Notes on Nowhere: Feminist Utopian Logic, and Social Transformation (American Culture (Minneapolis, Minn.), 13.)

Notes on Nowhere

A M E R I C A

N

C U L T U R E

Cutting across traditional boundaries between the human and social sciences, volumes in the American Culture series study the multiplicity of cultural practices from theoretical, historical, and ethnographic perspectives by examining culture's production, circulation, and consumption. Edited by Stanley Aronowitz, Nancy Fraser, and George Lipsitz 13.

Jennifer Burwell, Notes on Nowhere: Feminism, Utopian Logic, and Social Transformation

12.

John Bloom, A House of Cards: Baseball Card Collecting and Popular Culture

11.

David R. Shumway, Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Field

10.

Lisa Bloom, Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions

9. Michael Eric Dyson, Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism 8. Paul Smith, Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production 7. Maria Damon, The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry 6. Virginia Carmichael, Framing History: The Rosenberg Story and the Cold War 5.

Elayne Rapping, The Movie of the Week: Private Stories/Public Events

4. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture 3. Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 2.

1697-1975

Nancy Walker, A Very Serious Thing: Women's Humor and American Culture

1. Henry Giroux, Schooling and the Strugglefor Public Life: Critical Pedagogy in the Modern Age

Notes on Nowhere Feminism, Utopian Logic, and Social Transformation

Jennifer Burwell

American Culture, Volume 13

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

Copyright 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burwell, Jennifer. Notes on nowhere : feminism, Utopian logic, and social transformation / Jennifer Burwell. p. cm. — (American culture ; v. 13) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-2638-3 (he : acid-free paper) ISBN 0-8166-2639-1 (pbk. : acid-free paper) 1. American fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Utopias in literature. 3. Feminism and literature—United States—History—20th century. 4. Literature and society—United States—History—20th century. 5. Women and literature—United States—History—20th century. 6. American fiction—20th century— History and criticism. 7. Social problems in literature. 8. Logic in literature. I. Title. II. Series: American culture (Minneapolis, Minn.) ; v. 13 PS374.U8B87 1996 813'. 5409372—dc20 96-31507 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

For Julie

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Contents

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments 1. 2.

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Locational Hazards: The Utopian Impulse and the Logic of Social Transformation

1

Turning Inward: Strategies of Containment and Subjective/ Collective Boundaries in Traditional Utopian Literature

47

Speaking Parts: Internal Dialogic and Models of Agency in the Work of Joanna Russ and Octavia Butler

87

4.

Utopia and Technopolitics in Woman on the Edge of Time

131

5.

Acting Out "Lesbian": Monique Wittig and Immanent Critique 165

3.

Conclusion. Moveable Locales: Narrating Unsutured Utopia

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Notes

211

Works Cited

223

Index

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Preface

In imagining alternatives to our present social order, discourses of social transformation express two different but related orientations toward existing conditions. The first seeks a position from which to envision a radical, qualitative break with these conditions; the second seeks to disrupt society's claim to unity and legitimacy by teasing out the contradictions and fissures within these conditions. The first might be defined as Utopian, the second as critical.1 In itself, each impulse is burdened by a limitation: to the extent that Utopian constructions posit a self-contained and inaccessible ideal "elsewhere" where social contradiction has always already been resolved, they abandon a critical connection to contemporary conditions; to the extent that internal critiques confine themselves to a negative hermeneutics of exposure, they fail to present a positive alternative. If internal critique must confront its inability to escape the social structures of oppression or do more than merely describe existing conditions, Utopia must confront its disengagement—as a mere escape—from these conditions. In one sense, then, the limitation of the one impulse is precisely the absence of the other: without a Utopian horizon, the critical impulse can achieve no distance from existing conditions and no normative point from which to launch a critique; without the engagement of the critical impulse, the Utopian impulse becomes totally disconnected from the historical conditions of its production. This book is about a contemporary shift in the way discourses of ix

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social transformation articulate the relationship between the Utopian and critical impulses, a shift that can be broadly defined as the rejection of the Utopian impulse in favor of internal critique.2 I examine this shift in the context of a transformation in how discourses represent the relationship between subject and social space: for example, how figures of individual subjectivity are used to fund images of the social space; how a subject's experience of oppression and position relative to dominant power structures is understood to affect its ability to resist oppression and imagine alternatives. Although my primary focus is on contemporary feminist thought, I situate my analysis of feminism within the larger tradition of social discourses that, in attempting to break with existing conditions, reject the Utopian impulse toward escape or idealism in favor of a "standpoint approach" that derives social transformation from a group's position within existing conditions. In examining this larger tradition, I identify those Marxist conceptions from which feminism drew and those that feminism rejected, as well as that which feminism anticipated and shares with postmodern conceptions of the relation between subject and social space. My account of the relationship between subject and social space within sociopolitical discourse emerges through an analysis of how the informing logics of this relationship are played out in a series of contemporary feminist Utopian novels. Although Utopian literature is a genre with distinct formal characteristics, its explicitly political and didactic language invites us to examine it in conjunction with social theories of transformation. Until recently, this invitation has been taken up primarily by Marxist critics, whose characteristic contempt for Utopian literature is equaled only by their sense of ownership of the genre. The more or less socialist nature of literary Utopia's ideal societies—from the genre's inaugural moment with Thomas Mores Utopia through the end of the nineteenth century—provides one explanation for Marxism's claim to the genre. Another explanation for this sense of ownership, I will argue, comes from a set of assumptions about the ideal social space that Marxism, in spite of its materialist origins, shares with utopianism. In spite of its predominance, socialism as the informing vision of Utopias has been interrupted on two occasions: once in the late nineteenth century, around x

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the time of the "first wave" of American feminism, and again in the 1970s, in conjunction with the evolution of contemporary feminism. Although both the nineteenth- and the twentieth-century feminist Utopias express explicitly feminist beliefs, the second wave of feminist Utopias is distinguished by the way it inaugurated a revolution in the Utopian form in literature, which began to incorporate conflict, imperfection, difference, and transgression into representations of an ideal social space that traditionally had been defined by its harmony and its stature as a sutured totality. Recent interest in the contemporary literary "critical Utopias" has already sponsored a series of attempts to define how their representations of the "ideal" space diverge from those of traditional Utopian literature.3 Although I also address the contemporary introduction of conflict and transgression within the Utopian space, my goal is not to compare the relative merits of literary Utopias as blueprints for, or imaginary enactments of, visions of a transformed society. Nor is my goal to expand the definition of what "counts" as a blueprint for the ideal social collective by defending critical Utopia's representation of a more open, less sutured conception of what a positively transformed society might look like. My interest lies in how a recent transformation of a literary genre that has remained relatively stable for centuries is connected not merely to its feminist agenda (as evidenced by the extent to which nineteenth-century feminist Utopias retain the traditional form), but also to contemporary feminism's participation in an identity politics whose aim is to reconceive the relation between subject and society.4 My focus is on how these critical Utopias express a transformed relationship between the figure of the individual body and the body politic, and how this transformation aligns with a transformation to the political and ideological function of Utopian space within the narrative. In this sense, I read feminist attempts to construct an empowering definition of female subjectivity and the narrative strategies of contemporary feminist works of Utopian literature through one another. I examine how the narrative practices of contemporary feminist critical Utopias—the dilemmas, antagonisms, and resolutions that they express—are connected to similar sets of problems and resolutions within "nonliterary" feminist discourses of social transformation. My assumption

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is that the Utopian form in literature "visualizes" certain logics in theories of social transformation, and that to look at the productive practices in Utopian literary narrative is also to look at how the Utopian circulates in discourses of social transformation. The introductory chapter of this book is devoted to an analysis of the problematics confronting theories of social transformation that attempt to conceptualize the relationships among critique, ideology, and Utopia. In analyzing the shifting relation between critique and Utopia, I attempt to untangle specific investments revealed by the preservation or rejection of a particular aspect of the Utopian impulse and what these investments reveal about a theory's conception of the relation between subject and social space. I begin with Marxism's critique of the Utopian impulse for its status as "premature harmonization" and for Utopia's related tendency to abstract away from existing conditions. I go on to examine how radical feminism drew from a Marxist standpoint approach while expanding its critique of the Utopian impulse to include Utopia's tendency toward totalizing gestures and its abstraction away from a specifically gendered body. I then explore the persistence of Utopian logic in feminism's and Marxism's dependence on an abstract "representative subject" to stand for the revolutionary collective and how this dependence both instituted exclusions and conflicted with a standpoint approach based on a subject's immanent position. Finally, I chart feminism's and postmodernism's increasing rejection of representative subjectivity in favor of a subject who is partial, concrete, and wholly produced by conditions rather than existing outside of them. I connect the crisis that has arisen with respect to achieving a critical vantage point from subject positions now understood to be wholly "within" ideology to the way that the Utopian impulse continues to inform assumptions about what constitutes an authentic relationship between subject and social space. To breach this critical impasse, I argue, we can retain the argument, launched by earlier standpoint approaches, that resistance develops from some kind of failure in dominant society to present a completely sutured image of itself and is activated by the subjective experience of a contradiction. What we can reject, I suggest, is the persistent dependence on an abstract, self-consistent

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representative subject who exists wholly in contradiction and therefore wholly outside of existing conditions. In choosing to explore the Utopian form in literature simultaneously with the transformative impulse in theory, I am not suggesting that narrative form is ever a simple reflection of attempts within social theory to either expose or resolve the contradictions and dilemmas faced by social theories of transformation. Rather than abandoning a consideration of the literary form and abstracting it into social theory, I enlist its narrative practices in an exploration of the discourses through which theories of social transformation are articulated. In part, I bring a set of literary objects against an interpretive methodology that has limited its analysis to dominant texts in the genre and that has therefore delimited the political agendas assigned to Utopian novels in particular and literature more generally. By uncovering a different set of operations that Utopian narrative can perform on contemporary ideology, I also challenge the hermeneutics through which the relationship between literature, society, and the transformative impulse has been interpreted. In outlining these hermeneutics in the final section of chapter one, I take up Theodor Adorno's point that "the unresolved antagonisms of society reappear in art in the guise of immanent problems of artistic form" but reject the way he and Herbert Marcuse ultimately separate form from content by identifying the transformative in literature with a formal harmony that "escapes" or exists in opposition to existing conditions. I take up Fredric Jameson's proposition that literature in general, and Utopian literature in particular, is significant in part for its productive practices—for the "work" that it performs on contemporary ideology. I differ from Jameson's analysis of narrative form, however, insofar as it limits literature's function to the ideological function of mediating social conflict or contradiction. In general, I reject the categorical separation of literature and society implied in attempts to identify a particular formal aspect or organization of literature (such as harmony or fragmentation) with a particular political function (such as escape from or affirmation of existing ideology), because of the way this approach removes works of literature from their historical and social context. I adopt instead the New Historicist argument that the productive practices of literature signify inseparably from

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their social and cultural context. My analysis seeks to understand how the function of narrative form changes relative to this context, as this context is expressed through the social discourses circulating within a novel and through the subjective point of view that a literary narrative expresses. In subsequent chapters, I combine an analysis of selected feminist attempts to theorize female subjectivity with an analysis of narrative form in both traditional and contemporary feminist Utopias. In chapter 2, I explore the two primary registers that define traditional Utopian literature's narrative practices: the founding of the harmonious Utopian collectivity on the figure of unified, self-contained individuality; and the repression or projection, within the narrative, of social conflict or contradiction. I devote the first part of chapter 2 to showing how the homology between unified individual body and harmonious body politic operates, from Thomas Mores Utopia onward, to support a politics of colonization and to suppress individual difference. In the second part of chapter 2,1 consider how this same formal homology operates in a contemporary feminist Utopia based on a politics of female "difference." Through an analysis of Sally Gearhart's The Wanderground, I show how the traditional homology between self-contained subject and self-contained social space becomes problematic when it is applied to support feminist arguments that "female" qualities represent a superior set of values upon which to build a new society. Examining Gearhart's novel in the context of cultural feminism's "different voice" theory, I show how a feminist Utopian impulse founded on Woman's difference continues to draw on a logic of exclusion and threatens to consolidate women's position on the margins of the social space without challenging the social structures and logics that place them there. In contemporary feminist critical Utopias, I argue, the individual subject's relation to the social collective continues to be reflected in a complex metaphorical relation between individual and social body; however, this relation is no longer expressed as the simple foundational homology between the unified body and the stable social space (as it is in More and Gearheart). Instead, the contradictory ideologies that construct the female subject are examined in terms of how they are played out upon the female body, which is not repre-

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sented as existing prior to the social body, but rather in dialogic relation to it. These novels tend to reverse the relationship between individual and collective, concentrating on how female subjects can constitute themselves through the strategic use of an imagined Utopian society instead of using the figure of a "unified" female subject to resolve contradictions within the social space. A subversive impulse implied by the expression of desire replaces the regulatory impulse implied by the absolute gratification of desire as the defining feature of Utopia, and the traditional Utopian goal of projecting an ideal space free from ideological conflict is replaced by the goal of exposing and exploring the way that these contradictions inflect female subjectivity The dialogic relation between subject and social space is expressed in a structural and ideological permeability that characterizes the boundary between Utopia and dystopia: "dystopian" moments of dissatisfaction and conflict occur within Utopian space, and female protagonists move back and forth between dystopian and Utopian social space, both altering and being altered by their social environment. In chapters 3 and 4,1 examine a series of feminist novels in which the traditional homology between self-contained subject and harmonious space is rejected in favor of an antagonist relation between subject and society, and where the Utopian space is deployed strategically in order to expose, not resolve, social contradiction. In the first half of chapter 3,1 draw connections between postmodern and radical feminist conceptions of the subject through an analysis of how Joanna Russ deploys Utopian space in her novel The Female Man to expose the contradictory position that women occupy relative to the terms female and human. Here, the properly "utopian" social space in the text (itself characterized by dissatisfaction and representing only one of the historical tendencies in the novel) participates in producing the cognitive alienation through which the protagonist experiences and then questions the distance between the two incompatible positions to which she is hailed by dominant discourse. In the second half of this chapter, I show how the novels of Octavia Butler complicate Russ's critique by depicting a relation between individual and social space that cannot be reduced to a feminist challenge to the ideological sleight of hand that historically has collapsed

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(white) male into human and has excluded (white) female from the public sphere and from empowering self-definitions. In Butler's novels, I argue, contingent and strategic affiliations with and between multiple imaginary communities replace the experience of a single contradiction as the primary relation between individual and community, and negotiated survival replaces exposure or escape as the primary form of resistance. I examine Butler's Patternmaster series to show how her protagonists' membership in multiple communities forces her protagonists to forge alliances along multiple axes rather than around a single opposition. This arrangement produces not so much a cognitive alienation from a dominant ideology characterized by a single contradiction as a relative alienation from the various ideologies that create the artificial boundaries around and between communities. I then examine Butler's more dystopian historical fantasy Kindred, where she focuses specifically on the contradictions surrounding an African American identity based on bloodline through her narration of the paradox experienced by a protagonist who travels into the past to discover that she possesses both "black" and "white" ancestry. In analyzing all of these novels, I show how Butler uses imaginary social spaces as a means of narrating her female protagonists' efforts to negotiate a set of social contradictions that condense around the way race and gender oppression have combined historically to subjugate black and mixed-race women. In chapter 4, I show how Utopian space in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time acts as a radicalizing force on her contemporary female protagonist, whose body is being subjected by/to a Foucauldian network of power operating in her own time. Here, the relationship between Utopia and dystopia is characterized by permeable boundaries, so that what distinguishes Utopia from dystopia is not their relative level of harmony or "purity," but rather their relative distribution of power. Since it is the individual's access to self-empowerment and not the individual's level of self-integrity that distinguishes the Utopian from the dystopian in Woman on the Edge of Time, it is the radicalization and not the unification of Connie that motivates the narrative. As a projection of Connie's desire, Utopian space initiates the cognitive alienation that allows Connie to redefine her position within contemporary society and performs the

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strategic function that permits her to politicize the medicalizing discourse of the welfare system and to expose this discourse as neither natural nor inevitable, but rather as something that is imposed upon her. By analyzing Piercy's narrative as a Foucauldian-style "genealogy" of power, I explore the problems and possibilities of using genealogy as a political tool, as well as the problems and possibilities that Foucault's insights present for a feminism committed to resisting oppressive power. In chapter 5,1 analyze Monique Wittig and queer theory together in a way that combines my focus on the relationship between subject and Utopian social space with an exploration of the role that discourse plays in constructing and mediating subjective identity. I explore why and in what way Wittig is typically assumed to be a "postmodern" writer and how, as quickly as she is claimed under the rubric of postmodern sexual/textual practices, she is condemned for making an unabashedly Utopian gesture in relation to lesbian subjectivity. While I agree with the argument that Wittig combines postmodern logic with Utopian logic, I suggest that both these logics also operate in the interpretive practices of her critics. I argue that, like Wittig's positioning of the lesbian "outside" of the heterosexual economy, the positioning of the "queer" at a critical point of disruption within the system is still to locate the subject in question at a privileged (because it is transgressive) position in relation to the system. I then demonstrate that, although Wittig focuses on the relation between language and subjectivity, she does not (as her critics claim) end up positing a particularly "lesbian" way of speaking or removing lesbian subjectivity from its social context. Instead, her willful association of the lesbian figure with a Utopian point of locution represents a strategy for refiguring the relation between language and meaning. My argument rests on the premise that Wittig's Utopian effort to universalize a point of view that traditionally has been defined by its difference disrupts the dominant impulse to universalize heterosexual identity as the "neutral" against which all else (including that which is disruptive to it) is defined. Although in her novels she constructs a separate Utopian space from which women "resymbolize" their bodies according to their lived experience within an imaginary all-female society, the subtext of "forgotten" masculine

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ideologies of the body remains and ensures that, as the women go through the self-conscious process of exposing their own representations of the body as ideological constructions, they also expose all patriarchal representations as ideological and constructed. This active relationship of Utopian space to dominant ideologies and dominant literary traditions in Wittig's novels allows her universalizing performances to function as a challenge to, and not a replacement of, the universalizing dominant point of view. Throughout this book I analyze the productive interaction between ideologies of subjectivity and constructions of Utopian social space, simultaneously examining how a particular ideology of subjectivity informs Utopian narrative in an attempt to further understand how the narrative functions, and examining the organization of Utopian narrative in order to further understand the ideologies of subjectivity that inform it. Although the decision to analyze the Utopian social space in relation to figures of individual subjectivity is in part motivated by my belief that the Utopian narrative form is unique in the way that it invites such an analysis, my approach also coincides with the overwhelming emphasis in contemporary, and in particular contemporary feminist discourses on challenging dominant conceptions of the subject. My analysis rests on the assumption that discourses of social transformation—whether or not they construct an image of a transformed social space—retain a relation to the Utopian impulse, and that an examination of the logic informing this impulse cannot fail to shed light on the logic informing the language of social transformation.

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I would like to acknowledge the following people for helping me at various stages of drafting this book: Christine Froula, for her initial interest in this project and for her invaluable support and feedback throughout its dissertation stage and beyond; Jules Law, for his critical comments and advice; and Nancy Fraser, for her critical input and for supporting this project beyond the dissertation stage. I would also like to thank Biodun Iginla and Elizabeth Stomberg at the University of Minnesota Press for their support and flexibility during revisions to this manuscript, as well as George Lipsitz and Stanley Aronowitz for providing comments and suggestions that pushed me to consider more fully the issues surrounding my topic. Thanks to Lynn Marasco for her editing assistance, and to Bill Savage for his editing assistance and long-standing friendship. Thanks also to Elizabeth Traube and the Center for Humanities at Wesleyan University for providing the space and resources that allowed me to complete this manuscript. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Bishnupriya Ghosh for inviting me over the past seven years to share in both her critical insights and the irresistible enthusiasm with which she approaches writing, teaching, and living. I also owe special thanks to Dara Strolovitch for contextualizing and pushing the political implications of my ideas— both within and outside of this project—as well as for her eternal optimism and relentless faith in me. Finally, thanks to all whose technical, financial, and emotional support made this project possible.

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1 Locational Hazards: The Utopian Impulse and the Logic of Social Transformation

In Critique, Norm, and Utopia, Seyla Benhabib identifies the anticipatory/utopian pole within theories of social transformation as that which gives us our normative grounding and sense of a moral imperative, that which allows us to make qualitative judgments and to construct an orientation toward the good. In this way, Benhabib associates the Utopian impulse with what Ernst Bloch calls our "principle of hope"—our ability and desire to imagine something other and better than our existing conditions. At the same time, however, the Utopian impulse is characterized by a set of conservative logics and gestures that are increasingly seen as incompatible with positive social transformation. These "utopian logics" manifest themselves in the following gestures: an emphasis on unity, harmony, and selfconsistency; the institution of a strict boundary between authentic and inauthentic; a preoccupation with removing itself from implication in dystopian structures and logic; and the projection of internal contradiction and contamination onto a devalued space. U-topia literally means "nowhere"—an "unplace" whose nature is to be inaccessible to the "real," dystopian world (Marin 1984: 88)—and the defining goal of Utopia is to establish itself as a harmonious and stable space that exists as the self-contained "elsewhere" of existing conditions. The proper name of Utopia thus stands as a figure for the self-containment and inaccessibility that protects the image of the ideal society from being contaminated by the historical conditions of its production: Utopia at once names itself and creates the strict

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boundaries between itself and other social spaces that guarantee its existence as a separate and unique (state of) being. In creating itself as the absolute "elsewhere" of its historical moment, Utopia thus detaches itself from the process of social transformation and effaces its relation to the process of history. The requirement that Utopia exist as a harmonious and unified space funds the strict boundaries between authentic (that which is internal to Utopia) and inauthentic (that which is external to Utopia). This emphasis on authenticity has as one of its consequences the translation of internal contradiction into contamination, which is then projected onto external and subsequently devalued spaces. Utopia thus founds itself on a circular and self-fulfilling relation to its fear of contamination: it projects internal contradiction onto a subsequently devalued place, and when this contradiction confronts it as external contamination, Utopia reinforces the boundaries that sustain an image of itself as separate and self-contained. Originally, Marxism rejected Utopian logic primarily because of its idealist disconnection from material conditions; more recently, the critique of Utopia has progressed to a more fundamental questioning of the underlying totalizing gestures that fund Utopian logic. Contemporary feminist and postmodern critics, for example, have connected the construction of an undifferentiated, harmonious community to an ideology of "wholeness and identification" that sacrifices individual difference to a vision of hermetic social unity.1 In particular, critics attack the way Utopian concepts such as unity and transcendence have supported an oppressive ideology of the individual subject that creates hierarchies, effaces difference, and privileges some forms of subjectivity to the exclusion of others. The alternative, critics argue, is to view the subject as embedded in existing conditions, and to see contradiction and difference as something internal to the subject. Against the notion of a transcendent subject, these strains of contemporary theory present us with a radically embodied subject—one whose identity is historically grounded, contingent, and produced by culture rather than existing outside of it. The progression described here might be seen as a movement away from the anticipatory/utopian pole and into what Benhabib calls the critical/diagnostic pole—the pole that concentrates on dis-

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rupting the illusion of unity in subject and society. In fact, however, these two poles already imply one another: Utopia implicitly critiques existing conditions by explicitly thematizing a set of wishes and hopes for an alternative society; critique implicitly draws upon the Utopian impulse to establish the "outside" of existing conditions upon which our notion of critical distance rests. The extent to which these poles are interconnected is evident in the way that the "loss" of the Utopian pole in critical theory has been attended by an increasing sense of our eroding ability to effectively critique existing conditions. The more the Utopian impulse in general and the subject in particular is understood to be embedded and implicated in existing conditions, then, the more dire become the predictions for the possibility of moving beyond these conditions toward a positively transformed society. This chapter is in part about the crisis in critical and feminist theory surrounding the "loss" of Utopia. More specifically, it is about the manner in which theories of social transformation have participated in a movement away from the Utopian impulse—what they have attacked about the impulse, what consequences they have suffered as a result of the attack, and how they have attempted to adapt to these consequences. I examine both the assault on and the persistence of the Utopian impulse through the interacting relationships between oppression and the vision of a transformed society, subject and system, ideology and Utopia—relationships that constitute the nexus of the impulse toward social transformation. In particular, I am concerned with the relationship between figures of subjectivity and conceptions of the social space. In looking at how theories have attempted to adapt, I focus on the persistence of an "outside" in discourses of social transformation, on how the reconception and redeployment of the Utopian "elsewhere" is visible in, for example, the creation of new divisions between authentic and inauthentic. My goal, however, is not just to "expose" the presence of the Utopian impulse in feminist and critical theory, because I believe that no theory of social transformation escapes some relation to the Utopian impulse insofar as this impulse, most generally, funds our attempts to imagine the "other" of what is. Instead, I look for how an understanding of the specific way in which Utopian logics circulate (both

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explicitly and implicitly, positively and negatively) contributes to an understanding of the investments and interrelations that inform discourses of social transformation. In the following chapters, I analyze contemporary feminist attempts to reconceptualize the relationship between subjectivity, resistance, ideology, and Utopia via a study of contemporary feminist works of Utopian literature. While in part I enlist these literary objects in order to visualize the circulation of feminist discourse in relation to visions of a transformed society, I am also engaged in a study of the Utopian literature as a genre with distinct traditions surrounding both its form and its interpretation. While I reserve an examination of specifics of the traditional Utopian form in literature for the following chapter, I feel it necessary to preface that examination by addressing in this chapter the hermeneutics through which we arrive at an understanding of how literature functions in a social context. In addressing these hermeneutics, I primarily draw from and critique cultural Marxist hermeneutics, because of the way in which its methodology has focused specifically on identifying how the ideological and Utopian is expressed in literature's relation to society. Through an examination of the value and shortcomings of this methodology, I suggest a model that can accommodate an exploration of the Utopian literary form, while at the same time taking into account the fact that the manner in which literature signifies cannot be separated from the subjective point of view that it expresses and the social context in which it is produced and received.

The Dislocated Realm: Utopian Logic in Social Theory The Marxian challenge to utopianism originates in a materialist critique of merely "conceptual" enactments of social transformation that disconnected transformation from material conditions and from the historical process. Marx dismissed utopianism for the same reason that he criticized Hegelianism: utopianism, like Hegelianism, viewed relations between people and the limitations of those relations merely as the product of consciousness and understood solutions to evolve solely from the human brain in the form of a metaphysical truth that only had to be discovered conceptually to "conquer all the world by virtue of its power" (Engels, 36). The

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polemic that Marx and Engels originally launched against Utopian discourse thus had as its object the "always-already" quality that Utopia possesses relative to social transformation, a quality that led them to define Utopian constructions as escapist and politically disengaged "premature harmonizations" of the social space.2 Marxism thus negatively associated premature harmonization both with attempts to institute Utopia through a conceptual act of will before the material conditions existed for it to be enacted in reality, and more negatively with attempts by an oppressive order to falsely project an image of its own unity in order to legitimize its power. Against the "outside" of Utopia, Marx offered a theory of social transformation that was immanent to existing social conditions: social transformation, he argued, proceeded from the inner contradictions of society, and it was these internal contradictions that would push society beyond existing conditions. The visionary task was therefore not to juxtapose an external ideal to existing conditions; rather, it was to reveal, through an analysis of existing conditions, that what is already contains within itself what ought to be (Benhabib 1986: 34). The apparent paradox of Marxism lay in its argument that the revolution that would heal society's inner contradictions was to proceed from a subject who existed at the most extreme point of contradiction created by society's division into exploiter and exploited—the proletariat. This argument was based on the assumption that, since the proletariat experienced the brunt of the objective capitalist contradiction between a collective mode of production and the individualistic ideology informing social relations, it occupied the position of greatest alienation from society and was therefore least subject to ideological attempts to reconcile it with existing conditions. As the immanent contradiction of capitalism, the proletariat was in effect at once the product and the rejection or undoing of capitalist society. Although social transformation in Marxism appeared to proceed from within existing society's contradiction, then, Marx in effect reconstituted the proletariat as a "utopian figure" in relation to capitalism: by creating an extreme point of contradiction within society, Marx argued, capitalist society had effectively produced the proletariat as its "outside"—as that which could not be reconciled to it.

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In Culture and Domination, John Brenkman points out that although Marxism eschews both the false, ideological harmonizations of capitalism and liberal humanism, and the premature harmonizations of social utopianism, the unification of society and the resolution of social contradiction remains as its goal. According to Brenkman, the crime for Marxists lies in the unjust division of society's unity into exploiter and exploited, which the social world therefore looks continually for a way to heal.3 Although traditional Marxism critiques the way capitalisms rational humanism abstracts away from material conditions, on at least one level Marxism is no different from the liberal individualism or from the Hegelianism that it criticizes: if the complicity between Protestantism and capitalism produces the individual body as something to be controlled and transcended by the self, Marxism's construction of the proletariat abstracts the individual body into a representative unified collective subject. As Seyla Benhabib points out, although Marx replaces Hegel's "spirit" with "humanity," humankind remains no less abstract, and the plurality of human experience along with the unique perspectives deriving from our embodied identities is still denied (1986: 140-41). Benhabib traces this logic to what she calls the Marxist "philosophy of the subject," which privileges one group as representative of humanity and then creates out of this group a "collective singularity" (1986: 347). The representative subject thus becomes designated as the "universal human" and abstracted into a representative figure for the authentic collectivity—once its interests are realized then, by homology, so the interest of the entire social collective will be realized. The consciousness of the proletariat was understood to be revolutionary because it simultaneously proceeded "organically" out of an immanent material relation to the forces of production and because it represented the unreconcilable point of contradiction created by these forces. To become an active revolutionary subject, however, the proletariat had to experience itself as contradiction, had to step outside of the illusions fostered by capitalist ideology and realize the truly exploitative nature of its relation to labor: poverty, realizing its causes, would become the lever for revolution (Bloch 1986: 620). A problem arose, however, from the very fact that the proletariat's con-

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sciousness was immanent to existing conditions: this immanence caused the "authentic" consciousness of the proletariat to become at least partly "contaminated" by dominant ideology. Gramsci described this contamination as creating a situation wherein the masses possess two competing consciousnesses—one that grew organically out of their activity, and another that was inherited from dominant ideology (335). The recognition that the proletariat possessed a dual consciousness—one authentic and the other inauthentic—meant that the revolutionary subject did not merely exist as the contradiction to society, but also possessed a contradiction within itself. In an attempt to repair this contamination, Marxism introduced the concept of an objective observer whose role was to intervene and "undeceive" the masses from their inherited dominant ideology and thus allow them to step outside of ideology's illusions. The fact that the immanence of Marxist theory derived from the organic position of the worker, however, created a paradoxical role for the Marxist intellectual, who did not have direct experience of capitalist exploitation but who was now in the position of distinguishing the true from the untrue.4 In an attempt to preserve an "outside" to ideology, then, contradiction arose within Marxist theory around the fact that the subject describing/exposing the social contradiction (the Marxist critic) was no longer the subject whose experience was organic to this contradiction.5 The recognition that the proletariat failed to act more out of its interests than out of its illusions ultimately led Marxism to foreground the explanatory role of the critic over the organic experience of the proletariat. This prepared the way for the move from "voluntaristic" Marxism, whose goal was to raise the consciousness of the proletariat, to the scientific language of "structural" Marxism, whose goal was to objectively interpret the processes and conditions of historical change. In this model, the radical move became that of analyzing the structure rather than raising the consciousness of the proletariat (Brenkman, 83). This shift meant that the proletariat as actor—an actor already abstracted into a collective subject by Marxist theory—was replaced by the social structure as the "subject" of social transformation. As Brenkman points out, however, merely exposing the social structure no more led to changing it than did merely

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experiencing it, and the shift to scientific description meant that options for meaningful political praxis became further delimited (83). After the objective conditions had been identified and the material trajectory of society had been described, after one had analyzed how existing society contained the seeds of its own destruction in the form of a series of internal contradictions, one was left with nothing else to do but sit back and wait for this process to play itself out (Brenkman, 83). Once the focus is placed merely on documenting and predicting the evolution in the forces of production, the critical moment in Marxism is lost: social critic as facilitator is replaced with social critic as observer, and the experience of contradiction leading to action is replaced with the analysis of contradiction leading to passive understanding. The removal of authentic consciousness from the proletariat, combined with the disappearance of the proletariat as a single collective subject in advanced capitalism, led to the left's progressive disconnection of authenticity away from one's position within the structure of property relations. Disconnecting the revolutionary subject from a material motivation for struggle connected to its material position within the social structure paved the way for a lifestyle politics that associated authentic revolutionary agency in an undifferentiated way with opposition to authority and with individual ideological purity (Feenberg, 133). The New Left abstracted Marxism's association of authenticity with a subject's existence at the most extreme point of capitalist contradiction, so that the degree of one's oppression became the measure of one's authenticity, and marginality per se came to equal authenticity. As the primary expression of the desire for freedom over dominating practices, a concern about being co-opted or contaminated replaced a concern for transformation of the system. Commenting on this shift in emphasis, Andrew Feenberg observes that "the fear of co-optation testified to a moral rather than a political sense of the struggle. . . . Implicit in the ideology of unco-optability was the categorical imperative that difference must be maintained, that the left must preserve its ostracism and unpopularity as its claim to virtue in an evil world" (127). In this way, the concern for the purity and authenticity of the revolutionary sub-

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ject that was already implicit in Marxist theory won out over a concern for transforming the lived conditions of society's members. The set of priorities described here is also evident in the black civil rights movement, where the connection of authenticity with oppression manifested itself in black civil rights leaders' claims that they represented the authentic leaders of a revolutionary movement by virtue of their "most oppressed" status and in the left's readiness to abandon a floundering class analysis in favor of the struggle for black rights (Echols, 40). Because it retained the connection between authenticity and identity, the black civil rights discourse also retained the emphasis on a single category of oppression reflecting a single, representative subject. This led once again to the reduction of an oppressed group to an undifferentiated unified mass whose community interests came to be articulated by an elite group of representatives (Reed, 73). These interests included suppressing conflict within the community by, in part, subordinating issues such as sexism to the single cause of black unity and black (male) power. These interests, combined with the vicious government backlash against black political groups that were organized around achieving specifically political gains, ultimately contributed to a shift wherein more energy was invested in efforts to contest racism's distorting devaluation of black culture and history than in transforming material conditions. While the resulting set of positive countermyths provided empowering identifications for blacks, these myths also participated in a shift from a desire for the black community to consolidate a collective alliance as a means toward active political resistance into a desire to preserve a black particularity against the fear of the disappearance of blacks as a unique cultural group. This attempt to retain a black particularity funded, among other things, black nationalist romanticization of cultural patterns developed in the historical context of rural racial domination, as well as the advocating of quasireligious and misogynist institutions such as the Nation of Islam (Reed, 73). When it was combined with the desire to resolve the "cultural schizophrenia" (Jordan, 34) of being both black and American into a unified and coherent identity, the effort to construct empowering countermyths sometimes removed African-American identity altogether from its material conditions in the United States and re-

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located it in an often mythical and distorted .African social system that had little to do with contemporary African-American realities (E. R White, 9). Again, the association between authenticity and removal from existing conditions contributed to a situation in which an oppressed group expressed a concern for purity over concern for justice and reacted as much against integration as against domination.6 The contemporary feminist movement grew in part out of frustration with the way women's interests were subordinated to the single issues of race or class by the New Left and the civil rights movement. In spite of the alienation that they had experienced within these movements, radical feminists drew heavily from aspects of the left's class analysis and were inspired by the civil rights credo that one should look first to one's own oppression. Like Marxism, radical feminism dismissed—as ahistorical and disembodied—the classic liberal conception of the individual, arguing that this conception was founded on the illusion that individuals could transcend actual social and bodily situations. Unlike Marxism, however, radical feminists argued that this desire to transcend bodily being was (at least in Western society) particularly male. Feminists critiqued liberal humanism's disconnection of selfhood from the body, not because it justified oppressive economic conditions by compensating with the rational mind, but because in disconnecting selfhood from the gendered body, it had led to women's exclusion from a definition of full personhood while at the same time it had allowed gender exploitation to be dismissed as unimportant because it was connected to the body. Radical feminism's origins in the material sense in which women's bodies and subjectivities had been colonized and damaged meant that the individual subject/body could not and should not be dismissed or abstracted into a figure for the social body. Instead, this emphasis on the embodied female subject, combined with radical feminism's distrust of existing paradigms, led radical feminists to define oppression subjectively to include anything that women experienced2& oppressive: "We regard our personal experience, and our feelings about that experience, as the basis for an analysis of our common situation. We cannot rely on existing ideologies as they are all products of male supremacist culture. We question every generalization and accept none that are not confirmed by our experience" (Redstockings, 113). 10

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After it had defined what women experienced as oppressive, they argued, feminist analysis of these experiences would then provide the basis for a theory of women's oppression and the praxis to counter it: "Our feelings will lead us to our theory, our theory to our action, our feelings about that action to new theory and then to new action" (Sarachild, 78). Because the authority of women's experience was foundational to the project of contesting the false objectivity expressed in male-biased paradigms, then, the possibility of abstracting away from experience in the interest of objectivity or critical distance was antithetical to the project of radical feminism. In spite of its different starting point, Anglo-American radical feminism retained much of the logic of the left's class analysis, in a sense replacing an understanding of the proletariat with an understanding of women as the oppressed class. In the last instance, everything came down to the oppression of women instead of economics or racism: "All political classes grew out of the male-female role division, were modelled on it, and were rationalized by it and by its premises" (The Feminists, 114). Like Marxism, radical feminism initially expressed the belief that there existed some kind of unnatural division or split in the world that needed to be made whole again. Feminism understood women—as Marxism understood the proletariat—to bear the brunt of this unnatural division, which was caused by the appropriation, through the institution of gender, of "human" qualities to men.7 Feminists understood women's position in society—as Marxism understood the proletariat—to be characterized by a social contradiction; this time, however, the contradiction surrounded the irresolvable tension between how women had been absorbed under the category of "mankind" and how their "difference" had been used to exclude them from basic rights. The revolutionary rhetoric of radical feminism also mirrored the revolutionary rhetoric of the left: radical feminist manifestos argued that "the seeds of a new and beautiful world society lie buried in the consciousness of this very class [of women] which has been abused and oppressed since the beginning of human history" and that the key to revolution lay in awakening on a mass scale the "latent consciousness of women about their oppression" (Hanisch, 86; Sarachild, 79). Anglo-American radical feminism thus retained much of the original Marxist philoso11

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phy of the subject: women's position at the most extreme point of social contradiction guaranteed their status as authentic revolutionary subjects, and activating this experience would open the road to a transformed society. Several problems ensued from feminism's commitment to launch its critique and envision a transformed society from the subjective standard of women's experience. The first problem arose from the fact that feminists could not abstract women or women's experiences into "representative humanity" as Marxism had done with the proletariat, both because their analysis emphasized the concrete and embodied nature of women's oppression and because what defined women's oppression was precisely the extent to which they had been denied "full humanness." While Marxism came to understand the proletariat as "contaminated" by dominant ideology, women from the beginning perceived themselves as possessing a dual consciousness that resulted from the tension between their status as women and (in sexist society) their aspiration to full humanness. The fact that they contained within them the contradiction between being "human" and being "female" led feminist women to perceive themselves as "damaged goods" out of whom pieces had been cut (Tax, 11-12). The further recognition that the very experience from which women were trying to theorize had been constructed under conditions of oppression led to a situation where women, as the objects of their own consciousness-raising endeavor, became for themselves "the objects of a hermeneutics of suspicion" (Gallagher, 43). From the beginning, then, radical feminism understood the split caused by oppression to be not merely an abstract one between exploiter and exploited, but also an embodied one that existed within women. The subject/object split between the Marxist social critic and the masses at least initially allowed Marxism to compensate for the fact that the proletariat acted more out of its illusions than out of its interests by positing an objective point of critique in the critic. Because they were more invested in women's subjectivity and because they did not have the same sense of critical detachment from their "object," however, radical feminists would not and could not detach social transformation from women's experience and relocate it in a critical 12

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analysis of the system. Whereas Marxism could relocate the "truth" formerly embodied in the proletariat in the social critic's analysis of the objective evolution in the material forces of production, feminism faced the problem of trying to derive a "truth" from the subjective standard of women's experience (Grant, 30). As Judith Grant points out, radical feminism found itself caught in a tautology: it was simultaneously the lens through which experiences were interpreted and attempting to find its ground in those experiences (101). In other words, theorizing from experience left no normative point outside of experience from which to distinguish authentic from inauthentic experiences. Radical feminist attempts to apply the Marxist concept of "false consciousness" to women who did not experience their subordination as oppression were complicated simultaneously by the commitment to respecting all women's subjectivities that was implied in using women's experience to challenge male paradigms and by feminists' suspicion that their own consciousness was politically unreliable. On the one hand, all women's experience had to be valid because it was experienced by women; on the other hand, no women's experience could be valid because it had developed under conditions of oppression. Judith Grant identifies the tension between revaluing existing gendered experiences and demythologizing the structure of gender altogether with the tension between Anglo-American and postmodern feminism (144). In fact, both of these impulses (to deconstruct gender, to revalue as positive women's gendered experience) were present from the beginning in radical feminism in its American context. From the beginning, Anglo-American radical feminism manifested a tension between defending female behavior and critiquing the structure that had created it. On the one hand, feminists argued for the political and constructed nature of the designation of certain qualities as "female" or "male" and spoke of the need to critique "female nature" as a male concept. In her 1970 essay "Radical Feminism," for example, Ti-Grace Atkinson wrote that "in order to improve their condition, those individuals that are today defined as women must eradicate their own definition" (33). On the other hand, because radical feminism was based in women's experience, and because women seemed to behave in identifiably female ways, 13

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Anglo-American feminists wanted to defend female behavior by positively revaluing qualities such as nurturance and empathy as alternative models for social and political interactions. To some degree, the early tension between defending female qualities and critiquing the structure of gender that created them gave way to a renaturalization of the division between masculinity and femininity within Anglo-American feminism. Where this transition occurred, a radical feminist understanding of female qualities as socially constructed was replaced by a "cultural feminist" abstraction of these qualities into a stable opposition between "male" and "female" nature. While this strategy retrieved a normative point from which to adjudicate "authentic" female consciousness, designating as positive selected qualities assigned to selected women under oppression threatened to reestablish stereotypes of femininity and appeared to be more a matter of making a virtue out of necessity than a genuine challenge to the status quo. More than reflecting a passive reproduction of existing conditions, this "different voice" strategy dissociated gender from its social and historical context and predicated women's identity upon the active preservation of a stable opposition between "man" and "woman." The creation of an absolute boundary between women and men funded the argument that women's differences resulted solely from their relations to men and that the creation of a separate women's space would dissolve any salient difference between women and result in a unified collectivity. By identifying racism and classism as male issues, white radical feminists established a false sense of their moral superiority based on the suggestion that, lacking power, they could oppress only incidentally and by association: Women were the first group to be subjected as a caste all over the world, thousands of years ago—long before blacks were subjected to whites in America or anywhere else. Obviously whiteness does not overcome the caste position of being a woman in this society. There are some incidental advantages to being white . . . but the incidental advantages—which are meaningless in terms of woman's true caste position as a sex—come to her mainly in her affiliation with a dominant white male. (Burris, 106) 14

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Although it is true that (disproportionately white, middle-class) women's confinement to the domestic sphere isolated them and interfered with the creation of a political alliance in the public sphere, reducing women's isolation from one another to differences caused by their relations to men served to transpose class and racial hierarchies into entirely "male" issues. This logic both relieved women from any possible participation in acts of oppression and represented all other oppressions as irrelevant to and in competition with women's issues. By dissociating themselves from and setting feminism in competition with issues of racism and classism, white radical feminists reduced the identity of women of color to their association with men and forced them to choose between oppressions. While expressing a rhetorical commitment to women of all colors and class origins, white radical feminists nevertheless failed to understand how racism and classism persisted in the way their construction of issues and priorities alienated or excluded women who were not white and middle-class. African-American feminism found itself in the position of trying to fill in the gap between the gender blindness of the civil rights movement and the blindness of many white feminists to issues of race and class differences. While they started from the same focus on lived experience, African-American feminists did not share the same impulse to reduce the causes and effects of their oppression to a single category such as race, gender, or class. As women, they were subjected to the same threat of sexual violence confronting white women—a threat exacerbated by the racist stereotypes surrounding black women's sexuality. As blacks, they were excluded from whitebiased cultural notions of what constituted "proper" femininity, and they occupied positions within the family and the labor market that frequently placed them outside of both the dominant ideal and the feminist critique of female domesticity. The multiple oppressions experienced by black women meant that their resistance could not be expressed in the single contradiction of gender, whose terms they had not occupied historically or ideologically in a simple or straightforward manner. Membership in multiple oppressed groups required that they forge alliances along multiple axes rather than around a 15

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single opposition, leaving them less susceptible to a paradigm that reduced oppression to a single representative antagonism. While their observations were instrumental in offering insights about the way that oppressions were linked, black women still faced the problem of defining what a uniquely black feminism would look like. Their perspective, while it often served as an important corrective to more monologic perspectives, was not immune to the pressure to seek out a sense of unity and authentic collective identity by aligning themselves with a single oppression. This impulse toward unity could be expressed either by equating the power and sexism of black men to that of white men and thus rejecting any possibility of alliance with black men, or by rejecting feminism as a white issue and aligning themselves with an emerging black cultural nationalism that was often misogynous in its understanding of women's "place." While their emphasis on recovering and reinterpreting a history that had been effaced and distorted led African-American feminists to recognize the important role that Africa could play in offering models and constructing positive self-images, the usefulness of these images sometimes translated into an idealization of African values and a romanticization of the position of women within African families and African society.8 Similarly, while they uncovered ways in which slavery and reconstruction had produced alternative family arrangements within the black community, African-American feminists faced the danger of idealizing black families under slavery as having been characterized by unique levels of sexual equality.9 Again, the absence of a social discourse that viewed resistance in terms other than a single collective subject position contributed to a limiting choice between aligning with black men at the expense of a genuine feminist analysis or aligning with white women at the expense of a genuine class or race analysis. All of the social movements I have touched upon counter the idealist, escapist logic informing the traditional Utopian impulse with a standpoint approach that understands social transformation to derive from a subject's immanent position within the system. In conceptions of the revolutionary subject, however, two interrelated Utopian dynamics persist: social unification is predicated upon identifying a representative subject, and the authenticity of that represen16

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tative subject requires its absolute removal from implication in existing conditions. This removal is predicated on the subject's location at the most extreme point of oppression created by existing conditions, which produces this subject as the "outside" and therefore the negation of existing conditions. Unreconcilable to dominant ideology by virtue of its oppressed status, the interests of this subject are understood to point to an alternative reality or to the authentic postrevolutionary collectivity. Behind this set of interrelated logics is the persistent assumption that a single oppression can be eradicated in its entirety, and with its eradication resolve all other oppressions. In this way, a Marxist philosophy of the subject complements a "monist approach" expressed in the political claim that "one particular domination precipitates all really important oppressions. Whether Marxist, anarchist, nationalist, or feminist, these 'ideal types' argue that important social relations can all be reduced to the economy, state, culture, or gender" (Albert 1986: 6). Seyla Benhabib observes that to arrive at this conclusion requires two stages of analysis: first, the lived experience of members of a group must be reduced to their common oppression; second, their now abstracted needs and desires must come to stand for the abstract needs and desires of all through what Benhabib calls a "logic of substitution" (1992: 347, 434). In this sense, the authentic collectivity essentially stands or falls on the authenticity of the representative human whose interests guarantee it. Although immanent social contradictions (and not a transcendent ideal) provide the motor for change in both Marxist and feminist theory, a problem threatens to arise once these social conditions enter into the subject in the form of a dual (authentic and inauthentic) consciousness. Because a "utopian" philosophy of the subject correlates authenticity with the subject's removal from dominating practices, the extent to which the subject is viewed as produced by its conditions is also the extent to which it is viewed as "contaminated." Predicating effective resistance upon a unified representative subjectivity that exists in conflict with existing conditions tends to evolve into predicating authenticity upon a group's level of oppression. In "Co-optation," Gerald Graff sums up the dilemma arising from a theory that correlates a group's revolutionary force with the extent of its oppression: "the only truly authentic 'success' is to fail, or at least 17

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to remain as marginal as possible. Retaining one's radical credentials means remaining marginal—but then remaining marginal means remaining ineffectual." The result, Graff argues, is that there remain no conditions for when success might be legitimate (172). More than eroding possibilities for agency and resistance, this approach tends to result in a situation where groups consolidate their position outside of dominant practices by creating a "utopia of reversal" that renaturalizes divisions between groups at the same time that it revalues as positive the group's position outside of power structures.10 These reverse Utopias abstract the subject away from its historical and cultural context, encourage exclusionary paradigms, and result in severely eroded options for effective agency and resistance. The Challenge of Relocation: The Postmodern Turn in Critical Theory Within critical theory, the increasing sense that the subject is immanent to existing conditions has been associated with a dissolution of the boundaries between ideology and Utopia, to the point where they are perceived to have collapsed into one another. In Ideology and Utopia, for example, Karl Mannheim finally concludes that it is no longer possible for us to assume that there exists a class or group consciousness that is not itself ideological. Paul Ricoeur describes the attendant crisis for the project of critically reflecting upon society as "Mannheim's Paradox": if everything is distorted, observes Ricoeur, then nothing is distorted, and there remains no normative basis for the judgment of either Utopia or ideology (8). Mannheim attempts to rescue the distinction between ideology and Utopia by associating the two poles with a group s position within society: since dominant groups are in full accord with the existing order, he argues, they may be considered the primary bearers of ideology; since the "state of mind" of ascendant groups is incongruous with this order, these groups may be considered the primary bearers of the Utopian impulse that tends toward breaking the bonds of existing society (192). Within this model, however, Utopia threatens to become merely the ideology of ascendant classes, and the dynamic of "authentic" Utopian or transformative thinking comes to differ from the dynamic 18

