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3 Narrative, Gnosis, Cognition, Knowing: Em[ female]bodied Narrative and the Reinvention of the World
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first term is privileged over the second, and the operation of the generic often entails the rigid maintenance of such binary structures. In practice, this translates into a social intolerance for intermediate terms and nonbinary typologies, so that actual and variegated typologies of sex and physical features are suppressed. Miscegenation, hermaphroditism and gender variance of any kind (homosexuality, gender performance, transgendering ) contest the rigid determination of deeply structuring and culturally embedded binary oppositions governing gender and race. In ‘‘White by Law’’ (1995), Ian F. Handy López elaborates the legal intolerance for what he calls ‘‘in-between constructions of race’’ in American law. To this intolerance, we can compare the legal, social and medical intolerance that exists for hermaphroditism and other queer gender identities . Common sense governs the reproduction and functioning of generic typologies. Handy López also points out that whiteness is legally constructed using ‘‘common knowledge’’ (547) and on the basis of differentiation from what is ‘‘non-white’’ (‘‘white’’ is what is not constructed as ‘‘non-white’’; ‘‘white’’ is the unmarked term, the default and the generic within European-North American jurisprudence). The analogy with sexism is sound: as Cranny-Francis and others have argued, ‘‘common knowledge’’ is the dominant determinant in social constructions of gender , and in the regulation of the masculine as the generic and universal term in a wide variety of discourses (Cranny-Francis, 10). The disruption , the denaturalization of ordinary, common-sense sexist and racist discourse is a key political task. The third tendency relates to a specific privilege enjoyed by the unmarked or generic term in such a binary opposition: the privilege to ignore the content of the opposition. The point is made powerfully and practically in both feminist and critical race theory. The privilege to ignore race and/or gender is a (normally unconscious) side effect of basic generic function as it operates in relation to gender and race. From the perspective of the generic term, generic functions are invisible. Perhaps most important is the fact that the content or coding of the generic term itself is not absolute or ‘‘essential,’’ but is context dependent . In the same way that languages exist in relation to speech communities , generic codings exist in relation to the cultural formations that practise them. Ontologically, a generic is the mental representation that comes to mind, unless otherwise specified, for most people in a given cultural formation. Because it is possible to specify otherwise, it is also 30 Narrative in the Feminine possible to change the default cultural ‘‘settings’’: for example, at a congress of the Disabled Peoples International, the generic is a person with a disability. The context dependence of the generic has been insufficiently recognized, in spite of the fact that most people experience this context dependency from time to time. Generic function in itself is neither good nor bad; it has no moral or ethical content. Work in artificial intelligence and language production shows that some kind of generic or default is a necessary mechanism for most communication (see Philip Johnson-Laird). It is both possible and desirable that we develop a clearer understanding of the generic as a semiotic mechanism. Given the considerable force of generic function in structuring all kinds of discourses, the fact that generic content is programmable and context dependent has significant political, legal and social implications, and opens up a variety of research avenues. The question, furthermore, leads to another which is less well understood— that of the typologies or collections of types—archetypes, stereotypes, character types, sexual personae, legal categories of person, citizen, immigrant, refugee, etc.—which inhabit our language and from which choices, generic or otherwise, are made. Like generic functions, functional typologies exercise a powerful and largely unconscious influence in a wide variety of decision-making contexts. They are related to the function of the generic, default or universal, in that typologies are the matrix, context, frame or field within which choices are made. Black and Coward make an important point about the masculine/ feminine gender typology: Women are . . . defined [by] specifically feminine, and frequently sexual, categories: whore, slag, mother, virgin, housewife. . . . The curious feature is exactly the excess of (sexual) definitions and categories for women. A similar profusion is not found for men, whose differentiation from one another comes not through sexual attributes and status, but primarily through occupation, or attributes of general humanity, eg., decent, kind, honest, strong. (83) The redundancy of sexual definition adhering to feminine types is tautological —the female types are the...