symbolic and historical conditions of canonical structures, the way in which representations of male bodies are produced can be traced. This frees the body up from notions of fixity and, I argue, enables the production of discourses that represent alterity or otherness that transgresses phallic necessity.
Poststructuralist feminist theory offers a methodology, that is, a technique or conceptual framework, for reading bodies, cultures and change. It does not offer a solution for emancipating all women everywhere. In terms of the application of poststructuralist feminism to deconstructing performance, it is a particularly useful framework precisely because it does not fall back upon abstract universalisms and generalisation that inform the production of canonical theatrical works, works that enunciate the intelligibility of the female body as an object of aesthetic contemplation or negated abjection. Rather, the body viewed from the point of poststructuralist feminist deconstruction is a text that is produced by the interweaving, so to speak, of various discursive threads. The female body (in performance) and the aesthetic object, then, are never neutral entities, but are invested with the fears and expectations of the dominant phallic imaginary that sublimates alterity.
and universal term. The unmarked object, the feminine, is remarked as other and the lesser term. The female body, remarked as such, becomes a means for hommosocial exchange.
The female body is simultaneously the site of scopic fascination, that is, invested in a regime of visibility, and the site of fear that results in the sublimation of excess or duplicity that is produced as ubiquitous with female nature and anatomy. Thus, according to Phelan (ibid), the other is converted into the familiar grammar of the linguistic, visual and physical body of the same, which means that difference is disavowed (this argument has clear links to Irigaray's thinking on the subject of sexual difference). Sexual difference is thus fixed under the masculine term where it becomes naturalised and standardised and the body of the other becomes a fetish object. I think that both for Phelan and Irigaray, we can read 'difference' as sexual difference across a range of gender identifications, but my feminist bias in this thesis means that I have focussed on how women are othered and fetishised. Suffice to say that in the process of fetishisation the female body is sexualised, which in effect equates woman with (biological) sex.
My argument is that the production of phallic texts of a standard sufficient to be admitted to the canon are premised upon the negation of difference and particularly the maternal. However, it is unnecessary to look for signs of a known femininity in cultural texts as this approach assumes an essential, universal gendered style or aesthetic. Rather, a poststructuralist approach means looking for: "signs of femininity's structurally conditioned and dissonant struggle with phallocentrism" (Pollock 1999:33). That is, it is possible to produce subversive readings of canonical works by reading for the blind spots in these works or, in other words, reading against the grain so as to produce an account of the alterity or otherness that ghosts the phallocentric-canonical text. I turn to a discussion of the maternal as a powerful trope of cultural abjection and negation and argue that reading for the maternal across the board opens up a field of options for feminist theory and practice.
3.3.i Reading for the maternal: the lost mother
Kristeva (1986:99) views the maternal as the primary structuring principle of a dominant masculine genre in the process of signification, as she states in the following:
We live in a civilisation in which the consecrated (religious or secular) representation of femininity is subsumed under maternity. Under close examination, however, this maternity turns out to be an adult (male and female) fantasy of a lost continent: what is involved, moreover, is not so much an idealised primitive mother as an idealisation of the unlocalisable relationship between her and us, an idealisation of primary narcissism (emphasis in original).
One cannot enter the symbolic order until there is a rejection and differentiation between self and other, because the subject-object relation that forms the primary structure of language, at least according to Kristeva, cannot be established until this differentiation takes place. To reiterate Kristeva's position, dealt with in further detail in Chapter One, the infant learns that the substances that are dejected from the body are not the same as the body/self. This detritus defines the subject by being constituted as the not-subject: my excrement, for example, shows me what / am not. The maternal body is rejected as a site of infantile jouissance or multiple and unconstituted drives and polymorphous pleasures in order for the speaking subject to be realised. The problem for women within a phallic culture is that the female body is conflated with the maternal, so that in effect all representations of the female body are substitutes for a (narcissistic) cultural fantasy. The problem, too, is that as the primary object, the maternal body is also an abject body, its processes that are necessary for life itself pushed into the realm of negative abjection.16
This foundational fantasy also structures the production of masculinist culture that is based upon the loss, repression or murder of the maternal wherein the maternal is negated as a by-product or container but not contributive to signification. The elsewhere of the maternal is always the elsewhere that is not represented or is unrepresentable in phallocentric cultural forms. This is because not only does the maternal present a threat to an exclusive patrilineal genealogy, but the maternal also holds the promise of a return to the unlocalisable, undivided jouissance of narcissistic infantile pleasure (a state prior to entry into the symbolic order). The female body, conflated with the maternal, threatens the ruin of representation because she is always already other. The western dramatic canon, that is premised upon exclusion and homogeneity, must negate the maternal in order to maintain the position of the masculine creative genius that has no debt to a maternal figure or origin.
16 Kristeva (1982:1-2) defines the abject as follows: The abject is not an object facing me, which I name or imagine [ ]the abject has only one quality of the object- that of being opposed to L.. from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master...to each ego its object, to each superego its abject.
The structure of the canon, by definition, relies upon exclusion and reiterates the ideology of exclusive, bounded subjectivity.