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of ideological thinking only in terms of the relative position occupied by the subject from which it originates. The outcome of this progression is that there remains little distinction, other than their position relative to power, between the "legitimate" visions of a transformed society possessed by marginalized groups and the "false" and compensatory Utopias offered by dominant society to reconcile people with existing conditions.11 Because Mannheim also acknowledges that the dominant order decides what gets defined as Utopian, a question arises concerning exactly how Utopia is able to "break the bonds" of existing conditions. Mannheim recognizes that the problem lies in the fact that the more Utopia is embedded within existing relations, the more the Utopian element is threatened with annihilation. At the same time, he promises dire results from the loss of an authentic Utopian goal: without it, he argues, there remains no point from which to judge the goals of ascendant groups as "better" or "more human" than the goals of dominant groups, and we are left with a situation in which Utopia is enlisted more and more in the effort to merely accommodate existing conditions. Mannheim's fear about the future of the Utopian impulse anticipates the negative prognoses for social transformation associated with the advent of "postmodern" society. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer set the tone of this prognosis when they identify society as having reached a point where all cultural production is absorbed by a dominant order from which "none may escape" and in which even departures from the norm "ultimately confirm the validity of the system" (123, 129). Like Adorno and Horkheimer, Fredric Jameson sees the process of negation, through which existing values are challenged, as being threatened by the concretization of Utopia in consumer society. Jameson eschews moral evaluations concerning the "usefulness" of postmodernism, on the grounds that it is not a matter of whether one may "choose" or "not choose" what is inescapable. His interpretation of postmodern society leads him to conclude that resistance is difficult or impossible now, however, because acts of resistance are "somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it" (1991: 49). From Jameson's perspective, the dilemma confronting 19

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resistance and Utopia in postmodern society is primarily a "spatial" one: the cultural sphere's "penetration" and "colonization" by multinational capitalism leads to a situation in which culture comes to contaminate more and more the theoretical reflections upon it. Jameson's rhetoric suggests that, rather than articulating a perception of something that has always existed, he is describing a real loss of "distance" between culture and critique, a progression in which the system recuperates theoretical reflection more than it used to. Jameson associates the contemporary encroachment upon possibilities for resistance with postmodern society's loss of a metaphysics of "inside versus outside," and the resultant "contamination" of the subject by its environment. In his analysis of postmodern metaphysics, Jameson identifies the inability to find a point of critique with what I would call a movement away from a "utopian" and toward a "postmodern" philosophy of the subject. The postmodern shift from the alienation of the subject to the fragmentation of the subject, Jameson argues, makes identification of what constitutes an "authentic" subject, and therefore the formulation of collective ideals, impossible. For Jameson, our postmodern bodies, "bereft of spatial co-ordinates," have become unable to generate a "mode of representation in which we could again grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain our capacity to act and to struggle" (1991: 51). The postmodern condition is thus characterized by a breaking down of an older concept of a "utopian" or an "alienated" space as a separate locus for launching cultural critique or for envisioning a transformed society. Cultural notions such as "opposition" and "subversion," according to Jameson, have become outmoded and anachronistic because they share the same "spatial presupposition" (of inside versus outside) that operated in the now defunct notion of critical distance (1991: 48). For Jameson, this loss of the boundaries between inside and outside promises far-reaching negative consequences for political praxis: with it comes the destruction of the opposition between "authentic and inauthentic" and "alienation and disalienation" upon which the Marxist theory of the social totality is founded. Jameson's subsequent effort to retrieve a Utopian pole in critical theory warrants comment for the way in which it represents, once 20

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again, an allegiance to an abstract, representative philosophy of the subject. Having accepted that dominant discourses and their informing ideologies are inescapable, Jameson attempts to divine the presence of a Utopian impulse within dominant ideology—to identify how dominant discourse might "resonate a universal value inconsistent with the narrower limits of class privilege which inform its more immediate ideological vocation" (1991: 288). In the process of criticizing Northrop Frye's Blakean reduction of social revolution to the concrete libidinal revolution of the individual body, Jameson suggests that a Utopian social hermeneutic would, instead, keep faith with its medieval precursor . . . [and] restore a perspective in which the imagery of libidinal revolution and of bodily transfiguration once again becomes a figure for the perfected community. The unity of the body must once again prefigure the renewed organic identity of associative or collective life, rather than, as for Frye, the reverse. (1981: 74; emphasis added) The return of Utopia via a progressive identification between the figural unified subject, forms of collectivity, and the perfected community leads Jameson to find his solution in the proposition that all collective consciousness is Utopian, insofar as it expresses the unity of a collectivity and therefore prefigures the ultimate collective consciousness of a classless society (1981: 291). In his critique of Jameson, John Brenkman points out that this interpretation of the social good fails to recognize that some forms of solidarity are based on shared privileges and not on rights, and are therefore exclusionary. Brenkman goes on to observe that the more central solidarity becomes as the positive counterpoint to contemporary atomization, the more indiscriminate the notion of collectivity becomes, until every manner of collective life acquires a Utopian definition—even forms of social solidarity such as fascism (220). By identifying the experience of collectivity—whatever its form—as the Utopian element in society, Jameson retrieves the Utopian impulse within existing society; however, in the process he replaces a concern about social justice with a concern about the loss of unity at the hands of

21

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postmodern fragmentation. While Jameson escapes Mannheim's reduction of Utopia to the ideology of the marginalized, in the process he disconnects authentic collectivity from the goals of the left and associates it with even the most totalitarian of states. As Carol Gallagher points out, much of what informs "postmodern" thought was in fact generated by theoretical breaks within the second wave of the women's movement—in, for example, feminist criticism of male-centered knowledge and objectivity, feminist assertions of the political and historical nature of knowledge, and feminist analyses of the constructedness of female identity (159). To the extent that they have challenged the exclusions implicit in totalizing gestures and holistic logic, contemporary feminists are in alliance with the postmodern project of disrupting hierarchies and denaturalizing binary oppositions. To the extent that feminists have attacked the concept of the unified and transcendent subject as being predicated on the exclusion of women and as denying embodied, gendered subjectivity, they have participated in breaking up this concept and arguing for a subject who is historically grounded, contingent, and produced by society rather than existing outside of it. In dealing with the heritage of their own theoretical breaks, however, many contemporary feminists express a frustration parallel to Jameson's over the constant unraveling of positive meaning that underwrites the deconstructive gestures that dominate postmodern thought. Many feminists, for example, have pointed out the suspicious irony in the fact that the dispersal of the category of the subject coincides so neatly with women's attempts to theorize an empowering female subjectivity. Like critical Marxists, feminists fear that postmodern logic leads to a relativism that precludes establishing a critical position from which to launch meaningful political action or set up meaningful alliances.12 Against the Marxist anxiety about how fragmenting the subject delimits the possibility of conceiving a unified collectivity, feminists express anxiety about the loss of agency that this fragmentation implies: if the subject is viewed as a discursive or cultural construct, then subjectivity dissolves into a chain of signification, and concepts such as intentionality, accountability, selfreflexivity, and autonomy disappear (Benhabib 1992: 214). Without the perception of distance from existing conditions that the Utopian 22

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pole gives us, feminists argue, we are left with the sense that there exist no possibilities for constructing positive meaning or envisioning alternatives to what exists—no Archimedean point from which to criticize society, and no options for agency except to deconstruct. Whether theorists welcome postmodern efforts to problematize the category of the individual subject or lament its "disappearance," the subject and its relation to the social body remain a significant point of inquiry. The legacy of contemporary theory lies in the realization that there exists no point from which to absolutely escape dominant constructions of the subject, and that "the T who would oppose its construction is always in some sense drawing from that construction to articulate its opposition" (J. Butler 1993: 122). To the extent that maintaining a regulative principle of hope is predicated upon achieving a subjective position "outside" of ideology, however, embedding the subject within existing conditions has led to the belief that options for critique have become severely eroded. Benhabib sums up our sense that feminism has lost the ability to critique or create positive meaning with the observation that we have suffered a "retreat from Utopia"—a failure to recognize that, in order for transformation to be thinkable and agency to be possible, we must have a regulative principle of hope and its sense of a moral imperative (1992: 229).13 Even when they are not concerned about the loss of unified subjectivity per se, then, feminist critics express a concern about how the advent of postmodernism is attended by the loss of a "utopian horizon" from which to judge authentic and inauthentic and thus construct an orientation toward the good. The current crisis in theorizing social transformation is a result of the perception that critical distance is incompatible with our understanding of the subject as historically situated and culturally produced. Behind this perception is the persistent assumption that, to be an authentic transformative agent, the individual and collective subject must exist in opposition to dominant society. Without abandoning the association between social transformation and this Utopian philosophy of the subject, we are left with either a retreat back into the very concepts of unity, self-consistency, and transcendence that critical theory and feminism deconstructed in their attack on liberal humanism or the pessimistic assertion that there no longer 23

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exists a "redeemable" position from which to launch a critique. To the extent that critical subjectivity, agency, and the ability to distinguish authentic from inauthentic cultural production is predicated upon being able to speak from a unified subjectivity that is uncontaminated by ideology, we are left, therefore, with only two options: disconnect the Utopian impulse from subjective experience and material conditions and locate it outside of culture and history (but at the expense of developing a genuinely immanent critique) or continue to view the Utopian impulse as embedded in and growing out of the existing order (but at the expense of its genuine ability to challenge that order). The problem I am describing here can be posed as the following question: how do we break with existing conditions and imagine alternatives, while at the same time recognizing the way in which these conditions have constituted our hopes, our wishes, and even the nature of our resistance? Instead of retreating into ahistoricism or pessimistic relativism, a way must be found to retain a notion of critique that is less disabled by an understanding of how ideology "intrudes" upon the subject. If the solution does not lie in a nostalgia for some older concept of unified subjectivity, this question remains: How is it possible to imagine resistance from a conception of a subject who exists not merely in contradiction to dominant society, but in possession of contradictory desires and wishes that, although they are constructed by dominant discourse, are not exhausted by it? Immanent Locations: Reconceiving the Relation between Subject and Social Space Contemporary critiques of standpoint theory argue that it faces insurmountable difficulties around identifying a normative point from which to evaluate experiences in a political context. Critics observe that a standpoint approach based on subjective experience encounters a twofold problem. First, it neglects to account for how the relevant experiences are selected, or to acknowledge the extent to which these experiences are preselected merely by virtue of the number of women who are excluded. Second, it becomes impossible to separate women's "authentic" consciousness from the conditions of oppres24

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sion under which they developed. In summarizing the latter problem, Jane Flax observes that a standpoint approach relies on "the assumption that the oppressed are not in fundamental ways damaged by their own marginality, and that they themselves are somehow removed from a will to power" (642). Certainly, the imminent collapse of this assumption proved too threatening for Anglo-American radical feminism; the possibility that women were both damaged by and implicated in oppression contributed significantly to retreats into a less politically engaged cultural feminism. It seems, however, that recognizing we are both implicated and damaged is utterly disabling only to the extent that agency and authenticity are predicated on moral purity, and moral purity is predicated on existence totally outside of dominant relations. As a challenge to this logic, Barbara Smith has pointed out that "it is neither possible nor necessary to be morally exempt in order to stand in opposition to oppression" (1984: 71). The impasse faced by the standpoint approaches of both radical Marxism and feminism reminds us that the reliance on a transcendent and idealized subject is antithetical to effective agency and political alliance. Smith's point returns us to the fact that struggle and resistance require not an ideal representative subject, but rather politically engaged actors. The exclusionary paradigm adopted by white radical feminists also seems to support Judith Grant's argument that an experiencebased standpoint approach avoids the issue of how one goes about choosing which experiences to identify with and what one chooses to make of those experiences (86). In relation to the problem of selecting relevant experiences, Deborah King observes: While contending that feminist consciousness and theory emerged from the personal, everyday reality of being female, the reality of millions of women was ignored. The phrase, "the personal is the political" not only reflects a phenomenological approach to women's liberation—that is, of women denning and constructing their own reality—but it also has come to describe the politics of imposing and privileging a few women's personal lives over all women's lives by assuming that these few could be prototypical. (57)

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While King's observation effectively sums up Anglo-American feminism's exclusionary paradigm, it also suggests that the problem lies not in the attempt to validate a set of experiences, but in the need to make these experiences universally representative. The limitation lies not so much in deciding which experiences one chooses to identify with, but in the impulse to infuse those experiences with prototypicality. This impulse results from an understanding of "authentic" subjectivity that not only views implication in existing conditions as the loss of critical distance, but also assumes that a complex identity derived from membership in multiple communities leads to the fragmentation of the category of the subject, and more generally to a fragmentation of value that severely erodes possibilities for resistance. The compensatory move is to abstract a particular subjective experience of social contradiction into a single, stable, and essentialized antagonism and to create out of this antagonism a single, representative collective subject who exists as the "ontological outside" of society. Finally, we may reject the notion that the loss of coherent personhood or the recognition of embodied subjecthood destroys the transformative impulse altogether by eroding our ability to escape dominant values. Elizabeth Fraser and Nicola Lacey identify the idea that being culturally situated subjects makes us hopeless subscribers to dominant values as a false "Cartesian anxiety"; the fact remains, they argue, that we do experience resistance to the dominant, because while our experience is not totally self-determined, neither is it totally determined (198). They suggest that the complexity of the subject ensures that we are capable of holding multiple and even conflicting views and interpretations of particular events or aspects of our lives without total disintegration (198). The belief that adopting a standpoint approach is solely responsible for the loss of a normative point of critique is also belied by the extent to which early radical feminists understood women's position within society to be contradictory and untenable. Radical feminism's ability to identify and analyze a set of irresolvable contradictions surrounding female identity suggests that it is possible to launch an effective critique from within an understanding of women's identity as socially constructed. The effectiveness of their critique suggests that it was not an inability 26

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to achieve any critical distance from women's socially constructed identity that caused a retreat back into a Utopian logic that disconnected female identity from the historical conditions of its creation. Rather, this retreat was caused by their continued allegiance, in their conception of an effective revolutionary subject, to the concepts of unity, self-consistency, and transcendence. This concern for an authentic because self-consistent identity led radical feminists to oppose female and male nature against one another, and to predicate women's authenticity on women's nonparticipation in the "masculine" impulse to dominate. Having deconstructed the terms upon which this older notion of the authentic revolutionary subject rests, and failing to reconceive the relation between subjectivity and resistance, we are left with either pessimistic relativism or with "utopias of historical reversal" that merely positively revalue and naturalize selected aspects of group identity as it developed under oppression. In reconceiving this relation, however, it seems productive to retain important gestures made by early standpoint approaches. One of these gestures is the proposition that resistance develops from some kind of failure within dominant society to present a completely sutured image of itself, or to present an image of its interests as completely consistent with the interests of all its individuals.14 Another is the notion that this "failure" is activated at least in part through the experience of contradiction, from a disturbance in self-certitude that reflects the fact that subjects never fully occupy the position that culture calls upon them to occupy, and that therefore provides opportunities for us to reinterpret subordination as oppression. Early standpoint approaches already express the "postmodern" notion of occupying incompatible or conflicting subject positions and suggest the possibility of an agency that derives from the perception of distance between contradictory subject positions and the failure to fully reconcile oneself with the norms (and illusions) produced by any one position. One problem arises when this disjuncture is understood to follow from a single, stable contradiction, and to result in the creation of a single representative (and revolutionary) collective subject. African-American feminists have been instrumental in challenging this tendency to assume that a single oppression can ac27

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count for the complexity of subjective identifications, or for the complex ways in which subjects are simultaneously excluded from and defined by dominant discourses. Their critique of a monist approach has inspired the observation that "the workings of power, the fragile construction of subjectivities, and the often inharmonious conflicts attendant to multiple identities are much too complex for the frame of margins and centers" (Caraway, 182). The recognition of multiple subject positions means that resistance does not grow out of the experience of a single, stable contradiction, but rather out of a series of contradictions and disturbances in selfhood. To the extent that contemporary feminism s "politicization of the personal" aligns with Foucault's observation that power and resistance are exercised locally and in everyday social relations, these insights can also pick up on a Foucauldian understanding that resistances that arise in relation to this exercise of power are similarly local and multiple. In Feminist Practice and Post-structuralist Theory, for example, Chris

Weedon draws on Foucault to argue that the dispersal of the subject that results from the lack of discursive unity on any given issue opens up the social field by sponsoring the development of "reverse discourses" that challenge the "official" dominant ideology. For Weedon, the decentering and multiplicity of the subject produces not merely a degenerated subject, but also spaces for resistance that are created by the distance between various subject positions.15 By stressing "disidentification" as the mobilizing force of identity politics, this reworked approach draws from the Marxist notion that the experience of social contradiction creates a certain degree of alienation from dominant ideology, and from the feminist notion that this is not a contradiction that pushes the subject "outside" of dominant society, but rather an internal contradiction. This approach suggests that the disjunctive experiences of subjects can inspire attempts to redefine cultural meanings and values, and it draws upon Althusser's argument that ideology forms subject positions through a process of "interpellation" or "hailing" while rejecting the scientific strain in Althusser that remains committed to stepping wholly outside of ideology.16 In Bodies That Matter, for example, Judith Butler refers to the gap (of misrecognition) that exists between the interpellative message and the subject it hails, taking issue with Althusser 28

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only.to the extent that he does not consider the range of disobedience that such an interpellating law might produce (4, 8, 122). In Discerning the Subject, Paul Smith similarly suggests that resistance comes at the point where ideological interpellations "fail" to produce a subject or form a subject position and produce instead a contradiction or set of contradictions. These contradictions, he argues, arise from "gaps in the agent's experience of the interpellative message" and contribute to the failure of official discourses to fully account for one's lived experience (39). From earlier standpoint approaches we can also recognize the need for some point of reference from which to evaluate existing conditions and from which to orient our actions. In trying to conceive of this point of reference, however, it is not necessary to retain the emphasis on subjective unity and absolute removal from existing conditions that defined earlier attempts. In focusing on how the gap between ideology and the subject produces possibilities for resistance, we still retain the Utopian impulse to "get outside" of dominant discourse. As Judith Butler argues, however, this is not the traditional Utopian outside: "There is," Butler states, "an 'outside' to what is constructed by discourse, but not an absolute 'outside,' an ontological thereness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of discourse" (1993: 8). For Butler, this constitutive constraint does not foreclose the possibility of agency; rather, it locates agency in a "reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanent to power, and not a relation of external opposition to power" (1993: 15). Although the individual agent remains the location from which resistance is launched, as Paul Smith points out, it is not necessary to possess a sense of unified, coherent subjectivity in order to possess agency: possibilities for resistance arise instead from the contradictions and disturbances among the various subject positions maintained by any individual. Since the principle of agency is founded on the disturbance of selfcertitude, it actually exists in conflict with the logic of unification (Smith, 78, 156). At the same time that this notion of a "multiple identity" suggests the spatial paradox of occupying incompatible or conflicting subject positions simultaneously, the possibility of agency exists in the perception of the distance between contradictory subject positions. The "distance" that permits critique is not a stable, 29

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Utopian distance from ideology, but rather an internal distance between the various positions that the subject is called upon to occupy, which can defamiliarize dominant norms and create opportunities for agency. This conception of our position as subjects understands that, to critique society or to imagine alternatives, we do not have to exist absolutely outside of dominant constructions; we just have to be not absolutely reconciled to them.17 In spite of the value of this reworked standpoint approach, it does not escape the impulse to reconstitute a variation of traditional Utopian logic relative to the subject. One danger is the temptation to capitalize on the privileging of terms such as disjuncture and contradiction within postmodern discourse, as a. means of reconstituting revolutionary identity. As I have pointed out, many of the strategies associated with postmodernism are already implied in radical feminism's critique of the structure of gender. There is a distinction, nevertheless, between feminism's sympathetic relation to certain "postmodern" strategies and practices (deconstructing dominant norms) and the way that some contemporary critics have attempted to forge a vanguard identity out of women's association with a set of postmodern "effects" (disruption as such). Whatever else postmodernism may offer women, it does not mark their fall from the position of a unified, effective agent lamented by Jameson. It is not surprising, then, that feminist attempts to capitalize on the loss of subjective coherence announced by postmodernism have occasionally developed into the claim that women are somehow "essentially" postmodern, by virtue of the fact that they have always possessed a problematic relation to unified subjectivity. This argument suggests that, since women are already excluded from the category of the transcendent subject, there is something about women or about their historically determined position within society that gives them a privileged position within postmodern culture. This argument is then translated into the claim that either the "revolutionary postmodern subject" is essentially feminine, or the feminine is essentially revolutionary by virtue of its postmodern nature. Julia Kristeva, for example, connects postmodernism's preoccupation with the breakdown of individuation and boundaries to "woman's" association with the failure to constitute individual boundaries: if postmodernism is about the break30

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down of individuation, Kristeva argues, then women's time has come, because they have been embodying that threat all along. Kristeva goes on to imagine a female "counter-society" where "jouissance" can take refuge—"an a-topia, a place outside the law, Utopia's floodgate" (1986: 202). In "Le Rire de la Meduse," Helene Cixous similarly argues that, because women exist uneasily within the symbolic order, they possess the potential to escape the totalizing logic of that order and to discover a transformed existence and language that is immanent to their association with excess and multiplicity.18 Other critics have translated an association between the postmodern breakdown of boundaries and women's alleged failure to constitute subjective boundaries into the claim that women have a privileged relation to the project of creating alternative conceptions of selfhood that do not rely on the creation of boundaries and therefore on the subjection of others.19 Most recently, strains of queer theory have translated the perception that lesbian identity is unnatural and therefore disruptive to heterosexual norms into the claim that the lesbian identity represents disruption as such.20 This strategy resurrects under a postmodern banner qualities traditionally associated with women or other marginalized groups, in an attempt to rejuvenate these qualities and to put forward what is often implicitly represented as a vanguard identity that is at once essentially postmodern and essentially feminine, or lesbian. The feminist version of this strategy combines those aspects of psychoanalytic and cultural feminism that emphasize women's relational and nurturing qualities and then celebrates these qualities as a kind of postmodern consciousness, avant la lettre. Here, postmodernism is enlisted to present a vanguard version of the "female nature/different voice" theory, a cultural feminism in postmodern drag. The basic project of cultural feminism—to positively revalue qualities traditionally associated with women—remains the same. The basic problem remains the same as well: to enlist postmodernism's privileging of margin over center in order to construct the margin as a Utopia into which subjects may escape or from which they may launch resistance still risks consolidating a group's position on the margins of social power. Jameson's statement that we have become "bereft of spatial co31

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ordinates" from which to orient ourselves politically is belied by the extent to which contemporary identity politics continues to be very much about borders: deconstructing borders, crossing borders, existing on borders. Jameson's sense that we are hopelessly spatially "disoriented" comes from his understanding of spatial orientation only in terms of a dichotomy between existence inside and outside of dominant culture. Reconceiving this axis as the space between discourses or subject positions and not as an absolute space outside of culture requires that we understand both positive identity and critical distance as coming from the borders that exist within and between cultures and identities. Another problem arises, however, in the impulse to generalize one particular way in which disturbances in identity are manifested and deployed, and to present it as a representative strategy for all marginalized groups. Against the Utopian impulse to remove lesbian identity from the dominant, queer theory argues for an approach that plays upon the designation of lesbians and gay men as "unnatural," and that deploys this designation in an effort to "contaminate" heterosexuality and challenge the naturalization of gender. Queer theory's argument rests on the assumption that, in dramatizing their own "failure" to become proper women or men, queers can throw the ontological validity of the entire category of gender into question. In this sense, the agenda approaches the radical feminist goal of annihilating gender, but seeks to do so from within, through a practice of hyperbolic parody and rearticulation that, in Butler's words, "works the weakness in the norm." To the extent that it may work, the effort by queer theory to problematize boundaries between identities and to uncover how these identities are implicated in one another suggests a strategy for challenging the exclusions that these boundaries create.21 Several queer theorists have also argued that their strategy for denaturalizing gendered identity can provide a paradigm for breaking down the boundaries upon which racism is founded.22 In part, the argument that homosexuality provides an opportunity to reconceive both the sexual and the racial stems from the sense that sexuality entwines us with others and therefore creates affiliations across different cultures.23 Primarily, however, the argument stems from the assumption that insinuating the unnaturalness of queer identity into hetero32

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sexuality might provide a model for challenging a racist ontology founded on distinguishing pure from impure. Queer theory's strategy of deploying a highly abstracted psychoanalytic discourse against itself is a reflection of the extent to which gay and lesbian identity has been constructed in and through this discourse: as an important site of gay and lesbian oppression, this discourse presents itself as worthy of ironic undercutting and deconstruction.The particularity of this strategy, however, cannot necessarily be translated in a way that can accommodate how members of another group ground their sense of place and resistance within a different set of historical and cultural conditions. Queer theory's strategy seems less appropriate to, for example, African-American identity, given the way in which the category of race has been constructed and upheld in the United States. While the denigration of despised sexuality is rooted primarily (although by no means exclusively) in the cultural-valuation structure of society, denigration of and discrimination against African-Americans is more evenly distributed across both the cultural-valuation structure and the political economy.24 In other words, although a deconstructive logic can and ought to be deployed against the category of race to repudiate the notion of a "racial essence," deconstructing race as a fiction remains a precarious strategy when this category continues to be deployed materially within the political economy to uphold a racial division of labor and to maintain African-Americans as a political-economic caste. In The New Historicism, Brook Thomas suggests that it is possible for marginalized groups to subscribe to narratives of self-assertion and positive identity without being either ironic or naively outdated, because "their temporal logic is not identical to that of white, middleclass males for whom such narratives are worthy of ironic undercutting or deconstruction" (58, emphasis added). Depending on how it is deployed, the effort to construct a strategic positive identity at a certain point in a group's history or in relation to a certain set of unequal power relations can represent effective resistance without being naively Utopian. Returning again to the case of Anglo-American feminism, I suggest that, to the extent that the revaluation of characteristics such as nurturance, empathy, and care was done with the recognition that these qualities were both socially constructed and 33

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only selectively applied to women, the effort proved to be politically evocative. This strategy represented an important step toward achieving the recognition that so-called female qualities, which were associated with women and therefore devalued, were not only legitimate but necessary to an alienated society that had based its public and political interactions solely on an ethics founded on rationality and the domination of nature. Only after these qualities were abstracted from their social and historical context and into a stable opposition between a degraded "male" nature and an idealized "female" nature did this strategy contribute to reinforcing limiting stereotypes of femininity and consolidate women's position on the margins of society. Just as the appropriate strategies for resistance cannot be separated from a group's temporal logic, so the political signification of the spatial paradox of experiencing a social contradiction or "discursive disjuncture" cannot be disconnected from the contemporary position of a group's identity. The political significance of borders within and between subjectivities—whether we attack or defend them, whether we understand them to be discursive or cultural— must be interpreted with attention to the interaction between the temporal axis that represents a group's historical movement and the spatial axis that represents its contemporary position relative to power, dominant discourses, and dominant cultural practices. I have suggested that those populations that have been at odds with or excluded from dominant values and dominant representations of subjectivity can find possibilities within a model that recognizes the distance between subjective identifications and that understands critical consciousness to develop through the comparison of one's subjective positions across discourses and cultures. While it resists the impulse to fall into a nostalgia for some older concept of the unified subject, this strategy also challenges the argument that the category of the subject has disappeared altogether and provides opportunities for marginalized subjects to create spaces for both resistance and the construction of positive identities. Textual Locales: Utopia and Ideology in Literature Critics' interpretations of literature's relation to society in many ways parallel their interpretations of the subject's relation to society. In 34

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their interpretation of literature, for example, Marxist cultural theorists, bring their materialist approach against the traditional Western notion that art, literature, and philosophy exist in a transcendent realm separate from material necessity and relations of dominations. This notion, they argue, encourages the belief that an escape into art or philosophy can compensate for the experience of material deprivation, and is therefore implicated in a philosophy of liberal humanism that tries to reconcile people with the existing order by pointing to an order that transcends it. Herbert Marcuse writes that this institution of a fixed division between an outer world of suffering and an inner world of harmony encourages escape into this aesthetic realm and thus participates in an apology for the outer world's remaining as it is: "The aesthetic form responds to the misery of the isolated bourgeois individuals by celebrating universal humanity, to physical deprivation by exalting the beauty of the soul, to external servitude by elevating the value of inner freedom" (1972: 92). Ernst Bloch similarly associates the celebration of unity in works of art with a false and premature harmonization that reduces the work to mere illusion and leads to a temptation for satisfied contemplation (1988: 148). To the extent that art is seen as an ideological "affirmation" that reflects the illusions of society and participates in relations of social domination, then, Marxist cultural critics approach the literary object with a hermeneutics of suspicion. In spite of their recognition that art is immanent to and implicated in relations of domination, Marxist cultural theorists have continued to look for something within art that negates or exists in contradiction to the ideological in society—in other words, for the presence of an authentic Utopian moment in art. Approaches that look for a negating function in literature attempt to identify ways in which the organization and content of literary texts either anticipate relations free of domination or reflect aesthetically, through their harmonious organization, a more ideal order. Art as negation is understood to be, if not entirely free from ideology, at least primarily relevant to the extent that it expresses or points to some alternative order. In attempting to locate this "utopian" moment in literature while still acknowledging the affirmative character of art, Herbert Marcuse 35

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suggests that the idealist separation of art from material conditions, while it participates in the justification of existing conditions, also carries with it an implicit critique of those conditions. "Art," writes Marcuse, "in its very structure, evoke[s] the words, the images, the music of another reality, of another order repelled by the existing one and yet alive in memory and anticipation, alive in what happens to men and women, and in their rebellion against it" (1972: 92). If the removal of art to a separate harmonious realm is compensatory in the bad sense, Marcuse concludes, its separate harmony also implicitly suggests that, by comparison, society is imperfect. In his analysis of Marcuse, John Brenkman observes that this conclusion attaches art's Utopian power to the sharp contrast created between one's affective experience of the harmony and unity in art and one's experience of the disharmony and conflict in everyday social relations; in short, the individual experiences a contradiction between unified text and divided reality, and thus sees society's divided reality as imperfect in comparison (106). Brenkman further points out that, although Marcuses "aesthetic experience" engenders a condemnation on the affective level that mirrors critical theory's condemnation of society on the cognitive level, art remains significant only for its status as an illusion, and "its value lies in an aesthetic sublimation of reality rather than a critical reflection upon it; its power is affective, not cognitive (107). For Marcuse, then, art remains sharply distinguished from reality, and its ability to critique existing conditions derives wholly from art's formal autonomy or "distance" from material conditions. At the same time, Marcuses undifferentiated valuation of "harmony" in literary form recalls Jameson's claim that instances of social collectivity, whatever their form or context, point us to a better order. For Theodor Adorno, art similarly contains within it a tension between the ideological and the authentic; it represents both an expression of affirmative culture in the negative, ideological sense, and an expression of what Adorno calls the "ineffable affirmative"—a figuration of "the dawn of a non-existent" (1984: 332). Like Marcuse, Adorno believes that the Utopian in art is expressed indirectly through aesthetic form (in, for example, the way modernism's liberation of form acts a "cipher" for the liberation of society) rather than 36

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directly through its content (1984: 17, 361). Adorno argues that the Utopian in art is manifested, as negation, in the formal elements of the work of art that resist being integrated into the world and therefore exist in opposition to existing reality (1984: 13, 67, 362). Adorno's argument that Utopia cannot be made concrete in the content of a book grows out of his sense that society is so infused with ideology that the valid, anticipatory elements in a work of art can only appear indirectly, through formal figuration. Adorno thus defines the "committed" literature of Brecht and Sartre, whose content intervenes in and critiques society through direct protest, as too easily co-optable because it does not transcend society or the narrow limits of subjectivity (1984: 343, 349). Adorno also admits, however, that while art's aesthetic autonomy gives it freedom from social convention and control, this freedom is paid for by severing art's relation to society. Adorno concludes that there exists a tension within art between its desire to remain autonomous (unreconciled and thus secluded from the world) and its desire to communicate with the world (1974: 65; 1984: 7). More accurately, however, this tension exists between Adorno's desire to identify the Utopian with formal qualities that negate society (in order to make it less easily co-opted) and his desire to maintain a sense of art's active relation to society. In correlating the Utopian with the negation of society, Adorno is faced with the familiar paradox that characterizes the relation between Utopia and critique in social theory: the extent to which art escapes co-optation by society is precisely the extent to which art loses its relation to society. Like Marcuse and Adorno, Ernst Bloch believes that works of art are part ideology and part authentic Utopia. Instead of searching for formal ways in which art negates society, however, Bloch makes the notion of Utopia concrete by arguing that the experiences of freedom are embedded in the wishes, daydreams, and myths expressed by a society. For Bloch, the Utopian in art is not merely that which negates society, nor does it derive from any pregiven telos of the historical process; rather, it derives from a process of political struggle that attaches new values to concepts such as justice, freedom, and happiness (Brenkman, 105). Bloch's conception of concrete Utopia reconnects literature with existing conditions by associating the 37

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Utopian content in works of art with the Utopian content in society. Because he embeds the Utopian in literature within society, however, Bloch faces Mannheim's problem of how to identify what is legitimately Utopian and not merely ideological affirmation. Like Mannheim, Bloch finds his solution by distinguishing the Utopian and the ideological in a work via their respective positions and function relative to the values of society: "The ideology in a great work," he writes, "reflects and justifies its times, the Utopia in it rips open the times, brings them to an end" (1988: 39). The role of the critic, then, is to strip away the false and ideological part of a work (the "widow display dreams" of capitalism) and uncover its authentic latent Utopian content. Once Bloch views Utopian goals as immanent and changing relative to the values of any given age, however, his conception of the role of the critic is faced with the same relativism that threatens Mannheim's ability to distinguish authentic from inauthentic Utopian content. Bloch compensates by arguing that, although the world remains "unfinished," the Utopian in past works remains indelible and will increasingly reveal itself as it becomes increasingly stripped of its past ideology (1988: 44, 6). In this way, Bloch ahistoricizes the Utopian content in art by evaluating it against a set of "basic human values" that endure across any human order. John Brenkman observes that in this way Bloch is driven to sever the Utopian from existing conditions and to see the valid meanings of culture (the Utopian kernels) as an essential and separated stratum of a society, part of a "semantic storehouse" that preserves itself intact across historical periods and epochs (105). In an effort to retrieve the Utopian in literature, all of these approaches end up disconnecting literature from existing conditions. The alternative approach does not attempt to rescue the Utopian in art from its affirmative, ideological function through a back door retreat into ahistoricism or timeless formalism. Instead, it focuses on the part of art that expresses dominant ideology and identifies the value of art with how its form lays bare the ideological in society. From this perspective, art provides the vehicle to expose ideology because it "creates distantiations which allow us to 'see' the gaps and fissures, the points of stress and incoherence, inside the dominant ideology" (Gallagher, 43).25 Instead of attempting to uncover the 38

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Utopian in art, the critic approaches art with a hermeneutics of suspicion that exposes how the harmony of the work represents false ideological solutions through which art mediates or resolves social contradiction. Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious is possibly the bestdeveloped example of the analysis of literature as ideological mediation. Jameson founds his mode of analysis on the proposition that "the aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal "solutions" to unresolvable social contradictions (79). Uncovering this process of formal resolution, Jameson argues, proceeds by uncovering the "antinomies" within the text—the "logical scandals" or conceptual "double binds" that reflect the absent subtext of a social contradiction. Since, according to Jameson, an antinomy is only accessible through an analysis of the productive practices through which the narrative attempts to neutralize and repress the underlying social contradiction, the role of the critic is to project backwards from the resolution provided by the text in order to discover the historical contradiction that this resolution manages or neutralizes. For Jameson, then, "the appropriate object of study emerges only when the appearance of formal unification is unmasked as a failure or an ideological mirage" (1981: 56). From Jameson's perspective, the correct manner in which a text should be read is thus essentially antagonistic to the goal of the narrative: the narrative attempts to suppress its productive practices, and the goal of the critic is to uncover these practices. The problem with an approach to literature that identifies critical practice solely with the process of projecting backwards to the contradiction that the text resolves lies in the fact that it tends to presuppose a single relation between the textual object and society. Because the project is one of exposure, this approach requires a "straight man" to deconstruct, and this requirement leads the critic to privilege books that express a dominant point of view. The only possible "subversive" act becomes that of the critic in "restoring" the oppositional voice that the hegemonic text has effaced through reappropriation, neutralization, and co-optation. Although at one point Jame39

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son makes an undifferentiated reference to black, ethnic, female, and gay cultural production, he immediately shifts his focus to their "dialogic reappropriation" by "hegemonic forms" and then argues that "only an ultimate rewriting of these [oppositional] utterances . . . restores them to their proper place in the dialogical system of the social classes" (1981: 86). This proper place, it turns out, is that of "'second degree' critical philosophies—philosophies that reconfirm the status of the concept of totality by their very reaction against it" (53). Texts that attempt to launch a critique of society are thus condemned to occupy the same place relative to the dominant order that the "subversive" subtext of a dominant literary work has to the work itself: they are accessible only through consideration of how they have already been co-opted by dominant discourse. Jameson defends his own decision to analyze canonical texts by reasoning that most "preserved" texts tend to be expressions of the dominant order, but in fact he participates in this selective preservation by developing a mode of analysis that requires expressions of the dominant order as its object.26 Jameson's interpretive priority thus leads to an absence of interpretive strategies for literature written from a marginalized point of view, except to claim that their narrative form merely reconfirms the existing order. When literary artifacts are viewed as wholly co-opted by dominant discourse, the only subversive act remaining is that of the critic. In a theory of literature as merely an affirmation of dominant ideology, then, the oppositional critic thoroughly replaces the oppositional text, which gets dismissed as ineffective and effaced by the critic's commitment to exposing dominant texts. Because Utopian literature explicitly thematizes a set of wishes and dreams in its construction of an imaginary alternative society, cultural critics have often dismissed it as an overly concretized version of the Utopian impulse. Nevertheless, like all works of literature, Utopian literature is characterized by a set of productive practices that combine to create its unique form. Whenever it has been analyzed in terms of these productive practices, Utopian literature has been associated with one or the other of the two impulses expressing literature's relation to society that I have discussed. One critical approach attempts to identify an anticipatory impulse in Utopian literature's emphasis on harmony and resolution 40

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of contradiction, arguing that this resolution provides a conceptual figuration for something beyond existing conditions. Louis Marin, for example, argues that the historical development of Utopian narrative might be viewed as a coded expression of socialist goals, a literary accomplishment that "fills up a site historically and theoretically unoccupied at the time when it was expressed, the site of the dialectical resolution of an historical contradiction" (1978: 263).27 Having claimed that Utopian literature functions as a conceptual figuration of the theoretical discourse of historical materialism, Marin then argues that Marxist theorists are merely providing Utopian literature with its proper concept by translating the "pure representation" of Utopian literature into a socialist theoretical framework that transcends the ideology of the individual literary work. In this sense, literary Utopias are useful to the extent that they enact figurally what is not yet historically possible through existing material conditions, and Utopian literature is positive because its harmony anticipates the harmony of the ideal socialist collective. The alternative approach views the harmony and totality that define the form of traditional Utopian literature as an expression of "affirmative culture," a premature or ideological act of harmonization that functions as an apology for existing conditions. From this perspective, Utopia's harmony does not express the Utopian anticipation of some better society, but rather expresses the ideological, illusory resolution of the contradictions in this society. The value of Utopian literature is thus not in the way it points to an alternative reality, but in the way that brings us back to the contradictions within existing society. Not surprisingly, Fredric Jameson frequently has used Utopian literature as his object of analysis; in its definitional effort to banish social contradictions by projecting or diffusing them, traditional Utopian literature provides an example par excellence of the kind of resolutory agenda that Jameson associates with the ideological function of all literature. The problem with this second approach lies again in the way that it disconnects Utopian literature from the anticipatory and critical poles altogether, and fails to imagine it as anything other than the enactment of ideological resolution. The reason that the form of Utopian literature in particular can be considered separately from its social context is connected to a more 41

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general categorical separation between literature and society characterizing analyses of the Utopian and ideological in literature: literature is evaluated in terms of how it is either disconnected from or implicated in social relations, how it expresses either the negation or the affirmation of existing society. Because interpretations of Utopian literature abstract it away from its social context, the formal act of resolution that defines traditional Utopian narrative can be judged, in and of itself, to be either anticipatory or ideological. The "literature as anticipatory" approach retains the Utopian impulse, but with the result of either abstracting literature from its social context by locating the Utopian in formal characteristics, or ahistoricizing its Utopian content in order to construct a normative basis from which to judge authentic Utopian content. The "literature as ideological" approach, while it retains a connection between literature and society, does so at the expense of literature's ability to do anything but reflect the ideological. Founded upon a homology between a figure of the unified individual body and the unified collective body, the traditional form of Utopian literature attempts to suppress its productive practices in order to uphold the illusion that it is describing the ideal society as harmonious and stable space {Maim 1984: 54). Repressing individual agency and instituting strict borders between Utopia and dystopia, Utopian narrative attempts to "freeze" the ideal society in time and remove it from existing conditions, in order to preclude the possibility of any destabilizing transformation's occurring within the Utopian space. Movement within and across Utopia's borders is thus antithetical to the Utopian narrative structure as such, and any hint of it threatens to destroy the harmony of the ideal space and to disqualify the Utopia as Utopia. Unlike traditional Utopias, contemporary feminist "critical Utopias" typically introduce conflict and transgression into the Utopian space, and display a heightened emphasis on individual agency that is manifested in the protagonists' movement both within and across Utopia's border. In reference to this formal revolution, Jean Pfaelzer asks, "To what degree is the retreat from a totalized or absolute representation of the future a democratizing and anti-patriarchal a c t . . . and to what degree does it represent our 'incapacity to imagine Utopia?" (193). Pfaelzer's reservation about the 42

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"new Utopias" drives from her perception that these Utopias have ceased to be blueprints for a transformed society (196). In response to Jameson's argument that the Utopian literary text has come to be merely a self-conscious reflection on the conditions of its own possibility, Pfaelzer asks whether, in subverting the Utopian form in literature, we still are reading about history, or whether we have been reduced merely to reading about the project of Utopian narration (195). The choice between reading about history and reading about narration is only absolute, however, if one considers the literary text separately from its historical context. While Pfaelzer is right to suggest that a purely formal analysis of narrative disconnects it from history, there is a way to understand an analysis of the processes of narration and a reflection upon historical conditions as not distinct from one another. The alternative is to understand narrative form as interacting with social context to produce a political effect. This alternative combines an analysis of problems and resolutions on the level of form with the New Historicist recognition that literature is part of a network of material practices and social discourses—practices and discourses that are not monologic in their cause or effects. To recognize that the literary text is embedded in the discourses and material practices of society is to recognize that a complex interaction of form, content, and social context determines the political effect of a work of literature. Against a literary criticism that institutes a categorical separation of literature from society, John Brenkman suggests that we understand the contradiction between freedom and unfreedom to exist not between art and society, but rather within the work of art (108). An approach based on this understanding picks up on Adorno's point that both legitimation of and resistance to domination exist simultaneously in the text, and that "the unresolved antagonisms of society reappear in art in the guise of immanent problems of artistic form" (1984: 8). This approach also benefits from Jameson's analysis of literary form in terms of how it "manages" social contradiction. At the same time, it does not understand specific aspects of literary form (harmony, fragmentation) to reflect the degree of art's autonomy from, or implication in, social conditions. Both Brenkman and Gerald Graff argue that we cannot assume that unifying or disjunc43

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tive dimensions of a work mark either resistance to or implication in oppressive social conditions; such judgments must be made by looking at how the expression of an idea or a given formal arrangement operates at the particular social conjuncture in which it is written and received (Brenkman, 108; Graff, 174). Just as the nature and political effect of social antagonisms cannot be abstracted into a particular formal organization of the text, neither can the manner in which the text resists relations of domination. Part of the project of this book is to look at how the Utopian form in literature expresses, through conceptual figuration, the logic that informs discourses of social transformations. In subsequent chapters, I examine in detail how contemporary feminist adaptations of the Utopian form in literature correspond to an increasing perception that the critical and the Utopian are imbricated in one another, and an increasing sense that both the subject and the Utopian impulse are embedded within the process of history. While I am analyzing a change to the Utopian form in literature in the context of contemporary and largely feminist reconceptualizations of the relation between subject and society, I am not suggesting a neat homology between subjective point of view and narrative form. Instead, I argue that what I have defined as "utopian" logic (the desire for purity and the fear of social contamination; the construction of borders; the construction of a representative subject) signifies differently depending upon the group on behalf of which it is deployed or questioned. This means that the political efifects (neutralization or exposure of social contradiction, expression of social antagonism) of both the traditional Utopian form and contemporary revisions of that form vary in relation to both the point of view that it expresses and the specific ways that the discourses circulating within the text engage with existing conditions. Although I am interested in looking at how changes in the Utopian form correspond to changes and crises in deploying the Utopian impulse in social discourses, I am also making a case for examining Utopian literature as literature, and not as merely conceptual figurations for an ideal society or as social theory that merely uses the literary form as a vehicle for a didactic expression of ideas. Literary narratives both express and resist dominant ideology; an analysis of how they do this must consider their literary form in rela44

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tion to the material social discourses that circulate within and around them. To identify as "authentic" or "inauthentic" Utopian representations possessing a particular formal structuring of the social space or expressing a particular narrative practice is to ignore the different relations that imaginary social spaces have to the dominant order. To extrapolate and universalize one mode of interpretation from a particular formal structure is on the one hand to privilege those texts that lend themselves to this mode of interpretation, and on the other hand to ignore the possibility that texts possessing the same form but expressing a different point of view do not perform the same ideological work. This means recognizing that the political effect of a particular literary form is tied to the subject positions that the social discourses circulating within the work express: just as strategies within identity politics cannot be abstracted to groups with different subjective histories, discursive constructions, and "temporal logics," so the textual strategies employed by works of literature in general, and Utopian literature in particular, cannot be abstracted from the subjective point of view that they express. In arguing that narrative form cannot be divorced from the implied subject position expressed in Utopian representations, I am arguing for a more situated definition of the relation between narrative form and ideology, and more generally for a reconsideration of how the Utopian impulse functions within all narratives that concern themselves with the process of social transformation.

