EDITED BY TERRY THREADGOLD

& ANNE CRANNY-FRANCIS

 AND

REPRESENTATION

This collection of essays makes an important contribution to

debate on the role of representation in the social construction
of the patriarchal gender order. It deals centrally with
questions about sex and gender, subjectivity and signification.
In her editor’s introduction Terry Threadgold confronts the
scepticism of those resistant to the challenge which
poststructuralist semiotics (‘that language stuff’) poses to all
branches of knowledge. She points out that these discourses
about language, or semiosis, seem arcane only because they
have not yet become part of everyday life, as have similarly
specialist discourses like economics, government, sociology,
biology. Exploring the dynamic intersections of feminist and
poststructuralist enquiry, this work demonstrates powerfully
new possibilities of resistance and transformation.

Susan Sheridan
Editor of Grafts: Feminist Cultural
Criticism (Verso, 1988)

In the midst of current and often reactionary nostalgias for

the old analytical categories and political certainties, this lucid
collection deals a timely coup de grdce to the unexamined
assumptions which too often prevail in Australian intellectual
debates. Informed by an awareness of global metropolitan
theory and by a passionate committment to political change,
these essays open up a new space beyond the dreary ping-
pong of binary oppositions and separatist politics. No longer
signifying the essentialism of an older dispensation, the
sexed body returns to confound the certainties of
masculine/feminine, to redefine a positive difference, a new
autonomy for women, for men.

Sneja Gunew
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2022 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/femininemasculinO00O0unse 4
“FEMININE:
MASCULINE
REPRESENTATION
Pit hs BY TERRY THREADGOLD
& ANNE CRANNY-FRANCIS eo

ALLEN & UNWIN

Sydney London Boston Wellington
© Terry Threadgold and Anne Cranny-Francis, 1990
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved.

First published in 1990

Allen & Unwin Australia Pty Ltd
An Unwin Hyman company
8 Napier Street, North Sydney, NSW 2060 Australia

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Unwin Hyman Limited

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Allen & Unwin Inc.

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National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Feminine/masculine and representation.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBNO 04 610018 0.

1. Femininity (Philosophy). 2. Masculinity (Philosophy).

3. Femininity (Psychology). 4. Masculinity (Psychology).
5. Sex differences (Psychology) in literature. I.
Threadgold, Terry. II. Cranny-Francis, Anne.
305.3

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-84872

Typeset in 10/11 pt Ballardvalle by Times Graphics, Singapore

Printed by SRM Production Services Sdn Bhd, Malaysia
Contents

Illustrations Vil
Contributors viii
Preface xil

1 Introduction
Terry Threadgold 1

2 The problematic of ‘the feminine’ in contemporary French

philosophy: Foucault and Irigaray
Rosi Braidotti 36

3 Modernity, rationality and ‘the masculine’

Ross Poole 48

4 Inscriptions and body-maps: representations and the

corporeal
Elizabeth Grosz 62

5 The discursive construction of Christ’s body in the later

Middle Ages: resistance and autonomy
Jennifer Ash 75

6 ‘The feminine’ as a semiotic construct: Zola’s Une Page

d’Amour
Maryse Rochecouste 106
 7 Deconstructions of masculinity and femininity in the films
of Marguerite Duras
Michelle Royer 128

8 Cross-dressing in fiction: literary history and the cultural

construction of sexuality
Virginia Blain 140

9 Homosexualities: fiction, reading and moral training

Michael Hurley 154

10 Soap opera as gender training: teenage girls and TV

Anne Cranny-Francis and Patricia Palmer
Gillard 17

11 Gender, class and power: text, process and production in

Strindberg’s Miss Julie
Susan Yell 190

12 Scientific constructions, cultural productions: scientific

narratives of sexual attraction
Gisela T. Kaplan and Lesley J. Rogers 748

13 The privileging of representation and the marginalising of

the interpersonal: a metaphor (and more) for
contemporary gender relations
Cate Poynton 231

Appendixes
A Extra illustrating material ey chapter 5 256
B French-English passages from Zola’s Une Page
d’Amour illustrating chapter 6 263
C Strindberg’s Miss Julie: supporting material for
chapter 11 267

Endnotes 273
Bibliography 279
Index 297

vi
Illustrations

Wood carving, Crucifixion a,

Wood carving, Crucifixion 78
Wood carving, Crucifixion 79
Wood carving, Pieta 80
Painting, Crucifixion 87
Painting, Eucharistic Man of Sorrows, Vienna
Master
Bernini's St Teresa in Ecstasy 100
Lemay Detail of Bernini’s St Teresa in Ecstasy 101
Wood carving, Man of Sorrows 102
Painting, Man of Sorrows 103
Painting, Pieta with angels 104
— Title pages of The Woman Who Did and The
—ON0ONIN
AURWN
Woman Who Didn’t 145
Scene from production of Strindberg’s Miss
Julie 206
The Little Fisherman by Pierre Puvis de
Chavennes
Bacchus by Michelangelo Merisi
(Caravaggio) Zio
The singer Boy George 216
=
Nie
See
oo Male performer of a female role in the
Peking Opera 223
N An onnogata actor applying his makeup 224

Vii
Contributors

Jennifer Ash is a postgraduate student in the English Department

at the University of Sydney. She is at present researching the
religiosity of the late Middle Ages, using a theoretical framework
of psychoanalysis, semiotics and French feminisms.

Virginia Blain is senior lecturer in English at Macquarie Univer-

sity. She was a visiting fellow at the Humanities Research at the
Australian National University in 1986, during the Feminist year.
She is currently completing work on the nineteenth-century
section of A Feminist Companion to Literature in English, a
critical reference to women from 1300 to the present, to be
published by Batsford (UK) and Yale (US) in 1989.

Rosi Braidotti has a BA from the Australian National University

and a PhD in Philosophy from the Sorbonne. She is professor of
Women’s Studies and chair of the Department at the University
of Utrecht in the Netherlands. She has worked and lived in Paris
and has published on issues related to feminism, philosophy and
psychoanalysis. She is the author of Patterns of Dissonance, an
essay on women in contemporary French philosophy (forthcom-
ing with Polity Press). She is on the editorial board of Women’s
Studies International Forum, Les Cahiers du Grif, Copyright and
Differences.

Anne Cranny-Francis is lecturer in English at the University of

Wollongong, where she teaches in the areas of nineteenth-
century fiction, cultural studies and critical theory. She has
published in the areas of cultural studies, nineteenth- and
twentieth-century fiction, Australian fiction and feminist
writing. Her book, Feminist Fiction, a study of feminist rewriting

Vill
 Contributors

of generic fiction, will be published by Polity Press in 1989. She is

currently working on an undergraduate text, En/gendered
Fiction, for New South Wales University Press on the coding of
gender into text.

Patricia Palmer Gillard is lecturer in Communications at the

Canberra College of Advanced Education. In 1986 and 1987 she
worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as head of
Research and Development for ABC-TV. She previously worked
as a media consultant with her own business, Audience Views, as
a lecturer in English Curriculum at the University of New South
Wales, and as a high school teacher. Under the name Patricia
Palmer she has published a book on children and television, The
lively Audience: A study of children around the TV set (Allen &
Unwin, 1986) and a report on TV viewing by teenage girls, Girls
and Television (Sydney: Social Policy Unit, Ministry of Educa-
tion, 1986).

Elizabeth Grosz teaches in the Department of General Philo-

sophy at Sydney University. She is the author of Sexual Subver-
sions: Three French Feminists (Allen & Unwin, 1988) and has co-
edited (with Carole Pateman) Feminist Challenges: Social and
Political Theory (Allen & Unwin, 1986) and (with Barbara Caine
and Marie de Lepervanche) Crossing Boundaries: Feminism and
the Critique of Knowledge (Allen & Unwin, 1988).

Michael Hurley teaches in the Faculty of Communications at the

University of Technology, Sydney. His teaching and research
interests are in recent Australian writing, science writing,
textual theory and public images of science and technology.
Much of that work focuses on gender, sexuality and sexual
difference.

Gisela T. Kaplan of the School of Sociology, University of New

South Wales, is the current editor (jointly) of the Australian and
New Zealand Journal of Sociology. She has co-edited a book on
Hannah Arendt, entitled Hannah Arendt: Thinking, Judgment,
Freedom (Allen & Unwin: in press), is a regular contributor to the
European journal Argument, has written for the Encyclopedia of
the Australian People (ed. J. Jupp, Canberra, 1988), and has
chapters in Australian Welfare: Historical Sociology (ed. R.
Kennedy, Macmillan) and Feminist Knowledge as Critique and
Construct (ed. S. Gunew, Methuen, 1988). With major training
Contributors

also in literature, psychology and history, and considerable stage

experience in Europe (as an opera singer), she is a defender of
interdisciplinary studies. She has a PhD from Monash University
and has lectured widely on women’s and migrants’ issues. At
present she is at work on a book on current western European
feminism.

Ross Poole was educated at Sydney University, the Australian

National University and Oxford University. He now lectures on
Marxism and social and moral philosophy at Macquarie Univer-
sity, Sydney. He has published articles in radical and academic
journals and collections, and is at present completing a book
entitled Morality and Modernity to be published by Routledge.

Cate Poynton is lecturer in Communication Studies at the South

Australian College of Advanced Education, Magill campus,
where she is responsible for the Language Studies component of
the BA (Comm. Studies) and also contributes to the Women’s
Studies Program. She has published on address forms and
practices, the semiotics of social relations and language and
gender. Her book, Language and Gender: Making the Difference
(1985) has just been republished by Oxford University Press.

Maryse Rochecouste teaches in the Department of Romance

Languages, the Centre for General and Comparative Literature
and the Women’s Studies Centre at Monash University. Her main
research interests are in literary theory, semiotic theory, textual
criticism, narrative, the nineteenth century, the hermeneutics of
Zola’s Rougon-Macquart, the semiotics of textual space and the
‘Fall’. Her PhD dissertation was recently published by Georg
Olms Verlag (Germany, 1988) under the title, The Role of Parallel
Catamorphic Systems in the Structures of Zola’s ‘Rougon-
Macquart’.

Lesley J. Rogers graduated in science from Adelaide University

in 1964. She then spent some four years in the USA studying at
the Graduate School at Harvard University and doing research at
the New England Medical Centre Hospital. She obtained a PhD at
Sussex University, UK, returning to Australia in 1972. In 1985
Sussex University conferred on her the degree of Doctor of
Science, for outstanding research in the sciences. She has been
active in feminism throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and has
written articles on biology and behaviour from a feminist
 Contributors

perspective. These have been published in The Other Half:

Women in Australian Society and Australian Women: Feminist
Perspectives. ;

Michelle Royer lectures on French feminist theory and literature

in the School of French at New South Wales University. She has
completed a PhD on the feminine in Margaret Duras’ films. Her
current research is on feminist film and literary criticism.

Terry Threadgold is associate professor in Early English Litera-

ture and Language at the University of Sydney. Her teaching and
research is in systemic-functional linguistics, semiotics, perfor-
mance studies, language in education, and language and gender.
With Elizabeth Grosz, Gunther Kress and Michael Halliday she
edited and introduced Semiotics/Ideology/Language (Sydney:
SASSC, 1986). She has published widely in critical linguistics
and social semiotic theory and analysis. She is at present
completing two books Genre: A Study in Power, Pedagogy and
Polyphony with Gunther Kress (for Polity Press) and Feminist
Poetics (for RKP).

Susan Yell is a postgraduate and tutor in the Department of

English, the University of Sydney. She teaches functional gram-
mar, semiotics and performance studies. She is completing a PhD
thesis on the analysis of conversation in prose fiction, focusing on
notions of conflict and control (character/character and nar-
rator /reader).

xi
Preface

The chapters which now constitute this book were selected from
a much larger group of what were originally produced as papers
for a conference on the theme ‘Feminine /Masculine and Repres-
entation’. The conference was intended to provide a multidiscip-
linary and sexed perspective on the still problematic sex/gender
issue and the question of representation. It tried to provide a
place and a motivation for men and women to work separately
and together on the problems involved. The results were much
less homogeneous and sometimes much less harmonious than
their representation in the book might suggest.
The book inevitably involved a selection and a reduction of
that heterogeneity. The lack of harmony, that is, the contradic-
tions, the debates, the unsolved questions, even sometimes the
contemporary confusions over terminologies and methodological
frameworks, we hope we have not eradicated. They are import-
ant testimony to the currency and the immediacy of the debates
and to their openness. We have hardly begun to ask the right
questions, let alone answer them: that is one thing we hope this
book will say.
The conference was sponsored by the Sydney Association for
Studies in Society and Culture (SASSC) and held in Sydney in
late 1986. Much of the material has been considerably reworked
since then. Some of it has appeared in other places (Braidotti,
in Australian Feminist Studies and Rochecouste, in her book
Parallel Catamorphic Systems in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart (1988))
in a somewhat different form, and some has been expanded and
presented at other conferences (Jenny Ash’s chapter was pre-
sented in something like its present form at the International

xii
 Preface

Summer Institute for Structuralist and Semiotic Studies,

Vancouver 1989, Cate Poynton’s at the same institute in 1988).
We are grateful to all the authors who have been so willing
to rewrite and reorganise their material for inclusion in the
book and for permission to publish what has already appeared
elsewhere.
Thanks are due too to all those who worked so tirelessly to
make the original conference and thus now the book a success:
Susan Elfert, Secretary of SASSC, and her band of postgraduate
helpers from the Department of Early English Literature and
Language, University of Sydney; Ian Reid, John Lechte, Paul
Thibault, Cate Poynton, Jacqueline Rousseau-Dujardin and Jac-
ques Trilling, Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz for their many
contributions; Anna Gibbs and Lesley Sterne for their partici-
pation, and the membership of SASSC for its continued and
enthusiastic support of interdisciplinary events of this sort.
Thanks are also due to the Vice-Chancellor, Professor John Ward,
University of Sydney, for making funds available to help SASSC
bring speakers from overseas and interstate.
We are grateful to the following for permission to reprint
photographic and visual materials: Ministero per i Beniculturale
e Ambientali, Firenze, Italy. Studio Vista, Cassell and Collins
Publishers, London. Lund Humphreys, London.
We would like to thank Venetia Nelson for her constructive
criticism and help and John Iremonger for his continued support
of this and other projects like it.

Terry Threadgold and Anne Cranny-Francis

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] Introduction

Terry Threadgold

Reversing dichotomies and the semiotics of the Lie

It occurs to me that when we formulated the title of this book in
1986, when we reversed the dichotomy masculine/feminine,
when we put the feminine in front, on top of the bar, we were
suggesting that the masculine might be defined in terms of the
feminine, instead of the usual phallocentric definition of the
feminine always in terms of the masculine, the other, what she is
not. We were trying to make the taken-for-granted nature of the
usual dichotomy visible, legible.
We also did something counterproductive. We merely re-
versed the terms, leaving the dichotomy, the opposition, poten-
tially intact: we did not necessarily redefine the two terms in
their specificity and their difference, their autonomy. Nor did we
suggest that there might be more than two terms to be con-
sidered, that this binarism might be a quite arbitrary division into
two of what is actually a continuum. Such are the dangers of
speaking, meaning, writing, inside phallocentrism. Phallocen-
trism, located in all our dominant malestream Western ways of
thinking and talking about and making our world, is a discursive
and representational construction of that world in binary terms
such that one term is always regarded as the norm and highly
valorised, while the other is defined only ever in relation to it
and devalorised. Thus: masculine /feminine, rational /irrational,
active /passive and so on.
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

If we start with one of the dichotomies which structure

phallocentrism then we are always already ina double bind. We
can either reverse it or try to neutralise its effects or insist that
the two terms are independent. What we cannot do it seems is to
free ourselves from its implications—in this case, that there are
just two things, masculinity and femininity, and that they exist in
some kind of relationship. Somehow we have to try to start
somewhere else, to speak, mean and write outside these limita-
tions on what can (is possible/is allowed to) be spoken, meant
and written. That is one of the things that many of the contrib-
utors to this book are trying to do.
In constructing feminine/masculine as a reversal, however,
we remained inside the relationship the dichotomy implies. And
as well we told a lie... the kind of lie that representation always
is. Representation—making something appear, to stand for some-
thing else, which exists—is real. But does it, is it? What we can
say of representation we can also say of signs. ‘Semiotics is
concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is
everything that can be significantly taken as substituting for
something else’ (Eco, 1976:7). This something else does not
actually have to exist and it does not have to exist in the way in
which it is represented as existing. Representation is always a
process of signification, of semiosis, of meaning-making, but, like
the sign, representations (which in fact are signs) can be ‘taken’ as
referring to something else, something ‘real’, outside significa-
tion, something which was not made but is. This is how a process
of construction, of making meaning, comes to be interpreted as
reference, referring to something that already exists. It is how
representations come to be taken as realities. It is the very
problem that Carole Pateman (1988) is struggling with when she
argues for the need to understand how it is that slavery has come
to be interpreted as freedom in Western civil and capitalist
societies.
Semiotics aims to understand this thing that is called repres-
entation. This is why Eco (1976:7) defines semiotics as the ‘dis-
cipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie’.
The paradox of the ‘lie’ is that once structured it may be read as,
and thus become, a new ‘reality’. The construction of the world
and the making of meaning go hand in hand.
It is important to realise that this talk of ‘lies’, and the whole
knotty problem of the relationship between representation and
what we think of as reality, is not the old marxist false-
consciousness argument in a new guise. There is no sense of
 Introduction

semiotics as a ‘science’ or master knowledge which can somehow

get at the ‘truth’ ‘behind’ other people’s lies. All representations,
including semiotics itself, that is including theories and know-
ledges, are ‘lies’ in this sense of constructions, fictions. Some
writers actually use the terms narrative or story to talk about
representations. Thus Lyotard (1984) spoke of the great cultural
narratives of marxism and psychoanalysis, Carolyn Steedman
(1986) wrote of the ‘stories’ (that is, the other constructions) of
women’s lives that cannot be told within those narratives, and
Carole Pateman analyses the ‘stories’ of the social contract that
circulate in social and political theory. There is no single ‘truth’,
only different constructions, different representations, some of
which are read as ‘fact’, some as ‘fiction’, depending on the way
they are functionally contextualised and by whom and in whose
interests.
What we have is a world constructed in and through discourse,
meaning and representation, and the people in that world are
constructed in the same way. The semiotic and psychoanalytic
and post-structuralist and now feminist story that rewrites the
liberal humanist and capitalist narrative of individualism sees
subjectivities, too, as a function of their discursive and bodily
histories in a signifying network of meaning and representation.
This means, among other things, that there is no way for those
subjects ever to be outside that network as ‘objective observers’.
The ‘knowing’ subject of ‘science’ is no longer one of the
characters in these new stories. In them subjectivities are always
inside and sometimes struggling to be also outside the signifying
processes and practices of/in which they speak.
That is a paradox about which Teresa de Lauretis has much
more to say (1987:24-26), and there are many things in the above
that require further definition and explanation. But these are the
issues that this book and the voices to be heard within it are
debating and constructing as they speak, for, to quote Eco again
(1976:29) one cannot speak about the way people speak and mean
without affecting, sometimes perpetuating and sometimes
changing, the way they do it. The explanations will evolve as
they, and I, attempt to grapple with the problems.
I want to carry on a little longer about this business of
representation and reality. We need to talk more too, about this
‘inside’ and ‘outside’, this positioning of subjects who speak/
write and hear/read. These are, it seems to me, some of the
singly most difficult concepts for those who are ‘outside’ semiotic
and post-structuralist debates to come to terms with. They are
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

difficult because they run counter to all our commonsense

knowledge on the subject, and often, as Tagg (1988) has shown
with respect to Roland Barthes, counter to our most profound
personal desires. .
Let me return to the issue I was discussing above—that of
making meanings and then taking the meanings one has made to
be reality. When semioticians, post-structuralists, or feminists
(and they have much in common with respect to these issues)
declare that there are no ‘facts’, that there is no one single ‘truth’,
no ‘reality’ that has not been constructed, the commonsense
response tends to be in the order of ‘stub your toe on that brick
and you’ll know about reality’ or ‘if you’re poor and hungry you
know what reality is’. And, as I will argue later, these responses
are not so far removed from the theoretical responses that one
finds in the ‘hard’ and even social sciences to the kinds of
questions I am dealing with here. They are responses that take
the form of constructing dichotomies, setting up oppositions,
between theory or metalanguage and the ‘real issues’ of: politics
and class, or between ideology (usually now in the sense of
systems of knowledge or belief, but still related to consciousness)
and ‘real’ structures like the economy, government and so on.
These are realisations of oppositions that are still more funda-
mental to phallocentric discourses such as fact/fiction, mind/
body, material/immaterial. There are many things happening
here, but among these the continuing effects in the discourses of
these sciences of the representation/reality problem and of the
tendency for meaning-effects to be discounted as irrelevant are
paramount.
The problem is that no one takes language, or rather semiosis,
the processes by which meanings are made in a social system,
seriously. This is hardly surprising. Our entire educational
process, and the institutions of mainstream linguistics (see
Poynton this volume) and philosophy continue to foster and
perpetuate a view of language that is ‘realist’, ‘referential’ and
‘malestream’ (Pateman and Gross: 1986). It is a view of language
that continues to argue, against all the evidence to the contrary
(see Robyn Rowland 1988:chs 1, 2 for a discussion of similar
persistences of malestream knowledges, in the face of all the
evidence, in biology and science) that meanings inhere in words,
that there is a ‘true’ meaning to be recovered from language, that
language is a container for meanings which it transmits un-
problematically from sender to receiver (and of course sender
and receiver are universal, unsexed, ungendered, male?) Lan-
 Introduction

guage ‘refers’ to a reality which pre-exists it. People take no part

in all of this. Such are some of the dominant metaphors (Reddy:
1979). Little wonder that we think we ought to be simply able to
‘say what we mean’ or that we believe ‘we know what we mean’
or that we think we are ‘in control’ of the meaning process.
The issues are extremely complex and to some extent require a
massive deconstruction of the whole malestream linguisitic
edifice, something semiotics and post-structuralism and psycho-
analysis have been doing for the last twenty years or so, but that:
is in some ways much more effectively done from within
linguistics, as Poynton’s chapter in this volume demonstrates.
That whole long labour cannot be repeated in the space of this
introduction, and it has to be said that the institutional edifice of
malestream linguistics shows hardly a crack as a result of this
concerted onslaught, but it is something that all of us who work
with the questions and debates that centre around sex/gender
and representation need to be familiar with. I have written at
length about these questions elsewhere (Threadgold 1987a,
1987b, 1988a). Suffice to say for the moment that what is at issue
here can be viewed metaphorically as a problem of labour and
forgetfulness. Rossi-Landi (1973:6ff.) locates the problem in the
product/process (or system/use) dichotomy which permeates
product- or system-oriented work in the social sciences (and is in
fact constructed in and through that work). Cate Poynton (this
volume) gives an account of the effects that the product/system,
process/use binarism has had in the construction of contempor-
ary mainstream linguistics. Speaking subjects who labour to
make meaning inevitably change the system as they work: once
the meanings are made they are viewed as ‘products’ and the
processes by which they were produced are forgotten. It is at that
point that the ‘product’, which in this case we might characterise
as the representations we have been talking about, ‘takes on a
sort of apparently autonomous, monstrous life of its own’ (Rossi-
Landi, 1973:62) and is capable of subordinating ‘the capital
constituted by the linguistic workers, the speakers, to itself, so
that all individuals are, as it were, spoken by it’.
That is, what makes it hard for us to see that the truth-effects of
signifying practices are lies, in the sense outlined above, is the
fact that the labour of making meanings is forgotten. Meanings
are made but they are also reified, ‘used’, ‘consumed’ and
internalised (or resisted) by speaking subjects. This happens in
ways that contribute to the social production of consciousness,
and of self-consciousness, and of those commonsense ways of
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

knowing and believing and experiencing that are the very stuff of
the transparency and inevitability of representations. Even
Roland Barthes, who spent most of his writerly life deconstruct-
ing them, was not immune to these truth-effects, as John Tagg has
shown (1988:1-3). The example is helpful in many ways, not least
because it involves the question of desire. Tagg explains how in
Camera Lucida Barthes ‘leaves us with a poignant reassertion of
the realist position’, asserting a retrospective photographic real-
ism—the camera is an instrument of evidence—in the face of his
mother’s death, and his search for a ‘just image’ of her (Barthes
1981:70). For Barthes what the photograph asserts is the undeni-
able truth that ‘the thing has been there’. It may be a reality one
can no longer touch, but it is a reality that once existed (Barthes
1981:76,87). With the personal and very private grief and desire
this anecdote expresses we will none of us have any difficulty in
identifying. But it raises again all the questions of semiosis, the
lie, signification and representation that I discussed above in
relation to language. Indeed what was said about language as
semiosis needs to be said of all semiotic processes in whatever
material medium they may be realised.
Thus, to quote Tagg again: ‘I need not point out, of course, that
the existence of a photograph is no guarantee of a corresponding
pre-photographic existent’, and later: ‘we have to see that every
photograph is the result of specific, and, in every sense, signific-
ant distortions which render its relation to any prior reality
deeply problematic and raise the question of the determining
level of the material apparatus and the social practices within
which photography takes place’ (p.2) and finally: ‘The indexical
nature of the photograph—the causative link between the pre-
photographic referent and the sign—is therefore highly complex,
irreversible, and can guarantee nothing at the level of meaning.
What makes the link is a discriminatory technical, cultural and
historical process in which particular optical and chemical
devices are set to work to organise experience and desire and to
produce a new reality—the paper image which, through yet
further processes, may become meaningful in all sorts of ways.’
(p.3).
It is in this sense that semioticians and others argue that there
is no reality unmediated by semiotic processes. The photograph,
as produced (by a labouring subject of semiosis), is not the simple
reflection of a prior reality, but a new and specific reality, a two-
dimensional, positive paper print from a granular, chemical
discolouration on a translucent negative. This new reality is
 Introduction

capable of becoming meaningful in certain contexts and has real

effects (viz. Barthes) but because of its history as process it cannot
refer to a pre-photographic reality as truth. The photograph
‘cannot deliver what Barthes desires... the repossession of his
mother’s body’ (Tagg, 1988:3).
As for photography, so for language and all other forms of
representation...
To return to Rossi-Landi’s monster, it is not, as Rosalind
Coward (1984) explained some time ago, a question of simply
seeing women (or indeed men) as being attacked, ‘oppressed’
from outside, as it were, by practices of representation. The
problem is deeper than that. It is the problem that Wendy
Hollway (1984:227ff.) was attempting to deal with, the problem of
the investments that subjects have in complying with practices of
representation, or, as Coward asks, ‘what is the lure in the heart
of these discourses which causes us to take up and inhabit the
female position?’ (1985:29). Of course, we do not have to, we can
resist, but we can never quite escape the phallocentric libidinal
economy of discursive and representational practices within
which our sexed identities, our subjectivities, have been and go
on being constructed. As Teresa de Lauretis argues (1987:10) the
subject of feminism, and we could say also the subject of
femmeninism (a term used by Kamuf, 1987 to describe the role of
men in feminism), is a theoretical construct whose definition is
in progress, inside and outside the phallocentric ideology of
gender: and so, (I can only speak as woman) we continue to be
cast as woman, we persist with that imaginary relation, even as
we know we are not that.
When we constructed this book as a discussion of the issues
raised above, and reduced in the process the heterogeneity of the
voices of the original conference at which these questions were
discussed, we were operating under very specific institutional,
economic and ideological constraints. That is, our making of
meaning, in and through the construction of this book, was not at
all separate from institutional and power relations or from the
truth-effects of representation.
We selected materials that enabled, or would enable, the kind
of breadth and depth of approach that we ourselves had been
looking for in our own teaching and research on the social
semiotics of gender and representation. We have therefore
included work on the construction and deconstruction and
reconstruction of the masculine/feminine dichotomy in visual
(Ash, Kaplan and Rogers, Yell), performance (Kaplan and Rogers,
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Yell), filmic (Royer) and televisual (Cranny-Francis and Palmer

Gillard) and bodily (Grosz, Ash, Yell) as well as verbal media,
and we have deliberately tried to bridge and problematise
the institutionalised high/popular culture (Ash, Rochecouste,
Cranny-Francis and Palmer Gillard, Yell), canonised/non-
canonised (Blain, Hurley, Royer), and science/humanism
(Kaplan and Rogers) boundaries and the disciplinary /interdis-
ciplinary, theory/application difference by including work on
the texts of philosophy (Braidotti, Poole, Grosz), linguistics
(Poynton) literature (Ash, Rochecouste, Blain, Hurley, Yell) and
drama (Kaplan and Rogers, Yell) as well as those of other domains
like soap opera (Cranny-Francis and Palmer Gillard), feminist
film (Royer), and the theatrical rehearsal (Yell), work that eludes
or exceeds the disciplines of philosophy, literary criticism,
English, biology or linguistics, but which in its very inter-
disciplinarity, begins to construct new and specific generic
boundaries.
Thus there is a discernible difference between the kinds
of texts produced by the three post-structuralist, feminist/
femmeninist, and/or semiotician, and/or psychoanalytic philo-
sophers (Braidotti, Poole, Grosz), the feminist literary critic
(Blain), the post-structuralist femmeninist (Hurley), the structur-
alist semiotician (Rochecouste), the post-structuralist /linguistic
and post-structuralist/psychoanalytic semioticians (Yell, Ash),
the French feminist semiotician (Royer) and the feminist linguist
(Poynton) and the neurophysiologist/sociologist (Kaplan and
Rogers). There are also differences between the texts of the men
and women in this volume, even within the totally inadequate
categorisations that I have deliberately left inadequate and open
above. Poole’s text is not like that of Braidotti and Grosz,
although there are some similarities. His text is not like Hurley’s
which to some extent exhibits a ‘feminisation’ that is becoming
typical of certain kinds of post-structuralist writing about liter-
ature and which Braidotti (this volume) also locates in the work
of certain deconstructionist male philosphers.
There are at least two points to be made here.
First there is no way of arguing that theories or genres, kinds of
writing and the discourse and stories that they involve, are
universally and essentially masculine or feminine, or the pro-
perty of either men or women. Men and women may have
particular kinds of investments in positioning themselves within
any genre, discourse or story, although some positions are more
usual or more difficult, or more readily allowed, than others
 Introduction

(Hollway, 1984; Kress and Threadgold, 1988b). At the same time

it is important to understand that being feminine or masculine in
a male body and being feminine or masculine in a female body
(Gatens, 1983), and thus writing, or being, in a feminine or
masculine way as man or as woman, are not the same thing. They
are not the same because they do not mean the same, either for
the writer or for the reader, or for the subject and the ‘others’ who
perceive him/her. Masculinity and femininity are valued quite
differently in these bodily and sexed contexts. Thus, for ex-
ample, Derrida’s conception of/evaluation of what he is doing
and Braidotti’s (this volume) are worlds apart.
These very complex questions about the dialectic or institu-
tional effects, subjective investments, social practices, sexuality
and signifying processes in and through which masculine and
feminine subjectivities are constructed and constrained, allowed
freedoms and limited, able to mean differently and silenced, are
discussed and analysed in a number of heterogeneous contexts in
the chapters of this book but perhaps most explicitly and in some
of their most complex forms in the work of Poole, Ash, Blain,
Hurley, Palmer Gillard and Cranny-Francis and Yell. The com-
plicity of men and women in these processes and the relations of
sexual domination which are the linchpin of this complicity are
most strongly foregrounded in the work of Ash, Blain and Yell.
The really very different (if not unrelated) issues of discursive
positioning and sexuality are frequently confused in feminist
arguments about women and language (Spender, 1980 is an
extreme example; see Cameron, 1985; Poynton, 1985; Thread-
gold, 1988a) and the confusion is compounded by misunder-
standings or essentialist extensions of the psychoanalytically
based arguments of Kristeva (1984) and Irigaray (1985a,b) which
would celebrate a ‘feminine’ language, a woman’s language,
constituted of all that is opposite to ‘masculinity’ in phallocentric
discourse (Moi, 1985: Part II). Royer’s chapter in this book deals
with the effects of such a feminist, filmic ‘writing’ in the work of
Marguerite Duras. This is the reversal syndrome with which we
began, and this feminist strategy remains entangled in the
phallocentric web with which it begins even as it struggles to
make that web visible. Woman, women, silenced, disembodied,
unable to speak except in intonations. We have to ask—is that
how we are?—or is that how we have been made?
The second point to be made in relation to the inter- or trans-
disciplinarity of the chapters in this book is the one about
constructing new generic boundaries (fences, obstacles for
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

readers to jump). What my ‘categories’ show is something of the

intertextuality and discursive incompatibilities that may result
from interdisciplinarity and which, quite simply, make it hard
for people to talk to one another. It is often hard for the chapters
in this book to speak together. It is much harder for those who
remain within older generic and disciplinary frameworks, and
who do not share the assumptions about the nature of represen-
tation, language and meaning that are shared in this book, to
speak with us.
There is a need for dialogue, but the questions of language,
meaning, representation and the issue of difference, among men
and among women, and between men and women, the questions
raised by sexed bodies and by the construction of meaning,
knowledges and subjectivity in and through those sexed bodies,
makes the dialogue, even as the new genres evolve, ever less
straightforward. There are only two men in our book, as authors.
There are many more in the form of male theory, knowledges,
ideologies. There is only one chapter, written by two women,
that speaks from the world of science. Why is it that a theme like
this should attract so little attention from women or men in the
sciences? Are they/the sciences not subject to representation,
not implicated in the construction of sex and gender? That too is
a question that must be aired.
Our construction of this book/our representation of what was
a conference depends on the following beliefs. Sexual difference
and masculinity and femininity are not unrelated, but neither
can be understood outside the field of representations /significa-
tions in which they are constructed and which they construct.
Representation is construction. The whole of Art and Literature
and High Culture is the writing/making of that construction. But
the construction of sex/gender goes on, not only in the family,
the school, the institutions of the law, religion, politics and
labour, through all the many and diverse forms of cultural
production, but in the academy, in our theories, in and through
our attempts to deconstruct it, to make it visible, to subvert
representation, to show that the apparent image is not a reflec-
tion of the real, but a construction of it. Even as various
femininisms and femmeninisms (Kamuf, 1987:78) seek to decon-
struct the sex/gender question and subvert the power of repre-
sentation and desire (Coward, 1985:25), the process of
construction goes on... That too we cannot not address... and
who is this ‘we’ in whose voice ‘I’ seem to speak? (Adrienne Rich,
1985:21). That will do for a beginning...

10
 Introduction

Speaking together: intertextuality, discursive conflict

and representation.
I hope that what I have said so far may begin to answer the
question why a book on feminine/masculine and representation.
It may also begin to explain why it is that this woman cannot just
say what she means, why she has to make it all seem so
complicated, so difficult, why she uses that ‘jargon’ when
‘ordinary’ words would have done just as well. It might explain
the writing strategies of many of the contributors to this book,
who also go to great lengths to ‘use’ ‘theoretical frameworks’ to
‘state the obvious’. Or do they?
What we are using is of course a metalanguage, or several and
there are reasons for that too (Threadgold, 1989 forthcoming). If
all representations in ‘ordinary’ language are already construc-
tions then we cannot use ‘ordinary’ language to talk about
‘ordinary’ language without forever remaining enmeshed in the
contradictions and ambiguities of our own constructions and our
own constructedness. For we are also subjects in language, in
semiosis. We are, in a sense, what we can mean (in both senses of
can, ‘are able to’/‘are allowed to’) Metalanguages are also
constructions but they are constructive of other realities and that
is their critical function in relation to the complexities of the
lived realities in which so-called ordinary language is always
implicated (Morris, 1988:34).
There would be far less confusion in feminist work on
discourse and language if this were properly understood
(Threadgold, 1988a). There would also be far less linguistically
naive fear of ‘male’ metalanguage, and of theory (Toril Moi,
1985). These questions are discussed very cogently in Pateman
and Gross (1986) and in Caine et al. (1988), where it is made clear
that the issue confronting any attempt to undo the masculine/
feminine dichotomy, as a symbol of patriarchal and phallocentric
ways of knowing, depends precisely on ‘not turning our backs’ on
contemporary theory, methodology, and the classics of political
and social theory, and one might say of linguistic and critical
theory as well, but rather on learning how to dismantle and
transform this work so as to produce new knowledges, new ways
of meaning. Malestream knowledges can be subverted (Pateman
and Gross, 1986:4). There is no need to make the whole wheel
again each time. This seems to me to be what is wrong with
Irigaray’s current work on language. The rejection of all lin-
guistic and semiotic frameworks as male metalanguage, with the

1]
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

attendant charges of master-theories and mastery, considerably

weakens her own enterprise (Irigaray 1985c).
The problem is a complex one and needs constant rethinking.
Maryse Rochecouste (this volume) uses a Greimassien frame-
work to analyse the detailed linguistic realisations of what she
calls a patriarchal discourse on femininity, showing how that
discourse is perpetuated and constructed as a representation of
femininity (this is what women are) in the novels of Zola. Yet the
Greimassien theory she makes operate in the service of this
deconstruction is founded, precisely, on the phallocentric di-
chotomies Rochecouste seeks to make visible. Its foundation is
the famous semiotic square which Christine Brooke-Rose had
such fun deconstructing (1985:9-20). Now Rochecouste, unlike
many other writers in this book (Braidotti, Grosz, Ash, Cranny-
Francis, Yell, Poynton), does not actually mix theories or tamper
with the theory. She uses it, intact, to read with. If male theory
really bites, ought she not to have been appropriated by it, so that
she could not have spoken except in its terms? Or is that what
she is doing? And is that why her feminist reading works?
These kinds of questions make me think that it can be argued,
although this is to anticipate a little, that to speak a metalanguage
(male or not) as a sexed male or female feminine and feminist
(femmeninist) subject, and embodied subject, constructed in and
through a historically specific network of signifying practices,
social and power relationships and institutional frameworks, can
never be to mean, in the same way as that same metalanguage
will mean, spoken in the context of malestream knowledges,
by a sexed male or female masculine non-feminist subject, con-
structed in an equally specific, but different network of significa-
tions. Essentialist you say, or simply incomprehensible? Think
about it...
But you see what the problem is. Given the extraordinarily
narrow dissemination of linguistic and semiotic concepts, and
the equally extraordinary myths and fears that surround their
use, to use them at all is to make oneself very hard indeed to
understand. But I must insist on the need for the terminology and
identify myself here with what Meaghan Morris has dubbed ‘the
humourless feminist’ (1987:176):
Yet she’s really a helpful soul. For humourless
feminism, unlike philosophy’s ‘dark unlegislatible’
femininity, insists on metalanguage: not
metalanguage understood as a policing of discourse, or

12
 Introduction

as a primacy accorded to one discourse (say,

philosophy, or ‘theory’ in literary terms) over others, but
more simply as a critical shift in relation to a given
discourse, in a particular place and time. Such shifts
enable, if they cannot alone achieve, the re-statement,
re-working, re-mapping of the terms of our social
existence. Without the Humourless Feminist’s move—
clumsy, indispensible, insufficient—the spriteliest
feminist politics can find itself rapidly blocked.
What is at issue is a need for dialogue, a need for translation—
that need to which my earlier questions about how we are to
speak together was already pointing. But again, before we can
speak together, or even begin to understand why our dialogue is
blocked, there are a number of basic issues about language and
semiotics, about all the ‘languages’ (the organisation of homes,
cities, transport systems, of sexed bodies and voices, writings) of
daily and institutional life and the ways in which they work, that
have first to be understood. These are generally not understood,
not even to the point of being regarded as problems. This, as I
have said already, is hardly surprising, when language about
language, language about meaning, and discussions of the ways
in which meanings (and therefore ‘facts’, ‘realities’ and ‘know-
ledge’) are made, not given, are so consistently and systematic-
ally eschewed in all our pedagogical institutions.
Let me look for a minute at some of the real effects of these
questions in the reading I have been doing in preparation for
writing this introduction. As I reread the chapters of this book I
realised that almost all of the writers worked comfortably with
the various metalanguages that are available for grappling with
the questions of languages and semiosis, and thus with the
problem of representation. Some writers (Braidotti, Grosz,
Poynton and Kaplan and Rogers) effect quite significant shifts in
the metalanguages themselves, demonstrating my point above
about the phallocentric metalinguistic effects. Yet in reading
around the chapters, outside the book, in a good deal of very
recent feminist writing in Australia and elsewhere, I still find
very much in evidence the strange notion that theory, and by
implication metalanguage, are in some sense quite separate from,
a kind of intellectual game in relation to, ‘real’ political action.
How then I wonder are the chapters of this book, chapters
which as I have now ordered them in my reading, and for readers,
the co-texts which now come together to articulate something of
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

an argument about the construction of men and women in and

through phallocentric representations—how are they to be
understood and read? How are they to dialogue with their
intertexts, these other feminist texts which see themselves as
somehow ‘real’, ‘political’ and straightforward in relation to the
‘theory’, ‘intellectual elitism’ and difficulty of what is in this
book? What kind of thing are they? Sometimes they look like
philosophy, or literary criticism, or linguistics. They talk about
things like semiotics, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, decon-
struction and feminism. What are they?
Riddles for readers. The problem of the name. First lesson in
semiotics, or post-structuralism or linguistics, if you like. In
order to know how to read you have to have been taught, trained
in the reading of it. Once you know its rules, you can accept or
reject them. Without them you are all at sea. Michael Hurley (this
volume) gives a more detailed account of how this works, and his
own reading of the institutions of literature and of some texts
which they exclude provides explicit, theorised examples of
resistant readings. But in a sense there is not a chapter in the
book which does not illustrate the power of genre, of generic
transformation, and the business of compliance and resistance.
So, you’ve understood about genre. What you need is a name.
But although you think it is the name you need—‘this is a book
of interdisciplinary x’s’—actually as yet there is no name that
will subsume and reify them all, turn them linguistically and
semiotically into things, which you will then know how to
handle, use, and make reflect some pre-given reality—the name
alone is not enough. For contrary to common belief and common
sense, language and meaning does not work through names,
words, alone, and this despite the ideology realised in the
institution of the dictionary, and in reform of sexist language,
which beavers away at changing words when it is the whole
social system that needs deconstructing.
Language or any other semiotic system is not a set of forms
with meanings attached. It is a set of complex, evolved, evolving
and open semiotic systems where meanings are realised in and
constructed through complex material media, in contradictory
and overlapping institutional sites, by sexually, socially and
historically positioned speaking subjects, who are subjected to
and constructed in and through signifying networks of power and
desire.
That is why one cannot simply define one’s terms.
To understand what semiotics is (notice the way the language,

14
 Introduction

the grammar of subject, predicate and nominalisation, reifies the

term) or what any metalanguage or theory is on about, one has to
have been part of its evolution, or be prepared to trace that
evolution, by reading, talking, exchanging meanings in dialogue,
intertextually, interpersonally, understanding the institutions
within which the discourses and genres peculiar to this theory
operate, living those institutions and their networks of power
and desire, so that one’s own subjectivity is partly constructed in
these signifying practices.
That is of course the risk and the paradox—anad it is where the
truth-effects of representation always lie: the point at which the
subject who has laboured to understand, to make sense, a subject
in process, becomes a finished product, and confuses the semi-
otic products of her labours, the meanings and the self she has
constructed, with some kind of natural, unmade, pre-given
reality.
The finished feminist, interdisciplinary, post-structuralist sub-
ject who confidently speaks of women’s oppression and
patriarchy as if the words, the names, constituted some universal
reality ‘which we all understand’, in need of no further explana-
tion or argument, and the finished social science feminist
subject, who wants to know what these names have to do with
her lived experience as a heterosexual, feminist intellectual—
both are caught up in this endless and contradictory semiotic
business of being and becoming, of making meaning and know-
ing, of reality and representation.
But this is the signifying order within which we have to work
and it explains, among other things, why Ann Curthoys (1988)
writing as a historian, in a book which is full of useful insights,
reads the work of radical feminist theory as being uninterested in
sociology or history. The need for dialogue, and translation, is
very obvious here. Let me quote:

Mia Campioni and Elizabeth Gross have argued in an

Australian context for a French-influenced radical
feminism. They called for a recognition of ‘the role of
the body in constituting consciousness’. Women’s
oppression, they suggest, can only be understood ‘in
terms of the existence of sexually differentiated
bodies... The point is that we are not disembodied
subjects, consciousness distinct from bodies’. Yet
Campioni and Gross are not very interested in asking
sociological or historical questions, with the result that it

15
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

is difficult to apply their perspectives to answering

questions like ‘why is it women who mother?’. (Curthoys,
1988:133)

