Introduction

In the late eighteenth century, Mary Wollstonecraft observed that "genteel women are, literally speaking, slaves to their bodies, and glory in their sub-jection. . . . Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison."¹ Like Wollstonecraft, many feminists today document how social discourse inscribes women's bodies with subordinate identities, mak-ing women, in comparison to men, more body than mind. Against this sub-ordination, Wollstonecraft urged women to see themselves as embodied with public possibilities, as ship captains, if they wished. So feminists today speak of the possibilities of resistance, although for postmodern feminists women's choices are limited, and the body is a site of continuous contestation. In this issue, we continue this discussion about the body and identity, as you may have guessed after viewing the image on our front cover, "Eve Returns from the Mountaintop."

Unlike the Eve of traditional religious iconography, who is either the prelapsarian innocent or the shamed, carnal woman, "Eve Returns from the Mountaintop" embodies an identity both spiritual and sensual. The title of her image and her radiant body imply a recent encounter with God, but she wears a bitten apple between her breasts and a coiled serpent on her belly. "Eve Returns from the Mountaintop" is one piece of "The Torso Experience," an installation exploring the messy, fluid processes by which we construct notions of bodies. Lois Regn, the artist, built each piece in her mixed-media installation from mass-produced, marked-down, made-for-display torsos. On each of these identical, perfect, headless female bodies, Regn inscribed an individualized image, from the idealized strength of Joan of Arc to the denigrated weakness of a human female doormat to the embodied nation-state of "MISAMERICA." "The Torso Experience" begins with a photograph of the entire installation which, at first glance, seems to be a department store with its even rows of mannequins, instruments of consumerism. But a second look tells us that each torso embodies messages that challenge as well as accommodate the commercial discourse on the female body.

Preceding "The Torso Experience" in this issue are two articles, both focused on African American women, which explore relationships among embodiment, types of physical harm, and identity. Jennifer Griffiths uses trauma theory to probe a performance piece by Robbie McCauley about the rape of an enslaved woman, McCauley's great-great-grandmother. In this performance, Sally's Rape, McCauley argues that the trauma of black women raped by white men did not end with slavery. Instead, collective memories of interracial rape—and white denial that it occurred—continuously shaped the way blacks and whites read and reacted to each other's bodies. For African American women, each interracial encounter evoked traumatic flashbacks of rape and the additional trauma of white refusal to credit their memories. For whites, these encounters maintained white privilege, including their identification of black women as objects who could not speak creditably in public. Amanda Davis analyzes the work of some African American women writers from the 1960s and 1970s who, in the era of Black Nationalism, a movement celebrating the revolutionary power of a black community united as and for black men, wrote about black men harming the bodies of black women. Like Griffiths, Davis examines issues of how bodily violence threatens women's sense of self, how physical and verbal abuse reduces women to battered mute objects. Both Griffiths and Davis see resistance and healing as possible; they especially emphasize the importance of women speaking publicly of their injuries.

The rest of this issue comprises four articles concerned with various aspects of identity. While the authors do not focus on the body as a site of developing identity, the body often plays an explicit role in their narratives. The first two essays examine the different ways that individuals construct identities and how, depending on the context, various groups may read them. Amy Sueyoshi contends that masquerades allow individuals to adorn their bodies in defiance of the identities imposed by others based on physical appearance. Such...