, quite in opposition to the realist perspective 1 am advocating, continues to theorize language and identity only in lems of patriarchal mastery and repression, and as a consequence is forced. as Allison Weir observes, inro the paradoxical position of asserting a ferninine identity as the bais of liberation from the phallic law of identity (Weir 1996, 106). "That this feminine identity is woman's nonidentity does not deliver her from paradox. but only adds another one" (Weir 1996, 106). In counterposing feminine multiplicity to masculine identity. in arguing that woman defies the ontological conditions of the unitary subject, Irigaray's own concem for the eventual emergence of a specifically female subjectivity founders in spurious paradox. The problem here is that Irigaray, like Butler, subscribes to a rigorous anti-realism which permits her to theorize identity only as a form of violation and repression of difference.

But whereas Butler deconstructs sex and gender identity by refemng to a difference which underlies and threatens to overtum al1 identity, for Irigaray the difference in question, a difference repressed by masculine identity, is feminine nonidentity. For neither Butler nor

Ingaray, it seems, does the term "woman" gain any part of its meaning hmrefemng to actual women, but on the contrary derives its meaning from its differential relations with other terms; and in Irigaray's case, more precisely, it denves its sense from its position in phallic language as absent Other. 1 would argue. however, contra Irigaray, that the term "woman" is not oniy or even primarily a texnial principle that functions independentiy of its role of refemng to actual women; and whilc it may be "absent". as Alison Assiter points out. from certain foms of representation. it is not in fuct absent from language (Assiter

1996. 65). Instead of claiming, then. that "woman refers to what cannot be defined. enu merated. fomulated or formuiized" (irigaray l985a. 230). feminists need to argue, dong realist lines, that the term "woman" has been used and understood wrongly. The appropriate response to androcentnsm in language is not to renounce altogether the

"language of masculinisrn". but, as Alison Assiter again sensibly points out, to "retain the term 'wornan'. part of the sense of which is to refer to real women. and alter its meaning" (Assiter 1996, 66). Irigaray. however, notwithstanding her ofticid rejection of Lacan's etemalization of the masculine symbolic, cannot admit the possibility that language is malleable in the way 1 am suggesting, and so is forced into the project of discovenng a feminine language as the only route to woman's coming-to-be a subject. and to the postulate of a pre-linguistic feminine jouissance as the foundation for this alternative symbolic. But the idea that language is a monolithic system that can be subverted through the erotic play and "disruptive excess" of the polymorphous female body. a nebulous force existing outside conceptual and linguistic structures and finding expression in language in the form of disniptions in syntax. ambiguous meanings and so on. is singularly inadequate from a position which conceives language as a space of contested social meanings, and which consequently insists on locating the specifically feminine, not to mention the specifically feminist, qualities of language in content rather than in style. Rather than viewing language as the exercise of an absolute power against which only diversionary tactics may be used, feminists need to regard it as a medium of social interaction and communication. one that can be employed by wornen to contest existing world views, develop alternative positions and convince others of the validity of their clairns. Irigaray, taking the view that language. identity and indeed structures of any kind. including the notion of selves as discrete entities, are repressive impositions of the phallic law. fails to show, as Rita Felski argues, how the subversion of fixed rneanings and the unified subject in itself Unplies anything other than anarchism or relativisrn (Felski 1989, 40). Moreover, Felski continues, by rejecting discursive argumentation and reasoned critique as masculine prerogatives inexaicably linked to the illusion of a determining subject. and by valonzing an erotically based linguistic play as the primary form of liberating activity, she undermines

women's subjective agency and cnticai intervention in such a way as to delegitimate her

own theoretical position (Felski 1989,42).3

Let me retum to Braidotti. Described by Naomi Schor as one of Irigaray's "most acute readers" (Schor 1995, 33, Braidotti follows lrigaray in exposing the false universalism of the male subject and in affming the pressing need to develop a specificaiiy female speaking position. Her version of sexual difference theory departs from the premise that sexual difference is ontological, primordial and inextricable from one's being, "in a way that is unrepresented by the grammatical structure of language" (Braidotti 1994b. 193). Sexual difference is always already there and constitutive of the human experience. "For me," Braidotti writes, "'being in the world' means already 'being sexed,' so that if

'1' am not sexed, '1' am not at all" (Braidotti 1994b. 175-6). She explains:

31t may appear contradictory to clairn on the one hand that irigaray repudiates masculine language and on the other that she envisions an "erotically based linguistic play" as a form of liberating activity. What Irigaray is rejecting as "masculine" is language as a stnictured medium of communication. The linguistic features which makç social communication and interaction possible - wbich include, as Elizabeth Gross points out ( 1987. 138), ideals of textual transparency and intertranslatability, the subject-predicate correlation. and adherencç to a normative grammar - are possible, irigaray thinks, only by virtue of men's disavowal of corporeality. A feminine language would therefore be finnly based in the pre-linguistic realm cf the female body and feminine desire. For this very reason, however, it would not so much constitute an alternative to phallic language as disrupt and subvert its single, fixed meanings from a position beyond or prior to culture. Thus Irigaray counterposes the unity, self-transparency and neutmlity of masculine Ianguagc to a feminine fom characterized as nuid. hysteric, polysemic, fragmenteci and so on. Felski's points, then, arc twofold. In the first place, the polysemic text ernerges as quintessentially feminine only if we accept the dubious premise that language as a structured medium of communication is inherently masculine and repressive. In the second place. Irigmy's own position as critic is incornprehensiblc on sush a view. Being-a-woman is not the predication of a prescriptive essence, it is not a causal proposition capable of predetennining the out- corne of becoming of each individual identity. It pertains rather to the facticity of my being, it is a fact, it is like that: "1" am sexed. "1" have ken a woman - socially and anatomically - for as long as "1" have existed, that is to Say, in the lirnited scale of my temporality. forever. ...My "being-a-woman," just like my "king-in-language" and "king-mortal" is one of the constitutive elements of my subjectivity. Sexual difference is ontological, not accidental, peripheral, or contingent upon socioeconomic condi- tions; that one be socially constmcted as a female is evidenf that the recognition of the fact may take place in language is clear, but that the process of construction of femininity fastew and builds upon anatornical realities is equally me. One is both bom and consmcted as a Woman /"womanl'; the fact of being a woman is neither merely biological nor solely historical, and the polemical edge of the debate should not, in my opinion, go on king polar- ized in either of these ways. (Braidotti 1994b, 186-7). Immediately manifest in this passage is Braidotti's profound disagreement with Judith Butler on the question of a female subjectivity. For Eutler. the notion that there exists a universal subject called "woman" is misguided, even reactionary. for its failure to appreciate that the category "wornan" is not an essential unity or substantive identity, but a regulatory fiction generated by repressive regimes. Braidotti, on the other hand, rejects any suggestion that positing sexual difference as ontological difference is necessarily apolitical or effectively conservative; and indeed from her perspective, feminists cannot afford not to assen the specificity of the female subject as an embodied. and therefore sexed. entity. In her understanding. the project of sexual difference, which departs from the de~onstn~tion

of the traditional, universal, disembodied and gender-free subject, is pnmarily an effort to think the corporeal roots of subjectivity. and thus recognize the finiteness and partiality of thought. without, however, succumbing to deteminkm of either the linguistic or biological

variety. Her emphasis on embodiment depends on a radically anri-essentidisr understanding of the body as the site of intersection between the biological. the social and the linguistic, as "an interface, a threshold, a field of intersection of material and symbolic forces; a surface where multiple codes of power and knowledge are inscribed" (Braidotti 1991. 219). The embodied subject. Braidotti argues, is "neither an essence nor a biological destiny, but rather one's primary location in the world, one's situation in reality" (Braidotti 1994b, 238).