I would have thought that the question of sexed bodies and of the
socially constructed consciousness of the body that might result
from the positioning of subjects within a phallocentric order,
which is what Campioni and Gross are arguing here, might have
everything to do with why women mother. Campioni and Gross
are absolutely explicit, in their critique of the marxist ‘rational
subject’ that this subject is ‘unhinged from lived experience and
from the particularity of a position in the world’, and in their
critique of the related marxist notions of truth and language, that
the singular reality which this imposes is incapable of dealing
with ‘the struggles of women, blacks, gays or youth’ (Campioni
and Gross, 1983:123,125). This, and the very project of a critique
of Marxism’s ‘insidious politics of representation’ (p.119), does
not read to me like a lack of interest in sociology or history.
In fact it sounds very like the argument that I read in Curthoys’
own book, and indeed in the paragraph which follows the quote
above (1988:133). Curthoys is very concerned with the question
of why it is women who mother, which she sees as crucial to
understanding many other aspects of women’s position in capita-
list societies. So, after a fascinating analysis of why patriarchy
cannot be explained in terms of capitalism, or seen as coterm-
inous with it, a critique of the widespread use of the terms
patriarchy and oppression without adequate contextualisation or
analysis in terms of class, age, ethnic and gender differences, and
an attempt to grapple with the apparent universality of the
woman-childcare problem, Curthoys returns to biology and the
body: ‘When confronted with such a universal pattern, the only
basis for universality does indeed lie in the body, in the fact that
human reproduction relies on a biological duality between male
and female. The only commonality we can be sure of, theorically,
is that in all societies this biological duality is given social
meaning, is constituted as a basis for sexual division.’ (1988:133).
In some ways Curthoys is here arguing from a position that is
remarkably close to both Campioni and Gross, and to Carole
Pateman (1988) and Poynton (this volume). It is Pateman who
puts the sexual back into the social contract, refusing the elision
of the private and the personal from the public world. ' Working
within and outside social and political theory, in the gaps where
it is silent, she ‘recovers the story of the sexual contract’, showing
how patriarchy and oppression have their basis in the sexual

16
 Introduction

contract between sexed men and women, which preceded

historically, but continues to have discursive and semiotic
effects on the construction of capitalist institutions. The job she
does in social and political theory is parallel to the one performed
by Cate Poynton (this volume) in recovering the story of the
grammar of the interpersonal in the exclusions and the silences
of malestream linguistics. The exclusion of the interpersonal is of
course complicit with the exclusion and denial of sexuality. Both
women’s work is complex, fully cognisant of the implications of
the operations of language, discourse, and semiosis in the pro-
cesses of representation. Pateman’s, in addition, provides an in-
stance of that proper analysis and deconstruction of ‘patriarchy’
which Curthoys’ book demands.
With all this intertextual agreement then, and apparent evid-
ence to the contrary (neither Pateman nor Poynton is ignorant of
or uninterested in French theory; both are concerned with social
and historical questions), why does Curthoys think that radical
French theory, in the bodies of Campioni and Gross, or in their
disembodied textual voices, is not interested in sociology or
history and cannot be ‘applied’ to ‘real’ questions? It is, I think
again, a question of language, or of metalanguage, and of the
failure to recognise the way metalanguages can become institu-
tionally naturalised to the point where one does not any longer
know that one is speaking them, or being spoken by them, to
recall Rossi-Landi’s formulation of the problem.
The problem is recognised in Curthoys’ and Pateman’s books
in relation to feminist theory and the reified use of the terms of
patriarchy and oppression, terms that have been constructed
within the discourses of feminism (Millett, 1977), and then taken
for granted as referring to some reality outside the process of
that contextualised construction. It is recognised in Gross
(1986:190ff.) and Grosz (in Caine et al. 1988:98ff.) in the careful
attempt to define sexism, patriarchy, phallocentrism and various
feminisms and their difference from ‘feminist in(ter)ventions’
which ‘aim at establishing an openly sexualised body of know-
ledges’ that would enable ‘a dialogue between knowledges now
accepted as masculine, and the ‘alien’ or ‘other’ voice of women’,
and open up the question of the ‘ethics of sexual exchange in
knowledges’ (Grosz, 1988:103). The latter is something Rosi
Braidotti (this volume) is also concerned with.
It is a problem however that is frequently not recognised in the
dialogues that go on between feminist ‘theorists’ and women in
the social or hard sciences who see their feminism as somehow
not ‘theoretical’. It is this difference that Curthoys’ comment

17
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

calls attention to. In some ways, she and Campioni and Gross are
saying the same thing; in others, they are saying very different
things. Curthoys will never see that while she believes that her
language is ‘ordinary’ and theirs ‘arcane’ (this is my inter-
pretation), or while she believes that ‘ordinary’ language can
effect that shift in relation to a discourse, that reworking of our
experience, which Meaghan Morris speaks of, and which the
metalanguage Campioni and Gross use is trying to effect.
Why should terms like ideology, biological essentialism, class
barriers, segregation of the labour market, capitalism be regarded
as self-explanatory? Why should there be an apparent and taken-
for-granted separation between ideological and economic and
political effects: ‘The courts’ wage-setting criteria were not
primarily ideological, but economic and political’ (Curthoys,
1988:123). Why should terms like semiotic, discourse, textuality,
subjectivity have the status of arcane mysteries? The following is
typical of many reactions: ‘There have been a few delightful
moments, during my desultory and decidedly non-expert read-
ings in semiotics, when the subject made me laugh out loud
instead of terrorizing or, same thing perhaps, boring me stupid’
(Brooke-Rose, 1985:9). These things are not unrelated to the
blocking of dialogue. And the answers are quite simple once one
understands that this is a semiotic problem.
Words, terms, only have meanings in relation to the enor-
mously complex discursive and semiotic systems (including the
sexed bodies and subjectivities) within which and through
which they are functional. For a materialist historian, who is not
a semiotician, ideology is consciousness, the mind, beliefs,
separated from the material, real institutions of economics and
politics (mind/body perhaps? theory/reality?). There are frag-
ments here of a phallocentric discourse, of the effects of a male
construction of knowledge which would always separate con-
sciousness and material reality. For a semiotician, and/or a
radical feminist philosopher, economics and politics are con-
structed in and through discursive and semiotic processes and as
such they are ideology (not ‘false consciousness’, but constructed
systems of meanings). There can be no separation between them,
anymore than there can be a separation between mind and body
or theory and reality. So there are then real semiotic differences
in the way these women construct the world.
These differences are, at this level, discursive differences,
differences related to the circulation and specification of dis-
courses, and to the positioning and construction of subjects in a
semiotic order. Language about language or semiosis, if it is of the

18
 Introduction

post-structuralist, deconstructive or psychoanalytic kind, is

arcane and mysterious because it is rarely ever heard, read or
spoken. The terminologies of the discourses of politics, govern-
ment, sociology, psychology, history, anthropology, even biology
and science are, on the other hand, a regular part of everyday life.
They circulate in textbooks in the school system, in newspapers,
on television, in science fiction, in the documents produced by
the bureaucracies with which we all deal daily, in our everyday
talk and conversation, to name but a few of the sites and
institutions which privilege and support, and continually recon-
struct and change, this hegemony of knowledges.
What were once technical ‘jargons’, metalanguages, have made
the transition from theory into the transparent world of the
ordinary, the everyday. We forget that these too are construc-
tions, of the world, and of ourselves: and this forgetfulness has
‘real’ effects in the intertextual arguments I have been decon-
structing. It makes extremely difficult a dialogue between
women, let alone a dialogue between men and women.
Our attempts to speak together are still enmeshed in a
phallocentric order of discourse and representation: and that
order, if it is to exist, has to eschew the knowledge of language
and semiosis which would enable us to disentangle ourselves
from phallocentric constructions or to see the need for autonomy
and difference, as articulated by Grosz (1988:103). The very
existence of a phallocentric order of discourse and representa-
tion depends on a purely representational or referential view of
language (Poynton, this volume), a view which sees language as a
passive conduit for mental processes and pregiven realities, and
denies the dynamic aspects of the interaction between speaking
subjects and discursive and representational practices. Only
such a realist, individualist view of language can support the
conceptual, rationalist basis of phallocentric theory-construc-
tion, with its commitment to objectivity and truth, to ‘scientific’
methods, to the separation of the subjects who know from the
things that are known, and to the system of binary oppositions
which defines humanity in male or masculine terms (see Grosz,
1988 for a much more detailed account of these questions).
Now the question of binary oppositions and representation was
where we began and is indeed central to the story that this book
might construct for a reader. If the implications of the mascu-
line /feminine dichotomy are that the feminine has always been
constructed in terms of the masculine in phallocentric repres-
entations, and that the masculine has been constructed as
sexually neutral, universal, and if the implications of that, less

19
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

often discussed, are that the masculine side of the dichotomy

thus also avoids the need to define its own specificity, the
specificity of the male body, male subjectivity (Grosz, 1988:97),
then it would seem to be very important for men and women to
begin to understand why and how that has come about. One way
to do this would be to do some really specific and detailed work
on the nature of representations, on the details of the realisations
of this phallocentric order of discourse, or its transformations and
subversions (viz. feminine/masculine) in specific cultural pro-
ducts /processes, under specific historical and social conditions.
There is a good deal of support for, and recognition for the need
of, such a critical social semiotic form of cultural analysis
(Morris, 1988; Tagg, 1988; Curthoys, 1988:151; Weedon 1987:151;
Pateman and Gross, 1986; Keller, 1985), but in fact there is often a
great absence where this work should be. This is so particularly
in the area of detailed linguistic, discursive and semiotic analysis
of the kind that might point to the intricacies of the interrelation-
ships between sex and gender, subjectivity and signification, or
discuss the historical relations between representation and
subjection, or the discursive and semiotic and institutional
complexities of social stasis and social change—and so on. This is
not to deny the value of the enormous amount of work that has
been done (for example, Pateman, 1988: Schaffer, 1988; Seidel,
1988; Birch and O’Toole, 1988; de Lauretis, 1986, 1987; Diaz-
Diocaretz and Zavala, 1985; Coward, 1984; Warner 1985, 1987;
Irigaray, 1985a,b,c, to name only a few) but to argue for the need
for a great deal more work of this kind.
It is to argue too for a rethinking of the effects of the
deconstruction of malestream linguistics by post-structuralism
and semiotics. Realist theories of language may need to be
deconstructed, even discarded, but that does not mean that we
can stop thinking about language, stop trying to make sense of its
functions and uses, stop trying to rework, rethink both the real
and constructive processes in which language and other semiotic
systems participate. There are ways of theorising language and
semiosis which are not malestream, even if formulated originally
by men (Threadgold, 1987a and 1989 forthcoming; Poynton, 1985,
1988, this volume; Henriques et al., 1984) ways that would fit
most of the characteristics of feminist knowledges outlined by
Grosz (1986:190ff.; 1988:92ff.)
These are the potential tools for a kind of feminist or sex/
gender-conscious work on discourse and representation that
feminism and semiotic/post-structuralist analysis on the whole

20
 Introduction

have not yet produced very often. And when I say ‘taols’ here I do
not mean a return to the language of the malestream discourse of
‘theory’ and its ‘application’. I do not mean positioning ourselves
as the dutiful daughter in relation to ‘master knowledges’, and
thus, as is so often the case, again making our own work invisible,
silencing our own voices (Gatens, 1986:21). I mean to engage in
the active deconstruction of those master knowledges in the very
process of trying to make them work/labour in the interests of a
sex/gender-conscious cultural analysis, so that the process of
analysis itself becomes thé process of the construction of those
in(ter)ventionist theories and knowledges of which Elizabeth
Grosz and others speak.
There are many examples of the ways in which attempts to
analyse the question of masculine/feminine and representation
have fallen short of this aim, simply by failing to recognise and
account for their own inevitable positioning inside that phal-
locentric discursive and signifying order where theory, albeit
refused or unidentified, circulates. Chris Weedon (1987:152-56)
and Susan Sheridan (1988a, 1988b) present a cogent case for the
limitations of much feminist work within the literary institution
(Showalter, 1977, 1986; Gilbert and Gubar, 1979) which in
seeking to find and valorise representations of women’s experi-
ence in literature, or in seeking to recover and valorise women’s
writing, without theorising the construction of gender or subject-
ivity, or indeed the reading and writing processes, in either post-
structuralist or psychoanalytic terms (they are not much
concerned with linguistics), simply reproduce the commitment
to a theory of the transparency of language and the fixity of
subjectivity that is characteristic of much malestream literary
criticism.
These are the kinds of problems that make an analysis of
representation itself, as an issue, as a signifying and social
process, so crucial. There is a world of difference between realist,
experience-based accounts of images of women, in literature, art,
or film, and an understanding of the way in which those images,
and those who produce them, as writers or readers, participate in
the signifying and discursive networks of power, desire and
representation which actually construct and constitute cultures
and social systems.
The problem is even more acute in regimes of knowledge like
science or social science, regimes which are constituted by these
very representational processes themselves as ‘factual’, ‘truth’-
based, mathematically or statistically verifiable. Here, it is hard

2)
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

to come by even the recognition (common in literature because of

its construction as fiction) that the stuff of the science is an
‘image’, which with all its reflectionist connotations of a reality
‘out there’ which the image truthfully represents, rather than
constructing, is at least one step forward from a position which
thinks its constructions are really itself.
Despite the excellent accounts of these questions in feminist
critiques of science (Keller, 1985; Grosz and de Lepervanche,
1988), they remain everyday problems with which we have
constantly to deal. The debate between Curthoys and Campioni
and Grosz which I discussed (or constructed) above is one kind of
‘real’ effect that results from our entanglement in representation,
our having to speak in the languages, the discourses that we are,
even while trying to say other than what they say. It takes other
forms institutionally when in discussions of curricula for
Women’s Studies programs we find women from the social
sciences arguing for the ‘real’ stuff of class and history and
politics over what is seen as theory, a course on representation. Is
such a course really necessary as a core course they ask ... We do
not escape the truth-effects of representation so easily. We do not
emerge unscathed from the patriarchal structures we inhabit; we
cannot so readily deconstruct subjectivity discursively produced
within a phallocentric order. We should all remember this.
There is a need then for more and other kinds of feminist work,
and femmeninist work, on these questions and there is a need for
dialogue between and among these positions and for that
dialogue to be informed by the kind of understanding of
language, signifying practices, discourse and representation and
subjectivity that Weedon would call post-structuralism and I
called above a critical social semiotic form of cultural analysis
(perhaps giving a name to the interdisciplinary x’s in this book).
One of the interesting aspects of these contributions is that in
analysing the way in which the masculine/feminine dichotomy
is realised in phallocentric discourse in many media they also
often demonstrate the existence of alternative non-binary dis-
cursive constructions of the continuum which phallocentrism so
arbitrarily divides into two (Braidotti, Grosz, Blain, Hurley,
Kaplan and Rogers). More importantly, they are often able to
show how patriarchy and the phallocentric network of signifiy-
ing practices which it supports manages to elide/exclude/
marginalise or silence these alternative discourses and repres-
entations which would question and unsettle its own construc-
tions. It is not that we cannot speak, that language is -a

2
 Introduction

straitjacket, it is that we are not allowed to speak, and that if we

do anyway, what we say is not recognisable to those who read
and listen from a position inside the phallocentric representa-
tional networks of patriarchy. That is the dialogue and the co-
textual and intertextual story that this book, through its many
different voices, might construct for the reader who is trained to
read it thus or who is ready to listen in new ways.

Sex/gender, feminine/masculine and the body

Why should it be though that a book in which the focus would
appear to be the social, discursive construction of masculinity
and femininity should also have a great deal to say about sex and
the body (Braidotti, Grosz, Ash, Rochecouste, Royer, Hurley,
Yell, Kaplan and Rogers)? The return of the repressed perhaps?
Surely, in feminism particularly, we have to keep the biology
of sex and bodies separate from the social construction of
masculinity and femininity, from what has become identified
with ‘gender’ and defined as a social or semiotic construct, not a
biological given? Why should this book be so concerned with the
discursive construction of bodies and with sexual difference,
with sex as a semiotic construct (Grosz, Ash, Blain, Hurley)? Why
should there be a certain insistence on the body as a site for
the making of meanings (Grosz, Ash, Hurley, Yell)? Why is the
strict separation of embodied biological sex (what characterises
and differentiates bodies) and socially constructed gender—
disembodied (since if masculinity and femininity are social
constructs they may attach themselves to, be located in, any kind
of sexed body)—suddenly being questioned? What has the sexed
body got to do with representation? Why is there a certain
slippage, within and among the chapters in this book, between
the pairs of terms masculine and feminine, male and female, men
and women, sex and gender?
The answers to these questions are not simple. Like the
questions raised in the last section of this introduction they have
to do with binary oppositions and with the kind of world, the
kind of knowledges, those oppositions construct in and through
the phallocentric discourses and representations that, in turn,
support and maintain the institutions of patriarchy. Unsettling
those oppositions is part of the business of dismantling and
transforming those knowledges and institutions. It is also part of

eo
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

the business of making new meanings and knowledges, but

precisely because new meanings always have to speak in the
languages of the old, both inside and outside them, it is a difficult
enterprise and one whose ramifications and implications can be
extremely hard to understand (Threadgold, 1989 forthcoming).
The argument for looking again at the sex/gender dichotomy
which feminism itself has helped to construct is a very complex
one. It is complex both because of the contradictions in phal-
locentric discourses which produce reversals and arguments
within feminist debate, and also because it depends fundamen-
tally on an understanding of the metalinguistic metaphoricity of,
and the translations that have to be made between, a number of
discursive frameworks that speak feminism and which it speaks.
A central problem once again, for understanding the arguments,
is semiotics, and particularly that kind of semiotics which is not
logocentric, or language-centred, and which therefore has no
trouble with the concept of a sexed body as a text on and in and
through which ‘systems of patriarchal morphology may be
inscribed’ (Grosz, 1988:142; Suleiman, 1986). But that is already
to oversimplify, for psychoanalysis is also part of this construc-
tion of things, and it is the imaginary body, women’s and men’s
socially and historically mediated experiences of their bodies,
which actually bears the marks of these social inscriptions (see
Ash and Yell, this volume, for analyses of these processes).
The whole argument then provides a further radical shift in
the already radical proposal of social semiotics and post-structur-
alism that consciousness is socially, discursively constructed,
rather than being the prime mover (mind) in the organisation of
the world (body). Now, the body and thus sex, is also being
represented as a social semiotic construction. The mind/body,
material/immaterial, private/public, discursive /non-discur-
sive, text/context, product/process and masculine/feminine
dichotomies of patriarchal and phallocentric knowledges are
being radically deconstructed. But so now is the sex-gender
distinction on which so much work in social science and
feminism has depended, and along with it, the priority of
discursive effects (with its elision of sex/gender and the non-
discursive) which has been such a strong tenet of a Foucauldian
post-structuralism (Braidotti, Grosz, this volume). What is being
argued here is that the socially and historically mediated experi-
ence of the sexed body, already a semiotic experience, is prior to,
different from, and interactive with the discursive construction
of subjectivity (Grosz, this volume).

24
 Introduction

In part, this seems to be one of those reversals or declarations of

independence with which we began. It is what can be said or
meant next if one wants or needs to,say other than what is
already being said within a binary phallocentric order. So the
non-discursive (what for Foucault was bodies, behaviours, prac-
tices, all that was not realised in discourse, and what for
semiotics, despite its best intentions, remained for a long time
also bodies, behaviours, practices, the things it constituted as the
context for primarily verbal and sometimes visual texts) becomes
prior to the discursive, sexual is asserted as prior to social
difference, and sexual difference, autonomy, is asserted instead
of the masculine/feminine binary and subordinating relation-
ship. But there is also something else being said here and it comes
from outside that phallocentric order and demands and begins to
accomplish a more radical dismantling of it.
There are several distinct versions of this new story and they
are found in many places. Something similar seems to me to be
being argued in some versions of feminist post-structuralism
(Henriques et al., 1984; de Lauretis, 1987; Weedon, 1987: 108),
although here the semiotic construction of the body is not given
priority over the discursive in quite the same way. The work of
Poynton in linguistics and Curthoys in history and Pateman’s
(1988) move in sexualising the private realm and refusing its
phallocentric and patriarchal elision from the construction of the
public, seem to be translating Grosz’s feminist in(ter)vention
much more closely into the domains of historical, linguistic and
political analysis.
There is much in what I have just said which is cryptic, elusive
and dense. My aim was to map out a terrain. Let me now go back
to the beginning—or at least to the troubled questions of biology,
essentialism, and nature, of masculinity, femininity and sexed
bodies, and of equality and difference—and try to follow these
arguments through again in different places and in different
voices. There is an extensive and growing literature on the
subject of the body, some of it emerging from Foucault’s post-
structuralist emphasis on discourse and the surveillance of the
body (Barker, 1984), some of it specifically psychoanalytic (for
example Rose, 1986), some of it specifically feminist (Diamond
and Quinby, 1988), some of it semiotic and/or linguistic (Scarry,
1985; Suleiman, 1985), some of it mixtures of many of these
(Suleiman, 1986; Kroker and Kroker, 1988; Allen and Grosz, 1987;
Rowland, 1988:28ff.). Ihave made no attempt here to be exhaust-
ive or representative and in what follows I am going to be even

25
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

more selective in tracing some of the argument about the body

through a small number of specific but very important Australian
texts.
A feminism of equality, in working within the current patri-
archal order, arguing for equality of women and men within that
order, leaves the phallocentric duality of mind and body firmly
in place. This happens because in working against arguments
that the biology of women’s bodies both justifies and explains the
position of women within that order (see Lumsden and Wilson,
1981 for an extreme example), a feminism of equality is always
forced into the position of denying the importance of sexual
difference (the body) in order to argue for mental equality (the
mind). It is in and through the discursive realisations of these
kinds of arguments that the sex/gender distinction as we now
know it has been constructed. It has been important to focus on
social construction, culture, discourse, the public sphere of
women’s activities, and to deny the relevance of their ‘other’—
the private sphere of women’s activities, ‘real’ biological bodies,
nature, the non-discursive (both that which is non-verbal,
bodies, behaviours, physical practices and that which is ex-
cluded from the discursive, the private, the personal, the emo-
tional, women, giving birth, the sexual). However, in arguing
thus, women are actually being totally compliant with the phal-
locentric order of discourse, even as they struggle to resist it.
None of its arbitrary but rigid binarisms is unsettled in the least
by any of these arguments: indeed the arguments enlist the very
opponents of the system in an elaborate and complex reconstruc-
tion of its own binary world of mind/body, private/public
oppositions and a new construction of a sex/gender opposition
which only further complicates the issue and further reinforces
patriarchal and phallocentric structures. It results in a neutering
of sexuality which is entirely complicit with the patriarchal
construction of the universal (male) subject.
It is not good enough to merely include women in the existing
body politic: and the conceptual, for which read linguistic and
semiotic, difficulties of arguing within this system for a position
for women which would be outside it are enormous.
It is because of these difficulties that a feminism of difference
(for example Irigaray, 1974, 1977, both books translated in 1985)
has emerged and that this feminism argues specifically for the
foregrounding of sexual difference and the body as a way of
clearing a space among the detritus of phallocentrism for a
construction of woman and of man that would not be endlessly
tied up in phallocentrism’s dichotomies—woman as the negative

26
 Introduction

of man, man in terms of the absence of woman, manas the denial

of man, woman as the denial of woman. But—and this has to be
understood, and is usually not understood—this is not the same
sexual difference, not the same body that we find differently
constructed and contextualised in biology and in the biological
arguments for the naturalness of women’s inferiority, of her
childcaring role and so on. Nor is it the kind of essentialist
argument for a universal femininity (Kristeva, 1984) which has
sometimes resulted from mere reversals of the masculine/
feminine dichotomy, so that everything that is devalorised by the
phallocentric dichotomy now becomes valorised as the essential,
the universal feminine: nature, body, private, passive, emotional,
irrational, illogical, hysterical, madness, sexuality and so on.
If the argument is not all these things, then what is it? How
does a feminism of difference claim to stand outside the discur-
sive and representational processes of phallocentrism in which a
feminism of equality seems to remain entangled? Or must it
always be both inside and outside? And is that the difference?
Moira Gatens (1988:59ff.), to whose writing I am indebted for
much of my understanding of the above issues, provides a very
clear account of what it would be to be both inside and outside
and of why, indeed, this might make the difference. Arguing that
any account of women’s current political and social position
requires a coherent theory of the body, she points to the fact that
while feminism has shown the masculine bias of the supposedly
‘neutral’ humanist subject it has paid not nearly enough atten-
tion to the congruence between that subject and representations
(constructions) of the body politic, of politico-ethical life
(1988:62). These stories of the body politic, where that body is
defined on the exclusion of women’s bodies (p.60) through the
fantasy of the man-made (motherless) social body (p.64) which
appropriates women’s reproductive function to itself, disavowing
that function by excluding women from the body politic and
restricting them to the private and natural realms, controlling the
reproductive female body as a natural resource, explain a great
deal about the common ways of thinking and believing that
characterise current ideas about the relationship of women’s
bodies and the state. .
These are the stories that we are all inside, that we live daily.
Poole (this volume) discusses the implications of the same and
related stories for understanding the construction of masculinity.
They are stories which inevitably involve the male myth of auto-
reproduction that Gatens points to in the sexless and motherless
creation of the body politic. Pateman discusses these in relation

vay
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

to the elision of the sexual contract from the story of the social
(1988:35-38). Rowland (1988:170ff.) discusses the same myths as
they are realised in medical practices, technologies and dis-
courses. Ash (this volume), although her analysis is much more
complex than this in the questions it poses about sexuality, the
body; institutions and men and women, analyses what seems to
me to be a version of the same phenomenon in the ‘feminisation’
of Christ’s body in institutionalised religion in the Middle Ages,
an appropriation of the feminine that is not dissimilar to what
Braidotti (this volume) describes in contemporary deconstruc-
tionist male philosophy. Always the stories are predicated upon
the exclusion of women and sexuality, and the incorporation in,
or control by, a rational, social, neutered male body, of the
feminine, the excluded other.
But there are other stories (Gatens, 1988:67) which are not
predicated upon these mind/body or sex /gender (sexed, private
women and neutered, public, social men) distinctions. Spinoza’s
account of the body as a process, which has no ‘truth’ without
contextualisation, and where thought is dependent on the
character of the body, instead of mind controlling body as in the
other story, provides, Gatens suggests, another place to start, a
place that is outside the body-politic story. This might allow a
historically specific account of the position of woman as wife and
mother which would be autonomous with respect to the domin-
ant frameworks of the other story.
Gatens’ paper appeared in print at almost the same time
as Carole Pateman’s (1988) dismantling and transformation
(Pateman and Gross, 1986:4) of the very social and political
theory within which stories of the body politic and the original
social contract on which it is founded circulate. Her argument is
far too complex to repeat here, but there are aspects of it which
are crucial to the understanding of that coherent theory of the
body that Gatens (1983, 1988), and Grosz (1986, 1988, this
volume) and other feminists of difference are arguing for.
First Pateman provides a timely historical criticism and ana-
lysis of the meanings and political uses of the term patriarchy,
pointing to the fact that according to political theory patriarchy
was dead 300 years ago, whereas feminists since the seventeenth
century have been arguing that all political theorists have upheld
patriarchal right, while in feminist work since the sixties
‘patriarchy’ has been very much in focus, but with little con-
sensus as to what it is. It refers to a form of political power, but is
it literally ‘rule by fathers’, is it culturally specific or universal,

28
 Introduction

does it exist only in the family or in social life as a whole, and

what is the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism?
(Pateman, 1988:19-20). ,
To answer some of these questions Pateman sets about un-
doing the private/public separation on which the social contract
that established ‘civil’ society as a post-patriarchal construct is
based: and this entails putting the sexual back into the social, not
only in the rewriting of the contract as sexual, but in our
understanding of the way in which what has been represented as
before ‘civil’ society and capitalism (patriarchy and sexual
domination), what was excluded in the stories of their construc-
tion (the private, the family, women and heterosexual relations),
persists within them institutionally and as a particularly modern
form of patriarchy. This form is not the traditional ‘father as head
of the family’ version, nor yet the classical paternal theory of the
political rights of fathers and the obedience of sons, but a modern
fraternal and contractual version which structures capitalist civil
society (p.24). However it continues to be read as a patriarchy
related to paternal right, partly because of the residual effects of
the father-son model (p.32), partly because of feminist retellings
of Freud’s story of the social structure which is constructed in
terms of kinship not contract, and of relations between mothers
and fathers, not husbands and wives (p.30). Pateman’s argument
is that the effect of all these factors is to direct questions at the
family and to obscure and avoid discussion of the relations
between men and women which precede relations between
fathers and mothers and which are institutionalised in marriage
(conjugal rights), and employment practices (the master-slave
relationship) (p.12,37) within civil society.
In all of this the public sphere which is created by the social
contract is seen as replacing nature, and as unrelated to the
private sphere which is its necessary basis (p.10-11). This is how
the sexual, already in place in ‘nature’ is evaded, elided from the
discussion. Thus the social contract is represented as anti-
patriarchal and as freedom while in fact being ‘a mechanism
through which sex-right is renewed and maintained’ (p.14).
Retrieving the story of the sexual contract, putting the private
back in the public, involves, according to Pateman, seeing how
the story of the social contract, realised in the institutional
practices and discourses of modern law, provides a specifically
modern method of creating local power relations of a patriarchal
kind within sexuality, marriage and employment. Thus, ‘to tell
the story of the sexual contract...is to show how sexual

29
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

difference ... constructed as political difference... is central to

civil society ... ‘individuals’ cannot be separated from sexually
differentiated bodies... the story of the sexual contract is about
heterosexual relations... and women as embodied beings... it
is not limited to the private sphere (pp.17-18)...One of the
advantages of approaching the question of patriarchy through the
story of the sexual contract is that it reveals that civil society,
including the capitalist economy, has a patriarchal structure. The
capacities that enable men but not women to be ‘workers’ are the
same masculine capacities required to be an ‘individual’, a
husband and head of a family. The story of the sexual contract
thus begins with the construction of the individual. To tell the
story in a way that illuminates capitalist relations and modern
patriarchy, the theoretical route through which (civil) slavery
comes to exemplify freedom also has to be considered’. (p.38).
I have rehearsed these arguments at length and in detail
because it seems to me to be particularly important that we do
not misunderstand the position being articulated by feminists of
difference, and because it is therefore crucial that we do
understand that sexual difference and the sexed body, as they
are theorising these, are absolutely central to political, social and
historical questions and that none of these things is separable
from the discursive, semiotic and representational practices and
processes in and through which they are alternately constructed,
reified, de-constructed and transformed. Gatens’ (1988) and
Pateman’s analyses provide a necessary and helpful contextual-
isation for the theorising of the body in Gatens (1983) and Grosz
(1987, 1988 and this volume). .
In her critique of the sex/gender distinction (1983) Gatens
argues that it perpetuates the ignoring of sexual difference and
the foregrounding of class, discourse and power in accounts of
the construction of subjectivity. Constructed to enable the claim
of equality independent of sex, the dichotomy is based on what
she sees as the untenable assumptions of the alleged neutrality of
the body and the primacy of consciousness. Masculine and
feminine behaviours are then able to be constructed as inscribed
as a consciousness that is joined to an indifferent, passive body. It
is then possible to argue, as degendering and socialisation
feminism does argue, that one can change the effects of ‘lived’
experience by changing culture (pp.144-7). That is, the social
palo pee of identity is seen to be operating at the level of
ideas.
But, as Gatens demonstrates, masculine and feminine beha-

30
 Introduction

viours have different personal and social significances when

acted out by male and female subjects. The male and female body
have different significances and this must, she argues, effect
male and female consciousness. What is valorised in patriarchy
is not masculinity (gender), but male masculinity. The issue is
not gender but sexual difference (p.148).
Thus she insists that there is a non-arbitrary relationship
between the male body and masculinity and the female body and
femininity. The so-called gender categories actually correspond
to the construction of the male and female body in a relation of
social and historical specificity. This is very much the same point
that de Lauretis is making when she defines masculinity and
femininity as the cultural contents given to sexual difference
(1987).
That is, theorists of sexual difference are not talking about the
physical body, the anatomical body. They are talking about a
body which, in Freudian terms, is both biological and psychical, a
hinge between nature and culture, and about a biology which is
always already cultural (Grosz, 1987:7-8). What is taken as a
biological given is, in other words, already a cultural construc-
tion (see also Rogers, 1988; Kaplan and Rogers this volume). The
meaning the biological body has for human beings, the signifi-
cance of the body as lived, varies with ideas about bodily
functions in a given culture, for example (Gatens 1983:150-51).
This significance is learned and developed in a milieu of social
meaning and value and constitutes what Gatens (1983) called the
imaginary body. The work of Jenny Ash (this volume) on the
discursive ‘feminisation’ of Christ’s body points very clearly to
that body as a site for the foregrounding of certain bodily
functions and processes which cannot be separated from the
question of female sexuality—the bleeding wound, the gaping
hole; menstruation, childbirth, castration—or the patriarchal
Freudian stories in which the making-meaningful of these
experiences in the form of the imaginary body is always
entangled.
Now this talk of ‘ideas’ and the ‘imaginary’ might well seem to
be sliding back in the direction of consciousness and the
discursive construction of identity, but as the theory has de-
veloped it has become clearer that there is a real distinction being
drawn here between that and this other notion of bodily and
discursively constructed subjectivity. In 1983, Gatens argued
against the prevailing socialisation and degendering position in
the following terms:

31
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

A most common claim made against feminists of

sexual difference is that their theories are essentialist
and a priori, in short, ahistorical. This claim operates
like the infamous blade that cuts both ways. The irony of
the accusation is that feminists who propose
degendering propose it outside of history and without
considering the extreme resilience of expressions of
sexual difference and the networks of language and
other systems of signification that both constitute and
perpetuate this difference (p.150; the italics are mine).

In 1987 Grosz is more specific about the particular psychoana-

lytic semiotics of the body that she is developing:

The subject’s relation to the body is always libidinal.

This is a necessary condition of its ability to recognise
the body as its own. The body, when experienced as-a-
whole ...—that is, the body and its various organs and
orifices—are always psychically or libidinally mapped,
psychically represented, as a condition of the subject’s
ability to use them and to include them in his or her
self-image. These libidinal or eroticised investments are
not simply or clearly psychological rather than
physiological ... This implies that the body itself, which
is continually traversed by organic-psychical drives, is
both biological and psychical. This understanding of the
body as a hinge or threshold between nature and
culture makes the limitations of a genetic, or purely
anatomical or physiological account of bodies explicit.
If the body is purely natural, an object or form, of
otherness, that has value and status relative to
subjectivity or consciousness, this means that the body’s
biological capacity for consciousness and subjectivity
aes uninvestigated. (p.8, extended italics only are
mine).

This is a very different construction, in psychoanalytic and

semiotic terms, of the sexed body and sexual difference from the
constructions of sexual difference that are to be found in
discursively and Foucauldian influenced feminist analyses
which also use psychoanalytic concepts (Henriques et al., 1984;
de Lauretis, 1987; Diamond and Quinby, 1988). And yet the
results are neither totally incompatible nor entirely different.
Thus, for example Hollway (1984:236-38) who speaks of

32
 Introduction

gender differentiation in relation to discourses concerning sexu-

ality, arguing that men’s and women’s different subjectivities
mean that they do not have equal opportunities of taking up
subject or object positions in certain of these discourses, suggests
that men and women must also have different ‘investments’,
which she later relates to Lacanian desire (p.239) and a Foucaul-
dian concept of power as productive of knowledges, meanings,
values and practices (p.237), in taking up positions in one
discourse rather than another. Thus for example it is men who
take up the subject position‘in the discourse of male sexual drive,
not women, women who generally read a sexual relationship
through the have/hold discourse, not men. The question is why
this is so and under what conditions might it change.
While this account speaks in terms of gender as discursively
constructed, it does not eschew the question of the historical and
socially specific construction of sexuality and biology (men’s and
women’s subjectivities) and it explicity argues for the effects of
this on consciousness (in Grosz’s sense) when it suggests that
men and women, qua men and women, read or position them-
selves in discourse differently. De Lauretis argues this even more
specifically: ‘female subjectivity and experience are necessarily
couched in a specific relation to sexuality,’ (1987:18; and see Ash,
this volume).
Both these approaches have affinities with a discursive and
social semiotics of the body which would read the body as text,
seeing its physical, sexual and socially inscribed attributes,
accoutrements and behaviours as the material instantiations of
systems of signification, or discourses, which construct and are
constructed by a regime of sexual difference, and which particip-
ate in the resilience (Gatens, 1983:150) and persistence of that
regime (Threadgold, 1988b, 1989 forthcoming; Ash, Yell, Hurley
this volume).
As for the body, so for theory, narrative, cinema, television,
theatre, literature, literary history, English studies, soap opera,
linguistics, biology and feminist deconstruction and in(ter)ven-
tions. These all offer different stories of the body and of sexual
difference and they compete and struggle to construct (and
sometimes silence) different and heterogeneous and multiple
realities, meanings, knowledges, biologies, bodies and subjectiv-
ities as they are in turn constructed and silenced or articulated
by them. As such they are all technologies of gender (de Lauretis,
1987) and sexuality, producing and reproducing constructions,
fictions, with the potential power of the truth-effects of repres-
entation. These are socio-cultural practices, the discourses and

33
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

the institutions, devoted to the production of women and men,

producing in the subject those meaning-effects and self-repre-
sentations which constitute the embodied, lived experience of
gender and sexuality. aan
Some of these effects and representations are extraordinarily
stable, static, resilient; others are dynamic, volatile, constantly
changing. The reasons for stability and change need analysis.
The potential for a different construction of sexuality and
gender, outside the sexual contract, at the local level of resist-
ances in subjectivity and self-representation, is possible precise-
ly and only because the self-reflective subject of semiotics is both
inside and outside the processes of semiosis and representation
(see Yell, Poynton, Hurley this volume).
- The work of this book is to try to understand, explain, de-
construct, change and transform some of these processes. In the
doing it becomes another construction... and we need to keep
asking, a construction for whom, in whose interests? Why do
we change and subvert a discourse or a representation...
How?... with what consequences? That remains an open
question... as does the question of sex/gender, masculinity/
femininity and representation... but we can only go on asking
...and the consequences are sometimes surprising:
It could be said that one of the paradoxical effects of
feminism as a political force has been to force the
recognition of the diverse and unexpected character of
the organisation of sexual differences. It has proved a
difficult and contentious problem as to how to analyse
the effects of anything from social policy to artistic
practices in respect of the organisation of sexual
differences. But to reduce these problems to the
simplification of an always already antagonistic
relation between two social groups who are frozen into a
mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive division is
an obstacle both to feminist analysis and to political
practice. (Adams, 1979:57)
We hope this book has avoided the last and grappled with the
second. We know that what it has to say forces a recognition of
the first. Susan Suleiman (1985:60), trying to imagine what the
dream of moving beyond the double bind inherent in the binary
constructions of phallocentrism might look like, quoted Cixous,
whose text, Suleiman says, is inspired by such a dream. That text
is not a bad place to end... or to begin...

34
 Introduction

And then ifIspoke about a person whom I met and

who shook me up, herself being moved and I moved to
see her moved, and she, feeling me moved, moved in
turn, and whether this person is a she [un elle] and a he
[une il] and a he [une il] and a she [un elle] and a
shehe [une ellil] and a heshe [une ilelle], I want to be
able not to lie, I don’t want to stop her if she trances, I
want him, I want her, I will follow her. (1985a:118)
>

35
2 ‘The problematic of ‘the
feminine’ in contemporary
French philosophy: Foucault and
Irigaray

Rosi Braidotti

} [iARGUMENT rests on some premises, which are drawn

from my work on the problematic of ‘the feminine’ in
contemporary French philosophy (Braidotti, 1981, 1982,
1985): a direct parallel can be drawn between the crisis of the
‘knowing subject’ of classical philosophy and the elaboration of
the theoretical discourse on ‘the feminine’.
Over a century ago, Nietzsche stated that all decadent,
diseased and corrupted cultures acquired a taste for ‘the
feminine’—if not for the effeminate. The ‘feminine’ thus
described is nothing more than a very elaborate metaphor, or a
symptom, of the profound discontent that lies at the heart of
phallo-logocentric culture. It is a male disease, expressing the
crisis of self-legitimation which, according to J.F. Lyotard (1979,
1980) is the mark of post-modern societies. This ‘feminine’ bears
no immediate or even direct relationship to real-life women; I
believe that, as feminists, we should question the rather ancient
mental habit which consists in using the ‘feminine’ as the sign,
the metaphor or the symptom of: illness, crisis, discontent. It is a
typically masculine attitude which turns male disorders into

36
 Foucault and Irigaray

feminine values. Thinking of Freud’s President Schreber (Freud,

1911) who in his delirium declared that he was both male and fe-
male and all the more female as he was God’s own favourite, well
may we wonder at the depths of the ‘becoming-woman’ as a trend
in modern thought—a trend of which Derrida (1967, 1972, 1978)
is the main spokesman in France.
What makes me particularly critical of this kind of philosoph-
ical thought is that it neglects, in its fascination for ‘the feminine’
taken as the sign of the crisis of the rational subject, the historical
and theoretical impact of the world-shattering event which has
been the women’s movement.
Isn’t it strange that it is precisely at the time in history when
women have made their voices heard socially, politically and
theoretically that philosophical discourse—a male domain par
excellence—takes over ‘the feminine’ for himself?
It seems to me that the relationship between theorisations of
the feminine and feminist discourse and practice is to be thought
out in terms of power and strategy, and that the coincidence I
mentioned earlier between on the one hand the crisis of the
phallo-logocentric subject and on the other the renewal of
interest for the feminine is in fact a pre-text which conceals the
real issue—that’s to say the head-on collision between patri-
archal assumptions about the feminine and the existential reality
of women’s lives and thought—which feminism has allowed us
to express.
That’s what is at stake for me in the post-modern, post-
structuralist, ‘post-post-card” debate. To demonstrate this I have
chosen to displace the debate onto a side issue which is highly
significant: the question of ethics and the extraordinary interest
that it is receiving in contemporary French philosophy.
Why has the question of ‘ethics’ come back to the philosophical
agenda—after all the years when ‘politics’ was top of the hit
parade of ideas?
My hypothesis is that the so-called ‘crisis’ of the rational
subject, with the related inflation of the notion of the feminine,
has had some beneficial effects on some male philosophers.
I will juxtapose Foucault’s notion of ethics, with the focus on
sameness, with the ethics of sexual difference of Irigaray, a
woman psychoanalyst and philosopher. It seems to me that
Irigaray’s critique of the binary structures of philosophical
discourse leads to a very intense call for alterity, for otherness,
for sexual difference as a sign for multiple differences. I will
therefore also argue that we are faced with a fundamental

37
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

dissonance between on the one hand the discourse of the crisis of

the logos and of its feminine, and on the other this project of
feminism which demands a focus on sexual difference.
By setting side by side Foucault’s and Irigaray’s notions of
ethics I wish to point out firstly the radically different directions
in which their respective thought is moving. I will argue that
Foucault elaborates a new ethics that remains within the
confines of sexual sameness, whereas Irigaray is arguing for
sexual otherness as a strategy allowing for the assertion of
feminine subjectivity.
Secondly, I will argue that the profound ‘dissonance’ between
these two thinkers, their variations on the common theme of
ethics, demonstrates the lack of symmetry in the discourse of the
two sexes. It consequently adds further evidence to the feminist
project of positing sexual differences as the central question in
the post-modern debate.
The sheer importance of the ethical issue in the work of some
male philosophers is an offshoot of the crisis of the rational
subject, which has shaken the phallo-logocentric system to its
foundations. The question of alterity, of otherness, is receiving
renewed attention precisely because of the problematisation of
the structures of subjectivity in modern thought. It is my firm
belief that the women’s movement is one of the primary sources
for the dislocation of the rational subject.’

Foucault

In the Afterword of Dreyfus’ and Rabinow’s book Michel

Foucault—Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics*, Foucault
defined the general outline of his thought and stated as his
central theme the critical, historical analysis of the modes of
constitution of the subject: the ways in which, in our culture,
human beings are made into subjects. His analytics of the subject
is committed to revealing, denouncing and ultimately undoing
the specific form of violence—that’s to say the power formations
that are at work in the philosophical game. What really interests
Foucault is the materiality of ideas—the fact that they exist in an
in-between space caught in a network of material and symbolic
conditions, between what he calls the document, the archives,
and the monument, between the text and history, between
theory and practice, and never in any one of these poles.
His philosophy is a philosophy of relations, of in-betweens and

38
 Foucault and Irigaray

in that sense he represents the absolute antithesis of sociology.