Reading for the maternal means reading against the grain of patriarchal texts for the incomplete repression of the feminine or the abject that is displaced into the margins of hegemonic discourse. Such resistant readings are not recuperative in the sense that any authentic feminine voice can be 'revealed', but these are valuable because they enable, for one, the deconstruction of how the other is repressed and marginalised. Furthermore, reading against the grain enables the conceptualisation of mobile imaginary spaces that are available in the interstices of institutions and the power- knowledge apparatus. Here I recall Foucault's (1976) concept of resistance, that is, that resistance is immanent in the functioning of power. Thus, there are multiple voices immanent in any discourse. Here we can see why it is important that feminism teases out the many voices that are immanent in texts and does not set out to define one authentic system of representation for women. Constructing polyvocal cultural narratives serves to challenge the reproduction of the other-as-the-same: in undermining the master narrative that appeals to visibility as a guarantee of truth, the ontology of the Real is challenged.
That is, the myth that language can give access to a Real that pre-exists linguistic construction is exploded by multiplicity and contra-diction inherent in a polylogue of disparate voices.
I contend that the use of the live body in performance art transgresses the border between the discrete aesthetic object and subject in process which in turn challenges the production of closed and discrete systems of language, knowledge and identity. Because performance art is a body-centred form, that is, the body is an explicit site of performance, it is imaginable that we can talk of producing discourse in these acts that forms "a hiatus in the very possibility for cultural reproduction"
(Haver in Golding 1997:284). Perhaps this is a rather Utopian view, as the performing body is beset with the problem of reception: the female body in performance takes up an ambiguous status because the performer works both with and against dominant modes of representation. If feminist performance art is to transgress phallocentric canonical structures "in their diverse formations and varying systems of representation" (Pollock
1993:33), then performance cannot merely reinscribe the maternal onto the body but must surely show up the patriarchal/phallocentric "...presumptions governing its contexts and
commitments" (Grosz 1995:22) and suggest that the fixing of the maternal in terms of negative repression is endemic to phallic economies. Further, using the sexually specific female body as tool for cultural inscription can serve to undermine the ubiquity of the phallus with the production of signification and cultural authorship. In the phallocentric symbolic, the phallus not only guarantees the authority (the presence) of the speaking subject, but comes to signify active desire whilst the feminine subject is relegated to the passive position of desired object. We are confronted again by the problem of sexual difference and desire.
3.3.ii Differance. difference, and desire
Derrida's term differance refers to the inability of language to be what it promises, that is, the signifier is never identical with the signified. Differance means both difference and deferral and refers to the idea that nothing, no word, idea, text or subject is identical with itself. The moment that something is thought, said, written, intended or performed, it is no longer itself or present. In this way, truth, meaning, identity and presence are constantly deferred and never arrive (Fortier 1997:63-64). Feminist deconstruction largely assumes that ideas such as meaning and presence do not hold truth nor integrity. Thus, canonical works, literary, dramatic or visual, are not impervious to a feminist textual analysis nor is the transcendent authority of the phallus guaranteed. When feminists speak of difference, it is linked to the idea of differance, that is, the slippage of meaning in language, but refers to sexual difference specifically. Sexual difference is suppressed by the phallic (the law of the same). Irigaray argues that the female body is a site of perpetual differance, such that oneness or the same cannot hold. Irigaray links the female sex to a symbolic multiplicity that makes it impossible for the female body to ever be identified as it were:
the/a woman who does not have one sex—which will usually have been interpreted as meaning no sex— cannot subsume herself under one term, generic or specific.
Body, breasts, pubis, clitoris, labia, vulva, vagina, neck of the uterus, womb... and this nothing which already makes them take pleasure in/from their apartness thwarts their reduction to any concept. Woman's sexuality cannot therefore be inscribed as such in any theory... (Irigarayl991:59).
Irigaray's statement, that woman's sexuality cannot be inscribed in theory, is not intended to negate feminist theory. In fact, it is an injunction to theorise, but not at the cost of monologic indifference, for this reinforces the idea of woman as the lacking side of a masculine-feminine binary pair. The interpretation of not-one-sex as no sex is problematic because, as I have already stated, this constitutes women as lacking and as the mere mirror or container for masculine desire, possession and exchange. I return to Irigaray to explain the psychic economy that positions the phallus/penis as primary signifier in structures of social exchange and in so-doing, negates sexual difference:
[the meaning of the clitoris and of motherhood] was thought of in the pleasure of apartness, and from other pleasures too... Their meaning, as with anything to do with female desire, having been assigned them by self-representation of (so-called) male sexuality. Which, inevitably, serve as models, units of measurement and guarantors of economic progress for anyone sensible. Its necessarily trinitarian structure included: subject, object and the copula-instrument of their articulation...The bosom of mother-nature permitting the conjunction of the (male) one and the (so-called) other in the matrix of discourse (Irigaray 1991:59-60).
It has already been established that, as Irigaray points out in the above passage, there is a phallic sexual code that governs the production of signification and hence cultural forms.