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2 Turning Inward: Strategies of Containment and Subjective/Collective Boundaries in Traditional Utopian Literature

Depending upon the point of view from which the ideal collective is conceived, the political effect of the narrative practices that support the traditional form of Utopian literature can vary dramatically. In the first part of this chapter, I examine how Utopian logic operates in traditional works of Utopian literature that express a more or less socialist agenda; in the second part, I explore a novel in which this traditional Utopian literary form has been adapted to reflect and support a contemporary feminist vision. My study of the Utopian literary tradition in this chapter is not intended to be exhaustive; my goal is to pick out certain generalizable tendencies that distinguish the traditional Utopian narrative from other genres. My focus is on the fact that, although crucial elements of the form remain the same (the emphasis on harmony, the strict division between authentic and inauthentic, the absorption of the individual into the collective and the suppression of agency), the different social contexts in which these formal elements operate produce a different set of political effects. More specifically, I analyze how these political effects reveal that traditional Utopian logic becomes problematic when it is deployed from a position of disempowerment. Since the relationship between individual and social body lies at the heart of my analysis of both Utopian logic and the logic of contemporary feminism, I concentrate on how the political function of the Utopian narrative is expressed in the relation between figures of subjectivity and images of the social body. My comparison of a contemporary feminist Utopia to traditional 47

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socialist-oriented Utopias is sympathetic to Donna Haraway's observation that "to be constituted by another's desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the laborer from his product" (1990:201). In traditional socialist Utopia, abstracting the individual body as a figure for the collective, although it entails several undesirable political effects, does not represent an outright contradiction. In feminist Utopias, however, using women's bodies as a figure for the ideal women's collective confronts the problem that women's bodies are a primary site of gender oppression and have been represented by dominant discourse as the site of particularity and difference— not abstract universality. It is thus impossible, as well as politically undesirable, to make the female body stand as a figure for an ideal social collective in the traditional way that this homology has operated. In this chapter, I critique not only elements of Utopian logic within the socialist tradition, but also the choice made by radical feminists to adapt this logic in developing their strategies of resistance and the resulting tendency toward a more essentialist cultural feminism. Traditional Utopian narrative relies on a figure of subjectivity founded on exclusion and the projection of negative qualities onto an outside body, thus supporting dominating practices with the same logic through which it establishes its harmony and self-containment. I argue here that certain strains of radical feminism, in order to sustain this Utopian dichotomy between authentic and inauthentic, elected to adopt the position of "other" in this individual/other dichotomy and thus predicated feminist Utopia upon a logic that supports women's disempowerment. In critiquing how the use of traditional Utopian logic impaired feminist goals, I do not wish to dismiss the boldness of early radical feminism's analysis or the extent to which this analysis provided the foundation for our current understanding of gender relations and the nature of women's oppression. By critiquing some of their strategies in hindsight, I am not so much dismissing them as naive as I am attempting to come to an understanding of how they shed light on some of the double binds that face feminism today. The Sealed Pact: Utopia and the Hermeneutic of Unity In Thomas Mores Utopia, Utopian social space is founded on a figure of organic unity, on a conception of the individual body as har-

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monious and self-contained—free from contamination and protected by an absolute boundary between itself and its external environment. Mores Utopians begin by dividing the pleasures of the individual body into two classes: the first consists of the gross satisfactions that "fill the senses with immediate delight," and the second consists of "nothing more than the calm and harmonious state of the body" (59). In actual fact, however, these two classes of pleasure are mutually dependent: the pleasure of the senses derives from interactions between body and environment that "restore the weakened body with food" or "eliminate some excess in the body" and these interactions in turn sustain the body's equilibrium (59). Although the harmonious body thus depends upon a process of exchange between internal and external, the Utopians take great pains to emphasize the harmonious state itself over the interactive process of achieving it. Any activity involving the passage of waste or nourishment between the body and its external environment—although necessary for maintaining bodily equilibrium—uncovers the disquieting fact that this equilibrium is not absolutely self-contained and self-sufficient. As a result, the Utopians devalue the process of exchange between internal body and external environment that threatens to compromise the absolute integrity of the body. They stress the mere "use value" of these exchanges, which, they argue, are "not pleasant in themselves, but only as ways to withstand the insidious attacks of sickness"—to defend against external assault (60). What the Utopians truly desire, but are unable to achieve, is the fiction of absolute tranquility and self-sufficiency expressed by the figure of the absolutely self-contained body. To maintain the myth of the selfcontained body the Utopians repress the necessary interaction between the body and its external environment and consolidate a dichotomy between internal/good and external/bad. What is internal to the body comes to represent the locus of harmony; what is external to the body comes to represent a hostile and threatening space—the locus of sickness and contamination. Raphael, whose description of his visit to Utopia provides the narrative vehicle for More's critique of emergent capitalism, states that 49

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social evils... may be alleviated and their effects mitigated for a while, but so long as private property remains, there is no hope at all of effecting a cure and restoring society to good health. While you try to cure one part, you aggravate the disease in other parts. Suppressing one symptom causes another to break out, since you cannot give something to one man without taking it away from someone else. (32)

The conceit that Raphael elaborates in this paragraph simultaneously marks the moment in the text when the individual body becomes a figure for the social body and the moment when organic socialism is posited as the solution to societal ills. Raphael at once establishes private property as the primary social evil and presents a holistic model of Utopian society as the integration of parts within a unified whole. Thus the individual body becomes the proper figure for More's image of the Utopian social totality, which is defined as the absolute resolution of social conflict, a self-contained space free from ideological contamination and in which all social contradiction has been neutralized. Like the individual Utopian body, Utopian society aspires to being utterly self-contained: its inaugural moment is marked by King Utopus's act of severing the peninsula from the mainland to create an island. Also like the individual Utopian body, the apparently integrated and self-sufficient Utopian society depends upon a sustained interaction with its external environment. In Utopia, this interaction is particularly troubling because it threatens to expose the contradiction between Utopias implicit dependence upon a capitalist structure and its explicitly socialist ideology. At the same time that Raphael extols the socialist nature of Utopia and condemns capitalism, however, he also recounts how the Utopians maintain capital within Utopia and on the mainland in order to hire mercenaries (located on the mainland) to protect the border of Utopia from hostile incursion. As a result of this interaction, Utopians face the double contradiction of being a socialist country whose stability is guaranteed by a capitalist exchange, and also a tranquil country that engages in war. The Utopians attempt to resolve the presence of capital within their society by converting their gold into chamber pots and shackles, so that capital signifies within the Utopian space only in terms of 50

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its debased use value. The real danger to Utopia comes from its own relocated capital on the mainland, however, which not only threatens to expose an ideological contradiction within the protosocialist society, but also marks an exchange that exposes the permeability of Utopias boundaries. To resolve their internal contradiction and reestablish the integrity of their boundaries, the Utopians first externalize internal contradiction and construct it as contamination, and then seal themselves off from the threat that it poses. This process is activated when the Utopians create out of the mercenaries who protect their borders (personified in the Zapoletes, or "busy sellers") a devalued race whose role is to absorb Utopia's own internal contradiction, even as they keep its borders intact. Raphael describes the Zapoletes in the following manner: Because the Utopians give higher pay than anyone else, these people are ready to serve them against any enemy whatever. And the Utopians, who seek out the best possible men for proper uses, hire these, the worst possible men, for improper uses. When the situation requires, they thrust the Zapoletes into the positions of greatest danger by offering them immense rewards. Most of these volunteers never come back to collect their pay, but the Utopians faithfully pay off those who do survive, to encourage them to try it again. As for how many Zapoletes get killed, the Utopians never worry about that, for they think they would deserve very well of all mankind if they could exterminate from the face of the earth that entire disgusting and vicious race. (75)

Here, the ideal of the self-contained harmonious body requires that Utopia's ideological contradiction be converted into contamination, and then rejected from the social body and located in some external space. Once it is projected, however, that contamination confronts Utopia as the very external threat against which its society and its ideals must be protected. The act of projecting contradiction and defending its borders is thus a circular and self-fulfilling process that simultaneously relies upon and fosters the creation of a "devalued other" against which Utopia defines itself. This ideology of self-containment and of the division between 51

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self and other manifested in Utopia's social practices leads to what Anna Yeatman calls a "philosophy of mastery," in which the individual's freedom qua mastery is predicated on the existence of a whole host of quasi-individual actors to whom the task of representing the "other" term of the dichotomies may be delegated. Thus, if the patriarchal individual is to appear reasonable and impartial, there must be the other so placed as to represent nonreasonable and partial viewpoints or values. (288) Young s point is reflected in the way that More constructs his Utopia: his ideal society cannot exist as such without designating an external devalued space. The reiflcation of the dichotomy between internal (good) and external (bad) supports all of Utopia's colonizing practices; once the dichotomy has been instituted, the Utopians can justify all of their violent and imperialistic practices outside of Utopia by identifying the inhabitants of other countries as inferior. When the Utopians declare war, for example, they plant "secret agents" in the hostile country to foster suspicion and panic by promising rewards to those who will assassinate the king and his most powerful supporters (73). Robert Adams notes in an editorial comment that in associating these practices with his Utopians, More seems to have forgotten that these very same practices were condemned by Raphael in Book I as "examples of low craft in unscrupulous courtiers" (73). More is able to justify the very practices that Raphael critiques in Book I, however, precisely because these activities go on outside of the strict boundaries that separate Utopia from non-Utopia. Since the populations outside of Utopia are already radically devalued, different codes of behavior can operate outside of Utopia without affecting the ideological integrity of Utopia itself. To maintain equilibrium within their population, the Utopians also exchange people back and forth across its boundaries; when the population of Utopia becomes too large, people are sent from Utopia to the mainland and instructed to form a colony. The colonies do not exist for themselves, however, but rather as an undifferentiated "buffer zone" that stabilizes the population of Utopia. Indigenous

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peoples on the mainland are required to give up their own culture and assimilate into the Utopian culture; if they refuse, they are driven off or destroyed. The Utopians justify this practice by maintaining that if the indigenous people refuse to assimilate to the Utopian culture—which is by definition the best culture—then it must be because they are themselves inferior, idle, and wasteful, and therefore do not deserve to exist (44). Colonies of Utopia are expected to mirror Utopia socially and politically, and those who do not conform to the image of Utopia are destroyed or banished. The fact that the Utopians have no sense of the indigenous people's having a separate existence in their own right is directly connected to the fact that in order to maintain equilibrium and ideological purity, whatever is external to Utopia must exist merely as a "space" that neutralizes the internal contradictions and disequilibrium of Utopia. The formal resolution of Utopia's internal instability thus establishes the boundaries between internal and external that support a politics of imperialism, exploitation, and genocide. In Utopics: Spatial Play, Louis Marin points to the structure of Mores Utopia as proof that in the creation of culture something must always be repressed, and that this act of repression must always be mystified. Marin relates this act of violence to the way the Utopians have the indigenous people perform the labor that severs the peninsula from the mainland, and he argues that this forced labor contains the conquered's violence toward the conqueror and allows the vanquished people to channel their resentment into a violence aimed at the earth; the result is "civilization" (108). Marin's rhetoric implies that this violence, and its attendant repression, are the necessary accessories to the creation of culture. When Marin claims that their status as Utopian citizens is brought about by the masochism of the conquered people ("those defeated defeat themselves through work on their own soil and come upon their humanity in this selfreflexive violence), he elides the fact that this repression relies on the projection and externalization of negative and threatening impulses within the Utopian collectivity, which the collectivity then confronts as something radically alien (109). Marin's proposition that this violence is "self-reflexive" also elides the initial devaluation and colonization of the natives, and his proposition that Utopias inaugura53

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tion story represents the archetypal story for the creation of culture naturalizes a conception of culture as inherently dominating even as it effaces its own violent origins.1

The Concealed Eye: The Gaze, Spatialization, and Social Control According to Louis Marin and Fredric Jameson, to write Utopia is to project a rational model of the social totality onto a "metaphorical space" so that it may be visualized. According to Marin, this spatialization of the social totality permits the Utopian narrative to fulfil its designated telos, which is "to integrate the oppositions and contradictions [of society] into a non-conflicting whole" (1978: 265). Marin associates this Utopian tendency toward spatial representation with the will toward total knowledge, a will that is realized in "the omnipresent gaze of the viewer contemplating Utopia's harmonious spaces" (1984: 53). The openness of Utopia to an omnipresent gaze, however, reflects more than an impulse to reveal its harmony. An analysis of More's Utopia reveals that the act of spatialization also submits the citizens to a controlling gaze that guarantees the "harmony" of Utopia through a process of vigilant surveillance. Although the borders around Utopia protect it from external threats, the possibility that Utopia could become contaminated from within remains an anxiety throughout the text. As a result, the act of unfolding Utopia before the reader/viewer as a harmonious space is paralleled by an effort to ensure Utopia's social stability by keeping everything within the purview of a policing gaze. On a societal level, the vertical geographical organization within More's Utopian city allows for a surveilling gaze that "fixes" Utopia's stability. The capital city, Amaurat, is simultaneously the home of the prince, the seat of power and knowledge, and a space from which the entire rest of the island is visible. After describing the layout of the Utopian city of Amaurat, Raphael concludes: So you see there is no chance to loaf or kill time, no pretext for evading work; no taverns, or alehouses, or brothels; no chance for corruption; no hiding places; no spots for secret meetings. Because they live 54

Turning Inward in full view of all, they are bound to be either working at their usual trades, or enjoying leisure in a respectable way. Such a life style must necessarily result in plenty of life's good things, and since they share everything equally, it follows that no one can ever be reduced to poverty or forced to beg. (49) Mores allegiance to a hierarchical social structure with Amaurat at the top of both the geographical and the political space is based on a metaphor of the rational body, with the head (the prince) controlling and containing the body (the citizens of Utopia). 2 The policing gaze helps to ensure that citizens do not consult together on business outside of the senate or popular assembly—a practice that has been designated illegal. Ostensibly the ban on this practice guarantees the interests of democracy by ensuring that the prince and those in power do not conspire against the people. In reality, however, this interdiction contradicts Utopia's democratic structure, which requires that political representatives consult with the people outside of the popular assembly before they bring issues to the assembly (39). It is thus the people who are prevented from plotting together to overthrow the prince, while the prince, from whose position everything is "visible," remains secure. Just as the harmony of the city is guaranteed by laying it naked before the view of its ruling elites, so are individuals laid naked before a gaze that is intended to uncover their moral worth. In Utopia, the virtue of marriage partners is ascertained by exposing their naked bodies to a mutual gaze—a gaze that, at least as it is described by Raphael, progressively evolves into a vehicle through which a man guarantees the virtue of his prospective wife. Raphael explains: Whether she is a widow or a virgin, the bride-to-be is shown naked to the groom by a responsible and respectable matron; and, similarly, some respectable man presents the groom naked to his future bride. We laughed at this custom and called it absurd; but they were just as amazed at the folly of other nations. When men go to buy a colt, where they are risking only a little money, they are so suspicious that though he is almost bare they won't close the deal until the saddle and blanket have been taken off, lest there be a hidden sore under-

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was subordinated was unity, and the radial pattern seemed most conducive to this end" (161). They specifically connect this to a "natural and true" desire to imitate "man's form," because "the human figure was geometrically perfect and had an ideal harmony of parts" (164). In Utopianism, Krishan Kumar similarly argues that the Renaissance Utopia "pitted reason against the formless chaos of nature" by constructing a totally self-sufficient entity that contained within it the totality of human knowledge (14, 15). Kumar also associates the design of the Renaissance Utopian city with a fear of contamination, reproducing the logic of the design as follows: "The political and social institutions of men decay more rapidly than the cities they inhabit. . . . Might it not be possible to stave off corruption by the careful design of the physical environment?" (14). During the Renaissance, then, the ordered and hierarchical structuring of physical space fully emerges as the solution to social problems. We need not emphasize the similarity between these descriptions of the Utopian city and Foucault's description of Bentham's penitentiary panopticon in its strict form, where the inmate population finds itself subject to a permanent disciplinary gaze that contains delinquency. This panopticon, like More's and later Utopias, represents an architectural, hence spatial, solution to the problem of discipline whereby violence is replaced by unceasing observation as the prevailing disciplinary mode. The techniques of surveillance make power into a kind of "optical physics"—not the optics of spectacular punishment and the disciplining fear that it creates, but the optics of an omnipresent and vigilant gaze that aims to distinguish absolutely the criminal from the virtuous. Although Foucault identifies this new disciplinary mode with the beginning of the eighteenth century, already in More's Utopia there exists a space architecturally designed to produce an economy of visibility that guarantees the virtue of the Utopian citizens through the presence of a surveillant gaze. Foucault points out that discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways; . . . it must neutralize the effects

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Turning Inward of... agitations, revolts, spontaneous organizations, coalitions — anything that may establish horizontal conjunctions. (1977: 93) As a disciplinary adjunct, the gaze always turns out to be a gaze from "above" that consolidates the hierarchical separation of dominating from dominated. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault makes specific the connection between the normalizing intent of the gaze and the subordination of the individual: "It is this fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection" (187). The openness of Utopia to this gaze is an integral part of what defines Utopia as such, guaranteeing its internal harmony at the same time that it is opened up to the serene gaze of the reader/viewer. Like Bentham's panopticon, this disciplinary gaze performs the stabilizing function of "freezing" the Utopian space and precluding any possibility of transgression. The citizens live in full view of a centrally located gaze, and their virtue and their sin are also written on their bodies for all to see. From a Foucauldian perspective, "spatialization" loses the Utopian sense of opening up Utopia to the "harmonizing gaze of the reader/viewer" and becomes associated only with a "fixing" in space that defines and controls the individual in the interest of social stability.

The Sealed Body: Sacrifice of the Individual to the Social Space Fredric Jameson argues that, in traditional Utopian literature, the social structure typically becomes the main protagonist, so that "the category of Scene tends to capture and to appropriate the attributes of Agency and Act, making the 'hero' over into something like a registering apparatus for transformed states of being" (1981: 112). Jameson's analysis is accurate in the sense that, although a single character's accidental entry into the Utopian space typically provides the narrative vehicle through which Utopia is described, this movement does not disrupt the boundary between Utopia and dystopia, between space and action, nor does it reflect any genuine agency on the part of the visitor, who becomes part of the "registering apparatus" through which the harmony of Utopia is opened up to the gaze of the reader.

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Because Utopia is structured in Utopian novels as an ideally stable space, the goal is to banish all conflict and transgression by absorbing the will of the individual into the good of the collective. In More's Utopia the ideological integrity of ideal society rests on the figure of a well-balanced, integrated body; however, injury to the actual individual subject is permissible when it serves the social good. Although voluntary disruption of the body's equilibrium is frowned upon and More's Utopians insist that "no pleasure shall carry pain with it as a consequence," this rule is suspended when the integrity of the individual body comes up against the good of the social totality: They think it is crazy for a man to despise beauty of form, to impair his own strength, to grind his energy down to lethargy, to exhaust his body with fasts, to ruin his health, and to scorn natural delights, unless by doing so he can better serve the welfare of others or the public good. Then indeed he may expect a greater reward from God. (61) Although the figure of the harmonious body upholds the structural integrity of the social space, More's anxiety about bodily pleasure encourages him to view the actual body as expendable to the interest of social stability. This sacrifice of the individual to the social body suggests a relation between the actual individual body and the collective body that is one of competition rather than homology, a relation in which the individual body functions, like the colonies, as a "buffer zone" whose sacrifice secures the social equilibrium of the community. More's rational humanism is consistent with this rejection of the material body in favor of the mind, a rejection that replaces physical health with the consciousness of living a virtuous life as the highest good in Utopia (60). Pleasure becomes the sublimation of the individual to rationality and Christian virtue—the self-sacrifice of the body to the mind or to God. Abstracting the individual body into a figure for the social space thus has a double advantage. On the one hand, the unified body as figure allows More to characterize internal contradiction as contamination and to project it as external so that it threatens

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Utopia from the outside and establishes the boundaries that create Utopia as such. On the other hand, the body as abstract figure allows More to compensate for his anxiety about the actual body by repressing it in favor of the social collective. The policing gaze that guarantees the integrity of the collective is thus combined with the surveillance over the self and a disciplining impulse inspired by Mores rational humanism and Christian asceticism. The important continuity between these two dynamics lies in the fact that both are consistent with an ideology of mastery—mastery over that which threatens the integrity of the individual and social body from outside, and internal mastery over a potentially indulgent body. In later Utopias, mastery over the individual body/subject continues to play a role in guaranteeing social harmony. In Campanella's City of the Sun, for example, the origin of unhappiness—again private property—is associated with an individual excess that threatens the harmony of Utopia: They claim that property comes into existence when men have separate homes with their children and their wives. From this self-love is born; for in order to increase the wealth or dignity of his offspring or leave him heir to his goods, every man becomes publicly rapacious if he is strong and fearless, or avaricious, deceitful, and hypocritical if he is weak. When self-love is destroyed, only concern for the community remains. (39) Here, the negatively valued private property is identified with the subsequently negatively valued quality of self-love, and the necessary destruction of private property with the necessary destruction of individual selfhood. While the design of the community is based on the figure of the integrated body, the actual individual is in fundamental conflict with the community and must be subjected to it. In B. F. Skinner's Walden Two (1948), the movement away from a Utopia in which the subject is disciplined from without to the modern Foucauldian subject whose conformity to society originates internally has become complete. The conflict between individual wants and society's needs is finally resolved by conditioning individuals to

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desire a status and position that is consistent with the specific needs of society (164). Here, the conflict between individual freedom and absolute social stability is resolved by literally collapsing the individual's desires into the needs of society: individuals are conditioned from birth to desire only what is in the interest of the harmonious collective. While Skinner's society has restructured the social space to produce humane working conditions and economic equality, this positive restructuring is revealed to be a product of one man's vision, to which the individual psychology of society's members are then accommodated through rigorous socialization. Utopia thus becomes an emanation of one man's ego, the man who conceived of and built it. The qualities that this man conditions into his "subjects" consist of tolerance for pain, self-restraint, and self-control, all of which he connects to the basic human desires for health and for a minimum of unpleasantness. Here, Mores rational humanism is combined with a utilitarian rationalization of human emotion to the needs of a stable and unified collective existence. Skinner's protagonist explains: "Sorrow and hate—the high-voltage excitements of anger, fear and rage—are out of proportion with the needs of modern life, and they're wasteful and dangerous. . . . When a particular emotion is no longer a useful part of a behavior repertoire, we proceed to eliminate it" (92-93). Although in Walden Two the content of the social space is based upon "utopian" principles, the absolute sacrifice of individual will to the overriding interest of collective stability is perfectly consistent with the strictly hierarchical and totalitarian society envisioned by Orwell. Walden Two, the last major Utopia to be written before the advent of "critical Utopias" in the 1970s, is structurally identical to the dystopia that exists as its mirror image—1984. In sacrificing individuals absolutely to the collective, Skinner thus enacts what Jameson's Utopian resolution in The Political Unconscious suggests, and here the absolute valuation of collectivity over justice hints at an implicit alliance between Utopia and totalitarianism.

The Concealed Figure: Utopian Space and the Gendered Body By the nineteenth century, the beautiful body is cited frequently as visible proof of the harmony expressed by the Utopian space, while 61

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the labor that figures of the individual body perform in relation to the Utopian space is increasingly divided according to gender. In News from Nowhere (1890), for example, William Morris identifies the beauty of the physical space with human virtue: the architecture is not merely exquisitely beautiful; its arrangement also expresses desirable moral qualities. As the Utopian guest tours his new surroundings, he is led to exclaim, "This whole mass of architecture which we had come upon so suddenly from amidst the pleasant fields was not only exquisitely beautiful in itself, but it bore upon it the expression of such generosity and abundance of life that I was exhilarated to a pitch that I had never yet reached." (20) That the social space can "express" moral qualities through the beauty of its architecture is paralleled by the expression of moral qualities through the physical beauty of the citizens. Although the men are also described as attractive, it is the women who are repeatedly called upon as examples of the beauty and harmony of Utopia. The guest describes the tour he is given by Clara, the daughter of his host: We turned into the cloister and came to a richly moulded and carved doorway, where a very pretty dark-haired young girl gave us each a beautiful bunch of summer flowers, and we entered a hall much bigger than that of the Hammersmith Guest House, more elaborate in its architecture and perhaps more beautiful. I found it difficult to keep my eyes off the wall-pictures (for I thought it bad manners to stare at Clara all the time, though she was quite worth it). (85) For the guest, consideration of the pictures and consideration of Clara possess the same status; like the pictures and the architecture, Clara represents an artifact attesting to the beauty of Utopia. This association of women with works of art runs throughout News from Nowhere: Clara is compared to a book whose pictures are "most lovely," while her friend Ellen is favorably compared to a tapestry 62

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(129, 175). Like the harmonious body in Mores Utopia, female beauty is connected to the stability of the Utopia; however, female harmony possesses a positional relation to the Utopian space different from that of the abstract harmonious figure present in More and in Renaissance Utopias. Here female harmony exists as a stable reflection of the Utopian space rather than as a stable figure for the Utopian space, a physical part of Utopia or a pleasurable mirror that reflects the harmony of the social space and enhances men's enjoyment of life in Utopia. The identification of women's beauty as a mere reflection of the harmonious Utopian space in News from Nowhere points to the broader fact that women's issues are absorbed into the overriding concerns of traditional Utopias—private property and economic inequality. All ugliness, disease, and conflict are understood to be the negative result of private property and the worker's alienation from "his" labor. Once private property has been abolished and the worker is no longer alienated from his labor, then the social space (and women as one of its artifacts) becomes harmonious and beautiful. Just as Morris describes crime within the Utopian society as a "spasmodic disease" that justifies the isolation of transgressors from the community (70, 71), so does he describe idleness as the primary "disease" of preutopian London. By constructing idleness as a disease caused by capitalism, Morris can represent its containment and then its cure in Utopian London. Predictably, this former disease of idleness was reflected in the ugliness of the women: "these Idleness-stricken people . . . especially the women, got so ugly and produced such ugly children if their disease was not treated sharply, that the neighbours couldn't stand it" (33). Here, the women's movement of the nineteenth century becomes a "strange piece of baseless folly, the result, like all other follies of the period, of the hideous class tyranny which they obtained" (51). Once private property is abolished, the now healthy and comely women are free to fulfill what is defined as their "inherent maternal" instinct, unhampered by economic hardship (52). That women continue to exist as the objects of male desire is no more tellingly revealed than in Hammond's representation of women's work in the home:

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Don't you know that it is a great pleasure to a clever woman to manage a house skilfully, and to do it so that all the house-mates about her look pleased, and are grateful to her? And then, you know, everybody likes to be ordered about by a pretty woman: why, it is one of the pleasantest forms of flirtation. (51) Here, women's labor is relevant only to the extent that it enhances their status as aesthetic objects and provides a titillating distraction to men. In Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), women's beauty and happiness also signify only to the extent that they contribute to the happiness and well-being of the men. Bellamy explains: The men . . . so well appreciate that they owe to the beauty and grace of women the chief zest of their lives and their main incentive to effort, that they permit them to work at all only because it is fully understood that a certain regular requirement of labor, of a sort adapted to their powers, is well for body and mind. (263) Bellamy then writes that "women are a very happy race nowadays, as compared with what they ever were before in the world's history, and their power of giving happiness to men has of course increased in proportion" (265). Again, women's labor is valuable to the extent that it makes them attractive and thus fitting accessories to the Utopian space. Economic equality is again associated with the liberating of the maternal instinct: consideration of women's position in the nineteenth century makes the Utopians "realize how tremendous is the indictment of humanity against [the nineteenth century's] economic arrangements on account of women, and how vast a benefit to mankind was the revolution that gave free mothers to the race" (137). The worker's struggle is women's struggle, and though "men might regard economic equality with favor or disfavor, according to their economic positions . . . every woman, simply because she is a woman, was bound to be for it as soon as she got it through her head what it meant for half of the race" (143). Although in both of these novels economic equality relieves women of material burdens in the

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same way that it relieves men, it does not lead to any revaluation of female subjectivity. Women experience a material change in the sense that they are no longer the "property" of their husbands and they have the same material rights as male subjects; however, because the problem of female subjectivity has not been addressed, women remain merely objects within the Utopian space. A number of effects accrue around the Utopian emphasis on harmonious collectivity. Utopia constructs an external threatening space into which it projects its own internal contradiction and against which it must subsequently be defended. The spatialization of Utopia that opens it up to the harmonious viewer turns out to support a disciplinary gaze that controls desire as well as transgression. With the abolition of private property comes not only the desirable abolition of labor exploitation, but also the abolition of individual interests altogether. In Feminine Fictions, Patricia Waugh points out that "traditionally, Utopia has functioned as the absolute projection of desire which, in its rationalized stasis, is paradoxically the death of desire" (196). Because desire destabilizes by pointing beyond the immediate moment, traditional Utopias attempt to neutralize it by simultaneously disconnecting the ideal social space from the conditions of its creation and preempting the possibility of future transformation. The degree to which traditional Utopian narratives refuse to engage with the process of social transformation manifests itself in the extent to which they attempt to efface the very process of history from their social space. In Edward Bellamy's Equality (1897), for example, the transformation that initiated Utopia is described as a painless evolutionary process that spontaneously reached a standstill once Utopia was achieved. Because it involves conflict and change, the political process is by definition antithetical to Utopia: in William Morris's News from Nowhere, the Utopian citizen Hammond remarks that "it is only in periods of turmoil and strife that people care much about history," adding later that "we are very well off as to politics—because we have none"; in his preface, B. F. Skinner writes that "an important theme in Walden Two is that political action is to be avoided" (Morris, 25, 72; Skinner, xvi). Because the need for political process suggests an unresolved "remainder" incompatible with harmonious totality, and because historical process by definition sug-

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gests movement and change, both are banished in the interest of stable collectivity. This sublimation of individual needs and desires to the interests of harmonious collectivity is aided by the abstraction of the human subject into a figure for the ideal collective. Once it is sufficiently abstracted, the notion of collective harmony comes to override concerns about justice. Although it represents an implicit critique of existing society, the Utopian logic described here is ultimately the logic of resolution. In its definitional investment in keeping social contradiction from erupting and threatening the image of social totality, Utopia deploys strategies that are wholly consistent both with conservative attempts to maintain the status quo and with the logic of domination. When Utopia Speaks with a Different Voice In "Linguistic Utopias," Mary Louise Pratt argues that the relationality of social differentiation means that dominant and dominated groups are not comprehensible apart from one another (59). In the previous section, I discussed how, traditionally, the "purity" and selfcontainment of Utopian society is established by translating internal contradiction into contamination, and then projecting this contamination onto a devalued external group; this group then confronts Utopia as an external threat, consolidating the boundaries between internal (good) and external (bad). The act of exclusion that this process entails remains repressed in the text, but the Utopian community cannot define itself as such without the existence of this devalued "outside." The following questions thus arise in relation to Utopias written from the perspectives of groups whose aim is to challenge specific acts of domination and exclusion. What happens when a marginalized group attempts to construct its own Utopia from its position on the outside, while upholding the same strict boundary between purity and contamination and expressing the same allegiance to the notion of a unified and self-consistent collectivity? What issues present themselves through examination of a Utopian collectivity specifically organized around a collective experience of oppression? In part, the separatist strain in contemporary feminism grew out of the conviction that women required a space "within which to feel 66

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their strength," a refuge from patriarchal norms, and a forum from which to construct a collective base for action.3 In part, it grew out of the desire to establish the existence of a female culture whose positive qualities, such as communication and empathy, could provide an alternative to the principles of rationality and differentiation that traditionally had dominated the public sphere.4 While creating a space for political action was necessary, and positively revaluing "female" qualities was politically evocative so long as it resisted essentializing some kind of a female principle, a third rationale for creating and sustaining a separate women's space was politically misguided and naive from the beginning. According to this third logic, women were divided from each other solely by their relation to men, and the creation of a separate women's space would thus dissolve the differences among women. This separatist impulse drew from Utopian logic in the sense that it attempted to draw strict boundaries between women and men and to predicate women's authenticity on their nonparticipation in male violence and oppression. This separatist impulse similarly characterizes one category of literary feminist Utopian projections: the representation of an uncolonized Utopian women's community existing on the borders of patriarchy.5 Here, the interaction between ideology and literary form differs from traditional Utopian narrative primarily as a result of the different position that the female Utopian community occupies relative to the division between dominating and dominated. The central focus of the narrative becomes the revalued "other" space that is effaced in traditional Utopias; this revalued space asserts itself and, constructing its ideal collective on the outside, challenges the normative assumptions of dominant society. Although this kind of separatist Utopia exposes the impulse toward domination and violation that remains repressed in traditional Utopia, as well as the agents behind this act of domination, it retains traditional Utopia's allegiance to ideological purity and to strict boundaries between Utopia and nonutopia. The collective alliance of women in this type of novel continues to rely on the existence of a structure of oppression and the existence of an impulse toward mastery; however, now "male" society with its impulse toward domination becomes the locus of dystopia, and Utopia consists of those women who have no relation 67

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to violence or acts of domination except as innocent victims. Although the boundary between Utopia and dystopia contains the impulse toward mastery within the male-dominated space, Utopia continues to depend on the existence of a dominating impulse in order to establish its authenticity through the collective experience of marginality and victimization. This structure both perpetuates the myth of absolute difference that supports women's subordinated position and denies ways in which women can oppress other women by projecting the impulse to dominate onto men. Male Rape and Female Identity In Sally Gearhart's The Wanderground, Utopian space is protected in the traditional manner by strict boundaries that differentiate Utopia from a nonutopian space that is categorically devalued. In Gearhart's novel, the city no longer represents the rational Utopian society that it did in More and in later Renaissance Utopias; instead, it is a "mad, alien place" characterized by male domination and exploitation. The male-dominated city continues to occupy the center of the geographical space, while the female Utopia occupies the netherlands beyond the city borders, surrounding and containing the threat posed by the men who occupy the city. Evidence of permeability in the boundary between the two spaces produces an anxiety similar to that in traditional Utopias; permeability is perceived as potentially contaminating and therefore as disruptive to the unity and integrity of the Utopia. The primary motivation that drives Gearheart's narrative forward and gives the women their sense of unity lies in the attempt to maintain the integrity of the border around the city—a border that the women constitute by forming a connective web of consciousness that remains constantly alert to possible male incursions into the female collective. In traditional Utopian narrative, the ideal society's relation to the past is evidenced by the Utopian citizen's forgetfulness of contemporary practices and institutions, a loss of memory that occurs in direct proportion to the extent that these former practices conflict with the values and beliefs of Utopian society. This act of forgetting makes oppressive contemporary practices unintelligible to the Utopian citizen and thus constructs a boundary between contemporary 68

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society and Utopian society by emphasizing the unbridgeable conceptual distance between the two. Similarly forgotten, or elided, is the revolutionary upheaval that initiated the Utopian society Because the revolutionary act implicates the Utopians in violence, it is either completely repressed in the narrative or is removed from the Utopian society through a forgetfulness caused by a lengthy passage of time. The unity of the female society in The Wanderground, unlike that in traditional Utopias, is predicated upon acts of remembering. To maintain the collective identity that coheres their alliance with one another, the women keep the threat of incursion alive through the recollection of former acts of violation. The threat that Gearhart's women must protect against is represented literally and figurally as rape, and the novel's inaugural moment is an act of rape that generates rumors of a resurgence in male potency outside the city. This resurgence, which is variously referred to as a "chink in their defensive armor" and a "crack in the seal," simultaneously initiates the narrative describing the Hill Women's life and inspires their renewed commitment to each other in the interests of collective self-defense. Memory of the abuses and violations that the Hill Women had formerly suffered at the hands of men loom menacingly on their collective emotional horizon; any woman caught unprepared by another woman's powerful memory of victimization can find herself falling into "full retrosense," during which she "lives out" the other woman's rape as if she were actually experiencing it. Although the women's memories occasionally take the form of random and unwelcome intrusions into their consciousness, the process of remembering male abuses of women is neither casual nor random in the Hill Women's society; instead, it is rigorously institutionalized and functions as the primary means through which the women establish a communal identity. Through their frequent gatherings in the "Remember Rooms," the Hill Women pool their individual experiences and cultivate a sense of their collective history of oppression. In one episode, the women are presented with the story of Judy and Shirley, who escaped the city in the early days only to be hunted down by men in helicopters who captured Shirley and took her away. When, within this remember-narrative, Judy recalls her friend's capture, she reflects on how 69

Turning Inward for the rest of her life she would be forgetting Shirley's wide and screaming mouth, her near escape from the corner of the mesh only to fall and be covered again. Every hour of all her remaining days Judy knew she would be forgetting the hovering machine. . . . She would be forgetting always the lurch of the helicopter. . .. She would set herself rituals for forgetting it all, a litany of forgetting every morning, a keening of forgetting every night. (157) For the Hill Women, the attempt to "forget" only confirms the certainty of its failure, and Judy's rituals of forgetting only emphasize the impossibility of escaping the past. Although historical memory poses a threat to the women within the story, it does not function in the narrative as a subversive subtext that threatens the coherence of Utopia, as it does in the traditional Utopian society. The protective "shield" that each woman develops to guard herself from memories does not function in the same way that the phenomenon of "collective amnesia" functions in traditional Utopias; instead, this shield dramatizes the persistent threat posed to women by men, establishing the women's connectedness through shared vulnerability. Through the formalization of their memories in the Remember Rooms, the women simultaneously perform the political function of exposing the pervasive damage that male violence perpetrates on women and translate their former oppression into a mechanism for social consolidation. The organized, intensive accounts of violation given by the Hill Women expose the damage that acts of domination have perpetrated on women. At the same time, founding the coherence of the female Utopia on the division between dominator (male) and dominated (female) predicates the existence of Utopia on the persistence of this division. Although the "masculine" impulse to violate has been successfully contained, it remains definitive in establishing the absolute dichotomy between man as rapist and woman as victim that founds Gearhart's Utopia. In a paradoxical reversal of the traditional Utopia's homology between self-contained subject and self-contained society, Gearhart consolidates her Utopia's identity through the potential permeability of its subjects' boundaries—through their vulnerability to violation. By predicating their collective identity on the masculine impulse to violate, Gearhart thus ends up relying on women's position

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as victims within the opposition dominator/dominated. Although Gearhart's Utopia exposes a male impulse to dominate, her women are unable to escape the subject position that this domination has created; as a result, The Wanderground threatens to consolidate women's position on the margins of society without significantly challenging the structure of oppression. A crucial part of feminism's legacy has been the extent to which it has exposed both the act and the persistent threat of rape not as the isolated actions of individuals but rather as an expression of men's attempt to dominate and control women. Feminist condemnations of rape as well as feminist attempts to expose its frequency and to broaden the definition of what constitutes rape have been crucial in exposing the tragic effects of male violence against women. A problem arises, however, when the act of rape is invoked in order to establish a male/female dichotomy and to establish the legitimacy of feminism by granting women a unique status over victims of other oppressions, most frequently over victims of racism. In "Rape, an Act of Terror" (1971), Pamela Kearon and Barbara Mehrhof articulate the following argument in support of the essential division between men and women: Like Nazism and racism which also posit superiority a priori, sexism is grounded in a physical manifestation of the assumed superiority. For Nazism it is blond hair and blue eyes, for racism skin color, for sexism the penis. But skin, eye, and hair color are physical traits which simply exist. They cannot engage in activity. There is, then, no unique act which affirms the polarity Aryan/Semite or white/ black. Sexual intercourse, however, since it involves the genitals (that particular difference between the sexes selected by the Ideology of Sexism to define superiority/inferiority), provides sexism with an inimitable act which perfectly expresses the polarity male/female. (80) Whereas in socialism the individual is absorbed into his relation to labor, here the argument that rape "perfectly expresses the polarity male/female" causes women to be absorbed into their relation to heterosexual intercourse. This strategy both ignores the obvious challenge that homosexuality poses for a polarity thus constructed and

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upholds the distinction between men and women and the uniqueness of women's position by abstracting gender oppression into the act of rape. Because Gearhart projects the impulse to dominate onto men in general and onto the act of rape in particular, any violence on the women's part can be represented as a falling into masculine ways of being and can be dismissed as their failure to evolve fully into true womanhood (for example, when Troja is horrified to realize that she "intended a man's crime" by urging the penetration of another women's consciousness against her will). Abstracting men and women into the categories "rapist" and "victim" also elides the diversity of women's experiences and ignores the different degrees of access that women have to power. Although the Hill Women come from a variety of different cultural backgrounds, their individual identities are absorbed into their overwhelming universal status as victims of masculine sexual domination and violation, and their identities are absorbed into a collective reaction against it. In Talking Back, bell hooks points out that defining women against men allows us to define women purely in terms of their status as victims. For hooks, this suppresses the fact that women can also function as oppressors: Clearly, differentiation between strong and weak, powerful and powerless, has been a central defining aspect of gender globally, carrying with it the assumption that men should have greater authority than women, and should rule over them. As significant and important as that fact is, it should not obscure the fact that women can and do participate in politics of domination, as perpetrators as well as victims—that we dominate, that we are dominated. (20-21) The Hill Women's obsession about their potential physical violation by men masks an anxiety in the text about their potential contamination by any participation in an ideology of domination—an anxiety that grows out of their allegiance to an absolute Utopian opposition between "authentic" (victim) and "inauthentic" (victimizer). The threat of contamination through participation in acts of domination thus is translated into the threat of violation in The Wanderground, now not a subversive dynamic that could potentially destabilize the 72

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Utopian social body but rather a structural necessity that coheres it. Preserving the notion of Utopian "purity" and resting it on rituals that underscore and formalize their status as an innocent victims, Gearhart's women avoid confronting their own potential participation in dominating practices. Women, Nature, and the Maternal In "Mother Right: A New Feminist Theory" (1973), an article that arguably influenced the transition in the 1970s from radical feminism to a more essentializing cultural feminism, Jane Alpert calls for "a society in which the paradigm for all social relationships is the relationship of a healthy and secure mother to her child" (92). Alpert argues that if matriarchy means a society that emphasizes the qualities of nurturing, empathy, and process over goal-directed activity, "then matriarchy means nothing less than the end of oppression" (92). Alpert urges that the uprising of women "must be based on more than opposition to oppression and the definition of Woman as Other. It must be an affirmation of the power of female consciousness, of the Mother" (94). Rejecting the masculine notion of subjectivity founded on differentiation, Alpert calls for a social organization founded on identification, implicit in the maternal figure. Feminism has a long tradition of drawing upon women's maternal function to construct a positive and empowering female identity—either, as in American feminism, through the association between mothering and qualities such as nurturing and empathy or, as in French feminism, by deriving a "maternal subversive" from the mother's position within psychoanalytic law. Julia Kristeva, for example, creates a maternal subversive based upon the proposition that the female subject as Mother constitutes a threat to the subject in the struggle between "integrated self" and "abjection." According to Kristeva, "proper" individuation and socialization requires the "expulsion of the improper, the unclean, and the disorderly" (1982: 71). Once expelled, the "not-me" comes to stand for "the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside" (71).6 Through this process, then, the subject learns to confront its own contamination as something alien to it, something that threatens it from "outside." For Kristeva, sub73

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jective anxiety does not originate in any real threat posed by the external (those objects against which the subject defines "himself"); rather, it originates in the dread that the boundary between inside and outside will collapse altogether. Kristeva defines the subjective fear surrounding this permeability of boundaries as abjection, the terror that the "me" and the "not-me" cannot be clearly differentiated. Kristeva's work on abjection foregrounds and genders what remains implicit and repressed in the traditional Utopia—that the dynamics of social oppression can be connected to the fear of one's own internal contamination. In this sense, the anxiety of subjectification that Kristeva describes parallels the anxiety that characterizes the figure of the traditional individual and social Utopian body. For Kristeva, if men flee the abject in their search for full subjectivity, women are the abject—the maternal site that marks the failure to consolidate the ego, the dissolution of the subject, the ambiguity between the "me" and the "not-me" expressed in the pregnant body. According to Kristeva, "woman" represents both a boundary (in the sense that she exists on the margins of the symbolic order) and the failure of boundaries (in the sense that she marks the failure to constitute oneself fully as a subject) in this drama of subjectification. Although for the male subject the process of projecting contamination is never fully successful, it does not entail any radical contradiction. The female subject constructed as Mother, however, occupies a problematic position in this struggle between "integrated self" and "abjection." Because as a group women have existed as a repository for those qualities against which dominant subjectivity has defined itself, a female social space organized around the maternal possesses a problematic relation to traditional Utopia's strategy of consolidating itself through the formal institution of stable boundaries between self and other. According to Kristeva, women's marginal status protects them, while their status as the failure of boundaries provides their revolutionary threat. In Sexual Subversions, however, Elizabeth Grosz points out that Kristeva's reduction of women to their function as a "maternal site" and her related suggestion that woman is a process without a subject "does not involve any agency or identity. If anything it is their abandonment" (79). While Kristeva draws on male fear of the abject to empower women as maternal (as something fear74

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ful), the creation of this fear does not empower women as individual or collective agents. As I will show, the founding of a female collective identity upon the figure of the mother both problematizes women's efforts to differentiate themselves from one another and from nature, and contributes to their rejection of positive agency. The "Wanderground" in which Gearhart's Hill Women live is at once a border and a positive space—a boundary that contains the men in the city, and a society in which women have developed new ways of interacting with each other and with their environment. At the same time that she maintains an allegiance to the strict boundaries around Utopia based on the ideology of self-contained individuality, Gearhart rejects the notion of a subjective identity that is based on the division between self and other, and instead founds her female-centered Utopia on the figure of the Mother. Within their Utopian society, women privilege the identity-diffuse qualities traditionally associated with the maternal (empathy, intuitiveness, nurturance) and represent their communication with one another through metaphors of envelopment. The primary metaphor that the women use to describe their social and political interactions with one another is the image of descending to a womblike "center." When the women meet publicly to debate a political issue around which they are divided, for example, they describe this process as an inward movement into a common female center of power that they all share (122). As it expands, this feeling of a presence greater than any one individual makes each woman feel "more deeply grounded, more vital, more steady, more nearly at home" (122). Breaches that have been created by the divergent perspectives that divide individual women are resolved by dramatizing their common relation to motherhood, a relation that blurs the boundaries between mother and child in each woman. In the following passage, the women attempt to heal the breach caused by their disagreement over what to do about an increase in male incursion into the Wanderground: Old Artileda came to the center. Her presence lay open for anyone who would join. "There was once an infant," she was saying, "not yet used to the world or to the hurts and aches that the world could inflict. She needed holding."