The central concern of Foucault’s work is the criticism of the
despotic power exercised by the philosophical text and by the
history of philosophy as a monolithic block of knowledge. It
seems to me that this critique provides the overall unity of his
intellectual project.
As he stated in his introduction to volume 2 of The History of
Sexuality, *
There is always something ludicrous in philosophical
discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to
others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find
it, or when it works up a case against them in the
language of naive positivity. But it is entitled to
explore what might be changed, in its own thought,
through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to
it. The ‘essay’—which should be understood as the assay
or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes
changes, and not as the simplistic appropriation of
others for the purpose of communication—is the living
substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that
philosophy is still what it was in times past, i.e.: an
‘ascesis’, askesis—an exercise of oneself in the activity of
thought. (p 9)
The choice of this place of enunciation implies a redefinition of
philosophy, the ‘exercise of oneself in the activity of thought’, ‘a
test in the game of truth’. It is a practice which entails a
relationship to oneself and to alterity and is consequently an
ethical stance.
Foucault’s analytic of subjectivity outlines three main modes
of objectification, which transform human beings into subjects.
These correspond to different stages of his own work.
In the first phase he analyses the type of discourse which
claims the status of science, especially in the field of the human
sciences; this phase of his work, marked by The Order of Things
and The Archeology of Knowledge, leads him to the critique of the
role that the ‘knowing subject’ plays in the history of Western
philosophy.
The second stage of Foucault’s work deals with the
constitution of the subject through what he calls ‘the dividing
practices’: exclusion, separation and domination within oneself
as well as towards the others. This part of his reflection starts
with Madness and Civilization and Birth of the Clinic and

39
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

continues through to The Order of Discourse and Discipline and

Punish. The central notion is that the modes in which human
beings are made into subjects in our culture rest on a complex
network of power relations, which he defines in terms of the ‘the
microphysics of power’. ‘Power’ being the name we give to a
complex strategic situation in a given society, the body is the
privileged target of the mechanisms of power relations. Foucault
develops a political economy of the body—a body defined in
terms of materiality, that is to say as subject matter which is
prone to a variety of symbolic and material operations: it must be
made docile, submitted, erotic, usable, productive etc.
These techniques of control and codification of the living body
meant as the site of subjectivity also produce ‘truth-effects’ in
that they generate specific types of knowledge about the subject
and his/her social inscription. The normative aspects of the
power relations in which the body is caught are consequently
positive, that is to say productive in terms of knowledge in the
sense of truth about the living subject. Thus Foucault’s notion of
the subject rests on a technology of the body as connected to both
the rational nature of power and the normative character of the
ratio.
This idea also provides the link between the second and the
third stages of Foucault’s work; in the latter he concentrates on
the ways in which a human being turns him/herself into a
subject: the internal modes of submission and domination by the
subject. He takes sexuality as the field in which the proliferation
of discursive practices and therefore of normative truth-effects is
the strongest in our culture. In the first volume of his History of
Sexuality he defines Western culture as ‘sex-centric’: we are the
ones who invented scientia sexualis, turning sexuality into the
site of self-relevation and truth about oneself. His question then
becomes: what is this ‘sexuality’ which we are all so concerned
with? And by what means do we become sexual subjects?
In the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality
Foucault analyses the ancient Greek and Roman practices of
discourse and control of sexuality; he thus points out that the
practices which for us come under the general blanket ‘sexuality’
constituted what Graeco-Roman culture called ‘the arts of
existence’, that is to say, ‘these intentional and voluntary actions
by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also
seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their
singular being and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries
certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria’ (p.10).

AO
 Foucault and Irigaray

Foucault argues that the array of ‘arts of existence’ in the sense of

‘techniques of the self’ were later assimilated into the exercise of
priestly power in early Christianity and then into educational,
medical and psychological types of practices.
It seems to me that the evolution of Foucault’s thought traces
the progressive sexualisation of his discursive practices: the
intersection of the archeological phase with the genealogical
decoding of the practices of the self—which produces his History
of Sexuality—also marks his increasing awareness of his own
speaking stance as a man, a male philosopher. It is possible to ar-
gue for instance that in his early texts Foucault’s androcentric
bias is manifest: he uses the term ‘man’ as a universal form, thus
betraying his blindness to sexual difference. In his later works,
however, he is conscious of the fact that the system of control of
sexuality which he is analysing rests on a profound dissymmetry
between the sexes. Speaking of the ‘practices of the self’, he
states: ‘Women were generally subjected...and yet this ethics
was not addressed to women; it was not their duties, or
obligation, that were recalled, justified, or spelled out. It was an
ethics for men: an ethics though, written and taught by men, and
addressed to men—to free men, obviously.’ (p.22)
The point Foucault makes here concerns not so much the
exclusion as the disqualification of women as ethical agents and
consequently as subjects. He stresses the interconnection
between entitlement to moral status and the right to citizenship
in the social, political and judicial sense of the term. The rules
and regulations of a moral life—which also transform the subject
into an ethical substance—are implicitly connected to socio-
political rights, and women are kept on the margin of both.
Arguing that governing oneself, managing one’s estate and
participating in the administration of the city were three prac-
tices of the same kind, Foucault emphasises the key value of
‘ethical virility’ as the ideal on which the system as a whole rests.
In turn this implies perfect coincidence between one’s anatomi-
cal sex—male—and the imaginary construction of masculine
sexuality; moreover, he stresses the accordance of both to the
ruling social representations of what ought to be the universal
ethical standard: symbolic virility. Thus the male body is all one
with the body politic.
If we read Foucault’s project in this sense, it can be taken as the
critical anatomy of phallocentric structures in discourse; the
practice of ‘ethical virility’ in fact also lays the foundation of the
philosophical game as such, that is to say that it provides the

Al
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

basic parameters of the political economy of truth, as submitted

to the authority of the logos. Moreover, the phallo-logocentric
economy thus analysed also reveals the male homosexual bond
which constitutes the basis of the social contract as well as the
discursive practices which society adopts for itself: it is a world
for and by men.
Whatever the female ‘use of pleasure’ may have been like,
with its truth-effects and production of knowledge about the
female subject, remains a matter of speculation. The discursive
gap translates into historical absence; thus, the whole history of
philosophy, as we have come to inherit it, has been conjugated in
the male masculine and virile mode. History—rather than
anatomy—is destiny.
According to this reading of Foucault, it can be argued that he
is a male philosopher who is bringing out the highly sexed rules
governing philosophical discourse. Far from being universal, the
scene of philosophy rests on the most sexual-specific premises:
those which posit the primacy of masculine sexuality as a site of
social and political power. In Foucault’s latest work phallo-
logocentric discourse is a specific political and libidinal econ-
omy—one which assigns the sexes to precise roles, poles and
functions, to the detriment of the feminine.

Irigaray
As a feminist, a psychoanalyst, a powerful writer and a philo-
sopher, Luce Irigaray cannot be situated very easily; she is
forever in between different fields, disciplines, levels of experi-
ence and places of enunciation. Her work on the philosophical
subject is related to the crisis of the logos mentioned above, and
in many ways it is a positive, non-reactive response to the
masters of the crisis of philosophy. Irigaray addresses the same
tradition of classical Western ontology which Derrida, Foucault,
Deleuze and other contemporary French philosophers have also
focused on. But there is a fundamental difference in the very
place of enunciation which she adopts: for Irigaray the crisis
which for Foucault spells the death of philosophy is already
over—she is standing among the ruins and already sees what is to
come to replace the old order.
There is a visionary, utopian and at times even prophetic
quality in Irigaray’s writing, which expresses her faith in the
force of the feminine as a new symbolic and discursive economy.

A2
 Foucault and Irigaray

A comparable force of affirmation and quality of intensity is

found in the work of feminist theology (M. Daly), of lesbian
poetry (A. Rich) and in the work of Italian radicals (C. Lonzi,
1974, 1977 and more recently Luisa Muraro 1984)? on the
question of the female symbolic system.
Women can see the light where men just stare into empty space
watching the downfall of the phallic monuments and documents
they had erected by and for themselves. Women have something
to say—failing to say it would amount to an historical abortion of
the female subject. .
For Irigaray the crisis which spells the death of the logocentric
subject opens the condition of possibility for the expression of
female subjectivity. The crisis is merely the death of the
universal subject—the one that disguised its singularity behind
the mask of logo-criticism. That men should be greatly shaken by
this is no wonder, but the crisis allows us to ask at long last the
question which for Irigaray is fundamental: that of sexual
difference.
What makes Irigaray’s critique of modernity very significant is
that she attacks the complicity between rationality and mascu-
linity. The subject of discourse is always sexed; it can never be
pure, universal or gender-free.
Irigaray’s work rests on a double purpose:

1 to undo the association of masculinity with rationality and

universality—through the rereading of the history of Western
ontology;
2 to voice and embody in her own texts women’s own ‘feminine’,
as distinct from the kind of ‘feminine’ which is implicitly
annexed to the logocentric economy.

What is at stake in Irigaray’s project is the double urge to

express the radical novelty of a feminine corporeal reality which
has never been adequately represented and also not to interrupt
the dialogue with the masters of Western philosophy. This is
particularly true of her first phase: Speculum and This Sex which
is not One,® where her very special style mediates the intense
effort of critique and creation which marks her work.
Irigaray’s textual strategy is eminently political: it consists of
refusing to separate the symbolic from the empirical, to disso-
ciate the discourse on ‘the feminine’ from the historical realities
of the condition and status of women in Western culture. In other
words, the fact that ‘the feminine’ is the ‘blind spot’ of all textual

43
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

and theoretical processes means that women’s voices are buried

underneath someone else’s, man’s own words. There is therefore
a direct equivalence between the process of metaphorisation of
‘the feminine’ and the phenomenon of the historical oppression
of women. Irigaray’s project is to recover, unveil and express that
voice, starting from the major texts of Western philosophy.
‘The feminine’ she is after is a woman-defined feminine and as
such it is still a blank; it is not yet, we are to think of it in the con-
ditional mode: how can the feminine of /in/by women come into
being in the sexually indifferentiated (indifferent/undifferen-
tiated) system of our culture? What are the conditions that would
make the first coming of the female subject possible? The
strategy Irigaray proposes in response to this challenge consists in
claiming as her place of enunciation the position to which ‘the
feminine’ is assigned in various texts of classical philosophy.
Thus she reads, or rather unreads the texts as a function of their
representation of and relation to the ‘feminine’: it is a game of
specular/speculative reflection of the inner logic of phallo-
logocentric discourse. This game of strategic repetition of throw-
ing back to the text what the text does to the ‘feminine’ becomes
a highly subversive practice of critique of discourse.
Irigaray’s project of redefining the parameters of subjectivity
and the very understanding of what thinking is all about rests on
one major assumption: the belief in the ontological basis of
sexual difference. In other words, the difference between the
sexes is radical and it is constitutive of the human experience; it
should be listed alongside mortality as the ineluctable frame of
reference of the human being. Just like death, sexual difference
is always already there, whether we acknowledge it or not. The
ontogical claim for sexual difference is what makes Irigaray so
important theoretically and politically; the essentialist belief in
ontological difference is a political strategy aiming at stating the
specificity of female subjectivity, sexuality and experience while
also denouncing the logic of sexual indifferentiation of phallo-
logocentric discourse.’
The now famous image of the lips of the female sex—close
together and yet apart—stands for the multiplicity, the excess
and the unique combination of plurality and singularity which
characterises the bodily, sexed reality of the female experience.
This highly suggestive image, with its implicit reference to the
psychoanalytic theory of female narcissism, is however very
ambivalent. Irigaray is not a theoretician of homosexuality and of
the lesbian experience; on the contrary she has made it quite

44
 Foucault and Irigaray

clear that she aspires to genuine heterosexuality in the sense of

full recognition of sexual difference by each sex. The process
must start with each woman recognising other women in a
system of symbolic reference, of mutual and auto-recognition of
‘the woman as other’.
Another way of exploring the polyvalence of the images
Irigaray proposes is the mother-daughter relationship which
exemplifies the specificity of the female libido and of female
desire while being both unexplored and misunderstood in
psychoanalytic theory and practice. The emphasis that Lacanian
psychoanalysis places on the Name-of-the-Father and the pri-
macy of the Phallus is such that the mother-daughter couple is
simply left aside, foreclosed. Irigaray reads this couple in terms of
a woman-to-woman relationship which phallocentric power sep-
arates and denies; recognising the bond of women is the first step
towards the elaboration of another symbolic system, one in
which the patterns of separation would be mediated differently.
The Ethics of Sexual Difference is one of the clearest manifesta-
tions of Irigaray’s notion of ‘otherness’ in relation to the project of
expressing female subjectivity. In comparison with her earlier
works, this book marks a shift that was already visible in Amante
Marine; La croyance meme; and Femmes Divines—namely that
the double-layer structure of address, the fact that Irigaray was
addressing both the great masters of classical ontology and
women who are existentially involved in the process of trans-
formation of the ‘feminine’ in our culture, becomes streamlined.
In The Ethics of Sexual Difference Irigaray is addressing almost
exclusively the great masters, and this narrowing of the inter-
locutor, combined with the vocative mode of speech, produces
an intense poetic text which reads as a major treatise on love.
The focus of Irigaray’s text is the politics of heterosexuality;
she argues that the mystery of alterity, of relationship to the other
and especially to the Other that is the Divine Being, is summed
up in the other who is sexually different from me, that is to say
the other sex for each sex. Emphasis is laid on the classical
Cartesian passion of ‘wonder’ as the perfect mode of encounter of
men and women, each sex in its specificity: the perfection of two
sexually different beings. And while the feminists cried out in
horror at what reads at first sight as a monumental step
backwards towards monogamous heterosexual couples, Irigaray
has been quite adamant, particularly in her work on female
goods and the female experience of the divine, that the politics of
heterosexuality as the underlying theme of the thought of sexual

45
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

difference is a necessary step in order to ensure the emergence of

female subjectivity and of an imaginary and symbolic system
morphologically suited to the female corporeal reality.
Ethics is for Irigaray a move towards the other (sex) as the
paradigm for a new mode of relation to the other, including the
other woman who, while sexually the same-as me, remains
nevertheless an-other, a mystery.

Of dissonance and other games

If you set side by side the two projects of ethics which I have
briefly summarised here, you will see quite clearly the opposite
directions in which the respective thoughts of Foucault and
Irigaray are moving. Foucault elaborates a critique which re-
mains within the confines of sexual sameness; Irigaray empha-
sises sexual difference as a way of asserting female subjectivity.
Foucault’s account of classical Greek and Roman ethics, of the
use of pleasure and the apprenticeship of the arts of subjectivity
in all its political and symbolic connotations—as direct from the
Christian form of ethics—is not meant as an apology for either
discursive system. The focus of his work on ethics is the
discontinuity between the modern predicament and earlier, both
Christian and Classical, ethics. What ultimately interests him is
to try and elaborate a modern ethics, one which would be
historically and conceptually suited to the here and now of our
place of enunciation. The question is: how can we move beyond
the historicity of our modern condition? Foucault argues that the
age of modernity is one for which no morals is possible: we are
historically condemned to rethink the basis of our relationship to
the values that we have inherited, especially from the nineteenth
century.
Irigaray’s project of redefinition of the basis for interpersonal
relationship, her ethics of sexual difference is another response
to the same historical challenge: how can we learn to think
differently about human subjectivity and alterity? This question
has been on the philosophical agenda ever since Heidegger, and
it seems to me that feminism as a movement of thought is caught
up in this problematics and it has a major role to play within it.
And yet, it may well be that the feminist reply to the challenge
of modernity is radically different from the response of male
philosophers; the case of Foucault and Irigaray tends to prove
that on the conceptual level, patterns of great dissonance are

46
 Foucault and Irigaray

emerging between male and female philosophers. It may well be

that we differ as to the nature and structure of difference; it may
well be that sexual difference as a movement of thought will
open the door to the recognition of multiple differences which
spell the death of the One and Only logic of phallo-logocentrism.
The lack of symmetry in the thought of difference—such as it
emerges in the work about ethics—also confirms Irigaray’s
insight that conceptual thinking is not neutral but rather very
sexual-specific. That major divergences should appear between
male and female thinkers on the question of difference is
therefore rather reassuring; I would even argue that the funda-
mental asymmetry in the thought of sexual difference as elabor-
ated by men and women is precisely what makes the intellectual
dialogue between them possible.
Dissonance is related to sexual difference as one of its modes of
expression. If we are to take seriously the notion that the
philosophy of sexual difference is the central question for
modernity and one which we are historically condemned to
come to terms with, we should grow accustomed to playing the
game of dissonance as a mode of relation.
Lacan’s witty remark that love means giving what you have not
got to someone who does not want it anyway adds a further
dimension to this debate: dissonance as a mode of relation is also
the theme of encounter and of desire. It is quite clear that desire
is the one concept behind the philosophy of sexual difference,
but that is another story...

47
3. Modernity, rationality and
‘the masculine’

Ross Poole

Reason has always existed, but not always in reasonable

form
Marx 1975: 143

Faust to Mephistopheles: ‘Yours is the bread that satisfieth

never’
Goethe 1951:87

& ENEVIEVE LLOYD, has recently argued that the various ideals
of reason which have concerned Western philosophy have
involved an exclusion of what have been taken to be
feminine characteristics, and that the conception of what it is to
be feminine has been in part constructed through this process of
exclusion (Lloyd, 1984: esp. ch.7). A corollary to this is the thesis
that the various ideals of reason have included what have been
taken to be masculine characteristics, and that masculinity is in
part constructed through this process of inclusion. To be a
masculine subject (‘to be a man’) is to recognise oneself in the
ideals of reason and to aspire to the norms of rational thought and
action.
An important implication of Lloyd’s argument is that even
within Western philosophy there has been no single ideal of
reason. While there has been general agreement that reason

48
 Modernity, rationality and ‘the masculine’

defines both the goals and the practices of philosophy, there has
been a great deal of variety in the manner in which this goal and
these practices have been conceived. Reason is not, except in a
very abstract or perhaps a utopian sense, a universal. It has been
constructed, and contested, in accordance with different concep-
tions of the world, of social existence and of morality. Corres-
ponding to these different conceptions have been different
constructions of masculine and feminine identity.
My focus in this chapter will in one sense be much narrower
than Lloyd’s in that I will only be concerned with one cluster of
conceptions of rationality. But in another sense it will be broader.
I will be concerned with forms of rationality, not as these have
been deployed in the discourse of philosophy, but as they are
constructed in certain practices which are characteristic of
modern social life. I will be concerned, in other words, with
reason as it is constituted by modernity. But not just with reason:
I will also be concerned to delineate the forms of masculine and
feminine identity which are defined, through complementary
processes of inclusion and exclusion, by these concepts of reason.

I
The thesis that the modern world is characterised by a particular
concept of rationality is associated with Max Weber. According
to Weber, the development of modern Western civilisation has
been a process—undoubtedly uneven and incomplete—of ‘ra-
tionalisation’. Which is to say that certain principles of rationa-
lity have come to be embodied in the dominant institutions and
practices of the modern world—especially in the capitalist
market, the capitalist labour process, the bureaucracies and the
establishments of science. Rationalisation in this institutional or
objective sense generates corresponding modes of rationality and
the thought and behaviour of those subject to it.
The account of rationality which I provide here will be
Weberian in spirit rather than in detail. Weber’s own account is
complex and defies easy summary (for systematic attempts to
display Weber’s views on rationalisation and rationality, see
Levine, 1981 and Brubaker, 1984). In what follows, I will select
from, simplify, interpret and often go beyond Weber’s account as
suits my purposes.
There are, I suggest, three pervasive modes of rationality in the
modern world:

1 ‘Instrumental’ or ‘Means/End’ rationality (see Weber 1922/

23:293, 1964:115).

49
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

2 ‘Juridical’ rationality (Weber does not clearly distinguish this

from instrumental rationality; but see Weber, 1922:216-21).
3 ‘Cognitive’ or ‘scientific’ rationality (see Weber, 1919; 1922/
23:293).

Instrumental rationality

This form of reason is most clearly present in the marketplace,

the labour process and capitalist accounting procedures, but it
informs a wide range of other activities as well. It is almost
certainly the dominant form of reason in the modern world, and
in many discussions is simply identified with rationality per se.
Individuals are rational in this sense if they select from the
range of possible actions open to them that action which on the
best evidence available is most likely to achieve a given end.
Where ends conflict, this rationality selects those ends which are
most likely to be achieved, taking into account the intensity and
duration of the desires involved. It abstracts from consideration
of immediacy and considers future ends as being as important as
present ones. This concept of reason treats all desires as having a
right to gratification. It functions to point to the ways in which
they might be gratified and, by taking into account their strength,
duration and the contingencies of the world, it introduces a
ranking among them.
Instrumental reason is concerned above all with efficiency and
its only measure of efficiency is quantitative. It is most effective
where its material—the potential means available to maximise
nett satisfaction—is also conceived quantitatively. Instrumental
reason’s preferred form of existence is as calculation of quantita-
tive input and quantitative output, and this is paradigmatically
exemplified by capitalist accounting procedures.
Instrumental reason characteristically takes one of two kinds
of end. The first concerns the consumption needs of the indi-
vidual. The second, which is characteristic of capitalist enter-
prise, concerns not consumption but profit. According to Weber,
‘Capitalism is identical with the pursuit of profit and forever
renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational capitalistic
enterprise’ (Weber, 1984:17). What this involves is acting in such
a way as to maximise one’s returns, not in order that one might
consume the proceeds, but in order that they might be used to
further one’s returns in the next round of activity; and so on,
indefinitely. This is a form of rational behaviour, which is

50
 Modernity, rationality and ‘the masculine’

directed toward an end where the end is always a means towards

a further end of exactly the same kind. In so far as individuals are
conceived of as having ends of this kind, they must be supposed
to have desires which are never satisfied and are indeed
insatiable.
Weber’s analysis of the Protestant ethic was intended to show
how this kind of insatiable desire, rationally pursued, came into
existence, and in so doing gave the psychological impetus
necessary for capitalist development to begin. However, once
capitalist institutions and practices are established then society
is objectively rationalised in this sense, and individual behaviour
must conform to it (see Weber, 1984:45-55). This is clear in the
case of the capitalist entrepreneur. Unless such individuals are
prepared to reinvest a competitive proportion of profit into
improved and expanded production, then they will not be able to
continue as capitalists, and will be replaced by others who do
reinvest. For capitalists, therefore, as against say feudal lords,
consumption wants must be subsumed under the rational pur-
suit of ends which are only means to further ends. What is
pursued in other words are not ends, but the capacity to pursue
ends. This is identical with the pursuit of power, not as a means,
but as an end in itself. It has long been noted, especially by
theorists of the Frankfurt School, that the operation of instru-
mental reason involves power in the sense of control (see for
example, Marcuse, 1968). It needs also to be stressed that
instrumental reason in the form in which it is especially
characteristic of the entrepreneur, but which is much more
pervasive than this, is the same as the pursuit of power for its
own sake. (We might have called this ‘the will to power’ if this
term had not already been appropriated in a rather different
sense by Nietzsche.)
In a capitalist society, the effective pursuit of profit through
increased productivity is only possible where there is a corre-
sponding increase in consumption. This may be achieved
through expansion of the available market. More characteristi-
cally, however, it is achieved through an intensification of
consumption. Thus, complementary to the pursuit of power for
its own sake is the drive towards increased consumption. Just as
the former is conceived as insatiable, so too are the consumption
needs of the individual. These come to be directed not at specific
objects of consumption but at the act of consumption itself.
Wants of this kind are insatiable, and the attempt to satisfy them
involves the unending repetition of acts of consumption. In this

51
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

way, instrumental reason as directed towards the consumption

need of the individual comes to assume the same repetitive and
insatiable structure as that form of instrumental reason con-
cerned with profit maximisation.

Juridical rationality
This form of reason is instantiated in the practices of the
judiciary and some parts of the state bureaucracy. Weber noted
it, but seemed not to have conceived of it as distinct from
instrumental reason (a surprising oversight given his familiarity
with Kant). However it is at least prima facie distinct. Individuals
are rational in this sense if they conceive of their actions as
instances of general principle which they are ready to apply to all
actions which are relevantly similar. If instrumental rationality
is concerned with efficiency, juridical rationality is concerned
with consistency. In its exemplary form, for example, the
government bureaucrat or judge dealing with an action, it is
concerned to establish the appropriate description of the act, and
then to apply to it the relevant principle. In so far as it informs the
behaviour of individuals, it does so by constraining the opera-
tions of instrumental reason to actions which instantiate princi-
ples SAS which apply to all actions which are relevantly
similar.

Cognitive rationality
This form of reason is instantiated in the practice of modern
science. Its concern is with truth, in some realist sense of that
term (the ‘correspondence’ theory of truth being the most
familiar realist account). Individuals are rational in this sense if
their beliefs and judgments are arrived at or tested by methods
which are more likely than available alternatives to produce true
beliefs and judgments. These methods are those of experiment,
repetition and quantification, and the construction of concepts
which are abstract and allow for the use of mathematical
procedures. The individual who is rational in this sense is, if not
in possession of the truth, at least oriented towards it. Which is to
say that he is on the path towards conceiving the world as it is
and not, for example, as he might want it to be.

52
 Modernity, rationality and ‘the masculine’

These three forms of rationality have certain common features.

Each is characterised by a certain impersonality. Each abstracts
from relationships of kin, emotion and empathy, and deals with
its material in terms of efficiency, consistency or objectivity.
Each involves a separation of rational subjects from the objects of
their rational concern. What is dealt with is other. And finally,
each has a penchant for the mathematical: what is rationally
conceived is quantity, and quality only exists to demarcate the
distinct spheres of rational attention. But there are significant
distinctions also between the various forms of modern reason,
and some tensions between them (as, for example, between the
entrepreneurial drive toward instrumental efficiency and the
bureaucratic demands for consistency). I shall return to some of
these issues later.

Il
For Weber, a necessary condition for the rationalisation of the
market, production, administration and knowledge was the
institutional separation of these spheres of activity from the
household, the familial, the erotic and the emotional (see Weber,
1984:21-22; 1922:197, 215-216). It is the exclusion of these from
the domain of public life which allowed for the impersonal and
calculative otherness which is essential for the operation of
reason. This does not mean—could not mean—the elimination of
the domestic, kin relationships, sexuality and the passions from
social existence. But it does involve a kind of conceptual
quarantine, so that these disorders do not infect the domain of
the rational.
I am not here so much concerned with the blurred and
uncertain social distinction between a public world of rationality
and a private realm of its opposite, as with the ways in which this
conceptual—or perhaps symbolic—distinction enters into the
construction of masculine and feminine identity. What is at issue
is not the social fact that men—largely—dominate the public
world and that women—largely—inhabit the private. What is at
issue is the fact that this distinction informs our conception of
what men and women are.
Masculinity is constructed within the ideals of reason. This is
not to say that to be a man is to be rational. It is, however, to re-
cognise oneself within the conception of reason, and it is to
aspire, however unsuccessfully, to its ideals. The relationship
between masculine identity and reason involves both the ‘is’ of

53
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

identity and the ‘ought’ of obligation. It is my identity asa

rational subject, which means that I am inscribed within the
norms of reason. I recognise that they are addressed to me and
inform me as to what I ought to be and do. ;
To be instrumentally rational in the specifically modern sense
is to pursue efficiency and ultimately power on the one hand, or
consumption on the other. It requires a capacity to abstract
oneself as an agent from the particular social relationships in
which one exists, from specific others, and even from one’s own
activities. All these must be evaluated in terms of their effective-
ness in pursuing one’s ends. Where other relationships,
individuals and activities are more effective as potential means
towards those ends, they must be selected. Whatever comes
within the scope of rational calculation must be conceived as
other. Correspondingly, the identity of the rational agent must be
achieved through abstraction and separation from particular
individuals, relationships and activities.
If instrumental rationality presupposes abstract individuals as
its subjects, the operation of juridical reason serves to constrain
the activity of such individuals. An individual is rational in this
sense when he conceives of his behaviour as subject to universal
principles binding upon himself and all others like him. It is a
requirement of a certain kind of equal treatment and imparti-
ality. It is, in other words, a principle of formal justice. The legal
system and the bureaucracy are the external embodiment of
these principles, and impose themselves on the behaviour of
individuals subject to them. The internal representation of this
principle—and thus the internal constraint on instrumental
action—is the voice of morality.
Feminity is constructed, at least in part, through exclusion
from the ideals of reason. It is constructed, not through abstrac-
tion and separation, but through relationships. To be a woman is
to exist within specific relationships to specific others and it
involves specific activities with respect to those others. It is to be
wife, mother, nurturer and so on. These activities, relationships
and others are not subject to the norms of instrumental reason,
because they are not replaceable means to independently speci-
fiable ends. They are rather expressive of a certain relational
form of identity, and are necessary to sustain that identity.
Morality does not here take the form of an impartial and
impersonal consistency but of working through one’s specific
responsibilities to specific others. (Hence the lack of a sense of
justice—as a characteristic of this kind of morality—which has
worried such moral theorists as Rousseau, Hegel and Freud).

54
 Modernity, rationality and ‘the masculine’

There are quite different moral structures involved here. For

the abstract relentlessly insatiable individual which is one aspect
of masculine identity, morality takes the form of law and duty. It
is the necessary constraint—either external or internal—on its
behaviour. From another perspective, it is the containment of
instrumental rationality by bureaucratic reason. Things are quite
different for that relational form of identity which is, in part,
constitutive of femininity. Here, morality is a form of character.
To be moral is to be a certain kind of person, to know how one
should act in order to express that identity, and so to act.
Somewhat paradoxically given the etymology of the word (ulti-
mately from vir, man), the morality appropriate to feminine
identity is one of virtue (for a fuller discussion of this, see Poole,
1985a).
I have so far supposed that masculine identity is constituted
through the public sphere. This, however, cannot be the whole
story. Masculinity exists in both spheres: the private as well as
the public. It is plausible to suggest that masculinity is doubly
representative. In the public sphere, masculinity represents the
private; hence masculine identity is not merely abstract, but also
that of bearer of family responsibilities (‘breadwinner’). Within
the sphere of domesticity, it is the role of masculinity to
represent the wider public realm of reason, order and duty.
Indeed, as we shall see in a moment, without such represen:
tation, the private world could not produce and reproduce the
kind of identity required by the public world.

Ill
Rationality is produced and reproduced through the structures of
public life—the exchange of commodities, the workplace and so
on. This is what Weber meant by rationalisation: individuals in
carrying out their daily lives must subordinate their activities to
the logic of the institutional framework within which they exist.
There is no once and for all constitution of the rational masculine
subject. Still, it is clear that there must be a primary process in
which the elements of masculinity are put into place.
I will only discuss one stage in this process here, though it is
one which is of particular significance to my theme. This is the
resolution of the Oedipal situation for the male child. There are
two aspects of this which are important. First is the moment of
separation: the child repudiates the mother and breaks out of that
identity formed in relationship to her, Second is the moment of
incorporation: the child takes into himself the figure of the

rate)
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

father. These moments are not parallel. The loss of the first
identity is total. What is left, and what is henceforth the identity
of the male child, is a void. What is left is the capacity to abstract
from any given context, i.e. any relationship or activity, and—
eventually—to bring the norms of instrumental reason to bear on
it. The superego which is formed by taking in the figure of the
father remains other, even if an internalised other. As such, it
represents the demands of impersonal consistency and justice. It
is the law both within and external to the self. This is at least one
reason why the familial world in which the Oedipal drama takes
place must contain a representation (perhaps in the superego of
the father) of the demands of public and juridical rationality.
The abstract subjectivity which is brought into existence
through the resolution of the Oedipal situation is a highly
vulnerable one. It exists only by constituting everything with
which it comes into contact as other, and thus separating itself
from everything which could give it content. Generalised other-
ness, however, must also pose a threat to that identity: it invokes
a world which is not the self, but which might also engulf it. Con-
sumption presents itself as one way in which this threat may be
evaded. It is an activity which both affirms the self and which
negates otherness. But it is a form of consumption which is
literally infinite in scope, since it must take everything which is
not the self as a potential object. A complementary strategy
involves bringing that externality under control: it involves the
quest, not for consumption, but for power. In these two strategies
lie the psychological basis for the insatiability of consumption
wants and of the desire for power which operate through the grid
of instrumental reason.
There are two (at least) more specific threats to this form of
identity. It seems highly likely that the identity of any given
subject of experience is crucially dependent upon a measure of
recognition by other subjects. Our individual existence must find
confirmation in our experiences of others. That is to say, some
form of intersubjectivity is a necessary condition for subjectivity,
Hence, if one fails to recognise the existence of others as subjects,
one eliminates a condition necessary for one’s own subjectivity.
But the instrumental rationality to which masculine subjectivity
aspires has no place for the subjectivity of those others who fall
within its scope. Others exist only as means or as impediments,
not as subjects in their own right. Even where instrumental
rationality is constrained by the demands of justice (the super-
ego), it does not allow for genuine intersubjectivity. The second
problem confronted by the masculine subject is the threat—and

56
 Modernity, rationality and ‘the masculine’

the attraction—of that relational form of identity associated with

the feminine. If it was the repudiation of the mother which
allowed entry into masculine subjectivity, this repudiation is
never in practice complete, and collapse back into that relation-
ship is an ever present possibility. Such a collapse is both a desire
and the ultimate threat: the complete loss of self. This emerges
most clearly in the domain of erotic love, and encapsulates the
problem of (hetero-)sexuality for masculinity. (In the last two
paragraphs, I have drawn on Hegel, 1977:104-119.)
Modern social life offers a number of partial resolutions of
these problems. There are, for example, forms of identity which
are constituted through relationships of mutual recognition.
Often, these build on the relationships embodied in the family.
Nationalism is the most familiar and pervasive of these (see
Poole, 1985b). There are also various rituals through which some
of the tensions embodied in masculinity are held in suspension
and the underlying desires gratified, at least in fantasy. Thus, to
take an example explored by Jessica Benjamin (1984), in fantasies
of erotic domination, and more especially the sadomasochistic
rituals celebrated in much pornography, the practices of instru-
mental reason are extended to the erotic. Through the fantasy,
the agent confirms his identity through the exercise of power
over the other (who will usually be, but need not be, a woman).
What is crucial is that the victim’s submission to the power be (or
come to be) voluntary and that her or his eventual annihilation
be indefinitely deferred. Hence, it involves and indefinitely
prolongs the moment of recognition but remains within the
canons of instrumental reason. Further, the exercise of ritual
violence against the woman is both a revenge against the mother
and also a confirmation of that identity gained by repudiation of
her.
It is important, however, that the resolutions offered in modern
social life to the problems of the masculine subject are partial and
depend heavily on fantasy and illusion. The abstract identity
which is a precondition for the operation of the modern form of
reason is a highly vulnerable one, and the main direction of the
desires which move that subject—towards consumption,
towards power—only recreates that vulnerability.

IV

According to Nietzsche (1968:9), nihilism comes on the scene

when the highest values devalue themselves. On this account,

57
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

nihilism is the consequence of the turning in on itself and self-

destruction of a value system. It is in this sense that modern
forms of reason are nihilistic.
Instrumental reason promises, if nothing else, the efficient
realisation of an individual’s goals. However, in its modern form
it takes as its goals ends which are essentially unrealisable. The
goal of consumption, for example, has come to be located, not in
the satisfaction of one’s consumption needs, but in the act of
consumption itself. Thus the gratification achieved with a
particular act of consumption is evanescent, and must immedi-
ately give way to the quest for further acts of consumption. What
is achieved is not satisfaction but endless repetition. The goal of
power is equally unattainable. In part, this is because power is
always relative: to have it means to have more than others.
Hence, one’s own achievements are always liable to be under-
mined by the achievements of others (cf. Hobbes, n.d.: chs.
10-11). But the unattainability of power is also due to the internal
logic of the quest. Whatever is achieved must always be used as a
means for further achievement of exactly the same kind. In other
words, whatever is achieved as an end only has value in so far as
it can be used as a means to further ends. But, as Aristotle pointed
out (1976:ch.1, section 1), means are only valuable in so far as
their ends have value. Somewhere, there must be ends which
have value as ends, not as means. Yet this is precisely what the
conception of instrumental reason directed towards power rules
out. As a consequence, the rational individual finds his energies
directed toward ends which are of their nature unattainable. As
was the case with consumption, what is achieved is not the
efficient realisation of goals, but endless and compulsive
repetition.
The incoherence of instrumental reason is not diminished by
the operations of juridical reason. The demands of justice and
impartiality do import new values, indeed values which are often
at odds with those of instrumental reason. These demands place
limits on the instrumental activity of any given individual by
imposing some principles of equal treatment (or perhaps equal
right) to others. What this does not provide is any further
principle which might validate the restless endeavours of
instrumental reason. It is silent about ends.
Weber’s own worries about nihilism had a slightly different
origin. For him, modern scientific reason revealed a world which
is devoid of human or quasi-human meaning and purpose. We
thus find ourselves in a world in which the only values are those

58
 Modernity, rationality and ‘the masculine’

posited by us, values which are therefore a matter of subjective

choice, not rational argument. Weber was aware of a paradox
here. For if it was science which revealed a world in which
values can only exist as non-rational choices, the commitment to
science itself becomes just such a matter of non-rational choice.
Science cannot validate itself, and the choice of science as a way
of life is no more or no less rational than the choice of religion
(Weber, 1919).
Weber’s worry here is that the subjectivism and arbitrary
nature of value which is revealed by scientific reason threatens
to encompass science itself. This worry may be deepened. For
while Weber assumes that there is a tendency towards both
scientific rationality and instrumental rationality in the modern
world, he is aware that these two ‘types of rationalism are very
different, in spite of the fact that ultimately they belong insepar-
ably together’ (Weber, 1922-23:293). The problem is that there is
an insuperable tension between the two forms of rationality.
One might treat scientific reason as a form of instrumental
rationality by positing as its specific end the appropriation of the
true—a conception and understanding of the world as it is in
itself. No doubt there are those who do take this as an aim in life.
Probably it was this lonely commitment to ‘science as a vocation’
which Weber was, against all his principles, advocating. But one
cannot help hearing at this point Nietzsche’s mockery of those
‘objective’ men whose desire it is to reflect the world like
mirrors. They are ‘precious instruments’ who need to be taken
good care of but whose role must be to be used by those who are
mightier (1973:115-116). In the modern world, it is instrumental
reason, i.e. that form of reason which in its dominant forms is dir-
ected towards power, which does and must dominate that other
form of reason directed towards truth.
It might be suggested that herein lies the place and the
justification of scientific reason: that as the necessary means for
the efficient pursuit of one’s ends, one needs an understanding of
the world as it is, not as one would want it to be. But the
connection is contingent at best. There are far too many cases
where ideology and self-deception are necessary components in
the achieving of certain goals for it to be plausible to hold that
there is some essential relationship between instrumental reason
and the pursuit of truth.
Indeed, the argument here can be reversed. It is plausible to
claim that the institutions, practices and discourses of modern
science exist largely within the space provided for them by the

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

dominant forms of instrumental reason—that which is directed

towards power. But if this is so, precisely for that reason, science
cannot make good the claim to ‘truth’ in any realist sense, for
example to provide an account of the world which corresponds to
how it is. Compare the situation with prescientific world views
such as those of religion. From the perspective of modern
science, these appear to construct a world which involves an
objectification of the desires and fears of the human subject but
which are not recognised as such. But the same analysis can be
provided of modern science itself. The world displayed by
modern science appears as an objectification of those desires
which are served by that science particularly the desire for
power. The world lacks meaning (is ‘disenchanted’ in Weber’s
poignant phrase) just because it is conceived as a means to ends
which are independent of it. In other words, the meaningless
world revealed by science has no more claim to be the ‘real
world’ than has the meaningful world revealed by religion. Both
worlds are the objectification of the desires of the subjects
involved in the construction of the discourse. So just to the
extent that scientific rationality is subsumed within instrumen-
tal reason it loses its status as a purveyor of objective truth.
A critique of modern conceptions of reason should not be
confused with an affirmation of the non-rational. The critique I
have provided here is largely an auto-critique: it makes use of
certain principles of reason in order to show the limited, partial
and ultimately self-defeating nature of the conception of reason
which contains them. It is by its own criteria that instrumental
reason in its characteristically modern form fails: it does not
provide for the efficient pursuit of human goals. It is because
scientific reason claims to pursue objective truth that those forms
of science which are subsumed within the logic of instrumental
reason can be shown to fail in this aim. It is a mistake criticised
by Hegel (1977:50-51) to think that the result of an effective auto-
critique is a mere nothingness: a complete denial of the claims of
reason. To reject modern conceptions of reason is in some way
and in some form to go beyond them. Such a going beyond only
appears to be a form of unreason if one accepts the claims of
modern reason to be identical with rationality itself. From a more
critical and historically informed perspective, it is part of the
process of constructing new and more adeqnate conceptions of
rationality (cf. Lloyd, 1984: especially 109-110).
Similar remarks can be made about the construction of
masculinity and femininity associated with modern conceptions —

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 Modernity, rationality and ‘the masculine’

of reason. To assert the feminine has point as a reminder of the

significance of certain norms and ideals which have been
subordinated or excluded. But ultimately, the present construc-
tion of femininity exists as the symbiotic opposite of masculinity:
it presupposes and is presupposed by it. Hence it does not provide
an independent set of principles to set up against dominant
masculine norms. Corresponding to the nihilistic tendencies of
modern reason are certain obsessive, repetitive and ultimately
self- and other-destructive features of masculinity. Its claims to
represent the human condition as such are invalidated by the
existence of the feminine; its implicit claim to represent and
realise some ideal of human existence is invalidated by its own
criteria. It is by reference to its own standards and ideals that
masculinity is driven to go beyond itself.

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4 Inscriptions and body-maps:
representations and the
corporeal '

Elizabeth Grosz

... books are only metaphors of the body...

—Michael de Certeau ‘Des outils pour ecrire le corps’

Traverses 14-15,1979, p.3

The book has somehow to be adapted to the body.

—Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own Penguin,

. 1963, p.78
Ts BobY has figured in many recent texts as a writing
surface on which messages can be inscribed. The meta-
phorics of body-writing poses the body, its epidermic
surface, muscular-skeletal frame, ligaments, joints, blood vessels
and internal organs, as corporeal surfaces on which engraving
inscription or ‘graffiti’ are etched. The metaphor of the textua-
lised body affirms the body as a page or material surface on which
messages may be inscribed. The analogy between bodies and
texts is a close one: tools of body-engraving—social, surgical,
epistemic or disciplinary—mark bodies in culturally specific
ways; writing instruments—the pen, stylus, or laser beam—
inscribe the blank page of the body. The ‘messages’ or ‘texts’

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 Inscriptions and body-maps

produced by such procedures construct bodies as networks of

social signification, meaningful and functional ‘subjects’ within
assemblages composed with other subjects. Each gains a (pro-
visional) identity from its constitutive relations with others.
Inscriptions of the corporeal differences between bodies can be
seen to produce body-subjects as living significations, social texts
capable of being read or interpreted.
I want to explore and evaluate this metaphor of corporeal
inscription. The metaphor does not, of course, originate with
those associated with it today—Foucault, Deleuze, Irigaray,
Lyotard, Lingis et al.; it is anticipated in considerable detail in
Nietzsche’s writings, and is strikingly evoked in Franz Kafka’s
short story, ‘The Penal Settlement”. Both Nietzsche and Kafka
conjecture about the ways in which social power, especially
punitive and moral systems, mark bodies in more or less violent,
brutal and socially sanctioned ways, through institutionalised
cruelty and torture. It is not my aim to encourage sadomasochism
(though an analysis of cultural sadomasochism would be well
worth undertaking) but to re-examine various presumptions
within current feminist and leftist theory about the ways in
which power functions to construct subjectivity.
This chapter will explore the following theses:

1 that, as a material series of processes, power actively marks or

brands bodies as social, inscribing them with the attributes of
subjectivity. (This is intended to challenge a prevailing model
of power conceived as a system of ideas, concepts, values and
beliefs, ideology, that primarily effect consciousness);
2 that consciousness is an effect or result, rather than the cause
of the inscription of flesh and its conversion into a (social)
body; and
3 that while relying on the work of a number of male theorists
of the body (Foucault, Nietzsche and Lingis), feminist as-
sertions of sexual difference simultaneously problematise
their work. Thus, although this chapter focuses on male
theorists, my objectives remain feminist: to see what in their
works may be of use for a feminist account of sexed bodies.