This code or set of rules of exchange does not allow women a signifier of their own with which to articulate their desire because women are already always other, reproduced as the same. This means that "women are forced to address the phallus/penis as the only flag of sex" (Chisholml995:24). The phallic sexual code that governs texts also governs canonical dramatic texts, and as in masculinist literary texts, dramatic texts are structured to foreground masculine (phallic) desire, conquest, movement and agency. The female body that cannot express its own desire (because the female can only address the phallus/penis as the referent of desire) is relegated to the position of wanting-to-be-desired. Indeed, in Lacan's phallic schema, woman signifies the desire to be desired, whilst the male actively desires women in the trinitarian structure of object, subject, and the authoritative or active phallus. It is not so much who he desires that matters in the triangulated structure of masculine desire, that is, whether men desire women or men, but how that exchange of
desire takes place. That is, masculine desire is positioned as active and feminine as latent and passive. In a simplistic formulation, women wait whilst men do.
The phallic schema that governs the production of texts is inextricable from flesh and embodiment. The myth that women are in fact castrated or thwarted males, as has been seen in the discussion of the chora and biomedicine in Chapter Two, has held sway in various manifestations over the western imagination for centuries. Female sexual passivity has been instituted in psychoanalytic discourse, after Freud's account of the development of 'normal', passive female sexuality, that sees 'her' move from experiencing active arousal and pleasure in the clitoris to passive vaginal intercourse (Creed 1995:96). Evident in these examples is that female genitalia, particularly the clitoris, are perceived as threatening to phallic supremacy and are thus subdued under the phallic mark. The clitoris, within the phallic sexual and symbolic code, is not only obfuscated, but is a threat to the autocracy of the phallus. Given that women have been seen as failed or castrated men, it is not surprising that desire has been thought of as the territory of masculinity. The potential activity of the clitoris is threatening to the myth of male sexual dominance. Historical examples of what I would define as gynophobia abound: it was not unusual, up to the nineteenth century, for tribades (the term 'lesbian' was not yet in use) who practised supposedly penetrative sex with their enlarged clitorises to be burnt or undergo a clitoridectomy (ibid). Women diagnosed as hysterical (by definition having an uncontrollable sexuality) or suffering from nymphomania in nineteenth century Europe were not infrequently treated by having the clitoris removed in order to pacify them. Ritual clitoridectomy continues to be practised in heavily patriarchal African and Islamic cultures (Dillenborg 2004). As can be surmised from these examples, the active clitoris, signifying active sexual arousal and desire, is thus inscribed as dangerous, volatile and inappropriately masculine. Female desire is untenable within phallocratic discourse because sexual difference is subsumed under the masculine term.
The history of female genital mutilation is not only literal, but has been practised in western patriarchies via the textual negation of female desire in discourses of
17 Perhaps homophobia is symptomatic of a displaced misogyny in that homosexual men are feminised within dominant heterocentric discourse: it is perceived as culturally improper for a biological male to be desired, to put it in other words, to be feminised. It is doubly threatening to straight cultures that the economy of homosexual desire allows for a doubling of pathways of desire, as the desired male can also be
symbolically (actively) desiring, a paradox that confounds masculine/feminine binaries.
medicine, psychology, philosophy, and the arts. In effect, phallic texts cut out the clitoris in order to inscribe the phallus as the origin of signification and desire. This negates the possibility of sexual difference in the production of cultural texts and reiterates a pervasive masculine imaginary. Scholes (1982:134) states that: "In western Europe, from the Enlightenment on, this process [of clitoridectomy] has been primarily a semiotic one, not enacted on the suffering bodies of actual women, but inscribed in printed texts". Thus, the phallic imperative is fixed in the printed word and is shored up by canonical structures that traditionally admit and reify masculinist works. The masculinist tradition of artistic production perpetuates ontological violence towards the female body by immasculating female characters, readers and viewers. The female viewer is coerced into identifying themselves in relation to a primary male figure. In canonical dramatic texts, this immasculation of the female subject is instated in the formulaic method of centring action ('doing') and agency around a male protaganist. The needs and desires of the male figure are of primary importance whilst female characters generally take on a maternal or anti- maternal role (mother/castrating female). Female desire and agency thus sublimated, the viewer or reader is set up to be male-identified, that is, to address the masculine term as the marker of desire and agency. Women are thus fixed into a dichotomy whereby they come to signify either virgin/whore or mother/monster and there is little space for representational nuances in the interstices of these terms. The reproduction of femininity under the phallic mark in canonical dramatic works fixes women in a hommosexual circuit of exchange wherein "...women and words are analogous media of exchange in the grammar of social life" (Brook-Rose 1986:312). Thus, the female body is fetishised and passed around, as it were, in a visual and linguistic economy that erases the trace of the desiring, speaking female body and negates difference. In order to resist masculine identification, one has to read actively against normative readings that privilege the masculine voice. To read for the maternal in canonical works ruptures the condition of closure that initially admits a work into a canon and opens it up to multiple textual readings. By reading against the grain for difference, the material and symbolic conditions that enabled the production of that text can be taken into account.
Poststructuralist feminists consider the production of phallocentric canonical texts to have taken place at the expense of women.
The pressing question is really why the phallocentric text must perform such violent amputations and silencing. The short answer, as it were, is that female sexual difference