From such a perspective, arguments such as Butler's that seek to demonstrate that there is no ontology of sexual difference, on the grounds that bo th Our gendered identity and the alleged facticity of our sex are fictions engendered in language, simply miss the crucial point about sexual difference. They overlook, as Moira Gatens puts it in an enlightening article, "the significance of gender and its intirnate relation to biology-as-livrd in a social and historical context." (Gatens 1990, 150). She explains: Conceming the neutrality of the body. let me be explicit, there is no neutral body, there are at least two kinds of bodies; the male body and the female body. If we iocate social practices and behaviours as embedded in the subject .... then this has important repercussions for the subject as always a sexed subject...... The very sarne behaviours (whether they be masculine or feminine) have quite different personal and social significances when acted out by the male subject on the one hand, and the female subject on the other. (Gatens 1990, 145). Sexual difference, according to Braidotti. should be understood as an originary and non-negotiable difference based in women's embodied reaiity and lived expenence as female-sexed beings. If we depart from an understanding of the body as it is situated, lived and experienced, it is evident that the identity "woman" and the fernale body are not connected in the merely arbitrary way that, for example. Butler supposes. Neither cm th& connection be severed as nonchdantly as Butler sometimes seems to suggest, and certainly not withoot considerable existential anxiety on the part of the individu& concemed. What is missing from Butler's account of the performative construction of sexed subjects, in short, is the element of experience, which intervenes as a mediating factor in the social and linguistic construction of "woman". "Woman". Braidotti writes. "is both representation and expenence" (Braidotti 1994b. 187). This is not to deny that "woman" is in pan a phallogocentnc construct, but only to insist that there is more to it than that; for. as Braidotti explains, "'1, woman' am the direct empincal referent of a11 that has been theonzed about femininity, the female subject and the feminine. '1. woman' am affected directly and in my everyday life by what has been made of the subject of 'Woman"' (Braidotti 1994b, 187). The crucial point is that al1 wornen - understood neither as merely linguistic nor purely biological entities but as biocultural, histoncal beings - are implicated in the confrontation with a certain image of Woman that is the culturally dominant mode1 for female identity, and that the recognition of this fact translates as the assertion of sexual difference. Women's margin of non-belonging from the phallic system is not only a symbolic or linguistic phenornenon, but on the contrary must be connected to the bodily existence and lived experience of women. Indeed, feminist criticism developed out of a concem with "femaleness as the expenence of a female subject" (De Lauretis 1984. 165); and while deconsûuctionist perspectives are an important reminder that we cannot assume a simple coincidence between a subjectivity as woman and the biological condition of being female. they nonetheless take place, as Sibel Inik points out. at a level of abstraction too far removed from the experiences of actual women to be useful to feminist politics (Irzik

1990. 73). Against those who would clairn that "woman" has only a linguistic reality. therefore, the founding gesture for Braidotti's feminism of sexual difference is what she. following Teresa de Lauretis, calls the recognition of a hiatus "between woman as representation (Woman' as cultural imago) and women as expenence (real women as agents of change)" (Braidotti 1994b, 164). The recognition of this interval allows us as women to recognize, on the one hand, the totality of definitions, the stock of cumulated knowledge, theories and representations of the female subject as Our "historical essence," but at the sarne time it pennits us to state that "'we' women find these representations and images of 'Woman' highly insufficient and inadequate to express our experience as women" (Braidotti 1994b, 187). Introducing the category of expenence into her theory, then, allows Braidotti to distance herself from those reductionist or idealist accounts which conceive the subject as a relational identity "syoken" through discourse. Whereas for Butler and Irigaray the term "woman" appears primarily as a linguistic consauct whose sense is derived from its relation to other tenns, and whose subversive potential is itself a feature of language. the sarne is not true of Braidotti. In her view. the term "woman" gains part of its meaning from referring to actual women, who in turn are actively involved. as "both rhe effect and the

manipulators of linguistic signs" (Braidotti 1994b. 190), in altering the meaning of the signifier. Unfortunately, Braidotti dces not go very far toward theonring the concept of experience and its complex relation to fonns and processes of subjectivity. on the one

hand, and to resistance. on the other. Nevertheless, in arguing that "woman is both representation and expenence", she manages to avoid the unsatisfactory conclusions to which both Butler and Irigaray are driven by the logic of their arguments. Braidotti advocates neither relinquishing the signifier "woman" as a rnetaphysical nonsense nor retaining it to refer to "that which cannot be defined". Instead. she argues that real-life women as agents of change need to collectively repossess the "images and representations of 'Woman' as they have been coded in language. culture, science, knowledge. and discourse and consequently intemalized in the hem. mind. body. and lived experience of women" (Braidotti 1994c, 120-1). Women "cannot afford to merely cast off their sexed

identity: they rather need to critically and thoroughly repossess it" (Braidotti 1994~.120).

Braidoni does not advance this position with any consistency. Certainly. she offers the beginnings of a theory of women's critical agency that does not reduce that capacity to a feature of language. Borrowing a phrase from Irigaray, Braidotti refers to the process of

women's critical repossession of the signifier "woman" as mirnesis. But there is a crucial difference between Irigaray's version of mimesis and the one proposed by Braidotti. For Irigaray. mimesis consists in repeating "the way in which, within discourse, the feminine finds itself defined as lack, deficiency, or as imitation and negative image of the subject" (Irigaray 1985b, 78). It consists in repeating the qualities traditionally associated with the

feminine - fluidity, indeterminacy. hystetia, polysemy, and so on - "to such an extreme degree that the end result is the opposite of cornpliance: it unsettles the system by throwing

back to it what it cannot accept about its own operations" (Grosz 1989. 138). Now. such a strategy of mimetic repetition is the only option available, and a rather bleak one at that, once language is designated as inherently masculine and repressive. Once we accept. with irigaray. that the existing field of articulability is governed and constrained by a monolithic phallogocentrisrn which accords women no place as active, self-defined subjects and no language to speak their specificity, then there is nothing left for women but to employ divenionary tactics aimed at provisionally unsealing the system. However. as Elizabeth Grosz points out, Irigaray does not "naively" advocate mimesis as a strategy for women in general, but rather Irigaray herself in her rereading of philosophy assumes the mimetic role (Grosz 1989. 136). In her deconstructive texts "woman" ernerges as a textual force the precise nature of whose relation to Irigaray as a woman is unclear. but whose indeterminacy and excess continually dismpt the single fixed meanings of phallogocentric texts. There is no room in her work, in other words. for a conception of language as a space of contested meanings, or for a view of women as subjects actively engaged in trying to convince others of the validity of their claims. On the other hand, implicit in Braidotti's understanding of mimesis as a process of critical repossession and redefinition of the signifier "woman" by real-life women is a conception of language which, as a medium of social interaction and communication. is more malleable than irigaray supposes, and which need not necessarily be equated with patriarchal domination and repression; and correspondingly. a view of women as agents of change who cm use language to argue about meanings, including, among other things, the meaning cf the term "woman". That is to Say, she distances herself from determinkt accounts wherein language is deerned inherently masculine and repressive and the feminine emerges as a subversive textual force operating without any evident or necessary connection to actual women. True to her typically vague and unsystematic style of doing theory, however.

Braidoni fails to explore these ideas with any rigour, and everything 1 have just ventured to Say about her work is thrown into question by some of her further comments. In the same article as appear her thoughts on mimesis, for example, she proposes that "the feminine as expenenced and expressed by women is as yet unrepresented, having been colonized by the male imaginary" (Braidotti 1994~.122). Or again: "the me force of the feminine rests on its king the sign of silence, the non-said, absence, and therefore on the fact that wornen do not speak as subjects" (Braidotti 1991, 105). It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that behind such assenions lies the sarne old assumption after all: language is masculine, therefo~subjectivity - and agency - are denied women. But if we accept the premise that language and subjectivity are inherently masculine, then we have to admit. as one Italian feminist put it, that "up to that moment [we have] gotten everything wrong. A thinking subject can corne to no other conclusion when she discovers that al1 she has done and thought was not really her own thought and will, but some other subject's thought and will" (Milan Women's Bookstore Collective 1990, 103). As women and feminists, we must defend ourselves against a representation of Our lives which annihilates our position as human subjects.

Despite Braidotti's clairn that "being-a-woman" is an "essential difference" that al1 women share and that separates them from men, despite her vehement defence of sexual difference as an ontological difference. there cm be little doubt that she. like Lrigaray, has as her prirnary objective the deconsmiction of essentialist visions of subjectivity. In the latter's analysis, classical visions of subjectivity are inextricably bound up with essentialism. W ithin the scheme of dic hotornous opposition that produces the appearance of essence. one pole is represented as the nom and the other as the deviation; and insofar as the masculine haî traditionally slotted itself into the former category and confined Woman to othemess, Irigaray's goal is to undermine and provisonally overthrow the reign of binary oppositions, and in particular to rnake "woman" express a "different difference" by releasing it from the traditional polarities. Her defence of sexual difference is best understood, Braidotti explains. as a form of "strategic essentialism" which may appear to "repeat the binary perversion of phallocentrism", but which is, in reality, a mimetic tactic that "airns at producing difference" (Braidotti 1994b. 184). Similarly, Braidotti suggests that "political agency has to do with the capacity to expose the illusion of ontological foundations" (Braidotti 1994b, 35) even as she posits "woman" as an ontological catepry.