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Turning Inward Zephyr took the vision inside herself. She folded herself into a round ball. She began to cry. "We bend ourselves around her to protect her, to stroke her," Artileda's message went on. Zephyr stroked the tiny child. "We feel her bend around us. She holds us, protects us," said Artileda. Zephyr snuggled into the warm arms, was the warm arms. The mindreach of hundreds of women, sad and sore, battered and disappointed, hung in the air above the northern mountains where, just a ridge or two beyond, the coast hills meet the sea. They created the presence which held them, held and rocked, held and stroked, held and soothed. (123)

Here, the threat to the Utopian society is represented as the possibility that the collective female identity will split up into separate, individual entities with dissenting views about how they should act. This threat is resolved in the narrative by abstracting the women's connection into their maternal function. Although the Hill Women remain incapable of resolving their political differences, they are able to maintain their unity by sublimating their individual political agendas into a communal nurturing impulse, through which they become both mother and child to themselves. In her 1974 article "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" Sherry Ortner argues that in order to explain why women have been universally devalued it is necessary to find something else that traditionally has been universally devalued, and with which women have been associated. Ortner finds this equation in women's association with nature, pointing out that it is a "specifically human ability to act upon and regulate rather than passively move with and be moved by, the givens of natural existence," and that culture is founded on bending nature to our will (72).7 Since women are considered a "part of nature" because of the extended role that they play in reproduction, and since it is always culture's project to subsume and transcend nature, it follows that "culture would find it natural" to subordinate, not to say oppress, them" (Ortner, 73). In her article "An End to Technology, a Modest Proposal," Gearhart writes that "the true ecologist understands the connection between strip mining and 76

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pornography, laboratory animals and slavery, clear cutting and genocide—all of it earthrape" (178). Like Ortner, Gearhart connects the exploitative use of nature to the singular process of individuation in masculine subjectivity, which requires a "separation from" and thus ultimately a "domination over" others. Gearhart reasons that if we are to study and control nature, then we must distinguish ourselves from it. As a consequence we can "do to" other entities what we would never think of doing to ourselves. If we perceive an "other" to be a part of ourselves, we deprive ourselves of the luxuries we have become so dependent on. (179) For Gearhart, any manner of creating the subject that is predicated on defining it against an external object is inherently violent, and she argues that only through our identification with nature will we transcend our impulse to exploit others. Whereas Ortner attempts to reinterpret women's position relative to culture by arguing that women do in fact play a predominant role in the socialization of individuals, Gearhart bases her Utopia on wholly identifying women with a natural environment that is passively acted upon and victimized by men. Like the manner in which they identify with one another, the manner in which the Hill Women identify with nature is based simultaneously on a maternal metaphor and on an alliance between the women and the "whole raped earth," which has suffered a parallel violation at the hands of "masculine technology." This alliance with nature—as both mother and victim—plays a crucial role in inaugurating and guaranteeing Gearhart's female collective. Gearhart establishes an alliance between women and nature based on their mutual status as victims and the perception that "woman and nature, in a sense, are the original other" (Y. King, 121). Although the Hill Women stress the importance of their actions in maintaining the connective web of consciousness that contains male violence within the city, in actuality their society is protected by the "will of the earth"—a will that culminated in a historical upheaval that the Hill Women refer to as the "Revolt of the Mother." This revolt was not instituted by the women, but rather by the earth herself: "Once

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upon a time . . . there was one rape too many. Once upon a time . . . the earth finally said 'no'" (Gearhart, 158). The earth's revolt causes men to become impotent as soon as they enter the wilderness beyond the city borders, thus effectively arresting in a state of perpetual potentiality their impulse to violate women.This notion that nature poses a threat to masculine subjectivity is archetypal in American pastoral literature. In The Lay of the Land, Annette Kolodny describes the American need to respond to the land as feminine as a progression from an understanding of nature as all-powerful mother to an understanding of nature as a potentially emasculating force, over which men must gain complete power and control (154). In an article describing how the masculine desire to appropriate the feminine procreative function resulted in the creation of the nuclear bomb, Evelyn Fox Keller argues that technology's efforts to understand and appropriate the secrets of nature are based in a fear of the maternal function, a function that has been projected onto nature and therefore makes it threatening.8 Mary Ann Doane points out, however, that although technology "promises more strictly to control, supervise, regulate the maternal. . . somehow the fear lingers— perhaps the maternal will contaminate the technological" (170). The Wanderground draws upon this fear that the maternal landscape will "contaminate" the technological to create and then secure the integrity of Utopia, without requiring the women to act. Since nature has "blocked" men's dominating impulse and ensured that they are impotent outside of the city limits, the women can no longer be circulated within the masculine economy of desire, and are thus no longer of interest to the men. The fact that nature blocks the masculine impulse to dominate rather than transforming it achieves two things: it gives the women the status of pure surplus within the masculine system (thus securing their Utopian freedom), and it preserves their status as potential victims (thus consolidating their collective identity). This separate world, which has always been associated with the feminine, is now appropriated by and for the feminine; however, the liberation of "true" female nature within the Hill Women's society is secured by figuring woman as waste within the "masculine" system, a system from which they nevertheless continue to receive their identity as victims. 78

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Because the women do not distinguish themselves as subjects discrete from their external environment, there is no return to nature that is not also existence as nature: for the Hill Woman, nature is "as much of her flesh as [is] her own body" (29). This existence as nature benefits the collective doubly: nature responds to their will as if their will were its own; because their will is identical to nature, nature can revolt on their behalf without implicating them in violence. Through this identity with nature, the Hill Women resolve the tension between their human need to act on their environment and the belief that it is morally wrong (and masculine) to impose their will by projecting their will onto nature. Furthermore, their connection with the power of nature allows the women to claim that they can "do anything that the old machines could do, and with a good deal less effort" (145). When one of the women asks why—since they are capable of it—they do not create bombs and nerve gas and disease pellets, she is met with this response: That's the mistake men made, sisterlove, and made over and over again. Just because it was possible they thought it had to be done. They came near to destroying the earth—and may yet—with that notion. Most of us like to think that even long ago women could have built what's been called "western civilization"; we knew how to do all of it but rejected most such ideas as unnecessary or destructive. (145) Here, the difference between men and women lies not in their respective abilities to control nature, but in the fact that the women have contained this impulse to control, that they refuse to apply their power to alter their environment. Through this act of self-abnegation, paradoxically, the Hill Women magically become omnipotent: "By refusing to abuse power as men did with their technology, they become, in fact, all-powerful, able to enter into the consciousness of the animate and the inanimate, and in turn to gain their help and protection" (Lefanu, 65-66). Although women replace instrumental technology with an alliance to nature, the superiority that this force gives them over men is not the power to act on their environment

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but rather, in the final instance, the power to refuse to act. The Hill Women can thus attribute the whole history of their oppression not to disempowerment but to a morally superior refusal to use their power because they regard it as inherently oppressive. The refusal to use their power preserves their status as innocent victims at the same time that it refigures their disempowerment as a conscious choice and upholds their perception of themselves as omnipotent. Throughout the narrative, the activities of the women are split equally between containing the male threat within the city and enacting the rituals that maintain the threatening memories of masculine aggression—no energy has been directed toward preparation for a revolution. When Evona asks in frustration why it always has to be the women who maintain the integrity of the borders, the gentles (men who have rejected violence) suggest that the increase of violence outside of the city has coincided with an irregularity in the rotation pattern through which the Hill Women "guard" the Wanderground from the city. The gentles interpret this as an indication that it is the women's special nature to enforce this "delicate balancing of nature" and to send some "supernatural message to keep [men] toeing the line" (178). At the end of the novel, the women express the fear that their combined energy will become so great that it will cause some kind of catastrophic upheaval in the order of things: "All of them were preparing for the time when it would be possible to gather their power, to direct it, and to confront whatever murderous violence threatened the earth" (123). Although the women continue to look forward to this time, "many hoped it would not be necessary, that the violence would continue to be contained in the cities" (123). Ultimately, then, any impulse toward active preparation for a revolution is overridden by the women's role in maintaining the status quo, and the novel ends with the referral to a "day of reckoning" that promises to remain infinitely deferred. In the maternal metaphor, the figural association between individual and collective body leads the women's will to be absorbed into the maternal function and the will of nature. In collapsing the women's will into Mother Earth's, Gearhart relies on women's traditional association with nature to resolve the problem of agency and avoid implicating the women in any violent action. Within their ideal society, 80

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the women never have to forcefully impose their will upon nature because it responds passively to their wishes; in relation to their oppression, women's association with nature ensures that its revolution will include women: as co-mothers and co-victims the women become the passive beneficiaries of nature's revolt. In the traditional Utopia, the metaphorical abstraction of the unified body as a figure for the unified collective leads to individual needs and desires being subsumed into the collective will. As Annette Kolodny points out, the pastoral trope of nature as feminine does not lead to any empowering sense of individual agency for women, since they merely constitute the "maternal environment" into which men escape in their flight from the encroachments of alienating culture, or that threatens to devour them (154). Thus, while "masculine" subjectification leads to the construction of a devalued other, countering it with the maternal not only abstracts women into their reproductive function, it abstracts them into that against which positive identity is constituted, into the "environment" against which male subjectivity is understood to define itself. This process upholds a gendered distinction between identification and differentiation, and positively revalues women's identity as the failure of differentiation. As a result of basing the ideal society on the figure of the mother, the women fail to differentiate themselves from one another and from nature and also participate in a collective rejection of agency. A Challenge to Boundaries: "Gentles" and "City Women" Throughout the novel, the Hill Women sustain the boundary between (female) Utopia and (male) dystopia by representing male and female nature as essentially incompatible. Together they profess "an understanding of this fundamental knowledge: women and men cannot yet, may not ever, love one another without violence; they are no longer of the same species" (115). Reflecting upon the unbridgeable distance between "man" and "woman," the Hill Women explain, "It is not in his nature not to rape. It is not in my nature to be raped. We do not co-exist" (24). This "official" construction of the boundary between women and men is contradicted, however, by the fact that the women's collective identity is specifically founded on their shared vulnerability to rape—the fact that what distinguishes 81

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them from men is precisely the fact that it is "in man's nature" to rape, and it is "in woman's nature" to be vulnerable to rape. This notion of "man as threat" and "woman as victim" founds the formal and ideological coherence of The Wanderground—without it, the entire logic through which the social space is divided breaks down. This opposition between man (as oppressor) and woman (as innocent victim) is complicated in The Wanderground, however, by the existence of two groups: the women who have remained in the city, accepting and participating in their subordination and the subordination of others, and the "gentles," men who have rejected violence and allied themselves with the Hill Women's struggle. The existence of these groups suggests that the opposition between men and women lies not in the incompatibility of male and female natures, but rather in their respective positions within the victimizer/victim opposition— positions that, although shored up by the structural division of social space, have the potential to shift. Confronted with a woman who lives in the city, the Hill Woman Ijeme finds herself staring at this "city edition, the man's edition, the only edition acceptable to men, streamlined to his exact specification, her body guaranteed to be limited, dependent, and constantly available" (63). Ijeme's sense of women as a single, undifferentiated community, however, forces her to acknowledge her identity with this woman and to remind herself that "what we are not, we each could be, and every woman is myself" (63). To avoid the contradiction between the "official" acknowledgment of a single collective female identity and the existence of the city women, Gearhart draws upon the idea of "false consciousness." When Ijeme attempts to "enfold" the city woman's mind and is met with "a dull nothing," she concludes that as long as a woman's body remains confined by the specifications of male desire, her mind and her self remain fundamentally alien and inaccessible to "real" women. The city woman's misguided desire for Ijeme (who is disguised as a man) becomes an increasingly oppressive parody of masculine desire that transforms into a grotesque assault on Ijeme, who finally exclaims to herself, "Raped . . . I'm being raped by a woman" (65). Once again, then, the distance between Hill Women and the oppressive forces of the city is established through the creation of a dichotomy between victim and 82

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victimizer; this time, however, the sexual assault is perpetrated by a woman with whom Ijerne's ideology forces her to identify. By representing the city woman's aggressiveness in the form of an attempted rape, Gearhart once again subsumes all other forms of oppression into the act of rape. This in turn subsumes the possibility of differences between women that originate in issues of class and race into an absolute difference between man (or male-identified women) as rapist and woman as victim. Nevertheless, the fact that a woman can oppress Ijeme problematizes the notion of an essential division between men and women by suggesting that the aggressive impulse is a function of position and socialization rather than of something inherent to the person, a possibility that threatens the opposition on which the women's Utopia is founded. The "gentles" represent a group of men who have allied themselves to the women's struggle, and who act as contacts to help the Hill Women guard the borders of the city and to warn the Hill Women when an imbalance in the number of women within the city threatens the integrity of that border. Gentles have "sworn to isolate themselves from women" because they understand that women and men cannot love one another without violence. Just as the female "city edition" suggests that woman can collaborate in aggressive behavior, the male "gentles" who live in the Wanderground suggest that men are not inherently sexually violent. To manage the threat that this suggestion poses for the boundaries between Utopia and dystopia, Gearhart must disconnect the gentles from masculine sexuality. Although the term gentles initially appears to function as a code word for gay men, as the narrative unfolds it becomes clear that the gentles' alliance with the women is predicated on their rejection of sexuality altogether. When rumors of male potency outside the city reach the women, none of the gentles could confirm the rumors but, as Evona reminded them, that was no real test. The country gentles had long since found it a relief not to be sexually active—that's why they were able to be in the country—and probably could not perform sexually even in the heavy energy of the city. (128) 83

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By representing the only friendly act men can perform toward women as the total rejection of sexuality in favor of existence as neuters, Gearhart confirms the status of male sexuality both as inherently violent and as the origin of oppression. In the process, the possibility that the gentles could represent a third term that mediates between aggressive masculine sexuality and feminine victimhood is shut down. In rejecting this particular third term—male sexuality that is not inherently violent or that does not require women for its expression—the women uphold the absolute opposition between men and women upon which the women's status as victims, and the structure of Utopia, is founded. Conclusion The traditional Utopian narrative upholds a division between inside (good) and outside (bad) that supports, and is supported by, the abstraction of individual identity into a social identity that is selfcontained, harmonious, and integrated. Utopia's borders are constituted by defining it against two other social spaces: the dystopian past (usually represented by a visitor from the contemporary society that the Utopian novel critiques), and a devalued space that exists outside of the Utopian society's borders. Typically, traditional Utopia's forgetfulness and its frequent literal incomprehension of the past (which remains implicitly present in the narrative as the object of critique) is designed to remove the Utopian present utterly from dystopian past, and therefore to attest to how far Utopia has progressed—severing Utopia from any implication in past violent actions. Utopia simultaneously projects internal social contradiction outside of its borders in order to sustain its self-image as harmonious ideal, in the process supporting a policy of expansion and colonization. The devaluation of this external space justifies the oppression of everything outside of Utopia's borders at the same time that it releases the Utopians from any implication in dominating practices. If, in traditional Utopias, ideological purity is achieved by projecting/forgetting/repressing Utopia's implication in dominating practices, in The Wanderground, purity is achieved by drawing upon women's position as victims of dominating practices. The women in The Wanderground manifest the same withdrawal from politics that 84

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exists in traditional Utopias, and for primarily the same reason: Utopia must remain untainted by the violence that is implied in the attack on another's beliefs and practices, and any action on the part of its individuals threatens the harmony upon which Utopia is founded. In traditional Utopias, the external threat justifies the colonizing Utopian society's oppression of others, but the threat posed by men in The Wanderground creates a sense of vulnerability in the women at the same time that it precludes any genuine agency on their part. To the extent that they achieve their ideological purity through their status as passive victims, then, the women are unable to "fight back" lest they compromise this absolute purity, and as a result the primary act of resistance on the women's behalf is instituted by nature, "dea ex machina." The Wandergrounddemonstrates how deploying the Utopian logic that creates strict boundaries between Utopia and dystopia can immobilize, rather than enable, women. Like the traditional Utopia, the women's collective is defined against a dystopian past, and the coherence of the women's collective in The Wanderground is not undermined by the threat of external attack, but rather consolidated by it. The relation of Utopia both to the past and to external threat is more complicated in The Wanderground, however, and this complication stems from women's position relative to the dominating practices that the Utopian society critiques. In The Wanderground, the women's utopian-present threat is tied inextricably to their dystopian past, so that this past is not removed or diminished from Utopia, but rather defines it. In this sense, Gearhart's Utopia is not forward looking but backward looking—not anticipation of the future but memory of the past. While the women's memories of violation function critically to expose and condemn contemporary sexual abuse, these memories also compose the basis for their Utopian identity. Unwilling to use the figure of isolated individuality to consolidate the boundary between Utopia and nonutopia, the Hill Women establish their boundaries by upholding the dichotomy dominator/victim; refusing to consolidate their identity by dominating others, the women choose instead to achieve their identity by being dominated. The problem with this strategy lies in the fact that although it critiques and supports dominating practices, it continues to rely on the persis85

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tence of domination to establish identity. To the extent that the women's collective identity in The Wanderground derives from the existence of violent and invasive gestures by men, the integrity of their Utopian space relies for its definition on the continuation of an oppressive order in which they occupy a disempowered position. The status of the Hill Women in The Wanderground is paradoxical: they exist at once as a collective in which boundaries between individual women have become virtually effaced and as a structural border that contains male violence. To forge an identity out of their relation to male acts of domination blocks women's access to genuine subjectivity and agency, limiting them to the position of always reacting (and defining themselves) against masculine threat. As a boundary, the women function reactively to maintain the status quo. The Hill Women constitute an essentially passive locus of resistance on the borders of the male-dominated city, and this prevents them from actively undermining the impulse to dominate. The Hill Women's function as a boundary graphically demonstrates the extent to which they continue to support the logic of othering, even within a structure that gives the woman a voice and an affirmative collective (if undifferentiated) subjectivity. The Hill Women's permanently "liminal" position reproduces women's traditional status relative to the dominant order, similarly reproducing the problematic relation to identity and to agency traditionally associated with women. In the end, this "flight from the phallic" positions women in a reactive, negative struggle as opposed to a productive one.

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3 Speaking Parts: Internal Dialogic and Models of Agency in the Work of Joanna Russ and Octavia Butler

Possessing a disempowered position within society, oppressed groups need something more than a stabilizing of the social space that consolidates their position on the margins. The traditional Utopian goal of projecting an ideal space free from ideological conflict, however, is incompatible with the goal of exposing and exploring the contradictions and double binds that inflect female subjectivity. If marginalized groups retain this strategy, challenges to the status quo tend to reproduce the logic of stable difference and create "utopias of reversal." To the extent that contemporary feminists address the ways in which women have been denied the opportunity to establish themselves as empowered subjects, their goal is first to establish women as individual agents and to expose the ways in which they have been excluded from this position. This goal requires a narrative form that emphasizes the connection between social change and female agency while rejecting innocence as a precondition for a positively transformed society. The traditional Utopian logic of difference stabilizes individual and collective identity through a process of negativity and opposition, constructing everything beyond the limits of a given identity as "that which it is not." As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe point out, this logic underwrites acts of cultural domination by allowing the colonizer to construct itself as antithetical to the object of colonization and to suppress any similarity between colonizer and colonized (127). Against this "logic of opposition," Laclau and Mouffe 87

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offer what they call the "logic of antagonism," which aims to expose the impossibility of stable difference between two self-consistent and unified things, and points instead to "the presence of the other that prevents me from being fully myself" (125). This logic can be deployed against a dominant society's ambition to constitute itself as a full presence at the expense of a host of subjects who come to be defined as its negation. In an expression of this second logic, Donna Haraway argues for a relation between subject and social space organized around "a network of ideological images, suggesting the profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and the body politic" (1990: 212). Like Jameson, Haraway associates this permeability with the postmodern breakdown between inside and outside and the resulting contamination of identity and loss of purity. Instead of lamenting this profusion of spaces and erosion of boundaries as Jameson does, Haraway welcomes it for the way it contributes to the "failure" of dominant discourse by disrupting the legitimacy of its myths of transcendence. She explains: "I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims" (1991: 195). Like Paul Smith and Judith Butler, Haraway suggests that the precondition for agency lies not in the older notion (and experience) of the unified for which Jameson expresses nostalgia, but rather in the disturbance of self-certitude that is in conflict with the logic of unification. Instead of using the figure of a "unified" female subject to provide a structural resolution to ideological contradictions, feminist critical Utopias tend to reverse the relationship between individual and collective, strategically drawing on the Utopian imagination—not to project an ideal collective, but to explore ways in which women can constitute themselves as subjects. Here, the relationship between individual and collective body in critical Utopias is based on antagonism rather than homology, and the disjunctive experiences of the female protagonists are deployed against society's holistic and inclusionary claims. The contradictory ideologies that construct the female subject are played out upon the female body, which is not represented as existing prior to or outside the social body, but rather in 88

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dialogic relation to it. In critical Utopias, a structural and ideological permeability begins to characterize the boundary between Utopia and dystopia: "dystopian" moments of dissatisfaction and conflict now occur within the Utopian society, and female protagonists move back and forth between dystopian and Utopian social space, both altering and being altered by their social environment. Formal Utopia, which now occupies only part of the social potentialities explored in the novel, is enlisted in an activist program to engage with oppressive forces that still dominate parts of the social space. A subversive impulse expressed as desire replaces, as the defining feature of Utopia, a regulatory impulse expressed as the absolute gratification of desire. As a result, both Utopia and dystopia fall back as settings for the foregrounded political quest of the protagonist. . . . The concerns of this revived, active subject are centered around the ideologeme of the strategy and tactics of revolutionary change at both the micro/personal and the macro/societal levels. (Moylan, 45) Both the structure of the narrative (which places a renewed emphasis on enonciation over enonce) and the social forms characterizing the Utopian space are designed to accommodate revolutionary, antihegemonic action over the containment of destabilizing movement within and across the borders of the Utopian space. The critical Utopian narrative works to expose a historical contradiction rather than to master it through strategies of containment, and thus invites a set of interpretive practices different from those applied to traditional Utopian literature. Although these texts are not completely unreceptive to approaches designed to "expose" Utopian narrative productive practices, they lend themselves less to an interpretation based on reading backward from the act of neutralization in order to expose a text's conceptual antinomies (and the attending historical contradictions) than to an interpretation that evaluates the extent to which the textual strategies succeed in exposing conceptual double binds that dominant ideology attempts to resolve and cover up. Both Joanna Russ and Octavia Butler describe a series of female

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protagonists in their movement between different social spaces and historical timelines. This movement creates a "cognitive alienation" that denaturalizes and contextualizes the protagonists' contemporary identities and provides a model of the relationship between individual subject and social space that is one of dialogic interaction rather than representative homology. Their novels, not merely exploding the fiction behind society's holistic and inclusionary claims, focus specifically on ways in which women can express and have expressed their agency from within contradictory positions. Joanna Russ's The Female Man does not deploy Utopian space to neutralize a social contradiction, as traditional Utopias do; instead, it deploys this space to expose society's own act of neutralizing a contradiction. The central paradox addressed in The Female Man is the impossibility of conceptualizing oneself as both a woman and a human being, given the ways that women have been systematically excluded from "human" endeavors and systematically effaced within the generic category "mankind." For Russ, the primary contradiction derives from the systems of thought through which society conceives the relation between the terms man, woman, and human, and the narrative of The Female Man is organized around exposing the "difference" between man and woman as a conceptual ruse that denies women as a group access to empowering self-representations. As an autobiographical novel, The Female Man shifts the narrative focus toward the individual, so that the particularity of the individual female protagonist's experience becomes the departure point for an exploration of the relationship between individual and social space. The only properly "utopian" social space in the text (itself characterized by both dissatisfaction and desire) participates in producing the cognitive alienation through which the protagonist experiences the distance between two incompatible subject positions, and it is the female protagonist's perception of this primary contradiction that sets up the Utopian moments of resistance motivating the narrative. Like Russ, Octavia Butler explores the tensions that characterize the relationship between individual and social space; for Butler, however, no single contradiction characterizes the relationship between her female protagonists and the social spaces they encounter. Her protagonists' multiple subject positions produce not so much a 90

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cognitive alienation from a dominant ideology characterized by a single contradiction, but rather a relative alienation from the various ideologies that define the respective communities of which they are members. Butler's Patternmaster trilogy, in which she recounts the evolution of a "psychic" society, contains several key female characters who are associated with more than one community. In the process of negotiating their membership in multiple communities, these protagonists both develop the skills they require to survive and inspire challenges to the naturalized differences that sustain the absolute boundary between communities. In her historical novel Kindred, which Butler has referred to as a "grim fantasy," the protagonist's movement between social spaces takes place as a movement between contemporary urban and nineteenth-century rural plantation settings. Here, Butler explores the contradictions surrounding AfricanAmerican identity and bloodline. In all of her novels, Butler reaches beyond Russ's goal of exposure into an exploration of relationships between individual and community that are characterized by negotiated survival. Backtalk: Interactive Identities, Radical Feminism, and The Female Man The "postmodern" understanding of the individual's relationship to the social space as partial and situated works in favor of subjects who have historically been denied access to universality and transcendence, and whose location in society is therefore always already marked. Although beginning from an assumption of situatedness and focusing on social antagonism are conceptually and politically useful strategies, a problem can arise when a lack of specificity characterizes the translation of this model into a figure for subjectivity. Haraway, for example, founds her image of the postmodern, oppositional subject on the figure of the cyborg—a half-human, halfmachine creature that disrupts the boundaries between inside and outside, natural and artificial, innocent and implicated. She describes her cyborg as the figure for a "blasphemous, ironic" subject—an illegitimate offspring of dominant and dominating systems that has become "exceedingly unfaithful to [its] origins" (1991: 151). The problem with Haraway's cyborg figure lies in the fact that, as an abstract 91

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metaphor, it remains politically undifferentiated and therefore politically disconnected.1 The effect here associates a political process (disruption) with a particular vision of the subject that nevertheless fails to specify the surfaces upon which a social antagonism is constituted. Without this specificity, the process of disruption or deconstruction per se becomes transformative, abstract disruption replaces abstract unity as the good, and the goal of social justice is obscured. In exploring the tension between how women had been absorbed into the category of "mankind," and how their "difference" had been used both to objectify them and to exclude them from basic human rights, radical feminist manifestos more than once concluded that the tension between being female and being human produced in women a particular kind of female schizophrenia.2 Radical feminists refused the choice between existing (even for themselves) as objects of male desire or becoming completely invisible, and instead attempted to create a "resistant subjectivity" that both played off of and challenged society's definition of their refusal as antisocial and unfeminine. The following excerpt from "The Bitch Manifesto," for example, gives Haraway's "cyborg" a radical feminist specificity: Bitches want to be both female and human. This makes them a social contradiction. . . . Therefore, if taken seriously, a Bitch is a threat to the social structures which enslave women and the social values which justify keeping them in their place. She is living testimony that women's oppression does not have to be, and as such raises doubts about the validity of the whole system. Because she is a threat she is not taken seriously. Instead, she is dismissed as deviant. Men create a special category for her in which she is accounted at least partially human, but not really a woman. To the extent to which they relate to her as a human being, they refuse to relate to her as a sexual being. . . . Neither men nor women can face the reality of a Bitch because to do so would force them to face the corrupt reality of themselves. (Joreen, 5) Whereas Haraway's cyborg is an ironic (but passive) artifact symbolizing the unpredictable, contradictory, and therefore potentially disruptive by-products of militarism and capitalism, radical feminism's 92

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"bitches" represent subjects whose desires are produced by their society, but who consciously and flagrantly combine these desires in a way that exposes an official contradiction within society. The resistant subject that "The Bitch Manifesto" envisions is the semiautobiographical subject of The Female Man. In The Female Man, Joanna Russ refracts the relationship between individual and society through the lens of a fragmented subject whose seemingly ungrounded consciousness shifts across four different but overlapping timelines, thus producing a disjunctive set of experiences and perceptions. While the disjointed nature of Russ's narrative appears to be a particularly "postmodern" or "poststructuralist" effect, the narrative also expresses both thematically and formally a specifically radical feminist understanding of women's contradictory position within society. The Female Man is written out of the gap between discourses that hail women—out of the space between what the female protagonist wants for herself as a human being and the choices that society offers her as a woman. Whereas Sally Gearhart begins with an abstract conception of the female subject and from that constructs the social space, Russ contextualizes her female subject through the introduction of two considerations: the range of historical tendencies in any given social space and the disjuncture between the individual female body and the patriarchal collective body. Russ locates the potential for change not in some altered conception of the subject that would then produce an altered social totality, but rather in the space between the conflicted desires of the individual female subject and the contradictory expectations of society. The female body becomes the site of resistance, the space where the distance between being "female" and being "human" is exposed, and where the contradictions that this distance entails for the female subject are explored. The Female Man provides an opportunity to connect the postmodern argument for situated knowledge (which posits that contradictions and multiple subject positions create the potential for agency that grows out of one's specific location within history and culture) with a specifically radical feminist understanding of how gendered society institutes demands upon and desires within women that are incompatible and contradictory. In The Female Man, the social space is fractured into four differ93

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ent timelines, only one of which is recognizably Utopian. Out of this fractured social space emerge four different subjectivities, each more or less aligned with one historical timeline, and all different purely as a result of the different historical and cultural conditions in which they exist. The superimposition of multiple timelines produces a split subject who reflects contradictory aspects characterizing women's contemporary experience: Joannas character is dominated by a tendency to intellectualize about the logical contradiction of being as a woman; Jael's is dominated by an impulse toward activism and terrorism; Janet represents the Utopian withdrawal into a separate "female" space; and Jeannine represents the desperate attempt to fulfill society's expectations. When all of the women finally come together, Jael asks them to look at themselves and then at each other. She then explains: What you see is essentially the same genotype, modified by age, by circumstances, by education, by diet, by learning, by God knows what. . .. Who'd think it was the same woman?... Yet we started the same. . . . We ought to be equally long-lived but we won't be. We ought to be equally healthy but we're not. If you discount the wombs that bore us, our pre-natal nourishment, and our deliveries (none of which differ essentially) we ought to have started out with the same autonomic nervous system, the same adrenals, the same hair and teeth and eyes, the same circulatory system, and the same innocence. We ought to think alike and feel alike and act alike, but of course we don't. So plastic is humankind! (162)

Instead of relying on the image of the individual body as a figure for the social body, Russ presents the reader with the image of a body that changes in response to variations in its historical situation. The social space does not replace the individual body as the locus of stability, however, so that there remains no "zero point" that guarantees the stability of either space. Although each of the different historical timelines more or less grounds each of the different female protagonists, at many points in the narrative the reader becomes uncertain about which of the four protagonists the narrative "I" represents. One woman's "voice" suddenly intrudes within another's discourse 94

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without any formal indication to mark the shift for the reader; another woman is suddenly physically displaced by a third in the middle of a scene. Joanna, who provides a running commentary throughout much of the book and whose timeline most closely approximates Russ's, comes closest to representing the author's autobiographical voice. Although this suggests that the multiple timelines are existing historical tendencies within Joannas (Russ's) contemporary society, even Joanna is not fully in control of her discourse or of the direction of the narrative. By conflating her authorial voice with a protagonist who represents only one-fourth of the subjective potentialities in the book and who is unable to keep control of the narrative, Russ compromises the objective distance of the authorial voice and involves it in the movement between subjectivities.

Joanna: Becoming the Female Man Within The Female Man, the contradiction between socialization as a woman and aspirations as a human being is articulated by Joanna, the most reflective and theoretical of the four protagonists: There is the vanity training, the self-effacement training, the deference training, the dependency training, the passivity training, the rivalry training, the stupidity training, the placation training. How am I to put this together with my human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my transcendence, my brains, and my fearful, fearful ambition? I failed miserably and thought it was my own fault. You can't unite woman and human any more than you can unite matter and anti-matter; they are designed not to be stable together and they make just as big an explosion inside the head of the unfortunate girl who believes in both. (151)

Joanna's first gesture of resistance is to recognize that her discomfort originates not from a failure within herself or from her own scandalous desires but rather from a logical paradox that is built into the structure of gendered society. Having assessed the incompatibility of her desire with her position as a woman, Joanna concludes that the only way to attain her goals is to turn into a man: 95

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If we are all Mankind, it follows to my interested and righteous and rightnow [sic] very bright and beady little eyes, that I too am a Man and not at all a Woman. . . . I think I am a Man; I think you had better call me a Man; I think you will write about me as a Man from now on and speak of me as a Man and employ me as a Man and recognize child-rearing as a Man's business; you will think of me as a Man and treat me as a Man until it enters your muddled, terrified, preposterous, nine-tenths-fake, loveless, papier-mache-bull-moose head that I am a Man (And you are a woman). (139-40) Although Joanna maintains a relation to Gearhart's premise that "female" and "male" are incompatible, instead of naturalizing this alleged incompatibility to create a "reverse Utopia," she charges society with creating this incompatibility as a ploy to deny women access to privilege. Instead of rejecting masculine privilege (for fear that she will be implicated in oppressive desires) and mapping out distinctly masculine and feminine spheres, she willfully claims the power and opportunity that it represents as fair game for her own aspirations as a human being. The concept of the "female man" is not merely the appropriation of and identification with masculine privilege, however, nor is it an androgynous term representing the dialectical resolution of the two officially contrary terms woman and man. Purposely constructed as a logical scandal, Joannas decision to become a "female man" symbolizes her refusal to occupy her "official" position within the binary opposition upon which gendered society is founded. Combined with "female," the sex-specific origins of man return to reinforce the contradiction between "including" women in the generic masculine and excluding women from masculine entitlement. The term female man thus stages the "failure" of the conceptual sleight of hand that conflates mankind with the sociological male. Because the term reproduces the way that female is used as an exception to or qualifier of the generic man and willfully challenges women's exclusion from mankind, it is at once the reflection of a social inequality and an act of resistance against it. By designating herself a "female man" Joanna creates out of herself a creature who is at once a product of her society and the discursive options that it presents her, and a challenge to the doublespeak that conceals and naturalizes women's exclusion as women.

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Jeannine: Resignation of Self Toward the beginning of the novel, Joanna's character is thrown together with Jeannine, whose timeline coincides more or less with Russ's contemporary society, except that World War II never happened, the Depression continues, and there is no evidence of a burgeoning women's movement. Jeannine represents the least empowered of the four protagonists, and the one who feels the most pressure to fulfill society's expectations. In spite of her efforts to conform, however, even Jeannine possesses an inarticulate sense of the distance between her desires and the options that are available to her as a woman: "everything suggests to Jeannine something she has lost, although she doesn't put it to herself this way; what she understands is that everything in the world wears a faint coating of nostalgia, makes her cry, seems to say to her, 'You can't'" (105). When she is introduced to the reader, Jeannine already possesses the Utopian desire to escape her oppressive conditions, but she has no clear perception of an alternative mode of being that could challenge the "naturalness" of society's expectations and thus legitimize her own desires. Joanna, who functions in the narrative as both character and interpretive authorial voice, explains that Jeannine flees from "the unspeakableness of her own wishes—for what happens when you find out you want something that doesn't exist" (125). For Jeannine, this "unspeakableness" signifies in two related ways: on the one hand, it represents her perception that her desire for a different life is somehow scandalous; on the other hand, it represents the total absence of words or concepts through which she could identify and articulate her desire. Although her sense of loss is for something of which she cannot yet conceive, the only way that Jeannine can articulate her desire is as the perception of loss, a nostalgia for something that she once had, but that she lost when this "knowledge was taken away from" her (124). Jeannine's identity is expressed through a negative relation to society. Because she senses society's refusal to acknowledge her existence but lacks any other context from which to develop a positive sense of her existence, she finds whatever identity that she has in nonexistence. Joanna, for example, observes that Jeannine is "fond of not being able to do things; somehow this gives her a right to something"

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(125). Jeannine's self-effacement is graphically portrayed through her interactions with the other female protagonists, during which she literally melts into her surroundings. Joanna observes: Jeannine loves to become entangled with the souls of the furniture in my apartment, softly drawing herself to fit inside them, pulling one long limb after another to fit in the cramped positions of my tables and chairs. The dryad of my living room. I can look anywhere, at the encyclopedia stand, at the cheap lamps, at the homey but comfortable couch; it is always Jeannine who looks back. It's uncomfortable for me but such a relief to her. That long, young, pretty body loves to be sat on and I think if Jeannine ever meets a Satanist, she will find herself perfectly at home as his altar at a Black Mass, relieved of personality at last and forever. (93) Because Jeannine is unable to construct a positive identity for herself, she turns her desire to transform her circumstances against herself in a masochistic act of self-effacement that fulfills with a vengeance society's act of erasing her existence. The extreme nature of this selfeffacement functions—like Joanna's willful transformation into the "female man"—as a spectacle that dramatizes society's act of neutralizing her desires. Through Joanna's interpretation and analysis of Jeannine's motivations, the spectacle of her self-effacement is given the context necessary for it to signify in an actively political way. Joannas relation to Jeannine is characterized by an almost vicious contempt for Jeannine's masochism, a sadistic dismissal of her pain, and resentment over the fact that she has been "stuck" with Jeannine. This relation suggests not only that Jeannine lacks form and the ability to articulate her desires, but also that she represents a part of Joanna that Joanna wishes to repress. More than once, Joanna expresses her contempt for Jeannine by blocking Jeannine's impulse to withdraw and forcing her to confront her position. When, for example, Jeannine attempts to leave her mother's house for a brief respite from her family's persistent pressure on her to find a husband, Joanna's voice intrudes in the form of an ironized social conscience:

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"You ought to appreciate them more, Jeannine." "I know," said Jeannine softly and precisely. Or perhaps she said Oh no.

" . . . You ought to marry someone who can take care of you, Jeannine." "Don't care," said she. Or was it Not fair} ". . .What do you think you're waiting for?" "For a man," said Jeannine. For a plan. (127) While Joanna is busy goading Jeannine by mimicking the voice of society that Jeannine is trying to escape, she begins to perceive another voice (represented by the italicized words) that is intruding to articulate Jeannine's rebellion. Joannas suspicion that someone else is present is confirmed when Jeannine's brother attempts to lead her by the arm back into the house. To Joanna's surprise, the woman revealed under the light is not Jeannine but the Utopian figure of Janet, who "thinks that being grabbed is not just a gesture but is altogether out of line" (115). Janet proceeds to release herself/Jeannine from Bud's grip by twisting his thumb and adding a warning: "Touch me again and I'll knock your teeth out" (115). In this passage, a third Utopian protagonist's ignorance of the "proper" reaction (which is to accept passively Bud's interference) temporarily validates and provides a vehicle for Jeannine's inarticulate desire to resist.

Janet: Critical Utopia Through the figure of Janet, Russ deploys the conventions surrounding Utopia against contemporary values in order to disrupt them. Joanna specifically relates her ability to articulate the concept of the "female man" to the effect that Janet, whose world represents the only properly Utopian society in the novel, has had on her consciousness. She recalls: "After I called up Janet, out of nothing, or she called up me (don't read between the lines; there's nothing there) I began to gain weight, my appetite improved, friends commented on my renewed zest for life, and a nagging scoliosis of the ankle that had tortured me for years simply vanished overnight. . . . Oh, I made that woman up; you can believe it!" (29-30)

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As a Utopian figure, Janet is both a product of Joanna's desire and the one who creates the cognitive alienation that allows Joanna to conceptualize her "female dilemma" as neither natural nor inevitable. Janet's misunderstandings of contemporary practices, like those of a typical Utopian character, both denaturalize these practices and provide a vehicle for some of Russ's most scathing satirical jabs at her own society. While she is in Joanna's world, Janet consistently refuses to behave according to the societal expectations in which Joanna continues to be invested and by which Joanna is still constrained. Because Janet is from an all-woman society, her first reaction upon arriving in Joanna's world is surprised revulsion at the man upon whose desk she has appeared, and her second reaction is to assume that the female secretary is in charge. Janet's assumption that women are in charge, combined with her chronic noncomprehension of and active contempt for the gender roles and sexual taboos of Joanna's society, disrupts the gender game by introducing the possibility of a whole new set of rules. Janet's failure to recognize the taboo against speaking about lesbianism combines with her allegiance to her own seemingly arbitrary combination of taboos (sexual relations between generations, waste, ignorance, unintentional offense to others) in order to expose all cultural taboos as socially constructed and ideological. When she seduces the daughter who lives in the house where she is billeted, Janet also becomes the vehicle through which Joanna—who remains as a presence in the house throughout the episode—vicariously participates in violating the more serious social taboos that constrain her own desire. To Joanna's surprise, she finds herself participating in Janet's transgression: "Janet—I—held her, her odor flooding my skin, cold woman, grinning at my own desire because we are still trying to be good" (71). Here, the collapsing of boundaries between the two women allows Joanna to express her desire through Janet. Although Janet's society, Whileaway, resembles a traditional utopia in many ways, Whileawayan society is neither totally innocent nor free from dissatisfaction and violence. The origin of psychology in Whileaway, as in Gearhart's Utopia, lies in the relationship between mother and child. At every point, however, Whileawayans deconstruct the possibility that this relationship emanates from the 100

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kind of essential "maternal instinct" that grounds Gearhart's nurturing and empathetic female subjects. To the extent that Russ blurs the boundary between mother and child, this blurring is expressed in the way that adults remain childlike—impulsive, willful, temperamental—while children typically express a precocious disapproval of adult indulgences. Although a Whileawayan child's relationship with her mother is decisive in her development, it is in the separation from the mother that the Whileawayan personality is formed. This personality, it turns out, is neither harmonious nor stable: separation from the mother is what "gives Whileawayan life its characteristic independence, its dissatisfaction, its suspicion, and its tendency toward a rather irritable solipsism" (52). Whileawayans look forward to the five years that they will spend raising a child not because it is perceived as an expression of their essential function, but because it is the only time when they are excused from work duties: "On Whileaway they have a saying: when the mother and child are separated they both howl, the child because it is separated from the mother, the mother because she has to go back to work." (50). Whereas in The Wanderground motherhood represents the loss of self symbolized by the merging of mother and child, in Whileaway motherhood represents a secondary means toward the real end, which is to pursue the work and leisure activities through which the women of Whileaway constitute themselves as subjects. With the Whileawayan personality, Russ proposes an alternative to the opposition between the traditional Utopian subject defined against an external object and the maternal Utopian subject defined by her lack of boundaries. Although they are created out of the lack that they feel over separation from the mother, Whileawayans do not manage this lack through the typical psychoanalytic pathology—in short, they do not devalue the mother and then define themselves against her. Instead, they channel their lack into creative action. Children do not exist as objects of a nurturing maternal impulse, but instead are trained to be active members of the community at an early age. In this manner, the Whileawayan personality and the Whileawayan social structure are founded on discontentment and hope—those elements of the Utopian impulse that lead to activism rather than stabilization of the social space. 101

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Jael: The Loss of Innocence In Joannas description of her evolution into the "female man," she paints a picture of what she has become: I'm a sick woman, a madwoman, a ball-breaker, a man-eater; I don't consume men gracefully with my fire-like red hair or my poisoned kiss; I crack their joints with these filthy ghoul's claws and standing on one foot like a de-clawed cat, rake at your feeble efforts to save yourselves with my taloned hinder feet: my matted hair, my filthy skin, my big flat plaques of green bloody teeth. I don't think my body would sell anything. I don't think I would be good to look at. O of all the diseases self-hate is the worst and I don't mean for the one who suffers it! (135) Although this description is embedded within the largely analytic discourse through which Joanna articulates the concept of the "female man," it anticipates the image of Jael, the activist "ghoul" who dominates the latter part of the narrative. In Demand the Impossible, Tom Moylan argues that Jael emerges as a product of Joanna's increasing awareness of and engagement in an analysis of her position within society (86). While Moylan proposes that the emergence of Jael allows Joanna to become the female man, the narrative structure deliberately problematizes efforts to establish such one-way causal relations between characters. More accurately, one might describe Jael as emerging simultaneously with, but semiautonomously from, Joanna's increasing awareness—as the physical manifestation of what for Joanna remains only a theoretical proposition. Jael is both the grotesque embodiment of a transformation that Joanna merely conceptualizes and an autonomous subject whose actions Joanna neither controls nor anticipates. At the beginning of the novel, the Utopian protagonist Janet appears to be the character who is most in control of her own actions and the one whose efforts connect the women across their respective timelines, while Joanna appears to be the character in control of interpreting their interactions. Jael remains a renegade voice that intrudes periodically but has no name and no context. At a certain

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point in the narrative, however, Joanna's, Janet's, and the reader's faith in Janet's control of the women's movement, and in Joannas ability to interpret the flow of events, is disrupted. As the narrative progresses, it becomes increasingly evident to Joanna that "some other figure has entered into their story" and that it is this someone else, possessing some unknown agenda, who is actively "collecting J's." Shortly after this recognition, the three women are suddenly transported into Jael's world, where women and men live in separate territories and are engaged in a cold war. The division of Jael's world along gender lines again recalls the world of Gearhart's The Wanderground, except that no "colonized" women remain in the maledominated territory and the men are forced to reproduce themselves by trading for male babies produced parthenogenetically in the female realm. Hardly ideal, the social organization of Jael's world nevertheless expresses the typical bounded logic of traditional Utopia. As in The Wanderground, the salient division between men and women remains the division between sexual predator and sexual object, and masculinity is defined as the need for a feminine or "feminized" sexual object to dominate. Since no women remain in the male-occupied territory, the sexual function of the colonized women in Gearhart's maledominated city is fulfilled in Russ's "Manland" by "the changed"— men who, at some point in their lives, chose to accept rape by other men rather than protect their lives at any cost. Unlike Gearhart's gentles (who are completely desexualized), the "changed" and the "half changed" are hyperfeminine and hypersexualized; they take over the sexual function of women by absorbing "the burden of having always to be taken, of having to swoon, to fall, to endure, to hope, to suffer, to wait, to only be" (171). Commenting on the function of the changed, Jael asks, "If most of the fully changed live in harems and whore-homes, and if popular slang is beginning to call them 'cunts,' what does this leave for us? What can we be called? The enemy" (167-68). Because men's need for an object to dominate has been turned against itself, the women in Jael's world are no longer required to occupy this position. Parthenogenesis (a device typically employed in separatist feminist Utopias) renders men useless to the female society, and the fact that the masculine desire for an object to

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dominate has turned against itself renders the women of Jael's world incomprehensible to and therefore relatively protected from Manlander society. The trigger for Jael's terrorism originates in the same gender game that impels Joanna to willfully propose a theoretical paradox and Jeannine to willfully indulge her self-effacement. Jael specifically attributes her terrorism to what she calls the "guilt of sheer existence" that society made her feel: "It was the secret guilt of disease, of failure, of ugliness (Much worse things than murder); it was an attribute of my being like the greenness of the grass. It was in me. It was on me. If it had been the result of anything I had done, I would have been less guilty" (193). Jael points out that her guilt is not a function of anything that she has done, but rather of the fact that she has been designated as the locus of guilt—of original sin—in society. She explains, "I am not guilty because I murdered. / murdered because I was guilty. Murder is my one way out" (195). Instead of founding her identity on victimhood, Jael accepts the guilt that society has assigned, at the same time insisting on the agency that her guilt already implies. She explains: For every drop of blood shed there is restitution made; with every truthful reflection in the eyes of a dying man I get back a little of my soul; with every gasp of horrified comprehension I come a little more into the light. See? It's me! I am the force that is ripping out your guts; I, I, I, the hatred twisting your arm; I, I, I, the fury who has just put a bullet into your side. It is I who cause this pain, not you. It is I who am doing it to you, not you. It is I who will be alive tomorrow, not you. . . . It is I, who you will not admit exists. (195)

Jael's insistent references to "I" in this passage underscore her effort to make herself visible as a subject and an agent behind and through violence. She creates a site of resistance from the subject position assigned her by exposing and then refusing the logical contradiction between being simultaneously guilty and incapable of agency. According to Jael, removal of the sexual objectification that made them merely an adjunct of men's desire grants the women of her world a relative freedom that derives from their unintelligibility rela104

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tive to "masculine" logic. The women in The Wanderground find their definition in their vulnerability to the (suspended) masculine impulse to dominate; in contrast, Jael's existence outside of the masculine sexual economy makes her simultaneously a freak and an equal in the eyes of the Manlander. Although the changed have freed women from sexual objectification, the "disguise" that allows Jael to carry out her job as an assassin remains dependent upon the Manlanders' inability to see her in any terms other than her sexual desirability. Rather than staging a Utopian retreat out of this incomprehension, however, Jael capitalizes on it during her acts of terrorism against the Manlanders. As a Manlander tries to strike an alliance with Jael by expounding upon "equal rights for all Men" while simultaneously reflecting upon "the emotional nature of Woman," Jael feels herself becoming more and more "a chalk sketch of a woman. An idea" (177). The Manlander forces Jael into a position where she is invisible except as a sexual object, but his assumptions also simultaneously create the stage for her resistance. The Manlander's increasingly single-minded perception of her as a potential sexual object ultimately activates Jael's hysterical strength, while at the same time his assumptions render the "real" Jael increasingly invisible to him. Instead of reacting by being seduced or becoming a victim, Jael kills the Manlander before he is even aware of any real danger. At the end of the novel, Jael also undermines any remaining innocence surrounding Janet's Utopian society, Whileaway, by challenging Janet's origin story with an alternative story that exposes Jael's own completely implicated actions as the force behind the creation of Whileaway. Janet's society shares with traditional Utopias an origin story that is characterized by the absence of violence or struggle. According to Janet, human agency had nothing to do with the creation of the Utopia—Whileaway was transformed into an all-woman society by a plague that wiped out all the men. Whileaway's origin story is consistent with the typical Utopian tendency to either repress or neutralize the violence implicit in creation of the society, and is virtually identical to the creation of female Utopia in The Wanderground through the emanation of a natural force. Like traditional Utopia, Whileaway possesses an inaccessibility that protects it from intrusion and "contamination" by other societies. Jael explains to

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Janet, "You . . . were almost impossible to find. The universe in which your Earth exists does not even register on our instruments; neither do those for quite a probable spread on either side of you" (161). The unlikeliness or conceptual inaccessibility of Janet's world—the "probability distance" between her world and the other existing worlds—protects it from potentially contaminating interaction with other societies and renders an aggressive or defensive posture unnecessary by providing the same kind of protection that geographical or temporal inaccessibility provides in traditional Utopias. As a challenge to the purity of Janet's Utopian world and in response to Janet's disgust over her "brand" of activism, Jael exclaims: Disapprove all you like. Pedant! Let me give you something to carry away with you, friend: that "plague" you talk of is a lie. I know. The world-lines around you are not so different from yours or mine or theirs and there is no plague in any of them, not any of them. Whileaway's plague is a big lie. Your ancestors lied about it. It is I who gave you your "plague," my dear, about which you can now pietize and moralize to your heart's content; I, I, I, I am the plague, Janet Evanson. I and the war I fought built your world for you, I and those like me, we gave you a thousand years of peace and love and the Whileawayan flowers nourish themselves on the bones of the men we have slain. (211) Again, Jael's insistence on her own agency establishes her as a subject, this time disrupting Janet's Utopian assumption of innocence in the process. Her visibility and her agency make Jael a threat to society, because for society to function Jael must be simultaneously designated as the locus of guilt and immobilized. From this perspective, Jael is grotesque both because she makes visible on the surface of her body how her guilt has transformed her, and because she exposes the logical contradiction of her position. Jael's life as an assassin is both a self-fulfilling prophecy that confirms the danger she is already assumed to represent and a spectacle whose ironic hyperbole functions as a critique of that assumption. Jael's character thus expresses the same tension between implication in and resistance against the sys106

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tern that characterizes Haraway's cyborg figure; however, she does so within a radical feminist understanding of gender oppression. Like Joanna's concept of the "female man," Jael is both a product of an impossible situation and the return of the repressed that confronts society with its own violence and turns that violence against it. Jael is society's creation gone awry—a female Frankenstein's monster who, once visible, becomes the mirror in which the reader views society's cruelty. That Jael is both grotesque in appearance and unsettling in her actions reflects the extent to which Russ critiques women's position within society by transforming it into disturbing spectacle. That Utopia is rendered permeable in The Female Man is manifested on several levels: a narrative that has as its goal the construction of Utopia as stable space is replaced with a narrative motivated by subjective desire-, the repression/resolution of contradiction that establishes Utopia in its innocence is replaced by the exposure of social contradiction; Utopia as telos is replaced by Utopia as strategic deployment. Through the interactions of her multiple protagonist(s), Russ employs the Utopian impulse antagonistically to denaturalize contemporary social relations instead of adopting Utopia's resolutory tendency to set up a structure that neutralizes social contradiction. Unlike The Wanderground, The Female Man does not translate the division between men and women onto the social space in order to found an abstract notion of female collectivity based upon an essentialization of selected female qualities and experiences. Partly as a result of its autobiographical nature, The Female Man approaches collective transformation from the perspective of the individual female subject; although it continues to exist as an autonomous social space, much of Utopia's significance within the narrative lies in the changes that it effects on the consciousness of those who exist outside of it. Utopia becomes a subjective cognitive projection that empowers the individual, and the radical feminism that informs Russ's novel grounds its praxis in the experience of individual female agents. Although The Female Man retains the same female/male dichotomy that structures The Wanderground, it de-essentializes the boundary between men and women by exposing how it has been socially instituted and employed strategically within patriarchy to deny women access to empowering self-definitions. Once it is de-essentialized, the opposi-

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tion between man and woman can no longer be used to uphold women's status as innocent victims, and action becomes possible. In The Female Man, "internal" and "external" describe the individual's position relative to power, and the novel is structured around the goal of exposing power relations rather than the goal of creating privileged communities. Although power is defined as access to a definition of oneself as human, and disempowerment as the exclusion from this definition, the structure of the novel disrupts exclusionary logic rather than resolving the dilemma of female subjectivity by revaluing women's position within that logic. This shift creates the potential for a notion of internal and external that is not based on a subject's or a community's essential nature (a definition that continues to support the distinction between the "pure" and the "impure," and therefore the logic that supports exclusion from the community) but rather on a subject's position relative to socially constructed identity categories. Speaking in Tongues: Octavia Butler, Heteronomous Identities, and Negotiating the Boundaries of Community While Russ critiques the naturalization of gender divisions, she still identifies women's primary contradiction with the way in which men establish themselves as full subjects by constructing women as sexual objects. In designating the tension between being human and being female as the fundamental contradiction of women's existence, Russ forgoes the opportunity to critique the definition of what it means to be human and disregards the fact that gender is not the only category through which some individuals are denied access to full subjectivity. Although the autobiographical nature of The Female Man makes it less totalizingly representative, Russ's strategy continues to express a monist paradigm that absorbs issues of race and class into the tension between the terms female and human. In the process, she reproduces in relation to women the Marxian notion of a "revolutionary subject" who experiences a single primary contradiction. In the following section, I explore how Octavia Butler rejects this monist philosophy, choosing instead to present the reader with female protagonists who negotiate individual and collective interests within a context of both gender and racial oppression. 108

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In all of her novels, Octavia Butler complicates Russ's monist paradigm by replacing a focus on the exposure of a single contradiction as it is experienced by a female protagonist with a focus on a female protagonist's efforts to negotiate a set of social contradictions that condense around the way that race and gender oppression have combined historically to subjugate African-American and mixed-race women. While Butler purposely avoids reducing her protagonists to their black or mixed racial origins, her novels depict a relation between individual and social space that recognizes the fact that women's position within society cannot be fully addressed by a feminist challenge to the ideological sleight of hand that collapses (white) male into human and excludes (white) female from empowering self-definitions and from active participation in the public sphere. Membership in multiple oppressed groups forces Butler's protagonists to forge alliances along multiple axes rather than around a single opposition. Combined with the protagonists' limited access to official power structures, these multiple affiliations inspire them to develop the strategic undermining, strategic alliances, and strategic collaboration necessary to their own survival. In Butler's novels, contingent and strategic affiliations with and between multiple communities replace the experience of a single contradiction as the primary relation between individual and community, and negotiated survival replaces deconstructive exposure or Utopian escape as the primary form of resistance. In the way they depict the relationship between individual subject and social space, Butler's novels frequently enact a confrontation between two competing narrative logics. The first consists of the formal logic that defines the collective identities of the respective communities that populate her novels. This logic tends to absorb or reify difference by reducing members of a community to a shared physical attribute or ability and, like the traditional Utopian impulse from which it is derived, it tends to be antithetical to both individual agency and social transformation. The second consists of a "situational logic" that foregrounds the extent to which historical and social context is constitutive of individual and group identity, and that tends to focus on individual agency and the denaturalization of difference. Typically, Butler's narratives initiate the breakdown of the 109

