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191 12 Locked in, Locked out, or Locked up? In 1993, we were pleased to be included in a stimulating group of feminist scholars, activists and artists invited to a symposium at the University of Arizona to consider how feminist theory and practice use metaphors of space and place. At that time and in that context, feminism seemed rich and diverse. We undertook intellectual exploration of the question with delight and were impressed with how many fresh ways others found to talk about marginality, location, confinement, urban locales and pueblo spaces. Now, in 2000, this question of placement, of categorization and labels , of positioning and its relationship to political engagement, seems far less easy, as we have tried to show in the developing argument of this book. Calling this a postfeminist age is not to renounce our earlier feminism as (relatively) youthful wrong-headed extremism or narrow identity politics. Rather it is an acknowledgment of how the many assaults on feminism and claims made in its name have resulted in debilitating caricatures allowing the culture at large to dismiss and discount it. It is the age we are calling postfeminist , not ourselves, although we can confess to being “sadder but wiser” feminists. We borrow Professor Harold Hill’s phrase from The Music Man to suggest experience that moves one past moralistic pieties without his implication that we have nothing left to lose or would be his preferred sort of girls, despite our call for acknowledging the complexity of desires. In calling the sort of ethnographic observation we are striving to do “engaged cultural criticism” we aim to do more than simply relabel and repackage old approaches. We are highlighting our commitment to thinking through the politics of the works and practices we study without presuming where that concern will lead. The feminism that we have valued is that which sees gender difference as one site where inequities can be instituted, a springboard from which to try to understand any manipulation of difference, any inequity. Perhaps calling that approach “feminism” always invited misunderstanding . And clearly today, given the wealth of feminist scholarship published in the last thirty-five years and intense awareness of gender issues in the broader culture, we have moved very far from the ’60s when Friedan could call the situation of white, middle class women “the problem that has no name” (1963). Often today, feminist issues in any situation are widely apparent if differently interpreted and require little highlighting. So, we are trying to ask, where do we go from here? What needs to be done? In thinking about space as metaphor and as actuality in our work and in feminist writing more generally for that conference in 1993, a natural place to begin seemed to be the Albany branch of Borders, the chain of book superstores owned by K-Mart that have proliferated. The name Borders might appear to echo a geographical metaphor that, although it seems contradictory or at least ironic to say so, has had a central place in feminist and subaltern theory: that of the margin, the interface of two cultures as a locale of displacement from which to speak a multiple vision. In actuality, the name refers not to a postmodern intellectual condition but to a locatable origin or author: Tom Borders, founder of the original academic bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan. (Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.) But at the mall in Albany or Westchester, the name Borders takes on the appearance of a metaphor that speaks to the problem of figuring out, as ideas and disciplines transmogrify, which ideas belong together, which fields adjoin or butt up against each other: shelf by shelf stand women’s studies, queer studies, men’s studies, birth and infancy, mysticism and occult. As intellectual fashions shift, as the political connotations of names, fields, and topics change and are manipulated, borders take on new contours, follow new rifts and fissures in the intellectual landscape. At Borders, our earlier book, Tattoo, Torture, Mutilation, and Adornment: The Denaturalization of the Body in Culture and Text is placed discreetly away on the somewhat recherché anthropology shelf between ethnographies like Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific and Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, an accident of alphabetical geography. Its cover photograph, depicting a mural that once graced an entire wall at the Smithsonian entitled “Soft-Tissue Modification,” portraying practices of altering the body from around the world—Chinese foot binding, 192 Conclusion [18.118.227...

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