She defines ontology as that which deals with what is "implied in the very definition of an entity" (Braidotti 1994b 177), but cheerfully asserts a few pages later that "1 do not have to define the signifier womn in order to assert it as the speaking subject of my discourse" (Braidotti 1994b. 186). She does not go so far as to Say. with Irigaray. that "woman refers to what cannot be defined". but nevertheless. like Irigaray, she wants to assert a fernale subjectivity without giving any propositional content to that category. Thus she contends that " being-a-woman" is the ontological precondition for women's existentid becoming as a subject; a subjectivity as "woman" is the starting point for the active process of "becoming-women" (Braidotti 1994b, 187-8). It is on the issue of becoming. Braidotti proposes, that feminists of sexual difference have a great deal to gain from a critical engagement with Gilles Deleuze. In any case sexual difference theorists have in common with Deleuze a deep suspicion of Western philosophy for its treatment of difference as the reactive pole of a binary opposition organized so as to affirm the power and primacy of the same. But whereas the former seek to release the feminine from this binary logic and to let it express a pure difference apart from identities based on the phallus. Deleuze wants to allow for the affirmation of difference as positivity without reference to any one symbolic system. His efforts at deconstnicting identity in the name of a non-sexualized "multiplicity" have not thus far recommended him to many feminists, and Irigaray, for one, sees in his position the dissolution of a relation to language and to sex that women have so far never possessed (Irigaray 1985b. 14 1). While Braidotti concus that Deleuze's theory of rnultiplicitous desire may "finally result in women's disappearance from the scene of history" (Braidoni 199 1, 1 19). she does not want to dispense with hirn in so unequivocal a fashion. On the contrary, she proposes a Deleuzian "nomadic subject" as a suitable figuration for a new. postmetaphysical ferninist subjectivity. Braidotti perceives thret elements in Deleuze's thought which, she thinks, should recommend it to feminists of sexual difference. In the Fust place, there is his afore-

mentioned critique of Western thought for its reliance on a binary logic which devalues difference by treating it as a subset of identity. In Western philosophy, for Deleuze as for

irigaray and other theorists of sexual difference. being is univocal, it is One. the Same, and it asserts its sameness through a series of hierarchicdy ordered differences. Difference cm only be comprehended in relation to a "normative idea of a being that remains one and the same in al1 its varied qualifications and attributes" (Braidotti 1994d. 164). But according to Deleuze this emphasis on sarneness, self-identity and being misapprehends the fundamental multiplicity of the world. a world in constant flux and change. a world in which no entities preserve a stable identity; a world. in short, wherein "only becoming has being" (Deleuze 1983, xi). Resisting the tendency to assimilate difference into a more encompassing identity. Deleuze airns at the affirmation of "pure difference". of difference as positivity.

In the second place, Deleuze has in cornmon with sexual difference theory a critique of psychoanalysis for its conception of desire as negativity. Deleuze challenges the universal devance of the oedipal construction and disputes the founding scene in which the Law of the Father acts to prohibit and repress an original expenence of pleasure. and desire emerges as lack (Butler 1987a. 204). As an alternative he proposes a conception of desire as a prelinguistic. generative and life-affming force. "irreducible to any son of unity" (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 42). that is empowered and enhanced through being affected by extemal phenornena. Ontological desùe is "a process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 154). Having thus dispensed with the prohibitive law that disfigures the unconscious by instituting desire as lack, he reconceives the unconscious in ternis of displacement and production. Far from being a neornetaphysical container of deep inner truths, the unconscious is a generalized. impersonal, acentered system, a machinic network that engineers "desiring-production". For Deleuze. desirelthe unconscious is what expresses pure difference in its etemal becoming. The unconscious stands as a guarantee that the subject will be represented as split, as not-one, as a multiplicity in which consciousness will never coincide fully with the subject; it "separates the thinking subject fiom the illusion of pienitude and self-transparence" (Braidoni 1994d, 164). Finally, Deleuze posits a single. corporeal substance traversing al1 beings independently of the matter of their individuality. In his understanding. a body is "not defined by the fom that determines it nor as a deterrninate substance or subject nor by the organs it possesses or the functions it fulfïlls" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 260); rather, every body is the arbitrary product of the active (dominating) and reactive (dominated) forces of which it is composed, which forces are constantly in flux: In the frst place, a body. however small it may be, is cornposed of an infinite number of particles: it is the relations of motion and rest, of speeds and slownesses between particles. that define a body, the individuality of a body. Secondly, a body affects other bodies, or is affected by other bodies; it is this capacity for affecting and king affected that also defines a body in iü individuality (Deleuze 1988, 123).

In this scherna. consciousness is the locus of an illusion. for it "merely expresses the relation of certain reactive forces to the active forces which dominate them" (Deleuze 1983, 4 1). However, although Deleuze joins other deconstructionists in challenging a unified and unifying consciousness as a pure and autonomous representational force, he believes, unlike many, that there is something outside the text. For him. force, bodies and desire remain fundarnentally irreducible to language (Bogue 1989, 34). So while Derrida urges us to rid ourselves of al1 personalist references by drawing attention to the linguisric determination of the subject, Deleuze does so on empiricist grounds by emphasizing an impersonal. transcendental desire. Indeed, there is not much left of the traditional subject in his account of desinng-production. Far from being a cause or origin. the individual subject is a "heterogeneous aggregate of parts that function as components of supra- individual social and natural machines" (Bogue 1989, 95). The subject is "produced as a residuum alongside the machine .... on the periphery, with no fixed identity, forever decentered. defined by the states through which it passes" (Deleuze and Guattari 1983.

This fundamentally multiplicitous subject is Deleuze's "nomad". If the prime function of social codes is to codify and regulate the flows of desire. to channel desiring- production into prescribed pathways. to temtorialize molecular multiplicity into molar aggregates and in the process produce the illusion of stable identities, then the deterritorialization of those codes breaks down rigidly fixed molar subjectivities and produces the multiple, nomadic subject. The nomad traces a process of becoming-other. becoming plant, animal, vegetable. mineral, becomings-rnolecular and -imperceptible of al1 kinds. exclairning, at every point of intensity, "So that's what it was!" and "So it's me!"

(Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 20). Now. it is important to bear in mind that for Deleuze. a becorning is not a resemblance, an imitation, or an identification. for these al1 mistakenly assume a stable subject in advance: rather,"a becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987,238). As Braidotti explains,

Becoming is neither the dynamic opposition of opposites nor the unfolding of an essence in a teleologically ordained process leading to a synthesizing identity. The Deleuzian becoming is the affmation of the positivity of difference, meant as a multiple and constant process of transformation. Both teleological order and fixed identities are relinquished in favour of a flux of multiple becoming. (Braidotti 1994b. 11 1). Braidotti finds the nomad an inspiring mode1 for a new, postmetaphysical feminist subjectivity. She emphasizes that rejecting the universal. disembodied subject of philosophy and recognizing the subject as an always embodied entity does not only entai1 recognizing its sexually differentiated structure; it also means accepting its unconscious, affective roots. But while Irigaray chooses to focus on feminint jouissance as the unsaid of male discourse. Braidotti prefers a Deleuzian version of desire and the unconscious. where desire is thought in terms of a productive, generative. and life-affirming force.

Ontological desire is not merely libidinal; rather, it is "the desire to be, the tendency of the subject toward being, the predisposition of the subject toward being" (Braidotti 1994b.