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formal and reified logic that upholds the boundaries between communities, by orchestrating a situation where individual membership in multiple communities combines with the formal logic of collective identity to create a paradox in the mind of the female protagonist. This paradox is activated by the protagonist's movement between communities or historical timelines and then deconstructed when the protagonist's movement forces her to develop a situational ethics that derives identity from historical context rather than from an abstract and formalized identity category. Like Russ, Butler explores the contradictions that surround individual and group identity; Butler, however, goes beyond merely exposing disabling tensions or contradictions into an exploration of how attempts to negotiate these tensions transform both individual and collective identity. Patternmaster: Reweaving Community Patterns Although Butler has stated that "I don't write Utopian science fiction because I don't believe that imperfect humans can form a perfect society" (Beal 1986: 14), her Patternmaster trilogy contains a number of imaginary communities that express Utopian dynamics in their relations with one another. Within these novels, the passive description of an ideal society, or its active deployment against oppression, is replaced by the narration of a female protagonist's efforts to mediate her own interests with the interests of the communities with which she is associated. In the process, Butler's protagonists aid in mediating the conflicting interests expressed by the various communities. Their ability as mediators is predicated specifically on their membership in multiple communities and on the resulting inside/ outside border position that they occupy in relation to these communities. This position both provides them with the necessary knowledge to translate interests across collective borders and forces them to develop the strategies of negotiation, role-playing, alliances, intimidation, and collaboration necessary to their own survival. Although both direct confrontation and Utopian escape also characterize Butler's societies, the emphasis on survival and negotiation overrides the impulse toward either confrontation or escape. Butler's Patternmaster trilogy is, to a significant degree, an exploration and critique of how communities establish the definition of 110

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"human" in their own image, and of how this process leads to xenophobia and ultimately to violence. Unlike Russ, Butler understands the chauvinism behind definitions of what it means to be human as not merely, or even primarily, an expression of gender oppression; instead, Butler focuses her critique more generally on the impulse to create and uphold hierarchies of difference. Although discrimination based explicitly on skin color is critiqued throughout the trilogy, Butler launches the main force of her critique figurally, by constructing a series of hierarchies within and between communities that derive from differences that do not signify in our own cultures. Within these imaginary societies, for example, hierarchical difference and exclusion are established variously through one's level of telepathic ability (Patternist society), through one's status as a fighter or a nonfighter, and through the degree of blue that individuals possess in their fur (Kohn societies). In themselves, these less familiar and therefore more dramatic differences function to "absorb" and render insignificant what becomes, in comparison, the relatively minor variations in human skin color—without significantly challenging the logic of difference. By enacting a series of "failures" on the part of her protagonists to recognize the symbolic value of differences adhered to by the various communities with which she is associated, however, Butler deploys the "strangeness" of these differences to denaturalize and reveal the arbitrariness of all cultural hierarchies based on physical differences or differences in ability. Butler's Patternist society is created through the manipulations of Doro, an ancient being who, through four thousand years of careful eugenics, has succeeded in creating the "raw material" for a new race. Before the "pattern" is created that will bind this new race together, Doro's people exist as unstable "latents" who possess unusual telepathic ability but who remain isolated from one another and are disproportionately represented within the dispossessed populations that exist on the fringes of society. In Mind of My Mind, these scattered individuals are united by Doro's protegee, Mary, when she spontaneously and inadvertently emanates a telepathic force that effectively unifies Doro's people and establishes her as the "mother" of a new race. In the way that this new collective existence imposes order and tranquility by transcending/absorbing individual difference, Pattern111

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ist society is typically Utopian. The Pattern both affords the "latents" a kind of emotional peace that they lacked prior to its institution and realizes what turns out to be their natural inclination for collective existence. Individual failure either to be absorbed into the Pattern or to be "neutralized" is not tolerated: Mary explains that "we had no prison, needed none. A rogue Patternist was too dangerous to be kept alive" (1977: 211). Not surprisingly, since its Utopian resolution is to transcend rather than to dismantle the logic of difference, the creation of Patternist society institutes its own set of hierarchies and exclusions. Internally, hierarchies are based on the relative strength of an individual's telepathic power; externally, the community defines itself against a host of "quasi others" who function either as a typical Utopian "threat" (the mutant and violent Clayark race against which Patternist society must establish a protective solidarity) or as a colonized slave race (the "mutes" who do not possess telepathic abilities and who perform the domestic labor that the Patternists cannot tolerate because of the emotional "static" produced by their own children). The Patternists rationalize their enslavement of the mutes by understanding it as an uncontrollable expression of their telepathic power, and they justify the way that they control the will of the mutes by arguing that they are merely activating latent desires that already exist in the mutes. This dual rationalization—that it is in the Patternists nature to oppress and in the mutes' nature to be slaves—represents the typical "master's" logic employed to escape any implication in oppression. Although the latents' inability to integrate into "normal" societysuggests an implicit critique of the way in which contemporary society discriminates against difference, the potential for social critique offered by their position within non-Patternist society is preempted by the fact that their disempowerment results from a shared psychic anomaly. The fact that their bond results from a characteristic that has been "bred" into them effectively displaces the political and structural causes of marginalization onto naturalized variations in individual psychology. Patternist society further preempts political action against oppressive conditions by offering a typically Utopian and transcendent resolution. Rather than mobilizing her "people" against the oppressive conditions under which they had suffered 112

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while they were living within the general population, Mary emanates a force that reconstitutes their psychic anomaly as a psychic gift that allows them at once to escape their individual misery and isolation and to achieve magical and absolute control over the remainder of society. In this sense, the coming together of the latents into the Pattern functions much like an enormously successful consciousnessraising experience, one in which transformation of individual consciousness as a step toward political action is replaced entirely by transformation of individual consciousness as social transformation. The logic behind the creation of Patternist society supports the fantasy that absolute power correlates with and ultimately follows from absolute victimization and powerlessness (recalling the escapist fantasy expressed by the women in Gearhart's The Wanderground), and is consistent with the liberal ideology through which society reconciles individuals to existing conditions by advocating the higher power of the mind. In this case, mental transcendence is combined with Utopian logic so that the power of the mind results not merely in individual transcendence, but in the collective transcendence represented by Patternist society. Butler leaves largely unexamined the way that Patternist society's creation reduces political transformation to a naturalized quality shared by selected individual psyches. Instead, she focuses on opening up the colonizing aspects of Patternist society to internal critique at the hands of its members, paying particular attention to the inequalities, compromises, and constraints that characterize relations within the collective. From the beginning, the Pattern is represented as a constraint upon individual freedom: although the Pattern grants latents a measure of psychic peace, they object to being kept on "leashes" by Mary, and they understand their position as a kind of enslavement. The group's very status as a unified collectivity is more than a constraint on individual freedom; it means that the individuals within it cannot survive at any distance from one another and are therefore prevented from leaving Earth when they want to. Many Patternists also express objections to the unequal power relation that develops between Patternists and mutes: Emma challenges Doro's dismissal of her objections to the term mutes, exclaiming, "I know what it means, Doro. I knew the first time I Heard Mary use it. It 113

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means nigger! . . . And if you don't think they look down on us nontelepaths, the whole rest of humanity, you're not paying attention" (1977: 161). The more absolute "otherness" of the Clayarks is also ultimately deconstructed when the Patternist Teray meets a lone mute while fleeing his own impending "mental enslavement" to a powerful Patternist housemaster. Teray's belief that Clayarks are animals is shaken first when the Clayark speaks to him in Teray's own language, and again more profoundly when the Clayark reveals his own conviction that Teray is subhuman. This encounter prompts Teray to reflect that "Patternists and Clayarks stared at each other across a gulf of disease and physical difference and comfortably told themselves the same lie about each other. The lie that Teray's Clayark had tried to get away with: 'not people'" (1977: 30). Teray's recognition here relativizes collective definitions of what constitutes "the human" and reveals these definitions to be dependent not upon some universal value, but rather upon a community self-image that is derived from a selected set of attributes shared by group members. While Patternist society's origin story both displaces and transcends difference by imposing an artificial unity on its members, it is precisely the imposition of this unity that forces its members to negotiate variations within the community. In this way, the Pattern drives its members into accepting their differences from one another: when the racist Jan tries to leave the Pattern after discovering that it includes people of all races and that the "mother" of this Pattern is of mixed race, she is forced back by its pull upon her and ultimately learns to confront and overcome her racism. More significantly, the members of Patternist society ultimately challenge the one man who claims to have transcended race absolutely: Doro. When Doro insists that his absolute difference transcends his race with the proclamation "I'm not black or white or yellow, because I'm not human," his wife Emma responds, "You mean you don't want to admit you have anything in common with us. But if you're born black, you are black. Still black, no matter what color you are" (1977: 94). Butler also implicitly associates Doro's assumption of his unique transcendence with the hubris and cruelty with which he has treated his people. Doro is represented as "partial," and his attempt to create a new race as an ego-driven need to create beings in his own image who

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will "tell him what he is—what he should have been" (1977: 163). Whereas Doro has displayed a total disregard for human life by consuming host bodies selected from his people throughout the centuries, Mary "feeds" off of her people's collective unity and strength without killing them and uses the Pattern that she has created in order to rescue "the most pathetic of Doro's discards." Whereas Doro is a parasite, Mary is "a symbiont, a being living in partnership with her people. She gave them unity, they fed her, and both thrived" (1977: 217). Butler suggests here that Mary's relation to "her" people represents a maternal alternative to Doro's, and that Doro's envy and resentment of Mary represents a thinly disguised figure for male envy of female procreative power: Mary observes that "he envied me for doing what he had bred me to do—because he was incomplete, and he would never be able to do it himself" (1977: 206). Mary's symbiotic relationship with the Pattern is represented both as something inherent to her—something she was "born to do"— and as a conscious, learned choice that she makes to live in partnership with rather than as a despot over the rest of the Patternists. When Doro and Mary finally reach a confrontation over their incompatible goals for the collective, Mary draws on the power of the collective to defeat him. Her ability to draw on this collective power does not derive finally from any mythical maternal power that Mary has over the Patternists, however. Although technically Mary "owns" the Pattern, she learns that deploying her power absolutely can only lead to destruction of herself and the Pattern, and that neither she nor the other Patternists can survive without mutual cooperation. Mary's successful rebuttal of Doro's attempt to take over the collective by fiat depends finally on her ability to negotiate alliances with others in the collective and to convince them that the benefits of mutually empowering coexistence outweigh its constraints. Because Mary has learned to live in cooperative relationship with the rest of the collective, Doro's attempt to consume her is met with the "new life" that flows into her continually from the Pattern, and it is Doro who is finally absorbed into the Pattern in a manner that effaces his individual identity entirely. Survivor, the final book of the Patternmaster trilogy, centers around a mixed-race female protagonist who has been forced to live at dif115

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ferent times within various warring communities; as a result, she occupies a position both inside and outside all of these communities. As an outsider, Alanna is not bound to the internal hierarchies created within any of the societies, nor is she indoctrinated into the prejudices through which each of the cultures defines the others as subhuman. The defamiliarization created by Alanna's failure to recognize the symbolic value of differences within and between the various communities, rather than absorbing or transcending difference, denaturalizes cultural hierarchies. To survive, Alanna must both challenge their assumptions about her and learn to observe the customs of the respective communities with which she is associated. This strategically learned behavior never becomes natural for Alanna; she continues to see how many of the communities' practices are foolish and based on faulty assumptions, and she never fully assimilates into any one culture. When she is captured by a group of missionaries who have left Earth to form a new society, Alanna is initially treated as subhuman because she is a "wild human"; after proving her "humanity," she is confronted with discrimination because of her skin color. When the missionaries attempt to put Alanna "with her own kind" because they feel she would be happier there, her mother, Neila, wonders aloud whether this "aging clique of aging bigots . . . really think[s] that our small colony can survive separating itself into this and that race" (1978: 32). When later Alanna is captured by theTekohn community, she is forced to learn yet another set of unfamiliar customs. In the process, Alanna again refuses to be absorbed by the community or to submit to practices that violate her. Just as she struck back against the missionaries who taunted her for being a "wild human," so does she refuse to accept the culturally endorsed belief of her Tekohn husband, Diut, that he has the right to hit her when he is displeased. Because she is an outsider, Alanna has a self-consciously learned relation to their customs based on the need to survive, rather than an inherited and naturalized one based on community membership. Alanna's skin looks strange to the Kohn not because it is dark, but because it lacks any hint of the fur whose variations of blue are the basis for Kohn hierarchy. Diut observes that, until Alanna entered the community and revealed to the Kohn that she could forget 116

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her learned respect for the blue whenever she wanted to, "respect for the blue was inborn with us. No one questioned it. It seemed impossible not to value it" (1978: 109). Because she has not inherited respect for the blue and because without the blue she cannot fit into the hierarchy, Alanna's presence deconstructs the Kohn belief that respect for the color blue is natural and innate. When they first meet, both Alanna and Diut relate in first-person accounts their initial repulsion at the other's difference and their initial belief that the other represented the distortion of nature. Diut observes later that "there was a strange beauty to her when one did not try to fit her into the Kohn image—when one did not see her as a twisted Kohn" (1978: 150). Here, Butler launches an implicit critique of racism by creating an unfamiliar difference that functions figurally to represent racial difference. By having Diut evaluate Alanna against the Kohn image, Butler creates a situation in which it is the "human"(and not human of color) that is on trial as a deviation. In the process, she radically decentralizes and relativizes the norms against which deviation is measured. Alanna's involvement with and loyalty to multiple communities grants her a unique knowledge that simultaneously works to her own and others' advantage yet makes her vulnerable to community prejudice. On the one hand, her perspective leads her to value personal and community survival over the absolute preservation of boundaries between communities, and over the absolute preservation of her own and others' racial and "moral" purity. On the other hand, her position renders her vulnerable because it threatens the perceptions of absolute difference that shore up the unity of the respective communities: that she survives her capture by the Tarkohns makes the missionaries suspicious of her when she returns to their community; that she chooses readdiction to meklah (a drug that Garkohns use to control Kohn prisoners) rather than death at the hands of the Garkohns makes her "unpure" in the eyes of the Tekohns. Because the existence of her Tekohn child is too threatening to the missionaries' conviction of the absolute difference between human and Kohn, and to their belief that the Kohn are merely "furred caricatures" of humans, Alanna chooses to hide the fact that she gave birth to a Tekohn until her involvement with the missionaries has ended. Even 117

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after she has successfully negotiated an alliance between the Tekohn and the missionaries, the missionaries refuse to accept their likeness to the Kohn and persist in viewing Alanna's deceased Tekohn child as a subhuman mutant. Although it strains her relationships within the community, Alanna's philosophy of survival, combined with the strategic alliances that she has made with members of various communities, also gives her the knowledge, skill, and leverage necessary for her to initiate larger strategic alliances between communities. Because Alanna knows the customs and behavior of various cultures, she both bears witness to the inaccuracy of their beliefs about each other and facilitates their alliance by translating customs and behaviors across the different cultures. Alanna deploys the knowledge that her position grants her to, for example, convince the missionaries that the Tekohns are not their enemies and that it is the Garkohns (with whom the missionaries have been living in uneasy alliance) who have been stealing their people and who plan to absorb the missionaries into their culture through interbreeding. When Diut urges Alanna to escape before the Garkohns discover that she has exposed them to the missionaries, she refuses to desert the missionaries until she knows they are safe, explaining, "For a while, they were my people" (1978: 106). Alanna insists that she will play as many roles as necessary—even collaborator—to help the missionaries escape the Garkohns, and she similarly advises the missionary leader Jules to play all three of his roles—leader, slave, ally—to get what he wants for his people. When Jules accuses her of indoctrinating him with "wild human philosophy," she responds that for her it merely represents "survival philosophy." Both with Alanna's Tekohn child, and with the secret interbreeding through which the Garkohns are "absorbing" the missionaries, Butler challenges the assumption that biology institutes absolute differences between cultures. Her main challenge to the assumption of difference, however, is launched through her protagonist, whose movement between communities disrupts their boundaries by revealing their respective beliefs to be founded in ideology rather than in nature. With this novel, Butler moves away from the limited formal logic through which the Pattern is instituted at the beginning of 118

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the trilogy and toward an active situational logic that is founded upon agency and movement within and between communities. Although Alanna's body already confronts those other than herself with the presence of difference, it is through her actions that she dismantles the prejudices and assumptions that have accrued around difference. In narrating Alanna's efforts to mediate the interests of various communities, Butler depicts a form of agency that privileges survival over purity and negotiation over the jealous protection of collective boundaries. Kindred: Bloodlines and Social Contradiction With Kindred, Butler departs from the depiction of imaginary communities into a "grim fantasy" that describes an African-American woman's movement between her contemporary urban society and a nineteenth-century slave-owning plantation. As in The Female Man, a contradiction surrounding the protagonist's identity is played out in Kindred on (and in) the female body. Like Russ, Butler transposes her protagonist to another social space where she meets another "version" of herself whose difference—again a result of her historical moment—expands the protagonist's understanding of her own contemporary situation. Rather than moving between the present and an imaginary future Utopia, however, the protagonist in Kindred moves between the present and a dystopian period in American history. As in her previous novels, Butler explores complications that derive from the protagonist's association with multiple communities; here, the primary contradiction focuses on the way in which race and gender oppression have combined historically to subjugate AfricanAmerican women. The narrative is driven by Dana's discovery that she is being repeatedly pulled back in time to save the life of her ancestor Rufus in order to ensure her own future birth. The logical paradox centers on the fact that Rufus is the white son of the plantation owner and that Dana's family line is initiated when he rapes her great-great-grandmother. In "On Being the Object of Property," Patricia Williams explains that her decision to write about her great-grandmother represents her attempt to "pin myself down in history, place myself"—both as a means of sustaining her identity and because of the dangerous his119

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torical malleability that attends the failure to document oppression (165). In the same article, however, Williams also refers to the discomfort she felt when her mother assured her of her birthright to be a lawyer, an assurance that was based on the fact that, since one of her ancestors had been a lawyer, the law was "in her blood." Williams's discomfort arises from the fact that the ancestor to whom her mother refers was a white slave-owning lawyer who bought her eleven-year-old grandmother and immediately impregnated her. Of her mother's comment, Williams observes: She wanted me to reclaim that part of my heritage from which I had been disinherited, and she wanted me to use it as a source of strength and self-confidence. At the same time, she was asking me to claim a part of myself that was the dispossessor of another part of myself. . . . [CJlaiming for myself a heritage the weft of whose genesis is my own disinheritance is a profoundly troubling paradox. (166) Although Butler states that she wrote Kindred out of her respect for and sense of continuity with her ancestors and their experiences of oppression, Kindred also functions, like Williams's anecdote, as an exploration of how this sense of historical continuity with one's ancestors becomes paradoxical when it is combined with the specific way in which African-American women were oppressed under slavery. The contradiction felt by Butler's protagonist (that she must "collaborate" in the oppression of her slave ancestor to ensure her own survival) functions as a figure for the more general contradiction that characterizes her identity—the fact that her "impure" genetic heritage means that she contains within her the blood of her oppressor. On the level of blood kinship, Dana's relation to her white ancestor Rufus is one of continuity, and it is expressed formally within the narrative by the fact that Rufus must survive in order for Dana to live, and Dana must live in order for Rufus to survive. Their implicit acknowledgment of this mutual dependence leads Rufus and his father, Tom, to grant Dana a special status: when she arrives in the past, she is excused from much of the more strenuous labor on the

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plantation and is permitted instead to live in the house and act as Rufus's "nanny." As Rufus grows older and begins to assume his adult role as a plantation slave owner, however, the blood kinship between Rufus and Dana conflicts increasingly with the two interconnected levels on which their relation is one of antagonism and inequality: racial identity and access to power. The power differential between Dana and Rufus is expressed literally by the humiliations that Dana must undergo as a black woman on a nineteenth-century slave plantation and figuratively by the way the power that calls upon Dana to protect Rufus does not protect her and instead forces her to relive a time-travel version of the "dreadful, disorienting, involuntary voyage of her ancestors" from Africa into slavery (1979: xi). Ensuring her survival by protecting Rufus also puts Dana at odds with her black ancestors, with whom she has not only a genetic alliance but also an alliance based on racial identity and mutual disempowerment. Dana feels this conflict between her dual alliances whenever she is put in the position of having to choose between them. The paradox that Williams describes and Butler dramatizes grows out of the historical conditions of slavery and out of the way in which racial identity has been constructed in the United States. In her critique of the way in which kinship has been used in the United States to draw the color line, Naomi Zack refers back to the white slave holders' institution of the "one drop" rule, which both defined race on the basis of kinship and designated any mixed-race individuals as black (73). This strategy, which ensured that the greatest number of slaves would be perpetuated, meant that white and black were defined as incompatible by virtue of their relation to "black": "whiteness" was defined as the total absence of "black blood," while "blackness" was defined as any hint of its presence, however slight. Thus, although the predication of racial identity on kinship holds no contradiction for individuals identified as white since their identity has been named, by definition, as the absence of "black blood," it frequently presents a contradiction for African-Americans who retain their black identity but who may (and because of the historical conditions of slavery often do) trace in their family line the presence of Anglo-American ancestry. This means that for African-Americans, expressing continuity through kinship more often than not results in

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a social contradiction that can cause the sensation of internal contamination. Zack argues that, as a result of these historical conditions, to have "both slave and slave-owning [family] members . . . creates havoc in any identity based on family history," and she observes that "it is probably more tranquil psychologically not to identify with both a slave and a slave-owning ancestor; to do so could be called schizophrenigenic" (61). On the surface, this reference to the cultural schizophrenia characterizing African-American identity under conditions of racial oppression parallels the rhetoric of Anglo-American radical feminists when they describe how women experience their identity under conditions of gender oppression. By referring back to The Female Man, however, we can better understand how this contradiction between "black" and "white" is very different from the contradiction between "female" and "human." Russ points out the apparent contradiction between being female and human that arises from an ideological sleight of hand that collapses the masculine with the human and "exceptionalizes" (as not fundamental to being human) specifically feminine qualities. The very force of her critique, however, lies in our (at least contemporary) agreement that women constitute a portion of the individuals who fall under the generic category "human."3 Russ is thus not attempting to "prove" that women are human; she is dramatizing how they have been confined to existence as a (devalued) subset of it, and she is deconstructing the gender division that has funded this confinement. Although there have been parallel theoretical attempts to deconstruct the color line and to question the validity of race as a category (Zack's is one), African-Americans are faced by the resiliency with which racism continues to uphold the absolute division between black and white.4 The resiliency of this racism has often led mixed-race blacks, most notably during the Harlem Renaissance, to reject the concept of a mixed-race identity in favor of identification with an embattled black population. As Zack explains, this strategy represented not so much a choice as a political necessity. At the time whites did not even profess racial neutrality, and their hostile designation of "blackness" as a contaminating and enervating presence required black solidarity as well as cultural leadership and pride (97). Although it was

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a necessary political move, this strategy created a unique paradox for African-Americans. Constructing an African-American identity that defines itself against "the white" founds a collective solidarity but upholds the absolute division between "black" and "white" upon which a racist ontology is founded. Establishing a sense of AfricanAmerican continuity on the basis of kinship problematizes this absolute division, but at the expense of having to claim within oneself the blood of one's oppressor. Butler concentrates her exploration of the paradoxical relation between kinship, racial identity, and racial and sexual oppression on the tension between Dana's relationship with her white ancestor Rufus and her relationship with her black ancestor Alice, who will become Dana's great-great-grandmother after Rufus rapes her. When she first arrives in the past, Dana's blood relation to Alice leads her to view Alice as an ally, and Alice's home as a potential refuge. Their blood alliance is complicated right from the beginning, however, by the fact that it is "constituted" by an act of racial and sexual oppression. Initially, Alice merely views Dana's special relationship with Rufus as an example of a black woman betraying her people by accepting special favors from a white slave owner, and she accuses Dana of being a "white nigger" whose collaboration keeps her own people down. This general antagonism intensifies as Alice increasingly becomes the object of Rufus's sexual desire. In Rufus's mind, Alice and Dana are "two halves of the same woman," a woman split into her respective roles as nurturer and sexual object. When Rufus uses his power over Dana to enlist her in his efforts to possess Alice, he turns these two halves against one another. Through Rufus's act of manipulation, the "theoretical" antagonism that exists between Dana and Alice—the fact that for Dana to exist through Rufus, Alice must be violated by Rufus—is translated into an actual antagonism that implicates Dana's actions in Rufus's violation of Alice. By foregrounding the similarity between Alice and Dana, Butler heightens the sense that Dana's act of self-preservation in protecting Rufus is also necessarily an act of self-oppression. On a formal level, Kindred's narrative seems to collapse identity with kinship, and kinship with political affiliation: bringing Dana back into the past to help a white slave owner commit the act of op123

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pression that creates her family line suggests that having one's existence derive from an act of oppression is equal to being implicated in the commission of that act of oppression. Dana's dilemma, both in its theoretical and "material" form, thus suggests a problem with a standpoint approach that collapses kinship, identity, and politics— particularly when one understands kinship to derive from blood relations. There exists, however, another level on which the relation between kinship and agency operates in Kindred's narrative, one that situates this relation politically and historically rather than abstracting it from blood relation. On this second level, Kindred represents a complex exploration of the relation between identity, agency, and historical conditions and is a testimony to the fact that "the relative significance of race, sex, or class in determining the conditions of black women's lives is neither fixed nor absolute but, rather, is dependent on the socio-historical context and the social phenomenon under consideration" (D. King, 49). Once again, Butler implicitly problematizes the formal logic of difference that structures her narrative by focusing on the context-dependent actions of her protagonist. In her own time, Dana has a relatively equal relationship to her white husband, Kevin. As another struggling writer who has also rejected his family's more traditional ambitions for him, Kevin represents for Dana a "kindred spirit" with whom she forms an alliance based upon similar interests, similar temperament, and a mutual necessity born of poverty. Dana's contemporary situation is still inflected with racism and sexism: she is forced to look for work through a female temp pool (which she refers to as "the slave market"); she and Kevin encounter racism from Kevin's family and a feeling of betrayal from Dana's family; and Dana's relationship with Kevin almost ends over his assumption that she will give up her own work to type his manuscripts for him. It is not until Dana begins traveling back in time, however, that their unequal power relations become critical. When Kevin is drawn back with Dana into the past, he continues to share an alliance with Dana based on their shared knowledge that they are merely "acting," out of necessity and selfpreservation, the nineteenth-century roles of master and slave. As their distance from these roles is lessened by the immediacy of their experiences, however, their distance from one another increases.

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Kevin chronically disregards the implications of his unequal access to power in the nineteenth century, whether by failing to consider moving to a free state when they plan to leave Rufus's estate or by remaining in the house, unaware, while Dana is forced to witness the brutal beating of a slave (1979: 79, 100). Under contemporary conditions, Kevin's "inability" to see the difference between black and white can appear relatively progressive, and the assumption of privilege that he enjoys manifests itself in ways that are minor enough to be addressed and overcome. Kevin's actions in the past, however, cast an ironic light on Dana's observation that what attracts her to Kevin in her own time is the fact that he "can't see the difference between black and white" (1979: 150). Intensified under more blatantly oppressive nineteenth-century conditions, Kevin's blindness to his privilege and to Dana's danger is more than ignorant and offensive— it is potentially life-threatening. The relative facility with which Kevin falls into his nineteenth-century role, combined with similarities that suggest that Rufus is on some level Kevin's historical double, "dramatizes the ease with which even a 'progressive' white man falls into the cultural pattern of dominance" and emphasizes the way in which sociohistorical context inflects human behavior (1979: xix).5 This emphasis on sociohistorical context relativizes a formal interpretation of identity that derives subject positions only with respect to blood identity. By creating a narrative structure that transplants late-twentiethcentury characters into early-nineteenth-century conditions, Butler does more than foreground a paradox surrounding African-American identity; she also implicitly argues for a "situational ethics" that evaluates actions with attention to historical circumstances and relative access to power. If Kevin's accommodation to nineteenth-century conditions implicates him in patterns of domination, Dana's accommodation to these conditions transforms her into both a witness to and an example of African-American agency under slavery. Robert Crossley compares Dana's actions to the "ethics of compromise" that Harriet Jacobs tolerated to save herself and her children (1979: xxi). Although technically it does not fall within the firmly marked historical boundaries of the genre, Kindred thus functions in much the same way as a traditional slave narrative, foregrounding black women's "ac125

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tive roles as historical agents as opposed to passive subjects" (Carby, 36). Through her own necessity, and by observing the subtle and overt acts of individual resistance enacted by the slave community, Dana becomes a witness to the complexity of existence under slavery: her observations give context to and thus deconstruct stereotypes, while her experiences under slavery chart the development of her own situational ethics.6 From the moment she arrives in the past, Dana already possesses the impulse to place her own survival and the survival of her family ahead of avoiding the contradiction with which she is faced: upon discovering the nature of her relation to Rufus, she comments, "If I was to live, if others were to live, he must live. I didn't dare test the paradox" (29). What Dana lacks, however, are the skills and knowledge to survive under conditions of oppression that are far more severe than those for which her contemporary experience has prepared her. Dana develops this knowledge in part by observing the actions of the people around her. Although she recognizes in the cook, Sarah, what her own time would stereotype as a "mammy" figure, Dana discovers beneath Sarah's apparent cooperation with plantation rules a bitter and lasting anger over the sale of her children, and through her own experiences with slavery Dana comes to recognize in Sarah's resignation a woman who has lost all that she can stand to lose. Just as Sarah's cookhouse functions as a place of community and alliance with the other slaves, it also functions as a place of instruction for Dana. She recounts how "sometimes old people and children lounged there, or house servants or even field hands stealing a few moments of leisure. I liked to listen to them talk sometimes and fight my way through their accents to find out more about how they survived lives of slavery. Without knowing it, they prepared me to survive" (68). The rest of Dana's voyages describe a process through which she learns how to balance her individual integrity against survival within her severely constrained circumstances. This includes bearing a host of humiliations: the humiliation of calling Rufus master and pretending to be her husband's slave, the pain and humiliation of being whipped after her attempted escape, the humiliation of being called a "white nigger" by the other slaves for her alliances with Kevin and Rufus. Even in her compromised position, however, Dana continues 126

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to resist—first by turning her involuntary alliance with Rufus into an opportunity to influence him with an eye toward the future power he will hold over the slaves, then by risking her own safety and secretly teaching the slave children Carrie and Nigel to read, and finally through a series of increasingly desperate attempts to escape. An interpretive paradigm based upon the ideology of situational ethics, which focuses on choices made by historically grounded agents, helps contextualize the immobilizing formal paradox in Kindred around blood relations. Even though it would mean an end to her own existence, Dana refuses to compromise herself to the point of helping Rufus obtain Alice as a mistress, and she becomes involved only when he actively manipulates the situation by threatening to whip Alice and take her forcibly. When Dana agrees to present Alice with her choices—a "choice" that is finally between being beaten and forcibly raped or submitting to existence as Rufus's "mistress"—she initially accepts in silence Alice's condemnation of her as a collaborator. When Alice asks her what she would do, Dana points out that they are in different situations, but admits that if it were her, she would not submit; she then offers to stall Rufus so that Alice will have the best possible chance for escape. When Alice finally chooses submission to Rufus, it is not because Dana has fulfilled her "formal destiny" to collaborate with Rufus, but because Alice prefers this choice to the possibility of being caught and having the dogs set on her. In this scene—the scene that condenses most powerfully around the paradox of Dana's ancestry—both the antagonisms and the alliances shared by Alice and Dana are revealed to be not a pure product of blood relations, but a product of their positions relative to an oppressive power operating within a particular set of social circumstances. Both Alice and Dana are revealed to be the victims of Rufus's actions, and the actions of all three characters to be a product of their positions within a particular historically grounded moment and not a result of their abstract blood relations. Unlike The Wanderground, which is also based on the memory of oppression, Kindred does not predicate the innocence of its protagonist upon the historical experience of oppression; unlike The Female Man, it does not abstract the experience of oppression into a single contradiction. Insofar as the formal paradox in Kindred correlates 127

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Dana's mixed bloodline with alliances and actions that implicate her in oppression, it relies on a logic that derives identity from blood kinship and supports a definition of identity and political alliance that is based upon an ideology of racial purity and that views mixed racial heritage as a kind of "moral contamination." While the formal structure of the narrative (its enonce) foregrounds the paradox of Dana's identity, the action of the narrative (its enonciation) foregrounds the complex relationship between racial oppression, racial identity, and opportunities for agency. As a challenge to the formal and essentially Utopian logic that naturalizes boundaries between identities, Butler foregrounds the influence that sociohistorical context has upon her characters' alliances and modes of resistance. This alternate narrative logic—which emphasizes a situational ethics organized around negotiated survival—concentrates on how the historical conditions of African-Americans inflect in specific ways both their identities and the ways in which they have expressed agency through resistance. Conclusion In "Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Skepticism," Susan Bordo critiques the "Cartesian epistemology of nowhere," in which "the body—conceptualized as the site of epistemological limitation, as that which fixes the knower in time and space and therefore situates and relativizes perception and thought—requires transcendence if one is to achieve the view from nowhere, God's eye-view" (143). At the same time, Bordo critiques what for her is an equally politically suspect postmodern epistemology of "everywhere" that is characterized by a disembodied free-for-all that sets no limits on the movement within and between bodies and that therefore deprives individuals of any access to a grounded identity. She asks, "What sort of body is it that is free to change its shape and location at will, that can become anyone and travel everywhere? 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" (145). Bordo connects this postmodern body to the "epistemological fantasy of becoming multiplicity—"the dream of limitless multiple embodiments, allowing one to dance from place to place 128

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and self to self" (145).7 Both the "view from nowhere" and the "view from everywhere," Bordo argues, deny the fact that one is always somewhere, and limited (145). Both Russ and Butler offer an alternative to this sort of "bad" postmodernism, which fractures identity to the preclusion of possibilities for agency or resistance. In The Female Man, the multiple protagonists do not reify into a determinate notion of "woman as multiplicity," nor does the "confusion of boundaries" that Russ portrays degenerate into the plurality of being "everywhere" and "nowhere" at once. The difference within and between Russ's protagonist^) is grounded in specific social conditions and is the result of refracting her experience through four different historical relations to patriarchal society. Russ rejects both the ideology of the integrated body and the impulse toward resolution that this ideology reflects at the same time that she emphasizes the experience of internal contradiction as a precursor to agency. Here, the "fantasy" of proliferating identities represented by a fragmented, multiple subject is less an "escape" or a free play of floating signifiers than an autobiographical acting out of the social contradictions experienced by a white female academic in the 1970s. Although Russ's book allows for alliances among the four female protagonists who occupy different temporal logics relative to oppression, and although these alliances (and the attendant resurfacing of individual agency) undermine the "purity" of Utopia, the conceptual division between (male) dystopia and (female) Utopia remains relatively uncompromised. Deploying the Utopian form in a way that reasserts the connection between the Utopian impulse and agency, Russ nevertheless remains within the monist paradigm that informs the more conservative Utopian impulse and that tends toward reduction of political forces into a single opposition. Butler complicates this single opposition by introducing the complexities that surround the multiple identities of her protagonists. With the exception of Kindred, Butler's works contain what may be described as a series of "heterotopias."8 Although in their formal structure they reproduce many of the logics of Utopian collectivity, Butler's communities are by no means ideal, and they are organized explicitly to foreground the differences among their members while at the same time denatu129

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ralizing the differences between communities. The Utopian purity of Butler s imaginary communities—like that of Russ's Whileaway—is actively broken down by female protagonists who move between multiple communities and timelines. For Butler, this movement is less a means toward "raising the consciousness" of the individual protagonists than it is a means toward exploring the way that individual and community survival is predicated on the negotiation of difference. Both Butler and Russ create imaginary communities as backdrops for an exploration of contradictions within their protagonists' identities. Movement between communities engenders not only an exploration of these contradictions but also a deconstruction of the logic that produces them. The authors' respective treatment of social contradiction lead them to privilege different strategies for resistance: Russ turns an exploration of social contradiction into disturbing spectacle, and Butler turns an exploration of social contradiction into an argument for situational ethics. In none of the novels does the experience of contradiction or a deconstructive agenda preclude the possibility of agency; in fact, disjunctive experiences provide the impetus for the protagonists' actions and resistance. The narrative structures of these books, combined with the actions of their protagonists, reveal that it is not necessary to possess a "moral purity" based on a unified identity in order to resist oppression and that a deconstructive impulse aimed against the naturalization of difference does not preclude possibilities for positive identity or for effective agency that grows directly out of one's identity. The protagonists in these novels thus testify to the fact that feminism's goal of articulating women's submerged identities and postmodernism's goal of establishing antifoundational politics of difference are not necessarily antagonistic.9 These novels provide opportunities for understanding how agency can exist through the disturbance of self-unity and through the complex ways that subjects negotiate the social contradictions that surround their identities.

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4 Utopia and Technopolitics in Woman on the Edge of Time

Traditional Utopian literature relates to the novel's contemporary historical circumstances through a process of negation—contemporary society is present only as a repressed subtext, and visible only in the conceptual "antinomies" that the Utopian text attempts to neutralize or resolve. In the previous chapter, I explored the effects that occur when, instead of repressing the connection between contemporary society and imaginary society (a repression that is designed to preserve the absolute "elsewhere" of Utopia), a text actively foregrounds and thematizes the interaction between Utopia and contemporary society. This increased interaction funds an "ideologeme of activism" within the text, while the increased emphasis on agency leads the imaginary society to fall back as the setting for the actions of the protagonist.1 The protagonist's movement between social spaces heightens our sense of how an imaginary society can function within a novel as a strategic space deployed against existing conditions in order to foster action and resistance on the part of the protagonist. As a result of these related shifts in form and emphasis, the imaginary societies I discussed become more tied to and embedded in existing conditions and less capable of sustaining their "ideal" removal from these conditions. In Marge Piercy's critical Utopia Woman on the Edge of Time, description of Utopian space once again coexists with the narration of a female protagonist's experience within her contemporary society. By foregrounding how Utopian space interacts with the protagonist

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to denaturalize her experience of contemporary society and to inspire her resistance against oppressive conditions, the structure of Woman on the Edge of Time once again reflects a goal that is less the consolidation of an imaginary space free from all ideological conflict than it is the female protagonist's discovery of her own potential for agency. If in The Female Man the deferred discovery that Jael's agency lies behind the creation of Whileaway remains an unsettling one—a purposeful compromise of Utopia's innocence—in Woman on the Edge of Time the very existence of the Utopian future is revealed to depend upon the active resistance of the female protagonist in her own time. The protagonist's passage between contemporary dystopia and future Utopia is thus fundamental, not only to her own developing agency but also to the existence of Utopia as such. Within Woman on the Edge of Time, the Utopian society Mattapoisett exists simultaneously as a strategic projection that "arms" Connie with the conceptual tools to resist oppression and as an external reality that depends on her resistance for its survival. Mattapoisett is thus both a conventional Utopian space in which the oppressive conditions that define Connie s contemporary existence are already resolved and a social space whose parameters shift in relation to Connie's experiences and actions in her own time. With this development, Piercy addresses directly what Russ only alludes to—the unresolved question of the relationship between contemporary resistance and the image of a positively transformed future society. Piercy narrates the relationship between contemporary dystopia and future Utopia through the use of a Foucauldian-style genealogy that explores the way power acts on and through the individual body/ subject along three complexly related axes: the protagonist's experience of oppression, the image of a transformed society, and the protagonist's evolution to a consciousness of active resistance. While Piercy's novel does not resolve the question of how one moves from an identity of resistance formed by oppression to an identity beyond oppression, her narrative articulates a relation between the experience of oppression and the image of a transformed society that constructs them not as mutually incompatible, but as productively interactive.

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Power and Visibility I have already discussed how an economy of visibility, in which group members are subject to a disciplinary gaze, operates in traditional Utopias to stabilize or "fix" the harmonious social space. In the traditional Utopian space, discipline remains somewhat external to the subject; although an ever-present surveillance is designed ultimately to create a self-disciplining subject, the surveilling "gaze" generally originates from a position outside or above the individual and social body.2 According to Foucault, the goal of modern power is progressively to internalize this gaze, to create a power relation that is independent of the person(s) who exercises it and a social order wherein individuals "become caught up in a power situation of which they themselves are the bearers" (1977: 112). Foucault rejects the liberal "repressive hypothesis" that understands power to be merely constraining or prohibitive of individual desires and beliefs from without in favor of a model that understands power to be productive of these desires and beliefs. In Foucault's model, the operations of power, which were formerly understood to apply from the top down (for example, in state-centered or economic models of political praxis), are now revealed to obtain from bottom up and to be centered in the social practices that define "the politics of everyday life." The modern form of power that Foucault describes represents a shift from the previous form on several counts: it eschews its own visibility; it is individualized and capillary, extending power to the smallest and most minute level of the individualized subject and especially to the individual body; and it expresses an obsessive concern for control over the consciousness, and not just the actions, of the individual.3 In the new deployment of power that Foucault describes, virtue is no longer guaranteed by exposing the surface of the body to an external disciplining gaze; instead, virtue is guaranteed through an absolute penetration of the individual by a power that is, in Foucault's words, "coercive, corporal, solitary, and secret" (1977: 129). Foucault associates the impulse to isolate and embed power within the individual with an attempt to constitute the individual as an analyzable object, and in doing so to "lay down for each individual his true name, his place, his body" (1977: 190, 192). He describes how this 133

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process has expanded throughout the Enlightenment and has been applied to increasingly diffuse forms of social aberration or "contamination" that threaten the social body. The term plague, for example, which at first described a physical disease that had to be controlled by the separation out of contaminated subjects, has come to encompass all those who occupy marginal positions within society for whatever reason (madness, poverty) as a contaminating mass whose individual components must be isolated, defined, and controlled. In contemporary society, Foucault observes, this effort to isolate and define the individual coincides with the medico-juridical systems introduction of the "case study," whose taxonomy is designed at once to fix the individual in "his" (pathological) uniqueness and to bring him under the controlling aegis of the institutional system. Foucault's analysis aligns with observations and insights made by the contemporary feminist movement on several counts: like feminists, he expands the notion of the political to include the personal and everyday, and he focuses on sexuality as a key arena of political study; he critiques the notion of biological determinism; he focuses on the "submerged" knowledge of individuals who have been marginalized within society; and he identifies the human sciences in general and the application of biotechnology in particular as central to the modern form of domination (Sawicki, 49). While recognizing the value of how Foucault's "genealogies" offer valuable new ways to conceive the contemporary operations of power, feminists have nevertheless also identified two important and related levels on which his model is potentially antagonistic toward the goals of feminism. Less fundamentally problematic is the androcentric lens through which Foucault looks at the history of power—because his deconstructive efforts are applied largely through a "historical replay of patriarchy," he reproduces in his genealogies a predominantly male perspective.4 More troubling to feminists is the way that Foucault's conception of power as such fails to provide viable alternatives to the traditional models for critical consciousness and resistance that his theory dismisses as anachronistic. Linda Alcoff, for example, argues that because the category of woman remains in Foucault's analysis only as one of several "fictions," there remains no site for an emancipatory politics or for the construction of positive resistance, and the only 134

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thing left for women to do is to continue to dismantle this fiction (417-18). A feminism based on this precept, Alcoff concludes, "could only be a negative feminism, deconstructing everything and refusing to construct anything" (418). In a related critique, Nancy Hartsock points out that Foucault's critique of subjectivity and of humanism denies the efforts of third world and minority cultures to establish their own identities as oppositional to patriarchy and capitalism.5 Even when Foucault does make a gesture toward identifying sites of resistance, these sites remain undifferentiated and contradictory: Teresa de Lauretis points out that Foucault's notion of a resistance that originates from and speaks in the name of a "body of diffuse pleasures" implies a movement beyond sexual difference that denies the reality of gender oppression (1988: 23-24).6 From a feminist perspective, then, Foucault's androcentric approach combines with an underdeveloped conception of resistance in a way that ends up offering no history of women's resistance and no concrete model for women as actors. Foucault's failure to articulate specific strategies of resistance appropriate to his new conception of power is in part a consequence of his undifferentiated and "value-neutral" account of power, which suspends or "brackets" normative questions about whether modern applications of power are legitimate or not.7 Insofar as Foucault professes to be merely "describing" the operations of power, he adopts a methodology reminiscent of scientific Marxism and thus confronts the same dilemma around the fact that it is more difficult for a structural conception of power to conceive resistance than it is for a voluntaristic conception of power to do so.8 Like scientific Marxists, Foucault can only sit back and describe the social forces; unlike scientific Marxists, he professes to have rejected the humanist presumptions that define these forces as oppressive and that anticipate the path to emancipation—in fact, oppositions such as oppression/ emancipation and truth/ideology appear to have become anachronistic in Foucault. Combined with his "posthumanist" rhetoric is the way in which Foucault's analysis of how power is both productive and constraining toward the individual ends up flattening out the different sorts of power and constraints that obtain in social practices. Most notably, as Nancy Fraser points out, Foucault fails ade135

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quately to distinguish between the individual's necessary socialization into norm-governed practices that constrain individual freedom in order to enable collective existence and the overt and covert coercion expressed in the targeting of certain groups and individuals for social policy (32). Fraser points out that, by conflating degrees of social constraint and coercion under a general discussion of power and its operations, Foucault effaces the fact that while some forms of social constraint are illimitable to any social organization, many forms of social coercion are by no means necessarily so (1989: 31-32). Two related phenomena combine in Foucault's understanding of the relation between power and the individual subject to problematize the search for a site of resistance: the collapse of oppressive subjection and subjective development into one another, and the dissociation of power and control from specific agents of oppression. Our sense that Foucault has moved beyond the necessary distinction between subjection and subjectification remains, however, in tension with our sense that embedded within his "posthumanist" rhetoric is an account of power that clearly reveals the extent to which he views its modern application as malevolent and as a force to be resisted. Fraser defines this contradiction in Foucault as the "normative confusion" expressed by a value-neutral methodology that persists in using value-laden words such as domination, subjugation, and struggle. She argues that, in replacing the liberal "language of rights" with a postliberal "language of war," Foucault merely avoids the issue of "who is dominating or subjugating whom, and who is resisting or submitting to whom," without moving—as he claims to—beyond an understanding of power in terms of opposing sides (28-29).9 Fraser goes on to point out that the "ominous overtones" in Foucault's discussion of biopower (overtones that give Foucault's analysis much of its subversive force) refer back to our essentially humanist objection to an economy of the body that objectifies people, robs them of their autonomy, and negates the reciprocity and mutuality that are valued in human relations (63).10 In spite of its contradictions and lacunae, Foucault's analysis remains useful to feminists in a number of ways. Foucault's genealogies succeed in exposing the operations of power in new ways that expand our understanding of and question our assumptions about 136

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how and where it is applied. His understanding of culture as a set of historically grounded practices denaturalizes them by revealing their contingency, and his relocation of the operations of power to everyday practices suggests a mode of resistance that is local and concrete. Foucault's focus suggests a notion of resistance that is consistent with feminism and that understands how resistance can be carried out in local struggles that attack the form of power exercised at the everyday level of social relations (Sawicki, 23). The sense one gets from Foucault that there is no "outside" to power is balanced by the possibility his theories entertain for "the insurrection of subjugated knowledge" through marginalized groups' development of "counterdiscourses" (Phelan, 433). Although Foucault tells an androcentric story, the "truth-telling" through which his genealogies disrupt historical "epistemes" suggests their possible application to subjects who remain invisible in his own analysis (Phelan, 423). In order for it to support the goals of feminism, however, a Foucauldian approach must retain some sense of the distinction between forms of power that are enabling and forms of power that are coercive and must contain some attempt to discern "who is doing what to whom."