Writing bodies

Foucault is probably the most well-known theorist of the body

today. His disparate works cluster around a thematics of carna-
lity and its relations to subjectivity, around, that is, the intricate

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

history of the link between pleasure /pain/sensation /know-

ledge and power. Foucault’s account of the internal relations
between power and knowledge relies on a belief that power
functions directly on bodies by means of disciplinary practices,
which, while relying on knowledges, operate without mediation
of conceptual or intellectual processes—that is, without resort to
a concept like ‘ideology’. He bypasses a primarily marxist-
psychoanalytic-semiotic understanding of social power, which
sees ideology as a system of representations, signs received by
subjects regarding the social world and their place within it. For
him, power is not a set of signs, or texts, meanings or conceptual
functions. Power is a material force that does and makes things, it
is a substrate of forces in play within a given socio-personal
constellation. The body is its primary object. In Discipline and
Punish (1977) and the first two volumes of The History of
Sexuality (1977; 1985) he argues that power is inscribed on and by
bodies through modes of social supervision and discipline as well
as self-regulation. The bodies and behaviours of individuals are
targets for the deployment of power, and they are also the means
by which power functions and proliferates.
Power-knowledge is invested in producing determinate types
of bodies, with correlative psychical, economic and socio-moral
attributes. Bodies are objects of knowledges, which then reinvest
the body in increasing spirals of knowledge-pleasure and power:
‘The body is moulded by a great many distinct regimes; it is
broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is
poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws;
it constructs resistances’ (Foucault, 1977:153). If power is pri-
marily ideological, that is, a system of conceptual distortion, if
ideas, beliefs, ideologies, values—some kind of soul—are to be
attributed to the human subject, this is an effect of a certain mode
of corporeal inscription. For this reason, Foucault is irresistably
led in his accounts of the history of knowledges and of truth to
accounts of punishment, torture, medicalised observations, sex-
uality and pleasure—all processes that mark the body in specific
ways of specific rituals and practices. But if the body is the
strategic target of systems of codification, supervision and con-
straint, it is also because the body and its energies and capacities
exert an uncontrollable, unpredictable threat to a regular, syste-
matic mode of social organisation. As well as being the site of
knowledge-power, the body is thus also a site of resistance, for it
exerts a recalcitrance, and always entails the possibility of a
counterstrategic reinscription, for it is capable of being self-
marked, self-represented in alternative ways.

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Within our own culture, the inscription of bodies occurs both

violently—in prisons, juvenile homes, hospitals, psychiatric in-
stitutions—keeping the body confined, constrained, supervised
and regimented, marked by ‘body-writing-implements’, such as
handcuffs, traversing neural pathways by charges of electricity
in shock therapy, the straitjacket, the regimen of drug habit-
uation, chronologically regulated time-and-labour divisions, cel-
lular and solitary confinement, and deprivation of mobility, the
bruising of bodies in police interrogations etc.; and by less openly
aggressive but no less coercive means, through cultural and
personal values, norms and commitments. The latter involve a
psychic inscription of the body through its adornment, its rituals
of exercise and diet, all more or less ‘voluntary’ inscriptions by
lifestyle, habits, and behaviours. Makeup, stilettos, bras, hair-
styles, clothing, underclothing, mark women’s bodies in ways
other than the ways in which hairdos, professional training,
personal grooming, body-building etc, mark men’s. There is
nothing natural or a priori about these modes of corporeal
inscriptions: through them, bodies are marked so as to make
them amenable to the prevailing exigencies of power. They make
the body into a particular kind of body—pagan, primitive,
medieval capitalist, Italian, American, Australian. What is some-
times loosely called ‘body-language’ is a not inappropriate
description of the ways in which culturally specific grids of
power, regulation and force condition and provide techniques for
the formation of particular bodies.
Body-writing relies on the one hand on extraneous instru-
ments, tools for marking the body’s surface—the stylus, or
cutting edge, the needle, the tattoo, the razor; and on interior,
psychical and physiological body-products or objects to remake
the body—moisturising cremes, makeup, exercise, the sensa-
tions, pleasures, pains, sweat and tears of the body-subject. The
subject is named by being tagged or branded on its surface,
creating a particular kind of ‘depth-body’ or interiority, a psychic
layer the subject identifies as its (disembodied) core. Subjects
thus produced are not simply the imposed results of alien,
coercive forces; the body is internally lived, experienced and
acted upon by the subject and the social collectivity. Messages
coded onto the body can be ‘read’ only within a social system of
organisation and meaning. They mark the subject by, and as, a
series of signs within the collectivity of other signs, signs which
bear the marks of a particular social law and organisation, and
through a particular constellation of desires and pleasures.
The subject. is marked as a series of (potential) messages

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

from/of the (social) Other, the symbolic order. Its flesh is

transformed into a body, organised and hierarchised according to
the requirements of a particular social and family nexus. The
body becomes a ‘text’ and is fictionalised and positioned within
those myths that form a culture’s social narratives and self-
representations. In some cultural myths, this means the body can
be read as an agent, a contractual, exchanging being, a subject of
the social contract; while in others, it becomes a body-shell
capable of being overtaken by the Other’s messages, (e.g. in
shamanism, or epilepsy). Social narratives create their ‘charac-
ters’ and ‘plots’ through the tracing of the body’s biological
contours and organic outlines by writing tools. Writing instru-
ments confine corporeal capacities and values, proliferating the
body’s reactions and capacities, stimulating and stifling social
conformity (the acting out of these narrative roles as ‘live
theatre’) and a corporeal resistance to the social. The con-
sequences for the social are twofold: the ‘intextuation of bodies’,
which transform the discursive apparatus or social fiction/
knowledge regimes, ‘correcting’ or updating them, rendering
them more truthful, and ensuring their increasingly microscopic
focus on bodies; and the incarnation of social law in the
movements, actions and desires of bodies.

Social inscription

For Nietzsche, civilisation instils its basic requirements only by

branding the law on bodies through a mnemonics of pain.
Morality, shame and guilt are not the causes but the con-
sequences of the subject’s incorporation into collective memory
or history. Nietzsche conditions history and social life on the
provision of a kind of corporeal memory for each subject, a
memory fashioned out of the suffering and pain of the body. For
example, economic and social law functions only if the relation
between debtors and creditors is founded on some sort of
contractual guarantee, ensuring the payment of debts. For
Nietzsche, justice does not originate in economic equivalences or
some kind of mathematical computation, but from a com-
pensatory equivalence of the economic with the corporeal. This
equivalence ensures that, even in the case of economic bank-
ruptcy, the debt is repayable corporeally. Nietzsche cites
examples from Roman law where

66
 Inscriptions and body-maps

The creditor . . . could inflict every kind of indignity

and torture upon the body of the debtor; for example,
cut from it as much as seemed commensurate with the
size of the debt—and everywhere and from early times
one had exact evaluations, legal evaluations, of the
individual limbs and parts of the body from this point of
view, some of them going into horrible and minute
detail. (Nietzsche, 1969:64)
Damages are not measured by equivalent values which are
substitutable for each other, but by forces, organs or parts
extractable from the debtor’s body—a recompense by sanctioned
cruelty. Contractual relations are thus the foundation of justice,
and are themselves founded on blood, suffering and sacrifice.
Within such a corporeal economy, the creditor gains both the
benefit of a value equivalent to the debt, and the pleasure of
extracting it from the debtor’s body.

It was in this sphere, the sphere of legal obligations,

that the moral conceptual world of ‘guilt’, ‘conscience’,
‘duty’, ‘sacredness of duty’ had its origin: its beginnings
were, like the beginnings of everything great on earth,
soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time... this
world has never since lost a certain odor of blood and
torture. (Not even in good old Kant: the categorical
imperative smells of cruelty.) (p.65)
If morality and justice share a common genealogy in barter and
cruelty, social history and memory are also instilled in indi-
viduals by being branded on flesh. The law functions because it
is tattooed indelibly on the subject:
Man could never do without blood, torture and
sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for
himself; the most dreadful sacrifices and pledges
...the most repulsive mutilations ...the cruellest rites of
all the religious cults (and all religions are at the
deepest level systems of cruelty)—all thus has its origin
in the instinct that realized that pain is the most
powerful aid to mnemonics ... The worse man’s memory
has been, the more fearful has been the appearance of
his customs; the severity of the penal code provides an
especially significant measure of the degree of effort

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

needed to overcome forgetfulness and to impose a few

primitive demands of social existence as present realities
upon these slaves of momentary affect and desire.
(p.61).

These inscriptive processes may be more easily recognisable in

those forms of body-engraving designated as ‘savage’ or ‘pri-
mitive’ rituals and practices. In his two books, Excesses: Eros and
Culture (1984), and Libido (1985), Alphonso Lingis sketches an
account of the body as a surface of erotogenic intensity, a product
of and material to be further inscribed by social norms and ideals.
The processes by which the ‘primitive body’ is scarred seem to us
barbaric and painful. Lingis argues that the incision of or writing
on the body surface functions to intensify, proliferate and extend
the body’s erotogenic sensitivity. Welts, cuts, scars, tattoos,
perforations, incisions, inlays, function to increase the surface
space of the body, creating locations, zones, hollows, ridges:
places of special meaning (in some cases) and libidinal intensity
(in all cases). What he describes is the creation of erotogenic
orifices, rims or libidinal zones. These produce erotic zones
potentially at all points on the surface of the skin and within the
body’s skeletal and muscular frame, a kind of weaving of
inscriptive incisions with the sensations, sexual intensities and
pleasures of the body. This creates erotogenic surfaces, not
simply through the displacement of pregiven libidinal zones (as
occurs in the ‘civilised’ neurosis, hysteria—where, say, in Dora’s
case, the meaning of the phallus is displaced from the genitals to
the throat and oral cavity):
The savage inscription is a working over the skin, all
surface effects. This cutting in orifices and raising
tumescences does not contrive new receptor organs for
a depth body... it extends an erotogenic surface . . . It’s
a multiplication of mouths, of lips, labia, anuses, these
sweating and bleeding perforations and puncturings.. .
these warts raised all over the abdomen, around the
eyes... (Lingis, 1984:34)
Primitive initiation ceremonies and our own more ‘civilised’
forms of permanent and semi-permanent social body-markings,
designate the body as a socio-cultural and sexual body, a body
positioned in relation to the social body, an environment, mythic
affiliations with animals, plants, locations, sites etc. They not

68
 Inscriptions and body-maps

only mark the kind of individual, the position he or she may

occupy, but also the ways in which these positions may be
occupied. ;
Our own cultural practices are no less barbaric and no more
civilised than those operating in so-called ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’
cultures. Primitive inscriptions, it seems, can be differentiated
from so-called ‘civilised’ body-inscriptions in two broad ways:
the ‘savage’ body is marked on its naked surface by signifiers,
patterns, arrangements or organisations of marks, welts, cuts,
perforations and swellings; and the ‘savage body’ does not
presuppose, as does the ‘modern’ body, a latent or secret ‘private’
depth, a depth beneath the body’s superficial or manifest surface.
The ‘modern body’ is a body read symptomatically, in terms of
what it hides. The primitive body, by contrast, is all surface: it is
a proliferation or profusion of zones, indefinitely extending
libidinal intensity unevenly over the body’s surface, using
pleasure and pain to somato-psychically mark the body (like the
Medusa’s Head) through a multiplication of phalluses that are
peculiarly non-phallic because of their profusion. The processes
of initiation and tattoo designated as ‘primitive’ intensify and
unevenly spread over the whole of the body, along the lines
marked by incisions of social position, location, name and
function. These lines are inscribed in the case of the ‘civilised
body’ as the lines of incision of surgical and chemical inter-
vention, sites of social and personal remaking.
Primitive body-marking does not merely spread out a surface
of sexual intensity across the subject’s body, creating orifices,
hollows, plateaux, rims where previously there were smooth
spaces and unbroken surfaces. It divides up, or maps, the body in
regular ordered sequences carefully specified in ritual form.
Cicatrisations and scarifications mark the body as a public,
collective or social object—as a map of social needs, require-
ments and excesses; and as a legible, mean-receiving, interiority,
a subjectivity experiencing itself in and as a determinate form.
The body and its privileged zones of sensation, reception and
projection are coded by objects, categories, affiliations, lineages,
which engender or make real the subject’s social, familial,
marital or economic position and/or identity within a social
hierarchy: ‘It is the incision and tumescence of new intensive
points, pain-pleasure points, that first extends the erotogenic
extension. What we have then, is a spacing, a distributive system
of marks. They form not representations and not signifying
chains, but figures, figures of intensive points, whose law of

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

systematic distribution is lateral and immanent, horizontal and

not traverse’ (Lingis, 1984:38). The primitive body is distin-
guished from the civilised body not by degrees of barbarism or
pain, nor in terms of the writing implements and tools used, but
by its sign-ladenness. In the case of the civilised body, bodies are
created as sign-systems, cohesively meaningful and integrated
into patterns that can be read in terms of personality; and above
all, by the construction of a depth body, a body within which
resides an interiority, a psyche or self. Ours is not a superficial
identity but an enigma to be explored by reduction of the body to
a symptom of the self: ‘All that is civilised is significant... We
find the ugliness of tattooed nakedness puerile and shallow
... The savage fixing his identity on his skin... Our identity is
inward, it is our functional integrity as machines to produce a
certain civilised, that is, coded, type of action’ (Lingis, 1984:43).
Inscriptions on the subject’s body coagulate corporeal signifiers
into signs, producing the effects of meanings, depth, represen-
tations within or subtending our social order. The intensity and
flux of sensations traversing the body become fixed into con-
sumable, gratifiable form, become needs, requirements and
desires which can now be attributed to an underlying psyche or
consciousness. Corporeal fragmentation, the unity and disunity
of the perceptual body, becomes organised into the structure of
an ego or consciousness, which marks a secret or private depth.
These mark the ‘modern’ or civilised body as use and exchange-
value, the production and exchanges of messages.

Sexed bodies

Do differently sexed bodies require different inscriptive tools to

etch their different surfaces? Is it power which inscribes bodies
as sexually different? Or does sexual difference simply require
sexually differentiated regimes of power? Is sex or gender the
object of power? These remain central dilemmas for feminists
working on the texts of the male theorists of the body I have been
discussing. Their work remains problematic, even if highly
suggestive for feminists, in describing the interventions of power
on women’s bodies.
Foucault, for example, in certain texts (especially The History
of Sexuality) implies that the divisions between the sexes, and
the different characteristics attributed to them by knowledges,

70
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institutions and practices, are effects of power. He implies that,

outside the deployments of power, there is nothing other than
‘bodies, organs, somatic locatizations, functions, anatomo-
physiological systems, sensations and pleasures’ (1978:152-53).
For him sex, not gender, is the object of power. Women’s medical,
moral, psychological and domestic position is specified only as
part of a regime which creates the category of ‘sex’, bringing
together a heterogeneity of hitherto non-specific, disparate and
not always commensurable elements of bodies and pleasures:
‘Sex—that agency which appears to dominate us and that secret
which seems to underlie all that we are, that point which
enthralls us through the power it manifests and the meaning it
conceals, and which we ask to reveal what we are, and to free us
from what defines us—is doubtless but an ideal point in the
deployment of sexuality and its operations’ (1978:155).
In spite of his brilliant evocation of corporeal inscriptions,
Lingis also remains committed to a paradoxically sexed yet
neutral (neutered?) body underlying or forming the surface to be
incised. It is as if the body were a pure plenitude of undifferen-
tiated processes and functions that becomes sexed only by social
marks: ‘circumcision castrates the male of the labia about his
penis, as the clitoridectomy castrates the female of her penis. It is
through castration of the natural bisexual] that the social animal is
produced’ (Lingis, 1984:40, emphasis added). If these male
theorists of the body are still relevant to feminist theory—as I
think they are—then it seems essential that feminists distinguish
their own positions as feminists from this commitment to a
neutralised, non-specified corporeality; and also that they make
clear what the raw materials and basic units of inscription are,
that is, sexed, carnal, specific bodies: male, female, black, white,
etc.
To conclude, I would like to make some suggestions about how
feminists may use these conceptions of the body to articulate
women’s lived experiences and their potential for autonomy.
These suggestions are, I think, consistent with the insights of
these (male) philosophers of corporeality, and also with feminist
commitments to explore and question prevailing categories of
sexual polarisation. I will outline these briefly.
1. Biological, anatomical, physiological and neuro-physio-
logical processes cannot be automatically attributed a natural
status. It is not clear that what is biological is necessarily natural.
Biological or organic functions are the raw materials of any
processes of production of determinate forms of subjectivity and

7\
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

material, including corporeal, existence. If this is the case,

universal or quasi-universal physiological givens, such as men-
strual, anatomical and hormonal factors, need to be carefully
considered as irreducible features of the writing surface, distinct
from the script inscribed: a kind of ‘texture’ more than a
designated content for the ‘text’ or the ‘intextuated body’
produced. The raw materials themselves are not ‘pure’ in so far
as culture, social and psychological factors intervene to give
them their manifest forms: it is well known, for example, that
menstrual patterns can be severely disrupted or stopped accord-
ing to diet, exercise patterns, anxiety etc. Biology provides a
bedrock for social inscription but is not a fixed or static
substratum: it interacts with and is overlaid by psychic, social
and signifying relations (see Grosz, 1987). The body can thus be
seen not as a blank, passive page, a neutral ground of meaning,
but as an active, productive, ‘whiteness’ that constitutes the
writing surface as resistant to the imposition of any or all
patterned arrangements. It has a texture, a tonus, a materiality
that is an active ingredient in the messages produced. It is less
like a blank, smooth, frictionless surface, a page, and more like a
copperplate to be etched.
2. The anatomical differences between the sexes must be
distinguished from the ways in which sexed bodies are culturally
classified. Differences between bodies can be represented on a
vast continuum which could include bodies typical or represen-
tative of each sex, but also, all those who fit into both categories
(for example, hermaphrodites) or neither. Conceived on the
model of ‘pure difference’, corporeality is potentially infinite in
form, no mode exhibiting a prevalence over others. However,
within our social and signifying systems, this plenum is divided
and categorised according to binary pairs—male/female, black/
white, young/old etc.—which reduce ambiguous terms not
amenable to binary hierarchisation, back into this polarised
structure (hence Foucault’s analysis of the hermaphrodite Her-
culine Barbin, who is legally required to change ‘her’ sex from
female to male; there is no possibility of adopting a sexual
position that is neither male nor female). From pure differences of
a biological type, distinctions and oppositions, binary categories
and mutually exclusive oppositions are formed. It is thus not
simply a matter of the socially variable issue of gender being
imposed on a biological neutral body, but rather, a social
mapping of the body tracing its anatomical and physiological
details by social representations. The procedures which mark

#2
 Inscriptions and body-maps

male and female bodies ensure that the biological capacities of

bodies are always socially coded into sexually distinct categories.
It is the social inscription of sexed bodies, not the imposition of an
acculturised, sexually neutral gender that is significant for
feminist purposes (see Gatens, 1983).
3. While the sexes are represented according to a binary
structure that reduces n-sexes to two, the binary structure itself
reduces one term within the pair to a position definitionally
dependent on the other, being defined as its negation, absence or
lack. This is a phallocentric representational system in the sense
in which women’s corporeal specificity is defined and under-
stood only in some relation to men’s—as men’s opposites, their
doubles or their complements. This means that women’s auto-
nomously defined carnal and bodily existence is buried beneath
both male-developed biological scientific paradigms, and a male-
centred system of social inscription that marks female bodies as
men’s (castrated, inferior, weaker, less capable) counterparts. In
other words, not only is the corporeal surface to be inscribed
differently, the social regimes of body-tattoo, incision and mark-
ing, the tools of body writing, are oppositionally used to produce
male bodies as virile, strong, phallic, hierarchised, structured,
teleological, in relation to women’s passive, weak, castrated, dis-
organised bodily structure.
4. Inscriptive procedures marking the body and producing it as
sexually determinant and coded are active in transforming the
anatomo-physiological structure of the body as socially located
morphology. Body-morphologies are the results of the social
meaning of the body. The morphological surface is a retracing of
the anatomical and physiological foundation of the body by
systems of social signifiers and signs traversing and even pene-
trating bodies. Morphological differences between sexed bodies
imply both a traced, ‘biological’ difference which is transcribed
or translated by discursive, textual representations, and cor-
poreal significations. It implies a productive, changeable, non-
fixed biological substratum mapped by a social, political and
familial grid of practices and meanings. The ‘morphological
dimension is a function of socialisation and apprenticeship, and
produces as its consequences a subject, soul, personality or inner
depth. This has direct implications for the beloved feminist
category of ‘gender’ and its relation to its counterpart, ‘sex’.
Masculinity and femininity are not simply social categories as it
were externally or arbitrarily imposed on the subject’s sex.
Masculine and feminine are necessarily related to the structure

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

of the lived experience and meaning of bodies. As Gatens argues

in her critique of the sex/gender distinction (1983), masculinity
and femininity mean different things according to whether they
are lived out on and experienced by male or female bodies.
Gender is an effect of the body’s social morphology. What is
mapped onto the body is not unaffected by the body onto which it
is projected.
5. Whereas morphological oppositions between sexed (male
or female) bodies are prevalent in contemporary Western cul-
tures (at the least), their oppositional or phallocentric repre-
sentations are now capable of being challenged so that we need
no longer accept an unchangeable natural basis for their social
status. Their morphological status, as an effect of the transcrip-
tion and transmission of meanings and values for the body and its
specific parts and processes, can now be addressed by the kinds
of theoretical, literary and cultural representations of an auto-
nomously conceived and defined femininity, or woman-centred-
ness, that feminist work has provided. The oppositional form of
this morphology, moreover, can be contested, even if not readily
overthrown, by demonstrating the ways in which male self-
definitions require and produce definitions of the female as
their inverted or complementary counterparts. This implies,
among other things, an analysis of the ways in which masculine
or phallocentric discourses and knowledges rely on images,
metaphors and figures of woman and femininity to support and
justify their speculations. It also, and perhaps more importantly,
implies an exploration of the disavowed corporeal and psychic
dependence of the masculine, with its necessary foundation in
women’s bodies, on the female corporeality it cannot claim as its
own territory (the maternal body).

74
5 The discursive construction of
Christ’s body in the
later Middle Ages: resistance
and autonomy

Jennifer Ash

Ts chapter is an investigation into the religiosity of the late

Middle Ages, with its focus on the bleeding, dying body of
Christ crucified. I am interested in the discursive construc-
tion of that body, and the relationship which existed between
that body and (the body of) the medieval worshipper. However, I
would like to stress that what I am presenting here is work which
is in progress; I am not offering final conclusions or solutions,
only possibilities.
I must also specify the methodological equipment I am using in
this investigative enterprise: a combination of semiotic theory,
French feminist theorising, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. For
many who are working in the area of medieval studies there is a
problem with this, that I use twentieth-century theory to analyse
and interpret discursive material—texts and textuality—from
this other period. Does the application of contemporary theoris-
ing to the past constitute an anachronistic interpretative practice,
an act of analytic and interpretative violence against the cultural
integrity, the cultural specificity of an historical other?
For the semiotician, objections such as these are irrelevant.

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

The semiotic enterprise has demonstrated the relativity which

necessarily constitutes both textual production and textual
reception. The text is not an autonomous entity, but is, rather,
historically specific, bound to the signifying network, the
cultural context which produced it. And when in the twentieth
century we are confronted with a medieval text, we must be
aware of and respect its difference, its cultural specificity. Yet we
will never be able to read that text from a position within the
culture which produced it. My reading of medieval texts and
textuality will necessarily be constrained by the discourses
which inform my own position within late-twentieth-century
Western capitalism, those discourses which have constructed me
as thinking, speaking subject.
For this investigation, I have made use of both visual and
verbal texts. By visual texts I mean sculpture, painting, drawing
and manuscript illuminations; by verbal texts I am referring to
several specific generic types: religious prose and poetry, hagio-
graphy, sermons and prayers, and (selections from the) Cycle
plays. The dates of the texts used range from the twelfth to the
fifteenth centuries; provenance extends across linguistic and
geographical boundaries: England, France, Italy, Germany and
the Low Countries. I should stress that not all of these verbal
texts were written in vernacular languages; many were produced
in Latin, the ‘universal language’ of the educated, the official
language of ecclesiastical discourse.
It is possible to locate shifts within Christian consciousness
quite simply through the (re)construction of that event central to
Christian faith and cosmology: the (re)construction of the Cruci-
fixion which also works to construct Christianity’s distinctive
and distinguishing signifier. The originary moment of Christian-
ity is located in the Incarnation, the enfleshing of the Divine
Word, the paradox of the Christian God-man. The purpose of the
Incarnation was redemptive, and this was effected through
another paradox: that of (the) Divine death. Late Medieval
Christianity turned its attention to the events of the Passion,
obsessively focusing on the battered and bleeding body of
Divinity dying. The Crucifixion, rather than the Resurrection,
was situated at the centre of Salvation History. The late Middle
Ages constructed a Christian discourse which venerated, as its
object of worship, a body—passive, suffering, bleeding, dying.
The Christianity of the later Middle Ages was a discourse
constituted through a rhetoric (both visual and verbal) of vi-
olence and death, of pain and suffering: a discourse of the body
and the bodily, revelling in the fleshliness of the Word.
Transubstantiation was made official doctrine in 1215. The
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 Resistance and autonomy

Wood carving, first half of the fourteenth century. Alps, Salzburg

(Schiller, 1972 no. 486)
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Wood carving, c. 1300, Y-cross. Friesach (Schiller, 1972 no. 484)

78
 Resistance and autonomy

Wood carving, c. 1300, Y-cross. Cologne (Schiller, 1972 no. 483)

Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Wood carving, c. 1370, Pieta, Western Germany, Bonn (Schiller, 1972

no. 628)
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 Resistance and autonomy

celebration of the eucharistic sacrament was symbolic no longer:

to take communion was to participate in a communal, ritual
feasting, was to eat God’s flesh and drink His blood. The
constituent elements of the Eucharist were metaphoric no
longer; Christ’s body and blood was a real and actual presence in
the bread and wine.' A feast day dedicated to God’s body, to
Christ’s flesh and blood, was instituted in 1264, although it was
not universally celebrated until 1311-12. This was Corpus
Christi, the feast which led to the creation of the English Cycle
plays—a drama dedicated to the enfleshing of the Word, the
corporeal carnivalisation of the Divine.
From the year 1200 onwards, within the mass, the priest
elevated the host at the moment of consecration. When transub-
stantiation became doctrine, this celebratory, ceremonial gesture
was invested with power and meaning: to see the host was
enough. The communicant could consume the body of God
simply by looking, by (greedily) gazing upon Divine flesh held in
the hands of the priest. And, as the body of God, the host was
worshipped and adored, was treated as the most sacred relic of
all. Stories circulated: fantastical narratives of bleeding hosts,
wonder-working hosts, stories ‘authenticating’ and providing
popular ‘proof’ for the actuality of Divine presence (Ward,
1987:13-18). The body of Divine humanity was the object of
orthodox and institutionalised Christian devotional conscious-
ness and practices. But more precisely, it was this body in its
moment of dying which was the object of veneration and
adoration; that is, the body of God as sacrificial victim, silent in
His suffering, patient in the pain and shame of crucifixion.
There is a set of discursive statements which, in late medieval
Christianity, work to construct God’s (human) body in a very
specific way, crossing boundaries of media and genres. But the
specificity of this construction of Christ’s body functions on the
level of the metaphoric as well as the manifestly literal. That is,
the construction of Christ’s body—battered, bleeding, dying—is
the production of a polysemous signifier: Christ’s body means
and signifies differently in different contexts; Christ’s wounded
body can signify a range of different signifieds simultaneously.
Christ’s body is plural, polyvalent, polysemous. The relationship
between Divinity and the human subject who worships Divine-
Other can be apprehended, and signified through different
discursive and rhetorical possibilities. For example, in her
Revelations of Divine Love Julian of Norwich discusses the
visions of the crucified Christ she experienced while desperately
ill, and supposedly dying: ‘And thus I saw that god enjoyeth that
he is our fader, and god enjoyeth that he is our moder, and god
8]
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

enjoyeth that he is our very spouse, and our soule his lovyd wyfe.
And Cryst enjoyeth bat he is our broder, and Jhesu enioyeth that
he is our savyour’ (Colledge and Walsh, 1978:546). The speaker
here identifies the range of possible signifiers which might be
used to encode the relationship of each Christian with Divine-
Other. And there are other texts, which, like Julian’s speaking,
use the rhetoric of a familial discourse to signify the relationship
between self and Divinity. These texts metaphorically encode
the intensely, exclusively private and personal nature of this
relationship with the Divine. In the above statement, Julian
makes chaste reference to her (Divine) ‘spouse’, while other
speakers and other texts use a more passionate and aroused
language. But whether or not He is specified as ‘spouse’, the
Divine here functions as a very beloved other; it is Christ
constructed as lover in the tradition of the ‘sponsa motif’—
metaphoricity originating in the great biblical lovesong of
Solomon.
Texts such as the Middle English Passion lyrics, Richard
Rolle’s Meditations on the Passion, The Book of Margery Kempe,
but especially those (extraordinary) texts of poetic prose—pe
Wohunge of Ure Lauerd, On Ureisun of Oure Louerde, and A
Talkyng of be Loue of God—these texts verbally (re)construct the
spectacle of the bleeding, dying body of Christ.* This body is
made a site for speculation, contemplation and adoration; the
crucified body is the object of worship, but it is also the object of
desire. The bleeding wounds are privileged, invested with
meaning which is not only salvific but also erotic. That is, the
verbal (re)construction of the Crucifixion is the construction of
Christ as beloved other. In each of the poetic prose texts,
speaking begins with an ecstatic rhapsodising to Christ. The
opening utterance of A Talkyng of be Loue of God is the most
spectacular.
Ihesu sop God. Godes sone. Jesus, true God, God’s son!
Ihesu. sob God. sob mon. Mon Jesus, true God, true man! Man,
Maydenes child. Ihesu myn virgin’s child! Jesus, my holy
holy loue.Mi siker swetnesse. love, my sure sweetness! Jesus,
Thesu myn herte.my sele. my my heart, my happiness,
soule hele. Ihesu. swete Ihesu. health of my soul! Jesus, sweet
Ihesu. deore Ihesu.Ihesu. Jesus! Jesus, dear Jesus! Jesus,
Almihti Ihesu.Ihesu mi lord. my almighty Jesus! Jesus, my lord,
leof.my lyf.myn holy wey. Myn my beloved, my life, my balm,
hony ter.Ihesu. al weldinde my nectar! Jesus, all powerful
Ihesu.Ihesu bou art al bat Jesus! Jesus, You are all that I
I.hobe. Ihesu mi makere. bat me hope. Jesus, my maker, who

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 Resistance and autonomy

madest of nou3t.And al bat is made me of nothing and all

in heuene.and in eorbe. Ihesu my that is in heaven and on earth.
Buggere.bou bou3test me so Jesus, my Redeemer, You
deore.wip pi stronge passion. wib bought me so dear with Your
pi precious blod and wip pi grievous passion, with Your
pyneful dep on Roode. Ihesu my precious blood and with Your
saueour.pat me schalt painful death on the cross.
sauen.borw bi muchele Merci. & Jesus, my Saviour, who shall save
bi muchele mi3t Ihesu my me through Your great mercy
weole.& al my wynne. Ihesu and Your great power. Jesus, my
pat al my blisse is inne. Ihesu al weal and all my delight! Jesus,
so.pat bou art. so feir and so in whom is all my bliss! Jesus,
swete.3it art bou so besides that You are so fair
louelich.Louelich and and so sweet, You are moreover
louesum.pat be holy Angeles.pat so lovely; lovely and lovable
euere be bi holden. ben neuere that the holy angels, who always
folle. to loken on pi face. Ihesu behold You, are never weary
pou art al feir. whon be sonne of looking at Your face. Jesus,
azeyn be. nis bote a schade.And You are all-fair, the sun being
schomep azeyn be brihte leor but a shadow in comparison with
of hire besternesse. You and ashamed of her
Pou pat 3iuest hire liht.and al darkness in the presence of Your
pat liht hauep.Lihte my bester bright face. You, who give her
herte. Graunte pat bi light and all that has light, light
brihtnesse clanse my soule. bat is my dark heart. Grant that Your
vnseliche. wip sunne foule I. brightness cleanse my soul,
fuiled.Lord mak hire worpi. to pi which is miserably defiled
swete wonynge. Cundele me with foul sin. Lord, make her
wip pe blisse. of pi brenninde worthy to be Your sweet
loue. Swete Ihesu my leoue dwelling. Kindle me with the
lyf.Let me beo pi seruaunt.and bliss of Your burning love.
lere me for to loue be.&mak Sweet Jesus, my dear life, let me
me for to serue be.louynde lord. be Your servant, and teach me
so pat onliche pi loue.be euer to love You and make me serve
al my lyking my bou3t and my You, loving Lord, so that Your
longyng.Amen. love alone be ever all my delight,
my thought and my longing.
Amen. (Westra, 1950: 2-5)

But the construction of Christ as Lover is also the construction of

Christ as mother.
a ihesu louerd pi grip. hwi Ah! Lord Jesus, thy succour!
abbe ich eni licung in ober bing why have I any delight in other
pene in be. hwi loue ich eni things than in thee? why love I
ping boten be one. hwi ne bi-hold anything but thee alone? O that I
ich hu pu strabstest be for me might behold how thou
on be rode. hwine warpe ich me stretchedst thyself for me on the

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

bitweone pe ilke earmes. swa cross! O that I might cast

swibe wide to-spradde. he myself between those same arms,
openeb swa phe moder hire so very wide outspread! He
earmes hire leoue child for to openeth them as doth the mother
cluppen.3e sobes and tu her arms to embrace her -
deorwurbe louerd. gostliche to us beloved child. Yea, of a truth!
and to [pine] deorlinges wip be And thou, dear Lord, goest
ilke spredunge gest. as be moder spiritually towards us, thy
to hire child. hua leof. hwa lif. darlings, with the same out-
hwa deb him be bitweonen. hwa spreading (embrace) as the
wule beo bi-cluppet. a ihesu mother to her children. Each is
bin eadmodnesse and pin beloved; each is dear; each places
muchele milce. hwi nam ich in himself in thy arms; each will
pin earmes. In bin earmes swa be embraced. Ah! Jesus, thy
istrahte. and isprad on rode. humility and thy great mercy!
O that I were in thy arms, in thy
arms so out-stretched and
outspread on the cross! (Morris,
1886:184,185)

A. Ihesu bin ore. whi haue Ah Jesus, of Your grace! Why

l.likyng.in ober bing ben in be.pbat do J take pleasure in other things
bou3test me so deore. Whi ne than in You, who bought me so
be holde i. algates. wib e3e of dear? Why do not continually
myn herte. hou bou henge for contemplate with the eyes of
my loue streyned on Roode. pin my heart how You hung for the
Armes wyde I. spradde. pi love of me, stretched on the
derling to cluppe.wip toknyng of cross, Your arms wide-spread to
trewe loue.pbat sprong out of pi embrace Your darling in token
syde. Whi nul I.beo pi derling of true love that sprang from
and loue be ouer alle bing and Your side? Why do I not wish
comen to pi clupping.to cleuen in to be Your darling and love You
pin armes.and cluppen be above everything and come to
swete. A derworpe lord muchel Your embracing to cling in Your
is bi myldeschupe. pat arms and clasp You sweetly?
spraddest so bin Armes. Ah dear Lord, great is Your
bodiliche on Roode. and in clemency, who thus spread
toknyng of bat openest pi Your arms bodily on the cross
grace.pat sprad is so wyde.wib and, as a token of that, open
loueliche tollyng.& open is and Your grace, which is so widely
redi to alle bat in synne beop spread, with sweet inviting,
gostliche storuen.Clepeb him to and is open and ready for
lyue.and to loue cosses. As everyone who is spiritually
Moder dob hire deore sone.pbat dead in sin, calls him to life and
hereb hit wepen. Takeb hit in to love-kisses, as a mother
hireArmes.and askepb him so does her dear son, who hears
sweteliche. Ho leof. Ho lef heo him cry and takes him in her

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 Resistance and autonomy

dob him. hire bi twenen.Ho wole arms and asks him so sweetly:
be bi clupped.and cusse me ‘Hush, darling; hush, dear’. She
swete.who hab do my deore.who takes him in her arms. ‘He wants
hab do be so.Heo 3eueb him to be embraced and to kiss me
hire pappe. and stillep his teres. sweetly? Who, my darling, who
bat pappe beo my lykyng.my has done this to you?’ She
mournyng.my longyng. swete gives him her breast and stops
Thesu heuene kyng. to souken his tears. That breast be my
of my fulle.pat borw be speres pleasure, my care, my longing,
openyng.in feole mennes , sweet Jesus, King of heaven, to
gounyng.wib dewing of bi deore suck to satiety, which through
blood.stillep alle bales.And the opening by the spear,
wher eny mon wene bat he while gaped at by many men,
schal.haue part of pat ilke with the moistening by Your
sok.of bi deore herte in heuene precious blood relieves all
riche blisse. and bere be bi sorrows. And if anybody
derlying.in bi deore should think that he will share
cluppying.bote he be heere that same suck of Your
cluppe.hongynge on Roode. And precious heart in the bliss of the
parte of bi passion. borw holy heavenly kingdom and there
meditacion.wib loue lykynde be Your darling in Your
pou3t.and reube of his herte. affectionate embracing,
Nay sikerliche nay.ne trouwe pat without embracing You here,
no mon. Whose euere wol hanging on the cross and
haue part. ber of pi blisse. he mot sharing Your passion through
dele wib be. heer of bi pyne. holy meditation with love-
liking thought and heart-felt
pity...No, certainly not, let no
man believe that. Whosoever
wants to share Your bliss
there, he must share Your
suffering with You here.
(Westra, 1950:6,7)

In these texts Christ is lover, yet is simultaneously mother. The

body of Christ, wounded and bleeding, is the eroticised and
desired body of the lover, yet it is also the maternal body which
nurtures and feeds (Lagorio, 1985; McLaughlin, 1975; Bynum,
1982, 1986a, 1986b, 1987). In these particular texts two separate
systems of metaphoricity conflate, two distinct discourses merge
in Christ’s dying body. So that when the speaker says,

hwi nam ich in pin earmes. In O that I were in thy arms, in

pin earmes swa istrahte.and they arms so outstretched and
isprad on rode. outspread on the cross!
(Morris, 1886:184,185)

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

there is deliberate ambiguity, erotic tension in the play of

signification. Does the speaker yearn for the loving (but ‘chaste’)
embrace with the maternal body, or is it the erotic lover’s
embrace which is desired?
The construction of Christ as mother, of Christ’s body as the
maternal body, is founded on the association of women’s bodies
and food, women’s bodies as food in their maternal functioning
(see especially Bynum, 1986b, 1987). So the bleeding body of
Christ crucified can be recognised as maternal in its functioning;
the bleeding wound in Christ’s side functions as a lactating
breast. The speaker in A Talkyng of be Loue of God says,

ber wol I.souken of pi syde. There I shall suck of Your

pat openep a 3eyn me so side, which opens towards me so
wyde.wip outen eny wide, without moving at all,
fluttying.ber wol I.a bide.as and there I will stay. When it
As hit was opened for me.so was opened for me, so blessed
blessed be pat tyde. be that time. (Westra, 1950:68,69)

Bleeding is lactation. This maternal functioning of Christ’s body

is metaphorically constructed in visual texts with eucharistic
significance. Here Christ’s naked, wounded torso bleeds pro-
fusely; the blood spurts from His side wound (~breast)—and in
some texts, from all His wounds—into the chalice (of the
Eucharist). According to scientific theorising in the Middle Ages,
breast milk was actually blood; the blood of the mother which
was used to nourish the unborn child in the uterus was, after the
child’s birth, converted into breast milk.
So the crucified body of Christ is constructed as the maternal
body in its capacity to nurture and nourish the human soul, or—
as we shall see when metaphoricity is made literal, material, and
actual—in the eucharistic capacity of Christ’s corporeality to
sustain also the body (usually a woman’s body), to provide the
basic requirements necessary for (physical) survival. The bleed-
ing (side) wound as a source of nourishment is a lactating breast;
but it is more than this, it is also a womb. The agonising pain of
the crucifixion, the suffering of Christ in His passion, was the
suffering, the ‘passion’ of a woman giving birth. Marguerite of
Oingt, a fourteenth-century Carthusian prioress, wrote:

My sweet Lord...are you not my mother and more than

my mother? The mother who bore me laboured in

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 Resistance and autonomy

delivering me for one day or one night, but you, my

sweet and lovely Lord, laboured for me for more than
thirty years. And my sweet and lovely Lord, with what
love you laboured for me and bore me through your
whole life. But when the time approached for you to be
delivered, your labour pains were so great that your holy
sweat was like great drops of blood that came out of
your body and fell on the earth...Ah! Sweet Lord Jesus
Christ, who ever saw a mother suffer such a birth! For
when the hour of your delivery came you were placed on
the hard bed of the cross...and your nerves and all
your veins burst when in one day you gave birth to the
whole world (Bynum, 1986a:266)

Painting, 1331, Crucifixion, at the back of the Klosterneuburg Altar,

by the Vienna Master (Schiller, 1972 no. 5 16)

87
 Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Painting, c.1510, Eucharistic Man of Sorrows, by Jacob Cornelisz,

Antwerp (Schiller, 1972 no. 708)

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 Resistance and autonomy

Other texts use the side wound to signify different maternal

possibilities. For example, in the Middle English lyric ‘Quia
Amore Langueo’, the speaker who is the crucified Christ refers to
this particular wound first as a ‘neste’ (verse 8), and then as a
‘chaumbir’ (verse 14). In His poetic speaking, Christ, textually
constructed as the lover who is made to languish with the burden
of His love in the tradition of the Song, becomes Christ the
protective mother:
(8)
In my side y haue made hir neste;
Loke in! how weet a wounde is heere,
pis is hir chaumbir, heere schal sche reste,
pat sche & y may slepe in fere.
Heere may sche waische, if only filbe were,
Heere is sete for al hir woo;
Come whanne sche wole, sche schal haue chere,
Quia amore langueo.
(14)
My loue is in hir chaumbir: holde 3oure pees,
Make 3e no noise, but lete hir slepe:
My babe, y wolde not were in disese,
I may not heere my dere child wepe.
With my pap y schal hir kepe.
Ne merueille 3e not pou3 y tende hir to;
bis hole in my side had neuere be so depe,
But quia amore langueo.

(Furnivall 1866: 182,186)

The beloved bride becomes the speaker’s beloved baby, is the

speaker’s child-bride.
To construct Christ as mother, Christ’s crucified body as the
maternal body, is to construct Christ’s body with the attributes of
the feminine. A male body might signify the maternal through
means of metaphor, but there were other discourses working to
construct this body, a male body, as ‘feminine’. To begin with,
the dichotomous processes of classical philosophical discourse
had been thoroughly internalised by medieval theology:
man/woman, soul/body, spirit/matter, life/death, transcen-
dent/immanent, and so on (Bégrresen 1981; McLaughlin 1974).
The twelfth-century visionary and theologian Hildegard of Bin-
gen wrote in the Liber Divinorum Operum: ‘Man...signifies the
divinity of the Son of God and woman his humanity’ (Bynum,
1986a:274). And to Elizabeth of Schénau, another twelfth-
century visionary, the humanity of Christ appeared in a vision as
a female virgin (Bynum, 1986a:273-74, 1986b:420). So the en-
fleshing of the Divine Word came to be metaphoricised in terms
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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

of marriage between Divinity as groom, and humanity as bride.

But it was also the physiological theories of Aristotle (and to a
lesser extent those of Galen), which both informed medieval
scientific discourse and provided strong support for this meta-
phoric expression of the Incarnational mystery (Bégrresen, 1981,
Bullough, 1973; Lemay, 1982; 1985; Rousselle, 1988; Bynum,
1986b).
In the Aristotelian theory of procreation, the paternal function
is primary, providing the form which potential life will take, and
as well, the spirit or soul which will inhabit the newly-created
being. The maternal however, provides matter, human fleshli-
ness; the maternal body is simply a vessel, a space where the not-
yet-born might develop. The woman’s body, the feminine, comes
to be associated with the matter of human flesh; and so
humanity, the bodily aspect of the Divine, can be understood in
this sense as ‘feminine’. The fleshly matter of incarnated Divinity
was inherited from His mother Mary. Christ’s flesh was Mary’s
flesh, was quite literally feminine fleshliness; for Christ’s con-
ception was without the participation of earthly paternity: in the
bodily being of Christ, the Divine met with woman without
masculine mediation. And in its bleeding and feeding the male
body of Christ participated in the bodily functioning of the
feminine and the maternal.