196). Desire is the nonthought at the heart of thought; it is that which sustains the activity of thinking yet "evades us in the very act of propelling us forth" (Braidotti 1994b. 14). Thought in these terms. ontological desire is the prediscursive foundation for the becoming-subject of women, for women's desire to become and speak as female feminist subjects. Braidotti's female subject. as nomadic, molecular and multiple, should therefore be understood as a process of becoming sustained by ontological desire. The nomad is "a figuration for the kind of subject who has relinquished al1 idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity": it is "an identity made of transitions, successive shifts, and coordinated changes, without and against an essential unity" (Braidotti 1994b. 22). In counterposing the unity, mastery and self-transparence of the traditional subject of philosophy to the nomadic. split subject of desire, Braidotti intends to underline that affective or energetic relations, rather than rational consciousness, are the bais for the production of rneaning. Unfortunately. this assertion is entirely incompatible with her earlier arguments. Recall her contention that the task confronting feminists is the critical repossession and redefinition of the signifier

"woman". Although she refers to this process of critical repossession as "mirnesis", it is quite unlike Irigaray's version of the same - which assirnilates agency to the workings of a

pre-linguistic fernale desire - because it implies that women as rational agents can critically reflect on rneanings and endeavour to change them, using language as a tool of social communication and interaction. In her more Deleuzian moments, however, Braidotti suggests that mimesis is a nomadic journey or process of becoming sustained by multiplicitous desire. By emphasizing desire rather than language in the production of meaning. she equivocates on the question of women's capacity for critical reflection. Moreover, she fundamentally misunderstands the nature of Deleuzian desire. Far frorn suggesting that desire is involved in the production of rneaning, Deleuze argues that desire "makes its entry with the general colhpse of the question 'What does it mean?"' (itaiics added) (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 109). For Deleuze, the unconscious does not mean anything; it merely constructs machines of desire. "The question posed by desire is not

What does it mean? but rather 'How does it work?"' (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 109). Representation and meaning are always a social and psychic repression of desiring- production, whereas desire is what evades the code of meaning, what surnrnons "escape lines" and calls into question the production of meaning. In short, if indeed Braidotti wants to maintain that women can and should debate the meaning of the term "woman". then her emphasis on desire is misplaced. If, on the other hand, she wants to insist that "desire is the effective motor of political change" (Braidotti 1994b, 123), then she, like irigaray, ultimately ends up undermining women's critical agency by locating the source of subversion in a pre-linguistic and pre-subjective reah. It is less than obvious which of these options Braidotti prefers. What is clear, however. is that she, like Irigaray, ends up connecting a specifically fernale subjectivity with nonidentity and multiplicity. Whether desire is associated with a pre-linguistic realm of undifferentiated, polyrnorphous pleasure preceding the formation of intelligible subjects, or whether it is understood in Deleuzian terms as a prirnary, generative force which expresses multiplicity in its etemal becoming, the outcome is the same: the dissolution of the subject in favour of "pure difference". And so the paradox first apparent in Irigaray reappears in Braidoni. Both want to affirm nonidentity and rnultiplicity as the quintessential features of a specifically feminine subjectivity. But 1 have been arguing al1 dong that there is no case for assigning rnultiplicity and nonidentity to one side of a binary opposition based on sex. This conclusion follows only if we designate language as inherently masculine and repressive of feminine difference. The irony of Braidotti's position is that she, like kgaray, is highly critical of Deleuze's attempt to dissolve identity into an impersonal, multiple, machine-like subject. According to Deleuze, feminists who refuse to dissolve the subject "woman" into the multiplicitous forces that smcture her are conceptually mistaken, though they rnay be politically right (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 276). Feministr would be mily revolutionary if, rather than seeking to achieve a sex-specific identity. they developed a consciousness that was not specifically feminine. In Braidotti's view. Deleuze's position fails to take

account of the fundamental lack of syrnrnetry between the sexes:

Though Deleuze may praise the fragmentation of the subject, the flux of ail identities based on the Phallus, the truth of the maner is .... : one cannot deconsh-uct a subjectivity one has never ken fully granted; one cannot diffuse a sexuality which has historicaily been defined as dark and mysterious. In order to announce the death of the subject one must first have gained the right to speak as one; in order to dernystify meta-discourse one must first gain access to a place of enunciation. Fragmen- tation of the self being woman's basic historical condition.... we are left with the option of theorizing a general "becoming- woman" for both sexes, or else of flatly stating that women have been post-stnicturalist since the beginning of time (Braidotti 1991, 122). Even more distressing, from Braidotti's point of view, is Deleuze's suggestion that al1 lines of detemtorialization necessarily pass through the stage of "becoming-woman". His "becoming-woman". she suspects. has been disembodied to such an extent that it "bears no connection to the struggles, the experience, the discursivity of real-life women" (Braidotti 1991, 120-1). Yet she does not want to give up on the notion of becoming altogether. In an attempt to salvage it for feminism, she suggests that Deleuze's theory of becoming is "obviously determined by his location as an ernbodied male subject for whom the dissolution of identities based on the phallus results in bypassing gender altogether, toward a multiple sexuality" (Braidotti 1994b. 122). This is not, however. the option best suited to fernale embodied subjects. The process of becoming, "far from being the dissolution of al1 identities in a flux where different foms and connections will emerge. may itself be sex-specific, sexually differentiated, and consequently take different foms accordinp to different gendered positions" (Braidotti 1994b, 12 1). Not only that, Braidotti suggests funher that desire, by transcending the subject, lays the foundation for a new, genderized bond among women. The point, she says, is to "radicalize the universal. not get rid of it" (Braidotti 1994b, 204). What, exactly, Braidotti means by al1 this remains obscure. At any rate, it is difficult to see how her postmetaphysicai female subject, as a nomadic, molecular and multiple process of becoming, is any different from the kind of subject that Deleuze is proposing. The problem here is that Braidotti wants to have things both ways. On the one han& she is fully cognizant of the practical necessity of affming a female subjectivity. This realization, I think, is what lies behind her defence of sexual difference as an ontologicai difference against those accounts, such as Butler's, which seek to overthrow sexual difference in favour of "proliferating genders". But at the same time, by virtue of her post-saucturalist heritage and its thorough-going rejection of identity, she womes that such a stance may appear reactionary. This tension between the political need to assen a female subjectivity and the post-structuralist problematization of identity is, however, a spurîous one. It surfaces only when identity is conceived, dong post-structuralist lines. exclusively in terms of violence and repression of difference. And although Braidotti, as 1 demonstrated in this chaprer, at least gestures toward a less pessimistic view of identity, her mm to Deleuze, in her later work, ultimately confirms her post-sûucturalist credentials. Braidotti's dilemma neatly illustrates the paradoxes which a post-structuralist feminism invariably encounters. Throughout this chapter and the previous one 1 have been emphasizing that post-suucturalism's uncompromising anti-realism and hostility to identity are highly problematic from a feminist point of view. Because the deconstructionist critique of identity erects an unbndgeable gulf between sign and reference, discourse and reality, feminists who take deconstmction as their methodological framework risk overlooking the unambiguous existence of women as concrete, female-embodied beings whose subjective experiences and material circumstances are necessady the ovemding preoccupation of feminist theory and politics. Kate Soper, in another context, observes that ...it is not language that has a hole in its ozone layer; and the 'real' thing continues to be polluted and degraded even as we refine our deconstructive insights at the level of the signifier. (Soper 1995b. 151). This remark, with a few obvious adjustrnents. could serve as an equally pertinent rejoinder to post-structuralist feminists who, denying that we cm locate and describe real generaiity in the world, urge feminist theory finally to recognize this fact and direct its energies to spotting the " difference" w hic h such generalization inevitably excludes. The fear seems to be that if feminism does not adopt a view of ideritity as purely linguistic construct. then it is oblipd to concede an eternal essence of Woman as the gound of feminism. But of course these are not the only available options. and post-structuralism indulges in needless polemic when it behaves as though they are. The identity "women" is not sirnply imposed from without, as Braidotti seemed at one point to be quite reasonably proposing, but is something which women themselves construct, creating themselves anew even as they are constnicted. For post-structuralism. however, such a view of identity amounts to an impossible concession, inasmuch as it appeals to a measure of subjective autonomy that is not assimilated to linguistic structures of domination. Chapter Three: Materiaiist Feminism