Power and Knowledge Woman on the Edge of Time describes the operations of power upon its protagonist with the goal of materially defining and producing her as a subjected individual. Thus, Piercy's narrative invites an analysis that considers those gestures in Foucault that focus on retrieving subjugated knowledge and that focus on the biopolitics surrounding how power is applied to the individual subject and in particular to the individual body. Like Foucault, Piercy understands her subject not in terms of her exclusion from the social body, but rather in terms of her relationship to a politics that aims at incorporating her into society as a "pathological subject." Rather than ignoring Connie, the mechanisms of social control in Woman on the Edge of Time manifest an obsessive concern for penetrating, defining, and controlling her. Far from a Utopian and harmonious figure for the body politic, the protagonist (Connie) is instead subject to a politics of the body, in which power operates materially to constitute her as a "describable, analyzable object" (Foucault 1977: 190). The narration 137

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of Connie's experiences in contemporary New York charts an increasing violation of and control over her body: she has been raped, she has been sterilized against her will, and her child has been taken away by the state. By the time the narrative picks up Connie's story, she already perceives the entire welfare establishment in terms of its ability to redefine her as an object of clinical study Recalling her first official encounter with the system, Connie reflects: All those experts lined up against her in a jury dressed in medical white and judicial black—social workers, caseworkers, child guidance counsellors, psychiatrists, doctors, nurses, clinical psychologists, probation officers—all those cool knowing faces had caught her and bound her in their nets of jargon hung all with tiny barbed hooks that stuck in her flesh and leaked a slow weakening poison. She was marked with the bleeding stigmata of shame. (60) From the beginning of the novel, power is represented as a physical, corporal reality whose discourses simultaneously constitute her subjectivity and subject her to the mechanisms of power, leaving her to believe that her actions and her position result from some flaw that is internal to herself. The narrative proper begins after Connie brings her daughter in to be treated for a broken arm caused when Connie struck out at her in frustration. Connie is at once brought under rigorous surveillance and integrated into the system as a "case study"; her daughter, Angelina, is immediately taken away from her, and Connie is interned in a mental institution as a dangerous psychotic. As a case study, Connie is at once fixed in her pathological uniqueness and brought under the controlling aegis of the institutional system. The control to which Connie is subjected finds its most powerful metaphor in the dialytrode implant that the doctors plan to insert in her brain to "repair" her emotions. To the extent that the implant is designed both to be incorporated as a physical part of Connie and to transform her consciousness, its function is to collapse the division between physical body and consciousness altogether and to detach social control from any outside agent. The fact that Connie's own body

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provides the vehicle through which social control is applied effectively precludes the possibility of resistance. In this way, the implant functions as a physical condensation of the threat posed to Connie by the biotechnical and welfare systems' efforts to embed the operations of power more deeply within the individual. The implant threatens to create out of Connie a dystopian correlative to Haraway s transgressive cyborg figure whose "blasphemous" combination of human and machine deconstructs totalizing concepts of subjectivity as organically unified.11 Here Piercy presents the reader with a human subject whose total penetration by the technology of power precludes the kind of transgressive disjuncture that defines the oppositional force behind Haraway's cyborg figure. Instead of faltering at how the cyborg's disruption of humanist values threatens the status quo, power adjusts to modern metaphors of the brain as computer circuitry and finds new ways to penetrate and control the individual. Once the brain becomes mappable and each emotion locatable, the individual becomes susceptible to increasingly refined applications of power at the microlevel "circuitry" of consciousness. From this perspective, the surgical implant becomes the ultimate refinement of the social control that has already been exercised on Connie by the system, and the image of the implant reflects the goal of modern power, which is to preempt resistance, not through fear but through control and suppression of the desire to resist. To the extent that she combines in her novel a Foucauldian vision of power with an emancipatory politics, Piercy faces the problem of how to represent strategies of resistance in the context of a form of power whose location is diffuse, and whose application is refined to the minutest particle of the individual. Piercy diverges most obviously from Foucault by representing the application of power in gendered terms and connecting it explicitly with violation—achieving both these effects through the use of a rape metaphor. As she waits for the operation that will "stick a machine in her brain," Connie reflects: They would rape her body, her brain, her self. After this she could not trust her own feelings. She would not be her own. She would be their experimental monster. Their plaything, like Alice. Their tool. (279) 139

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Although Piercy s use of the rape metaphor makes explicit the connection that Foucault avoids—the connection between violation of the female body and patriarchal society—unlike Gearhart she does not ascribe a violating impulse to something biologically inherent in men. Associated with the insertion of the implant, the rape metaphor in Woman on the Edge of Time expands beyond women's physical vulnerability to men and includes the vulnerability of all who are subject to violation because of their disempowered position in society. Instead of consolidating women's position as victims, rape becomes "the book's metaphor for the double oppression of racism and sexism" (Du Plessis, 184) in a way that explicitly connects one's vulnerability to violation with one's relative access to power. Although its goal is to remove power from specific actors, the implant also functions to implicate the agents of power, and in this way it becomes "disloyal" to its origins. From the perspective of the doctors in the mental institute, the primary advantage to the implant lies in the way that it can be tailored to the specific transgression of each individual. As one doctor explains, "We can electrically trigger almost every mood and emotion—the fight or flight reaction, euphoria, calm, pleasure, pain, terror!" (204). The same mechanism that instantly neutralizes the unpredictable violence of Connie's fellow inmate Alice and turns her into a harmless flirt acts on another inmate, Skip, to control his "aberrant" sexuality by neutralizing his desire. Even before Connie begins her efforts to sabotage the doctors' work, however, the implant itself is already functioning to subvert their detached control of the situation. If it operates on one level to produce or alter desires within its "host" subject, the implant also has a productive relation to the desires of those who supposedly control its application. If at first Dr. Morgan uses the implant to control Alice's violence, increasingly he is revealed to use it as a means of stimulating, for his own pleasure, "the point that produced in Alice a sensual rush, until once she kissed his hand and told him that he was good to her" (260). If the implant initially transforms Skip's homosexual desires into self-hatred, it also reveals that "because he was too beautiful and tempted them [the doctors], they had fixed him" (270). The implant's role in uncovering or providing a medium for desires within the doctors (desires that in both cases center on 140

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"dangerous" forms of sexuality) exposes the agents of power in this situation to an uninvited gaze—the gaze of the reader. Overwhelmingly dystopian in its potential effect on Connie and her fellow inmates, the implant is nevertheless instrumental in creating the space for a politics of resistance within the novel and a way for Piercy to manage the "problem" of power. While it functions within Connie's "story" as a mechanism of control, the implant functions within the "plot" as a mechanism for locating the agents of power and for separating social control from the subjected individual's consciousness.12 On the level of story, the dialytrode collapses the distance between consciousness and physicality so that it becomes, literally, the vehicle for psychologically controlling Connie and, metaphorically, a condensation of the mechanisms of social control that suggests the uselessness of resistance. At the same time, however, the dialytrode provides the vehicle through which Connie identifies the attackers against which she will come to define herself, as well as the vehicle through which she develops an understanding of how the mechanisms of power operate. The limit of the implant—that which both allows the space for Connie's resistance and defines the rhetoric of that resistance—lies in the way that it takes an anonymous, ubiquitous power operating on the level of discourse and system and embodies it as a mechanical act of violence perpetrated by an identifiable set of individuals. Because the implant requires agency, someone to insert it and to turn the switch on, the agents of power can be localized in the doctors who perform the operation and therefore can be attacked. Refined so that its application affects the minutest particle of the subject, the implant nevertheless remains something that attacks the subject from without (and not merely something that produces the subject as such), and that therefore can be removed. The fact that there remains some distance between this application of power and the will of the subject allows Piercy to stage the resistance of her protagonist and to narrate her coming to agency. On the level of plot, the dialytrode not only exposes and denounces the agents of power to the reader, but also provides the organizing logic through which the function of Utopian space in the narrative may be understood—both as a locus of resolution and as a means for the development of a language of resistance.

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Neutral Gear: Utopia as Resolution The possibility of "removing" an oppressive application of power from the body not only provides the logic for how Connie will resist in her own time, it also sets up the logic through which the Utopian community of Mattapoisett constitutes itself as an ideal society. To be disempowered in Connie's world is to be vulnerable to violation—of one's body and, by association, of one's identity. The threat to the integrity of Connie's body in the hospital is dystopian, not because it is destabilizing or signifies a lack of purity, but because it reflects the physical presence of what the Utopian society of Mattapoisett has neutralized—namely, unequal power relations. Here, Utopian society is not consolidated by protecting the integrity of the individual or social body per se, or by establishing the division between self and other that is constitutive of the traditional Utopia; instead, Mattapoisett neutralizes the way oppressive forces attack the subject through the body, by removing identity from the body and locating it in the individual's social relation to the community. To do this, Mattapoisett severs the connection between biology and identity on two fronts: the relationship between racial markers and cultural identification, and the relationship between gender, reproduction, and sexual identity. Like The Female Man and Kindred, Woman on the Edge of Time reproduces the same subject in different timelines: Mattapoisett's Jackrabbit is a version of New York's Skip; Mattapoisett's Bee is described as representing unfulfilled potentialities in Connie's dead lover, Claud; and Connie's guide, Luciente, suggests an alternate version of Connie herself. When she contacts Luciente, however, Connie is at first unable to "recognize" herself, because she interprets Luciente through the familiar contemporary categories of self-representation that define Connie's society. When Luciente explains that her ability to connect with Connie results from the fact that Luciente is a strong "sender" while Connie is a strong "catcher," Connie immediately interprets these terms in relation to the category of gender. Connie assumes that Luciente's status as a "sender" means that Luciente is male and wants sex, and Luciente's construction of Connie as a "catcher" with unusually heightened receptivity connotes passivity to Connie: 142

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"Receptive. Like passive. The Mexican woman Consuelo the meek, dressed in black with her eyes downcast, never speaking unless addressed" (45). Because Luciente does not possess the qualities that mark her as female for Connie, Connie initially perceives herself as an object of male desire. When Luciente tells Connie that she mostly sleeps with men, Connie exclaims to herself, "Shouldn't a figment of her mind at least satisfy her? Perhaps being crazy was always built on self-hatred and she would, of course, see a queer" (64). Only after she feels Luciente's breasts against her does Connie realize that Luciente is female: "She stared at Luciente. Now she could begin to see him/ her as a woman. Smooth hairless cheeks, shoulder-length hair, and the same gentle Indian face. With a touch of sarcasm she said, 'You're well muscled for a woman.' In anger she turned on her heel and stalked a few paces away. A dyke, of course" (67). Luciente's body resists Connie's efforts to assign her a gendered subjectivity by failing to conform to the combination of actions and physical appearance that, in Connie's society, construct gender out of the division between sexes. In Mattapoisett, the opposition between heterosexuality and homosexuality that sustains the category of gender, and that Connie vainly attempts to call up in an effort to "place" Luciente within Connie's own gendered worldview, has become irrelevant. Luciente's Utopian "failure" to correspond to Connie's categories of intelligibility disengages the body from a gendered economy of sexual desire and reduces gender's force as a significant category of identity. Mattapoisett's primary disruption of gender takes place around the issue of reproduction—itself a major site of oppression for Connie, who has been sterilized against her will just as her mother was, whose sister was given fake birth control as part of an experiment, and whose daughter has been taken away by the courts. Connie's experiences in New York reveal how women's "power" of reproduction has become socially inseparable from reproductive technologies applied in order to punish and control women. The logic of Mattapoisett's "utopian" alternative to reproduction rests on this fact that Connie's source of empowerment is simultaneously the site of her oppression—that these two relations to power are inescapably bound to one another, and to eradicate the ways in which power oppresses the individual entails giving up the way power constructs an 143

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"affirmative" subjectivity. In Mattapoisett, therefore, embryos are grown in brooders, and advances in technology have provided men with the capacity to nurse, thus severing the biological link between mother and child. Luciente explains her society's choice to Connie in the following manner: "It was part of women's long revolution. Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we'd never be equal" (105). In connecting the operation of power upon the female body (a cultural phenomenon) to the sexual division of labor in reproduction (a biological fact), Mattapoisett's resolution draws from Simone de Beauvoir's argument, in The Second Sex, that reproduction is the site of women's limitation and of men's "evolutionary advantage."13 For de Beauvoir, women's disadvantage is connected to their biological "enslavement" to the species, and motherhood is inherently in conflict with women's desires to pursue activities that extend beyond their bodily reality and address the general human condition. De Beauvoir's understanding of the problem and solution surrounding women's oppression grows out of a liberal humanist tradition; while she does not consider the possibility of actually transforming the sexed body, she does argue that granting women their proper place in society will allow them to transcend the limitations imposed by this "existential" fact. When Mattapoisett "removes" reproduction from the body and thus erases the site of oppression, it resolves the problem of power not merely by altering the social arrangement of the sexes, but by altering the biological fact. In transforming power relations by transforming the body, Mattapoisett approaches Shulamith Firestone's radical feminist interpretation of de Beauvoir. In The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone proposes that, insofar as the problem of masculine privilege and female "possessiveness" is caused by the bodily exigencies of pregnancy, this problem can be resolved through advances in technology that remove reproduction from the female body. Firestone predicts that this strategy will work toward dismantling what she perceives as an oppressive familial social unit and ultimately will abolish the sex division altogether. What remains consistent across both these liberal and radical articulations of the problem 144

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surrounding female reproduction is how their resolution to the problem of reproduction follows a Utopian logic of transcendence. Just as the link between sexual identity, reproduction, and gender is dislodged from the individual body in Mattapoisett, so are ethnicity and cultural identity severed from their biological foundation in race. Here, Mattapoisett's application of a technology of "antipower" manifests itself through an extended effort to breed out the genetic markers that support race as a category of hierarchical difference. Luciente explains that Mattapoisett's resolution of racism—severing the link between race and culture by "diluting" racial difference— permits people to choose freely between equally valued cultures and to base their choice on the interests and skills that they wish to develop, rather than on their biology. She explains to Connie, "We decided to hold on to separate cultural identities. But we broke the bond between genes and culture, broke it forever. We want there to be no chance of racism again" (104). Although Luciente acknowledges that the culture into which one is born still carries special significance for the individual, she argues that there remains no possibility that this culture can be inherent in the individual, because identity is located in a sense of "place" rather than lodged as an essentialism in the body.14 The paradox surrounding Mattapoisett's relation to Connie lies in the fact that its resolution of the problem of power cannot be activated in Connie's time as a strategy of resistance. For Connie, who continues to be defined in her own time by the marks of race and gender, their erasure signifies the loss of identity categories that not only constitute the site of her oppression but also define for her a site from which to launch a politics of resistance based on the affirmation of her identity. When Connie sees the men of Mattapoisett nursing with their artificial breasts, she expresses resentment over the loss of this "ancient power" that was "sealed in blood and milk," and marked by suffering (134). Gazing upon the embryos, she reflects: How could anyone know what being a mother means who had never carried a child nine months heavy under her heart, who had never born a baby in blood and pain, who had never suckled a child. 145

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Who got that child out of a machine the way that couple, white and rich, got my flesh and blood. All made up already, a canned child, just add money. What do they know of motherhood?... She hated them, the bland bottle born monsters of the future, born without pain, multicolored like a litter of puppies without the stigmata of race and sex. (106) In her own society, being robbed of the ability to have a child has robbed Connie of what she perceives to be her one source of empowerment, and losing it signifies for her the fact that she is "no longer a woman" but instead "an empty shell" (45). Because she has been sterilized involuntarily, the removal of the reproductive capacity from the female body in Mattapoisett represents for Connie yet another loss of control at the hands of an invasive technology. From Connie's perspective, then, Mattapoisett's "progress" in relation to gender oppression threatens to attack her identity as powerfully as does the doctors' implant. Connie similarly perceives the neutralization of racial markers in Mattapoisett as undermining the struggle of oppressed people in her own time to validate their ethnic and cultural identity. In response to Mattapoisett's program for genetic redistribution, she protests, "In my time black people just discovered a pride in being black. My people, Chicanos, were beginning to feel that too. Now it seems like it got lost again" (103). That the rejection of the "stigmata" of race signifies a victory for the dominant order in her contemporary society is represented most powerfully in Connie's brother's "anglicization," a process through which he increasingly dissociates himself from his embattled cultural heritage. Connie recalls how her father "had been scared [her brother] would go bad, they would lose him to the streets. None of them had guessed they would lose him to the Anglos, entirely" (364). Because in Connie's society white skin is privileged and therefore functions as the "neutral" mark against which racial difference is defined, Connie perceives the erasure of racial markers as an act of neutralization that serves the interests of racial domination. For Connie, the same "mark" that makes the individual body vulnerable to oppression is also the signifier from which an affirmative identity that resists oppression can be constructed, and to "remove" 146

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the identity that society has constructed for her also threatens to erase identity as a means of resistance. Mattapoisett's redistribution of genes and reproductive power threatens her emerging sense of an affirmative politics that is founded on an identity that remains lodged within the body, and on a notion of social transformation founded on authenticating one's inward sense of identity in the face of its devaluation by the dominant order. Connie's position relative to Mattapoisett's Utopian resolution expresses the contemporary double bind surrounding the relationship between resistance and marginalized identity. On the one hand, in adhering to a marginalized identity as a site of resistance, one risks failing to move beyond that identity as it has been constructed under oppression and becoming locked into marginality. On the other hand, in dismantling or deconstructing this identity, marginalized groups are faced with having this identity taken away as a site of positive resistance. Connie's situation foregrounds the problem with postmodern deconstruction of identity and refers back to feminist suspicions of "deconstructing" the category of the subject just when marginalized groups are attempting to launch an affirmative subjectivity. The neutralization of sites of oppression in Mattapoisett also recalls the liberal claim (usually made by members of dominant groups) that society is, or ought to be, constituted as a neutral playing field that is gender- and colorblind with respect to how it deals with its members. As I observed in chapter 1, this claim typically has several effects: it precludes minority group efforts to achieve an affirmative recognition of their identity as difference and encourages assimilation into dominant values that are themselves by no means culturally neutral, while at the same time it fails substantially to challenge the structures that continue to discriminate against groups on the basis of this difference or to substantially acknowledge the resiliency with which gender and race remain sites of oppression.15 By strongly inflecting Connie's perception of Mattapoisett's powerneutral "utopian" identity with her experience of how her identity has been marked in her own society (a perception that is supported formally by her movement between a realist and a Utopian narrative), Piercy explores the tension between subjectivity, subjection, and social transformation. Not only does Mattapoisett threaten Connie's 147

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emerging sense of an affirmative identity politics, its resolution is not accessible to a subject whose difference remains written on her body. Although it produces an account of a "postpower" society that possesses an internal logic, Mattapoisett's resolution itself cannot account for the mechanics of change; it can only represent the stabilization of an already transformed society. Again we are back to the familiar problem—the temporal disjuncture between the always already of Utopia and the oppressive conditions of contemporary society.

Collision Course: Utopia as Resistance At the same time that Mattapoisett's solution to oppression is revealed to be inaccessible to Connie, Mattapoisett's existence promotes and rests upon her ability to recognize and resist oppression in her own time. Piercy foregrounds this relation between Utopia, oppression, and resistance by involving Mattapoisett in a violent struggle over which future will prevail, and by having this struggle take the form of a war over the "contested past." In the mental hospital, power manifests itself as an invasive impulse that penetrates, defines, and controls the individual body, and Connie's fear of the implant is centered on her perception that the integrity of her bodily boundaries and therefore her self is being violated. The conceptual connection between Connie and Mattapoisett lies in the fact that her experience in the mental hospital is at the epicenter of the struggle that eventually resulted (may result) in the creation of Mattapoisett. Luciente explains to Connie, "We must fight to come to exist, to remain in existence, to be the future that happens. That's why we reached you. . . . There was a thirty year war that culminated in a revolution that set up what we have. Or else there wasn't and we don't exist" (197-98). She goes on to explain to Connie that the technology threatening Mattapoisett's future existence represents the constellation of surveillant forces used to consolidate unequal power relations in Connie's time, and that the struggle for Mattapoisett's future represents a race between technology, in the service of those who control, and insurgency—those who want to change the society in our direction. In your time the physical sciences had delivered the weapons of 148

Utopia and Technopolitics technology. But the crux, we think, is in the biological sciences. Control of genetics. Technology of brain control. Birth-to-death surveillance. Chemical control through psychoactive drugs and neurotransmitters. (223) Rather than defining technology itself as inherently invasive and oppressive (as Gearhart does through her rejection of "masculine" technology in favor of a return to nature), Piercy criticizes the ideology that supports the oppressive application of "technology of power" toward the subjection of selected individuals.16 Connie's present is identified as a "crux time" in Mattapoisett's struggle—not just a moment in history, but the moment at which forces that will decide the nature of the future converge. The notion that Utopia rests upon a contested "past" shifts the emphasis in the novel onto what takes place in contemporary society and Connie, who has been shut out by her contemporary society, suddenly takes on vital importance for the future. While the Utopian society of Mattapoisett aims at "transcending" gender and race, the active relation that the narrative structure fosters between Utopian and contemporary society ends up foregrounding sexual and racial difference as components of subjectivity and sites of oppression. The moment at which Connie assents to the resolution offered by Utopia is thus also the moment at which she acknowledges her own exclusion from it: Suddenly she assented with all her soul to Angelina in Mattapoisett, to Angelina hidden forever one hundred and fifty years into the future, even if she should never see her again. For the first time her heart assented to Luciente, to Bee, to Magdalena. Yes you can have my child, you can keep my child.. . . She will be strong there, well fed, well housed, well taught, she will grow up much better and stronger and smarter than 1.1 assent, I give you my battered body as recompense and my rotten heart. Take her, keep her! I want to believe she is mine. I give her to Luciente to mother, with gladness I give her. She will never be broken as I was. She will be strange, but she will not be afraid. She will have enough. She will have pride. She will love her own brown skin and be loved for her strength and her 149

Utopia and Technopolitics good work. She will walk in strength like a man and never sell her body and she will nurse her babies like a woman. (141) Although Mattapoisett eradicates two primary points of oppression upon which power is concentrated in Connie's time—gender and race—this "absence" acts on Connie's consciousness to enhance her own awareness of how she is oppressed along these two axes. The moment at which Connie "recognizes" the future is also the moment at which she recognizes the inescapable way in which she has been marked by the present. Connie's relation to Utopia differs from the traditional relation between individual subject and Utopian society in the sense that this relation is expressed in terms of her radicalization and not her unification. Mattapoisett functions as a motivating force for Connie in two primary ways: it provides the vision of a transformed society that produces in her the cognitive alienation that allows her to see her present situation as not natural or inevitable, and it specifically identifies her active resistance in her own time as essential to its own existence. Insofar as Connie's radicalization is the end toward which the narrative moves, the dystopian hospital and the Utopian society of Mattapoisett actually function in similar ways. Both settings provide a set of allies and a counterdiscourse through which Connie reinterprets her subordination as an act of oppression, and both provide Connie with a set of contemporary allies on behalf of whom she will ultimately act. Whereas the alliance between people in Mattapoisett is founded on the erasure of difference and neutralization of power, the alliance that Connie develops with the other inmates in the hospital is based on their collective sense of being oppressed precisely because of their difference. It is finally through this sense of difference, and not through transcendence, that Connie articulates her resistance. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes how mid-nineteenthcentury Fourierists attempted to politicize crime by elaborating a theory that depathologized the criminal subject and put a positive value on crime as a mode of political resistance (288). Foucault also describes how this process of politicization is actually fostered by the

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prison system, and how incarceration gave rise to "convict pride, solidarity, and an almost revolutionary rhetoric of oppression and resistance (1977: 262). Specifically, he observes how prison life in the nineteenth century demonstrates that the abuse of power can lead to a criminal's no longer accusing "himself," and instead accusing justice (1977: 266). Piercy's depiction of Connie's experience in the mental institution presents the reader with an example of how the system can politicize criminal or aberrant behavior by fostering solidarity, and of how this solidarity can lead to subjects' developing a counterdiscourse that at once depathologizes and politicizes their subjective experience. Although it is dystopian in the extreme, the mental institution grants Connie an opportunity to talk with other inmates about broader social issues, and the oppressive conditions within the hospital lead to a sense of community and mutual support among the inmates: At odd moments, the better days, the mental hospital reminded her of being in college those almost two years she had before she got knocked up. The similarity lay in the serious conversations, the leisure to argue about God and Sex and the State and the Good. . . . Outside, whole days of her life would leak by and she wouldn't have one good thoughtful conversation.... Outside, who talked to her? (86) Through her alliance with her fellow inmate Sybil, who, as a witch, already represents a traditionally female form of resistance, Connie learns the techniques of survival and the importance of turning her anger against those who threaten her rather than against herself. At the same time that the mental hospital pathologizes and constrains the inmates, it also breaks whatever remaining ties bind them to society and facilitates the organization of a group of "delinquents" who educate and develop a loyalty to one another. Instead of integrating its inmates into the system, the hospital creates an absolute sense of disenfranchisement that destroys any investment in society and any hope that they may have preserved. After Skip's suicide, Connie reflects, "Drs. Redding and Morgan were right thinking they had cured Skip. . . . Before he had only been able to attempt suicide,

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cries for help carved on his body. They had cured him of fumbling, of indecision. They had taught him to act, they had taught him the value of a quick clean death" (286). Instead of annihilating Skip's transgressive desires and producing in their place a docile subject, power applied purely as oppression galvanizes him to reenact upon himself the violence that is being done to him by society. That Skip can only express his resistance in the form of suicide emphasizes the extent to which society has constrained him and the extent to which he has internalized society's hatred of him. At the same time, however, the spectacle of his suicide exposes a violence that, for the mechanisms of power to function properly, must remain hidden. Like Skip, Connie loses all desire to integrate into society once she experiences the full force of its injustice. Recalling the time before the courts took away her daughter, Connie reflects: If they had only left me something!... I would have minded my own business. I'd have bowed my head and kept down. I was not born and raised to fight battles, but to be modest and gentle and still. Only one person to love. Just one little corner of loving of my own. For that love I would have obeyed. I would have agreed that I'm sick, that I'm sick to be poor and sick to be sick and sick to be hungry and sick to be lonely and sick to be robbed and used. But you were so greedy, so cruel! One of them, just one, you could have left me! But I have nothing. Why shouldn't I strike back? (372) Although the social establishment has completely penetrated Connie's life, its absolute failure to acknowledge her as a legitimate subject or to acknowledge her desires ensures that, instead of becoming a docile subject, Connie finds her identity in resistance. Unlike Skip, whose act expresses his sense of utter despair and futility, Connie possesses the vision of a transformed society that motivates her to fight against the order of things. As the novel progresses, the distance between Utopia and resistance begins to diminish, and Utopia's status as independent of and acting upon Connie's consciousness is replaced by its status as her own strategic projection. In one of her final visits to the future, Connie imagines herself at the front fighting beside Luciente, against the 152

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doctors and caseworkers and "all the other flacks of power who had pushed her back and turned her off and locked her up and medicated her and tranquillized her and punished her and condemned her" (336). This scenario is created independently of Luciente, who denies having been at the front with Connie and suggests that "with that device in your brain maybe you visioned it. You've been redded [sic] for visioning over the last months, grasp, from all this going over [to Mattapoisett]" (367). Mattapoisett both gives Connie the power to "vision" alternatives and introduces to her the notion that its existence is predicated on victory in a "war" against alternative futures. After she visits the dystopian future New York, Connie reflects, "So that was the other world that might come to exist. That was Luciente's war, and she was enlisted in it" (301). By the time she imagines the second scene on Mattapoisett's front, Connie has fully combined the threat to Mattapoisett's boundaries posed by the alternate future with the threat to her own boundaries posed by the doctors: "The war raged outside her body now, outside her skull, but the enemy would press on and violate her frontiers again as soon as they chose their next advance. She was at war" (337). Through her independent projections, Connie thus appropriates the concept of war introduced by Luciente and establishes it as the defining metaphor for her own resistance. Once having defined her relation to her oppressors, Connie begins to represent all of her actions in the language of war, and even her visits to Mattapoisett come to represent small victories in a battle against the doctors for control of her consciousness and the consciousness of her friends. When Sybil tells her that the unresponsiveness of her body caused by her visits to Mattapoisett has frightened the doctors into delaying any further operations, Connie responds, " 'Good! That's my first victory. Tina was scheduled for Monday' With Luciente's help, she might be able to scare them again. What else could she do? It was the only way she could see to struggle" (325). Connie moves from the rhetoric of war to an act of war when, realizing that escape is impossible, she steals a vial of poison from her brother's flower shop. She describes the poison in the following way: 153

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This was a weapon, a powerful weapon that came from the same place as the electrodes and the Thorazine and the dialytrode. One of the weapons of the powerful, of those who controlled. Nobody was allowed to possess this poison without a licence. She was stealing some of their power in this little bottle. . . . Never had she done such a thing, grabbed at power, at a weapon. . . . Yes, she had stolen a weapon. War, she thought again. She would fight back. (363) At this point, when Connie begins to take an active role in formulating a plan of resistance in her own time and within the context of her own oppression, the image of the Utopian society Mattapoisett recedes on the horizon of her consciousness until it finally disappears altogether. The climax of the novel—Connie's poisoning of the doctors— brings the relationship between resistance and Utopia, political mobilization and Utopian resolution, to a kind of narrative crisis. Insofar as Mattapoisett can be understood to be a projection of Utopian desires and modes of thinking within Connie—insofar as the transformative impulse can be located in Connie's ability to sustain the image of Mattapoisett in her consciousness—the disappearance of Utopia at the end of the novel seems to reaffirm the proposition, implicit in the form of traditional Utopias, that violent struggle is incompatible with a positively transformed society. From this perspective, the disappearance of Utopia from Connie's consciousness at the end of the book represents the "death" of Utopia; Connie's action at the end of the novel negates the Utopian impulse and locks her into a cycle of violence in which her final act of resistance merely repeats her initial act of violence. Piercy's narrative is finally about being stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea—between passively sustaining the idea of a changed society in its integrity, and acting and becoming hopelessly caught within the dominant modes that one wishes to escape. Implicit in this interpretation is the assumption that the transformative impulse exists in the transcendent realm of consciousness: once it "spills over" into the realm of action as resistance, this impulse inevitably becomes implicated in the violent power relations it wishes to overcome. Utopia, as the telos of the novel, is implicitly predicated 154

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here on the moral purity of the protagonist; once Connie loses her innocence, Utopia cannot be sustained. The argument that the ending is about Connie's "betrayal" of Utopia is complicated, however, by Mattapoisett's dependence upon and endorsement of Connie's resistance. The following represents the final conversation that Connie has with Luciente before she loses contact with her altogether: "Luciente, do you think it's always wrong to kill?" "We live by eating living beings, whether vegetable or animal. Without chlorophyll in our skins, we have no choice." "I mean to kill a person." "How can I face something so abstract?" "To kill someone with power over me. Who means to do me in." "Power is violence. When did it get destroyed peacefully? We all fight when we're back to the wall—or to tear down a wall." (370) Like Russ and Butler, Piercy rejects an ideology of purity and innocence as the guarantee of a transformed society and discourages strategies that found a harmonious community on the projection of violence and contamination onto some other group or space that is subsequently devalued. By making the Utopian society not only dependent upon but also actively supportive of violent resistance, Piercy diverges from the logic that draws ideological boundaries between a harmonious, self-contained Utopian space and the transformative impulse that enacted it, and she suggests that the Utopian impulse cannot escape implication in the violence of the existing order. In one sense, from the beginning the language of war has been used to articulate Utopia, with its obsession about the threat of external invasion and its jealous protection of its borders. Particular to the traditional Utopian narrative, however, has been the way that Utopian society represses its own participation in warlike maneuvers and its dependence on violent revolution for its existence. Once Utopia's existence per se becomes secondary to the struggle for transformation, the violence implicit in the struggle for transformation becomes manifest in the narrative of transformation. Questioned about his own use of war metaphors in his political discourse, Foucault responds:

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Certain political discourses make a lot of use of the language of relations of forces: "struggle" is the word used most often. Yet it seems to me that people sometimes hesitate to follow through on the consequences of this, or even to pose the problem implicit in this vocabulary—namely, whether these struggles are, or are not, to be analyzed as episodes in a war, whether the grid for deciphering them should be that of strategy and tactics? Is the relation between forces in the order of politics a warlike one? (1980: 164). If Russ and Butler predicate the transformative impulse on the exposure of a social contradiction, Piercy goes one step further toward proposing that struggle is the core of power relations by writing a narrative that specifically articulates change in the language of war. Although Woman on the Edge of Time uses the language of war, Piercy's novel does not finally condense around the issue of the relation between violence and social transformation. A more productive way to interpret the narrative is as a genealogy designed to expose the operations of power upon a marginalized subject. While it is true that Connie's concluding act of resistance demonstrates that her character "could not escape the confines of the reality defined for her by the dominant white male culture" (Maciunas 257), it is also true that the narrative is not organized around the goal of escape, but rather around the goal of reevaluating, for Connie and for the reader, precisely this "dominant white male" definition of reality. In Writing Beyond the Ending, Rachel Du Plessis points out that "the perception that Connie is violent depends on an invisible 'natural' context of gender power"—in other words, the perception that the doctors' actions upon Connie are not themselves acts of war, but rather the justifiable punishment of Connie as transgressor (185). Sustaining this perception requires that Connie's actions and the actions perpetrated against her remain depoliticized—precisely the function of the medicalizing discourse that the doctors use to establish Connie as a pathological subject, "existing before the crime and even outside of it" (Foucault 1977: 251). From this perspective, the telos of the novel is not the institution of Utopia, but rather the development of the logic that contextualizes the doctors' attempts to violate Connie's body and identity as themselves acts of war in a struggle whose terms

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have been defined by those who possess power. After Connie poisons the doctors she says to herself: I murdered them dead. Because they are the violence-prone. Theirs is the money and the power, theirs the poisons that slow the mind and dull the heart. Theirs are the powers of life and death. I killed them. Because it is war. . . . For Skip, for Alice, for Tina, for Captain Cream and Orville, for Claud, for you who will be born from my best hopes, to you I dedicate my act of war. At least once I fought and won. (375) The primary function of the narrative in Woman on the Edge of Time is to provide a lens that reinterprets Connie's actions from the pathological to the political, and to develop for the reader the rationale through which Connie evolves from a perpetrator of random, undirected violence to an agent fighting back against a violent assault on her body and her subjectivity.17 Connie's violent act at the end of the novel does not merely validate the "official" definition of her as a violent psychotic, because the narrative refutes the dominant order's definition of her actions as pathological and instead politicizes them as acts of resistance. Utopia's disappearance does not result from the fact that its possibility is negated by Connie's actions; Utopia disappears because its function is strategic—within the story, to act on Connie's consciousness and push her toward action, and within the narrative, to politicize for the reader the operation of power in contemporary society. To the extent that Utopia is deployed strategically to push Connie toward actions, it is no longer needed once she has claimed her own agency. By the end of the book Connie is neither a violent psychotic nor an innocent victim, but rather a subject whose actions are as Utopian in their resistance against oppression as they are implicated in the dystopian system she inhabits. That Connie's resistance is so localized and ineffectual from a macropolitical point of view is a comment on the pervasiveness of a network of power that can no longer be substantially identified with an individual or a group of people who exercise it, but rather appears as "a machinery that no one owns" (Foucault 1980: 156). Connie

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explains to Luciente, "The closest I ever came to somebody with real power was when I was standing there in front of the judge who sentenced me. The people I've hated, the power they have is just power over me. Big deal, some power! Caseworkers, pimps, social workers" (177). Although they possess no redeeming moral qualities, the doctors in Woman on the Edge of Time are finally only functionaries of the system, the only accessible point at which Connie can attack an entire social organization designed to control and define her. Although it is not arbitrary, Connie's act of violence is easily absorbed by a system that distributes the mechanisms of power throughout the social body, so that one or two lost cells are easily regenerated. In this sense, the conclusion of Piercy s novel is less a comment about the incompatibility of violence and Utopia than it is a comment on the pervasiveness of modern power and the limited efficacy of resistance in effecting change on a macropolitical level. Precisely because Piercy recognizes the pervasiveness of modern power, however, she rejects the notion that the macropolitical arena is the only forum for resistance. Throughout the novel, Piercy has examined power and resistance through a micropolitical lens that focuses on biopower and its expression in the penetration and surveillance of individual bodies. Connie's act of poisoning the doctors by no means inaugurates a revolution, but at the micropolitical level of body politics, this act, even more than the mental journeys to Mattapoisett that leave her body unresponsive and her mind inaccessible to the doctors, sabotages their project and defeats their goal of using implants to subject the patients.

Conclusion Given the fact that in Woman on the Edge of Time Utopia is still recognizable as Utopia, it is not surprising that the explicit interdependence of violent resistance and Utopia threatens to become an irreconcilable contradiction in the text. By thematizing this contradiction, Piercy exposes the problem that Utopian narrative by definition attempts to repress—namely, the question of exactly how the movement from oppressive contemporary conditions to a positively transformed society is effected. In traditional Utopias the interaction between Utopia and nonutopia is suppressed both spatially (with strict 158

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geographical boundaries between internal and external) and temporally (with the "forgetting" of the revolution that inaugurated Utopia). To the extent that it exists in the text as the inaccessible "elsewhere" of contemporary society, Mattapoisett retains this "always already" quality that defines traditional Utopia's relation to transformation. In its interaction with Connie, however, Mattapoisett also functions as a "strategic future" whose conception is explicitly contingent upon acts of resistance in Connie's present. Through the dialogic interaction between the protagonist's experience of oppression and the vision of a transformed society, the novel once again expresses Tom Moylan's "ideologeme of activism" and endorses her movement from innocent victim to agent of resistance. Connie's act of violence, which forces a withdrawal of invasive technology from her body, ultimately is consistent with rather than in contradiction to the resolution proposed by Mattapoisett in which the "sites" of power are removed from the body. Although Woman on the Edge of Time retains a relationship between the individual body and the social body, it replaces a focus on the body politic with a focus on the politics of the body. Because Utopia depends upon the radicalization and not the unification of the protagonist, the image of Utopia based on a conceptual homology (or, conversely, the exposure of a conceptual contradiction) between individual and social body is replaced with an exploration of what is finally an overwhelmingly physical struggle against the way power is mapped onto the body. While Connie's identity of resistance is produced by her oppressive conditions, there remains a conceptual distance between oppressive power and subjective identity that threatens to become lost in Foucault. This distance accounts in part for the fact that Piercy retains the rhetoric of "violence against" the body, which Foucault's posthumanist rhetoric of "normalization of the body" effaces.18 Because she represents power as something that is applied to the individual from without, she can represent the subject's resistance to oppressive power by the body and through the body. Although she focuses on the same arena as Foucault in her examination of the technology of power, Piercy, more than Foucault, retains an explicit notion of power as asymmetrical and hierarchical, oppressive as well as productive in relation to the individual. 159

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The narration of Connie's experience in Woman on the Edge of Time turns on a Foucauldian understanding of subjectivity as doublevalanced, on the suggestion that both meanings of the word subject—"subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to one's own identity by a conscience of self-knowledge"—are tied up with a form of power that subjugates and makes subject to (Foucault 1980: 212). Connie's experience in contemporary New York demonstrates that the way in which modern institutions render individuals intelligible, even to themselves, is inseparable from society's efforts to produce a submissive subject. Also central to her experience, however, is a parallel paradox that remains unstated in Foucault—the unique relation that a subordinated subject has to the status of visibility. Female, Chicana, and poor, Connie lives within the double bind of visibility and invisibility. Insofar as she maintains her proper "place" in the social order, she remains invisible. The very system that renders her invisible and prevents her from attaining a functional position within it, however, also renders her more easily punishable should she transgress the boundaries of socially prescribed behavior. Piercy's perspective considers not just the fact that the constitution of Connie's subjectivity is inseparable from her subjection, but also the fact that the very qualities that cause her to be shut out of the system (her gender, her race, and her poverty) are the qualities that make her more susceptible to scrutiny and surveillance once she commits a transgression.19 Piercy's narrative implicitly distinguishes between two different but interdependent operations in modern power: it makes the individual visible as pathological object, and it keeps her invisible as subject. On one level, Piercy is writing a Foucauldian-style genealogy with the goal of exposing the way power objectifies individuals: her narrative is designed to render visible the application of social control upon the subject, and to expose how an individual's vulnerability to coercion is connected to her position within race, gender, and class hierarchies. On another level, Piercy is attempting to counter this act of systemic objectification with a narrative act of affirmative subjectification. She has attributed her choice of a Chicana protagonist, for example, to her desire to make visible "people who have been rendered invisible in history" and to redress the way that op160

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pressed subjects have been effaced from the "official" representations of subjectivity (1989: 120-21). While Piercy unambiguously associates the medico-juridical system's efforts to make Connie visible with Connie's own objectification, she clearly understands her own goal as a writer in making Connie visible (intelligible) to be an act of creating Connie as a subject. The fact, however, that both Piercy's conception of her role as a writer and her conception of the medicojuridical system's role as the enforcer of social order turn on rendering Connie visible as a subject returns us to Foucault's understanding of the link between the act of subjectification and the act of subjection. In other words, the fact that the goal of both Piercy as writer and of the social forces that she critiques is to "make visible" suggests a potential problem with the understanding of "doing" genealogy as a form of resistance by implicating Piercy's own project of narrative subjectification in unequal power relations. While Foucault's "postliberal" rhetoric escapes this problem by simply preempting the normative distinction between subjecting and objectifying, Piercy's clear distinction between the two invites a discussion of how their relation is played out in a Foucauldian-style genealogy. Because Piercy's narrative is explicitly tied up with the project of authenticating an identity, she is vulnerable to contemporary questions about the relationship between subject position and subjective representation, and about what constitutes an "authentic" site for explicating and affirming an identity. The current contemporary connection of an authentic voice to authentic subject position renders Piercy's authorial position potentially problematic, and it heightens the sense that Piercy, who does not speak from the subject position that she depicts, risks repeating the action of the system she critiques by imposing a subjectivity at the same time that she makes it visible. Piercy attributes her choice of protagonist to her desire to familiarize the "alien": "When we identify with fictional characters they offer us the opportunity to slip into someone else's skin. . . . When we can empathize with others we can less easily reject the alien, or what we perceive as the alien, because it truly becomes less alien to us" (1989: 112). Stated in this manner, Piercy's agenda already assumes a particular readership (one for which her protagonist's experience is "alien") and further invites questions about the issue of subjectivity and rep161

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resentation. For Piercy, Connie's body is the site of a complex set of contemporary social relations that define her marginal position relative to society. Connie explains to Luciente: In a way I've always had three names inside of m e . . . . Consuelo's a Mexican woman, a servant of servants, silent as clay. The woman who suffers. Who bears and endures. Then I'm Connie, who managed to get two years of college—till Consuelo got pregnant. Connie got decent jobs from time to time and fought welfare for a little extra money for Angie.... But it was her who married Eddie, she thought it was smart. Then I'm Conchita, the low-down drunken mean part of me who gets by in jail, in the bughouse, who loves no good men, who hurt my daughter. (122) The significance attached to the culturally coded names Consuelo, Connie, and Conchita in this passage borders disconcertingly on using cultural stereotypes to explore tensions within Connie's subjectivity. Rachel Du Plessis describes how Piercy attempts to present a protagonist who is "typically" Chicana, "indeed, somewhat overloaded with typicality by Piercy. She is a primer of the brutality of poverty, of a social psychology caused by oppression" (184). In her act of subjectification, Piercy's "overloading of typicality" threatens to reinforce existing stereotypes that reduce her protagonist to a "signifier" for oppression. Without discounting the danger of typifying and thus objectifying a marginalized subject (nor, conversely, suggesting that this process cannot take place even when marginalized subjects speak from their own experience), I would continue to argue for the political value and importance of Piercy's project. While Piercy may justly come under scrutiny concerning the representativeness of the experience that she describes, this should not, I believe, detract from the politically evocative force behind the other goals that fund her narrative. Although Woman on the Edge of Time does not escape implication in power relations, as a formally innovative genealogy it deploys the Utopian genre in a way that engages it in a forceful challenge to the dominant episteme as it is upheld by the medico-juridical sys-

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tern. As a formal enactment of the relationship between oppression, identity, and social transformation, Piercy's narrative launches a complex consideration of the problematic defining these relationships and a compelling consideration of the complex relation between power and subjectivity.

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5 Acting Out "Lesbian": Monique Wittig and Immanent Critique

If ultimately we are denied a new social order, which therefore can only exist in words, I will find it in myself.

—Monique Wittig, "On the Social Contract" To this point I have examined how the position, structure, and deployment of a Utopian "elsewhere" inflects relationships between individual subject and social body. I have discussed the connection between the traditional Utopian form in literature (with its emphasis on harmony and purity, its projection of contamination; and its suppression of agency) and a conception of the subject based on principles of unity and self-consistency. I have discussed the consequences when feminist Utopias accept the traditional Utopian form's grounding in a homology between the integrated individual body and the harmonious social space, and the possibilities that present themselves when writers deploy the Utopian form in nontraditional ways to transform conventional conceptions of the relation between subject and social space. While my critical analysis has implicitly understood the relation between subject and social space to be a socially constructed one, I have not examined authors who explicitly foreground the subject's construction in languages part of their strategy for resistance. Although Monique Wittig's use of imaginary female spaces from which a male presence has been virtually effaced reproduces many of the formal characteristics of the feminist Utopias that I have already described, she differs from the writers I have examined 165

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so far in the extent to which she emphasizes language as the locus of both oppression and resistance. Through an analysis of Wittig, and her critics, I combine my focus on the relationship between subject and Utopian social space with an exploration of the role that contemporary theory assigns to discourse in constructing and mediating subjective identity. Privileging the role of discourse in identity formation is generally understood to be characteristically postmodern and is associated with poststructuralist analyses of how meaning is constructed—and, more importantly, deconstructed—in language. Thus, it is antithetical to much of the Utopian logic that I have identified: while Utopian logic seeks to shore up boundaries, poststructuralism seeks to undo them; while Utopia seeks to preserve harmony and defend its own purity, postmodern logic seeks to foster disruption and to expose the acts of repression and projection behind this alleged "purity." Because Wittig argues in her essays that the possibilities for resistance lie in subverting the discursive conditions of the gendered subject's emergence, and because her novels are characterized by fragmented narrative and highly self-conscious language play, she is typically designated a "postmodern" writer. As quickly as she is claimed under the rubric of postmodern sexual/textual practices, however, she is condemned for making an unabashedly Utopian gesture in relation to lesbian subjectivity. Critiques of Wittig in the name of postmodernism more often than not contain one or more quotes from "queer theorists" Judith Butler and Diana Fuss. Both Butler and Fuss bring Wittig to task for drawing upon what I have identified throughout this book as the conservative tendencies within Utopian logic; in particular, they attack Wittig for her focus, in theorizing lesbian subjectivity, on establishing it as a space free from contamination. Fuss argues that Wittig essentializes and reifies the category "lesbian" as "a pure space above and beyond the problems of sexual difference" and in the process merely replaces the Lacanian phallus with "lesbian" as transcendental signifier (45). Butler similarly argues that, in claiming lesbians are "not women," Wittig elevates lesbians to a kind of mythic transcendence that is predicated on the fiction that they exist entirely outside of a heterosexual and patriarchal economy. In the process, Butler argues, Wittig suggests that while heterosexual norms

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are culturally determined, lesbian norms are somehow natural. In creating a constitutive division between lesbians and women, and a binary opposition between straight and gay, critics say, Wittig not only diverges from her own professed understanding of the subject as socially constructed but also reduces "lesbian" to a monolithic and transcendental signifier that disregards important differences among lesbians. Wittig is also frequently cited as an offender by critics who attack contemporary practices that posit a vanguard association between the lesbian and the postmodern. In her introduction to The Lesbian Postmodern, Robyn Wiegman attributes the tendency to claim this association to a temporal association between two "liminal figurations"—lesbian sexuality as the undermining point in relation to heterosexual identity, and the postmodern as an undermining force relative to Enlightenment philosophies that support a notion of unified and self-consistent identity (2). The danger, critics argue, lies in translating (either explicitly or implicitly) this temporal association into the claim that lesbians possess a privileged position relative to the postmodern—that (following Kristeva's logic in relation to women) postmodernism announces the fact that the lesbian's "time has come." Including Wittig in her critique of this claim, Judith Roof writes, "I am not only critical of any essential link between ways of life or identities defined by sexual orientation and a set of diverging philosophies about the condition of knowledge, consumer culture, and aesthetic practice, but am also suspicious of any superficial stylistic connection that pretends the alliance is deeper" (47). Roof suggests that this professed alliance is an attempt simultaneously to legitimize lesbian identity and to allay anxieties about how postmodern logic denies the bases for identity politics and experiential discourse. She argues that associating lesbian subjectivity with the postmodern critique of identity effectively creates out of this link another (essentializing) identity politic: "To prevent the postmodern from usurping the marginal challenge," Roof writes, "one simply names it lesbian" (53). From this perspective, Wittig is accused less of claiming Utopian transcendence in the traditional sense than she is of achieving a surreptitious transcendence via the claim to a special relation between lesbian identity and postmodern praxis. Annamarie

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Jagose argues, for example, that Wittig creates out of the figure of the lesbian an unconditional revolutionary and emancipatory "utopic site" by, paradoxically, positing lesbian as "the deconstructive term par excellence" (3). Wittig is thus criticized simultaneously for being too Utopian in her escapist attempt to draw boundaries between lesbians and heterosexual society, and too Utopian in her claims for lesbians as a privileged deconstructive force. In my critical analysis thus far I have employed "postmodern" logic to question the acts of exclusion upon which traditional Utopia is predicated, but I have also looked for ways in which the Utopian impulse can be deployed oppositionally in order to challenge acts of exclusion. In examining Monique Wittig, I look at what happens when these two impulses—the postmodern and the Utopian—combine in one writer's relation to language. Apart from the obvious connection that both Wittig and her critics have by virtue of the special place and role they accord lesbian identity in dismantling gender divisions, it is the peculiar claiming and then rejecting (in much the same way Marxism does with utopianism) that leads me to examine Wittig and her critics—including but not limited to self-proclaimed advocates of queer theory—together. What differentiates Wittig and queer theory is their understanding of the place and role of lesbian subjectivity: Wittig locates this place outside of gender and identifies the role to be that of speaking a language that escapes gender; queer theory locates this place at a "point of systemic failure" within gender and identifies the role to be that of dismantling gender by working its weakness from within. While I agree with the argument that Wittig enlists both Utopian and postmodern logic, I suggest in this chapter that both these logics also operate in her critics. The issue, then, becomes the political effect of the different ways in which these critics deploy postmodernism and Utopian logic in relation to lesbian identity. Like Wittig's positioning of the lesbian "outside" of the heterosexual economy, the positioning of the queer at a critical point of disruption within the system continues to locate the subject in question at a privileged (because it is transgressive) position in relation to the system. The term is still brought in an undifferentiated way against the system, and the queer remains a Utopian figure who exists at a point of critical disjuncture within the system. I am less in168

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terested in criticizing the way the Utopian sneaks back into the postmodern here, however, than I am in examining how the attempt to rout the Utopian impulse out has led to the very thematic association between lesbian and postmodern of which Wittig is accused. I suggest that theories beginning from the premise that lesbians exist in a privileged point of disruption are more likely to degenerate into a situation in which queer identity in general, and lesbian identity in particular, is understood to represent disruption as such. This degeneration, I argue, maintains lesbian identity in complementary relation to the system by advocating the acting out of a role that is already assigned to lesbians within the system. While I agree that Wittig utopianizes the figure of the lesbian, and that her philosophical defense of a lesbian "elsewhere" is both impossible and naive, I disagree with the argument that she tries to establish a thematic association between the lesbian and the postmodern or that she essentializes a unique lesbian identity. Although Wittig concentrates on the relation between language and subjectivity, she does not try to come up with a particularly "lesbian" way of speaking; instead, she tries to establish a Utopian point of locution and then to refigure the relation between language and meaning from that position. In doing so, Wittig is not attempting to generate a taxonomy of the lesbian body or of lesbian desire: it is not the fact that she posits a lesbian elsewhere, but rather the fact that she positions her lesbian figure elsewhere that counts. I believe that in focusing on the claims that Wittig makes in her philosophical essays and then dismissing all of Wittig's work as a naive reflection of this premise, her critics have in effect thrown the baby out with the bath water. While the premise that lesbians exist in a Utopian elsewhere is unsupportable as a philosophical treatise, her deployment of lesbian subjectivity remains politically evocative as a performative strategy in her novels. I am less ready, then, to dismiss the political effect of the way she uses the Utopian form in literature to create a neutral, universalized Utopian point of locution and then proceeds to name this elsewhere lesbian. Wittig's novels pose the following question: if the heterosexual point of view has been established as a neutral point of reference, what does it mean to name a "lesbian" point of view—not as the reference point for the representation of a uniquely lesbian ex-

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perience outside of oppression (as she tends to do in her essays), but as the neutral, universal point of reference in a literary text? My argument rests on the premise that Wittig's Utopian effort to universalize a point of view that has traditionally been defined by its difference has a disruptive power in relation to the dominant impulse to universalize heterosexual identity as the "neutral" against which all else (including that which is disruptive to it) is defined. Clearly, the universalization of a marginalized point of view does not function in the same way politically that universalization of a dominant point of view functions; within the larger context of dominant ideologies and dominant literary traditions, this universalizing performance inevitably functions as a challenge to, and not a replacement of, the universalizing dominant point of view. Although this strategy remains only implicit in Wittig's philosophical essays, in her reflections on the role of writers and in her novels its oppositional force is revealed. The Utopian Lesbian Poststructuralist explorations of the relationship between discourse and subjectivity begin with the following assumptions about language: that (following Saussure) there exists no "real" outside of language, and that words find their meaning not in relation to some absolute referent, but rather in relation to one another; that (following Derrida) the construction of positive meaning is always founded on the negation or repression of what then comes to be perceived as its opposite or antithesis; that resistance comes from the introduction of the repressed meaning in language, which disrupts these (illusory) binary oppositions by showing how the two terms of the opposition are interdependent. Applied to the subject, these premises translate into the following assertions: identities constructed as binary oppositions (male/female, heterosexual/homosexual) institute exclusions by privileging one pole of the opposition and defining the other pole negatively as its antithesis; resistance comes from showing how identities constructed in opposition to one another are not mutually exclusive, but are instead interdependent and implicated in one another. The Derridean idea that language is always characterized by a quality of "excess" in which the signifier overflows its signified, by a remainder that cannot be contained, is thus translated into the idea 170

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that social identities are never protected from their "discursive exterior," which constantly threatens to deform the stability of identities and prevent them from becoming fully self-contained (Laclau and Mouffe, 11). The subverting strategy, then, is to deploy this "internal outside" against the fiction that an identity can exist as a sutured totality in order to expose how identities are not absolutely self-sufficient and mutually exclusive, but rather find their definition in what they repress or project onto another. The logic behind this strategy is antiutopian, in the sense that it is designed precisely to break down the boundaries between inside and outside that are foundational to Utopian logic. Resistance comes not by shoring up the boundary between identities but by exposing how a difference formerly understood to be between social identities is in fact a difference within social identities, and by constantly exposing this internal difference in order to dismantle an identity's claim to unity and self-consistency. From this perspective, political subjects are "floating signifiers" whose power and vulnerability lie in their inability, or refusal, to be contained by political structures or discourses. Just as this approach grants marginal subjects the opportunity to subvert the terrain that has constituted their discursive conditions of emergence, so does it render affirmative discourse on behalf of marginal subjects unstable and vulnerable to being undermined (Laclau and Mouffe, 141). Any attempt to construct a sutured identity—whether it is an attempt by those in power to define themselves against a host of devalued marginalized subjects, or an attempt by marginalized subjects to counter this devaluation with a positive identity that exists outside of dominating practices—represents a failure to appreciate the way in which these subjectivities exist in unstable relation to one another. Although she focuses on the material relation between language and the body, Wittig diverges radically from poststructuralist/postmodern assertions that the concept of unified subjectivity marks the cornerstone of an oppressive philosophical discourse. Instead, Wittig posits being as essentially indivisible and identifies the mark of gender in language as an "ontological contradiction" imposed and perpetrated by patriarchal discourse.1 According to Wittig, the act of oppression lies not in the proposition that the subject exists as a unified totality, 171

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but rather in the way that the "class of men" has appropriated full subjectivity for itself through the imposition of gender in language: Language as a whole gives everyone the same power of becoming an absolute subject through its exercise. But gender, an element of language, works upon this ontological fact to annul it as far as women are concerned and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them of the most precious thing for a human being-subjectivity.... So what is this divided Being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible Being, it is a Being that does not exist, an ontological joke, a conceptual manoeuvre to wrest from women what belongs to them by right: conceiving of oneself as a total subject through the exercise of language. (1992: 81) For Wittig, if the role that language has played in reducing women to the particular and granting men privileged access to the universal constitutes the primary site of gender oppression, language nevertheless contains within it the Utopian possibility for all subjects to be fully self-present. Wittig associates the Utopian potential in language with a universalizing tendency that is expressed by the first person pronoun, arguing that "no woman can say T without being for herself a total subject—that is, ungendered, universal, whole" (1992: 80). This act of saying "I," Wittig argues, points to the possibility of destroying gender difference: "each time I say 'I,' I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor" (1992: 67). For the sociological woman, however, the possibility of sustaining this universal "I" remains suspended, because her gender will always intrude to mark her speech. Wittig's vision of positive transformation rests on the premise that, although language's "plastic action upon the real" presently results in the material oppression of women, this very plasticity of the real to language also presents the possibility that from the creation of a "new" language a new set of social relations could emerge. Wittig's paradox lies in the fact that, to liberate this "utopian" potential in language, she must theorize a conceptual "space" already free from contamination out of which a new language that will transform our

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perception of the real can grow. Since Wittig believes that gender oppression is inseparable from institutionalized heterosexuality, she locates her Utopian point of locution in the figure of the lesbian, who, she argues, already exists "outside" of gender. Wittig writes that lesbian identity represents "the only concept that I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically. For what marks a woman is a specific social relation to a man, a relation that we have previously called servitude" (1992: 53). Wittig's argument combines two propositions that appear within early articulations of Anglo-American radical feminism: the proposition that in contemporary society women cannot exist as full persons, and the proposition that lesbians are not "real" women.2 In "The Woman Identified Woman (1970)," for example, the group Radicalesbians situated lesbians at the vanguard of the feminist movement by combining the following two propositions: first, that "as long as we cling to the idea of 'being a woman,' we will sense some conflict with that incipient self, that sense of a whole person"; second, that in rejecting this designation, the lesbian represents a "more complete and freer human being" (83, 81). Playing off the radical feminist proposition that women have been denied access to full humanity through the institution of a conceptual sleight of hand, Wittig argues that women's divided subjectivity is primarily a discursive sleight of hand that is instituted in and through language. Wittig then designates lesbian identity as Utopian by virtue of the fact that lesbians are "not women" on any level that matters, and are therefore free from a gendered and divided subjectivity. As "escapees" from their class, then, lesbians provide for Wittig a Utopian figure and an Archimedean lever for rewriting the social contract.

