Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (33 page)

Recognition of this responsibility, however, forces one to take a more humble approach to the project of embracing heterogeneity. That project, taken as anything other than an ideal of social
process,
is selfdeconstructing. Any attempt to do justice to heterogeneity, entertained as an epistemological (or narrative) goal, devours its own tail. For the appreciation of difference requires the acknowledgment of some point beyond which the dancer cannot go. If she were able to go everywhere, there would
be
no difference, nothing that eludes. Denial of the unity and stability of identity is one thing. The epistemological fantasy of
becoming
multiplicity—the dream of limitless multiple embodiments, allowing one to dance from place

to place and self to self—is another. What sort of body is it that is free to change its shape and location at will, that can become anyone and travel anywhere? If the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the postmodern body is no body at all.

The deconstructionist erasure of the body is not effected, as it is in the Cartesian version, by a trip to "nowhere," but by a resistance to the recognition that one is always
somewhere,
and limited. Here, it becomes clear that to overcome Cartesian hubris it is not sufficient to replace metaphors of spectatorship with metaphors of dance; it is necessary to relinquish all fantasies of epistemological conquest, not only those that are soberly fixed on necessity and unity but also those that are intoxicated with possibility and plurality. Despite its explicit rejection of conceptions of knowledge that view the mind as a "mirror of nature," deconstructionism reveals a longing for adequate representations—unlike Cartesian conceptions, but no less ambitious—of a relentlessly heterogeneous reality.
30

The preceding discussion of the body as epistemological metaphor for locatedness has focused on deconstructionism's
theoretical
deconstruction of locatedness. In the next two sections of this essay, I want to shift gears and pursue the issue of locatedness— or, rather, the denial of locatedness—in more concrete directions.

It is striking to me that there is often a curious selectivity at work in contemporary feminist criticisms of genderbased theories of identity. The analytics of race and class—the two other giants of modernist social critique—do not seem to be undergoing quite the same deconstruction. Women of color often construct "white feminists" as a unity, without attention to the class, ethnic, and religious differences that situate and divide us, and white feminists tend to accept this (as I believe they should) as enabling crucial sorts of criticisms to be made. It is usually acknowledged, too, that the experience of being a person of color in a racist culture creates some similarities of position across class and gender. At the very least, the various notions of identity that have come out of race consciousness are regarded as what Nietzsche would call "life enhancing fictions."
31
Donna Haraway, for example, applauds the homogeniz

ing unity "women of color" as "a cyborg identity, a potent subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities."
32

I have heard feminists insist, too, that race and class each have a material base that gender lacks. When the suggestion is made that perhaps such a material base exists, for gender, in women's reproductive role, the wedges of cultural diversity and multiple interpretation suddenly appear. Women have perceived childbearing, as Jean Grimshaw points out, both as "the source of their greatest joy and as the root of their worst suffering."
33
She concludes that the differences in various social constructions of reproduction, the vast disparities in women's experiences of childbirth, and so forth preclude the possibility that the practices of reproduction can meaningfully be interrogated as a source of insight into the difference gender makes. I find this conclusion remarkable. Women's reproductive experiences, of course, differ widely, but surely not as widely as they do from those of men,
none
of whom (up to now technology may alter this) has had even the possibility of carrying a child under any circumstances.
34
Why, it must be asked, are we so ready to deconstruct what have historically been the most ubiquitous elements of the gender axis, while we remain so willing to defer to the authority and integrity of race and class axes as fundamentally grounding?

In attempting to answer this question, I no longer focus on postmodern theory, for the current of gender skepticism I am exploring here is not particularly characteristic of postmodern feminism. Rather, it flows through all theoretical schools of feminist thought, revealing itself in different ways. In place of my previous focus on postmodernism, I organize my discussion around a heuristic distinction between two historical moments of feminist thought, representing two different perspectives on "female otherness."

A previous generation of feminist thought (whose projects, of course, many feminists continue today) set out to connect the work that women have historically done (typically regarded as belonging to the material, practical arena, and thus of no epistemological or intellectual significance) with distinctive ways of experiencing and knowing the world. As such, the imagination of female alterity was a "lifeenhancing fiction," providing access to coherent visions of utopian change and cultural transformation. Within this moment, too, a developing focus on the role of mothering in the construction

of infant genderidentity (and thus of culture) was central to the ongoing feminist deconstruction of the phallocentric worldview. (Within that worldview it is the father/theologian/philosopher who is the sole source of morality, logic, language.)

The feminist recovery of female otherness from the margins of culture had both a materialist wing (Ruddick, Hartsock, Rich, and others) and a psychoanalytic wing (Dinnerstein, Chodorow, Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray), the latter attempting to reconstruct developmental theory with the preoedipal mother rather than the phallic father at its center. I think it is instructive to note the difference between the way feminists once described this work and how it is often described now. In a 1982
Diacritics
review of Dinnerstein, Rich, and Chodorow, Coppèlia Kahn describes what these authors have in common:

To begin with, they all regard gender less as a biological fact than as a social product, an institution learned through and perpetuated by culture. And they see this gender system not as a mutually beneficial and equitable division of roles, but as a perniciously symbiotic polarity which denies full humanity to both sexes while meshing—and helping to create—their neuroses. Second, they describe the father absent, motherinvolved nuclear family as creating the gender identities which perpetuate patriarchy and the denigration of women They question the assumption that the sexual division of labor, gender personality, and heterosexuality rest on a biological and instinctual base They present, in effect, a collective vision of how maternal power in the nursery defines gender so as to foster patriarchal power in the public world.
35