In rny overview of exemplary positions within the two main strands of post- structuraiist feminism, I argued that Butler, Irigaray and Braidotti jointly succumb, in their collective zeal to deconstruct the hurnanist subject, to a number of unwarranted assurnptions. Chief arnong these is the belief that identity is only and always a repressive fiction imposed by language which must be subvened in order to rekase the play of difference, and that to believe otherwise is to prove oneself captive to an outdated nostalgia for metaphysical presence. Butler, for example. conceives the identity "woman" as a mere fiction engendered in language, and argues funher that not only the identity "woman". but every identity is a linguistic construct of a similar kind; but in doing so she eliminates any convincing grounds for her critique, and in particular leaves her own implicit project - the valorization of lesbian sexuality - without a leg to stand on. Part of my argument in the fust chapter was that the ernancipatory impulse of Butler's project cmonly be made sense of in relation to a subject whose sensibilities are ignored, repressed or abused by the rationalities condemned in her critique. Butler's position, which singles out language itseif as the source of repression of difference in its imposition of coherent identities, cannot be much use to a feminist politics which must, after dl, concem itself with actual women as concrete. female-sexed beings, and whose subordinant position in our society. furthemore. is not only a linguistic phenornenon but is the result of social, material and histoncal relations of power. Sirnilarly, by locating the source of subversion in the logic of language itself, which even as it operates to impose identity on nonidentity is continually disrupted b y what it forecloses, she removes women's capacity for critical reflection and political action. Falling prey to the unfortunate post-structuralist tendency to equate cntical reflection with a pure consciousness existing outside language and culture. and in her justified eagemess to expose the inadequacy of such a notion, she fails to remark that consciousness need not be construed in this way. and that the more sensible alternative is to recognize both the constructed charmer of the subject and its potrntial capacity to crîticaliy

reflect on and materially intervene in its circumstances. Butler's theory, 1 concluded. is

unsatisfactory because it is too li ttle dialecticai.

A similar shortcoming. 1 next argued, plagues Irigaray's theory of sexual difference. At first glance there is reason for optimism. for it appears that Lrigaray wants to defend some notion of a subject "woman" that is not merely a fiction constructed in language. On closer inspection, however, it tums out that her defence of sexual difference is premised on the acceptance of a masculine symbolic. the main effect of which is to relegate "woman" to a pre-linguistic domain of polymorphous desire or feminine joiiissance. This proposition is quite different, of course. from rny assertion in Chapter

One that we need to admit a certain objective continuity to the identity "woman" and to the

female sex that is not finally rnanipulable by culture. In any case. it is not clear if Lngaray is arguing that there are women, really. behind the patriarchal texts. or if, on the contrary. "woman" is better understood as a (pre-)linguistic principle. Either way, the only option available to her. in light of her unyielding hostility to identity as the repressive imposition of a monolithic masculine symbolic. is to valorize multiplicity and nonidentity as woman's identity, notwithstanding the utter paradox of such a clah and regardless of the tenuous connection that those concepts may have to the experiences of actual women. Moreover. just as Butler removes women's capacity for critical reflection by theorking agency as a function of the structural operation of language, Irigaray incapacitates women as active subjects of change by locating subversion in a pre-linguistic realm of female desire that continually disrupts the stable fixed meanings of phallogocenaic texts. Braidoai, 1 argued in the sarne chapter, fms better, inasmuch as the introduction of the category of experience into her theory allows her to move beyond the post-struchiralist totalization of language toward a more nuanced account of subject formation and resistance. Like Irigaray. she defends sexual difference as an ontological difference. but unlike the former does not gound that difference in ahistoric linguistic structures. Instead. sexual difference is the result of women's lived experience as female-sexed beings, an experience which is not only integral to the process of formation of "women" as subjects, but aiso pennits us to recognize a hiatus between Woman as representation and concrete women as historical agents of change. But no sooner does Braidotti suggest, quite reasonably, that agency has to do with women's capacity to criticdly reflect on and redefine the signifier "woman", than she sets out to undermine that very proposition. Indeed, by celebrating Deleuzian notions like desire and nornadic subjectivity, she nsks precisely what she is othenvise at pains to condemn - the dissolution of the subject "women". and agency dong with it. into a flux of multiple becorning and "desiring-producticn". Nonetheless, as 1 said, the concept of experience is a useful one and ought to be retained, although it is Teresa de

Lauretis. and not Braidotti, who deserves the credit for theorizing its relation to forms and processes of subjectivity, on the one hand, and to resistance on the other. Therefore it is to de Lauretis that I now turn. In the face of unrelenting and seemingly decisive attempts at its deconstruction, de Lauretis insists not only on the need to retain the concept of expenence, but also on the need to elaborate further its relationship to social-materid practices, to foms and processes of subjzctivity. and to resistance. Post-structuralist theory, she notes, "does not countenance the notion of experience within its conceptual horizon or philosophical presuppositions" (de Lauretis 1994a. 8). Indeed, any appeal to experience, frorn the post- stnicturalist point of view. always carries with it the spectre of a "transcendental consciousness" which, so goes the argument, is the sorry legacy of philosophical humanism and which post-structuralism believes itself alone to have overcome. Insofar as any reference to experience, according to this line of argument, is irnplicitly a reference to a consciousness fully present to itself, it can be discredited by revealing the illusory nature of that unified consciousness and of identity more generally. nius Sibel Irzik (Irrik 1990,57- 9) demonstrates how Demda, having shown that the subject cannot be the origin of its own discoune because it has to conform to linguistic prescriptions, concludes not only that intentionality of meaning is thereby jeopardized, but that in fact the consciousness presumed to be its source is devoid of a reality more stable than language. For Irzik, however, as we saw in Chapter One, the fact that linguistic conventions precede individual subjects and are beyond their control need no? necessarily undemine al1 conceptions of subjective autonomy and identity. Demda, she thinks, consvues consciousness and identity in very absolute ways: either the subject is inside the linguistic system, in which event it is a function, rather than an ongin or presence; or it is outside language, which requires positing its self-presence in a pure consciousness (Irzik 1990, 64). But Inik contends that these two cases do not exhaust al1 the alternatives, and that, in particular, we do not have to define consciousness as a "pure and autonomous entity existing outside of any forrn of materiality and preserving its sarneness in the face of change and contradiction" (Irzik 1990, 65). Instead we ought to reject altogether Demda's formulation of the problem and reconceive "consciousness" as the narne for the various foms of involvement of human beings in the world, for the process by which individuals define themselves through their actions (Irzik 1990, 65). In this chapter I want to suggest that Teresa de Lauretis offers feminists one such alternative conception. By theorizing "expenence" as the process by which human subjectivity is constructed, she avoids the evident shortcomings of the transcendental consciousness and still preserves critical agency as a capacity of human subjects.

In Chapter One 1 wondered how it is that subjects do in fact develop a sense of continuous identity and selfhood if it is the case that subjectivity and identity are pure epiphenomena of language. This is a question which centrally concems de Lauretis.

How, she asks, "does '1' corne to know herself as 'a woman', how is the speaking/writing self en-gendered as a fernale subject?" (de Lauretis 1984, 182). For while there can be no doubt that Woman, meant as the representation of an essence inherent in al1 women, is a fiction produced by hegemonic discourses, that cultural representation - the image of Wornan as other-frorn-man, Nature and Mother, site of sexuality and masculine desire - needs, de Lauretis argues. to be distinguished from women as "real, historical beings and social subjects" (de Lauretis 1986b, 10). These real historical beings corne to know themselves as women through a "process of self-representation" which she terms "expenence":

...a process by which, for al1 social beings. subjectivity is con- smicted. Through that process one places oneself or is placed in social reality, and so perceives and comprehends as subjective (refemng to, even originating in, oneself) those relations - material economic. and interpersonal - which are in fact social and, in a larger perspective, historicai. The process is continuous, its achievement unending or daily renewed. For each person, there- fore. subjectivity is an ongoing construction, not a fixed point of departure or arriva1 from which one then interacts with the world. On the contrary, it is the effect of that interaction - which 1 call expenence; and thus it is produced not by extemal ideas, values. or material causes, but by one's personal, subjective, engagement in the practices, discourses, and institutions that lend significance (value. meaning, and affect) to the events of the world (de Lauretis 1984, 159).