Queer Theory: Lesbian as Disruption Although, like Wittig, queer theorists understand gender to be a cultural construction to which lesbian identity poses a challenge, they counter Wittig's Utopian logic with poststructuralist logic and argue that the political force of queer identity lies not in the way lesbian identity escapes gender, but in the way it deconstructs gender. They therefore advocate moving away from an emphasis on establishing a 173

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positive identity for lesbians outside of the heterosexual economy and toward an emphasis on how lesbian and gay identity can function as a means of breaking up the distinctions between male and female, heterosexuality and homosexuality from within. Observing that Wittig s attempt to "remove" lesbians from gender is both naive and politically suspect, Judith Butler points out that, although gay and lesbian identities may be structured in part by heterosexual norms, they are not determined by them, and "it is not necessary to think of such heterosexual constructs as the pernicious intrusion of 'the straight mind,' one that must be rooted out in its entirety" (1991: 23). Butler argues that Wittig fails to preserve the very tension of ambiguity that is the truly subversive political force behind the assertion that lesbians and gay men are not "real" men and women. Instead of using them to launch an escape from gender, Butler suggests, lesbian and gay deviations from gender norms should be deployed against the naturalization of gender identity.3 Butler thus focuses on turning the alleged "unnaturalness" of gay and lesbian identity against the naturalized gender division that funds heterosexuality in order to expose how heterosexual identity is itself merely an elaborate performance—an imitation for which there is no original. For Butler: If it is already true that "lesbians" and "gay men" have been traditionally designated as impossible identities, errors of classification, unnatural disasters within jurdicio-medical discourses, or, what perhaps amounts to the same, the very paradigm of what calls to be classified, regulated, and controlled, then perhaps these sites of disruption, error, confusion, and trouble can be the very rallying points for a certain resistance to classification and to identity as such. (1991:16) Instead of advocating for a critical practice founded on the strategic universalization of the lesbian "identity-sign" (as Wittig does), Butler advocates a critical practice that emphasizes its strategic provisionality, its potential to make identity itself a contested category. Queer theory draws heavily from feminist attempts to rearticulate Lacan's theory of subjectivity and subject formation, typically claim174

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ing for lesbians the same position in relation to language and the symbolic that psychoanalytic feminism formerly claimed for women. As in French feminism, resistance comes from the points where that which has been excluded within psychoanalytic law reasserts itself in a kind of return of the repressed—only now resistance comes not just from the repressed in dominant discourse, but also from the repressed in feminist discourse. Reflecting on this shift in position, Julia Creet suggests that feminism now functions as the repressive voice or the "law" (this time the law of the mother and not the law of the father) that more radical identities disrupt (138). In a move that recalls Helene Cixous's attempt to a launch a subversive female identity from the fact that women exist "outside" the symbolic, Sue-Ellen Case argues that the lesbians position outside of the symbolic can be activated to "disrupt platonic metaphysics" and "engender ontological shifts" (15).4 Following Kristeva on the threat posed to male subjectivity by the feminine, Judith Butler associates the threat that queer identity poses to heterosexuality with the subject's fear that the foundational boundary between inside and outside (the boundary that draws the line between the subject and that which is alien to it) will collapse, and what has been "excluded" will be revealed to be internal to the subject. Like Kristeva, Butler attempts to show how its "abjected outside" is not opposite or alien to the subject, but rather is that which the subject strategically excludes from its selfrepresentation—that "which is, after all, 'inside' the subject as its founding repudiation" (1993: 3). Here, "queer" replaces "woman" as the abjected figure, and the lesbian failure to adopt a "natural" identity replaces the maternal lack of boundaries as that which undermines the integrity of the subject.5 Earl Jackson observes:

Reading [lesbian critical] texts and practices chronologically, a shift can be traced in which lesbian exclusion from the heterosexist order and the "unintelligibility" of lesbian experience within the dominant society are addressed less and less as an injustice to be "corrected," and increasingly as a multiplex basis for a complex of contestatory identities to be valorized and extended. (131)

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Founding their identity on the subjective and societal fear of being contaminated by the "unnatural/excluded," queer theorists then play the historical/social suppression and demonization of gay and lesbian identity off the psychoanalytic association between the invisible (unintelligible) and the unnatural. Explaining "queer" identity's connection to the unnatural, Sue-Ellen Case writes: The queer, unlike the rather polite categories of gay and lesbian, revels in the discourse of the loathsome, the outcast, the idiomaticallyproscribed position of same-sex desire. Unlike petitions for civil rights, queer revels constitute a kind of activism that attacks the dominant notion of the natural. The queer is the taboo-breaker, the monstrous, the uncanny." (3) In a move that invokes what Earl Jackson calls the creation of a subversive community through "the active identification of the subjects with the scandal," queer literary and film critics go on to identify lesbians with those tropes and images that dramatize a deficiency in relation to the visible (specter, ghost, vampire), and whose "uncanny" status situates them in disruptive or disturbing relation to the natural (114). 6 Not merely an attempt to thematize and enact, as disruptive spectacle, the scandalous qualities already assigned to lesbians, this strategy is also designed to make visible the scandal surrounding the queer's invisibility in relation to both the historical/social and to psychoanalytic law.7 Queer theory not only attempts to turn "invisibility" into spectacle by concentrating on its performance in tropes of the invisible, it also reevaluates as subversive those who already make their sexuality visible as spectacle—the butch (and the femme, when she is with the butch), the transvestite, the drag queen. Here, the obviously performative impulse behind queer sexuality—the fact that these subjects are clearly not as they "appear" to be—contains its subversive force in the suggestion that the "natural" is also not as it appears to be. In all cases, critical praxis focuses on insinuating the unnaturalness of queer identity into heterosexual identity, either through the subversive force of parodic spectacle or by exposing lesbian subtexts in manifestly "heterosexual" novels or films in order to

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"infect" allegedly heterosexual texts with the specter of lesbian subjectivity.8 The political force of lesbian identity is not in the way it escapes oppressive categories, but rather in the way it disrupts them; not in its purity, but in its power to contaminate.

Marking the Queer: Disruption or Reflection? Strategies that deploy the unnaturalness of queer identity against institutionalized heterosexuality can be split up roughly into two camps: those that focus on how its more obviously parodic performances by social actors disrupt naturalized gender codes, and those that thematically identify queer identity with disruptive tropes of the unnatural in literature and film. The problem with both these strategies is the way in which they are relatively easily absorbed back into the status quo. Commenting on Butler's focus on the subversiveness of exposing all gender as performance, Michael Warner reflects, "If heterosexuality, as Butler says again and again, is bound to 'fail,' it's been failing for centuries, with great success" (19). Going on to ask what kind of politics is available to queer theory if heterosexuality already inevitably does what we want it to do, Warner adds, "The answer seems to be that queers should dramatize its failure, but we are already supposed to be doing that merely by being queer" (19). Here, Anne Koedt's 1971 warning against confusing a personal with a political solution and her observation that "sex roles and male supremacy will not go away simply by women becoming lesbians" are repeated twenty years later in Warner's caution that "merely being queer does not constitute political activism any more than merely being gay or lesbian did" (19). Queer theory's emphasis on "performing" queer identity threatens to repeat, in postmodern form, the degeneration of the credo "the personal is political"—originally an attempt to widen the sphere of the political—into a lifestyle politics that defines personal lifestyle choices per se as political. In arguing that the proliferation and variation of corporal styles constitutes a politicization of personal life, queer theory must still answer to Koedt's observation, in relation to the radical lesbian feminism of the 1970s, that lifestyle choices can only be radical when they are situated in the context of a political agenda (86). Because queer theory locates subjective agency in variations on the repetition 177

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of gender performance, however, the question of how one establishes this political context is not easily answered. As Carole-Anne Taylor points out, "If all identities are alienated and fictional, then the distinction between parody, mimicry, or camp, and imitation, masquerading, or playing it straight is no longer self-evident" (91).9 Butler herself stresses the importance of distinguishing a politically useful parodic rearticulation from a merely destructive repetition compulsion (1993: 124) but remains unclear on precisely how one distinguishes the two. The distinction cannot be made by recourse to the subject's intention, because Butler admits that the subject does not stand back from its identifications and decide instrumentally how and when to work them (1993: 131). This leaves the subversive moment resting with the critic, or rather in how the critic reads the object, but then Butler is also operating within the assumption that the theorist no longer occupies a "zero degree" point from which to launch an objective evaluation. Butler concludes that the effects of our efforts at rearticulation are incalculable, and that it is not possible to know the difference between the power we promote and the power we oppose (1993: 241). Not only, then, is the critic merely evaluating a performance by subjects who may have no political relation to or critical understanding of their activity, but the critic herself is unable to distinguish whether any given practice will have a positive or negative effect. The result leaves little room for meaningful praxis. Warner argues that Butler and Fuss have led what has turned out to be "a kind of negative identity politics in queer theory" (19). I propose that this negative identity politics is problematic less for the way that the critical project is defined negatively, as the disruption of gender codes or the uncovering of lesbian subtexts in heterosexual texts, than for the way it threatens to slide into the construction of an undifferentiated negative identity for gays and lesbians—who become not merely disruptive, but disruption as such. In this sense, queer theorists are subject to the same critique launched against feminists who made a similar move in relation to women: they capitalize on a postmodern fascination with disruption and attempt to claim a vanguard identity by combining the way postmodern logic privileges disruption with their assigned position as disrupters. Commenting 178

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on the way in which association with the postmodern has functioned to provide a "legitimating metanarrative for lesbian identity politics," Judith Roof observes: Joining the lesbian and the postmodern positions—the lesbian in the desirable place of flux, challenge, and apparent radicality—by augmenting a sexual and/or political category with characteristics of the postmodern's own cultural critique is an essentially conservative ploy. . . . [At] the heart of the association is a continued insistence on identity, which, despite its postmodern inflection, still organizes critical practice. (48) While I am not questioning the way in which queer theory expresses "continued insistence" on categories of identity—this seems to me both unavoidable and politically necessary—I am questioning the manner in which the association between queer and the postmodern degenerates from deploying an identity toward activating certain postmodern effects into forming an identity as these effects. The attempt to constitute an identity in this way is present not only in identification with tropes of the unnatural in film and literature but also in the suggestion (which Roof also includes under her critique) that lesbian subjectivity possesses a subversive poststructuralist relation to language. Developing what amounts to a lesbian version of feminine ecriture, for example, Elizabeth Meese argues in (Sem)erotics for using lesbian subjectivity as a figure for a mode of poststructuralist "lesbian" writing, theorizing, and acting on language. Beginning with the premise that lesbian subjectivity inhabits the structures of language in a certain way, Meese constructs a reflectionist relation between lesbians' historical deviation from heterosexual norms and a poststructuralist emphasis on language as characterized by slippage and displacement: "Lesbian writing creates a curious case where the metaphorical language of deviation (of substitution, drift, and transposition) is put in the service of writing what culture has historically regarded as deviation (as aberration and perversion)" (8). Meese then compares the "rhythm" of Gertrude Stein's writing to the "rhythm" of lesbian sexuality and identifies in Stein's writing a Derridean textual

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"jouissance," refigured now as "the converging 'perversity' of lesbian sexual/textual pleasure" (20, 69, 84). Meese's theory of lesbian writing recalls Helene Cixous's theory of women's writing, which argues that women's position "outside" of the symbolic produces a style of writing expressed in and through the body, and that the multiplicity of woman's erotogenic body results in a feminine economy of desire that produces, by homology, a language characterized by excess and multiplicity.10 The problems with Cixous's theory of "writing the body" have by now been amply noted by both French and American critics.11 Supporting the proposition that the feminine exists "outside" of the symbolic order, Cixous emphasizes women's proximity to the unconscious for its value as a space that remains inaccessible to men and where women, as the "repressed" of society, can survive intact. Cixous thus urges women to become escapees, to write, paradoxically, both from the real (the body) and from the unconscious—the two sites that escape the masculine symbolic order. According to Cixous's logic, the primary act of oppression in patriarchal language is the suppression of women's language, and women's political act of resistance is to speak that language, and through doing so to create the feminine Utopia. Replacing the Utopian social space with language, Cixous nevertheless retains the traditional Utopian logic founded upon a homology between an economy of the individual body and an economy of the Utopian space. Since for Cixous a female Utopian space already exists and needs only to be discovered by women, material changes to the system that oppresses women are ultimately unnecessary; women need only retrieve this "undiscovered country" in order to enter the fullness of a Utopian existence. Cixous, and Psychoanalyse et Politique, whose credo is "we are elsewhere," suggest that they have created an "impregnable space" and thus have already won the battle against masculinity by bringing the feminine into existence (Duchen, 36). At best, Cixous does little more than valorize the givens by emphasizing women's basic physical differences while continuing to perpetuate the same familiar myths about women as natural, sexual, and corporeal. Ultimately, Cixous does not "remove" women from the symbolic order when she opposes a uniquely feminine economy of the body and of writing to a uniquely masculine

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economy; instead, she revalues their position on the margins of that order, a position that nevertheless remains structurally integral to its functioning. In this sense, Cixous's women occupy the same structural position that women occupy within the division of social space in The Wanderground, a negative position on the margins of the dominant order that sustains the existence of the masculine subject as such, even though men are blocked from entering it. Cixous's "feminine" body is easily reappropriated by the phallic economy and easily domesticated by masculinist discourse because its definition grows directly out of it. While it is obvious how Meese reproduces some of the same problems associated with Cixous in her "lesbian" alternative, I believe that queer theory in general reproduces, less obviously, a similar set of problems. While queer theorists would undoubtedly reject Cixous's Utopian tendency to suggest that women (or any category of subjects) already exist outside of the system, along with Cixous's tendency to naturalize the gendered body, they still reproduce (albeit more self-consciously) her effort to thematize an identity in resistance from an assigned marginal position relative to the system in general and the symbolic in particular. While it rejects cultural feminism's naturalization of a separate women's space, the strategy of turning against the system its definition of lesbians as disruptive "errors of classification" too frequently leads critics to thematize for lesbians a "positive" identity as disrupters. Whether it is Cixous's "hysterics" or queer theory's "lesbian vampires," whether it is "escape" into a marginalized space or deployment of the disruptive force that this space is supposed to represent, resistance is launched from a position that the marginalized group already occupies relative to the system. In conflating the position assigned to them as disrupters within the system, with the act of disrupting the system as such, queer theory pays too little attention to the fact that failing to keep their place is exactly what the system expects—and even requires—of queers. In the process, a question is raised concerning the extent to which focusing on the unnaturalness of queer identity leads to a subversive acting out that disrupts the system and the extent to which it merely leads to acting out a designated position in a way that complements and can therefore be contained by the system, and that locks gays

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and lesbians into their historical position as peripheral figures on the margins of society. Finally, the designation "queer" is no less susceptible to the accusation that it effaces difference than is the designation "lesbian" or "woman." While this fact seems true of any identity category, I believe a danger lies in the attempt to compensate for a limitation posed by the process of categorization, by merely expanding the applicability of queer theory's approach to categories other than sexuality. To argue (as several queer theorists have) that the strategy for denaturalizing gendered identity can provide a paradigm for breaking down the boundaries upon which racism is founded ignores the different manner in which the categories of sexuality and race have been materially and discursively constructed. Teresa de Lauretis asks, for example, "Can our queerness act as an agency of social change, and our theory construct another discursive horizon, another way of living the racial and the sexual?" (1991: xi). Judith Butler compares the "juncture of discursive demands" where she positions her subject to the crossroad where Anzaldua's mestiza stands (1993: 124). While Anzaldua herself makes a connection between the queer and the mestiza, she also demonstrates that she is at least as interested in constructing a new positive identity for herself as she is in lesbian subjectivity's power to disrupt identity per se. Anzaldua describes how "the coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision, which can lead the way to a new consciousness"; at the same time, she recognizes that her mestizas are "refugees in a homeland that does not want them" and states that part of her goal in creating the definition of this new mestiza consciousness is to make a new culture for herself if she is not allowed to "come home" (78, 22). For Anzaldua, the "psychic unrest" caused by living in the interface between two worlds both denaturalizes the boundaries between two realities formerly understood to be incompatible and presents the possibility of a new positive identity. This identity is not absolutely unified and selfconsistent, but neither is it devoid of positivity; in the fusion of opposites Anzaldua describes the construction of a new strategic identity that gives her a place from which to form alliances and orient herself. Because she concentrates as much on creating a strategic

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"homeland" from her inside/outside subject position as she does on the disruptive force of her subject position, Anzaldua has been subject, in turn, to the accusation that she is attempting to construct a positive—even a Utopian—identity out of this position.12 This accusation ignores the fact that Anzaldua not only intends to create this strategic positive identity, but views it as a political and emotional necessity. As I stated in Chapter 1, queer theory's strategy of deploying a highly abstracted psychoanalytic discourse against itself is a reflection of the extent to which gay and lesbian identity has been constructed overwhelmingly in and through this discourse: as an important site of gay and lesbian oppression, this discourse presents itself as worthy of ironic undercutting and deconstruction. Psychoanalytic discourse also lends itself to the strategy of problematizing the division between homosexuality and heterosexuality because that division, as it is constituted within psychoanalytic discourse, is already problematic. This strategy of collapsing the boundaries between identity categories seems less appropriate, however, to racial identity. The difference is a result of both the historical and discursive conditions of these identities' respective emergence and their contemporary positions relative to power structures, dominant discourses, and dominant cultural practices. As Sagri Dhairyam points out, "The oftevoked contrast between the visibility of race and the invisibility of queer sexuality . . . hierarchizes queer sexuality over race by ignoring the cultural terrorism that maintains race as a stable category" (32). Terms such as passing and contamination that signify positive acts of disruption within queer theory contain much more negative connotations for African-Americans. Because race in the United States is founded upon a definitional opposition between "black" and "white" that is specifically designed to present them as incompatible, African-Americans continue to be faced by the resiliency with which racism upholds the differential treatment of blacks and whites. Although a deconstructive logic can be deployed against the category of race to repudiate the notion of a "black essence," deconstructing race as a fiction remains dangerous when this category continues to be deployed materially to oppress African-Americans. The assumption that oppression based on sexuality and race contains the same

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logic and history, and thus requires the same strategies of resistance, does not merely fail to make the queer multicultural; it threatens to translate into a colonizing gesture in the form of an assumption that one particular strategy of resistance is appropriate to all oppressions. A Trojan Horse in the House of Literature From the perspective of queer theory, Wittig's project seems hopelessly naive at best, and dangerously exclusionary and essentialist at worst. Wittig employs the logic of self-exclusion when she should employ the logic of internal disruption, and she attempts to universalize lesbian identity when she should be questioning the notion of identity as such. Clearly, Wittig's pronouncement in her essays that lesbians have no relation to patriarchal or heterosexual society is not sustainable, for this would be to argue that lesbians have no relation to contemporary political, economic, and ideological structures. Without endorsing this pronouncement, I suggest that Wittig's novels (whether or not they are understood to be an attempt to "enact" this pronouncement) succeed in activating a complex, interactive relation between contemporary ideology and the subject. Rather than "transcending" dominant norms, her novels perform the very disruptive work in relation to these norms that her critics aspire to. When Butler critiques Wittig with the insistence that we should be concerned with cultural innovation rather than myths of cultural transcendence, she fails to appreciate both how Wittig's narrative "myths" are cultural innovations and how Wittig's "universalization" of a lesbian perspective in narrative represents precisely the kind of performance that Butler advocates. Understanding the political force of Wittig's novels requires historicizing the narrative on two levels: first, by emphasizing the importance of the manner in which a text positions itself in relation to other narratives; second, by rejecting a purely structural analysis in favor of an analysis that appreciates how "subjectivity is engaged in the cogs of narrative and indeed constituted in the relations of narrative, meaning, and desire" (de Lauretis 1984: 106). Throughout, I have combined an analysis of subjective point of view with an analysis of narrative form to explore the way in which the political function of narrative form shifts according to its subjective point of view. 184

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I have not argued that form is an expression or reflection of subjective identity, however; rather, I have tried to show how subjective point of view interacts with form to produce a nexus of political effects. In specific relation to queer theorists and Wittig, I argue that there is an important difference between literary critics who make an experiential analogy that posits postmodern textual practices as the reflection of a material lesbian experience and a writer who employs those textual practices as a means toward refiguring the way lesbian identity falls on the social grid. While both may activate lesbian subjectivity, the former suggests a thematic expression of lesbian identity in language and the latter does not. Wittig argues that history always manifests itself in literature through the particular point of view of the writer, and that the strategic goal of a writer is to universalize this point of view. Through this act of universalization, the literary work becomes a "war machine" that disrupts dominant conventions. Although Wittig argues that this act of universalization is every writer's task, her rhetoric clearly reveals her implied audience to be oppositional groups invested in breaking up the existing order, and not dominant groups invested in reinforcing "universal truths." She writes, for example, "A text by a minority writer is effective only if it succeeds in making the minority point universal. . . . Word by word, [the literary text] must create its own context, working, laboring with nothing against everything" (1992: 64). Wittig rejects novels that merely thematize a specifically "lesbian" point of view in its particularity, arguing that this strategy risks reducing the text to a symbol or a manifesto, robbing it of literary force and ensuring that "in the (battle) field of literature, where attempts at constitution of the subject confront each other," this point of view will be defined merely in terms of its difference" (1992: 61). As an alternative, Wittig concentrates on how formal experimentation, combined with the depiction of imaginary cultures in which social relations have been radically transformed, can change the textual reality in which lesbian subjectivity has been inscribed. Wittig's critique of "l'ecriture feminine" focuses on how it represents "the naturalizing metaphor of the brutal political fact of the domination of women"—the mark of women's oppression, not the method of women's liberation (1992: 59). Although Wittig focuses, 185

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like Cixous, on language as both the site of women's oppression and the site of social transformation, her definition of how language oppresses women, and therefore of how women can resist oppression through language, differs from that of Cixous. Whereas Cixous constructs her vision of a Utopian language from the way the female body is marked, Wittig recognizes (like advocates of queer theory) that this marked body is already ideological: "What we believe to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an 'imaginary formation' which reinterprets physical features (in themselves as neutral as any others but marked by the social system) through a network of relationships in which they are perceived" (1992: 48). For Wittig, the position "outside" of the symbolic order in which Cixous locates her female Utopia is as much an ideological construction as the order itself. For Wittig, all language (not just women's language) possesses a material relation to the body, but this materiality is expressed in the way that language marks the female body (and not the male body). Instead of focusing on how the special materiality of woman's "body language" presents possibilities for constructing a separate Utopian space not dominated by masculine representation, Wittig focuses on the material and physical (and, in a dystopian society, violent) action that language has on the individual and social body. Since Wittig believes that language is oppressive insofar as "sex, under the name of gender, permeates the whole body of language and forces every locutor, if she belongs to the oppressed sex, to proclaim it in her speech," her goal in her novels is to challenge the way in which women's bodies have been ideologically marked in contemporary society (1992: 79).13 Mikhail Bakhtin argues that words become the author's "own" only when the author appropriates them from other contexts and "populates" them with the author's own intentions (278). By taking words into new contexts and attaching them to new material, Bakhtin writes, an author can induce words to find "newer ways to mean" (346). In her use of formal experimentation to defamiliarize language, Wittig draws from the Russian formalist distinction between language as it exists in its materiality and language as the bearer of meaning.14 On the level of meaning, Wittig argues, language is ideological; to release the Utopian potential in language, therefore, one 186

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must separate it from conventional meaning and from its embeddedness in oppressive ideology and oppressive social relations. For language to become the mechanism of change, then, words must be read (written) in their materiality, "but one must understand that to attain this result a writer must first reduce language to be as meaningless as possible in order to turn it into neutral material—that is, a raw material. Only then is one able to work with the form" (Wittig 1992: 47). As Victor Erlich points out in relation to the Russian formalists, however, what is really at issue is not the (impossible) emancipation of language from meaning, but rather an attempt to grant words a kind of "autonomy vis-a-vis the referent" (185). Like the Russian formalists, then, Wittig means to loosen this bond between the sign and the object by using poetic neologism to defamiliarize the conventional, connotative associations between words and their objects. Wittig acknowledges that "language does not allow itself to be worked upon, without a parallel work in philosophy and politics, as well as in economics, because as women are marked in language by gender, they are marked in society by sex (1992: 67). For Wittig, then, the process of creating new meanings in language can only take place by imagining a social space that already operates outside the logic of conventional social relations. In her Utopian novels, Wittig attempts to enact this "parallel work" on the social level by depicting a Utopian space where biologically female subjects are neither marked in language by gender nor marked in society by sex. Through the creation of imaginary spaces in which material conditions are radically different from those of contemporary society, Wittig attempts to create a new context from which she can attach new meanings to conventional symbols. Although in her Utopian effort to wrench language and meaning from its conventional associations Wittig succeeds in displacing contemporary symbology, her act of appropriation cannot be total without losing its relation to contemporary meaning systems and thus becoming unintelligible. I return to Bakhtin's insights, however, to suggest that this failure to achieve absolute autonomy represents not the limit of Wittig's project, but rather the political charge that ignites it. Bakhtin's argument rests on the proposition that there can exist no neutral words, and that words remain shot through with a history of 187

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contradictory intentions and acts of verbal recognition (278). For Bakhtin, the political force of recontextualization and reaccentuations lies not in achieving an absolute autonomy of words and meaning from their former contexts, but rather in the way that their reaccentuation in new contexts dialogizes these words by foregrounding the dialogue that exists within words between their present and former significations. Bakhtin argues that this reaccentuation is essential to the way in which language can function to disrupt attempts within culture to impose monolithic and unitary meaning: "It is necessary that heteroglossia wash over a culture's awareness of itself and its language, penetrate to its core, relativize the primary language system underlying its ideology and deprive it of its naive absence of conflict" (368). In the depiction of her imaginary spaces, Wittig self-consciously thematizes, deploys, and, ultimately, relies upon the dialogue that her words establish with more conventional contexts.15 Performing Ideology: Les Guerilleres In Les Guerilleres, Wittig narrates the struggle of an all-female society to overthrow an oppressive masculine order and to create a new order free from categories of domination. Although the members of her imaginary society exist in a separate space from which a male presence has been virtually effaced, the narrative is less a social, political, and economic blueprint for a transformed society than it is an exploration of the relationships between language, ideology, and the female body. The conception of a social space "free" from contemporary gendered power relations constitutes only an initiation of the real work performed by the text—symbolic warfare against naturalized contemporary representations of the female body. This warfare is played out in three distinct but overlapping stages: the process of separating the female body from the loaded metaphors that have defined its relation to patriarchal society, through the Utopian act of "forgetting" those former associations; the process of self-consciously constructing an alternative symbology and mythology that grow out of the collective's lived conditions; and, finally, the female collective's rejection, because it is limiting, of its own dependence upon particular metaphors of the female body to describe its relation to the world. Fundamental to Wittig's strategy is her universalization of the 188

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subjective point of view. In Les Guerilleres, Wittig displaces a patriarchal point of view with the strategic use of personal pronouns. Throughout, she replaces the masculine-neutral pronouns Us and on with elles; "elles disent" replaces "on dit" (they say) to express the general opinion of the collective. With this shift in pronominal convention, Wittig institutes a "feminine neutral" that expresses a point of view that, although it is linguistically female, is socially universal in the context of the narrative.16 The force of Wittig's strategy, like that of Russ's conception of the "female man," lies not in the way that she carves out a separate space based on some conception of "feminine" subjectivity, but in the way that she combines a "universal" point of view with a term that has been used conventionally to designate the particularity of a female point of view. On another level, Wittig's narrative strategy focuses on "emptying out" language of its former meanings by depicting a kind of Utopian "forgetting" of language's relation to its contemporary contexts and inscribed ideologies. In Les Guerilleres, this Utopian forgetting separates words from their former meanings and establishes the conceptual distance between her imaginary social space and a patriarchal order that no longer signifies: Elles disent qu'elles ont trouve des appellations en tres grand nombre pour designer les vulves. Elles disent qu'elles ont retenu quelques-unes pour leur amusement. La plupart ont perdu leur sense. Si elles se referent a des objets, ce sont des objets a present tombes en desuetude, ou bien il s'agit de noms symboliques, geographiques. II ne s'en trouve pas une parmi elles pour les dechiffrer. (8) [The women say that they have found a very large number of terms to designate the vulva. They say they have kept several for their amusement. The majority have lost their meaning. If they refer to objects, these objects are now fallen into disuse, or else it is a matter of symbolic, geographical names. Not one of the women is found to be capable of deciphering them.]17 Because they no longer reflect the material and social relations of the subjects in question, the words of the now-defunct order have be189

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come "emptied" of meaning for the women. Coextensively with their experience of how their "former" language has ceased to signify, the women undergo a process in which the oppressive threat of the old order is increasingly abstracted into a memory trace to which the women, existing within a transformed social context, no longer have access: "Quand elles repetent, il faut que cet ordre soit rompu, elles disent qu'elles ne savent pas de quel ordre il est question" (When they repeat, this order must be destroyed, they say that they do not know what order is meant) (8). At the same time that the women's forgetfulness empties the female sexual organs of the hyperbolic metaphors that have defined the relation between the female body and the social space, their repeated detailed anatomical descriptions reduce this body to its materiality. This attempt to describe the body literally, without the mediation of metaphorical comparisons, represents Wittig s effort both to expose the body in its materiality and to step "outside" of ideology by using language in a purely referential way, without the interference of conventional ideology between the sign and the object. While this effort to "speak" the body in its materiality cannot escape the way in which language continues to mediate their representation of the body, performing this "emptying out" of ideology institutes at least an initial displacement of the system. Throughout, Wittig's imaginary collective expresses a self-consciously constructionist approach to its own culture, in the process implicitly questioning any essentializing view of our own. The women maintain a sense of the instrumentality of their symbols, viewing them as guidelines or tools through which they consciously construct meaning. In their analogies between the body and the social space, for example, they explicitly favor the use of similes that maintain the status of the comparison as comparison and that do not suppress one term at the expense of naturalizing and mystifying the other term. Even while the women redesign the world with themselves as the point of reference, they intentionally question the distinction between a legitimate, "true" history and an invented history by recognizing that an invented history will serve when the recollection of a real one cannot. The women's feminary, for example, contains the following lines: "II y a eu un temps ou' tu n'as pas ete esclave, souviens-toi. . . . Tu dis qu'il n'y a pas de mots pour decrire ce temps, tu dis q'il n'existe pas. 190

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Mais-souviens-toi. Fais un effort pour te souvenir. Ou, a default, invente" (There was a time when you were not a slave, remember. . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say that it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent) (127). By arguing that an act of invention is as legitimate as the recollection of something that really "happened," and may in fact be a necessary strategy, Wittig again implicitly denaturalizes the process through which culture is constructed. Unlike the traditional Utopian narrative, which sustains the fiction of having moved beyond a relation to its contemporary context, Les Guerilteres actively fosters a relation to the subtext of contemporary society, because the presence of this subtext is necessary to activate the text's political strategy. The subtext of conventional symbology remains present, for example, throughout the women's practice of developing new representations of their bodies that grow out of their own social experience. They frequently refer to "the zero, the circle, the vulval ring," both as a way of designating the point at which they started over and as the figure through which they interpret their cultural heritage. On a superficial level, this method of using the female sexual organs as a primary metaphor for constructing a uniquely female experience merely replaces the phallocentrism of masculine symbology with a kind of "vulvocentrism," and thus recalls the "ecriture feminine" practice of rewriting the world from the specificity of the female body. Wittig, although she narrates a reconception of the social space from the perspective of the female body, does not do so in order to create a homology between a uniquely female economy of the individual body and a uniquely female language or symbology. Although elements of the women's cultural history have been invented by Wittig, the majority of it is recognizable as belonging to the dominant tradition of Western mythology—as in, for example, the following passage: Elles disent que les feminaires privilegent les symboles du cercle, de la circonference, de l'anneau, du O, du zero, de la sphere. Elles disent que cette series de symboles leur a donne un fil conducteur pour lire un ensemble de legendes qu'elles ont trouvee dans la bibliotheque et qu'elles ont appelees le cycle du graal. . .. Elles disent

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qu'on ne peut pas se tromper sur le symbolisme de la table ronde qui a preside a leurs reunions. Elles disent qu'a l'epoque oil les textes ont ete rediges, les quetes du graal ont ete des tentatives singulieres uniques pour decrire le zero le cercle l'anneau la coupe spherique contenant le sang. (61-62) [The women say that the feminaries give pride of place to the symbols of the circle, the circumference, the ring, the O, the zero, the sphere. They say that this series of symbols has provided them with a guideline to decipher a collection of legends they have found in the library and which they have called the cycle of the grail. . . . They say it is impossible to mistake the symbolism of the Round Table that dominated their meetings. They say that, at the period when the texts were compiled, the quests for the grail were singular unique attempts to describe the zero the circle the rings the spherical cup containing the blood.] Wittig's goal here is not to replace patriarchal mythology, but rather to read it against the grain in order to disrupt the way its point of view has been naturalized as universal. In reading this symbology from the perspective of her imaginary female collective, Wittig replaces the formerly "neutral" point of reference in patriarchal mythology with a point of reference that originates in the female body, in the process making explicit the sexual connotations already circulating, but formerly suppressed, in the myth of the holy grail. In the relationship between Utopia's material and symbolic erasure of the old order and the continuing presence of the old order as subtext lies the tension between Utopia (transcendence) and resistance (political engagement). If it were possible for the erasure of the old order to become total, the imaginary society and the narrative itself would lose the relation to contemporary ideology that sustains their oppositional force: the Utopian impulse universalizes an already transformed point of view, but where is the locus of resistance if one moves immediately to an imaginary space outside of it? In other words, a fully Utopian "forgetting" would preclude the possibility of any kind of resistance (for what would one be resisting?) were it not for the fact that the language retains a relation to its former contexts. The act of "forgetting" former representations of themselves creates

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an imaginary cultural space for the women to remember (invent) their own mythic past, but the fact that the subtext of these former representations remains as a memory in the text is what Wittig capitalizes on to perform her political work in Les Guerilleres. Wittig's strategy of keeping the subtext of dominant ideology in play ensures that it is included when the women finally confront the ideological nature of their own symbology and acknowledge the danger in using potentially naturalizing metaphors to describe their relation to the world. At a certain point in the narrative, the women's chronic suspicion of metaphorical language is transformed into a more fundamental questioning of the logic that informs their own symbolic strategies: Elles disent qu'au point ou elles en sont elles doivent examiner le principe qui les a guidees. Elles disent qu'elles n'ont pas a puisser leur force dans des symboles. Elles disent que ce qu'elles sont ne peut pas etre compromis desormais. Elles disent qu'il faut alors cesser d'exalter les vulves. Elles disent qu'elles doivent rompre le dernier lien qui les rattache a une culture morte. Elles disent que tout symbole qui exalte le corps fragmente est temporaire, doit disparaitre. Jadis il en a ete ainsi. Elles, corps integres premiers principaux, s'avancent en marchant ensemble dans un autre monde. (102) [The women say at this point they must examine the principle that has guided them. They say that it is not for them to exhaust their strength in symbols. They say that henceforth that which they are will not be compromised. They say it is thus necessary to stop exalting vulvas. They say that they must break the last tie that binds them to a dead culture. They say that any symbol that exalts the fragmented body is temporary and must disappear. Thus it was formerly. The women, an integrated body their primary principle, march forward together into another world.] Expressing a fear of becoming imprisoned in their own ideology, the women reject as mythology a relation to the world that is based primarily on what is unique about their bodies. With this rejection, they imply the insufficiency of feminist practices that do not go be-

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yond attempting to positively revalue and naturalize metaphors of the female body. At the end of the novel, victory over patriarchal mythology in the war that has run throughout the narrative results in a "nouvelle espece qui cherche un nouveau langage" (new species that seeks a new language) (189). Although the novel ends with a reference to the process through which this "new species" comes together to begin the project of assigning new names to the objects around them, Wittig stops short of actually speaking the words that will designate Utopia. On one level, the absence of this new language might be understood as Wittig's confrontation with what Jameson refers to as the limit of the "thinkable"—that which defines, according to him, the "failure" of Utopia. In "Of Islands and Trenches," Jameson writes: The ultimate subject-matter of Utopian discourse would then turn out to be its own conditions of possibility as discourse . . . [and] it would follow, in that case, that Utopia's deepest subject, and the source of all that is most vibrantly political about it, is precisely our inability to conceive it, our incapacity to produce it as a vision, our failure to project the other of what is, a failure that, as with fireworks dissolving back into the night sky, must once again leave us alone with this history. (21) Were the narrative in Les Guerilleres propelled by the goal of constructing a separate, ideal space that breaks with the dominant order, the novel's ending could indeed be interpreted as Wittig's ultimate inability to escape contemporary ideology. This "failure," however, does not operate in the novel only as a lesson on our inability to escape this history; it is also deployed productively to engage with and disrupt the naturalization of contemporary ideology. The very fact that Wittig cannot reduce language entirely to meaninglessness (sever it entirely from existing ideology) prevents her from making a Utopian leap to an entirely new language; however, this limitation ensures that when the women expose their own acts of invention to be ideological, they will do so to the subtext of dominant representa194

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tions as well. In the end, what defines the narrative practice in Les Guerilleres and what makes it most deeply political lies in the way it employs the Utopian impulse to expose all representation to be constructed and ideological. Le Corps Lesbien: The "I" Exalted In Le Corps Lesbien, Wittig shifts her focus from the collective to the individual, and "j/e" replaces "elles" as the subjective point of reference in the narrative. On the one hand, Wittig describes j/e as the material mark of the alienation experienced by a subject who attempts to speak herself in a culture and language that are alien to her: "J/e is the symbol of the lived, rending experience which is m/y writing, of this cutting in two which throughout literature is the exercise of a language which does not constitute me as a subject" (1973b: 7). At the same time that Wittig identifies j/e as the sign of a rupture within the subject created by dominant discourse, however, she also describes j/e as a signifier of the Utopian impulse in the novel, a sign of her attempt to move beyond dominant discourse: The bar in the j/e of The Lesbian Body is a sign of excess. A sign that helps to imagine an excess of "I," an "I" exalted. "I" has become so powerful in The Lesbian Body that it can attack the order of heterosexuality in texts and assault the so-called love, the heroes of love, and lesbianize them, lesbianize the symbols, lesbianize the gods and goddesses, lesbianize the men and the women. This "I" can be destroyed in the attempt and resuscitated. Nothing resists this "I" (or this "tu," which is its name, its love), which spreads itself in the whole world of the book, like a lava flow that nothing can stop.