In the second half of this chapter I want to explore the relation

constructed between the heavily coded body of Christ and that of
the medieval Christian who worshipped and adored that body.
Exploration begins with the metaphoricity of the Song of Songs,
which perhaps functions as the key text for medieval Christian-
ity. Medieval exegetical practices used this Song’s metaphoricity
to construct the discourse of Christ as lover/groom/husband.
Read allegorically, the Song tells of the passionate love-longing
which exists between each human soul and her beloved-other,
the Divine Word. That is, each human soul is feminised, becomes
the bride of Christ. This is the metaphoricity used by the
discourse of affective or ‘positive’ mysticism, ‘cataphatic’ mysti-
cism. The Song’s erotic metaphoricity was used to signify the
mystery which constitutes mystical experience: union with the
Divine.
The saintly Bernard, abbot over the Cistercian monks at
Clairvaux, spent the final twenty years of his life sermonising on
this particular text, developing a system of mystical theology
based on it. But Bernard died in 1153, and his strategic use of the
Song’s metaphoricity was transformed—the mystical marriage

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metaphor ran quite out of control. Bernard had produced his

sermons, his mystical reading of the Song, for a masculine,
monastic audience. For him, these were the true ‘brides of
Christ’. But since Christianity’s first centuries women religious
had been identified as the intended of the Son, destined for
nuptial bliss with the Divine. Women religious could identify
themselves as the ‘brides of Christ’ at the level of the literal and
the actual, an identification not accessible to male religious
(Bugge, 1975). The phenomenon of mysticism increased dramati-
cally in the later Middle Ages; Bernard’s mystical theologising
had been only the beginning. But it was the irruption of a
‘feminine’ mysticism which disturbed church authorities. For
these women took the language of mysticism, the language of the
Song, and made it their own; these women appropriated the
metaphoricity intended for the monastic mysticism which was
produced within the bounds of institutionalised orthodoxy.
These women took the metaphoric from Bernard’s texts and
made it literal (Bugge, 1975). But to make metaphor literal was to
materialise the immaterial: theirs was ‘a very material mysti-
cism’ (Beckwith, 1986), a discourse obsessed with fleshliness and
actuality, the substantiality of bodily being, a discourse which
focused on the bleeding, dying body of the God-man.
These mystical women identified with the Divine body they
worshipped and adored. Being women, they could identify with
Divine immanence, the fleshly substantiality inherited directly
from the maternal body, a woman’s body. And they could
identify with that crucified body in its capacity to bleed and
feed—for these are the functions of a woman’s body. That is,
these women recognised something of themselves, their bodily
experience in the body of the crucified Christ. These mystical
women identified with that body in a manner which can best be
explained, I think, through psychoanalytic theorising.
Hagiography is the narrativisation of this bodily identification,
the relation which existed between the body which was wor-
shipped and adored and the body of the worshipper. These
narratives present the lived experience of late medieval sanctity
in terms of an extraordinarily vigorous asceticism. But I want to
stress that I am referring here not only to the lifestyle of saintly
women, for since Christianity’s inception there has always been
a select minority of both men and women who chose to live out
their lives through the heroic ordeals of Christian asceticism. But
hagiographical evidence constructs the mystic discourse of the
later Middle Ages as fiercely ascetic, and as a discourse
dominated by women.

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Christianity in the later Middle Ages was a penitential prac-

tice: the focus on and identification with Christ’s dying body
produced a religiosity and a lifestyle with an emphasis on
passivity, patience, pain and suffering (Kieckhefer, 1984), all of
which proved to have redemptive effect. That is, for the body to
bear pain and suffering passively and patiently, was for that body
also to participate in the salvific achievement of Christ’s body.
To suffer bodily pain in this life was penitential, was to bear
purgatorial punishment for sinfulness in this life rather than in
the next. Bodily suffering could also be substitutive: the peniten-
tial suffering of a saintly body could release some other body
from its earthly pain, or liberate a soul from purgatory’s punish-
ments (Bynum, 1987). The Christian lifestyle was conceived of as
an ‘imitatio Christi’, a ‘via crucis’. In its most extreme form this
‘imitatio’, this mimicry of and identification with the Divine
body, became a literal experiencing of the same. The body of the
worshipper, the mimic, would be inscribed with the pain and
suffering of Christ’s dying body; the stigmatised body of the
worshipper would be marked in total identification with the
body of the Divine Other, would participate in the hol(e)y
wounding of (a) grand Passion.
Freudian psychoanalytic theorising names such a display of
mimicry of bodily identification with an-Other, hysteria. I want
to stress that in late medieval Christianity, both men and women
participated in this lifestyle of imitation, this heroic if hysterical
lifestyle of spiritual athleticism. There were men whose bodies
expressed total identification with that of the Divine: St Francis,
Peter of Luxembourg, Henry Suso (see Kieckhefer, 1984, but cf.
Huizinga, 1965). Yet their masculine feats of imitative fervour
were somewhat more restrained, were always somehow less
than the imitative strategies of mystic women. It would seem that
if Christianity in the later Middle Ages was a discourse increas-
ingly mysticised, it was also a discourse increasingly feminised, a
discourse hystericised.
In the discussion which follows I will be focusing on the
bizarre behaviour of these women; and I will be using the
Freudian paradigm of hysteria because it enables interpretive
access to what would otherwise function as an indecipherable
code, an impenetrable system of signification. The theorising of
contemporary French feminists—Helene Cixous, Catherine Cle-
ment, but especially that of psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray—has
been founded on the Freudian model of the (feminine) hysteric; it
is a theorising which itself participates in and reproduces the
hysteric’s discourse. For the psychoanalytic investigation into
hysteria—an investigation which was the founding moment of _
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psychoanalysis—has demonstrated that hysteria functions as

strategem.” Hysteria constitutes a woman’s psychical resistance,
her unvoiced rebellion against patriarchy, against the function-
ing of Symbolic Law and Order. For in hysteria it is the body
which speaks, the body is used to encode, to articulate psychic
pain, psychic suffering. The hysterical body signifies dramati-
cally, for in patriarchy, woman’s relation to language—to
representation, and symbolisation—is problematised. 4
Within psychoanalytic theory—and I am using a Lacanian
framework here—entry into the Symbolic Order, into language
and subjectivity, is by means of the resolution of the Oedipal
drama. Theorising has provided a paradigm of this process in the
case of the boy, but for the girl-child there has only been
conjecture, sheer speculation. Woman, her body, her sexual
difference, constitutes an enigma for psychoanalysis; she is the
‘dark continent’. But within the Symbolic Order, the dominant
discourses are congruent, isomorphic with phallic sexuality. So
the woman with her bodily and sexual difference is alienated, is
excluded by and from language, by and from a system of
signification where the signifier of signifiers is the phallus
(Lacan, 1977:281-91; Gallop, 1985:133-56). For a woman to speak
at all, it seems that she must of necessity mime the man’s relation
to language, she must participate in a masquerade. However
Luce Irigaray proposes an alternative: the possibility of an-other
discourse, an-other language which would be a ‘feminine’
language able to express the difference of woman’s bodily being,
and her sexuality. Such a language would speak, would in fact
produce and make possible the morphological plurality of wo-
man’s sex, the multiplicity of her body’s polymorphous plea-
sure(s)—a polyvalent and playful speaking.
The hysteric’s discourse signifies woman’s excessive disquiet
under the dictates of the Father’s Law, enunciating her aliena-
tion and exclusion from symbolisation and the workings of
phallic signifying processes. The mystic’s program of bodily
‘imitatio’ was a bodily ‘acting out’ which constituted and conse-
crated her status as holy; it was a process of bodily signification—
ascetic achievements which from the contextual distance and
difference of the twentieth century seem to demonstrate an
excess which disturbs, and which has at times been identified as
pathology. Asceticism has always been an integral part of
Christianity: activities such as heroic fasting, sleep deprivation,
the wearing of hair shirts and plates of metal next to the skin,
binding the body with ropes and chains, self-flagellation, immer-
sion into freezing water, extraordinarily long periods of prayer
and psalm-reciting accompanied by innumerable genuflexions
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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

and bodily contortions. But hagiography from the later Middle

Ages cites acts of extraordinary self-abasement and humiliation,
acts of self-immolation, acts of gruesome and grotesque violence
carried out by the saint on her own body. For example, Mary of
Oignies (thirteenth century) hacked off pieces of her own flesh
while immersed in a vision of the Crucifixion (Bynum, 1984:190);
St Catherine Benincasa of Siena (fourteenth century) attempted
to overcome physical disgust and nausea by drinking pus from
the putrifying, cancerous breast of a dying woman. To Raymond
of Capua, her confessor and biographer, she said, ‘Never in my
life have I tasted any food or drink sweeter or more exquisite’
(Bynum, 1987:171-72). Similarly Angela of Foligno (thirteenth
century) drank the water used to wash the sores of lepers, and
when a scab stuck in her throat she commented that it tasted as
‘sweet as communion’ (Bynum, 1987:144-45). Francesca de’
Ponziani (fourteenth to fifteenth century) would prepare herself
for sexual relations with her husband by pouring boiling pork fat
or candle wax over her genitals (Bell, 1985:137).
But it was fasting, food deprivation, which dominated the
intensely ascetic Christianity lived out by these mystic women.
Often it was a fasting against the advice of confessors, or against
the explicit orders of religious superiors. Even within the context
of medieval Christianity, the fasting of these women was per-
ceived as excess, was, even then, identified as pathological, or
more dangerously, as diabolical (Bell, 1985; Bynum, 1987). It
became a fasting ‘out of control’, a fasting which went beyond the
control of church authorities, the male priestly caste. And it
could be a fasting to the death—as with St Catherine of Siena,
who died in 1380 at the highly significant age of thirty-three.
Evidence, both biographical and autobiographical, suggests
that these fasting women were acting out a form of hysteria
which has again irrupted in the patriarchal society of the late
twentieth century. I am speaking of anorexia, and again there
will be those who will be troubled here at what might seem to be
the inappropriate application of contemporary terminology, the
imposing of contemporary medical—or at least psychiatric dis-
course—onto this historical other, wilfully disregarding, and
deliberately annihilating, cultural specificity, cultural alterity.
But this is to wilfully misrecognise the meaning and function of
hysteria, and in particular of anorexia. For neither hysteria nor
anorexia should be reduced to the discourse of late-twentieth-
century medical science; hysteria/anorexia is not a disease so
much as the expression of profound social and psychic dis-ease

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(which, I suggest, occurred back in the fourteenth and fifteenth

centuries just as it does now, in the twentieth century). And it is
psychoanalytic theory which enables access to the meaning and
function of the hysteric’s body, the anorexic’s body; for the
hysteric, the anorexic, speaks the ‘unheard-of’ language of the
body which only psychoanalysis can decipher (Ulmer, 1980).
Psychoanalysis has demonstrated that anorexia, like other
forms of hysteria, functions as a strategy by means of which the
anorexic acts out her resistance to the workings of the Symbolic
Order, which has locked her into a position of passivity within a
patriarchal construction of the feminine. Anorexia is a woman’s
strategic play for autonomy within a system which both defines
and constructs her in terms of lack and castration, a state of being
which is ‘not-all’.° The anorexic stages her refusal of and
rebellion against such a definition and construction of her ‘self’
through direct action; and it is action effected with her body, the
Symbolic body, the ‘castrated’ body of patriarchal femininity.
Destruction of the Symbolic body, however, enables the recon-
struction of an-other body, an ‘autonomous’ body liberated from
the controls and constraints of phallic signification and phallic
Law. Anorexia is a discourse dealing directly with power and
control. The records of female sanctity in the later Middle Ages
provide evidence which supports this. There are, for example, St
Catherine of Siena, Umiliana de’ Cerchi, Francesca de’
Ponziani—mystical women whom the historian Rudolph Bell
has called ‘holy anorexics’ in order to distinguish them from the
outbreak of fasting women in our own time (Bell, 1985).
But to return to the Middle Ages: women in ever-increasing
numbers were choosing to dedicate their lives to God, to live the
penitential lifestyle of a religious—a choice which often nec-
essitated remarkable determination in order to fight against
frequent familial opposition.® And as we have already seen, this
female religious was very likely to participate in a very literal
and ascetic ‘imitatio Christi’. Her religious experience often
reached the ecstatic extremes of a flamboyant mysticism. The
religious life functioned for these women as an alternative to the
subject(ed) position(s) enforced upon them by the workings of
the patriarchal ordering of society. It provided a space where
women might locate ‘solutions’ to the crises engendered by the
patriarchal construction of femininity. The ascetic practices of
the religious woman, her mystical experiences, constituted the
radical refusal of her own ‘self’ as the ‘patriarchal female’, and a
reconstruction of subjectivity and sexuality beyond the stric-

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

tures of the Law. And this constituted her own ‘inquiry into
femininity’,’ her attempt to locate a different ‘self’, a bodily being
beyond the Name/No of the Father.
Yet historical evidence of the strict claustration imposed on
medieval religious women by the male church hierarchy, the
extent of the dependence of the female religious house on male
religious for sustenance both spiritual and physical, seems to
suggest that the religious lifestyle would not and could not
provide these women suffering severely from Symbolic con-
straint(s) with anything different (Schulenburg, 1984). The insti-
tution of the church in the Middle Ages was a patriarchal
construct, and operated according to the dictates of the Father’s
Law. Women religious were able physically and materially to
resituate themselves with the development of the Beguine
movement and the mendicant tertiary orders. However, it was
only when a woman religious—whether or not she was bound by
vows or rules of enclosure—adopted a strategy of mysticism and
asceticism that excess worked to liberate her from the limits
imposed by the masculinist discourse of institutionalised reli-
gion. Her excess(es) took her beyond arbitrary limitation and
man-made boundaries; her excess was ecstatic, an ex-stasy, a
being beyond herself where she might meet with the Divine. The
excess of her rapturous relation with the Divine-Other bypassed
her need for priestly mediation, male mediation which also
functioned as male containment and male control. Her ex-stasy
took her way out of control, beyond the control of the Other.
Patriarchal discourse, as we have seen, identifies woman as the
‘not-all’, yet simultaneously perceives in her ‘lack’, her ‘cas-
trated’ (Symbolic) body, a disturbing excess which resists sym-
bolisation. As excess, as that which exceeds, woman is located by
male discourse as Otherness;, her difference (of excess) makes
woman an object of fantasy for (a) masculine subjectivity. But the
site of the Other is also the site of God and Truth: that which has
been submitted to an intense process of mystification, positioned
behind a veil, a ‘cloud of unknowing’.® That is, the site of the
Other is the site of excess, of that which exceeds symbolisation
and Symbolic processes. Woman and Divinity meet in and
through unmediated excess.
Julia Kristeva theorises such excess in terms of ‘semiotic’
irruptions into the workings of the socio-symbolic order. Holi-
ness can be the site of such an irruption, also poetry and madness
(Kristeva, 1976, 1980, 1984). However, institutionalised religion—
and in this specific instance I am referring to the monolithic

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machinery of the medieval catholic church—works on behalf of

Law: the institutionalisation of holy excess is Symbolic control
and containment. The mystic woman on the other hand, ruptures
religious discourse, the institutionalised Christian discourse of
the later Middle Ages. Excess exceeds (and succeeds); her
holiness is a (strategic) madness which transports her beyond, is a
pleasure which takes her out of herself. Her excess, unsymboli-
sable, unspeakable, is her ‘jouissance’: excess beyond the
phallus.
The hysteric (it has been said) suffers from reminiscences
(Freud, 1912:5, 156); but (more specifically) the anorexic suffers
from nostalgia for maternal corporeality, the plenitude of the pre-
Symbolic body (Celemajor, 1986, 1987). The medieval woman
mystic, the ‘holy anorexic’, through her intense devotion to and
excessive identification with Christ’s crucified body, attempts to
relocate, reconstruct her Symbolic body (and being). But this is
also her attempt to recreate the wholeness, the completeness of
the mother-child relation in the Imaginary state of being. That is,
mystical union with the Divine can function as fusion with the
maternal body. Christ’s body, the human body of the Divine, has
become of the body of the phallic mother. Longed-for union/
fusion could be achieved, quite literally, through the celebration
of the Eucharist, the ingestion of the host, which was to incorpor-
ate the body of Christ in a fleshly and substantial way. To eat
Christ was to ‘fuse’ with him physically and actually, was to
recreate and re-experience the bodily pleasure(s) of the Imagin-
ary dyadic existence. Intense eucharistic fervour was a basic
constituent element in the feminine mysticism of the late Middle
Ages. It functioned as yet another manifestation of feminine
excess: a holy madness. But it was most extreme in those women
who exhibited heroic eating austerities, women who would not
eat. For these women the only form of nourishment acceptable,
the only form of bodily sustenance permitted, was the host (for
example, St Catherine of Siena). For these women, the host was
enough, was itself sometimes experienced as ‘too-much’. For the
eucharistic meal was, for many of these women, the occasion for
rapture and ecstasy. So much so that church authorities litigated
against the communication of ecstatic women (Bynum, 1987:328,
n.116). It was a desperate attempt to reassert control, to confirm
(male) authority, to contain the excess so visible, so obviously
present in the woman’s body as pleasure took her quite beyond
herself, rapt into ecstasy. The bodily pleasure of her ex-stasis was
total, the polymorphous pleasure located in the pre-Oedipal

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

body, in the unsymbolisable excess(es) of woman’s body.

The body of Christ then, functions as the woman’s object of
desire, a body discursively (re)constructed as both lover and
mother. There is textual evidence of the eroticisation of Christ’s
wounded and bleeding, dying body; but it is an eroticisation
which is quite primal, which signifies a return—or at least the
desire to return to the longed-for body of the first love-object: the
body of the (phallic) maternal. So Catherine of Siena, when she
had drunk the pussy offering from a dying woman’s cancerous
breast, was able, in a vision, to take both nourishment and
comfort from Christ’s bleeding side wound; Christ speaks:

‘As you then went far beyond what mere human

nature could ever have achieved, so I today shall give
you a drink that transcends in perfection any that
human nature can provide...’ With that, he tenderly
placed his right hand on her neck, and drew her
toward the wound in his side. ‘Drink, daughter, from my
side,’ he said, ‘and by that draught your soul shall
become enraptured with such delight that your very
body, which for my sake you have denied, shall be
inundated with its overflowing goodness.’ Drawn
close...to the outlet of the Fountain of life, she fastened
her lips upon that sacred wound, and still more eagerly
the mouth of her soul, and there she slaked her thirst.
(Bynum, 1987:172)

Her lips meet the lips of his wound in the kiss of (a) union which
is mystical, yet also physical, sensual. So too the speaker in
A Talkyng of be Loue of God enunciates holy desire:

Penne ginneb be loue.to Then the love begins to well

springen at myn herte.and up in my heart and glows very
glouwep up in myn hotly in my breast. The tears
brest.wonderliche hote. be loue of love run plentifully down my
teres of myn neb.rennen ful face. My song is delight of love
smerte.my song is likynge of without any melody. I leap at
loue.al wip oute note. I.lepe on Him swiftly as a greyhound at
him raply.as grehound on a hart, quite beside myself, in
herte.al out of my self.wip loving manner, and fold in my
loueliche leete.And cluppe in arms the cross at the lower end. I
myn armes.pbe cros bi be sterte. suck the blood from His feet;
be blood I.souke of his feet.pat that sucking is extremely sweet. I
sok is ful swete. I.cusse and kiss and embrace and

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 Resistance and autonomy

I.cluppe and stunte oberwhile.as occasionally stop, as one who is

mon bat is loue mad.and seek love-mad and sick with love-
of loue sore. i loke on hire.pbat pain. I look at her, who brings
him bringep.and heo bi ginneb Him, and she begins to smile,
* to smyle.as pau3 hire likede as if it pleased her and she
wel.and wolde i dude more. I wanted me to go on. I leap
lepe eft ber i was.and auntre me back to where I was and venture
pore.i cluppe and I. cusse as myself there; I embrace and I
I.wood wore. I.walewe and i kiss, as if Iwas mad. I roll and I
souke.i.not whuche while. and suck I do not know how long.
whon I.haue al don.3it me luste And when I am sated, I want yet
more.pbenne fele I.pat blood.in more. Then I feel that blood in
pou3t of my Mynde. as hit weore my imagination as it were bodily
bodilich.warm on my lippe. warm on my lips and the flesh
and pe flesch on his feet.bi fore on his feet in front and behind so
and beo hynde.so softe and so soft and so sweet to kiss and to
swete.to cusse and to cluppe. embrace. (Westra, 1950: 60,61).

But if mystical ‘inedia” was the strategy deployed by Catherine

and others like her to locate possible alternatives to the patri-
archal construction of the feminine, it was, as the realisation of
an ‘autonomy’ (of being) situated in dangerous excess, as danger-
ous excess, beyond the phallus.
And now, in the late twentieth century, this mystical discourse
of late medieval women becomes the privileged site of contem-
porary theoretical explorations into femininity.The French psy-
choanalyst Jacques Lacan theorises the feminine by means of
Bernini’s spectacle in stone, his spectacular representation of the
rapt body of St Teresa in ecstasy: the representation of excess in
stone. Lacan constructs his theory on and of the feminine using a
masculine reproduction, a masculine reconstruction of the same.
The male artist and the male theorist intrude upon an excessive-
ly, intensely private moment, that moment when the mystic
woman achieves union, experiences union with the Divine. Like
the church authorities in the later Middle Ages, a male priestly
class threatened and outraged by their exclusion from this
relation between the mystic woman and the Divine, the male
artist and male theorist attempt to enforce and inflict masculine
presence, a presence which works to effect (male) dominance
and control.
But in ‘La Mysterique’, Luce Irigaray (1986) posits resistance to
phallic discourse which works to reappropriate and constrain
that which exceeds. ‘La Mysterique’ is a coming together of the

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Bernini’s St Teresa in Ecstasy

mystic, the hysteric, mystery and woman (through ‘la’—signifi-

cation of the feminine): femininity, holiness and madness con-
flate in this discourse. Irigaray liberates (the mystic) woman from
the binding restraints of male theoretical discourse, the male
construction of the feminine. The discourse of feminine mysti-
cism, the feminine relation with the Divine, is again used
strategically as a site for (feminine) resistance as it is also a site for
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 Resistance and autonomy

Detail of Bernini’s St Teresa in Ecstasy

feminine (self-)knowing, a site for the realisation of an autono-

mous being.
To bring to an end this brief exploration of the religious
experience and expression of the late Middle Ages, I would like
to consider a few final texts: visual (re)constructions of Christ’s
crucified body, and a short passage from ‘La Mysterique’ (Iri-
garay, 1985), a text which speaks (of) the relation which was/is
10]
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Wood carving (detail), 1370-80, Man of Sorrows. Southern Germany,

Frauenworth (Schiller, 1972, no. 698)

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 Resistance and autonomy

Painting, first third of the fifteenth century, Man of Sorrows, with

symbols of judgment, by Master Francke, Hamburg (Schiller, 1972
no. 711)

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

104
 Resistance and autonomy

between the mystic woman and the wounded, bleeding body of

that man who was/is also Divine.
And if ‘God’ who has thus re-préved the fact of her
non-value, still loves her, this means that she exists all
the same, beyond what anyone may think of her. It
means that love conquers everything that has already
been said. And that one man, at least, has understood
her so well that he died in the most awful suffering. That
most female of men, the Son.
And she never ceases to look upon his nakedness,
open for all to see, upon the gashes in his virgin flesh, at
the wounds from the nails that pierce his body as he
hangs there, in his passion and abandonment. And she
is overwhelmed with love of him/herself. In his
crucifixion he opens up a path of redemption to her in
her fallen state.
Could it be true that not every wound need remain
secret, that not every laceration was shameful? Could a
sore be holy? Ecstasy is there in that glorious slit
where she curls up as if in her nest, where she rests as if
she had found her home—and He is also in her. She
bathes in a blood that flows over her, hot and purifying.
And what she discovers in this divine passion, she
neither can nor will translate. At last, she has been
authorized to remain silent, hidden from prying eyes
in the intimacy of this exchange where she sees (herself
as) what she will be unable to express. Where she sees
nothing and where she sees everything. She is closed
over this mystery where the love placed within her is
hidden, revealing itself in this secret of desire. In this
way, you see me and J see you, finally I see myself
seeing you in this fathomless wound which is the source
of our wondering comprehension and exhilaration.
And to know myself I scarcely need a ‘soul’, I have only
to gaze upon the gaping space in your loving body.
Any other instrument, any hint, even, of theory, pulls
me away from myself by pulling open—and sewing
up—unnaturally the lips of that slit where I recognize
myself, by touching myself there (almost) directly.
(Irigaray, 1985: 199-200).

105
6 ‘The feminine’ as a semiotic
construct: Zola’s Une Page
d’Amour

Maryse Rochecouste

Suna provipes highly functional analytical tools with

which to explore textual dynamics. The aim of this chapter’
is to demonstrate the use of these tools in the exploration of
textual communication in prose narrative, more specifically to
look at the representation of the feminine in Zola’s Une Page
d’Amour. My analysis of this will show how the multiple
components which contribute to the representation of the femin-
ine in the novel are intimately,and obsessively linked with the
theme of the Fall, or the ‘catamorphic’, as I shall refer to it.
The term ‘catamorphic’ thus pinpoints the major recurrent
theme of the ‘Fall’ in the novel and it highlights the generality of
the theme through all its manifestations. Zola’s work is centred
around notions of the Fall, of falling, crumbling and decaying. He
manipulates verbal and semantic systems to do with both
descent and ascent. Consequently, space—within which actan-
tial representations occur—plays a major role as a textual
signifier.
In the novel Une Page d’Amour images of the Fall are related to
the representation of one facet of feminine identity, namely
female sexuality. One consequence of this is that the representa-
tion of the heroine’s sexuality gives us some insight into

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 Zola’s Une Page d’Amour

patriarchal values; her sexual identity as constructed in the

novel can be seen as a discourse through which we can decode
the patriarchal ideology of the nineteenth century.
One cannot use the tools of semiotics without using a certain
amount of basic terminology. Since this may not always be
familiar to all readers let me first define some basic terms
relevant to this analysis. Sign, signifier, signified and significa-
tion are crucial concepts in semiotics, as Saussure and his many
followers have shown. A sign—which consists of a signifier and a
signified—is a simple material object, for example a sound, mark,
shape, gesture or colour, which by a natural or conventional
relationship is held in a given society to take the place of a
complex reality (Fiske, 1982:ch. 3). The signifier is ‘the sign’s
image as we perceive it’ and the signified ‘the mental concept to
which it refers’ (Fiske, 1982:47). Signification is the ‘process’ or
‘act which binds the signifier and the signified’ (Barthes,
1981:48), whereas the referent is the external ‘reality’ to which
the signifier refers and through which the signified acquires
meaning.
Associated with the sign and signification are the notions of
denotation and connotion. The former is the ‘first order of
signification’ and ‘describes the relationship between the signi-
fier and signified within the sign, and the sign with its referent in
external reality . . . [It] refers to the commonsense obvious mean-
ing of the sign’ (Fiske, 1982:90-91). The latter ‘describes the
interaction that occurs when the sign meets the feelings or
emotions of the user and the values of his culture’ (Fiske,
1982:91).
There is, further, a triadic classification of signs—icon, index
and symbol—which is derived from the work of the philosopher
C.S. Pierce. I use it in the generally accepted literary sense,
described as follows by Hawkes: ‘... the icon, something which
functions as a sign by means of features of itself which resemble
its object: the index, something which functions as a sign by
virtue of some sort of factual or causal connections with its
object: and the symbol, something which functions as a sign
because of some ‘rule’ of conventional or habitual association
between itself and its object’ (1977:127).
When we come to deal with the way signs are used in texts we
need two other equally important concepts: paradigm and syn-
tagm. A paradigm is a ‘set of signs from which the one to be used
is chosen’ (Fiske, 1982:105), that is, it consists of sets of elements
which are interchangeable on the basis of discontinuity, similar-
ity or variation. The use of a paradigm involves selection,

107
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

association and substitution of elements belonging to these sets.

A syntagm is ‘the message into which the chosen signs are
combined’ (Fiske, 1982: 105). That is, it consists of elements
which unfold along the linear axis of combination, contiguity
and succession, and it involves the structuring, organising and
ordering of signs.
The ‘actantial model’ (already referred to above) is a Greimas-
sian typology inspired by Sourian’s and Propp’s work on recur-
ring character types in narrative. Greimas (1987) defines and
classifies narrative performers or ‘actants’ according to the roles
they perform in the action. The term ‘actant’ refers to units of
narrative grammar, that is, categories of protagonists (and of
course the protagonists themselves) defined by their function in
the intrigue. Greimas, attempting to develop a ‘grammar’ of
narrative, isolated six fundamental functions which he grouped
in the following pairs: subject-object, sender-receiver, helper-
opponent. The focus of any narrative varies according to which
character one elects as the actantial subject (and this is not
necessarily the hero). (See Greimas, 1987:ch. 4).
Since my analysis also looks closely at space, I will use the term
‘proxemics’: here I prefer the exact definition of Hall who coined
the word and defined ‘proxemics’ as ‘the study of man’s percep-
tion and use of space’ (1980:83). My use of the term ‘anamorphic’
(the opposite of catamorphic) referring to anything pertaining to
height, elevation or altitude, is related to my interest in the way
space is constructed in the novel. The term ‘valorisation’ means
the attribution of worth, value or quality, but is used as a
technical term in the discussion of the attribution of value to
members of binary semantic oppositions (Ubersfeld, 1987:189).
Zola’s Une Page d’Amour is marked by striking dichotomies,
and the text unites, juxtaposes and sets up parallel systems of
opposites. There is a disparity and an interplay between these.
Every pattern or cluster of images constructs two antithetical yet
complementary spatial configurations: one is real, the other
imaginary: the ‘real’ is in fact one face of a coin whose meta-
phoric and inseparable reverse side is constructed by the
imaginary. The dialectic between them is crucial to the represen-
tation of female sexuality in the novel. Zola uses vocabulary and
imagery strongly based in the semantics of language of the
physical senses: sight, touch, hearing—above all smell, move-
ment and colour. One of the fundamentals of any semiotic
analysis of text is the interpretation of paradigmatic clusters—
the variables of themes and imagery—and their syntagmatic

108
 Zola’s Une Page d'Amour

organisation or structuring in the sequence of the text. By

examining the visual, auditory, olfactory and kinetic paradigms
or systems of meaning in the text I have found that underlying
structures relevant to the Fall are specifically associated with the
representation of the feminine: the heroine’s Fall in Une Page
d’Amour is directly related to her sexual trangression. Embody-
ing both stereotypes of woman as ‘damned whores and God’s
police’ (Summers, 1975) at a crucial stage in her life, she has to
choose between the two contradictory codes of behaviour me-
diated or conveyed to her through her positioning in specific
social and cultural contexts; none of the accepted sexual stereo-
types allow ‘whore’ and ‘saint’ to co-exist within the one
individual.
The catamorphic structures within which these polarised
stereotypes occur must manifest themselves within space. They
must form part, either of the textual space itself, or of the various
spaces described in the text. They may appear as abstract or
concrete, as acted upon or acting, as icons, indices or symbols. As
part of the textual space itself, the catamorphic semantics of
falling/the Fall, and its various associated connotative values,
along with its antithetical anamorphic pole, the semantics of
ascent /transcendance, together constitute an aspect of the para-
digmatic/syntagmatic structuring of the text. Spaces described
within the text, such as the apartment and Paris, the Passage des
Eaux, never escape Zola’s manipulation of these semantic
systems of descent and ascent: nor do objects within these spaces,
like the swing, which constructs a new spatial semantics of its
own based again on this same catamorphic/anamorphic opposi-
tion.
Une Page d’Amour depicts a brief love affair. Oppressed and
frustrated by her past dull life, and now widowed and trapped
between the subconscious incestuous affection of her daughter
Jeanne and her own ‘bovarysme”’—Héleéne, the main female
actant, rebels. In her effort to free herself and find self-fulfilment,
she yields to sexual passion offered to her by Henri—a married
man; but she (mis? )interprets Jeanne’s death which follows soon
after as punishment for her adulterous transgression. Unable to
cope with her shame and guilt, she decides, in self-abnegation, to
return to her former life pattern: she engages in yet another
loveless, but legal, marriage.
Based on the story structure, the following basic actantial
models can be drawn to establish the areas of conflict more
clearly:

109
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Figure 1

SENDER RECEIVER
Temptation Self
Escape zen Henri
Freedom
Sexual passion Subject: Héléne desires
Love
Initiation
The unknown

HELPER OPPONENT
Henri Object: passion = Henri Rambaud
Mere Fétu Abbé Jouve
Bovarysme moral probity
Paris (enticing— bourgeois morality
represents the maternal love
unknown) guilt

Figure 2

SENDER RECEIVER
Symbiosis Self
Incest
Egoism
Subject: Jeanne desires

Object: Héléne

HELPER OPPONENT
Rambaud (pawn) Henri
Abbé Jouve Pariz

110
 Zola’s Une Page d’Amour

The opening chapter is carefully structured so as to emphasise

Héléne’s psychological dilemma. On the one hand for instance,
paradigms of purity and respectability abound, seemingly depict-
ing Héléne’s dominant trait of character. A whole range of
stereotyped values associated with the female gender, such as
passivity, innocence, emotional sensitivity and maternalism are
directly attributed to her. In other words, she seems to display
the appropriate gendered psychological and social attributes
pertaining to the ‘Saint’.
On the other hand, many other elements contradict this
surface representation, suggesting that all is not well; for exam-
ple, the theme of drowsiness, the nocturnal scene itself, her
daughter’s sudden epileptic fit;? plus also the theme of closed and
open spaces, of suffocation and freedem to breathe, the disorder-
ly layout of her bedroom, the symbolic white shroud formed by
the fallen snow. These have many connotations, among which
are ignorance, psychic stagnation, even death.
Most telling of these are perhaps the involuntary and probably
unconscious kinetic indices associated with the hairstyle and
vestmental codes,* functioning as ‘attitudinal markers.’ For
instance, the opposition between Héléne’s neatly tied up or
dishevelled hair, between her shawl hanging neatly on her
shoulders or slipping down, between Henri’s fastened or un-
fastened jacket all contribute to the production of meaning.® Here
they reveal the characters’ metamorphosis. As in travesty or
exorcism rituals, the ritual of undressing and dressing is linked
with the dialectics of appearance and reality, death and rebirth:
by undressing, the actants symbolically signify that they are
dropping their social masks and defences to reveal their true
selves.
The purely functional role of all these conflicting signs is soon
superseded, as the more important role ascribed to them in
defining the nature of the space they occupy—that is, the
referential space of Héléne’s private environment and in turn
Héléne herself—emerges. It soon becomes apparent through the
conflict constructed through these patterns of opposites that
Héléne longs to free herself from her bourgeois morality and to
find self-fulfilment; she is in fact sexually unawakened despite
having experienced marriage. Her first arranged marriage is
described thus: ‘She had been... tormented with fever neither
of the body nor of the heart ... Good heavens! Was there nothing
else? Did that sum up everything?’ (Zola, 1895:59, 1857:49
modified). Now widowed and obviously experiencing a lack, she

11]
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Figure 3

ACTANT SIGNIFIER SIGNIFIED SIGNIFICATION

it
dishevelladul
ducasingate
gil2a ¢
sexuality
me d moral
yA abe degradation
Hair/clothes
Héléne /Henri RM 8 pp 49-57

pele neat appearance

dressing -—» 4 respectability
order moral rectitude

asks herself while indulging in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe: ‘What did

the book mean when it spoke of a love so powerful that it could
give meaning to one’s whole existence?’ (Zola, 1857:49).
Representations of female sexuality can be further deciphered
through one of the novel’s catamorphic foci, namely Héléne’s
‘Fall’ from virtue in moral and socio-cultural terms, and through
her failure to come to terms with her libidinal drives.’
The battle triggered by her psychological dilemma is encapsu-
lated in a key sentence describing her and Jeanne contemplating
Paris from the window of their apartment in Passy:
It was as if they had stopped on the THRESHOLD of a
world that lay forever outspread before them, and
refused to enter it. (Zola, 1895:65, my emphasis)
This sentence makes explicit the literal and figurative thre-
shold upon which Héléne vacillates, torn between her secure but
claustrophobic existence and the unknown but intoxicating
adventures she craves for. As the link between exteriority and
interiority, the window which ambiguously symbolises separa-
tion and alliance makes concrete a critical phase in Héléne’s
sexual development.
The notion of threshold in turn connotes initiation (liminality)
and rites of passage. In another context, Eliade stressed the

112
 Zola’s Une Page d’Amour

sacredness of such initiations and the personal growth they lead

to (Beane and Doty, 1975:169); and one could expect them to be
positively valorised. But, as will be seen, that is not the case with
Héléne’s initiation® to sexual emancipation,® which can certainly
be regarded as a liminal experience. Plagued by her ignorance of
life, symbolised by Paris—as spelt out by the sentence: ‘Paris-
..was life’ (Zola, 1973:349, my translation)—she has an intense
desire for knowledge; and although hesitant, she is nonetheless
prepared to explore her true sexuality and sexual identity—or
rather, Zola’s conception of her sexuality; the social, cultural and
sexual constructs of her patriarchal society have become too
constricting.
The sentence about the window/threshold is the first major
indication that the binary spatial opposition between Paris and
Heéléne’s apartment is a hierarchical one, and that it plays a vital
role in the representation of woman, and also forms part of a
catamorphically oriented semiotic system.
In any proxemic analysis, the point is not merely to ‘identify
oppositional spaces and the closely woven interplay of their
network of meaning...the point is to see if space organizes
itself, and how it organises itself oppositionally’ (Ubersfeld,
1978:190 my translation).
Zola exploits the binary function of the potential paradigm
‘above/below’ by semanticising it: one automatically associates
this type of spatial hierarchy with the symbolism related to
concepts of ‘high’ and ‘low’, various scenes in the text being
divided according to these two symbolic levels. As Ubersfeld
(1978:189) points out, traditionally, ‘the valorisation of height,
sign of spiritual and social elevation, is linked to culture and the
image of the sky as the source of values and of authority’ (my
translation).
Héléne’s apartment, apparently symbolic of her moral probity,
appropriately occupies a towering position above Paris:
The two windows of Héléne’s room were wide open.
Down below the vast plain of Paris stretched out, in the
abyss that lay at the foot of the house, perched right
on the edge of the hill. (Zola, 1895:56)
Through this sharp contrast whereby Paris is spatially positioned
down below, the capital city acquires negative connotations.
Indeed, the spatial relationship of Passy and Paris is the concrete
realisation of the opposition themes of superiority and inferior-
ity, or of virtue and transcendence as opposed to sin and the Fall

113
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

respectively. Through this positive valorisation as ‘high’, Passy

becomes the metaphor for inaccessibility—at least until the
process of devalorisation is set in motion.
Let us see, through two selected extracts juxtaposed to the two
sentences quoted earlier, how the textual semantics, based on
conflict and opposition, proceeds to construct Héléne’s psycholo-
gical dilemma:
Upstairs in her room, in that familiar atmosphere of
cloistered quiet, Héléne felt herself stifled. She was
amazed to find the room so calm, so confined, so
drowsy under its blue velvet hangings, while she herself
was panting and afire with turbulent emotion. Was
this really her room, this lonely, lifeless, airless place?
Then, violently, she threw open a window and leaned
there to look out at Paris. (Zola, 1895:94)
Paris... was unsoundable and various as an ocean,
innocently bright in the morning and aflame at night,
assuming the joyous or melancholy mood of the skies
it reflected. A burst of sunshine would set it rippling with
floods of gold, a cloud would darken it, awakening
stormy turbulence. It was constantly new; in a dead
calm it would glow orange, under a sudden squall turn
leaden grey from end to end, bright clear weather would
set the crest of every house-top sparkling, while
rainstorms drowned heaven and earth and wiped out
the horizon in chaotic disaster. For Héléne it held all
the melancholy and all the hope of the open sea; she
even fancied she felt the sharp breath and the tang of
the sea against her face; and the very sound of the city,
its low continuous roar, brought her the illusion of the
rising tide beating against the rocks of a cliff. (Zola,
1895:47-48).

As demonstrated in Figure 4 below, entitled ‘Apartment vs.

Window vs. Paris’,"° when the convergence and opposition of
signifieds are tabulated, a clear pattern emerges: superiority and
virtue, linked to the apartment in Passy, are paradoxically
associated with a comatose state instead of a transcendent one—
and indeed, Héléne does lead an impassive and indolent life. By
opposition, action and adventure, linked to Paris, are associated
with change, instability, disorder, disaster and destruction, as

114
 Zola’s Une Page d’Amour

well as ecstasy. At a semantic level, the window which defines

the boundaries between these two opposite worlds—the apart-
ment and Paris—is a mere demarcation point which permits the
elaboration of these conflicts. The effects of devalorisation of the
‘high’ and oscillation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ are largely
achieved through the inversion of the symbolism of verticality
(see Figure 4).
The connotations so far described are further expanded
through a process of association, to include the following para-
digmatic relations and syntagmatic features. The antitheses in
the syntagmatic sets (the linear associations that structure the
text as it develops), marked by the vertical arrows in Figure 5,
pull in opposite directions to the paradigmatic sets associated
with the meanings apartment, window and Paris, listed on the
horizontal axis in Figure 5. The graphic organisation of Figure 5
illustrates this semantic conflict and the mediating role of the
window:
Héléne’s psychological oscillation, constructed through these
antitheses and oppositions, may be explored from two other
semiotic perspectives: first through the proxemics of the swing in
the garden sequence, and second through that of another con-
necting artery between the two major oppositional spaces,
namely le Passage des Eaux—the Water Passage. Through its
mediating capacity as an ambiguous signifier, the window has an
obvious affinity with both the swing and le Passage des Eaux.
Héléne’s psychological oscillation, like a pendulum going to
and fro, is evoked by the swing on which she sways, literally
_suspended in midair between heaven and earth; the reader
cannot help wondering whether she will gather enough momen-
tum to attain the desired height and thereby achieve mutation. In
this context the swing sequence is a key one, the swing’s
symbolism being very rich and complex. The swing’s sharp and
natural focus on upward and downward motion, mirroring
Héléne’s irresolution, allows the symbolism of verticality to be
exploited once more. At a metaphysical level, swinging, isomor-
phic to flying, symbolises spiritual elevation and purification by
air.
This semantic shift converts the swing scene into a clear
allegory of the initiatory scenario with dominant, positive valori-
sation. At a more physical level, the swing’s rhythmic motion
which evokes the movement of coition makes it a sexual symbol
linked to fertility rites; it is therefore a signifier of Héléne’s and
Henri’s future liaison.