I quote this passage at length because it clearly illustrates the crucial point; narnely, that while de Lauretis is no defender of the transcendental subject, she is not therefore prepared to sacrifice al1 notions of continuous identity and reflexive autonomy. She refuses. in other words, to proceed from the realization that subjects are culturally and linguistically constmcted, and cannot for that reason be the pure origin of their own discourse, to the post-stxucturalist conclusion that language is the sole source and locus of meaning. Instead of simply reversing the opposition between language and consciousness. pnvileging language where humanism privileges consciousness. de Lauretis defends their mutually constitutive, indeed dialectical, effects. The significance of her contribution to feminist theories of subjectivity should therefore not be underestimated. Not only does her concept of experience bridge the gap between discourse and reality, between the sign and its referent, and thus avoids the: risk of ideaiism inherent in narrowly linguistic theories of subjectivity, but it also ushers in a theory of meaning as a continual production of human subjects, and so preserves human agency against its erasure by those same (overly) deterrninist theories. For de Lauretis, then, expenence refers to "an ongoing process by which subjectivity is constmcted semiotically and historically"; more accurately. it is the narne for "a complex of habits resulting frorn the serniotic interaction of 'outer world' and 'inner world', the continuous engagement of a self or su bject in social reality" (de Lauretis 1984, 182). This definition owes a great deal to Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of semiosis.

What connects Peirce's inner and outer worlds, de Lauretis explains, is the "chain of interpretants", "an ongoing senes of semiotic mediations linking objects. signs. and events of the world to their 'significate effects' in the subject" (de Lauretis 1994b. 299). Peirce identifies three general classes of significate effects (de Lauretis 1984, 173-4). "Emotiond" and "energetic" interpretants refer, respectively, to the feeling produced in the subject by a sign, and to the muscular or mental effort produced in the subject through the mediation of the emotional interpretant. The "ultimate" intepretant is a "habit-change". a "modification

of a person's tendencies toward actions"; it is "self-analyzing" because it rnakes sense of the emotion and muscular or mental effort that preceded it by providing a conceptual representation of that effort (de Lauretis 1984. 174). In this way the ultimate interpretant prevents the process of semiosis from lapsing into a limitless circulation of meaning. The process of semiosis conchides, even if temporarily, with a modification of consciousness. with a habit or habit-change in the individual persons who are its subjects. In this way the chain of meaning cornes to a halt "by anchoring itself to somebody. some body, an individual subject" (de Lauretis 1984, 178). In drawing on Peirce's theory of semiosis, de Lauretis equips herself with a powerful counter-argument to currently fashionable perspectives on subjechvity. Whereas post-structuralisrn conceives the subject "woman" as a thorough-going linguistic effect without any buis in objective reality and recornmends as a corollary that ferninists dispense with the signifier altogether or, failing that, launch it into an infinite regession of meaning. de Lauretis reminds us that "the signifier does not endlessly rush on toward the abyss of nonmeaning, and that there is a referent, the real world, after all" (de Lauretis 1986b, 17). Indeed, if the subject of semiosis is "the place in which. the body in whom, the significate effect of the sign takes hold and is real-ized" (de Lauretis 1984, 182-3). then there can be no questioil that the subject is physically implicated and bodily engaged in the production of meaning. Thus de Lauretis argues that a certain experience of sexuality effects a social being which we cal1 the female subject. and that expenence. that "complex of habits. dispositions, associations and perceptions", is what engenders one as female and constitutes women's identity (de Lauretis 1984. 182). This approach has the important advantage of recognizing. as Butler for one does not. that the identity "women" is not just a fipent of language, but a term with real. rnaterial implications and concrete referents. It is in this sense, moreover, de Lauretis cm be counted a reaiist, for she evidently thinks that we cm encounter and aciccurately describe real generaiity in the wodd, narnely, the categoIy of fernale-embodied individuals called " women". De Lauretis. then, distinguishes herself from post-stmcturalist feminists by ailowing that the terni "woman" has concrete referents who. through their particular expenence of sexuality and the female body. participate in the construction of their identity as wornen. Yet this body of lived expenence - "the place in which. the body in whom, the significate effect of the sign takes hold and is real-ized" - is not, for de Lauretis, a natural body. Hence her critique of Peirce for his failure to specify "what kind of a body it is" that is involved in the process of semiosis, or "how the body is itself produced as a sign for the subject and vanously represented*'(de Lauretis 1984, 183). It is not women's experience of the natural body which intervenes in the semiotic construction of their identity. but rather their expenence of the female body as it is constructed by the heterosexual imperative which intervenes in that process. She wntes that

[clornine to terms with the oedipd contract and its underlying master code, the gender system, means to question not gender inequality (which is merely a tautology), nor gender as woman's differencefrom man (a 'sexual' difference simply derived from and opposed to the standard that is man), but the very terms 'man' and 'woman' in their relationship. an etymological trace of which is visible in the English word (wo)man. Thus it is not sufficient to rernark the now accepted view that gender is a cultural or symbolic construct, and to describe its surface manifestations, without analyzing and deconstructing the deep-structural hierarchy embedded in its foundation in 'mythic thought.'...As long as the very tems of this contract remain unquestioned, the fernale body. with dl the effects of meaning produced in its representations, will continue to be. as it in fact has been, constantly rewritten, yet remaining 'always already' inscnbed in the (a)symmetry of the heterosexual presumption. (de Lauretis 1987,260- 1). Since the body of women's lived experience aiways remains caught, according to de Lauretis, within the normative institution of heterosexuality, it is not a natural body.

Nor. for that matter. is it at al1 possible to expenence the natural body, for the body is always marksd, inscribed and made meaningful in discourse. The task confronting feminists. therefore, is the stniggle to represent female sexuality and desire in tems that exceed the "sexual (in)differenceWof masculine discourses. The feminist task is to transcend both gender and sex in the way that. for example, Monique Wittig "reconstitut[esl the body in a new erotic economy ...rewriting it othenvise. other-wise: a lesbian body" (de Lauretis 1988, 167). "What is meant by lesbianisrn," de Lauretis asks. "if it is not a female sexuaiity unfettered or autonomous from masculine desire and definition?" (de Lauretis 1994a, 3 1). The suggestion that lesbianism represents a tnily autonomous female sexuality is highly problematic. for its underlying assumption is that female heterosexuality is a thorough-going construct of masculine discourse. and for this reason necessarily oppressive to women. Indeed, for de Lauretis, relations between men and women cm never be anything other than oppressive to wornen, because gender categories are constmcted by the patriarchal institution of heterosexuality in its own interests. Moreover, since it is the case that "gnder inequality is merely a tautology", the only option available to feminists is to transcend the binary gender grid altogetheri and the lesbian, apparentiy. effects precisely such a aanscendence. But the claim that relations between men and wornen are necessarily oppressive is not a convincing one. On the contrary. it is quite possible to imagine a society wherein women and men are equally valued despite their gendered differences. So de Laureris is mistaken to suppose that challenging the subordination of women in pauiarchal society requires repudiating gendered identities as purely normative constructs of the institution of heterosexuality. At a political level. such a strategy risks alienating heterosexual women who are not likely to take kindly to the suggestion that their innermost desires. even if these are experienced as authentic in a most profound sense, are in reality determined by extemal forces. Even more imponandy. in presenting the lesbian as a figuration for the mily autonomous female subject. de Lauretis implies that lesbian sexuality is somehow more authentic or natural than female heterosexuality. This discrepancy between a professed cornmitment to a consmictionist account of genders and sexualities and a surreptitious appeal to an authentic lesbian sexuality also, as we saw in Chapter One. plagues Butler's theory of gender performativity. Of course, Butler insists that she is not invoking an authentic sexuality at all, but rnrrely exposing that which language in the course of its functioning forecloses and renders "unthinkable." Similarly. de Lauretis would likely respond that in valorizing the lesbian, her intention is certainly not to invoke a natural or authentic sexuality, but rather to develop representations of the female body which mscend phallic constraints. But why should we want to transcend phallic constraints, if not because we believe that those constraints damage and repress Our authentic selves? 1 think it is nrcessary to repeat bnefly, therefore, the arguments I made in Chapter

