Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (7 page)

mind—or whatever it is that speaks social 'discourses'—as it brushes across the tabula rasa of the body."
38
In some areas biology may play a very great role in our destinies, and it always informs our lives to varying degrees. However, even in those areas where biology may play a more formidable role, its effect is never "pure," never untouched by history. We are creatures swaddled in culture from the moment we are designated one sex or the other, one race or another.

Many feminists remain agnostic or ambivalent about the role of biology and sexual "difference"; justifiably fearful of ideas that seem to assert an unalterable, essential female nature, they are nonetheless concerned that too exclusive an emphasis on culture will obscure powerful, and potentially culturally transformative, aspects of women's experience. Is pregnancy merely a cultural construction, capable of being shaped into multitudinous social forms? Or does the unique configuration of embodiment presented in pregnancy—the having of an other within oneself, simultaneously both part of oneself and separate from oneself—constitute a distinctively female epistemological and ethical resource? Is PMS merely one more deployment in the everadvancing medicalization of the body? Or is it also an opportunity (as Emily Martin argues) to access reserves of emotion, understanding, and creativity that normally remain dormant, repressed?
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One could reasonably answer that the female body is
both
construction
and
resource. It is important to recognize, however, that these ideas carry heavy ideological and personal freight. Women who suffer from blinding headaches, incapacitating back pain, and violent mood swings just before their periods may resent any suggestion that PMS is to the slightest degree culturally constructed. Women who have minimal or no symptoms but whose male partners and employers continually sneer or make jokes about women's behavior being dominated by their ovaries (ideas that hark back to nineteenthcentury notions that women's physiology and psychology are ruled by their reproductive systems) may find themselves arguing that PMS is simply a cultural myth perpetuating male dom

inance in the public workplace. Moreover, the polarizing effects of the outbreak of phobias about "essentialism" have often found feminists lining up (or being lined up) on different sides of a divide. Joan Peters, in her witty account of the long, slow slide into menopause, sardonically describes this divide. On the one side are the "Transcenders"—for whom the female body, undetermined by nature or history, can be recreated anew by feminism. On the other side are the ''Red Bloomers"—for whom the female body is a source of pleasure, knowledge, and power, to be revalued rather than remade. Of course, Peters intends these terms as caricatures.
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But they are useful in highlighting, within the specific context of perspectives on the female body, the tension that Ann Snitow describes as being "as old as Western feminism": the tension between "needing to act as women and needing an identity not overdetermined by our gender."
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Clearly, both poles of this tension are necessary to feminist struggle and social change. If the efforts of "Red Bloomers" are needed for the deep transformation of culture, the arguments of "Transcenders" are needed to dismantle the barriers that prohibit entrance to domains reserved for men only. Now that I am a tenured professor, the "female" aspects of my identity, I hope, can operate transformatively, disturbing received notions of professorial and philosophical expertise and authority. When I was a graduate student, however, it was necessary to my professional survival that I demonstrate that I could argue "like the boys." Deciding how much one may "bloom" and how much one has to "transcend" in any given context is a tricky, subtle business (for movements as well as for individuals), and it is easy to lose track of who you are and what you wanted when you started, particularly if you were ambivalent to begin with. And what woman, growing up in a sexist culture, is
not
ambivalent about her "femaleness"?

Today, as I argue in several essays in this volume, the forces of "transcendence" seem to be in ascendance within postmodern feminism. In theorizing that ascendancy, I make use of much the same methodology I apply in my analysis of eating disorders. Rather than offer a causal explanation, I examine various elements as they intersect or crystallize in the phenomenon I am trying to understand. Some of these elements are
general
cultural attitudes; others have to do with
academic
cultures; still others have specifi

cally to do with contemporary
feminism.
Throughout, my perspective on contemporary academic paradigms such as deconstructionism is to explore their
participation,
their embeddedness, in culture—as the expression, in an academic arena, of fantasies, anxieties, and fashions being played out in other, more "popular" or public contexts.

Although my language may not consistently reflect this, my overall analysis depends on a distinction between postmodern culture and poststructuralist thought.
Postmodern,
in the most general
cultural
sense, refers to the contemporary inclination toward the unstable, fluid, fragmented, indeterminate, ironic, and heterogeneous, for that which resists definition, closure, and fixity. Within this general categorization, many ideas that have developed out of poststructuralist thought— the emphasis on semiotic indeterminacy, the critique of unified conceptions of subjectivity, fascination with the instabilities of systems, and the tendency to focus on cultural resistance rather than dominant forms—are decidedly postmodern intellectual developments. But not all poststructuralist thought is postmodern. Foucault, as I read him, has both modern and postmodern moments. In his discussions of the discipline, normalization, and creation of "docile bodies," for instance, he is very much the descendant of Marx, whereas later revisions to his conception of power emphasize the ubiquity of resistance—a characteristically postmodern theme.

I view current postmodern tendencies thoroughly to "textualize" the body—exemplified in Judith Butler's analysis of drag as parody (see "Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern Bodies, Postmodern Resistance") and Susan McClary's reading of Madonna's music videos (see "'Material Girl'")—as giving a kind of free, creative rein to
meaning
at the expense of attention to the body's material locatedness in history, practice, culture. If the body is treated as pure text, subversive, destabilizing elements can be emphasized and freedom and selfdetermination celebrated; but one is left wondering, is there a
body
in this text? In "'Material Girl'" I explore how a similar effacement of the body's materiality is played out
concretely
in our postmodern imagination of the body as malleable plastic, to be shaped to the meanings we choose.