115
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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

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 Zola’s Une Page d’Amour

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Figure 5

Apartment : past (life) / security / ignorance / frustration

t t t t
Window’: present / uncertainty / curiosity / fluctuation
| | ' |
Paris : future / danger, risk / knowledge / fulfilment

At a psychological level, flight is also symbolic of mental

escape, as suggested by the familiar imagery of letting the
imagination take flight to release thought. Hence the act of
swinging is a signifier having Héléne’s ‘bovarysme'’ as signified. It
could also be argued that at a semantic level, Héléne’s ‘bovarys-
me’ is a form of masturbation or ‘plaisir solitaire’.
However, despite this positive anamorphic emphasis on ascent
and light, the kinetic rise and Fall imagery of swinging and flying
makes these actions, paradoxically, potentially catamorphic, that
is, symbols of falling: hence, they are most appropriate vehicles
for the metaphorisation of Héléne’s Fall, more particularly so
since her Fall stems from her sexual dilemma.
To begin with, neither the tacit erotic connotation of the
swing’s rhythm, nor its orgasmic objective for both mother and
daughter, can be denied; as such the swing’s rhythm is a clear sig-
nifier of their solitary—yet public—masturbatory pursuit, a
practice frowned upon by convention, hence culturally devalor-
ised. The phrasing of the following quotation can be interpreted
as being mimetic of swinging or slow rhythmic masturbation:
Jeanne adored swinging ..:. the rush of wind against
her face, the sensation of sudden flight, the continuous
swaying to and fro, rhythmical as the beat of wings,
thrilled her with exquisite pleasure, as if she were setting
off into the clouds... [She] sat on the swing, radiant,
an expression of rapt awe on her face, and her bare
wrists quivering slightly with delight. (Zola, 1957:42,
modified)
Note that Zola specifically uses the word jouissance. The simple
act of pushing Jeanne, as well as recollections of the past, trigger
Héléne’s arousal, and undoubtedly her secret desire is gratified

118
 Zola’s Une Page d’Amour

in the rapture thus described: ‘. . . a sudden impetus would carry

her off and she would sail down, her head thrown back, her
eyelids closed, an ecstatic fugitive, dizzy with the fierce rapture
of soaring and sinking’ (Zola, 1957:44, modified). Again, that
revealing word jouissance reappears.
The sexual tempo is also accentuated by orchestrated repeti-
tion. Evidently, sexual activity—especially of the above nature
and devoid of procreative focus—usually associated with infer-
ior instincts, even with sin, because of its ephemeral, terrestrial
and physical nature, hence spatially with depth, is ironically also
associated here—through symbolic inversion—with height, the
realm of spiritual perfection, transcendence, ecstasy. The swing
then, like the window, is an ambiguous signifier. Even light
imagery, in the form of a golden aura denoting fire, emphasises
the voluptuousness of Héléne’s flight and here connotes physical
passion instead of mystical and spiritual sublimation.
However, catamorphic signifiers lurking unobtrusively in the
background enable the alert reader to predict a catastrophe.
Héléne’s literal fall, announcing her figurative moral one, is
firstly prefigured in Jeanne’s own recollected fall on a previous
occasion. Héléne also experiences giddy spells on the swing. The
calamitous connotation of this signifier—vertigo—which I have
explored in other novels of the series (Rochecouste, 1979, 1988),
again signals disaster, especially when reinforced by ‘attitudinal
markers’, namely the reactivated hairstyle and vestmental
codes'' whose catamorphic connotations I referred to earlier.
Once all these combined catamorphic connotations reach their
crescendo, Héléne’s literal fall from the swing hardly comes as a
surprise: it abruptly negates the implicit positively valorised
anamorphic symbolism of this signifier. Flying, which connotes
the myth of Icarus, could have warned us of this outcome.
The dangers of ‘bovarysme’ are thus clearly illustrated. And
since it is Henri’s arrival on the scene which prompts her to jump
from the swing, his role as agent of her moral Fall becomes more
apparent.
Héléne’s self-inflicted pain and the sprain which ensues, form
part of the ritual of mutilation in the unfolding initiatory
scenario. Similarly, her ability to pick herself up with superhu-
man courage despite her pain, anticipates the outcome of the
novel: her paradoxically sublimating yet damning return to her
virtuous comatose state, her psychological death and spiritual
rebirth.”
Only after Héléne’s Fall from the swing—the fallen angel—can

119
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

the full irony of the following sentence, with its religious

overtones, be appreciated: ‘[She] seemed... like a saint with a
halo of gold flying up to Paradise’ (Zola, 1957:44).
Inow come to my third and last example of semiotic polarity, le
Passage des Eaux. Like the window and the swing, it connects the
two axes of verticality, height and depth, and its symbolism is
again ambiguous.
The very notion of ‘passage’ implied in this symbolic name
associates it with the rites of passage referred to earlier, and the
connotation of movement and change related to initiatory or-
deals that it evokes makes it a dominant motif; it is therefore not
surprising that it is described in minute topographical detail.
For example, one of its striking features, its seven flights of
steep stairs, provides an important lead. The number 7 symbo-
lises completion and/or perfection, and is therefore particularly
relevant in the present context. Owing to their verticality,
staircases are classic symbols of ascent, of the search for
knowledge and hence of transcendence and are therefore ana-
morphic, but negatively they are also symbols of descent, of
regression and hence potentially catamorphic.
Aspects of initiatory scenarios can be clearly detected in
Héléne’s hazardous trips up and down le Passage des Eaux: for
instance, the novice’s act of rupture in the attempt to break away
from a present mode of existence which would positively
valorise the passage. However, here Zola again appears to
devalorise all this positive symbolism and more particularly the
ascensional symbolism, for, instead of depicting Héléne moving
up from one plane to another, from the profane to the sacred, he
emphasises her stepping Down, thereby indicating that she is
going down the spiritual hierarchy and abandoning her moral
rectitude.
On the other hand, this stage of her descent could also be
interpreted as the descent to Hell, a major part of initiatory
rites—always positively valorised—which ensures the symbolic
death of the novice before symbolic rebirth. Eliade wrote:
‘initiatory death is often symbolized... by cosmic night, by the
telluric womb... images [which] express regression to a per-
formed state ... rather than total annihilation’ (Beane and Doty,
1975:166). In this context, Héléne’s descent could be regarded as
the journey to a prenatal state or return to the womb, in which
case an analogy could be drawn between le Passage des Eaux and
the birth canal; I will explore this gynaecological link shortly.
A second equally important lead is the aquatic feature of this
symbolic passage. Durand (1969:103-4) has shown how water can

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 Zola’s Une Page d’Amour

be doubly valorised: positively, as in the case of clear, pure,

running waters like those of fountains or, negatively, as in the
case of dark and gloomy mires or marshes. In the latter instance,
such deep and still waters appear hostile and inauspicious owing
to their treacherous capacity to flood and swamp, that is, to
swallow and destroy—characteristics which associate them with
what Bachelard (1964 [1942]: chs. II, III) calls ‘the symbolic
substance of death’ (my translation). Hence, this ambiguous
aquatic association matches the ambiguity of the stairs. But,
because Héleéne is depicted going down the passage and because
of the return to the womb posited, the reader’s imagination is
directed towards two schemes: that termed ‘avalage’ or
‘swallowing’ by Durand (1969:233-34, 243-44, 256, 267), and that
of descent again. Both evoke chthonian depths and consequently
nocturnal realms; our cultural code could further expand this
chain of connotations to include a negative ‘evil-sin-hell’ syn-
tagm.
There can be no doubt then, as to the doubly catamorphic,
though ambiguous, resonance of this carefully chosen name.
Through it, le Passage des Eaux connecting Passy and Paris
becomes the metaphorical and ambiguous gateway either to
damnation or to salvation. This polarity automatically evokes the
female sexual stereotype whore/saint, witch/angel, mistress/
wife.

Figure 6

ACTANT SIGNIFIER SIGNIFIED | SIGNIFICATION

le passage des virtue = salvation

Eaux, un étrange
escalier étranglé
entre les murs des threshold
jardins voisins, une connecting temptation
ruelle escarpée qui link bridge
descend sur le quai, gateway
des hauteurs de Passy. | labyrinth |
Au bas de cette pente”
(p. 73), sin = damnation

12]
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

As can be seen, then, le Passage des Eaux is by no means an or-

dinary, straightforward stairway; it appears—on the surface—to
have many attractive attributes, but paradoxically its labyrinth-
ine aspects are equally prominent:
She had, in particular, taken a strange liking to the
Passage des Eaux. She enjoyed the coolness and the
silence of this steep alley, the unvarying cleanness of
its pavement, washed on rainy days by a rushing torrent
from the heights. She had a queer feeling when she
stood at the top and looked down the steep slope of the
passage, which was usually deserted ... Then she
would venture down it...and carefully make her way
down the seven flights of broad steps, alongside which,
taking up half the width of the narrow passage, ran the
pebbly bed of a stream. To right and left stood garden
walls, bulging with age, and mouldering away with grey
leprous patches. There were overhanging trees with
drooping foliage, and a great cloak of ivy outspread;
and all this verdure, disclosing only blue glimpses of
sky, shed a dim, quiet, greenish light. Half-way down she
would pause for breath, staring curiously at the street
lamp that hung there, listening to laughter in the
gardens... Sometimes an old woman would climb up
the stairs, clutching the black gleaming iron rail... But .
more often she was alone, and she delighted in this
quiet shady stairway, like a hollow lane through a forest.
Once at the bottom she would look back, and the sight
of the steep slope down which she had ventured always
gave her a little shiver of fright. (Zola, 1957:33)
The extract invites two dominant interpretations. First, the
iconicity of topographical anatomy can easily be detected, the
passage being full of vulva imagery.’* Indeed, neither the male
writer’s nor the female actant’s erotic attention, focused on the
zone of entry, ought to be underestimated. Héléne’s journey '
through the passage is clearly analogous to the exploration and
discovery of her own physical sexuality: she is obviously
mesmerised by the trap or threshold of the sexual aperture. The
analysis of concrete spatial referents shows a constant metaphor-
ical transposition. The steep alley (narrow passage /hollow lane)
with its surrounding overgrowth and rushing torrent are power-

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 Zola’s Une Page d’Amour

fully evocative of female sexuality and the various fluids

associated with it. Even the reference to the colour green through
the verdure, greenish light and bushes echoes Durand’s
(1969:250-51) equation of that colour’to ‘the maternal cavity’.
Thus, gynaecological correlations are implicit throughout.
Second, a basic paradigm: virtue/sin, usually culturally linked
with repulsion/attraction, resistance /surrender, emerges clear-
ly from the analysis in Figure 7 entitled ‘Passage des Eaux’,'* and
reinforces the ambiguity of this labyrinthine refuge, making it
difficult to determine at this early stage which semantic set
predominates. Seen in an actantial context, the anthropomorphic
characteristics of some of the spatial components expose the
latter to be pseudo-‘helpers’: the walls, trees, ivy and foliage
pretend to offer safe and attractive shelter, but the clear catamor-
phic impression of engulfment they convey indicates that they
are in fact treacherous, that they are seducing Héléne and leading
her into a trap; as such they are definite ‘opponents’ in the
traditional sense of middle-class morality. So far, the ‘pebbly bed
of a stream’ does not hold the promise of a bed of roses.
An analysis of the second description of Héléne going down le
Passage des Eaux helps to disambiguate the metaphorical signif-
cance of the passage.
Outside it was still thawing. The causeway was deep in
mud... The sky was grey, and from the pavement a
mist was rising. The road lay dimly before her,
deserted and uninviting, though the hour was yet early,
the few gas-lamps looking in the damp haze like
yellow spots. She quickened her steps, keeping close to
the houses and shrinking from sight as though she
were on the way to keep an assignation. But as she
turned hastily into the Passage des Eaux, she halted
beneath the archway, her heart giving way to genuine
terror. The passage opened beneath her feet like some
black gulf. The bottom was invisible; the only thing she
could see in the black tunnel was the uncertain
glimmer of the one lamp which lighted it. In the end her
mind was made up; she grasped the iron railing to
prevent her slipping. Feeling her way with the tip of her
boot, she landed successively on the broad steps. The
walls, right and left, grew closer, seemingly endless in
the night, while the naked branches of the trees

123
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

overhead cast vague shadows of gigantic arms with

shrivelled outstretched hands. She trembled as she
thought how one of the garden doors might open and a
man spring upon her. There were no passers-by, and
she stepped down as quickly as possible. Suddenly from
out the darkness issued a shadow; the shadow coughed
and she was frozen with fear; but it was only an old
woman creeping up with difficulty. Once more
reassured, she lifted up with greater care her dress which
had been trailing in the mud. So thick was the coating
of mud on the steps that her boots were constantly
sticking fast. At the bottom she turned aside
instinctively. From the branches the rain-drops dripped
fast into the passage, and the lamp glimmered like
that of some miner, hooked to the side of a pit down the
wall of which water was oozing dangerously (Zola,
1895:214).

The second extract contains many important changes and

variations; these constitute semiotic elements which have a
distinct signifying function. The steep alley has lost its previous
appeal; Héléne’s fondness for it has been replaced by an obvious
malaise. Her earlier ‘strange sensation’ and ‘slight fear’ have now
turned into a ‘real fright’; the ‘patches of blue sky’ have
deteriorated to ‘grey’; she is frozen with terror by an unidentifia-
ble shadow emerging from the darkness. Anthropomorphisation
as well as a powerful connotative iconicity now make the
passage, walls and trees definitely ghoulish and menacing,
confirming their actantial roles as opponents.
Instead of the previous purifying images of the clear paving
stone washed by rain, and the positively valorised running
waters of the stream, there are now images of decomposition and
filth—a liquefying process which connotes defilement, corrup-
tion and contamination; Héléne’s stained frock symbolically
marks the beginning of her downfall (see Fig.7).
The soft and discreet greenish light that had filtered through
before and given the shaded stairs a quasi-religious charm has
vanished. Now, only the flickering glow of the streetlamp lights
the narrow passageway which appears like dark entrails or a
dangerous mine shaft. These two powerful second-level icons
reinforce the earlier association of the passage with the birth
canal. In addition, the hollow imagery of the homologous and
iconic ‘black hole’ and ‘pit’ evoke the womb. As Borie (1971:178)

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 Zola’s Une Page d’Amour

Schema Number 3: Passage Des Eaux

MODES OF
PERCEPTION CONVERGENCE] OPPOSITION
(REAL/ OF OF
METAPHORIC) SIGNIFIER SIGNIFIED SIGNIFIEDS | SIGNIFIEDS
fraficheur
silence
pavé [...] propre [...]] cleansing purification
THERMIC lavait
AUDITORY | coins bleus de ciel calmness refuge
jour verdatre trés doux
VISUAL et trés discret
intimacy shrine
c'était un grand charme safety
que cet escalier
recueilli et ombragé
jardins
arbres
branches
feuillage
VEGETAL lierre freedom
verdures
(jour) verdatre
foréts
ANAMORPHIC | auteurs superiority ——|
eoccats height strength
u
red inaccessibility ae a
montait ae]
KINETIC _| levait_1es_yeux cere tamcendence ETE |||
ruelle escarpée
pente raide steep slope
Passage
étages
larges marches narrow path Underworld
étroit couloir
CHTHONIAN descente
and escalier
CATAMORPHIC chemin creux labyrinth
pente si raide
s'enforcer
descendait descent FALL
jetait
dégringolaient
sous inferiorit;
en bas depth failure d
désert, connu 4 peine | seclusion alienation |
CONTACTUAL elle restait seule solitude nothingness — ore

portes [...] jamais

CLOSURE ouvertes
enclosed space imprisonment
1
muraille
x ae |id]
elle avait [...] une
étrange sensation
se hasardait
a petits pas
elle s'arrétait pour
souffler
SENSORY s'aidant de la rampe
and s'appuyait sur son
KINETIC ombrelle comme une
canne tribulation
se risquer
légére peur
escarpée steepness
raide
si raide
pluie flowing /falling |breaking of waters
AQUATIC torrent coulant
* pleuvaient Valley of tears
murs [...] mangés stain defilement “s1stiprersseseresee’
VISUAL d'une lépre grise decay destruction =

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

says, ‘the feminine body evidently defines itself through its

hollowness, it is womb, envelope, container’ (my translation).
In view of these gynaecological associations, the thawing snow
and the ‘flood of mud’ are analogous to menstruation and the
breaking of the waters. Such violent aquatic eruption with its
threat of inundation can only be negatively valorised; given all
these negative elements, the total change of tone in the second
description of le Passage des Eaux can also be interpreted as a
combination of post-orgasmic lassitude, masturbatory guilt and
menstrual fear. Finally, the suggestive adverb upon which the
extract ends—dangerously—is charged with evil omen.
This brief comparison clearly shows the prevalence of negative
valorisations in the second extract, thereby confirming the
catamorphic significance of the Passage des Eaux and exposing
the earlier misleading and ironic valorisation of the anamorphic.
This devalorisation process persists with an increasing emphasis
on catamorphic aquatic imagery during Héléne’s third frantic
trip down the passage:
When she turned down into the Passage des Eaux, she
hesitated for a second. The stairway had turned into a
torrent, the gutters of the Rue Raynouard had
overflowed and were pouring down. Foam was splashing
over the steps, in a narrow passage, while patches of
rain-washed pavement gleamed; a wan burst of light
falling from the grey sky between the black branches
of the trees whitened her way. Barely lifting her skirts,
she hurried down. The water reached her ankles, her
light thin slippers nearly came off in the puddles. (Zola,
1957:188)

Furthermore, instead of the anticipated incubating womb with

its positive characteristics, at the end of her trip down le Passage
des Eaux the novice is confronted with the sordid ‘pink room’—
the iconic womb at the end of the birth canal—within a repulsive
and dilapidated house. Thus, woman, the ‘avaleuse’ or
‘swallower’ par excellence, ambivalently finds herself ‘avalée’,
or ‘swallowed’.
Needless to say, the climax of this negative initiation is
punctuated from beginning to end by the catamorphic rain,
which prompts Borie (1971:215) to term the love scene ‘cesspit
copulation’ (my translation). Given such valorisation, it is not
surprising that Héléne fails her initiation, despite the consumma-

126
 Zola’s Une Page d’Amour

tion of her love affair. This is reflected by the fiasco of her sexual
awakening which is thus expressed: ‘She shivered with a
pleasure she had not yet known. Memories returned to her; her
senses were aroused too late, leaving her with a tremendous
unsatisfied desire’ (Zola, 1895:270, 1957:218 modified). As Schor
(1976:188) points out, ‘desire can only be experienced after the
event’ (my translation).
Biblically, the Fall is the prerequisite to knowledge, but
ironically, despite her Fall, Héléne’s ignorance remains. When
she eventually decides to become a wife again, rather than a
mistress, she denies herself her individuality and the freedom
and equality which widowhood placed within her reach; in so
doing, she expresses to what extent she is the product of social
and cultural constructs.
The manner in which her search for sexual identity is
constructed can be seen as constituting a discourse. Within that
discourse the narrative structures available to her remain limit-
ed. For a brief moment she is the subject in her own narrative
quest, but in the final analysis, she remains the object of desire,
the prize to be won. This discourse reflects Zola’s understanding
of female psychology and is a representation of the victimisation
of women through sexual and patriarchal ideologies. My semio-
tic analysis of the catamorphic structures in Une Page d’Amour
exposes the construction of woman as sufferer, unable to fulfil
her drives and her femininity because of social repression.
To conclude, then, it can be seen that space and its consti-
tuents, especially the sexualisation of the urban landscape, are
indeed key textual signifiers subtly contributing to the represen-
tation of the feminine which is intimately linked with the theme
of the Fall. The malleability of the signs explored confirms that
Zola’s ironic valorisation and subsequent devalorisation—parti-
cularly of space—is a major contributing factor to such represen-
tation. I hope that my method and decoding of the text has
brought to light some aspects of the nature and implications of
gender bias in communication, by exposing some of the ideolo-
gies present in prose narrative.

127
7 Deconstructions of masculinity
and femininity in the films
of Marguerite Duras

Michelle Royer

[: 1975, when Héléne Cixous wrote ‘Sorties’ in La jeune née

(1975:172), she began her text by the questioning of what is at
stake in this chapter. She wrote:
Where is she?

Activity /passivity
Sun/moon
Culture /nature
Day/night
Father/mother
reason /feeling
Intelligible /sensitive
Logos /Pathos

Man
Woman
In that text, H. Cixous exposes the dichotomic system of binary
oppositions as the basis of ‘phallo-logocentrism’. Between the
two terms of the couple there exists a relationship in which the
masculine paradigm dominates ‘the other’. The subordination of

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 The films of Marguerite Duras

the feminine to the masculine is also what is signified by the bar

of separation.
The question of the place of woman outside that system is
clearly formulated by Shoshana Felmar when she asks:

How can the woman be thought about outside of the

Masculine/Feminine framework, other than as opposed
to man, without being subordinated to a primordial
masculine model? How can madness, in a similar way,
be conceived of outside its dichotomous oppositions to
sanity, without being subjugated to reason? How can
difference as such be thought out as non-subordinate
to identity? In other words, how can thought break away
from the logic of polar opposition?’

How can one escape dichotomic thinking? Marguerite Duras

(1981:175) suggests the following strategy: ‘Reverse everything.
Make women the point of departure in judging, make darkness
the point of departure in judging what men call light, make
obscurity the point of departure in judging what men call clarity.’
‘When we have a male in front of us, we could ask: does he have
some female in him? And that could be the main point.’
When |! decided to centre this chapter on one film, India Song, I
encountered my first problem. How can one centre an analysis
when the object of the study is scattered over different texts,
films, plays? In 1973, Marguerite Duras published what she
called the ‘text-film-play’: India Song. The film I propose to speak
about was made in 1975 and bears a lot of similarities with and
differences from the 1973 publication. It is placed in the vast
intertextual network of Marguerite Duras’ production. Charac-
ters like the beggar, the Vice-Consul, Lol. V. Stein are in-
terspersed throughout several texts. To add to the ‘confusion’,
Marguerite Duras re-used the sound track of India Song to make
a new film in 1976, called ‘Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta
Desert’, but with a new visual track. The recycling of films is
common practice for Marguerite Duras who, in her film
L’Homme Atlantique made use of the remnants of Agatha to
make her visual track. The combination of a new soundtrack
with familiar images produces a film looking uncannily the same
but in fact different. The use of these deconstruction strategies is
certainly very uncommon and contributes to producing a cinema
which is subversive not only of conventional film techniques but
also of the whole ‘economy’ of film-making.

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Now that I have acknowledged that India Song has a place in

the long self-deconstructive activity of Marguerite Duras’ works,
I would like to examine the deconstructive process functioning
in what is inevitably a somewhat arbitrarily selected unit of this
complex intertextual history: the India Song film.
India Song does not give any place to ‘the primordial masculine
model’ and the set of values attached to it. M. Duras wants to rid
herself of everything she learnt from men: rules, theories,
techniques, conventions. By doing so she invalidates the mascu-
line side of the dichotomy with its logical thinking and its
pretension to truth and re-evaluates the feminine side and
paradigm: silence, madness, passivity, negativity, multiplicity,
etc... Marguerite Duras undertakes the undoing of the di-
chotomic system of binary oppositions structuring the phallocen-
tric order by repositioning the oppressed element of the
dichotomy and by unsettling the bar of separation. Starting from
the place where the feminine is traditionally assigned she goes
on exploring it.
India Song tells the story of the last months of Anne-Marie
Stretter’s life and of her love affair with Michael Richardson. The
story takes place in India in the 1930s, during the monsoon, and is
told by voices whose faces stay invisible throughout the film.
They do not remember the story perfectly, they hesitate, contra-
dict themselves and one another and present a fragmented, non-
chronological account of what they think might have happened.
Another story is also told, that of the hunger, leprosy and misery
of Calcutta. It is told by two characters: a beggar woman off-
screen who is never seen but whose voice haunts the film and the
Vice-Consul who is heard and seen and who is in love with
Anne-Marie Stretter.
This analysis revolves around three characters: the beggar
woman, Anne-Marie Stretter, and the Vice-Consul; and around
one formal characteristic of the film: the disjunction of the
soundtrack and the visual track. The roles given to the female
characters play an important part in the process of the decon-
struction of the masculine/feminine dichotomy. The female
point of view is established as the reference point to engage an
interplay of similarities and differences between feminine and
masculine. At a technical level, India Song presents a similar
strategy. In the conventional film, according to Stephen Heath
(1981:201), ‘The image is all powerful and the sound track is a
supplement’. Christian Metz, in his book The Imaginary Signifier
(1977) confirms this by drawing an analogy between the film and

130
 The films of Marguerite Duras

the mirror stage, thus considering the film as primarily a visual

art at the expense of the soundtrack whose function is dispar-
aged. India Song reverses this trend by giving the soundtrack a
privileged role in the narration. Image and sound are never
synchronised and maintain a gap as well as a relationship of
identity and differences in which each track keeps a relative
independence. This independence of the sound exposes the
inability of psychoanalytic film theory to deal with the complete
film as image and sound, and the necessity for film criticism to
shift the emphasis from looking to hearing. Stephen Heath
(1981:121) acknowledges that Lacan had already ‘stressed hear-
ing, or more exactly invocatory drive, as closest to the experience
of the unconscious’, but more research still needs to be done in
this area.
The film opens (shot 2) with the voice of the beggar woman
singing in an oriental language. The song stops and the voice
starts laughing, then talks in the same oriental language. The
communicative function of the language is rendered ineffective,
at least for the French ear, but its materiality is emphasised. The
sonorities, the rhythm, the intonation, the pitch, what Roland
Barthes called the ‘grain of the voice’, are all we hear from the
beggar and they become the distinctive traits by which this
woman is identified in the rest of film. She stays a disembodied
voice throughout and comes back repeatedly, haunting the
sound track and provoking the same eerie feeling. The beggar
expresses in the language what Héléne Cixous considers the
most important: ‘the vocal, the musical, the language at its most
archaic and at the same time at its most wrought level’ (1977:488)
Cixous believes woman’s writing never stops echoing the ma-
ternal voice, the first song, the first music, the voice of Love,
deeply anchored and preserved within herself. In many of Duras’
films, the voice is used in a similar way. For example, in Le
Navire Night the two lovers know each other only by speaking on
the phone: they never see each other, and the voice has a very
erotic function.
From the beginning and throughout the film, the beggar’s voice
not only unveils the ‘other’ of language but also triggers the
narration. In the second shot and following the beggar, two
female voices begin to tell her story while on the screen the sun is
slowly disappearing. The narrators reveal that the beggar is mad,
of uncertain origin, has abandoned her children and is now
sterile. She is a lost soul, completely dispossessed and wandering
through Asia, aimlessly. We can only describe her in negative

ii
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

terms: she is the lack. The beggar woman assumes a totally

negative function regarding social order: as a beggar, she is out of
the system of exchange, she has no social status. She is complete-
ly on the negative side of the dichotomy as described by Cixous;
she has no definite origin, is no longer a mother nor a daughter,
she is even sterile and insane. She assumes with perfection what
Julia Kristeva (1981) believes is the function of women: ‘If women
have arole to play... it is only in assuming a negative function:
reject everything finite, definite, structured, loaded with mean-
ing in the existing order.’ By never appearing on the screen, she
also assumes a negative function regarding film as a visual art.
In shot 3, the stories of the beggar woman and of Anne-Marie
Stretter begin to be woven together: as a way of introducing
Anne-Marie Stretter, one of the voices says: ‘they were together
in Calcutta’. The beggar who had taken up a main role in the nar-
ration is now relegated to a secondary position as the other by the
second voice who asks, for precision, ‘the white girl and the
other?’. Beggar, colonised and a woman, she combines every-
thing that is repressed, dominated, negative in a colonial patriar-
chal society. Essentially a voice, she is also on the side of what is
belittled in the traditional film: the soundtrack. Anne-Marie
Stretter, as the wife of the Ambassador and as a colonial, has two
things in common with the beggar: she is a woman in exile, and
has followed the same itinerary through Asia. .
Simultaneously the visual track shows the interior of a room
with a piano. On it, a photograph of a woman dressed in black
and white. An Indian waiter comes in and brings a bunch of
flowers. At first, there seems to be a complete disjunction
between the soundtrack and the visual track. Further consider-
ations suggest an interplay of differences and similarities rather
than a total separation. Because the characters were first men-
tioned by the voices, the soundtrack becomes the point of
reference from which to compare what can be seen on the screen.
This situation leads the spectator to consider the soundtrack as
having a high status in relation to the truth of the story although
the truth is never unique or singular when told by two hesitant
narrators.
Similarities begin with the entry of the waiter and the
connotations attached to his costume (he is dressed in white
Hindu clothing). But the Indian characteristic is displaced from
feminine (the beggar) to masculine (the waiter). The rep-
resentation of a male to signify woman can be very disconcerting
although the dominated status of femininity is kept by the fact
that the man is a waiter and an Indian. The Indian waiter stands

132
 The films of Marguerite Duras

for repression and domination, but femininity is so strongly

repressed that it is obliterated, unrepresentable; it is there only as
absent. If the visual track fails to represent woman, it is able to
show a photograph of a young woman, how dead, which we have
identified as the late Anne-Marie Stretter.
Anne-Marie Stretter is seen for the first time quite late in the
film in shot 9, ten minutes after the beginning of the film. In shot
5, a slow pan lingers on her clothes and jewellery, traditional
signs of her gender, while the voices talk about the party, and the
love and desire between Anne-Marie Stretter and Michael
Richardson. When later we see a woman dancing with a man, we
identify them as this couple. The images are again understood in
relation to voices heard earlier and not the other way around. In
most of the shots the characters are seen reflected in mirrors.
This certainly bears some resemblance to the myth of Narcissus
and Echo, but contrary to a common use of the myth, this time
Echo recovers her place, once lost in this phallocentred system.
India Song associates the following terms: femininity, colonis-
ation, poverty, blackness, as what is repressed, to the extent of
obliteration, of unrepresentability. The visual track shows luxur-
ious decors, actors dressed in party clothes, bright lights and a
general feeling of wealth. Poverty stays off-screen, as does
blackness. The only sign of colonisation in that sumptuous house
is the presence of the waiter dressed in white. All that is
repressed is talked about by narrative voices, to which I would
like to return now in more detail.
For the first 28 shots, these women’s voices tell the story of the
past of Anne-Marie Stretter, Michael Richardson, the beggar and
the Vice-Consul by following their own random association, the
mechanisms of their memories. They contradict each other, their
own statements and the images in the visual track. The notion of
truth based on coherence quickly becomes irrelevant. The truth
of the story seems to be a collage of contradictory episodes, a
patchwork of uncertainties, of half-sewn fragments of texts at
times leaving gaps opened.
The story told by the soundtrack is punctuated by music,
background noises and numerous long silences. These pauses
contribute to creating the ragged aspect of the story and at the
same time transgress another taboo in film-making, but this time
a taboo of the soundtrack: the lack of sound. Silence is allowed in
conventional films only in very strategic moments, for example
to bring suspense. In India Song it is there to be heard as silence.
Silence is there for what cannot be expressed. Like the ‘black
screen’ used in another film by Marguerite Duras, L’Homme

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Atlantique, it signifies what is repressed to the point of complete

obliteration. Silence has always been one of the most subversive
strategies used by Marguerite Duras. In Nathalie Granger, the
silence of two women becomes terribly disruptive when a
salesman desperately tries to sell them a washing machine. To
his very wordy and lengthy speech, they offer their silence and
their mute smiles. The salesman loses his confidence and
stutters, unable to continue to play his game. According to
Marguerite Duras (1981:175) silence is very relevant to women
and to all oppressed people. Men should learn to be silent. She
considers that it is a new mode of being to be fostered.
The language of the narration used by the voices is very
unconventional: sentences are often elliptic and contain a great
number of nouns for a very few verbs, thus creating a very stilted
style. This intonation is often that of a question, with the voice
rising at the end of the sentences, and the delivery is slow and/or
hesitant. All these characteristics put into question the notion of
truth as implying logic, confidence, unity, coherence. Again, the
narration is on the negative side of the dichotomy.
The dialogues often have a poetic quality: associations between
the words are provided by rhymes, alliterations, assonances,
metaphors, rather than with logically constructed sentences. I
would like to illustrate that point with an example from two
different shots. The voices say alternately: Cette lumiére/la
mousson/cette poussiére/Calcutta Central/Il ya comme une odeur
de fleur/la lépre/OU est-on? (That light/The monsoon/The
dust/Central Calcutta/Isn’t there a smell of flowers? /Leprosy/
Where are we?) The statement il y a comme une odeur de fleur/la
lépre has a demystifying function. Flower and woman are
traditionally associated, but in this sentence leprosy comes in to
break the expectation, although the stereotype is used to create
the relationship between the three elements: Flower Woman
Leprosy. Later in this paper we will see how leprosy is closely
associated with Anne-Marie Stretter. These dialogues show noun
phrases, rhymes (lumiére/poussiére, odeur/fleur) which create a
feeling of stillness. The play on sounds, on the intonation and
rhythm, the disruption of the syntax, the multiplicity of meanings
emphasise what Julia Kristeva (1977) calls ‘the archaic dimension
of language, the semiotic’.
The semiotic relates to the ‘maternal’ in Kristevan theory. As
explained by Jane Gallop in Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1982),
‘the semiotic is a more immediate expression of the drives and is

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linked to the bodily contact with the mother before the paternal
order of language comes to separate subject from mother’, It is
‘given freer play in works of “‘art”’: it is the poetic dimension of
language’. The semiotic is seen as disruptive of the symbolic
order as it ‘sets the bodily rhythms of poetry against the linear
structures and codified representations of the symbolic’, (Kris-
teva, 1977:12). What India Song asks from spectators is very
demanding, because it asks them to question all conventional
behaviours. The spectators have to become attentive auditors,
not only voyeurs, and have to listen ‘otherwise’. Marguerite
Duras leads the spectators into the space of woman, traditionally
situated under the bar of the dichotomy masculine /feminine,
and whose elements are: femininity-sound-track-voice-poetic
language-silence-black-colonised-poverty.
But, later in the film, a male character, the Vice-Consul,
topples over the spectator’s imaginary bar of the dichotomy
masculine /feminine into the void of the voices.
The Vice-Consul has a very special place in the film: in an act
of madness, he shot at the lepers in Lahore and is now considered
as a social outcast by his colleagues. Invited by Anne-Marie
Stretter to a reception held at the Embassy (shot 24), his arrival is
accompanied by the guests’ comments: elle aurait pu nous éviter
cette présence. A Lahore personne ne le recevait (‘she should not
have imposed this person upon us.’ ‘In Lahore, no-one received
him’). During a conversation with Anne-Marie Stretter, at the
party, he declares his love for her and shows that he is aware that
other people consider him mad. He says (shot 52) je parle
faux/ma voix leur fait peur. De qui est-elle? (‘I sound false/my
voice scares them. Whom does it come from?’). It is interesting to
note that it is by the strangeness of his voice that he and others
acknowledge his madness. In that sense, he is very similar to the
beggar woman and to the female narrative voices.
The Vice-Consul sees Anne-Marie Stretter as part of himself
and they both agree that ‘they are the same’. They both have
difficulties becoming accustomed to living in Calcutta. Like the
Vice-Consul, Anne-Marie Stretter is often seen crying. Neither of
them is able to cope with the separation from their country of
origin which is for both of them the land of their mother, their
motherland in a literal sense. The arrival in India meant their
integration into the social order: for the Vice-Consul through his
work at the Embassy and for Anne-Marie Stretter as the wife of
the Ambassador. As one of the voices says (shot 21): ‘she cannot

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bear the fences around her, the guards, the officials’. Neither of
them is able to cope with the repressive institution of the
Embassy.
Music is for Anne-Marie Stretter and the Vice-Consul very
important. It reminds them of the time they were with their
respective mothers in Europe. Anne-Marie Stretter, at the time
called Anna-Maria Guardi, used to play the piano when she was
in Venice with her mother. But when she married the Am-
bassador, she stopped. She says that, since then, (shot 39) ‘a kind
of suffering is attached to music’. The Vice-Consul also talks
about his mother playing the piano when they were living in
Neuilly. While listening to ‘India Song’ played on the piano, the
Vice-Consul says (shot 35) cette musique me donne envie d’aimer
(‘this music gives me the desire to love’). Piano is a recurrent
theme in Marguerite Duras’ films: its music reminds of the
mother and is often a metaphor of desire. In the film Agatha,
music is one articulation point in the desire between mother-
son, mother-daughter and brother-sister.
To express his love for Anne-Marie Stretter, the Vice-Consul
uses maternal metaphors (shot 52): ‘You are in me, I will take you
with me and you will shoot at the lepers in Shalimar.’ He seems
to be unable to dissociate himself from her and from Lahore. He
says (shot 52): ‘Lahore, it is me.’ Lahore is the symbol of his
madness, and he is unwilling or unable to reject it. ‘I shot at
myself in Lahore without dying.’ ‘Others separate me from
Lahore, I don’t separate myself from it’. If we follow the
association made by the Vice-Consul we come to think that there
exists a series of equations between Vice-Consul-Lahore-mad-
ness-Anne-Marie Stretter. He is wishing to establish a kind of
symbiosis with these elements and that is where his madness
lies.
Madness seems to be the characteristic common to all of them,
although Anne-Marie Stretter’s madness is different. When she
was young, in Venice, she used to play music to the extent of
madness. She has always been mad, either because she was
expressing too much of herself or because she was doing what
she was supposed to do as the wife of the Ambassador, that is,
nothing. Since her marriage with him, she exhibits signs of what
has been designated as a typically feminine form of madness: a
silencing of herself; hysteria. She does not show anything of it,
and that is her madness. As one of the voices says, ‘nothing can be
seen’ but ‘she is imprisoned in a kind of suffering.’ Anne-Marie
Stretter’s madness is also expressed metaphorically as (in shots

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 The films of Marguerite Duras

19 and 38) ‘a leprosy of the heart’. Leprosy is a disease which is

often mentioned in India Song. It is a good example of the way
Marguerite Duras breaks a word meaning into a constellation of
signifiers. Leprosy is a disease affecting a lot of Indians, therefore
the repetition of the word by the voices and sentences such as
‘lepers burst like dust bags’ while the visual track is showing the
luxurious decor of the Embassy has the strength of a political
statement. It is also used as a metaphor for the shutting off of
women’s feelings in order to fit in the existing establishment.
The disease affects the nervous system, it disturbs sensations and
destroys feelings. Suffering from it consists in a general, gradual
deterioriation into insensitivity, anaesthesia. It is also a con-
tagious disease. Anne-Marie Stretter appears to have caught it at
the Embassy. As one of the voices says: les cercles fermes aux
Indes, ¢a me fait toujours penser a la lepre (‘closed circles in India
always remind me of leprosy’). Luce Irigaray (1985b) explains
hysteria by the repression of female desire which is, according to
her, common to all women. I would like to make this reference
parallel with a quotation from Marguerite Duras: ‘All women are
neurotic in my opinion’; ‘much female behaviour that one finds
normal would be considered as neurotic if exhibited in males’.
(1981:176).
Anne-Marie Stretter and the beggar suffer from a negative self-
directed sort of madness. The Vice-Consul directs his actions
more outwardly, and acts more voluntarily, by shooting at the
beggars in Lahore. But he says he would like to catch leprosy to
be like a woman, to stop his suffering. Through madness, the
Vice-Consul comes nearer the women’s world without being
totally in it. His final attempt to reach the feminine will be in his
decision to cry in the middle of the reception at the Embassy.
This act will also project him outside the fences of the park of the
Embassy, into the world of the lepers, of the outcasts.
In a major sequence lasting 25 minutes and including one shot
of ten minutes, we hear the Vice-Consul’s repeated cry. He also
calls, ‘An-na, Ma-ria Guardi’. On the screen, Anne-Marie Stretter
and Michael Richardson are seen, standing up, immobile, silent.
The disjunction between the soundtrack and the visual track
accentuates the intensity of the cry and its effect, while the
silence of the image is emphasised. As explained by Anne-Marie
Stretter, Anna-Maria Guardi is her maiden name (shot 39): ‘my
father was French, my mother was from Venice, I had kept her
name.’ So Guardi is also her mother’s and grandmother’s name,
the name of the female line of the family, and the father’s

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patronymic stays unknown. The genealogy of women-mothers is

kept functioning through the transmission of the name-of-the-
mother, and as expressed by Luce Irigaray: ‘By trying to re-
establish a genealogy of women-mothers, we are calling into
question the whole patriarchal order.” Without the name of the
father, the mother’s morality is always in doubt and the father’s
paternity can always be contested. It is interesting to note that, in
French, the sonorities of Guardi are associated with those of
‘garder’, to keep, although in Italian, it means to look (re-garder).
But what is there to keep or look after?
When Anna-Maria Guardi marries the Ambassador, her whole
name is changed: she becomes Anne-Marie Stretter. In this
transaction, not only her mother’s name is obliterated, but
another transformation also takes place, Anna-Maria becomes
Anne-Marie. The a becomes e. In French the two vowels are
feminine gender marks, but the a is heard whereas the e is silent.
Is that the sign for the reduction to silence of the feminine? In
French marie also means ‘to marry’ and Maria is the past tense,
‘married’. The name Anne-Maria Guardi tells us not only that the
female line is preserved but the word maria (i.e. the preterite) (in
English, ‘married’) reveals the desire between the mother and the
daughter—opening a new possible field of exploration of the
‘feminine’ in the subversion of the mother-daughter incest
taboo.
When she marries the Ambassador, the symbiotic relationship
between the mother and the daughter is replaced by the marriage
institution. Anna-Maria Guardi has adopted ‘the name-of-the-
father’ and has entered what Lacan calls ‘the symbolic order’,
under the name of the Husband. It is interesting to note that the
sonorities of ‘Stretter’ are very hard in French because of the t
and the r, and that in German, Stretter means to quarrel /argue.
When the Vice-Consul cries out ‘Anna-Maria Guardi’, he also
adds, gardez-moi (keep me with you) which reinforces the
association made with garder, to keep contained in Guardi, and
reverses the mother-child relationship he has expressed earlier
when he said to Anne-Marie Stretter, ‘You are in me’.
The Vice-Consul is calling the feminine within himself and in
Anne-Marie Stretter. As one of the voices says, il crie son nom de
Venise dans Calcutta desert, that is, he calls Anna-Maria Guardi,
in Anne-Marie Stretter. He is calling the feminine which had
been silenced by patriarchal order, and of which the names are
the metaphors. A previous shot had revealed that obliteration of
the feminine, when one of the narrative voices was reading, very

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slowly, detaching each syllable, the names on Anne-Marie

Stretter’s grave, ‘Anne-Marie Stretter written on the grave,
Anna-Maria Guardi erased’. It is read so as to make us hear
otherwise. On the screen, the Vice-Consul is shown with tears
running down his cheeks.
The dramatic cry of the Vice-Consul is also a disruptive act for
the phallocratic order represented here by the reception at the
Embassy. It is an emotional act out of keeping with his social
position. Although it does create a scandal, one of the guests
admits, ‘don’t you think, we could all cry’? Maybe they could all
cry, but it would be at the risk of being excluded from the
existing order. To illustrate that, on the screen, the image shows
the Vice-Consul walking in the streets of Calcutta. It is the first
time in the film apart from the opening shot, when we see outside
the fences of the park of the Embassy. The Vice-Consul is now
projected into the world of the lepers, of the poor, of the outcasts,
of the mad, of the other.
This sequence finalises the breakdown of the dichotomy
masculine/feminine by showing the Vice-Consul’s search for
the feminine. At this point, it seems to me that Marguerite Duras
is really ‘putting into practice’ the question quoted earlier in this
chapter: ‘when we have a male in front of us, we could ask does
he have some female in him?’
In this chapter I have shown how, by repositioning the
oppressed element of the masculine/feminine dichotomy as the
point of departure of her film, Marguerite Duras deconstructs the
dichotomic system. The feminine with its paradigm silence,
madness, colonised, blackness, outcasts, becomes the reference
point for the narration and its characters. But the feminine is not
essentially tied up with gender and the Vice-Consul’s cry
finishes undoing the dichotomy. Marguerite Duras does not
simply reverse the phallocentric system, she shows that the
opposition of the two terms is an illusion since in men the
feminine can also be present. In the film India Song the strategies
at work echo those suggested by Luce Irigaray for a redefinition
of the language that would leave space for the feminine: ‘There
would no longer be either a right side or a wrong side of discourse
or even of texts, but each passing from one to the other would
make audible and comprehensible even what resists the recto-
verso structure that supports commonsense.’ (quoted in Johnson,
1981).
aon what India Song makes audible is the name of the mother
and her voice.