One; namely, that if the body is regarded as a thorough-going cultural construction. it cm make no sense to challenge the imposition of cultural disciplines upon it. The body is not a mere consûuct, but a natural organism with transcultural properties and functions. and as such it is "a being that is the source and site of its own expenence of itself as an entity" (Soper 1995b. 135). Bodies, that is. are themselves the source of meanings; they are not infinitely malleable in the way that postmodernists believe. From such a perspective it becomes evident that heterosexuality is not merely a patriarchal nom. but a prescription of nature inasmuch as the continued existence of the human species depends upon it. This is not of course to overlook de Lauretis's main concem, for to Say that heterosexuality is a natural disposition is not to sanction the political persecution of homosexuality as unnatural. On the contrary, unless we admit some natural basis for al1 sexual dispositions, it is not clear why we should find objectionable the pervasive hetemsexism of Our culture. Similady. we need to reject the view that gender is a thorough-going hetemsexist consmct and admit, instead, some (fairly minimal) objective link between biological sex and gender, for otherwise, as Kate Soper points out. it is unclear how the process of gendenzation could have attained any cultural significance in the fmt place (Soper 1990, 169). But again, as Soper further argues, simply to recognize that there are certain biological differences between men and women is not to "predetermine their social existence or finally to explain why they happen to fulfil any parricular cultural role" (Soper 1990, 188). What this al1 amounts to, then, is a realism of a stronger variety than that espoused by de Lauretis. If de Lauretis is a realist in the sense that she insists on the material existence of women as real, historical beings, she nevertheless pestures toward an ideal future wherein the term "wornan" would be obsolete. Thus she argues that

[a] feminist frame of reference ...cannot be either "man" or "woman," for both of these are constxucts of a male-centered discourse, both are products of "the straight mind." If the goal of feminist theory is to define sexual difference for women, to understand how one becomes a woman, and what gives female- ness (radier than femininity) its meaning as the experience of a female subject, then the starting point can be neither "man" nor "woman"; neither Man with the capital M of humanism, or the lower-case man of modernism; nor, on the other hand, woman as the opposite or the complement of man; Woman as Nature. Mother, Body, and Matter, or woman as style, figure, or meta- phor of man's femininity. (de Lauretis 1986a. 13).

1 am proprosing, on the contrary, that "woman" is not merely the construct of a male-centered discourse. It is at least in part women's experience of the naniral body, and not only their expenence of the body as it is constructed by masculine discourses - although

it is certainly that as well - which intervenes in the construction of the identity "woman".

This is not by any means to reintroduce an etemal essence of Woman, but it is to affithat the female body and the identity "woman", as 1 argued in Chapter One, have a certain existential and historical continuity that is not in the final instance manipulable by cultural representations. Neither is this to deny the singular importance of de Lauretis's insistence on the real, and not only the linguistic, existence of women. By connecting the signifier "women" to the material existence of women as fernale-embodied beings. de Lauretis supplies ferninist theory and political practice with an epistemological ground that is rernarkable by its absence from post-stmcturalist feminism. The fact is that the extreme nominalism which post-structuralist feminist theory adopts in its quest to de-essentialize

"woman" prevents it from making theoretical distinctions which are absolutely crucial. In particular. post-structuralist theory cannot distinguish between a position. such as the one de Lauretis advances, which argues that women's lived experience as female-sexed beings consmicts their identity as women, and a position which seeks to reintroduce an essentiai

Woman as the ground of feminism. Nevenheless, while Lauretis's refusa1 to banish the referent from her theory is an important step in the right direction, 1 think it is necessary to travei further down the realist road than she is willing to go. Rather than evoking an eventual world beyond gender, feminists need to redefine and rearticulate the signifier "woman", with a view to releasing it from the various inaccurate and harmful meanings which have arbitrarily, and with such pernicious consequences. been attxibuted to it in patriarchal discourse. The suggestion that ferninists should redefine and rearticulate the signifier "woman" depends, as 1 began to discuss in previous chapters, on a less mechanistic account of agency than anything post-smcturalism is prepared to contemplate. On this issue, as it tums out, de Lauretis is especially helpful. Her conception of experience as a dialectical process by which subjectivity is constructed depans from the post-stmcturalist totalization of language toward a more subtle. and a more useful, account of agency. Whereas post- structuralists are bound to protest at the mere mention of experience. de Lauretis demonstrates that the term need not conjure up in us the spectre of a unified and unifying consciousness. On the contrary, experience, or consciousness as the name for the active involvement of a self in its own evolution, is a continrrous process of semiosis, and for this reason women's identity is never fixed once and for dl. This temporariness of identity is not the result. as Butler and Itigaray would have it, of an instability inherent in language or of a pre-linguistic force that disrupts fixed meanings. Instead, the identity of a woman changes over time because it is the product of her own interpretation and recorzs~r~ictionof her history. Our identity is "interpreted or reconsmcted by each of us within the horizon of meanings and knowledges available in the culture at given historical moments ...Consciousness, therefore, is never fixed, never attained once and for dl, because discursive boundaries change with historical conditions" (de Lauretis 1986a, 9).

Moreover. the specificity of a feminist theory may be sought "in that political, theoretical, self-analyzing practice by which the relations of the subject in social reality can be reaniculated from the histoncal experience of women" (de Lauretis 1984, 1 86).

The idea that fernale subjectivity cm be rearticulated and reconstnicted through

"self-analyzing practice" is. 1 think, the primary strength of de Lauretis' work. By theonzing expenence, or consciousness, as the name for the active involvement of subjects in their own consnuction. de Lauretis recognizes that the fernale subject is necessarily constructed through a variety of structural determinations without sirnply reducing her to a passive reflection of male discourse. For this reason her work constitutes an major improvement over the post-structuralist critique of a consciousness pregiven or transparent

to itself - a critique whose main discemible effect, as Rita Felski points out, is to replace an "inadequate voluntarism" with an "equally one-sided and mechanistic determinism" according to which "individuals remain unconscious of and unable to reflect upon the discursive structures through which they are positioned as subjects" (Felski 1989, 53). Indeed, tluoughout this essay I have been emphasizing the inadequacy of theories which conceive the subject as a mere epiphenomenon of social and linguistic structures, and the need to recognize, instead, that human subjects themselves act upon and alter those structures. even as they are constructed by them, through the reflexive monitoring of their actions. Feminists need to recognize that ...selves are not automatically instituted... that there is a self which is in rehtionrhip to the world by which it is constnicted, and that even as we acknowledge Our own dependency on a social universe which dways cornes to us in conceptualized fom. this conceptua- lization is dependent on subjects who are reflecting upon and con- stantly renegotiating the forces of construction. (Soper 1990, 153-4). To suggst that subjects are capable of "reflecting upon and constantiy renegotiating the forces of consmiction" is to adhere, as I have demonstrated, to an understanding of language that is quite at odds with the theory of language on which post-structuralism relies. Advancing reflexivity and critique as capacities of human subjects depends on a view of language as enabling, as a medium that makes social interaction and meaningful

communication possible, and so i t de parts from the post-structuralist tendency to view language and symbolic structures in entirely repressive and exclusionary ternis. Ferninists need to conceive of language, not as a fixed and unchanging order which forever determines consciousness, but rather, as Teresa de Lauretis demonstrates. as a flexible medium which pemits the subject to construct and reconstnict heaelf. Ferninist critique, in other words. cannot proceed on the post-structuralist conception of language as exclusionary structure, but must adhere to a view of language as a public medium of communication and interaction. one that permits women, as conscious, historical agents of change, to contest existing world views, develop alternative positions. and attempt to convince others of the validity of their ciaims. Conclusion

My central aim in this essay has been to demonstrate that feminist theory must recognize its ongoing engagement with the ideals, values and principles of humanist philosophy, lest it sever itself h.om the urgent political and social smggles in which the contemporary women's movement is necessarily involved. This is not of course to insinuate that feminists are better off rejecting postmodernism altogether in favour of an uncritical return to humanist ideals, for this would be to ignore feminism's own incisive critique of those ideals. I do not doubt that there cm be no going back to the rnyth of a universal subject. but 1 am nevertheless convinced that the present tendency to inflate this critique of the universalizing attitude of humanism into a thorough-going repudiation of the latter's relevance to feminism is an unwarranted exaggeration. A feminism which sets out to deny that humanism has any ongoing relevance whatsoever to feminist theory and politics strikes out on an impossible course. for as an explicitly political theory it must necessarily participate in the universalizing attitude which it consmcts as its ideological foe.