(1992: 87) Within the same pronoun, Wittig condenses her theory about the dual quality of the marginalized subject's relation to language. Following Russ's "female man," j/e marks a contradiction that expresses her subject's relation to contemporary society; following Cixous's "ecriture feminine," j/e marks a Utopian excess that points to a movement beyond existing discourse. 195

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In Le Corps Lesbien, Wittig universalizes her point of view by narrating the individual body's displacement of the social body altogether. Here, the individual body neither exists as a homologous figure for the Utopian social space (as in traditional Utopias) or in contradiction to the social space (as in feminist critical Utopias); instead, it replaces the social space altogether. Not merely attempting to write from an excess that reflects something inherent to the female or lesbian body, Wittig is instead attempting to conjure up, in language, a subject whose material, visceral presence eclipses and subsumes the old subject. Although one may easily read the (largely absent) collective in Le Corps Lesbien as the "elles" of Les Guerilteres, here the collective "elles" exists in competition with the individual subject's efforts to create out of her own desire an entire universe. When it does emerge, the social body's presence invariably intrudes as a hostile force that either imposes a painful separation upon the two lovers ("j/e" and "tu") when one identifies with the collective against the other or creates a bond between the two lovers when the lovers identify with each other against the collective. In either case, j /e (and tu, as the expression of j /e's desire) become the locus of Utopia, and the social body itself becomes the "other" against which j/e finds its definition. When the collective forbids their desire, or when tu's identification with the collective causes her to forget j/e altogether, it only strengthens the force with which j/e recites her desire. J/e's efforts to counter with her own willful forgetfulness only serves to call up tu more poignantly: "J /e n'ai pas de memoire. J/e ne connais pas tes epaules ton blanc cou tes yeux sombres, j/e ne connais pas ton ventre, j/e ne connais pas tes seins tes tetins marron clair, j/e ne connais pas ton dos tes larges omnoplates tes fesses bien developpees" (157). 18 J/e's "inability" to remember tu resonates as a litany of refusal that invokes and materializes the body of her love. Le Corps Lesbien depicts not so much a relationship between the individual body and the social body as a displacement of the social body by an individual body that has become so enlarged that it claims to stand for the universe in its entirety—a body that aims to replaces society with the logic of its own universe. Whereas in the traditional Utopia the specificity of the individual body is typically sacrificed so that it may stand as an abstract figure, in Le Corps Les-

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bien the social body is eclipsed by the specificity of the individual body. The second way that Wittig universalizes the narrative's subjective point of view is in refusing to name her subjects. Although the lovers ostensibly designate two different subjects, there exists no division between the "I" and the "you" of the narrative, except insofar as the terms themselves imply a distinction. Le Corps Lesbien is written entirely from j/e's subjective point of view, while tu exists only as j/e's love, as the expression of j/e's desire. As a thematic device, tu's persistent interdiction against j/e's desire to pronounce tu's real name both sets the terms of power struggle within their relationship and creates a bond that unites them. As a narrative strategy, however, this interdiction on the pronouncement of their names activates much of the political force of the novel. By refusing to associate "I" with a particular identity, Wittig denies the reader an opportunity to thematize this subject in its difference. Universalizing and detaching "I" from the specificity of a "locatable" subject allows Wittig to enact in her novel what she has already theorized in her essays—the potential within the act of saying "I" to reorganize the world from a universalized subjective point of view. In Le Corps Lesbien,Wittig attempts the same emptying out of language from the body that she depicted in Les Guerilleres; this time, however, she attempts it by literally disassembling the body. The novel describes a sustained erotic encounter during which "different features of the female body are detached from their usual place, and remembered, quite literally" (J. Butler 1987: 136). Throughout their acts of interpenetration, dissection, digestion, and reassembly, the lovers defy a whole host of binary divisions that support the way the individual body is located within the social space: the division between inside and outside, surface and depth, mental and corporeal, human and nonhuman; between desirable and undesirable parts of the body, and sexual and nonsexual parts of the body. Just as there is no hierarchical division between "I" and "you" in Le Corps Lesbien, so there exists no categorical division of the parts of the body. Judith Butler describes the effect of Wittig's strategy in the following way: "Erotogeneity is restored to the entire body through a process of sometimes violent struggle. The female body is no longer recogniz197

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able as such; it no longer appears as an 'immediate given of experience'; it is disfigured, reconstructed and reconceived" (1987: 136). This process represents Wittig's attempt to "democratize" the body by narrating an unfetishized subject whose presence in the novel includes all organs, secretions, functions, and sensations.19 In Le Corps Lesbien, Wittig retains her emphasis on how language acts materially upon the body, and her attempt to "recreate" the female body is characteristically bound up with her attempt to alter the conventional relationship between signifier and signified and between language and the body. Here, however, Wittig goes beyond her effort in Les Guerilleres to describe the body in precise anatomical detail and thus reduce it to its materiality; her strategy is not limited to an effort to "empty" the body of metaphor, but rather represents an attempt to relocate it altogether. In her descriptions of actions played out in, on, and through a body that is already removed from any relation outside of its own desire, Wittig further removes this body from the position designated to it within language by disrupting the conventional associations between context, image, and affect that underlie metaphors of the body. In the process, she explodes the conventional social hierarchies that these metaphors implicitly support. Because the lovers' actions in relation to one another are overdetermined in the set of affects that they originate from and produce, any effort to hierarchize the parts of the body according to conventional social logic is blocked.20 If, in Le Corps Lesbien, the Utopia of the social body is replaced with a Utopia of the individual body, Utopian space as the inaccessible elsewhere is replaced with a Utopian language as inaccessible elsewhere. Both critics and Wittig herself identify the language in Le Corps Lesbien as Utopian insofar as it meets the same criteria that defines the traditional Utopian social space—in the extent to which it remains impermeable to "contamination" by the dominant order. In "Lesbian Intertextuality," for example, Elaine Marks describes Wittig's strategy in Le Corps Lesbien as an attempt to construct a language of the body "sufficiently extreme and sufficiently blatant" to "withstand reabsorption in male literary culture" (375). In "Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation," Teresa de Lauretis agrees that, in Le Corps Lesbien, Wittig is attempting to reinscribe the fe198

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male body "in provocative counterimages sufficiently outrageous, passionate, verbally violent and formally complex to both destroy the male discourse on love and redesign the universe" (1988: 165). In Wittig's work, the Utopian impulse does not exist in a vision of the collective or in the figure of a body that resists penetration from the outside, but rather in how language itself in its new relation to the body resists contamination (appropriation) by the logic of the old order. Critical appraisals agree that, with Le Corps Lesbien, Wittig is attempting to challenge the way in which figurations of female sexuality have limited it to those parts that aid in heterosexual reproduction. When she comes under criticism, it is because critics link her formal strategies in the novel to the figuration of a uniquely lesbian sexuality. Butler, for example, claims that in Le Corps Lesbien Wittig associates lesbian subjectivity with "the emergence of an essential chaos, polymorphousness, the precultural innocence of 'sex,'" and thereby suggests that lesbians somehow escape cultural norms. Judith Roof similarly argues that the "lesbian status" of Wittig's subject both authorizes and is authored by self-evident shifts in language and structure, and that Wittig's textual practices in Le Corp Lesbien create a naturalized relation between her language and this lesbian status of her subjects. This effect, Roof argues, suggests an implicit claim on Wittig's part for the "truth value" of lesbian knowledge (62). Both these critiques fail to appreciate the way in which lesbian subjectivity figures in Wittig's textual performance. It is less useful to understand the lesbian subjectivity expressed in the text as author(iz)ing an escape from cultural norms than it is to understand this lesbian subjectivity as a device through which the entire female body can be refigured in the context of erotic desire. Although Wittig undertakes to redesign the universe solely from the perspective of the individual body, in the context of a sexual relation that is both named and recognizably lesbian, she does not undertake to design a language whose essential difference is constructed, by homology, out of a uniquely "lesbian" sexual economy. Although she envisions a new erotic economy that uses the logic of excess to overdetermine the way the body signifies, the result is not a lesbian version of the naturalized, gendered excess of I'ecriture feminines "jouissance." One can imagine

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the same act of defetishization attempted through a rhetorically similar narration of an erotic encounter between a male and a female body; at least one difference, I suspect, lies in the alacrity with which its attempt from a lesbian perspective is reduced by literary and cultural critics to an expression of lesbian "difference." Wittig's refusal to name or fully contextualize her subjects reflects her desire to strategically universalize what has been defined by its difference. Why, then, fetishize this lesbian point of view once again by looking for how its difference is expressed in and through the language and structure of her novel? Wittig's formal experimentation functions in a parallel rather than a homologous relationship to the thematic "elsewhere" of her subject, creating a verbal economy whose logic cannot be reabsorbed into conventional modes of representation. Conclusion In "Lesbians and Lyotard," Judith Roof presents us with an alternative to the thematic associations between lesbian and postmodern that she criticizes. Roof's alternative is a praxis that engages lesbian subjectivity in the disruption of binary and oppositional categories without evoking the authorizing power of naming this praxis the "lesbian postmodern." She praises, for example, Nicole Brossard's enactment of "a lesbian-linked theory/writing shaped around a desiring process rather than a definition of desire" and the way Brossard uses names as "indefinite referents, as dislocated points in a net of desire that constitutes writing itself" (63). Roof goes on to observe that "perhaps there is value in the sustained tension of an undefined and unlocated term, not as an indeterminacy that reiterates a cultural paradigm, but as one that plays within and beyond such paradigms—there and not there, not working as a name but as a suggestion" (64). While Roof chooses as her example the novels of Brossard, many of the effects that she describes seem appropriate to Wittig's novels. My application of Roof's observations to Wittig is, of course, unauthorized and, to paraphrase Haraway, extremely disloyal to their origins; Roof, after all, identifies Wittig as one of the primary offenders to which this alternative praxis is intended as a solution. Nevertheless, I believe that Wittig's novels achieve precisely 200

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the combination of a "lesbian-linked" context combined with indefinite referents that Roof advocates. The central importance of personal pronouns in Wittig's work underlines the extent to which she uses the Utopian impulse to universalize a subjective point of view that has been defined by its difference. The subversive force of Wittig's fiction lies in her use of formal techniques to universalize the point of view of a group that historically has been defined by its difference, and whose very status as "different" has been used to consolidate the norm; through these formal techniques she presents her point of view not as difference, but as the only point of view. Because her texts are both individual symbolic acts and "paroles" (words) that she self-consciously engages in antagonistic dialogue with the dominant discourse, their universalizing impulse operates oppositionally to disrupt and denaturalize the dominant point of view. Wittig's use of the Utopian impulse avoids a merely thematic relation between lesbian identity and a particular relation to language while it disrupts the way dominant and marginal identities are positioned in relation to one another. I have argued throughout that to universalize a position defined by its difference is necessarily oppositional and does not function in the same way that universalizing a dominant position functions. Wittig's work exposes the distinction between valorizing and essentializing a difference and strategically universalizing a difference: the first adopts a complementary position relative to dominant representations of the subject, and the second adopts an antagonistic position relative to these representations. Within the Utopian spaces that Wittig creates, her subjects claim to describe the world as such, but within the larger context of dominant literary traditions and dominant constructions of the subject, her novels can only function as a challenge to the naturalization of dominant representations. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe write that "any discourse is constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a center." According to them, the status of terms such as center, power, and autonomy must be redefined as contingent social logics that acquire their meaning in relational contexts (112). To view discourse in this manner, they add, foregrounds the importance of who controls the means to become 201

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rhetorically persuasive. On one level, this chapter participates in a struggle to control the "center" of the discourse through which Wittig's novels are interpreted. While I have argued for a particular interpretation of Wittig's work that aligns it with my overall focus in this book on potentially useful applications of the Utopian impulse, I have also suggested at several points that interpretations that accuse her of constructing the "lesbian difference" are at least partly guilty of refusing, in self-fulfilling fashion, to approach her deployment of the term with anything other than an eye toward its difference. On another level, the struggle to control the center of discursive constructions is what defines Wittig's work in relation to other literary works and social discourses. In the active dialogue and struggle with "former" cultural contexts, and not finally in an attempt to escape from them, lies the political force of Wittig's novels. Although her theorizing about language and her rewriting of the female body are defined by the longing for a Utopian elsewhere, what makes Wittig's novels most political is the fact that they engage with, rather than escape, contemporary ideology.

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Moveable Locales: Narrating Unsutured Utopia

In Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor observes that our orientation in moral space is similar to our orientation in physical space; this observation also holds true for our orientation in social and political space. Contemporary critical discourse, in particular, tends to construct social forces in spatial relations such as "inside versus outside" or "margin versus center." Given this characteristic of contemporary political discourse, my interest in combining an analysis of feminist theory with an analysis of Utopian literature derives not just from the explicitly political and didactic nature of Utopian literature, but also from the way that Utopian literatures emphasis on description spatializes the relation between social forces. Utopia's description of the social space provides an opportunity to "visualize" the relation between the experience of oppression and the vision of a transformed society, and to visualize the problematics of moving back and forth between them. Taylor also observes, however, that a basic condition of our existence is the way we grasp our lives in narrative, and that in order to have a sense of where we are, we have to have a sense of how we have become and of where we are going (47). In examining the relation between the Utopian and critical impulses, I have therefore also focused on this temporal pole by recognizing the fact that Utopia is not finally a space, but rather the narration of a space. In my analysis of the literature, I have emphasized that the manner in which this space is narrated and the relations that narration draws between the discourses circulating within the novel—as much as the

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frozen image of this space—contribute to how Utopian literature signifies politically. In part through an examination of the productive practices of Utopian literature, I have identified what I consider generally to be the conservative aspects of the Utopian impulse. I have shown how the traditional form of the Utopian novel is organized around the neutralization of contradiction, a homology between individual and social body (with the attendant suppression of the embodied individual agent), and a dichotomy between Utopia and dystopia (with the attendant concern for shoring up the boundaries of Utopia). I have observed that, in discourses of social transformation, this conservative Utopian impulse is expressed through a dependence upon representational subjectivity, a fear of contamination by the dominant order, the projection of internal contamination and contradiction, and the suppression of individual subjectivity and agency. I have demonstrated how, when attempts to imagine oppositional subjectivity and oppositional social spaces retain this conservative Utopian logic, they easily end up complementing the dominant order. An examination of feminist "utopias of reversal" reveals that, while attempts to construct a Utopia based on difference effectively turn our gaze to that other space against which the dominant order has defined itself, these attempts end up sustaining a complementary relation between the two terms of the opposition without significantly challenging the structure of that opposition. The rejection of Utopian logic in contemporary discourses of social transformation is inspired both by the identification of this logic's conservative tendencies and by the increasing perception that there exists no transcendent position outside of language and representation—in, for example, the body, or in some unreconstructed notion of the "experience" of marginalized groups—from which to launch a critique. This rejection represents a movement away from predicating social transformation on identifying a Utopian ideal toward which society is moving, or a Utopian point of locution from which to imagine alternatives to existing conditions. Since Utopia has traditionally attempted to suppress its interaction with existing conditions, recognition that the Utopian impulse is implicated in and produced by existing conditions has been understood to be hostile to 204

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this impulse—compromising its effectiveness and relevance. Because the Utopian impulse is also tied to the critical impulse, the perception of its erosion is also tied up with the perception of eroding possibilities for effectively critiquing existing conditions. Although I have examined when and how Utopian space sustains an oppressive logic or attempts to disengage itself from its historical conditions of production, I have questioned the proposition that the Utopian impulse is either always oppressive or always coopted. Through an analysis of contemporary critical Utopias, I have looked for ways that the Utopian impulse can be deployed strategically in a productive and critical way to challenge the status quo. The evolution of contemporary critical Utopias expresses a parallel trajectory to that which has characterized the language of social discourse: their form represents a movement away from understanding Utopia as the absolute outside of existing conditions, as "a complete happy island or a land of happiness in absoluto, without any unwanted remainder" (Bloch 1986: 759). Reflecting the social discourses that provide their informing ideology, these critical Utopias focus on exposing rather than neutralizing social contradiction, disrupting rather than upholding the homology between individual and social body, and developing a dialogic between self and other, Utopia and dystopia. In these novels, the "cognitive alienation" that Utopia has always fostered by virtue of its "otherness" is now explicitly thematized through the narration of a protagonist's movement between Utopian and contemporary social space. Utopian space interacts with contemporary society in productive ways that change both the form of Utopian space and the way in which contemporary practices signify. Within these novels, then, the end of Utopia's self-containment has resulted less in a total erosion of the Utopian impulse than in a transformation to the way that Utopian space functions within the narrative. To the extent that contemporary critical-Utopian novels express a transformation to the way that Utopian space functions within the narrative, they require a reconception of the hermeneutics through which Utopian literature is understood to function politically. Interpretive strategies of exposure aimed at uncovering the productive practices and relation to existing conditions that the Utopian impulse seeks to suppress, or that seek to understand how the Utopian 205

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impulse escapes these conditions, are not effective in relation to a narrative that actively fosters the interdependence of Utopia and ideology and actively acknowledges the embeddedness of Utopia in existing conditions. This type of narrative requires an interpretive strategy that looks for productive interaction between Utopian space and contemporary conditions not merely as a means of compromising or "exposing" the Utopian impulse, but as a way of understanding how this productive interaction changes both spaces. While a change to the Utopian form in literature accounts in part for the transformation to the way Utopian space signifies in the novel, a purely formal analysis cannot fully explain the transformed perspective that these novels express. The limitation of a purely formal analysis is borne out by the fact that novels with similar formal qualities seem to function in very different ways. Gearhart's The Wanderground, for example, although it retains both the traditional Utopian form and some of the political effects (suppression of individual difference), produces an overall political effect different from that produced by a traditional Utopia written from another perspective: the arrangement of Utopian space in Gearhart's novel sustains a paralyzing victim ideology rather than the disguised colonizing impulse supported by Mores Utopia. Monique Wittig, on the other hand, can create a fairly traditional Utopian space in formal terms but narrate this space in a way that fosters an actively disruptive rather than a conservative relation to dominant ideology. This variation in the way traditional Utopian space functions demonstrates that it is not possible to generalize the political function of a particular formal arrangement in literature; the literary object is embedded in the social conditions of its production, and its meaning alters depending upon the subject position expressed, the social discourses circulating within, and the manner in which these discourses are deployed. This variation in the political effect of Utopian narrative form suggests more generally that Utopia is a process and a relation, not merely a space or a position. Recognizing the importance of process and relation in defining what constitutes the Utopian, however, should not lead to generalizing and reifying a particular relation or process as inherently critical or Utopian without reference to its subjective and social context. This tendency is present in attempts to institute a "postmodern" 206

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Utopia by associating a particular identity with a privileged term such as disruption. Such a strategy represents a return to the conservative Utopian logic that aims to construct a representative identity (this time, paradoxically, by creating a positive identity as negation) or a representative relation between a particular subjectivity and the social space. In reconceiving the Utopian impulse, I have drawn from Ernst Bloch's observation that the Utopian impulse, rather than constituting an absolute escape, is defined in relation and is characterized by partiality. According to Bloch, the Utopian impulse is defined by desire: in its incompleteness and its expression of an unfulfilled wish, and not in the inverse anxiety about shoring up boundaries, the Utopian impulse manifests itself. Bloch also argues that Utopia is a process and a relation to the present—that Utopias give expression to the evolving tendencies in society and that Utopia is nothing if it does not refer to the now and "seek its spilled present" (1986: 579, 313). From this perspective, expressing a relation to the present can be seen as more than a product of Utopia's inability to keep its boundaries intact—more than a "failure" of Utopia; rather, it is the result of a Utopian impulse that actively seeks a relationship with the present. Reflecting its origins in the Utopian tradition, the critical-Utopian impulse moves beyond the confines of existing terms and in this sense represents an imagining outward. On the other hand, the unfulfilled wish or incompleteness expressed by Utopia is not just a movement away from the known to the unknown, but is also the turning back to and revaluing of the present. Reflecting its postmodern context, then, the critical-Utopian impulse is defined by partiality and draws from the "remainder" of existing conditions—what cannot be reconciled to these conditions through existing paradigms—in order to subvert the existing order's claim to being a sutured totality. Bloch's limitation lies in the way that, in searching for a point from which to evaluate culture while at the same time recognizing the Utopian impulse as embedded in existing conditions, he once again associates achieving a normative point of critique with identifying a set of absolute norms or ideals. While I have criticized the way critics such as Mannheim and Bloch ahistoricize Utopian desire 207

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in the interest of objectivity, I recognize the need for a Utopia to measure change against, for without it every change can only be viewed as positivity. In this sense, I recognize that both Utopian wishes and social critique are always committed to a set of goods and that, in Charles Taylor's words, even attacks on a hypergood are committed (whether admittedly or not) to their own set of hypergoods (1989: 71). Bloch's assertion that Utopian wishes express an "intended perfection" is not per se conservative; what it requires is a recognition that the normative values from which a Utopian wish arises are derived in relation, and are contingent rather than absolute or timeless. This approach represents a return to Mannheim's recognition that critique comes from internal relationships between positions and not from a privileged outside that reflects upon society with a "God'seye" view, while it rejects Bloch's retreat into an absolute telos as well as Mannheim's dependence on a zero point of critical reflection from which to evaluate progress. Instead, it draws upon what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe define as the "logic of equivalence," which is expressed in the comparison of equivalencies and nonequivalencies across and between subject positions. This logic replaces dependence upon an objective observer with recognition of how individuals and groups participate in creating the categories through which we evaluate the world, as well as a recognition of how their articulations modify the field of discursive possibilities. While this approach does not dispense with a normative grounding, it bases the value of new paradigms upon their ability to account for both the lived conditions and the desires of society's members. The contemporary transformation of the way that the Utopian impulse is deployed suggests that those formal qualities traditionally associated with the Utopian impulse (projection of contamination, concern with borders and purity) are not inherent to this impulse— if this impulse is defined broadly as the attempt to imagine alternatives or to critique existing conditions. Critical-Utopian logic demonstrates that actively fostering an interaction between the Utopian impulse and existing conditions does not necessarily announce the end of the Utopian impulse. My understanding of the relation between critique and Utopia, ideology and resistance, joins the Utopian and the critical together, positions them within culture and within 208

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history, and joins the experience of alienation and the construction of positive alternatives to how we understand and narrate ourselves as subjects. In situating the critical and Utopian within culture, I have argued that neither the critical impulse to deconstruct nor the Utopian impulse to create positive alternatives can be abstracted from their origin or their object—from their historical context or the subjectivities around which they are deployed. Evaluating the Utopian and critical impulses in social discourse and literature requires examining the productive relation between representations of the subject, ideology, point of view, and narrative form. Defining the arena in which these functions signify is the temporal pole that charts their historical movement and the spatial pole that charts their position in contemporary society. Produced within the narrated spaces constituted by these relations is the nexus of forces that drives the interaction between our understanding of the subjective and the social as they exist now, and our vision of what they might become.

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Notes

Preface 1. In Critique, Norm, and Utopia, Seyla Benhabib defines these two impulses in critical theory as the "explanatory-diagnostic" and the "anticipatory-utopian." 2. My intention in this book is not to explore all of the manifestations of Utopian thought in all its historical and social forms. For a more general history of Utopian thought, see Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World; Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias; Joyce Hertzler, The History of Utopian Thought; Krishan Kumar, Utopianism. 3. See, for example, Tom Moylan's Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. 4. Nineteenth-century feminist Utopias include Mary Griffith, Three Hundred Years Hence (1836); Mary Bradley, Mizora (1890); Mary Agnes Tinker, San Salvadore (1892); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland(1915).

1. Locational Hazards: The Utopian Impulse and the Logic of Social Transformation 1. Iris Young argues that "the desire for community generates borders, dichotomies, and exclusions, as does the desire for identification in social relations . . . [and] relies on the same desire for social wholeness and identification that underlies racism and ethnic chauvinism on the one hand and political sectarianism on the other" (301, 302). 2. Marxism's critique of Hegelianism is connected to its critique of the way liberal humanism attempts to derive harmonious society from consciousness. In liberal ideology, this attempt takes the form of encoding the isolation and alienation of the individual in capitalist society as the self-sufficiency of the rational individual, and compensating for the necessity of deferring one's material needs with a transcendence of the mind. This false move constituted what Ernst Bloch calls an "ideological harmonization," merely an embellishing move by the existing culture designed

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Notes to Chapter 1 to convince the individual that Utopia was contained in "Man's" ability to transcend his social and bodily situation through rational thought. In Negations, Marcuse critiques this isolated rationalism of the individual, arguing that freedom is reduced to the ability to transcend one's conditions through the application of reason, and is designed to reconcile individuals to existing conditions; regardless of how bad existing conditions remained, individuals could find freedom from them through selfcontrol of the rational mind. 3. Recently, the social logic informing Utopia's projection of a unified totality has been rejected by critical Marxists for its naive conception of social progress as the suturing of divergent interests into a unified whole, in favor of a social model that focuses on the transformative potential of antagonisms and disjunctures within social relations. See, for example, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Even when it is rejected

within the Marxist tradition, however, the goal of harmonization is not viewed as inherently oppressive but rather as an untenable goal in light of the contemporary proliferation of interests. 4. Louis Althusser discusses this paradox surrounding the position of the Marxist intellectual in Lenin and Philosophy. 5. Herbert Marcuse in fact celebrates the social alienation created in bourgeois society to the extent that it aids bourgeois intellectual efforts to theorize goals by making possible the abstract freedom of the thinking subject (1968: 150). In attempting to theorize an objective position for the intellectual that is at the same time organic to his social position, Marcuse thus ends up tying the vision and goals of Marxist theory to the very bourgeois alienation of the thinking subject that lies at the heart of the Marxist critique of capitalism. 6. Most recently, issues of authenticity and subject position are being theorized and debated within the field of postcolonial studies. Here, the debate about authenticity foregrounds more aggressively the tools of representation, and focuses in particular upon questions of voice and language. With her concept of the mestiza, for example, Gloria Anzaldiia envisions a culturally specific location from which to construct a strategic (although not sutured or self-contained) identity (see chapter 5 for a brief discussion of Anzaldiia). Gayatri Spivak, who is influenced more strongly by poststructuralist logic, views marginality as a strategic place from which one may reveal the points of crisis within the "master narratives" of individual and national identity. See Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, Outside in the Teaching Machine, and The Post-Colonial Critic. 7. For commentary on this "unnatural division," see Bonnie Kreps, "The 'New' Feminist Analysis," and Ti-Grace Atkinson, "Radical Feminism." 8. For examples of a romanticization of Africa in a black feminist context, see Jean Noble, Beautiful Also Are the Souls of My Sisters, and Gloria Joseph, Common Differences. For a critique of African cultural nationalism in the context of feminism, see E. Francis White, "Listening to the Voices of Black Feminism," and Frances Beale, "Slave of a Slave No More: Black Women in Struggle."

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Notes to Chapter 1 9. For an example of this argument, see Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class. 10.1 borrow the phrase "utopia of reversal" from Teresa de Lauretis. 11. Mannheim attempts to resolve this threat of radical relativism with his notion of "relationism," which describes a process through which political struggle between competing groups leads to mutual self-critique and self-awareness. Mannheim argues that political struggle and clashes between competing ideologies will lead to an ever-increasing aggregate of knowledge and an attending accumulation of our ability to distinguish the true from the false and to make rational, objective decisions (31, 103). For this theory to work, however, the critic/observer must exist at a "zero degree point" outside of political struggle, from which he or she interprets the gains of the whole society through an evaluation of the struggles between the parts. This position is inconsistent with Mannheim's recognition of the social critic as historically and culturally situated. 12. See, for example, Susan Bordo, "Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Skepticism"; Christine Di Stefano, "Dilemmas of Difference"; Seyla Benhabib, "Epistemologies of Postmodernism"; Nancy Hartsock, "Rethinking Modernism"; Barbara Christian, "The Race for Theory." 13. In Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor similarly asserts that we cannot do without some orientation toward the good. 14. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, for a fully developed account of this idea. 15. In chapter 4, I examine Foucault's theory of power and subjectivity, along with criticism of his failure to adequately theorize possibilities for resistance. In particular, I examine feminist critiques of the way in which Foucault collapses the distinction between forms of power that are enabling and forms of power that are coercive and in the process abandons a consideration of, in Nancy Fraser's words, "who is doing what to whom." 16. Although Althusser defines ideology as something that individual subjects think within and that is indispensable to them in making sense of their lives—and also acknowledges the extent to which the Marxist critic's own bourgeois ideology contributes to "falsifying" the object of study—he remains committed to the idea that the ultimate goal of Marxism is to uncover reality (now indirectly through the interpretation of ideological representations) in a way that will allow theory to outline a discourse that broke with ideology and became scientific (1971: 160, 162). 17. For an extended discussion of how strategic identity and subject position interact, see Denise Riley, "Am I That Name?": Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History. Riley draws from the distinction that Teresa de Lauretis makes between woman as "sign" and women as historical subjects. Riley argues that no single identity (e.g., racial, sexual) dominates any individual all of the time, and that for strategic purposes it is necessary to "march under different banners" in different social and political situations. 18. Jacques Derrida develops the image of "woman" as "a non-identity, a nonfigure, a simulacrum" in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles.

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Notes to Chapter 2 19. See Patricia Waugh, Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern. Waugh argues that women possess a privileged position relative to postmodernism because "the temporary focusing of identity that has become the formal mode of postmodernism has always been the experiential mode of most women's lives" (162). 20. See chapter 5 for an extended discussion of queer theory. 21. There exist several problems with the argument that "performing" queer identity represents a radical move, which I discuss in chapter 5, where I argue that merely being queer is no more subversive than merely being gay or lesbian was, and that it is impossible to discern whether performances of queer identity (for example, drag) are subversive parodies or are merely, in Judith Butler's words, "repetition compulsions." 22. See, for example, Teresa de Lauretis, "Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation," and Sue-Ellen Case, "Tracking the Vampire." 23. Both Teresa de Lauretis and Gloria Anzaldiia touch on this argument. 24. I draw this distinction between cultural-valuational and political-economic modes of oppression, as well as the argument that discriminations based on race versus sexuality fall along these two axes in distinct ways, from Nancy Fraser's article "From Re-distribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a 'Post-Socialist' Age." 25. Gallagher is talking here about Marxist critics, particularly Althusser and Macheray, but her comment can also be applied to poststructuralist uses of the literary object. 26. In some ways, the absence of "oppositional" texts in Jameson recalls the paradoxical relation between postmodern literature and poststructuralist practice. While both are "effects" of a postmodern age, poststructuralism is distinguished by a critical approach whose agenda is to problematize the logocentrism, binary oppositions, and illusion of unity and presence that provide the foundation for Western philosophy. Postmodern literature, on the other hand, is defined by a tendency to thematize its own artifice, to collapse the distinction between "fact" and "fiction"; its form is nonlinear, self-consciously discursive, and parodic. Since poststructuralist practice similarly requires a "straight man" to deconstruct, its method of decoding is less productive when it is applied to "postmodern" cultural artifacts that selfconsciously decode their own practices. 27. In "Of Islands and Trenches: Naturalization and the Production of Utopian Discourse," Fredric Jameson writes that "Utopia is a transparent synonym for socialism itself, and the enemies of Utopia sooner or later turn out to be the enemies of socialism" (3). In Thomas More and His Utopia, Karl Kautsky describes More as a "modern socialist" whose failure to achieve a properly socialist vision was limited only by the backwardness of his time (249).

2. Turning Inward: Strategies of Containment and Subjective/ Collective Boundaries in Traditional Utopian Literature 1. In "Right out of Herstory: Racism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herknd," Arun Mukherjee criticizes Charlotte Gilman for founding her nineteenth-century feminist Utopia on the same presumption of "self-reflexive" violence that I critique here. Mukherjee focuses her criticism on the way that Gilman disposes of the "na-

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Notes to Chapter 2 tives" to make room for her all-female Utopia by having all of the nonwhites kill their females and then die off, thus leaving the white females to reproduce by parthenogenesis. Mukherjee quotes Gayatri Spivak, who has observed that texts dealing with the project of colonization usually resort to "the construction of a selfimmolating colonial subject for the glorification of the social mission of the colonizer" (Spivak in Mukherjee, 135). The origin story of Herland, which retains all of the formal characteristics that define traditional Utopian narrative, bears out the proposition that the creation of a traditional Utopia is consistent with a colonizing impulse. Because one of Utopia's defining goals is to avoid implication in violent activity, or in conflict of any kind, it manifests a heightened investment in repressing the act of colonization by having the colonized turn against themselves. 2. In "Of Islands and Trenches: Naturalization and the Production of Utopian Discourse," Fredric Jameson points out the contradiction between Mores representation of Utopia as a horizontally aligned cluster of identical and equal cities and the fact that Amaurat exists as the capital and central city (18). 3. See Pamela Kearon, "Power as a Function of the Group," for an articulation of this separatist strategy. See also Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, for a contemporaneous feminist analysis of the relation between space and empowerment. 4. See Barbara Burris, "The Fourth World Manifesto." This article is important in part for the degree to which its struggles with the tension between wanting to valorize a separate women's culture and recognizing that this "culture" and the qualities that reflect it were developed under oppression. 5. See, for example, Katherine V. Forrest, Daughters of a Coral Dawn; Dorothy Bryant, The Kin ofAta Are Waitingfor You; Suzy McKee Charnas, Motherlines. 6. Kristeva draws from the work of British anthropologist Mary Douglas, who argues that every society is a "bounded system" that expresses vigilance against intrusion and demonization of the external. Douglas argues that "the human body is always treated as an image of society" and proposes that the need to preserve social boundaries originates in a preoccupation with bodily boundaries (70). Like Douglas, Kristeva argues that, like the individual body, the social aggregate mirrors the individual body when it manages its horror at the potential dissolution of identity by prohibiting "defiling" elements through the institution of taboos and forms of social rejection and marginalization. Both Douglas and Kristeva associate women with the margins of society, and both correlate women's peripheral position in society with the fact that they are less subject to social control and presumably less invested in efforts to establish bodily boundaries. Douglas goes so far as to associate women with "loosely structured" and therefore "less advanced" societies, which exhibit, according to Douglas, role confusion, familiarity, and an inarticulate social order with little concern for social or bodily control. 7. The assumption that progress is measured by the extent to which humans achieve domination and control over their natural environment is implicit in the "rationalization" of space in More's Utopia and the severing of Utopia from the

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Notes to Chapter 3 mainland. Francis Bacon associates this impulse specifically with control over nature, arguing that, to control his destiny, man must "penetrate into the inner soul and further recesses of nature," compelling nature to yield "the many secrets of excellent use" in her womb (Bacon quoted in "What If... Science and Technology in Feminist Utopias," Patricinio Schweickart, 202). Bacon's metaphor of nature as a female body connects this impulse to control his environment with man's attempts to discover and control the reproductive secrets of female nature. 8. See Evelyn Fox Keller, "From Secrets of Life to Secrets of Death." It is by now a familiar feminist strategy to show how technology represents a masculine procreative fantasy gone awry. From the nightmare of Frankenstein to the reality of the nuclear bomb, creation that is severed from the maternal function is understood to be a destructive mutation of the maternal impulse.

3. Speaking Parts: Internal Dialogic and Models of Agency in the Work of Joanna Russ and Octavia Butler 1. In Segregated Sisterhood, Nancie Caraway refers to the way Haraway articulates her concept of the cyborg identity with the concepts and praxis of women of color, including the idea of a "fractured and permanently partial identity" (58). Caraway goes on to observe, in relation to how Haraway draws from paradigms put forward by women of color, that an important contribution by women of color has been a warning against the reified "revolutionary subjects" in Marxism and feminism. In abstracting her "oppositional identity" into the figure of the cyborg, however, Haraway seems once again to construct a reified and politically decontextualized revolutionary subject. 2. See, for example, Meredith Tax, "Woman and Her Mind: The Story of Everyday Life." 3. In fact, the attempt to exclude blacks not only from the privileges accorded to "all humans" but also from the category of the human altogether has a vicious and more recent history than the attempt to exclude women. In this sense, black women's exclusion from "the human" is based at least as much on their race as on their gender, thus positioning them in alliance with, rather than in opposition to, black men. 4. For other works that question the validity of race as a category, see Ralph J. Bunche, A World View of Race; Richard Lewontin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature; Micaela di Leonardo, "White Ethnicities, Identity Politics, and Baby Bear's Chair"; James F. Davis, Who Is Black: One Nations Definition; Anthony Kwame Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa and the Philosophy of Culture; Stephen Gregory and Roger Sanjek, eds., Race. 5. Kevin's historical doubling is actually spread across a number of people: Rufus's father, Tom, is described as having Kevin's pale eyes, and when Dana first returns from the past, she initially mistakes Kevin for the white patroller who had been trying to rape her moments before. 6. See Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood for a fuller analysis of situational ethics in relation to black women slaves.

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Notes to Chapter 4 7. Rita Felsky launches a related critique in Beyond Feminist Aestheticswhen she points out that the notion of unstable meaning and identity does not, in itself, provide any guidance for political and cultural strategies. Felsky argues that skepticism and relativism are more easily afforded by the ruling elite, whereas they constitute a dangerous strategy for those who have yet to establish an empowering subjectivity. 8. Samuel Delany's Trouble on Triton, which depicts an imaginary society based on the principle of difference, is referred to in its subtitle as a "heterotopia." Delany, like Butler, activates the Utopian impulse toward a better life with attention to the various social structures and subcultures that define communities, rather than with the goal of creating a systematic Utopian society. See Tom Moylan's "Samuel R. Delany, Triton" in Demand the Impossible for a detailed examination of Delany's critical Utopia. 9. Nancie Caraway makes this point regarding a potential alliance between feminism and postmodernism in Segregated Sisters (59), elaborating with material from a paper presented by Kathy Ferguson at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association entitled "Interpretation and Genealogy in Feminism."

4. Utopia and Technopolitics in Woman on the Edge of Time 1. I borrow the term ideologeme of activism from Tom Moylan, who uses it in describing the activism that informs Woman on the Edge of Time. For a fuller account of how he uses the term, see Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. 2. The notable exception is B. F. Skinner's Walden Two. See chapter 2 for further discussion of Skinner's Utopia. 3. See Foucault 1977, esp. 138, 214, 216. 4. See Eloise A. Buker, "Hidden Desires and Missing Persons: A Feminist Deconstruction of Foucault," for a discussion of Foucault's androcentrism. 5. See Hartsock, "Rethinking Modernism: Minority vs. Majority Theories." For a related critique, see Barbara Christian, "The Race for Theory." 6. Foucault's attempt to locate the possibility for resistance in "bodies and pleasure" (as opposed to "desire") is also problematic on another level, given the extent to which he argues that power operates through the body (see the chapter entitled "Foucault's Body Language" in Nancy Fraser's Unruly Practices). 7. See Nancy Fraser, 1989: 21-22, for a discussion of this normative "bracketing" in Foucault. 8. See Elizabeth Fraser and Nicola Lacey, Politics of Community, 340, for a discussion of this problem in Foucault. 9. Fraser further argues that Foucault is naive in assuming that he can purge all traces of liberalism and humanism by avoiding explicit references to concepts like legitimacy and illegitimacy: "He assumes, in other words, that these norms can be neatly isolated and excised from the larger cultural and linguistic matrix in which they are situated. He fails to appreciate the degree to which the normative is embedded in and infused throughout the whole of language at every level and the degree to which, despite himself, his own critique has to make use of modes of description,

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Notes to Chapter 4 interpretation, and judgement formed within the modern Western normative tradition" (30-31). While admitting that we might not be content to retain traditional humanist standards forever, Fraser sees value in the strand of Foucault's thought that launches an immanent critique and "that aspires less to overthrow humanism than to keep it honest" (1989: 64). 10. In an interview, Foucault seems to posit, in rather mystical terms, something like a subjective consciousness or subjective will that escapes power: "There is indeed always something in the social body, in classes, groups and individuals themselves which is by no means a more or less docile or reactive primal matter, but rather a centrifugal movement, an inverse energy, a discharge" (1980: 138). Here, he returns to a language that separates consciousness from the subjected body, in contrast to his characteristic emphasis on the physicality of subjectivity and its production in and through the body. 11. See Simians, Cyborgs, andWomen, esp. 149, 151, 157, 163. 12.1 take the terms story and plot from Peter Brooks's use of them in Readingfor the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. By story I mean the succession of events referred to by the narrative—the illusion of "what really happened" to Connie— while by plot I mean the dynamic shaping and organizing of these events by narrative discourse. 13. See de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, "The Data of Biology." 14. Piercy explores the horrifying "inverse" of Mattapoisett's resolution of gender and racial oppression—the extrapolation of how technology can act on the body to consolidate power instead of to neutralize it—when Connie accidentally throws herself into a futuristic New York while she is under the influence of the dialytrode that has been implanted in her brain. This future New York is literally stratified; those who can afford it live above the poisoned atmosphere and prolong their lives by replacing worn body parts with new ones. In this alternate, dystopian future, Connie meets another potential version of herself in the figure of Gildina, a "cartoon of femininity" whose altered body (tiny waist, enormous breasts and buttocks, artificially lightened skin) reflects social values that support the exaggeration of gender and racial difference rather than eradication of it. Here, dark skin is possessed only by men who cannot afford the alteration and women who have not been chosen for "beauty ops"; white skin is thus a sign both of beauty and of class privilege. Whereas in Mattapoisett biopolitics are applied in the interest of equality, here biopolitics are used to create what is referred to as the "great split"—the consolidation of gender, race, and class inequality. In this future New York, one's identity and therefore one's position relative to hierarchies of power are overwhelmingly written on the body; alterations in the individual body shift one's relation to power but do nothing to displace or undermine the society's informing hierarchy of difference. 15. For a discussion of issues concerning recognition and difference in relation to liberal traditions of thought, see Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition.

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Notes to Chapter 5 16. In Mattapoisett, the interaction of machine and psyche (exemplified by the "kenner" that individuals wear around their wrists to access information and communicate with one another) does not constitute a threat because a technology of knowledge whose goal is to fix the object under a surveillant and controlling gaze is replaced by the technology of communication whose goal is to connect the members of a community. Although the kenner and the dialytrode exist in similar relation to the body and both contribute similarly to the task of socializing individuals, they signify in different ways because the first operates within a context of unequal power relations while the second operates in a context where power has been neutralized. 17. In relation to Foucault's notion of crime as a kind of "minirevolution," Judith Grant points out that crimes against gender (or any crimes) can become subversive political acts only if they are interpreted and perpetuated through feminist politics (or through another political lens) (164). 18. Jana Sawicki makes this distinction between "violence against" and "normalization of" the body in her discussion of the tensions between Foucault and feminism (80). 19. In Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde makes a similar observation about the paradoxical relation that black women have to visibility: "Black women on the one hand have always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism" (42).

5. Acting Out "Lesbian": Monique Wittig and Immanent Critique 1. Wittig's argument in part reflects her association with the radical lesbian feminist group Feministes Revolutionaires, which identifies gender itself to be the site of women's oppression and resistance to be the challenging of the very institution of gender in language. Wittig's group has disagreed bitterly in the past with the group Psychanalyse et Politique with which Helene Cixous is associated, and that draws from psychoanalytic logic to locate resistance in the release of a repressed feminine language. See Duchen, Feminism in France, for a fuller account of the differences between these two groups. 2. See chapter 3 for a discussion of the radical feminist argument that woman and person are contradictory terms. 3. Anne Koedt expressed much the same idea in 1971 when she argued that "deviants who inadvertently were socialized differently, or who chose differently, are . . . a threat to the premise that biology is destiny" (89). 4. Playing off Lacan's theory of the relationship between language, desire, and the symbolic, Cixous argues that because women exist incompletely and uneasily within the symbolic order, they do not follow the logic of sublimation that defines "masculine" entry into the symbolic order. For Cixous, women's position outside of the symbolic gives them access to a space not dominated by masculine logic into which they can escape and from which they can launch their resistance. 5. See chapter 2 for a discussion of Kristeva in relation to the abject.

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Notes to Chapter 5 6. Jackson's point here is in relation to gay men, but seems to apply to the approach of queer theory in general. 7. See chapter 3 for a discussion of how radical feminism attempts to make gender's "scandal" visible. 8. For examples of this strategy, see Judith Roof's A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian Sexuality and Theory; Sue-Ellen Case, "Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic"; Teresa de Lauretis, "Film and the Visible." 9. Andrew Ross argues that it is the extreme nature of the performance (here, in relation to drag) that prevents it from being mere reversal. To an extent this is true, in the same way that Russ's "female man" is a drag performance taken to the extreme of disruptive spectacle. Taylor also points out, however, that the emphasis on drag queens and transvestites in theories of the performativity of gender implies that gay men are better women or, in this context, at least better equipped to undo identity. In "Drag: l.Men," Erika Munk observes, in a related argument, that female impersonators are currently no more subversive than whites in blackface were when minstrel shows were popular (258). 10. Cixous defines her theory of female desire and language in opposition to Lacan's identification of the (masculine) subject's entry into language with the perception of lack. For Lacan, the male subject's entry into symbolic language initiates desire by signifying the object in its absence and is characterized by a series of metonymic substitutions that make it impossible for him to speak himself as such. Cixous rejects this process of substitution as a masculine dynamic, arguing that the female subject's relation to desire and language is characterized by an unproblematic passage from the multiple desires of the female body to the multiplicity of female writing. Language for women is not, as it is for Lacan's masculine subject, an expression of the distance of the subject from being, but rather a direct emanation of the plenitude and multiplicity that define the female body. Freud's Dora usurps the phallus to become the "true mistress of the signifier," the one who speaks most truly because she speaks with "body words." 11. For a critique of Cixous's strategy, see Helene Wenzel, "The Text as Body Politics"; Colette Guillaumin, "A Question of Difference"; Domna C. Stanton, "Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva." 12. See Annamarie Jagose, Lesbian Utopics, chapter 6. 13. Wittig recognizes that in French one must mark gender as soon as "je" is used in relation to past participles and adjectives, and that this is not the case with English. She argues, however, that even in English the sociological woman "must in one way or another, that is, with a certain number of clauses, make her sex public" (1992: 79). 14. See Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History—Doctrine for an examination of the theory and practice of Russian formalism. 15. Brook Thomas points out that Bakhtin's notion of a monolithic discourse that can be appropriated for subversive ends does not work as well in Western soci-

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Notes to Chapter 5 ety, where an official pluralism functions to domesticate subversive voices (59-60). While this is certainly the case, this act of domestication is performed much more easily when those "subversive voices" speak from within an "outlaw" language or position already assigned to them within the system, and less easily when they speak from a position that conflicts with their assigned place (of difference) relative to the system. 16. A problem arises in the English translation of "elles disent": to translate it as "the women say" is to particularize it and to reduce it to its difference; to translate it as "they say" only implicitly challenges the masculine neutral implied in the term. Both translations weaken the oppositional force of Wittig's strategy. 17. My translations here and following. 18. "I have no memory. I do not know your shoulders your white neck your dark eyes, I do not know your palms your precise cheeks, I do not know your belly, I do not know your breasts your light brown nipples, I do not know your back your wide shoulderblades your well-developed buttocks." 19. See Helene Wenzel, "The Text as Body Politics: An Appreciation of Monique Wittig's Writing in Context," and Cecile Lindsay, "Body/Language: French Feminist Utopias," for an elaboration of this argument. 20. I have discovered that any attempt to present a single passage that would exemplify my argument here is frustrated by the fact that it is precisely in the combination of all the passages in the novel—passages that associate the same actions upon the body with different emotions, different actions upon the body with the same emotion—that Wittig disrupts any attempt to construct stable metaphorical relations between language and the body. The same applies to the relation between j/e and tu: one passage represents them in one position relative to one another, another passage represents them in an entirely different relation. Without using it as an excuse to abandon the interpretive project altogether, I suggest that this crisis in interpretation reflects the success of Wittig's strategy in dislocating the reader from the security of conventional associations between language, meaning, and the body.

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234

Index

Adorno, Theodor, 19, 36-37 African-American feminism, 15-16; and Utopian philosophy of the subject, 27-28 Alcoff, Linda, 134-35 Alpert, Jane, 73 Althusser, Louis, 28, 212 n.4, 213 n. 16 Anglo-American feminism, 11-14, 25-26, 33,122, 173 Anzaldiia, Gloria, 182-83, 212 n.6 Atkinson, Ti-Grace, 13 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 186-88, 220 n.15 Beauvoir, Simone de, 144 Bellamy, Edward, 65 Benhabib, Seyla, 1, 2, 5, 6, 17, 22-23 Bloch, Ernst, 1, 6, 35, 37-38, 205, 207-8,211 n.2 body politic, 137, 159, 196, 198, 204 Bordo, Susan, 128 boundaries: between female and male, 14, 81, 107; between internal and external, 2, 20, 53, 171; between Utopia and nonutopia, 51-52, 60, 68, 83, 85-86, 89, 153; subjective, 70,74-75, 148,153, 215 n.6 Brenkman, John, 6, 7, 21, 36, 43-44, 254

Brooks, Peter, 218 n. 12 Brossard, Nicole, 200 Butler, Judith: and queer theory, 32, 174-75, 178-79, 182; on subjectivity, 23, 28-29, 88; on Wittig, 166-67,184,197, 199 Campanella, Thomas, 56, 60 Caraway, Nancie, 2l6n.l,217 n.9 Case, Sue-Ellen, 175-76 civil rights movement, 9-10, 15 Cixous, Helene, 31, 175, 180-81, 186, 195, 219nn.l,4, 220n.l0 cognitive alienation, 100, 150 contamination: of the social body, 51, 54, 66, 105, 155; of the subject, 7-8, 17, 72, 73-74, 176 Creet, Julia, 175 critical distance, 3, 20, 23, 26 critical Utopia, 42, 88, 196, 205-6 cultural feminism, 14, 25, 31, 181 de Lauretis, Teresa, 135, 182, 184, 198 Delany, Samuel, 217 n.8 Derrida, Jacques, 170, 179, 213 n.18 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno), 19

235

Index

Douglas, Mary, 215 n.6 Du Plessis, Rachel, 156, 162 Engels, Friedrich, 5 Felsky, Rita, 217 n.7 Firestone, Shulamith, 144 Flax, Jane, 25 Foucault, Michel: and biopolitics, 137; and counterdiscourse, 137, 150; and feminism, 28, 134-35; and genealogy, 132, 134, 136, 156, 160-61; and power, 133-35, 139, 157, 159-61, 217 n.6, 218 n.10; and the subject, 60, 160-62; and visibility, 57-58, 133, 160 Fraser, Nancy, 135—36, 217 nn.7,9 French feminism, 175 Fuss, Diana, 166, 178 Gallagher, Carol, 22, 38, 214 n.25 Graff, Gerald, 17-18, 43-44 Grant, Judith, 13, 25 Grosz, Elizabeth, 74 Haraway, Donna, 48, 88, 91-92, 107, 139, 200, 216 n. 1 Hartsock, Nancy, 135 Hegelianism, 4, 6, 211 n.2 heterotopia, 129 Horkheimer, Max, 19

Koedt, Anne, 177, 219 n.3 Kolodny, Annette, 78,81 Kristeva, Julia, 30-31, 73-75, 167, 175, 215 n.6 Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe, 87-88, 171, 201-2, 208 lifestyle politics. See identity politics Lorde, Audre, 219 n. 19 Mannheim, Karl, 18-19, 22, 38, 207-8, 213 n. 11 Marcuse, Herbert, 35-36, 211 n.2, 212 n.5 Marin, Louis, 1,41, 53-54 Marks, Elaine, 198 Marxism: and affirmative culture, 41; and critical theory, 18—20; and cultural criticism, 35-42; and the proletariat, 5-8, 11—12; structural versus voluntaristic, 7, 135; and utopianism, 2, 4-5, 168. See also social contradiction; Utopian philosophy of the subject Marxist philosophy of the subject. See Utopian philosophy of the subject Meese, Elizabeth, 179-80 Morris, William, 62-63, 65 Moylan, Tom, 89, 102, 159, 217 n.l New Left, 8, 10

identity politics, 28, 32, 148, 178-79

Ortner, Sherry, 76

Jackson, Earl, 175-76 Jameson, Fredric: on narrative form, 39-40, 41, 58-59; on postmodernism, 19-20, 31-32, 88; on Utopian discourse, 43, 194, 214 n.27, 215 n.2; and Utopian philosophy of the subject, 21,30, 61

poststructuralism, 93, 166, 170-71, 173, 179, 214 n.26 Pratt, Mary Louise, 66 psychoanalytic theory, 31, 33, 101, 175-76. See also French feminism; queer theory.

King, Deborah, 25-26 kinship, 120-23, 128

queer theory, 31-32, 168-69, 173-77, 181-84; and disruption, 174, 177, 178, 181-83; and postmodernism, 236

Index

167, 178-79; and race, 32-33, 182-83 radical feminism, 10-11, 15, 92-93, 107, 144, 173. See also AngloAmerican feminism representative subject. See Utopian philosophy of the subject reverse Utopia. See Utopia of reversal revolutionary subject. See Utopian philosophy of the subject Ricoeur, Paul, 18 Roof, Judith, 167, 179, 199-201,220 n.8 Russian formalism, 186—87 situational ethics, 109, 119, 125-27, 130 Skinner, B. E, 60, 65 Smith, Barbara, 25 Smith, Paul, 29, 88 social body. See body politic social contradiction, 5, 8, 17, 26, 41, 50-51, 66, 205; and female subjectivity, 87-88, 93; projection of, 2, 51,53,84, 155; and race, 109, 119-22; repression of, 53, 69, 84, 107,155 spectacle, 98, 106, 130, 152, 176-77 Spivak, Gayatri, 212 n.6 standpoint approach, 16, 24-30 Taylor, Carole-Anne, 178 Taylor, Charles, 203, 208, 213 n. 13, 218n.l5 Thomas, Brook, 33, 220 n.15

Utopia of reversal, 18, 27, 96, 204 Utopian content. See Utopian impulse Utopian impulse, 3, 18, 21, 24, 29, 204-5, 207-8; in literature, 35-38, 40, 195, 199, 205-6 Utopian logic, 1, 3, 44, 48, 180, 204; and imperialism/colonization, 53, 87, 112; and negation, 17, 35, 37, 42, 131; and origin story, 105, 114; and postmodernism, 147, 166, 169, 206; and purity, 25, 53, 66, 73, 129-30, 155; and race, 114-15, 145-46; and separatism, 66-67; and transcendence, 2, 111-13, 145, 149, 167, 192; and universalization, 169, 172, 192,201 Utopian moment. See Utopian impulse Utopian philosophy of the subject, 16-17, 23, 26-27; and Marxism, 6-8, 11-12, 17, 108; and the maternal, 74-78, 80-81, 101, 115; and monist paradigm, 17, 28, 129. See also African-American feminism Warner, Michael, 177-78 Waugh, Patricia, 65, 214 n. 19 Weedon, Chris, 28 Williams, Patricia, 119-20 Young, Iris, 211 n.l Zack, Naomi, 121-22

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Jennifer Burwell has taught contemporary women's literature, Utopian literature, and Canadian literature at Northwestern University and at Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto. She currently teaches contemporary literature and feminist theory at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and is working on an analysis of how issues of race and sexuality influence the strategies and conceptual paradigms that inform contemporary feminist theory and on an analysis of the treatment of race and sexuality in "Christian right" apocalyptic novels.