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8 Cross-dressing in fiction: literary
history and the cultural
construction of sexuality

Virginia Blain

T HE TITLE of this chapter plays on the titles of three texts, all

novels from the 1890s: The Woman Who Did and The
Woman Who Didn't, both published by John Lane and
Company, in 1895, and Six Chapters of a Man’s Life, published by
the Walter Scott Publishing Company, Ltd in 1904 (but probably
written earlier). All three form part of that turn-of-the-centruy
literary debate perceived by literary historians as a debate about
the phenomenon of the ‘New Woman’. The publishers’ names
are significant because, as Kay Daniels first pointed out (1972—
73:7), novels dealing with this topic in explicitly sexual terms
were not accepted by the respectable publishing houses, who
may none the less have come to regret their decisions in the face
of the outstanding popular success of these ‘immoral’ texts.
The question of the representation of women and the modes of
femininity attributed to them in fiction is an important issue at
present in literary criticism. These three novels, published either
just before or just after the end of the Queen Victoria’s reign,
raise certain questions which centre on the then controversial
topic of emancipated woman—or the New Woman, as this
construction was dubbed—and its relation to late Victorian
representations of femininity. Was femininity seen as inimical to

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a New Woman? Was it to be suppressed, or redefined, in

discourses representing her? Was the New Woman to be held
responsible for ‘free love’? Was maternity to remain an essential
ingredient of femininity? Was the New’Woman to be rewritten as
masculine? Is the New Woman really a Man?
This last question, often posed at the time, is a key one, as it
reveals a threat to masculinity disguised behind the apparent
threat to femininity implied by redefinitions and redescriptions
of women. I am going to argue in this chapter that women can be
described as representing traits both feminine and masculine (as,
indeed, can men). I will also assume that masculinity and
femininity are not simply terms of a binary opposition, but
instead represent a socially constructed hierarchy. That is, not
only are masculinity and femininity defined as polar opposites
whose (ideal) features contain mutually exclusive character-
istics, but in addition, masculinity has arrogated to itself the right
to judge and define the ‘proper’ characteristics of femininity.
However, while I claim that both sexes have access to masculine
and feminine characteristics, it is important to recognise that
each sex takes on these attributes in different ways, with very
different results. Any assumption of masculine characteristics by
women—or representation of masculinity as part of a female
character in a novel—still asks to be be read differently from the
representation of men’s masculinity, as Gatens (1983) has argued.
Any move by women to take on any of the characteristics of
masculinity (like muscular strength, or force of intellect) calls
out in men and women alike a fear of their potency that can only
be appeased by a reabsorption of women into that subordinate
feminine category. Hence the fear of the emasculating potential
of the New Woman that lies behind the contemporary Victorian
concerns about a perceived link between female emancipation
and cultural decadence, documented by Linda Dowling
(1979:447).
In conjunction with an examination of some specifically
located late Victorian notions of femininity and masculinity, I
want also to bring into account the role played by contemporary
reviewers and subsequent literary critics in the construction and
validation of literary history itself. In particular, I want to
question the validity of assigning a key place in literary history to
just one of these texts, Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did, while
ignoring the significance of the others.
Grounds given by literary historians for the place of Allen’s
text—its importance as an index of popular interest in questions

14]
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

of female emancipation and ‘free love’, rather than any intrinsic

literary merit (Fernando, 1977:132; Cunningham, 1978:62)—are
convincing enough. It was certainly popular, running through 21
editions in its first year and netting its author £1000 per annum in
royalties (Fernando, 1977:131; Cunningham, 1978:63). But the
other two texts also have strong claims to the same kind of
position in literary history: The Woman Who Didn’t as the most
directly feminist response to The Woman Who Did, challenging
many of the assumptions about female sexuality put forward in
that text; and Six Chapters as an important development of the
same debate, equally ‘popular’ in terms of sales (my undated but
still early copy is the forty-first edition). I want now to look at
each of these texts in more detail.
What Allen’s ‘Woman Who Did’ did, of course, was to live with
a man without marrying him, on the grounds that marriage law
was inequitable and went against her feminist principles. Thus
this novel symmetrically reverses conventional morality, making
marriage the immoral, and free love the moral choice. Herminia
receives her lover’s marriage proposal ‘with a flush of shame and
horror’; as Cunningham puts it: ‘the exact equivalent of the
conventionally pure woman’s reaction to a proposal for an
adulterous relationship’ (p. 61). By the end of the book, however,
having done what she did, and stuck to her principles, despite
suffering her lover’s untimely death and the hardships of single
motherhood, Herminia is faced with her daughter’s rejection of
her. This much-cherished daughter, for whom she has suffered
and in whom she invests all her hopes for the freeing of half the
human race from aeons of slavery, ends by despising her
mother’s martyrdom and determinedly avoiding it herself by
getting married as fast as possible. Our heroine then takes prussic
acid in the name of truth: ‘Not for nothing’, we read, ‘does blind
fate vouchsafe such martyrs to humanity. From their graves shall
spring glorious the church of the future.’ (Allen, 1895:240)
The male author of The Woman Who Did proclaimed himself
an ardent supporter of modern woman’s fight for freedom.
Naturally enough many modern women didn’t agree with his
reading of What the New Woman Wants. Millicent Garrett
Fawcett, the leader of the constitutional suffrage movement in
England, reviewed the book with a cruel wit, dwelling ironically
on its many absurdities. The final death scene, for instance, is
described prettily in the novel in terms of the donning of
appropriate dress and flowers by the heroine intending suicide:

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 Cross-dressing in fiction

‘In her bosom she fastened two innocent white roses... arrang-
ing them with studious care very daintily before her mirror. She
was always a woman.’ ‘A woman’ here is femininity, and
femininity itself almost becomes a euphemism for the ultimate
passivity of death. After drinking her prussic acid, Herminia
arranges herself fetchingly on her deathbed ‘and waited for the
only friend she had left in the world, with hands folded on her
breast, like some saint of the middle ages’. (Allen, 1895:240) Any
solemnity is disposed of in Fawcett’s acerbic description:

My experience of prussic acid is very limited; but I

once knew a cat who took it, and if its effects are equally
rapid on human beings, Herminia would have done
well to lie down on her bed, arrange the folds of her
drapery and compose herself into a saintlike attitude,
before she drank the poison. The cat’s ‘only friend left in
the world’ did not keep her waiting a single second.
She had no time even to strike an attitude. (Fawcett,
1895:629)

Herminia is not a mortal being as she dies: however, she is

feminine. Fawcett objects to the book’s presumption to speak for
women and for feminism, while in fact doing their cause an
enormous disservice by linking feminism with precisely the
doctrine most calculated to turn public opinion against the idea
of women’s emancipation—the doctrine of ‘free love’. She also
objects to its representation of women as beings locked into a
male-devised femininity which still insists on their ultimate
passivity while exalting their moral purity and prating about new
freedoms—another version of the old Victorian double standard,
in fact. But for Grant Allen and his ilk, a New Woman would be
inconceivable as woman if she lost her femininity. Since fem-
ininity constitutes the grounds of masculine desire, a divorce
between women and femininity is unthinkable.
Fawcett was not alone in her objections to this novel, though
others were made on different grounds. A reviewer in The Critic
points out that although ‘“Free Love” is [Allen’s motto]—yet the
book is dedicated to his dear wife’, while The Bookman objected,
more predictably, that ‘his glorification of the mere brute instinct
of mating is senseless and shallow’. In the Academy, however,
Allen found a supporter in the shape of a reviewer called Percy
Addleshaw, who claims, ‘there is not a- sensual thought or

143
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

suggestion throughout the whole volume’, and ends by assuring

us, perhaps somewhat ambiguously, that ‘there is no doubt that
his story was worth telling, and that it is swiftly told’. Another
reviewer comments that the aim of the book unconsciously
subverts itself: ‘From a plea for free love, the tale is changed into
a powerful argument for the rights of children’ (The Critic).
Meanwhile, Punch parodied Herminia’s eternal cry ‘the truth
had made women free’ into: ‘the terewth had made them free and
easy’; while a rash of suggestions for sequels included: The
Woman Who Couldn’t and The Woman Who Would If She
Could—and other such predictable jokes.
Several fictional ripostes to Allen’s book were in fact published
in the same year—1895—and all written by women. The Man
Who Didn’t, dedicated ‘to Married Men’ by Mrs Lovett Cameron,
is a short rather insignificant comedy proposing that children
should be maintained by the nation. More elaborate is the
argument put forward by Adeline Kingscote, under the male
pseudonym ‘Lucas Cleeve’, in The Woman Who Wouldn’t. Here
the Herminia-figure (renamed Opalia) addresses the question
avoided or elided in Allen’s book: that of asymmetry, or unequal
power balance in any male—female sexual relationship. Opalia
says: ‘I read a book once in which the heroine would not go
through the form of marriage in church for fear she should lose
her liberty, yet every action of her life showed that her liberty
had gone, whether she defied the conventional laws of society or
not’. (p.11) This is clearly a critical reference to Herminia in The
Woman Who Did. Opalia recognises that there is no such thing as
‘free’ love between unequal parties, and so she resolves to do the
opposite of Herminia, in effect, by agreeing to a companionate
marriage with the friendship and intellectual companionship for
which he says he is asking, and refusing the bestiality of sex. In
the end, however, she comes to see that women are forced to
‘succumb’ to sex in order to keep their men, so she becomes
submissive and is rewarded with a child, whom, fortunately or
unfortunately, we don’t see grow up to reject her.
Clearly a big stumbling biock for the representation of the New
Woman was her maternal function. Could a woman be represent-
ed as feminine if this function were not somehow accommodat-
ed? Allen’s book had laid its emphasis on motherhood as a
compulsory part of the representation of femininity: ‘Every
woman should naturally live her whole life, to fulfil her whole
functions; and that she could do only by becoming a mother,
accepting the orbit for which nature designed her.’ (p.73) Nature
always has a lot to answer for in these arguments. A concept of fe-

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 Cross-dressing in fiction

male eroticism divorced from notions involving maternity is a

long way off in a text like Allen’s, and, presumably, in a society
which popularised such a text. In fact this society’s chief fear was
of the femme fatale—the Belle Damé Sans Merci—and it is
precisely this image which emerges in the second of my three
texts.
The most interesting of the now-forgotten fictional ripostes to
The Woman Who Did, this is precisely the one which defuses the
issue of motherhood by making it irrelevant. This is the novel
called The Woman Who Didn’t, written by Vivian Cory, who took
the rather extraordinary pseudonym ‘Victoria Crosse’. The
Woman Who Didn’t was her first full-length publication, and it
was published by John Lane in a volume uniform with Grant
Allen’s novel, even down to a matching title page, thus giving the
impression of being the ‘authorised’ sequel to Allen’s book.
Here the man falls in love on board ship with a woman called
Eurydice, but the passion between them is never consummated.

THE WOMAN WHO DID THE WOMAN WHO DIDN'T

BY OG RIAN PCA EN BY VICTORIA CROSSE

LONDON: JOHN LANE, VIGO ST

BOSTON: ROBERTS BROS., 1895

LONDON: JOHN LANE, VIGO ST

BOSTON: ROBERTS BROS.. 1595

i
‘i
owi
Cda)
o.ReAs

ih o
.N
i

2)
.

Se |
F<,=
ae

Title pages of The Woman Who Did by Grant Allen and The Woman
Who Didn’t by Victoria Crosse, published by John Lane in 1895. The
similarity of design is clearly intentional.

145
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

She is married to another, and though her husband fills his time
with other women, leaving her entirely to her own devices (only
his portmanteau appears in the novel, not his person) she is
tempted neither to divorce nor to cuckold him, having made up
her mind, as she says, that matrimony is a holy tie, however
faulty individual cases may appear. Yet the whole novel is
sustained by an unresolved sexual tension which is only ended
by the lover’s departure back to the East. This lover is also the
narrator, and so the tension can be ascribed primarily to him,
which allows Eurydice to remain more ambiguous, shifting roles
between femme fatale and preacher of duty. Clearly enough, on
one reading, she enjoys power and has consciously conceived a
way to achieve it. Yet the masculine subject-position taken up by
a text signed by a woman adds an unusual dimension of dramatic
irony to the reader’s experience of the text. Eurydice’s own sense
ot irony about the masculine will to power is apparent. Her first
speech, which instantly draws the narrator’s attention, in fact
opens the narrative, which begins:

‘But why not pay them? We may just as well now as

when we reach the ship.’
The words came in a clear, cultivated woman’s
voice through the foggy duskiness of an Egyptian night,
from the farther end of the boat, which swayed slightly
from side to side on the smoothly heaving water. (Crosse,
1895:1)

It turns out that the other British passengers are causing delay by
insultingly refusing to pay the deferential African boatmen until
they have been conveyed out to their ship, with the dis-
honourable intention of not paying at all, and the narrator-hero is
fascinated by the self-possession of a woman who will address a
whole boatload of racist fellow countrymen with supercilious
scepticism and shame them into paying; as indeed she does, by
going on to say: ‘“I should pay now; if you mean to at all”’. (p.3)
What is set up in such an opening is the woman’s exposure of a
racist power nexus, which is subsequently transformed by its
context into a metaphor for the exposure of sexism. Just as
Eurydice disrupts the racist hierarchisation of British and
Africans, so does the subsequent text attempt an analogous dis-
ruption of the masculine/feminine hierarchy by representing
the woman as ‘in control’ of the man’s sexuality; but it is a
disruption that ends here merely in negation. Clearly sexual

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intercourse is not to be had on terms other than those posited by

such a hierarchy. Reviewers appear to have been universally dis-
satisfied with the book, the Saturday Review finding it ‘instinct
with vulgarity from cover to cover’, but having ‘no doubt it will
be extensively read by the nasty-minded pure’ (21 September
1895). The Athenaeum found the tone disagreeable: ‘her book
positively reeks of whiskeys and sodas and of physical passion.
Even the treatment of the heroine’s purity becomes offensive by
a sort of nauseous insistence on it; and altogether, if any advocate
is needed for the sanctity of the marriage tie, Victoria Crosse
certainly does not supply the place.’ (14 September 1895)
Of course we can read these objections as springing at least in
part from a resentment of an authorial ‘she’ taking on a male
preserve of whiskeys and sodas and physical passion (even with
the safeguard of a male narrator). But it is undeniable that the
book does not add up to a good argument for retaining the
sanctity of the marriage tie, just as it does not, despite its cheeky
reversals of Grant Allen’s story, effect any real transgression of
the dominance of masculinity and the submissiveness of femin-
inity. Playing the role of a Eurydice, a version of the femme
fatale, still confirms femininity as no more than a projection of
masculine desire. As a reviewer in The Critic (25 July 1896)
remarked, rather patronisingly but with some justice, ‘it would
take a stronger antagonist to dislodge [Grant Allen]’ despite the
courage shown, as he puts it, by ‘the young lady who writes
under the name of Victoria Crosse [who] may or may not have
chosen her nom de guerre with the idea of claiming distinguished
gallantry in the face of the enemy’. Queen Victoria had instituted
this highest of military awards in 1856, probably to lift flagging
military spirits after the Crimean War. To take such a revered
symbol of Britain’s imperial power as a mere sobriquet was
certainly a provocative gesture.
In 1903, two years after the Queen’s death and seven years
after the appearance of her own first novel, Victoria Crosse
published Six Chapters of a Man’s Life, which is the third and last
novel I shall deal with here, and which is much more daring in its
approach to sexual questions. Oddly enough, there is evidence to
show that this book too may have been written in 1895. One of its
less outrageous chapters appeared in The Yellow Book in that
year, under the title ‘Theodora: A Fragment’. Since Victoria
Crosse had a penchant for meaningful names, I might mention
that Theodora was the scandalous wife of the Roman emperor
Justinian, who changed the law in order to be able to marry her,

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

as she had been an actress and a prostitute. He then divided his

power with her in an unprecedented act of good faith, and of
course, according to Gibbon she abused it. (There is an ironic
textual reference to Gibbon’s Theodora.) Whether the rest of the
text was too daring to achieve publication until its author’s name
was well established by her intervening publications we cannot
know. By 1903 the author, or her publisher, had dropped the e
from the end of the Cross: was this in order to take up more
defiantly still such an ironically adopted pseudonym of mascu-
line valour? Or was it to suggest more immediately another con-
notation of the word Cross; not heroism or martyrdom, not anger
or angles, but an idea contained in the verb ‘to cross’, and
released more easily without the substantive weight of that final
e? Cross-dressing, perhaps? I am thinking here specifically of the
implications of a male narrator’s position when taken up by a
writer who signs herself as female; who adopts not a male
pseudonym (like Lucas Cleeve or George Eliot) but a female one.
However much the name Victoria Cross plays on concepts of
masculine militarism and masculine honour, it is none the less a
woman’s name—to say nothing of a queen’s.
In any case, what I would like to suggest in my discussion of Six
Chapters is the possibility that this particular text contains a
more radical disruption of the hierarchical structure of mascu-
linity/femininity than any of those encompassed by the seem-
ingly so daring linkages of the New Woman and free love in the
mid-1890s. This is a disruption that I would certainly wish to link
back to 1895, a vintage year, of course, for sensations in literary
circles, when we remember not only women who Did or Didn't,
but also the furore created by the publication of Jude the Obscure
on the one hand and the scandal of Oscar Wilde’s trial on the
other. Indeed it is possible that the latter event rather than the
former would be found to provide a more crucial link in my
theme of crossing, whether it be confined to textual cross-
dressing or extended to other forms of travesty and transgression.
And it was Wilde, after all, who is credited with the remark: ‘If
one could only marry Thomas Hardy to Victoria Cross he might
gain something of real passion’ (Stokes 1928:75).
Six Chapters of a Man’s Life has a simple enough plot, made
complex by the kind of sexual ambiguities it articulates. It is a
text which would add weight to Shoshana Felman’s thesis about
Balzac’s Girl with the Golden Eyes, in which she poses the
question: ‘are not sex roles but travesties of the ambiguous
complexity of real sexuality, of real sexual difference?’ (1981:28).
Six Chapters is a novel written by a woman from a man’s point of

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view about a man who falls in love with a woman who looks like
aman...
As in The Woman Who Didn't, the narrator here is also the hero
of the story. Called Cecil (still an ambiguously gendered name in
the nineteenth century), he is represented as a man of the world;
young, handsome, knowing and cynical, with a good deal of
sexual experience and no very good opinion of women, whom he
regards quite naturally as his intellectual inferiors. Thus far, very
conventional. Then, he meets Theodora, introduced to him at a
party by a friend who assures him he will like her, notwith-
standing her moustache. In fact, the moustache becomes the sign
by which he expects to identify her as he awaits her entrance into
the room:
I knew I must recognise Theodora by her peculiarity,
and I scanned the upper lip of all the girls who passed,
but without result. I was beginning to think she could
not be in the room, when my eyes were suddenly
attracted, for no reason that I was conscious of, from
the ring of dancers passing round the room to some in
the centre. And there, coming down the middle of the
room, under the full flood of light, was the face I was
looking for. My attention was so riveted upon the face
that I was not conscious of what figure belonged to it,
nor did I see the shoulders that bore it. It might have
been floating down towards me on the stream of light.
What a face it was, too! White, so that it looked
blanched under the pale, changeful electric light, and
lent a curious lustre by its gleaming, brilliant,
swimming eyes. The mouth was a delicate curve of the
brightest scarlet, and above, on the upper lip, was the
sign I looked for, a narrow, glossy, black line. It was a
handsome face of course, but that alone would not
have excited my particular attention. One sees so many
handsome faces. But such a tremendous force of
intellect sat on the brow... such a curious fire shone in
the scintillating eyes, and such a peculiar half-male
character invested the whole countenance, that I felt
violently attracted to it merely from its peculiarity.
(Cross, 1903:12-14)
Apart from these mannish traits, her body is utterly feminine, not
in terms of voluptuousness but a kind of strange bonelessness, so
that even grasping her hand is to sink into her flesh:

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

It was a very curious hand, so extremely soft that as

my fingers closed tighter and tighter over it, it seemed to
yield and yield and collapse more and more like a
piece of velvet within one’s grasp. (p.29)
What is going on? Is it a projection of epicene fantasy for
pornographic effect? Or might it be a serious social critique of the
fixity of sexual desire in those value-laden representations
which never transgress the man-made barriers of masculinity
and femininity? Let us go on.
After talking with Theodora about religion and morality, and
discovering that she shares with him the socially unacceptable
view that both are things of fashion which vary directly with the
latitude, it appears to be but a step to the question of a sexual
liaison. But there is a barrier for Cecil. He discovers that
Theodora is an heiress who will lose her fortune if she either
marries or forms an illegal union with a man (that is, if she Does
or if she Doesn’t). This is already an interesting change in the
power dynamic from the earlier novel, since it removes the red
herring of placing the institution of marriage as the basis of the
sexual hierarchisation of power, and focuses directly onto the
hierarchisation implicit in all representation of masculinity and
femininity in terms of sexual desire.
The economic barrier to the characters’ union threatens to
become a deadlock, as Cecil decides he does not want the
responsibility either of a disinherited wife in England or of a
female companion on his travels back to his archaeological work
in the East. He decides to forgo passion and keep his freedom.
However, just as he is about to depart on the boat train, Theodora
arrives at his lodgings and asks to accompany him. She is dressed
as a man, or rather, ‘some handsome boy of nineteen or twenty’
(p.121), and in this guise, Cecil finds her irresistible. He has
already told us that he ‘disliked in a mild, theoretical way,
women in the general term. I had an aversion, slight and faint it is
true, but still an aversion, to everything suggestively femin-
ine...’ (p.78). Her action, in coming to seek him out in the face of
his previous cold suppression of his desire for her, is decidedly
unfeminine, yet again this action is rendered ambiguous by its
representation of recklessness as a kind of will-lessness:
It was her sudden, complete abandonment of self, the
entire throwing away of her own will, the apparent
absolute merging of all volition into another’s, that
must have always set ablaze all the manhood of a man
who loved her. (p.118)

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Masculinity is here blurred with femininity, which in turn

becomes the projection of a passive (masculine) desire that
masculinity cannot tolerate within itself. At this point we might
possibly feel tempted to read the text as a disguised rep-
resentation of male homosexual desire masking a disavowed
lesbian desire. But I think such a reading would be reductive if it
failed to point out the ways in which such categories are in
themselves man-made. This text is transgressive not because it
represents erotic desires in terms of role-playing characters, but
because in doing so it disturbs the rigid boundaries polarising the
two sexes and opens up the socially constructed hierarchisation
of sexuality to a new form of critique which I will now attempt to
demonstrate.
The sense of this critique emerges slowly as one reads the text.
Theodora becomes Theodore, a charming young man, for the
other passengers on the boat to the East; and other young female
passengers flirt with him/her. Cecil’s possessive jealousy is
aroused no less by this same-sex flirtation than it had been
earlier, in a hotel in Marseilles, when he discovers Theodore
playing cards in another man’s bedroom. There is no safety in
such mirrored intensities of role-playing. Safety for what? The
answer this text throws up is: masculine power when deprived of
feminine submissiveness. While Theodora’s role-playing re-
mains under Cecil’s control, there is no problem, only height-
ened pleasure for him. For instance, as he says about playing
billiards with her (a game in which she excels): ‘If Iwon, I had the
satisfaction of beating a better player than myself; if I lost,
Theodora was my property, a part of myself...’ (p. 165)
Elsewhere, the impulse to control is clearly represented as part of
Cecil’s masculine desire, and as the book progresses, we see
Theodora cleverly playing on this desire to keep it at its height.
The desire of femininity is, of course, masculine desire: the
desire of masculine dominance for feminine submission. By the
time we reach the climax, it is clear that there is no return to
‘normality’ possibly commensurate with the expanded desires
conjured up by the rendering ambiguous of the woman’s sex-
role. And indeed, after an extraordinary crisis point is reached,
the denouement comes.
Theodora’s feminine ‘purity’ is about to be fatally com-
promised by her being held hostage to a violent and powerful
stranger who wants sexual intercourse with her precisely
because of her sexual ambiguity. At this point the text un-
compromisingly reveals the compromised nature of masculine
‘honour’. Cecil wants to shoot Theodora so that she will not be

15]
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

raped. She does not wish to be either raped or shot, but if forced
to choose, would prefer the former. She pleads with Cecil not to
kill her, but he, as he says, ‘longed to destroy her now, as [he] had
once longed to possess her’ (p. 248). He then says to her:
‘You value your life above your honour, then?’
‘Infinitely,’ she returned cynically, her face pale as
that of a corpse already, and her eyes suddenly blazing
with mockery and contempt.
‘I do not, then,’ I said in a low tone, my hand
clasping tightly the revolver.
‘I daresay!’ answered Theodora, and the light
scornful tone cut through my brain like a knife. ‘My
honour! A convenient term for the preservation to
yourself and your own egotistical, jealous, tyrannical
passion, of this flesh and blood.’ (pp. 248-9).
Her refusal of a Lucretia’s role throws into relief precisely those
elements of masculinity that she has hitherto so assiduously
fostered. Both characters have been trapped by the confines of
the very sexual dichotomy they saw themselves as having
transgressed. As she looks defiantly back down the gun barrel he
points at her, it is what he terms the ‘male’ character of that look
that drives him on in his desire to subjugate her. In possessing a
‘her’ who also comprises a ‘him’, he attains her femininity by
subjugating her masculinity. As Shoshana Felman has remarked
in a related context: ‘the substitution of woman for man and of
man for woman, the interchangeability and the reversibility of
masculine and feminine manifests a discord which subverts the
limits and compromises the coherence of each of the two
principles’ (1981:31).
Any idea of femininity as pure difference or as capable of
autonomy is indeed suppressed in such a substitution. Yet if
Gatens’ argument is right, and masculinity in men reads dif-
ferently from masculinity in women, Felman’s position is
problematised. In this text the suppression of femininity (rather
than its simple substitution or replacement by masculinity) does
not go unchallenged; masculinity is subverted from within by the
‘cross-dressing’ of the narrator, which takes the form of a
continual play on notions of clear-cut sexual difference. By his
constant foregrounding of femininity as a problem for masculin-
ity, the narrator-hero necessarily spotlights his own masculinity.
Yet simultaneously with the reader’s attention being drawn in
this way to his masculinity, comes the reader’s awareness of its

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fictional nature: the story must ultimately purport to emanate

not from a male subject (the narrator) but from a female subject,
the book’s signed author. In other words, the gap between the
position of enunciation and the position of the narrator is used, in
a sense, simultaneously to confuse and titillate the reader’s
expectations, and to destabilise the boundaries of both cat-
egories, highlighting not their difference but their ambiguous
overlap.
Furthermore, this extraordinary novel, in its critique of mascu-
linity, both implicit and oyert, opens a way for the possibility of a
new conception of feminine pleasure. One of the first and crucial
steps towards this is the representation of a femininity inde-
pendent of woman’s maternal function (Theodora says: ‘I should
detest the man who made me a mother’ (p. 163)). Such a
separation of femininity from maternity would scarcely have
been approved even by women as emancipated as Millicent
Garrett Fawcett. Nonetheless it can be seen, I think, as a radical
attempt to refocus the debate about the New Woman away from
questions of functionality and towards questions of pleasure: a
very different path from that laid out by Allen’s pseudo-radical
text. In this context, the name ‘Victoria Cross’ does take on a new
connotation of an entirely subversive kind of female gallantry.
If literary historians avoid the task of contextualising popular
landmarks like Allen’s The Woman Who Did, then the very
grounds upon which its minor canonisation rests are open to
serious misreading. It was not the mere fact of its popularity, as
critics like Cunningham and Fernando imply, that has led to its
historical status: rather, it is the controversial nature of that
‘popularity’, which can only be interpreted in the light of the
debate it bought into. The works of Victoria Cross(e) lay no more
claim to ‘literary’ merit than Allen’s book, but in popularity they
were at least equal. Can it be that the questions they raise, in
regard not only to Alen’s book but also to their whole cultural
ethos, have themselves been marginalised by the bias of literary
historians? Questions, that is, of the ways in which these three
novels problematise (with differing success) the polarisation and
hierarchisation of masculinity and femininity, by exploring the
ambiguous (and sometimes intolerable) crossing of sexual
boundaries by the creation of figures (narrators and characters)
who take on gender characteristics opposed to their sex. This is
not simply a literary transsexualism, but blurs the presumed op-
position between masculine and feminine and inverts the hier-
archical privilege of masculinity.

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9 Homosexualities: fiction,
reading and moral training

Michael Hurley

Golden-haired boy on the edge of a street

In his tight blue jeans on his lonely beat.
Hush! Hush!
I’m rather afraid
Christopher Robin is looking for trade.
John Waller (1983:327)

A young fellow standing near a street lamp came into

its light, while approaching Michael modestly. His small
hands were manicured, his.fine wrists and delicate
neck were blackish as with coaldust, but his hairless
face, with oval cheeks, was pink and powdered. His
eyes, large and timid, looked appealingly at Michael.
Michael brushed rudely past him. The boy retreated to
the fence once more to wait. Michael heard steps, the
boy coming after him, he thought, and he looked
back—only a tram conductor going home from the
depot.
Christina Stead (1934:245)

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 Homosexualities

A ND sO, with the Waller text, a disrupted innocence: an

innocence established through the repetition of familiar
verse patterns, phrasing and naming; a genre of English
whimsy celebrated, dispersed, rewritten. Desire is sexualised,
specified. It is male, ambivalently masculine, softened from the
harshness of manhood by being a boy’s story, yet raunchified: a
social organisation of desire particularised by ‘beat’ and ‘trade’,
signifiers of availability, of importunity. As a hedonistic natural-
isation of a metropolitan male homosexual voice, the register is
knowing, divinable, already known to some. It is a rebellious
naturalisation of identity, of sexuality.
And my second cameo: another boy, ‘a young fellow’. Again
importunate, but this time feminised. Unnatural, yet also a
recognisable figure in a continuously moving series of more or
less carefully particularised constructions of male (homo)sexu-
ality. This time, in a demonstration of metonymic fluidity, the
‘young fellow’ is without torso or legs, a bust with arms: an
aggregation of segmented, cosmetic detail (eyes, hands, wrists,
face) and movement. Incapable of metamorphosis into a tram
conductor, signifier of a decent masculinity, the boy preys
ineffectually on the socially distressed yet assertive male,
Michael. A second naturalisation of identities, of sexualities. _
My concerns are with the discursive construction and textual
deployments of sexualised identities; with the body as a site of
conflicting desires socially organised and unified around the
constructs ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’; with the textual organisation
and disruption of (homo)sexualities. And while my pretexts and
prefaces are male, the bodies of my discussion are female and
male. I am following several unfinished lines of thought, around
two different areas, first, the textuality of novels, and, second,
homosexualities and their social construction: the discursive
construction of homosexualities within fiction and readings of
them from both inside and outside the literary academy.
Two working assumptions underlie what follows. The first is
that fiction does not stand alone: the novel occupies a different
social space according to how the ‘social’ itself is constructed at
any given time (Weeks, 1985:178). In the late nineteenth century
the popular novel is constructed as socially dangerous (Leavis,
1932; Williams, 1971; Jackson, 1981). For much of the twentieth
century it is a device for moral training. The second assumption
is that a major social function of English studies, as administered
in secondary and tertiary education, is to produce a secular moral

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

subject; an individual capable of ‘intimate and infinite self-

correction’ (King, 1985:21). English studies is a moral technology,
a series of social techniques, skills and trainings which produce
and value a particular mode of subjectivity.
Terry Eagleton recently described it this way:
What Literature teaches is not so much this or that
moral value... It teaches us rather to be—let me
rehearse some of the cherished terms—sensitive,
imaginative, responsive, sympathetic, creative,
perceptive, reflective. Notice the resounding
intransitivity of all these familiar shibboleths. The task
of the moral technology of Literature is to produce an
historically peculiar form of human subject who is
sensitive, receptive, imaginative, and so on... about
nothing in particular... Literature is that process in
which the quality of the response is more significiant
than the quality of the object... What’s important is just
the production of a specific form of subjectivity, about
which we can say—quite intransitively—that it is
sensitive, creative, imaginative and so on. (1985:3)
Several objections might be made to Eagleton here. He universal-
ises the institution of literature, underestimating the effects of
exposure to a variety of criticisms, and their purchase in
different schooling systems. It is quite clear to any participant
observer of English studies that the ‘sensitive’ political choices
made by literary liberal humanists, for example, in the texts
chosen for study, in the readings of them that are circulated and
approved, do not forclose resistant readings and practices. The
justification for these choices may claim political neutrality, but
secondary classrooms are not successful machines of total
control. What is more, Eagleton’s ‘subjectivity’ is as conceptually
limited as the one he criticises (Greenfield 1984). Even if for
polemical purposes, his positing of subjectivity as an effect of a
limited range of critical practices is underdeveloped. This sim-
plicity is compounded by the later unproblematical linking of
them to a set of class interests (1985:5). He ignores, deliberately
no doubt, the implications of his excursion into Foucauldian
analysis, in particular the need for a more extensive theory
which connects techniques of reading with technologies of self-
formation.

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 Homosexualities

As an opening manoeuvre in the development of such a theory,

[ want to turn instead to the work of Catherine Greenfield (1983)
and Ian Hunter (1982, 1983, 1984a, 1984b). For reasons of time
and space, I want to take for granteti Hunter’s claim that the
literary sense is an ‘artefact of a whole social technology; the
point at which techniques of reading, disciplinary training and
the requirements of modern sociality are focussed in the forma-
tion of a secular conscience’ (1984a:132). If some version of this is
the case, and there are other reasons for thinking so (Bennett,
1979, 1985), the field of literary studies has nothing intrinsically
‘aesthetic’ about it. Reading, rather than recovering an act of
vision on the part of the writer, ‘indicates the definite recog-
nition-effects produced by the iteration of certain rules and
practices’ (1982:82). When institutionally formalised in critical
practices, these rules create the literary as an object of study:
reading trains ‘people in a specific mode of textual consumption’
(1982:88). This training is what produces in English departments
Eagleton’s morally sensitive critic whose primary occupation is
the endless repetition of commentaries on selected pieces of
writing. However, for Hunter, it is the training effect (the
transmission of ‘definite criteria of textual recognition’) that
matters here, rather than the sensitivity.
The possibility of non-literary readings of ‘literary’ texts
indicates that literary commentary involves a specific training of
readers. Whether literary or otherwise, different readings of texts
indicate different trainings, not simply differences in subjective
(private) points of view of a given text (1982:87). Understanding
of a different reading comes when we understand the procedures
used to produce that reading. The meanings generated do not
come from the text itself as though one can check one’s reading
by the text to test the fit: ‘One cannot first give it [the text], as it
were, a quick neutral glance without reading it, and then judge
later whether a reading fits it or not. That is to say one cannot
justify the rules of reading by pointing to the text, because
applying the rules of reading is how one points to it.’ (1982:88)
Catherine Greenfield extends this notion of reading as a form
of social training by pointing out that it is not
predicated upon a subject—it is not conceived as the
relation between a subject, or a reader, and a text.
Therefore a ‘readership’ is not defined as the space of
a reader qua subject of knowledge (or subject of
language as Signifier in the psychoanalytic

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

‘subversion’), but as a space occupied by available and

discontinuous, heterogeneous discursive forms. The
reader is the bearer of these discursive forms according
to various and changing institutional trainings which
confer special competencies. (Greenfield 1983:133)

For my purposes here I will employ the notion of ‘reading

formations’ to designate ensembles of these ‘discontinuous,
heterogeneous discursive forms’. Among these forms we can
include not only the various ‘literary’ reading practices, but also
their objects of analysis. That is, reading formations are sets ‘of
discursive and inter-textual determinations which organise and
animate the practice of reading, connecting texts and readers as
reading subjects of particular types and texts as objects-to-be-
read in particular ways’ (Bennett, 1984:7).
Granted my two working assumptions, that the novel is part of
an institutional process of moral training and that it functions to
produce moral subjects, it follows that not all literature is
deemed suitable for use in the formation of those moral subjects.
Because the articulation of rhetorical and moral criticism varies
considerably at different times it is not easy to predict what texts
and readings will appear in syllabi nor at what stage in the
certification process (Hunter, 1983:237). And there is consider-
able variation according to institutional site. I’m thinking here of
the discrimination against popular genres, whether written or
visual, found within the Leavisite and New Critical legacies and
the virtual exclusion of sexual fiction from canons and syllabi
unless that fiction is incorporable as somehow morally
exemplary.
So, for example, one finds competing canons in the literary and
extra-literary institutions. Not surprisingly, these canons val-
orise different texts, though there is some crossover at the
popular and contemporary levels. However, in any literary
variation of the canon of Australian literature, there is both a
paucity and a regularity of texts that have explicit homosexual
discourses inscribed in their readings. All the most likely
contenders come from recent Australian fiction and only two are
likely for immediate university canonisation: Jolley’s Miss
Peabody’s Inheritance and White’s The Twyborn Affair.
When I raise the question of homosexuality and Australian
fiction, critics draw my attention to motifs, minor themes, casual
references, incidents and characters in any number of novels. A

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 Homosexualities

partial list includes: Kingsley’s Geoffrey Hamlyn, Clarke’s For the

Term of His Natural Life, Praed’s Affinities, Fugitive Anne and
possibly The Scourge Stick, Richardson’s Maurice Guest, Stead’s
Seven Poor Men of Sydney, Tennant’s Foveaux, McKenzie’s The
Young Desire It, almost every Boyd novel, White’s Riders in the
Chariot, Harrower’s The Watch Tower, Jessica Anderson’s An
Ordinary Lunacy and Tirra Lirra by the River, Malouf’s Johnno
and Harland’s Half Acre, Moorhouse’s stories, Farmer’s Alone,
Jolley’s Palomino. There are more, and the last three complicate
the issue nicely in terms of any attempted construction of a canon
of lesbian and gay fiction that makes assumptions about the
writers’ (homo)sexuality.
There is another more informally institutionalised list which
gives greater weight to matters gay, excessive, different. It
includes Neville Jackson’s No End to the Way, Robert Adamson
and Bruce Hanford’s Zimmers Essay, Rae Desmond Jones’ Walk-
ing the Line, Elizabeth Riley’s All That False Instruction, Lee
Cataldi’s Invitation to a Marxist Lesbian Party, Gary Dunne’s If
Blood Should Stain the Lino, the two inVersions collections, Barry
Nonweiler’s That Other Realm of Freedom, the 40-plus contribu-
tors to Edge City on Two Different Plans, Emily George’s novels, a
myriad of stories and poems by Jeremy Fisher, Susan Hampton,
Pam Brown, Javant Biarujia, Margaret Bradstock, Louise Wake-
field, Ian Birks, Jan MacKemmish, Finola Moorhead, Sasha
Soldatow, Roger Raftery’s The Pink Triangle, Simon Payne’s The
Beat, Barry Hughes’ The Martini-Henry Modification, Karel Flor-
sheim’s Else Halberstadt, and Ross Davy’s Kenzo. Most of these
texts come from and are valorised only in explicitly Australian
gay male and lesbian reading formations. To put it another way:
‘Different reading formations... produce their own texts, their
own readers and their own contexts.’ (Bennett, 1984:8). While
these texts and authors have sometimes received mainstream
press reviews, with few exceptions they do not emerge as objects
for discussion in the literary journals and are not incorporated
into the moral training that is literary studies. Who speaks, where
and when? Who is able to listen?
Notice what gets constructed as homosexual in the first list I
mentioned: male same-sex friendship in Kingsley and Malouf,
same-sex paedophilia and sodomy as rape in Clark, unwilling-
ness on the part of a male character to fix consistently on a sex
object of either gender in Richardson; male use of cosmetics, a
high vocal register, and effusiveness in Stead and Tennant;
artistic interests among men in Tennant and Anderson; cross-

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

dressing in Stead (for men) and for women in Langley; same-

sex teacher-student relationships in McKenzie; misogyny in
Harrower and Anderson; emotional sensitivity in Anderson and
grotesquerie in Hanrahan.
Such lists make it patently obvious that what is involved here
is the condensing of questions of sex and gender, homosociality,
homosexual desire, paedophilia, homosexual behaviour and
homosexual identity into discrete, single, essentialist images of
‘the’ male and female homosexual (Plummer, 1981; Gatens, 1983;
Sedgwick, 1985).
At this juncture we do well to return to Foucault:
We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric,
medical category of homosexuality was constituted from
the moment it was characterised ...less by a type of
sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual
sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine
and feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one
of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from
the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior
androgeny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The
sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the
homosexual was now a species. (Foucault, 1978:43)

Foucault is referring to male homosexuality, but while I do not

wish to assume that the formation of sexed identities (masculine,
feminine) and of sexualised identities (heterosexual, homosex-
ual) are complementary, symmetrical processes, his point has a
general methodological force when we think of how ‘species’ is
often deployed in popularised pyschological discourses under
the guise of common sense. Here a binary opposition of hetero-
and homo-sexuality is made definitive of sexual truth. The social
power of this opposition is such that ‘homosexual’ is often used
to signify the social ‘unity of interests between subjects other-
wise categorised as perverse/sick/mad/queer/contagious and
so on’ (Watney, 1987). I began to indicate this with reference to
what is constituted as homosexual in the first list above, where
we begin to glimpse a second-order mythology of the homosexual
as ‘other’, mostly odd, sometimes funny and/or mysterious,
simultaneously ‘sympathetic’ and threatening; it doesn’t take
much of a twist to sense ‘stranger danger’. In a more ironic, but
not so disconnected twist, most often associated with liber-
ationist politics, we also see a reverse process in attempts to dis-

160
 Homosexualities

tinguish a ‘true’ (= non-perverse, respectable) homosexuality

within ‘these thousand aberrant sexualities’ (Foucault, 1978:44).
Before I turn to the analysis of readings of two texts, Rosa
Praed’s Affinities (1886) and Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair
(1979), I want to say specifically that reading formations involve
reading positions which are effects of the narrative process, its
structures and discursive organisation in any given text. They
generate, if you wish, the text’s own preferred reading, the points
at which narrative closure comes into play.
Affinities can be usefully discussed in terms of reading forma-
tions and positions. First, in an act ofliterary recuperation we can
restore it to public discussions of the Praed oeuvre (Hurley, 1985),
itself fragile but re-emerging (Summers, 1975; Modjeska, 1981;
Sharkey, 1983; Sheridan, 1982). Second, this recuperation can
position itself at some critical distance from the relatively
dismissive radical nationalist reading formations (Byrne, 1896;
Miller and McCartney, 1956; Green, 1966; Dutton 1976; Beilby
and Hadgraft, 1979). It can do so initially by taking seriously the
use of spiritualist and occult discourses in much of Praed’s
writing (Roderick, 1948). Within reading formations that articu-
late these themes in relation to issues of sex and gender and do
not downgrade the genre of female romance (Praed, Tasma, Ada
Cambridge) as distinct from the male (Clarke, Boldrewood)
(Sheridan, 1982), we can open out the contexts in which Praed’s
writing is read. Finally, though with some difficulty, since it is
out of print, we can read the text.
Affinities can be read as a disguised homosexual novel (Hurley,
1975), a potential gay ‘Australian’ novel of international signifi-
cance. For if you accept that the construction of male homosex-
uality as a sexual identity only begins to emerge in the late
nineteenth century as distinct from a set of previously loosely
and confusingly linked sexual practices, and that female homo-
sexuality emerges somewhat later (Weeks, 1977), then Affinities
is a formative text. Very briefly, I read the novel this way: it is a
romance which establishes a lineage connecting English
aestheticism with French literary decadence. The heterosexual
male hero is irrelevant except as a plot device and is formally
supplanted by the male anti-hero, who is clearly modelled on
Oscar Wilde. (It is important to remember that we are seeing
constructed a pre-trial Oscar Wilde figure.) There are also two
female protagonists. The first of these reminds one character
irresistibly of George Sand, though she is unable to say why. The
‘Wilde’ and ‘Sand’ figures have had an affair, but she rejects his

16]
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

physical desire in favour of non-sexual comradeship. He cannot

accept the rejection. She then establishes a comradely friendship
with another woman, an ‘innocent’, who in turn marries the
Wilde figure. Wilde ‘corrupts’ then murders her by telepathy, out
of jealousy for the women’s friendship and his rejection by
Sand.
Within the romance genre the discourses of aestheticism,
dandyism and decadence are used to construct a parody of the
literary and social conventions of romantic love. This parody
enunciates what I would call a ‘camp’ reading position which
relies on a series of naughty ‘underworld’ codes available only to
a select metropolitan readership (Weeks, 1977; Sontag, 1978;
Britton, 1978; Booth, 1983; Dyer, 1986). The camp enunciation is
then undercut by a feminist discourse which values female
friendship over male lust. And at this level another reading
position is installed that articulates questions of female friend-
ship and lesbianism.
Issues of language and discursive formations now become
central. The reading I have just given is an example of the
assumption that the several codes or discourses involved
described two pre-existing sexual identities, the male homosex-
ual and the lesbian, who merely await a member of the
cognoscenti to recognise them.
The main problems I see now with this procedure are first that
the ‘sensitive’ recreation of the discourses of masculinity, femi-
ninity and sexuality ‘found’ by me in this reading of Affinities
presumes a sexological taxonomy at odds with the reading
positions established by the narrative. That taxonomy effectively
postdates the discourses available to and mobilised in the novel.
My point here is not so much one of narrowly insisting on
historical accuracy but of suggesting that this whole arena is in
dispute. The price of foregrounding those taxonomic discourses
in the reading is insufficient attention to the alternative dis-
courses circulating in the text. Any reading of the Wilde figure as
homosexual installs a male homosexual subject; a subject that is
an effect of the discourses which circulate in the post-trial figure
of ‘Wilde’: a much ‘queerer’ subject (because far more socially
determined medically, legally and by the media) than that visible
in the 1880s. As Leigh Raymond suggests, the trials mobilised and
extended elements of previously extant (homo)sexual discourses
and the press condemned largely in moral terms rather than
those of medical discourse.’ Through its campness and feminism,
Affinities iterates, like many popular nineteenth-century novels,

162
 Homosexualities

a series of procedures for recognising sexual difference: pro-

cedures on the verge of being redeployed by other agencies to
sid abe a new object of social regulation, the homosexual
male. ,
Among the costs of condensing multiple forms of sexual
difference into a single basket (‘homosexuality’) is an acceptance
of the categories mobilised in social policies of regulation, and a
certain analytic confusion. Whatever else it may be, camp is nota
form of official social regulation. ‘Lily law’ forbid: whether naive
or deliberate, camp flouts administrated seriousness, literary or
otherwise. The mechanisms for recognising ‘the’ male homosex-
ual as a regulated social agent are not those which construct
‘camp’. Both are quite precise. Where they frequently overlap, for
my purposes here, is in particular textual forms: twentieth-
century novels which deploy approved discourses of (homo)sex-
uality as well as those which parody those discourses. Nor can
one just appropriate ‘camp’ as a category when discussing lesbian
parody. Camp can be misogynistic as the ‘Wilde’ figure in
Affinities partially suggests.
This may all seem a long way from conventional literary
criticism, but locating with some technical precision the pro-
cedures whereby sexual difference is regulated in literary
commentary has its difficulties. It requires simultaneously trac-
ing the emergence of English studies in relation to the social
regulation of sexuality, identifying the relevant reading and
writing mechanisms and analysing how they are used. To quote
Hunter once more:

The important point to keep in mind here is that, in

the modern apparatus of character-reading, it is not only.
the fictional character that is formed, but also the
moral character of the student... In particular, the
modern apparatus of character-reading is
distinguished by its utilisation of textual analysis in a
systematic regime of moral training. At the level of the
social policy, the apparatus of nineteenth century
popular education is argued for precisely in terms of
the need to combat [social deviance] by forming a sober,
moral population via the new apparatus of popular
education. (Hunter, 1983:234)

163
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

The appearance of the post-trial ‘Wilde’ figure as demonic in the

popular press, installed a new aspect in existing reading forma-
tions: the public was given a way of recognising male homosex-
uality. As a mode of perception, it involved particular
deployments of the male body (voice, hands, stance), clothes, and
social interests, a combination of specific aspects of ‘camp’ and
the dandy as found in certain social circles which came under
legal persecution and media scrutiny. These agencies, together
with more specialised ‘knowledges’ of psychology and medicine,
iterated particular rules for recognition of deviance.
Although contemporary urban male homosexuals have re-
created a clear difference between a masculine gender identity
and a homosexual sexual identity, paradoxically by an ironic
merging of the two, this situation is not symmetrical with the
sexual fluidity found in Affinities. The modern clone is in part a
resistant response to the social deployments of the ‘Wilde’ figure
as an effeminate pervert throughout the twentieth century
(Marshall, 1981; Blachford, 1981). The ‘masculine’ homosexual
often celebrates Wilde’s reputation as a sodomite while refusing
camp as a personal mode of expression. In Affinities there is no
such social distinction between gender and sexuality. Rather the
‘masculinity’ of the male rural gentry is parodied and that of the
metropolitan male ‘decadent’ is rejected eventually as ‘brute’
lust. Masculinity is relatively dispersed, less socially controlled
than when organised primarily around questions of sexual
identity. To ignore the social power of later more fixed signifi-
cations is to accept and project a purportedly general, popular
representation: ‘Wilde’. And ‘Wilde’ is part of a social mobilis-
ation of a viciously negative system of sexual regulation. This
point becomes central when! later discuss a particular reading of
White’s Twyborn Affair.
Similarly, to accept a binary:‘female friendship/lesbian oppo-
sition presumes a lesbianism constructed of the same character-
istics as sexology and psychology postulate for the male: a
combination of homosociality and same-sex genital sex, with the
same confusions of cross-dressing and sexual desire. The pre-
sumption is that male and female bodies are inscribed in the
ae ways by sexual discourses which are mirror images of each
other.
The semiotic organisation of discourses of difference in a novel
such as Affinities requires that these matters be rethought. There,
for example, male desire is constructed as lust irrespective of the
gender of the desired. For the female, desire moves in and
between discourses of marriage, extramarital friendship, bodily

164
 Homosexualities

autonomy, spirituality, moral corruption and homosociality.