It has been my main contention in this essay that post-structuralism cannot for this very reason constitute a suitable theoretical foundation for ferninisrn. Pitting itself against its enemy in highly polemical fashion. post-snücturalism effects its break with humanism. 1 hase argued, only by subscribing to a number of untenable assumptions about language. subjectivity and identity. Thus, for example. post-stxucturalism proceeds via deconstruction to demonstrate that the metaphysical conception of the subject as a self-identical being prior to the distorting effects of culture and language is nothing more than a superficial side- effect of the "logic of identity" embedded in language; and it concludes by arguing that political theories which invoke an authentic subjectivity beyond the reach of power or seek to liberate the supposedly autonomous seIf to a more innocent or natural future are not only futile, but also complicit in the very regimes which ought to be resisted. The problern with this formulation is not post-stnicturaiism's denial of metaphysical substance, but rather the fact that it proceeds from the deconstruction of metaphysical substance to the conclusion that al1 notions of continuous identity and autonornous selfhood are nothing more than effects of language, devoid of any reality beyond a linguistic one. This extreme scepticism is the result of post-stmcturalism's fondness for starkly exclusive eitherior choices: either, as Christopher Noms remarks. "it is the case that language provides a direct, unmediated access to reality, or, failing that, we are obliged to acknowledge that 'reality' is a wholly discursive construct, a realrn of linguistic ('textual') representations which constitute the real so far as we cm possibly know it" (Noms 1993, 202). Post-smicturalism, in other words, takes the by now uncontroversial insight that the linguistic terms we use to interpret, represent and criticize reality do not unproblematically reflect that reality to mean that language is "radically discontinuous with physical existence", that indeed there are no facts outside language that language may express or correctly or incorrectly represent (Nye 1992, 84). This is precisely the son of vigorous anti-realism that informs the post-smicturalist feminisms which 1 discussed above. Butler and Irigaray - and Braidotti too, in her Deleuzian moments - collectively endorse a view of language as structure which not only imposes identity and produces the illusion of stable subjects, but in that process represses and exciudes a potentid infinity of linguistic possibilities. Hence the hostility with which these theorists regard feminist appeals to common identities and attempts to abstract from particulars to universals; hence the suspicion with which they contemplate feminist attempts to disembed individuals from the singularity of their specific circumstances and experiences in order to make general claims on behalf of "women". These tactics. from the post- structuralist point of view, are bound simply to consolidate the dangerous illusion that women rea- exist. Tmly progressive feminists should saive, rather, to create a space for the expression of the "difference" which language in its inexorable march represses and excludes. That this ineffable "difference" is specifically associated by theorists of sexual difference with "woman" and "the feminine" simply underscores their distance from the lives and relationships they would address.

This is. 1 think. the crucial point. Post-structuralist feminism, by insisting on the whoily linpistic character of identity, indulges in an unnecessarily absaact form of theory which bears scant relation to women's life circumstances and concrete struggles which are

the primary preoccupation of feminist theory and politics. In its determination to veto al1

ralk of reference and reality. in its determination tc strip the term "wornen" of empirical

referents, it creates an unbridgeable gulf between feminist theory as it is practised in the academy and feminist politics as it is necessurily canied out. Indeed, it is more than a

li ttle ironic that post-structuralisü should devote suc h energy and intellectual effort to the deconstruction of a category which they nevertheless concede that they are obliged to

continue using for practical purposeS.' A "critical" theory which stubbomly maintains that

it is conceptually right even as it adrnits that it is politically mistaken is of little use to feminism, for the whole point of feminist theory is to inform feminist politics. For these reasons it is my firrn conviction that feminist theory and politics cannot proceed on the strictly anti-realist view of language adopted by post-structuralism. but must rather assume. in realist vein. that there is indeed some link between language and reality. sense and reference; that it is possible to identify and accurately describe real generality in the world; that it is legitimate to "universalize" and to think of individuals in the abstract: and that feminist theory need not, therefore, be restricted to a critique of the "logic of identity" or to a valorization of the "difference" which that univeaalizing logic forecloses. Moreover. the adoption of a realist perspective does not necessitate a retum to metaphysical substance. On the conaary. from a materialist perspective such as the one Teresa de

l~hus.for example. Butler's (1993) grudging admission that ferninists cannot simply abandon the signifier "women" even though hcr whoIe purpose is to demonstrate its fictive status and the detrimental consequences of its continued usage; thus also Deleuze and Guattari (1987) grant that feminists must continue to pursue a "molar"politics despite their fum conviction tbat a Wly revolutionary strategy would dissoive "women" into multiplicity. Even Demda (1982, 70) concedes that the "real conditions" of women's struggtes often requirc the "preservation of metaphysical presuppositions" which must be questioned on another ievel. 1 would Say, moreover, that the paradoxical position advanced by theorists of sexuai difference betrays this same tension between theoretical correctness and politicai necessify. Lauretis advances. the seerningly intractable opposition between identity as metaphysical substance and identity as linguistic constmct emerges as a spurious one, and feminist theory is free to reconceive identity in altogether different terms: as the product of a selfs ongoing. conscious, subjective engagement with the forces by wliich it is consmcted.

While 1 would maintain that de Lauretis does not take due account of what Carol Bigwood calls the body's "nonlinguistic silent presencing" in that dialectical process of construction. her work is nevertheless distinguished by her refusal to banish the referent from her theory. By reconceiving the identity "women" as a term whose concrete referents are embodied. historical beings, her rnaterialist perspective retains for feminism its episternological ground.

But we are not out of the woods yet, for the mere mention of the term "consciousness" is bound to elicit the immediate objection that the notion of a pregiven consciousness msparent to itself is a construct whose fictive status post-stxucturalism has lately revealed. But here again is proof of post-structuralism's dichotomizing habit of thought. Either language unproblernatically reflects reality or there is no connection whatsoever between language and that to which it refers; either identity is metaphysical substance or it is purely a linguistic phenornenon; rither consciousness consists in a pure entity rxisting outside language and culture or it is rnerely the surface effect of linguistic determinations which remain opaque to it and beyond its control. But of course these are not the only alternatives. We can readily admit that subjects are constituted by social and cultural deteminations outside their control while also insisting that they nevertheless retain some degree of autonorny from those determinations and some capacity for reflexive ctitique and reasoned argumentation. If we take the view that subjects are not rnerely consmcted through social and linguistic structures, but themselves act upon and modify those structures, then "consciousness" ceases to refer to a pure, self-transparent represenrational force and becomes the name for the active engagement of subjects in their world. So here again is underscored the sad inadequacy of those views which perceive language as unchanging structure rather than as medium of social communication and interaction, and which perceive subjects as passive epiphenomena of linguistic structures rather than as mord and political agents in any rneaningful sense. 1 do not deny, then. that the postmodem critique of the universal subject is an indispensable counterargument to those implausible and damaging propositions which traditional humanist philosophy presents as self-evident truths. Yet 1 am uneasy about those theoretical formulations which reject humanisrn wholesde as an obsolete creed. and which sce in al1 universalizing conceptions of the ideal of autonomous, self-determining subjectivity only the normalizing clairns of a particular social subject which seeks to subordinate al1 difference. I have argued, in parhcular, that feminist theory canot afford to renunciate the critena of reason, valid argument. reflexive autocritique and autonomous selfhood in favour a purely mechanistic theory of social change. And this is especially so if it wants to present itself as a principled cntic of those insidious foms of "tmth"which have over the course of time corne to seem natural and inevitable. As Christopher Noms remarks. it is only by applying these cnteria that "thought can resist the kinds of dogmatic imposition which derive their authority from a mystified resort to notions of absolute. transcendent truth" (Noms 1993. 288). Funhermore, the post-sûucturalist appeal to "difference" is itself only cornprehensible in relation to the specifically humanist ideal of the autonomous human being. If post-s~cturalismis called upon to justify its critique of the logic of identity, it can coherently do so only by recourse to the traditional humanist grounds of freedom. equality and respect for individual persons. Of course. post- smicturdism denies the very necessity, and indeed the possibility, of such justification; but at this point it "surrenders the normative moment" (Fraser 1995. 69) and underlines its own considerable distance from the theory and political practice of feminism. Alcoff, Linda. (1988j. "Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Cnsis in Feminist Theory." Signs 13: 3,405-36. Assiter. Alison. (1996). Enlightened Wowen: Modernkt Feminism in a Poshodern Age. New York: Routledge.

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