Cultural expressions are all around us. Klan leader David Duke even had his eyes and nose reshaped to appear "kinder and gentler"

to prospective voters. Contemporary movies are continually experimenting with the plasticity and deconstructive possibilities of the body: old bodies magically become young
(Sixteen Again),
young bodies become old
(Big),
death is transcended
(Cocoon)
or temporarily suspended
(Truly, Madly, Deeply),
reincarnation themes are played out
(Heaven Can Wait, Made in Heaven, Dead Again).
The extremely popular
Ghost
even plays with the notion that a well disciplined and highly motivated (dead) spirit can push material objects (and living people) around without the aid of body. Talk shows evidence a special fascination with sex changes; one frequent guest is a person who has gone back and forth from man to woman to man several times. And, of course, there are the extravagant claims, made throughout the popular literature on "the new reproductive technologies," that
any
woman, regardless of age or medical problem, can become pregnant. In this literature, the difficult, painful, and disruptive regimes demanded by the new technology are continually effaced or trivialized: "You can still carry your own baby" even after menopause, assures Sherman Silber (currently the leading fertility expert/darling of the mass media);
"All that is needed
is an egg donor" (emphasis mine).
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My point here, I hope it is apparent, is
not
to criticize people who have plastic surgery, sexchange operations, or gamete intrafallopian transfers. It is to highlight a
discourse
that is gradually changing our conception and experience of our bodies, a discourse that encourages us to "imagine the possibilities" and close our eyes to limits and consequences. A postmodern intoxication with possibilities is expressed in some of the methodological and epistemological ideals of postmodern thought as well, as I argue in "Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Skepticism." Earlier in this introduction I spoke of the Cartesian fantasy of the philosopher's transcendence of the concrete locatedness of the body (and so of its perspectival limitations) in order to achieve the God'seye view, the "view from nowhere." Today, I argue, a no less disembodied ideal is imagined by those who advocate "heterogeneity" and "indeterminacy'' as principles for interpreting culture, history, and texts. This is not to deny that history and culture are indeed heterogeneous. Rather, I take issue with the fantasy of
capturing
that heterogeneity in our "readings" by continually seeking difference for its own sake, by being guided by the pure
possibilities
of interpre

tation rather than an embodied point of view. I call this the "view from everywhere" fantasy.

Thus, although I am strongly skeptical of certain tendencies in postmodern culture and poststructuralist thought, my perspective is by no means thoroughly negative. For one thing, as will be obvious to the reader, my own work makes liberal use of the insights of poststructuralist thought, particularly those of Foucault. More deeply, my approach to understanding cultural phenomena has been shaped by the experience of living in "postmodern times," and the unavoidable encounter with complexity, multiplicity, ambiguity that this has meant for me. In sorting out my own ambivalent relationship to postmodernity I have been greatly aided by bell hooks's
Yearning
and Jane Flax's
Thinking Fragments,
which I discuss in "Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern Bodies, Postmodern Resistance" and which model what I think of as an embodied postmodernism, incorporating the best of postmodern multiplicity with a constant acknowledgment of both the limitations of the self and the weight of collective history.

For neither Flax nor hooks does the fragmented nature of postmodern subjects and postmodern knowledge mean that we cannot or should not talk about "black identity" or "women's experiences" as historically constituted. In this, their approach is to be contrasted sharply to that of Jean Grimshaw and other writers for whom generalizations about gender, race, and class have become taboo, not only "politically'' but
methodologically.
Although I recognize the validity of aspects of Grimshaw's critique, I have many concerns about the taboo on generalization, which I explore in connection with the Thomas/Hill hearings in "Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Skepticism." In that essay I also consider the related contemporary panic over "essentialism," suggesting, among other criticisms, that we look at that panic with a more psychocultural eye, as a possible expression of feminist anxiety over being identified with marginalized and devalued aspects of female identity. Such anxiety, however, cannot be adequately theorized only in terms of psychological ambivalence or inner conflict about our femaleness, our mothers, our bodies. Rather, it is also thoroughly continuous with the insistence on creative selffashioning that is manifest throughout postmodern culture. And it must be located in the context of the
institutions
we practice ininstitutions still dominated by masculinist, Eurocentric norms of "professional" behavior and accomplishment.

It is in this institutional context, I would argue, that we most need to "bloom" rather than "transcend." This does not mean alliance with determinist, essentializing ontologies. The most powerful revaluations of the female body have looked, not to nature or biology, but to the culturally inscribed and historically located body (or to historically developed
practices)
for imaginations of
alterity
rather than "the truth'' about the female body. This is one of the elements that I read in the work of Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Adrienne Rich, Sarah Ruddick, ecofeminist Ynestra King, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and a good deal of lesbianfeminist and "cultural feminist" art and literature. Without imaginations (or embodiments) of alterity, from what vantage point can we seek transformation of culture? And how will we construct these imaginations and embodiments, if not through alliance with that which has been silenced, repressed, disdained? So, for example, feminist philosophers have frequently challenged dominant conceptions of rationality, morality, and politics through revaluations of those "female" qualities—spontaneity, practical knowledge, empathy—forbidden (or deemed irrelevant) to the "man of reason."

There are those who would claim that revaluing "female" resources only
inverts
the classic dualisms rather than challenging dualistic thinking itself. This position, which sounds incisive and which frequently has been pronounced authoritatively and received as gospel in contemporary poststructuralist feminist writing, in fact depends upon so abstract, disembodied, and a historical a conception of how cultural change occurs as to be worthy of inclusion in the most sterile philosophy text. The ongoing production, reproduction, and transformation of culture is not a conversation between talking heads, in which metaphysical positions are accepted or rejected wholesale. Rather, the metaphysics of a culture shifts piecemeal and through real, historical changes in relations of power, modes of subjectivity, the organization of life.