inism in the style of punk. Both her persona and her writing style draw, perhaps surprisingly, on the well of punk, even if Weldon herself may "pretend" that they do not.
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For the purposes of this essay, feminism will become strategically fixed in the constellation of identity politics. The identity of "feminist" may become temporarily less problematic, while remaining, ideally, "permanently unclear" (Butler, p. 14). What I am identifying as "feminist" in Weldon's fictions is her ability to reveal that culturally constructed identity categories (sex, sexuality, gender, and even feminism itself) are, as Judith Butler puts it, "in no way stable." Weldon reveals them as identities "tenuously constituted in time,'' and "instituted through a stylized repetition of acts" (Butler, p. 270). Weldon is in the business of deinstitutionalization, with one eye, radically enough, on social transformation. This is a feminism of strategic flux, as is my definition of it.
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Punk of the 1970s is primarily a style which articulates on its surface, says Dick Hebdige, both a "breakdown in consensus" (p. 17) and an interruption of the normalized taken-for-grantedness of "anonymous ideology " (p. 9). It is an "intervention" in urban culture. Punk is, particularly, a moment and movement of negationa negation that calls any and all social facts into question as obnoxiously and optimistically as possible (Marcus, p. 7). Fashioned after the Situationist International of the 1950s and '60s, punk desires, through the creation of a persona and a textual style, to move the audience, the "spectator," from passive to active. The situationist and the punk use "situations" to disrupt a static "spectacle." This spectacle, first outlined by Guy Debord in
Society of the Spectacle,
is a capitalist stasis characterized by a politics of boredom (interchangeable images, repetition, monologue) and based in an "expert" media culture of abundant commodity and conspicuous consumption. Both the situationist and the punk try to counter the spectacle and the sense of separation from action and from others it induces, by creating "situations""constructed encounters and creatively lived moments in urban settings, instances of transformed everyday life" (Wollen, p. 31). Montages, broadsheets, posters, manifestos, and slogans are designed to pro-
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