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BACK COVER The back cover illustration is of Dorothy Cross’s sculpture Virgin Shroud (1993), constructed of cowhide, satin train, and steel. The editors with to thank the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, for permission to reproduce that image, as well as the two others by Dorothy Cross included in the following article. DOROTHY CROSS: BEYOND FEMINISM ROBIN LYDENBERG contemporary Dublin-based artist Dorothy Cross, whose training and residencies have taken her all over the globe, has nevertheless produced a body of work that reflects a “specifically Irish situation” (Fowler 18). Although her art often explores the complexities of sex and gender both within and beyond the Irish context, Cross has resisted being classified as a woman artist concerned with women’s issues. In taking this position, however, she is not totally at odds with certain strains in feminist theory, which has arrived at what some call its postfeminist phase. Cross’s career thus far has evolved through several stages that roughly parallel developments in feminist thinking about sexual difference over the past three decades. In the early phases of her work, Cross represents Irish cultural identity through contrasting gendered images evoking a pre-Christian Mother Ireland (in the Matriarchal series and Ireland Boxes of 1982–83) and a repressive patriarchal Catholic Ireland (in some of the Chairs, Spires, and Contraptions of 1983–86). In subsequent works she destabilizes such oppositional gender stereotypes by incorporating sexual ambiguity as a deconstructive tool, most notably in the Ebb show of 1988. More recently, her art suggests that gender and sexual identity may be seen as culturally and linguistically constructed; this approach is particularly productive for analyzing works belonging to the Udder series and the Power House installation —both completed in the 1990s. It is not difficult to recognize here DOROTHY CROSS: BEYOND FEMINISM 212 the trajectory of feminist theorizing—from essentialist models of sexual difference to the valorizing of androgyny and finally to recent theories of the constructed and performative aspects of gender, sex, and even the body. This general theoretical drift from essentialism to constructionism has produced anxiety among some feminists about the risk of losing sight of the body, an anxiety that has given rise to much compelling critical work on the topic. But under the influence of post-structuralist theorizing and postmodern stylistics, much of that work succumbs to a rhetoric so dense that it further obscures not only the body but the ultimate stakes for women and for men in this postfeminist moment. One way out of this rhetorical impasse may be through the visual arts, where alternative methods of “reading” sexual difference, the body, and materiality are given concrete expression. Dorothy Cross’s art, in particular, provides interpretive models that are refreshingly legible, yet theoretically sophisticated, rich in subtlety, wit, and subversion. For Cross, as for Judith Butler, making “gender trouble” is only one aspect of a broader challenge to all binary oppositions , a determined but playful problematizing of such distinctions as industrial versus domestic, urban versus rural, civilized versus primal, local versus global, history versus myth. In this broader context, Cross’s work seems to approach the utopian “third generation” feminism sketched out by Julia Kristeva in her influential essay “Women’s Time.” In that essay Kristeva identifies two basic and opposed models of women’s complex relationship to temporality. The first is a “cyclical time” derived from the conventional equation of the female with the maternal, a temporality tied to “gestation, to the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm . . . of nature” (191). In opposition to this seamless continuity with “archaic (mythic) memory” stands Kristeva’s second model, a linear and teleological time—the time of history and political engagement—made painfully discontinuous by rupture, loss, and the finality of death. Kristeva then identifies two basic “attitudes” or “generations ” of feminist theory and practice, each restricted in scope by its exclusive adherence to one of these temporal models. This theoretical and political split compels Kristeva to imagine a third generation that might bring together cyclical and linear time, myth and history, not to reconcile or obscure their differences, but to render them as “painful and productive ” as the irreducible difference between the sexes (193). Dorothy Cross’s artwork...

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