Spinning Our Wheels On Foundational Tenets

Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue amadzenned'ett4des americaines Volume25, Number 3, Fall 1995, pp. 139-148 Spinning Our Wheels On Foundational Tenets Heather Zwicker 139 Judith Butler. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex.' New York/London: Routledge, 1993. Pp. xii + 284. Elspeth Probyn. Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies. London/New York: Routledge, 1993. Pp. x + 173 and bibliography. The world of gender used to be simple: boys were boys and women were girls, and everyone knew their place. Then feminism happened, and before feminists had altogether convinced everyone that women were women, thank you very much, poststructuralism intervened with a crisis of representation that has resulted in a basic uncertainty about any such analytic categories. Judith Butler and Elspeth Probyn aim to link second-wave Anglo-American feminism with Foucaultian post-structuralism, in order to broaden our understanding of gender in cultural studies. While neither of them gives up the analytic category of wornen-"the project of representing women has been a condition of possibility for feminism and continues to provide the underlying epistemological basis for the articulation of feminisms" (7), asserts Probyn-both of them insist that foundational feminist terms and tenets must be rethought in light of the poststructuralist crisis in representation. In Sexing the Self, the feminist analytic category under scrutiny is the self; in Bodies That Matter, it is the body. Both texts take more than merely academic interest in the problems they explore. Bodies That Matter responds explicitly to some of the criticisms that 140 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue amadienne d'etudes amertcames Butler's earlier book Gender Trouble (Routledge, 1990) provoked (Butler's defensiveness, thankfully, is confined to the preface), but also implicitly to the plethora of contemporary social concerns revolving around the body, including AIDS, transvestism, transsexuality, and queerness. Probyn insists even more firmly on the proximity of the theoretical and the personal. Her project, to uncover "how we can use our sexed selves in order to engender alternative feminist positions in discourse" (1), attempts to theorize our use of the personal, and the anecdotes throughout Sexing the Sell give a liveliness to its theoretical arguments. In addition, Probyn's insistence that theory has to be personalized, while the personal has to be theorized, imparts an unusual sense of urgency and commitment to her work. One gets the sense that she is sincerely grappling with a real problem. Probyn deploys basic feminist terms like the self, experience, and the personal very carefully. In fact, she argues for a self-conscious, careful use of experience both as a bridge between theory and the lived everyday, and as an antidote to the testimonial use of experience as confessional truth beyond critique-what she calls "shooting from the heart." It is important to speak the self, in other words, but equally important to do a responsible job of it. The reworked self that Probyn has in mind is "a co1nbinatoire, a discursive arrangement that holds together in tension the different lines of race and sexuality that form and re-form our senses of self ... an ensemble of techniques and practices enacted on an everyday basis" (1-2). While interested in the self, Probyn is emphatic that she does not want this self to collapse into individualism-not only would that presume a humanist universalism , but individualism also forgets that "selves always work with other selves within discursive events" (112), and this is important to her notion of selves as social beings. In brief, she conceives of the self as a local, historically grounded site of intersecting vectors. Salutary for a feminism that has come to recognize the collaborations between gender and other axes of identity , such as race, sexuality, class, or community, Probyn's definition of the self sounds a lot like what other theorists call the subject. Unfortunately, the relationship between these two terms remains unexplored in Sexing the Sell: it is not clear what "self" does for Probyn's project that usubject" would not. Heather Zwicker I 141 Probyn would like to see the self function both ontologically and epistemologically. To function ontologically is simply to have experiences: this is the sense in which most...