In a 1987 talk, Jean Grimshaw describes these same texts as depicting motherhood "as a state of regression" in which the relation between mother and child is "idealized" in its symbiotic nondifferentiation.
36
Chodorow's ethnocentrism or lack of historical specificity was not the issue here; what was, as Grimshaw saw it, was Chodorow's portrayal of a suffocating reality as a cozy, blissful state and an implicit criticism of women who do not experience maternity in this way. Similarly, Toril Moi, in a talk devoted to reviving Freud's view of reason
against
the revisions of feminist objectrelations theory, describes the theory as involving "an idealization of preOedipal motherchild relations," a "biologistic" view of development, and a ''romanticization of the maternal."
37
Are Grimshaw and Moi discussing the same works as Kahn?

Of course the answer is
no.
For the context has changed, and these texts are now being read by their critics from the perspective of a different concrete situation than that which existed when Kahn produced her reading of Chodorow, Dinnerstein, and Rich. My point is not that Kahn's reading was the "correct" one; there is no timeless text against which to measure historical interpretations. Rather, I wish to encourage confrontation with the present context. It is the present context that has supplied the specter of "biologism," "romanticization," and "idealization." The dangers that we are responding to are not in the texts, but in our social reality and in ourselves.

In speaking of social reality, I am not
only
referring to the danger of feminist notions of male and female realities or perspectives entering into a conservative zeitgeist where they will function as an ideological mooring for the reassertion of the traditional gender roles, although in this time of great backlash against changes in gender power relations, that danger is certainly real enough. What I am primarily interested in here, however, are the changing meanings of female "otherness" for women, as we attempt to survive, in historically unprecedented numbers, within our still largely masculinist public institutions.

Changes in the professional situation of academic feminists during the 1980s may be exemplary here. A decade ago, the exploration and revaluation of that which has been culturally constructed as female set the agenda for academic feminists of many disciplines, at a time when feminism was just entering the (white, male) academy. We were outsiders, of suspect politics (most of us had been "political" feminists before or during our professional training) and inappropriate sex (a
woman
philosopher?). At that time, few of us were of other than European descent. But nonetheless to be a feminist academic was to be constantly aware of one's "otherness"; that one was a woman was brought home to one daily. The feminist imagination was fueled precisely by what it was never allowed to forget: the analysis of the historical construction of male power and female "otherness" became our theoretical task.

Today, women have been "accepted." That is, it has been acknowledged (seemingly) that women can indeed "think like men," and those women who are able to adopt the prevailing standards of professional "balance," critical detachment, rigor, and the ap

propriate insider mentality have been rewarded for their efforts. Those who are unable or unwilling to do so (along with those men who are similarly unable or unwilling) continue to be denied acceptance, publication, tenure, promotions. At this juncture, women may discover that they have a new investment in combating notions that gender locates and limits.

In such a world any celebration of "female" ways of knowing or thinking may be felt by some to be dangerous professionally and perhaps a personal regression as well. For, within the masculinist institutions we have entered, relational, holistic, and nurturant attitudes continue to be marked as flabby, feminine, and soft. In this institutional context, as we are permitted "integration" into the professional sphere, the category of female "otherness," which has spoken to many feminists of the possibility of institutional and cultural change, of radical transformation of the values, metaphysical assumptions, and social practices of our culture, may become something from which we wish to dissociate ourselves. We need instead to establish our leanness, our critical incisiveness, our proficiency at clear and distinct dissection.

I was startled, at a conference in 1987, by the raw hostility of a number of responses to a talk on "female virtue"; I have often been dismayed at the anger that (white, middleclass) feminists have exhibited toward the work of Gilligan and Chodorow. This sort of visceral reaction to theorists of gender difference (unlike the critiques discussed in the first section in this chapter) is not elicited by their ethnocentrism or ahistoricism; it is specifically directed against what is perceived as their romanticization of female values such as empathy and nurturing. Such a harsh critical stance is protection, perhaps, against being tarred by the brush of female "otherness," of being contaminated by things "female." Of course, to romanticize
anything
is the last thing that any rigorous scholar would do. Here, disdain for female "sentimentality" intersects with both the modern fashion for the cool and the cult of professionalism in our culture.

Generalizations about gender can of course obscure and exclude. I would suggest, however, that such determinations cannot be made

by methodological fiat but must be decided by context. The same is true of the representation of heterogeneity and complexity. There are dangers in too wholesale a commitment to either dual
or
multiple grids. Only the particular context can determine when general categories of analysis—race, class, gender—are perniciously homogenizing and when they are vital to social criticism.

Too relentless a focus on historical heterogeneity, for example, can obscure the transhistorical hierarchical patterns of white, male privilege that have informed the development of Western intellectual, legal, and political traditions.
38
More generally, the deconstruction of dual grids can obscure the dualistic, hierarchical nature of the actualities of power in Western culture. Contemporary feminism, like many other social movements arising in the 1960s, developed out of the recognition that to live in our culture is not (despite powerful social mythology to the contrary) to participate equally in some free play of individual diversity. Rather, one always finds oneself located within structures of dominance and subordination—not least important of which have been those organized around gender. Certainly, the duality of male/female is a discursive formation, a social construction. So, too, is the racial duality of black/white. But, as such, each of these dualities has had profound consequences for the construction of the experience of those who live them.