With all their discontinuities these discourses are the signifiers
of (sometimes sexual) differences, not (lesbian) sexual identity.
The sublime of female desire is articulated in relation to the
occult, an ineffable other. Male desire is a disease which corrupts
friendship between the sexes and makes women ill.
Together these articulations of gender, sexuality and desire
make the novel’s preferred reading position dangerous. That
position calls on a coterie knowledge, creating a specialised
reading formation, which, when mobilised through distribution,
enables a social celebration of difference, provides a rite of
passage for the neophyte (the about to be identified/newly
identifying male homosexual and the ‘new’ woman) and poten-
tially constitutes resistance to the emerging mechanisms of social
regulation. In this sense, Affinities not only predates most of the
English sexologists but also pre-empts their claim to scientific
and juridical authority. The reader constituted by that coterie
knowledge is perforce a specialist in recognising particular codes
and becomes part of a reading formation later marginalised in the
literary academy. (One suspects this is more so in Australia
where the histories of difference have been arguably more
problematic than in England, but that’s another matter.)
So the relationship of reading formations and reading positions
is socially dynamic, nicely complicating questions of moral
training. In terms of lesbianism this account needs further
development in relation to the, until recently, dominant critical
readings of The Well of Loneliness (Rule, 1975; Ruehl, 1982;
Martinez, 1983; Brown and Whitlock, 1985). In earlier readings,
as in some of the novel’s own discursive mobilisations, the
operative category of lesbianism is sexological: ‘inversion’. The
women are ‘inverts’, not properly female, and ‘perverts’, un-
healthy and degenerate. The trial of The Well simultaneously
conflates and creates (homo)sexual identity and female desire
into a discursive construction for homosocial women in some
ways parallel to that which emerged for men in the trial of Oscar
Wilde. The result in terms of publicly circulated cultural
artefacts was ‘the’ female homosexual. As Gillian Whitlock
(1985:37) has argued in the case of The Well of Loneliness, ‘most
forms of self-identification and expression reflect a gendered
heterosexual orientation that is policed by conventions within
existing forms of language and art’. This double articulation of
gender and sexuality has obvious implications for the assump-
tions with which I began.
English studies is a form of moral training with numerous

165
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

effects, including constituting moral subjects whose gender and

desires remain rhetorically and morally male and heterosexual.
That phallocentric constitution is achieved partly by the rules
and procedures of literary readings that produce particular
aesthetic effects (among others ‘seriousness’ which often ex-
cludes camp as an acceptable literary genre, except where it can
be subsumed into satire), and partly by the simultaneous articu-
lation of moral rules and procedures which construct ‘the’
homosexual as a ‘Wilde’, a ‘Sand’ or a ‘Hall’. Obviously another
study is needed to document how this occurs. In contrast some
gay readings are far more pleasantly promiscuous and likely to
claim any hint of difference as indicative of homosexuality
(Wotherspoon, 1984). When faced with dominant assumptions of
heterosexuality and sexually sanitised readings, this practice is
quite understandable and frequently unavoidable.
The rhetorical use of ‘Sand’ and ‘Wilde’ should not necessarily
be understood as assuming that, because an author’s sexuality is
known, one can automatically ‘read off’ the sexual dimension of
the texts which circulate in their name. Apart from the obvious
empirical and conceptual difficulties with intentional and con-
textual criticism, there is the issue of how authorship becomes
imbricated in particular reading formations. This is especially
the case with camp, gay male and lesbian readings in which
naming takes on several different functions, one specialised
version of which is to maintain competing, unauthorised literary
canons. Such canons, however, do not function so much as
policings of a purported excellence, but as points of cultural
resistance. Sand/‘Sand’ and Hall/‘Hall’ are part of an inter-
national lesbian reading formation, central to the processes of
lesbian self-identification. That formation, like camp, with
which it has a problematic relation (Hurley, 1985), may be seen as
another apparatus for moral ‘training. Thankfully neither is
under the control of the academy against which their reading
practices may be mobilised. Ironically perhaps, part of my
purpose in interrogating literary criticism is to expand the range
of texts in its purview, thereby increasing the risk of the
appropriation of those texts by reading practices which will
attempt to destroy them in the name of literary standards or other
moralities. This already occurs in the case of ‘names’ who have
received recognition for other reasons.
How this matters in terms of differences in reading formations
and the importance of taking reading position into account is
clear when we look at the reception of The Twyborn Affair in
Quadrant (Kramer, 1980).

166
 Homosexualities

In answer to the possible objection that reviews are not usually

extended pieces of critical discussion, I would argue that they
constitute a public form of training. Though there are differences
between reviews and more formal criticism (Morris, n.d.), the
conditions under which reviews are produced are conducive to
highly condensed exemplary texts. In this review, White is
described as dealing with ‘reality and illusion, fragmentation and
wholeness, discord and harmony... some of the large abstrac-
tions’ (p.66). The problem for the reviewer is that these opposing
abstractions are not at the heart of the novel. Rather at its centre
is the character E. and the question of sexual ambivalence.
‘Ambivalence’ is deployed here to a mean inability to maintain a
single, fixed, sexual role and identity. Thus, in E., there is no
‘wholeness of character’: ‘no theories about the fragmentation of
personality, transsexual experience or Jungian symbolism can
rescue The Twyborn Affair from its persistent preoccupation
with surfaces and exteriors, its empty virtuosity’ (p.67). Apart
from the implication that one can discuss the field of moral
character without any recourse to theory, the review suggests
that ‘virtuosity’ is a purely technical matter separate from
(semiotically ‘empty’) the matters under discussion. This is a
total refusal to engage with the formal organisation of the novel
and its role as a signifier in the articulation of difference.
Somewhat surprisingly, for a critic who presumably would
assert that the meaning lies in a text itself rather than in the
procedures used to read it, the final prescription is for a different,
totally predictable, novel:

As E. leads a submerged (actual?) life, so the novel has

a submerged subject. It is the problem and mystery of
family relationships, those subtle and for E. often
painful connections between father, mother and son in
which E. (as Eadith) seeks some explanation of ‘the life
she has chosen, or which had been chosen for her’.
There is a real subject here, but in The Twyborn
Affair it is not permitted to establish itself at the
centre. The extravagant disguises, the fluctuations of
tone between revulsion and jesting mockery are
discordant and, finally evasive. If only, one feels, White
could desert the circus animals
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what

167
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

and at last be satisfied as Yeats became, with his

heart. Certainly The Twyborn Affair, whatever its
subject, comes nowhere near the heart of the matter.
(p.66)
I intend ignoring, with some difficulty, the gratuitous offensive-
ness and patrician sentimentality of these formulations.’ In this
particular passage the reviewer’s metaphors are those of depth.
The real theme (‘submerged subject’) of the novel is ‘the problem
and mystery of family relationships’ as distinct from the narra-
tive’s emphasis on the character E. The reviewer initially sets up
an opposition between the aesthetico-moral category ‘character’
and the subject (theme) of the novel. Character fails as a guide to
the novel’s meaning because E. has no ‘wholeness’. The ‘real’
theme has to be recuperated by understanding that E., in his/her
third and chronologically last manifestation as Eadith, is a
unification and culmination of what has gone before in relation
to father, mother and son. (What happened to Eudoxia?) Under-
stood this way, ‘there is a real subject here’, one that the
intratextual organisation of discourse refuses to centre.
Notice how what is at stake is not so much the moral character
of E. but the moral character of the novel as a whole. We are still
in the realm of moral introspection, but its object has shifted. The
practice of paraphrase which reads the text for us is instructive
(Williamson, 1985). First, familiar elements of literary analysis
(character, subject) are used to suggest the displacement of the
morally proper: the family. Second, this procedure is amplified
by interpolating a transcendental morality: ‘the heart’, for good-
ness sake! Neither of these techniques is used reflexively,
consequently the purported ‘real subject’ is naturalised as
unproblematic. Heterosexuality and family life are quite simply
the space on which ‘circus animals’ may be inscribed.
Now it is not the reliance on adjacent discourses (‘family’,
‘sexual ambivalence’) which is the problem here. That reliance,
though not its uses, is unexceptionable. Nor is it necessarily the
disguising of moral judgment as formalist description which
grates: ‘the extravagant disguises, the fluctuations of tone
between revulsion and jesting mockery.’ What is objectionable is
the whole policing strategy of a moral anthropology which would
prescribe who speaks, where from, what of, who may listen and
how. Quite simply, one is not allowed to identify with or be like
E: extravagant, mocking, jesting, of uncertain sexuality and
gender. The review form has the advantage of not having to

168
 Homosexualities

justify this process. As an apparatus of public training it can

simply connect the authority of the literary sense with a
mechanism for policing moral character.
The attempt to establish a common moral ground between
criticism and reader in the ‘heart’ is a refusal to open for public
discussion the implicit recognition that those matters are
problematic. This refusal occurs not because families and sexu-
ality are being installed in writing circulating in the name of
Australia’s nobel laureate, though earlier in the review careful
references to White’s autobiographical Flaws in the Glass are
used to undermine his authority to speak ‘well’ on such matters.
It occurs because of what the textual organisation of those
discourses highlighted is doing: undermining the notion of a
homogeneous, unified moral field which is the proper subject of
Literature. The review tries to undermine the conditions of
intelligibility of The Twyborn Affair by suggesting it evades its
‘real’ subject.
The text’s preferred reading position requires that the
characters circulating under the name E. be understood by
readers who are prepared to shift across several combinations of
gender and sexuality, none of which is fixed. There is no easy
point of social identification, except perhaps that of fluidity
itself. Consequently a reading which refuses to relativise hetero-
sexuality is perforce hostile to the text. The narrative estranges
particular notions of permanently stable sexual identities. Like
E., the reader who identifies with the narrative flow is contin-
uously relocated. This has the effect of formally giving the male
and female, heterosexual and homosexual reader equal access to
the text in terms of processes of identification. Access to this
fantasy is heavily structured. The narrative distinguishes
between desire organised in terms of sexual object choice and the
changeability of identities which open from desire via shifting
identifications, through the operation of fantasy. The Twyborn
Affair refuses to confine the psychic negotiation of identity to
socially prescribed categories.
The political calculation implicit in reading formations that
refuse these strategies results not in a proscription of homosex-
ualities as such, but of all forms of sexual variety. The discourses
found in the Quadrant text compete with those of The Twyborn
Affair for our acceptance. The reviewer’s disgust is of a different
kind from that elaborated so carefully at different points of the
narrative. MacNeill discusses this question in relation to Eddie’s
rape by Prowse in Part Two: ‘the humour, expressed even unto

169
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

the minutiae of punctuation, the sardonic tone, reveal a disgust

at history which so shaped circumstance and the act, as well as
charging the writing with a disgust—much wider than a mere
recoiling from homosexuality—that is probably the writer’s own’
(1984:8). That ‘history’ is what I have been addressing in part
throughout this chapter. The discourses of Australian identity at
stake here require more analysis. This issue is addressed at
length in The Twyborn Affair. Also’required is a discussion of
how the category ‘Australian’ is used within literary theory and
criticism in relation to these matters.
Once more we can see that the shifting object ‘literature’ is
determined institutionally by an ensemble of moral, sexual and
writing practices quite at variance with each other. An important
consequence of this for criticism is that, in principle, all the
documents of the competing discourses ought to be of equal
pedagogic status. Any discussion of character formation ought to
be able to refer to the adjacent fields on which it relies, otherwise
it is doomed to repetition, the reproduction of the same. That, of
course, is what some reading formations desire.
In practice, however, the bounds of existing training insti-
tutions, such as university English departments, require tactical
manoeuvres that recognise the priority particular procedures
give to the ‘creative’ as distinct from the non-fictional prose text.
Any knowledge then of how selected fictional texts and their
‘certified’ readers deploy those adjacent discourses, and to what
effect, has to be supplemented with an awareness of the specific
writing practices involved. In the case of that problematic
category ‘homosexual’ writing, little understanding of those
practices comes from established criticism.

170
1O Soap opera as gender training:
teenage girls and TV

Anne Cranny-Francis and

Patricia Palmer Gillard

ae EENAGE GIRLS in Australia watch a great deal of television

soap opera. It is a major topic of conversation both in and
out of school hours and it seems to be a major source of role
model behaviour for these girls. In this chapter we report some
recent research on girls’ viewing habits, the kinds of programs
the girls favour and the reasons they give for doing so. We then
discuss some of the terms they use in their discussions and
attempt to denaturalise their meanings. We conclude with a
discussion of some recent work on soap opera as a women’s
genre, with special reference to Tania Modleski’s book, Loving
with a Vengeance.

Patricia Gillard: interviewing teenage girls about television

My interest in studying the significance of television in the lives

of teenage girls began when I was teaching at a girls’ school. One
day, after showing segments of soap operas, I asked a class of
16-year-olds what the women all had in common. They were not
so good at playing the game ‘guess what’s in the teacher’s mind’

bl
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

so they answered frankly: ‘they were all unhappy.’ Yet these

were the favourite programs of the girls in my class, their
mothers and their older sisters. It was enough to make me start
studying again, and move from teaching into research.
In 1980 I conducted a study of 34 teenage girls aged between
thirteen and a half and fourteen and a half. The aim of the
research was to understand how girls of this age defined their
experience of television viewing: the meaning it had in relation-
ships with friends and family and its significance to the way they
thought about themselves in the present and in the future.

Television’s significance to teenage girls

To the question, ‘Do you watch television?’ all the girls but one
answered yes, and some went on to describe particular programs.
All took it for granted that ‘television’ meant a succession of
regularly appearing programs—the ones they watched. Without
exception the girls stated that they knew at the beginning of the
week what their viewing would be.
In order to discuss the programs most significant to teenage
girls the interviewer focused on girls’ favourite TV shows. The
range of favourite programs for girls this age was found to be
quite narrow, and consisted mainly of regularly appearing
dramas, usually in series of serial form. Those mentioned most
often were ‘Restless Years’, ‘Young Doctors’, ‘Dallas’, ‘California
Fever’, ‘MASH’, ‘Prisoner’, ‘Brady Bunch’, and ‘Eight is Enough’—
in other words, what are known as soapies.
Individuals differed a great deal in the combinations of
programs they liked, but the reasons they gave for loyalty to
favourite programs were strikingly similar. Girls enjoyed pro-
grams which they felt were ‘true to life’, ‘realistic’, ‘down to
earth’ and which usually concerned people their age and older.
Interviewer [I]: Why do you like ‘Restless Years’?
Student [S]: It’s about teenagers, how they struggle
with their lives, what problems they have, how they can
look at things. The things they do, what mischief they
get into, stuff like that.
In the ‘Restless Years’, most of them, they’re really
natural. Especially the ones at home. They mostly sit
around and think about what they’ll be or do next.
They’re really kind of natural.

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 Soap opera as gender training

— Why do you like ‘Prisoner’?

S: Because it’s sort of down to earth. Like some
programs they have are sort of real ham-acted. You
really can’t believe things that you see. On
‘Prisoner’ everything’s sort of plain and everything.
Like you really get into it. You really get interested
and involved in the characters that are in it.
I: Do you think you could ever be in a similar
situation to some of the people in ‘Prisoner’? I don’t
mean that they’re in prison. I mean things that
could happen to you.
S: I suppose so.
I: And what would you do?
S: I don’t know, I’d probably follow their footsteps, and
see what happened to those.
I: Why?
S: I don’t know, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to
work it out for myself. If Isaw it I would probably,
you know, go after them, because I’d know what
they turned out like.

Girls generally disliked documentaries, the news and nature

shows and thought that they were ‘boring’. However, if girls felt
that a program was real for them on a personal level, it received
some acceptance.
Once accepted as being ‘true to life’, a high level of involve-
ment by the girls followed. Closer attention to the description of
favourite programs revealed different kinds of involvement,
though all were concerned with the details of interpersonal
interaction and its consequences. For example, girls watched the
interaction between characters very closely and sometimes
adopted gestures or behaviour as their own. However, apart from
appropriating particular mannerisms, the girls found it difficult
to describe themselves in relation to a single TV character,
though this comparison process was a subject which interested
them greatly and was a topic they discussed together.
S: My friends say I look like Marcia Brady. I am like
her but I can’t see it. I can’t see myself looking like
her.
I: Just appearance-wise they say?
S: No, personality and everything too.

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

More often the girls chose qualities from a number of characters

which they then put into a composite image which they felt
described themselves. Interestingly they sometimes chose qual-
ities from male characters as part of their composite.
So, in constructing a self-representation in terms of television
characters, a practice the girls enjoyed and which formed part of
their peer group interaction, they were prepared to range over a
variety of characters, female and male, and to attempt to give
complexity and diversity to the finished product. However,
when it came to using television characters to predict their own
future, to represent themselves as adults, the picture was quite
different. Diversity and complexity gave way to uniformity. The
girls used a narrow range of qualities repeatedly to represent
their future selves: they aspired to be friendly, understanding,
and to live in a happy home, married and with children. The
models for this future self-representation were provided by
sisters, mothers and female, not male, television characters. And
they did not find it difficult to find female television characters
who exactly fitted their adult self-image; composites were no
longer necessary.
In other words, teenage girls used the qualities of television
characters discerningly to represent themselves in the present.
They were prepared to pick and choose attributes from a number
of characters, and from both sexes, to construct an adequately
subtle and complex self-image. But when it came to representing
their adult selves, the girls were apparently channelled into a
narrow range of options which emphasised interpersonal skills:
homemaker, mother. And they felt unable to appropriate qual-
ities from male characters. At the same time the girls constantly
emphasised that the reason they enjoyed their television pro-
grams was that they were realistic and down-to-earth, and that
they provided a means by which to witness the consequences of
specific forms of behaviour by women: ‘If I saw it I would
probably, you know, go after them, because I’d know what they
turned out like.’ The implication is that television charac-
terisations provide them with a number of possible role models
which they can witness in operation from the safety of their
lounge rooms and from which they can make choices about their
own future. In practice, however, this does not seem to happen:
only one role model is seen as viable: mother and homemaker.
One must question, therefore, how these programs and charac-
terisations come to seem ‘natural’ and what is the role of that
kind of process in the girls’ acculturation.

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Television and relationships with friends

The girls’ definitions of TV’s ‘realism’ and their active use of its
content were made with friends, even though they watched TV
at home with their families. They would discuss new programs
with friends to decide whether they were the ones which their
group would ‘follow’. Once a program was adopted as a group
favourite, it was discussed regularly and sometimes acted out
within the group. It became clear during interviews that favour-
ite television shows were-often used by friends to express their
own values and perhaps to reinforce each other’s opinions. For
example, during a group discussion with ten girls, all close
friends because of their ethnic background, talk about the recent
marriage of Kitty on ‘The Sullivans’ prompted many statements
comparing love and relationships in the past and present:

S: Her wedding wasn’t like weddings now, it was

different. They looked like they were really, truly in
love. It was more emotional—people really felt
about it. Now, people just get married because
everyone expects it.

The girls accepted the fictional representation of the marriage as

realistic for a particular time and place and compared it with
their own experience of marriages, or with their understanding
of contemporary marriage. They did not question the realism of
the fictional representation in any way, and this surely has
important implications for their use of television as a medium.
Some of the girls also play-acted scenes from television in their
own groups. Acting-out roles was used to ‘fill in’ parts of the
show which friends had missed, or to enjoy again the most
dramatic parts of programs. Roles were sometimes assigned on
the basis of physical resemblance or similar personality types
and the aim was usually to act out TV events as faithfully as
possible. From their demonstrations in the interviews many girls
were excellent mimics. Although they derived enjoyment from
the time when their performance broke down, acting out of
programs was not intended as criticism or spoof, but as a faithful
imitation of events on screen.
There was only one girl who thought TV was inadequate in its
portrayal of women. She wanted a program which showed what
happened when a woman was ‘boss’.

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

S: I wouldn’t mind being a doctor or lawyer, something

like that. Something where I tell people what to
aewrs
Would you like to see things like that on television?
Yeah—It’s more realistic.
What do you mean?
Like nowadays there’s women’s liberation and I
think there should be more of that. So I’m up for
women’s lib. I like seeing more women being head
and not men always—because it’s always been men.
: What difference would it make to you?
S: I’d pay more attention to it—because it’s a woman
being the boss.
I: What if it is a woman, would you tend to try out
what she does, [more so] than if it was a man?
Siieey coh:
I: Why’s that?
S: Because if it worked for her, being a woman, it
might work for me. If it’s a man it doesn’t always
work. They say that a man’s stronger than a woman
and all that. So if it works for her it probably might
work for me.

This interview reinforces the points made earlier about the

girl’s use of TV characters as role models as well as pinpointing
the problems faced by girls attempting to formulate a self-image
which differs from those represented on television. This girl uses
the ‘realism’ criterion to criticise the portrayal of women on
television in traditional supportive roles. Since women are now
active in the professions to which she is attracted, she would like
to see female television characters in those roles. Her desire for
these role models also reveals the impact of these charac-
terisations on girls at a time when they are attempting to
formulate their future, to make decisions (about school subjects,
for example) which influence profoundly the rest of their lives.
The girl in this interview repeats the view that girls can use the
actions of television characters and their consequences to make
decisions about their own lives. So she argues that she would
follow what happens to a female character in a traditionally male
role in order to see what happens because ‘if it worked for
her...it might work for me’. She adds a recognition that role-
reversal does not necessarily work—that, if it worked for a male

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character, it doesn’t always work for women—following this

with a crude statement of patriarchal ideology: ‘They say that a
man’s stronger...’ She then reiterates her point about role-
modelling: ‘So if it works for her it probably might work for me.’
Her repetition of this point suggests that the characterisation of
women on television is used quite explicitly in the decisions they
make about their futures.
Many efforts are currently being made to increase the parti-
cipation by girls in schooling and further education, and in
lifetime vocational work. However, this participation is largely
dependent on the possibilities girls see available to them, on their
ability to formulate images of alternative futures and alternative
selves. What this research on girls and television shows quite
clearly is that teenage girls are profoundly affected by the
representations of women they see on television in the programs
that they themselves choose to watch and which form the basis of
so much of their peer group interaction—soap operas. Further-
more, as argued earlier, television soap operas offer a narrow and
distorted view of the identities available to adult women: they
can be wives and mothers.

Anne Cranny-Francis: deconstructing soap opera

The Girls and Television report

It is useful to consider further some of the terms used by the girls

in this study to talk about their favourite soap operas. What do
they reveal about the girls’ viewing practices? How they are
being positioned by those texts? And what kinds of ideological
assumptions are coded into that viewing position?
It was found that the girls did not like news or documentaries
or current affairs programs, because they found them boring.
One girl, Danielle, did express an interest in the Mike Willesee
program:
S: I like ‘Willesee’ because they have, you know,
children, really people who are sick and they cope
and all that. They have interesting things on. It’s
not just politics. They hardly ever have politics or
anything like that on. It’s just people who are
crippled and how some people have healed and
things like that.

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Not too many people would be surprised if the generic basis of

the Willesee program was found to be closer to soap opera than
current. affairs, given its emphasis on the interpersonal.
Danielle’s description of the program might serve equally well to
describe the girls’ favourite programs, which included “The
Sullivans’, ‘Dallas’, ‘Prisoner’, ‘Restless Years’.
The highest praise the girls had for these programs was that
they were ‘realistic’; they were ‘true to life’ and ‘down to earth’.
Conversely the programs they did not like were ‘boring’ and
‘unrealistic’, with the words often being used as synonyms. What
was this ‘realism’? It could hardly be experiential in the literal
sense. Very few of the girls interviewed would have had any
contact with female prisons or the Dallas business world and
none of them were alive during World War II. Only ‘Restless
Years’, a program about a school, might directly reflect their own
experience. Why then did they consistently use the term ‘real-
istic’ to describe programs whose settings were unknown to
them?
In the report on her research Gillard notes:

Whatever the kinds of interests the girls described, the

striking finding throughout the interviews was the
association of ‘realistic’ with an ability to be involved
with the situations and the people in a particular
program. There was not one girl whose television
viewing showed an undifferentiated enjoyment of a wide
range of programs. Girls were very definite about
favourite programs and their reasons for choosing them.
However their definition of ‘realistic’ and ‘true to life’
was not that of an outsider making a judgement about
‘the way life is’, but was more an intuitive response to
the authenticity of the characters and events portrayed.

An alternative reading might be that the girls are learning the

conventions of the soap opera genre, the genre characterised as
‘women’s television’ (in the same way that romantic novels are
characterised as ‘women’s fiction’). With a genre so heavily
dependent on the portrayal of character and of interpersonal
relationships, it is not surprising to find the adjective ‘realistic’ a
major element of non-specialist critical opinion. It might be
suggested that what the girls are concerned with is not so much

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‘realism’ as ‘consistency’, that characters and events are con-

sistent—not by reference to ‘reality’, but to the conventions of
the genre in which they are operating.
Gillard reports the response of the gir]s to having a favourite
character written out of a soapie: ‘Sudden deaths, such as that of
Grace Sullivan, were not tolerated, and for one fifth of the girls
interviewed this particular event caused a change in program
preference. They switched permanently to another serial drama.’
The girls here show their novice status in the field of soapie
viewing. Sudden death of a character is a time-honoured means
of allowing actors to change‘jobs, and has become a convention of
the genre itself. However, at this stage in their viewing history,
the girls are still primarily concerned with consistency of
characterisation, which is an attribute of the narrative charac-
teristic of soap opera. Characters do not disappear from nar-
ratives for no apparent reason; that tends to violate the
superficial cohesiveness of the narrative. If characterisation
becomes fragmentary (that is, if characters behave or are dis-
posed of in a way which is not consistent with their previous
operation), or if events seem to follow no logical order, then the
narrative loses its function as an apparently realistic repre-
sentation of causality.
The relationship between the temporal sequence of traditional
Western narrative and notions of causality has been widely
theorised. Roland Barthes, for example, noted: ‘Everything sug-
gests, indeed, that the mainspring of narrative is precisely the
confusion of consecution and consequence, what comes after
being read in narrative as what is caused by; in which case
narrative would be a systematic application of the logical fallacy
denounced by Scholasticism in the formula post hoc, ergo propter
hoc...’ (1977:94). Peter Brooks makes a similar point in Reading
for the Plot: ‘Plot as it interests me is not a matter of typology or of
fixed structures, but rather a structuring operation peculiar to
those messages that are developed through temporal succession,
the instrumental logic of a specific mode of human under-
standing. Plot...is the logic and dynamic of narrative, and
narrative itself a form of understanding and explanation.’
(1984:10).
The significance of this practice is not only aesthetic, of course;
it is also political. Writing about narrative and the cinema,
Christopher Williams claimed: ‘narrative militates against know-
ledge .. . because it attempts to conceal itself, to imply that this is

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

how the world is’ (Masterman, 1983:6). And the way narrative
does this is by concealing or obscuring the social, political,
economic and historical determinants of social interactions, by
concealing class difference, by concealing sexist practices, by
fabricating an ‘objective’ or ‘unbiased’ viewpoint which is
usually the viewpoint of the ideologically dominant class, that
is, white, male, middle-class. Fredric Jameson in The Political
Unconscious: ‘We may suggest that... . ideology is not something
which informs or invests symbolic production; rather the aesthe-
tic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or
narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right,
with the function of inventing imaginary or formal “solutions” to
unresolvable social contradictions’ (1981:79). By watching soap
opera teenage girls are learning our society’s narrative about our
society. They do not see the material conditions of our society;
they do not see (that is, they are not shown) class conflict in its
historical, economic framework; they do not see (that is, they are
not shown) sexism as an effect or function of a patriarchal social
formation. In learning our society’s narrative about itself these
girls are learning not to question anomalies or injustices; they are
learning not to see them. They are learning to accept ideological
justifications for the ‘way things are’, justifications which use
concepts such as ‘human nature’ and ‘natural’ to obscure the
ideological construction of ‘human nature’ and the social by a
particular socio-economic formation. And they are learning not
to ask why things are the way they are, or whether there are
alternatives.
This problem of alternatives is also a function of class, that of
the girls themselves, and it would be interesting to address a
number of issues not taken up in the Girls and Television report:
how do viewing practices differ from class to class? do different
classes assign more or less value to their television viewing? if
different kinds of programs are favoured by different classes, do
their ideological inputs differ significantly? (see, by comparison,
the investigation of the ideology of women’s work in mother—
child interactions in Hasan (1986)) Whatever the answers to these
questions, it is pertinent at the moment to devote continuing
attention to the kind of program that current research by
academics, television companies and market researchers
identify as having a huge teenage following, and that is soap
opera.
It was noted earlier that there are very few strong female
characters in soap operas. It is worth adding that those who do

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exist are usually circumscribed in some crucial way. For ex-

ample, ‘Prisoner’ was very important to some girls as it was seen
as having strong women characters, principally Bea, whom the
girls might emulate. Without going into along discussion of what
‘strong’ might mean in relation to female characters, it is
important to contextualise those characters and to realise that
they are all in jail. If these characters are strong, might not their
position within the narrative suggest that strong women are
suppressed by society? They might be self-determining and
independent but can only practise these attributes when safely
removed from the rest of society. In jail their self-determination
and independence is highly conditional and depends ultimately
on the dictates of a patriarchal society and its representatives.
Furthermore, it may be this very independence which got them
into prison in the first place...
It should be remembered here that the girls repeatedly
described the way they study the outcome of events in soap opera
as a guide to their own behaviour:

S: I often think back to the show I’ve watched and I

relate with that character.
I: And what do you do as a result of that?
S: Well, I don’t do anything about it, but I often think
about it and if it’s good what happened to them to
fix it, I'll try and do the same, but if it’s not, well I'l
go about it my own way.
The setting of ‘Prisoner’ might be considered here: why the series
is set in a jail. Surely there are alternative settings available for
an all-female soap opera, from an all-female magazine or pub-
lisher to a factory or sweat-shop to a convent. So why choose a
prison in which to situate strong female characters? Is this the
only setting in which they are tolerable? in which the narrative
of bourgeois patriarchal society can situate them?
The other side of this strong female character issue is the
problem of role models. The poverty of female role models with
whom girls can identify at a time when they are making
important career choices was noted earlier in the discussion of
the Girls and Television report. There are not many female
lawyers, scientists, plumbers, electricians, mechanics, or
mathematicians on television. When they do appear, their
profession is often treated in the same way as the man’s shirt on
Bo Derek, the laughable ‘contradiction’ serving to make the

18]
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

woman underneath more feminine, cute, sexy. The important

feature, of course, is the woman underneath, the body, the
physical femininity, not the professional person. So when Alexis
is running the company in ‘Dynasty’, is she treated as a scheming
executive who happens to be a woman, or as a scheming woman
who happens to be an executive?
This treatment of the professional woman is not surprising,
given the conservative (patriarchal bourgeois) ideology of the
narrative. Since female assertiveness is considered an abnormal
trait in a patriarchal society, it is not surprising that patriarchal
narratives should assign this trait only to female characters who
are evil and inevitably defeated in some way, or who are
somehow restricted (Jackson, 1981:121). And since it is difficult
to be any sort of professional without being assertive, it is again
not surprising that there are so few professional female char-
acters. The importation of such characters into contemporary
narratives would be very difficult as there is no space for them,
no role they can play; the narrative would then seem ‘un-
realistic’, which, among teenage girls at least, is a mortal blow to
its acceptability.
Of course space for such characters can be and has been
negotiated in other ways (e.g. Billie in ‘Lou Grant’, the major
female characters in ‘Seeing Things’, the female lawyers in ‘L.A.
Law’, the main characters of ‘Cagney and Lacey’) but this is still
the exception rather than the rule. As the Girls and Television
report recommends, probably one of the best solutions here is to
have teenage girls (and boys) not only construct female role
models themselves, but also suggest reasons why those models
do not appear in television soap operas, or just about any other
kind of television program.
Again the invidious feature of the (soap opera) narrative is not
so much what it shows (though that is often bad enough), but
what it conceals, such as the career possibilities available to
women and the self-determination women can choose to exer-
cise (even when limited by economic circumstances). These
exclusions and concealments are not only a feature of the
entertainment of women (and men) who are already living out
their choices, but also of young girls (and boys) whose choices
have yet to be made. Not that these exclusions and concealments
are always performed literally; there are professional women
characters and strong female characters in television programs,
including some soap operas, but we need to look closely at their
roles in the narratives before we get too excited about that. The

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important point that arises from the Girls and Television research
and the discussion of it is that the construction of femininity in
television programs, including soap operas, with their notori-
ously conservative gender, class and race ideologies, is being
used as a guide to the construction of femininity in society as a
whole by teenage girls at a very vulnerable time in their lives,
personally and professionally. Teenage girls are reading these
ideologically constructed narratives as ‘realistic’ in an ex-
periential sense, seeing their characterisations of women and
their interactions as sufficiently ‘realistic’ to be a guide to
behaviour in their own lives.

Soap opera as feminine culture

In Loving with a Vengeance Tania Modleski puts what seems to

be an increasingly popular case for soapies, that they should be
regarded as part of feminine culture and that we should,
therefore, concentrate on the good in them.
It is uncontestable that soap operas are often fun. Chocolates
are fun too. They taste good, but they produce acid in your mouth
which rots your teeth; fat for your body which makes you
unhealthy; and they ruin your skin, which makes you miserable.
On a very few occasions they might also have a beneficial effect,
a sugar boost, but with chocolates—as with soap operas—that is
very rare. We cannot get rid of soap operas any more than
chocolates, and we probably do not want to, but we should be
aware of what they are about most of the time. The sugar
producers’ expensive reassurances that sugar is good for you
seem extremely unconvincing; so is much of the recent feminist
work suggesting that soap opera is a ‘female’ (as opposed to the
patriarchally constructed ‘feminine’) genre. It is important to
respond to this work for a number of reasons, but one of the most
important must be that teenage girls specify soap operas as their
favourite television programs.
Modleski argues that soap opera (sometimes identified as
‘daytime television’) is a ‘caring’, female-oriented, ‘politically
liberal’ program genre. Writing of the aesthetics, and hence-the
politics, of soap opera Modleski says: ‘It is scarcely an accident
that this essentially nineteenth-century form continues to appeal
strongly to women, whereas the classic (male) narrative film is,
as Laura Mulvey points out, structured ‘around a main controll-
ing figure with whom the spectator can identify’. Soap operas

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

continually insist on the insignificance of the individual

life...’ (Modleski, 1982:91). A few pages later she adds: ‘Marcia
Kinder... suggests that the “open-ended, slow-paced, multi-
climaxed” structure of soap opera is “in tune with patterns of
female sexuality”’ (Modleski, 1982:98). The problem with the
latter quotation is that it tends to obscure the history of the soap
opera genre, which must have as much to do with the nine-
teenth-century serial novel as it does with melodrama, Mo-
dleski’s choice (Modleski, 1982:90). The serial novel was very
popular in the nineteenth century, chiefly, of course, because of
the prohibitively expensive price of books, and it was not limited
to female readership. Without engaging in detail with the
psychosexual interpretation it should be noted that soap opera,
like the serial novel, was developed to meet the economic
imperatives of a particular social formation. That its narrative
has some attraction for its readership is hardly surprising, as that
is a condition of its existence. If the rhythm Modleski via Kinder
refers to has something to do with female sexuality, that is most
likely a fortunate accident, since those rhythms correspond
primarily to the demands of sponsors and television executives,
about advertising and programming. As to the notion that soap
operas insist on the insignificance of the individual, again there
are problems. Even if ‘Dallas’, ‘Dynasty’, ‘Falconcrest’, ‘Prisoner’
and ‘A Country Practice’, all of which have prominent main
characters, are not considered typical, this judgment does not
seem valid. Most soapies feature a sequence of characters
adopting the main role. It may not be quite the traditional (quest
narrative) hero role, although at least one character is usually in
this role most of the time—whether it is Victor Newman in ‘The
Young and the Restless’ or Doctor Elliott of ‘A Country Practice’.
The point is that no social context is provided for these characters
and their interactions. They’are not social beings; they are
disconnected individuals. Soap operas do, in fact, continually
insist on the significance of the individual; what is insignificant
for them is the social formation in which characters might be
situated. In so doing they produce a series of traditional nar-
ratives, the premises or conclusions of which are continually
revised to produce yet another narrative. In soap operas the only
thing which is significant is the individual, represented in a
series of contextless characters.
Elsewhere Modleski herself writes directly about the political
consequences of soap opera viewing: ‘Soap operas, contrary to
many people’s conception of them, are not conservative but
liberal, and the mother [Modleski’s construction of the ideal soap

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 Soap opera as gender training

opera subject/spectator] is the liberal par excellence. By con-

stantly presenting her with the many-sidedness of any question,
by never reaching a permanent conclusion, soap operas under-
mine her capacity to form unambiguous judgements’ (1982:93).
As noted above, events in soap operas never reach a single,
permanent, unambiguous conclusion; every apparent conclusion
is the possible source of yet another complex narrative. Soap
operas do, in a sense, reject closure, the closure associated with
the construction of a particular meaning for the viewer which
almost invariably encodes dominant ideological discourses. That
is, the narrative is theorised as positioning the viewer to accept a
particular set of ideological discourses as natural or valid, and
her/his acceptance of those (usually conservative) discourses is
signified by acceptance of the closure of the narrative at a
particular point (DuPlessis, 1985:1-19). The viewer, thereby,
accepts the causal sequence established in the narrative, which
is premised on the acceptance of particular ideological dis-
courses. The avoidance of closure by soap operas does not
necessarily indicate any kind of political radicalism; viewers are
not necessarily positioned to be liberal or open-minded. Instead
soap operas reach a discontinuous series of permanent conclu-
sions, each narrative in the ongoing series of interwoven nar-
ratives reaching its own conclusion. The conclusions change
because the premises change, but this is less like liberalism than
double-think. It is not that the viewer’s understanding of her/his
society is going to be enriched by these revisions, because social
context, historical development, political economy have no place
in soap opera narratives. It is simply that today 1 + 1 = 2 and
tomorrow 1 + 1 = 3. And it is in this way that soap operas may
well challenge our construction of the ‘real’, may reveal the con-
struction itself. But they are not agents of liberalism in quite the
sense Modleski suggests.
Another positive quality described by Modleski concerns the
position of the villainess: ‘If soap operas keep us caring about
everyone; if they refuse to allow us to condemn most characters
and actions until all the evidence is in (and, of course, it never is),
there is one character whom we are allowed to hate unre-
servedly: the villainess, the negative image of the spectator’s
ideal self’ (Modleski, 1982:94). Although much of the suffering on
soap opera is presented as unavoidable, the surplus suffering is
often the fault of a villainess who tries to ‘make things happen
and control events better than the subject/spectator can’ (Mod-
leski, 1982:94).
Modleski’s first ‘if’ requires considerable scrutiny. Modleski’s

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

belief that soap operas encourage ‘caring’ is premised on the

notion that soap operas never let the viewer condemn a character
totally, because the evidence about each character is never fully
gathered. As noted above, soap opera viewers do condemn
characters, over and over again, judgment (viewing position)
being modified by the current state of narrative double-think: the
character we condemn this week may be next week’s hero. So
even if one accepts that a viewer can learn about causality from
TV narratives in the literal way Modleski suggests, then these
narratives still do not function as the bastion of liberal
humanism.
More disturbing in this position, however, is the idea of the
villainess whom we all hate. This soap opera villainess is a
standard character in fiction. She is the woman who steps out of
her socially (ideologically) acceptable role. Modleski’s own
language is revealing here. The villainess is one who ‘tries to
make things happen’, that is, to be active, not passive as ‘befits’ a
(patriarchally-constructed) woman. She tries to ‘control events
better than the subject/spectator can’. The ontology of this
statement is very confusing. It seems rather that the villainess
tries to control events better than the main, usually male,
character can—which identifies the subject/spectator position
with that of the main, usually male, character. Further, her evil is
not so much that she is a negative of the spectator, but consists in
her personification of the transgressive woman, the active,
dominating, powerful woman. Her fictional characterisation is
‘the bitch’. She is there to be bested, to be defeated, usually by a
man, but sometimes by a woman in the role of patriarchal female
(feminine) subject. Villainesses almost always use sex as a major
weapon against their enemies, so that their own sexuality is fore-
grounded: they are not villains who happen to be women, but
women who happen to be villains. Their ideological function
within the narrative is a highly conservative one: they represent
and reinforce the sexist definition of women. With teenage girls
as viewers this is obviously a disturbing function of soap opera
narrative.
Finally consider Modleski’s descriptions of the value of soap
opera for women, first in relation to their enforced passivity:
‘While soap operas thrive they present a continual reminder that
women’s anger is alive, if not well’ (Modleski, 1982:98). Modleski
here accounts for the popularity of the villainess, tracing it to her
acting out of the female viewers’ frustrated demands for power in

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 Soap opera as gender training

a (patriarchal) society which defines them in terms of powerless-

ness and passivity. Modleski follows with this statement a couple
of pages later: ‘Daytime television plays a part in habituating
women to distraction, interruption, and spasmodic toil... her
duties are split among a variety of domestic and familial tasks,
and her television programs keep her from desiring a focussed
existence by involving her in the pleasures of a fragmented life’
(Modleski, 1982:100-01). The second statement is extremely
problematic, and again Modleski’s own language highlights the
problem areas. She deseribes soap opera as functioning as a
behaviour modifier, ‘habituating’ women to their existence.
This seems to imply that this ‘fragmented life’ is not particularly
pleasurable; why else would women need to be habituated to it
(and note the disposition of female viewers as receptive, passive
puppets). This statement suggests that soap opera functions as a
valium substitute. The other sentence in this statement contains
an equally revealing verb: the female viewers’ television pro-
grams ‘keep her from desiring a focussed existence’; in other
words, this function of soap opera is actively repressive. Soaps
prevent women from even wanting a coherent existence, sup-
posedly by replacing this desire with the pleasures of a frag-
mented, discontinuous lifestyle.
The whole statement seems profoundly evasive. Ifa pleasure is
not desired, one usually does not have to be kept from it. And
being involved in the pleasures of a fragmented life sounds a lot
like learning to love your disease. The whole line of reasoning is
profoundly disturbing. Perhaps there is some value in being
deadened to what you (apparently) cannot have, but again that
represents soap opera viewing as the same kind of behaviour
modifier as gin or cocaine or valium. Perhaps soap opera viewing
can be used to make unpleasant living conditions tolerable, but it
does nothing to change those conditions. Worse, it reproduces
and reinforces the ideology which produces the working con-
ditions women find so difficult.
Even if mature women do use soap opera creatively to alleviate
their difficult working conditions (for example, by using their
knowledge of soap opera conventions to interact recreationally
with the text), it is important to remember that these women do
not constitute the entire audience; part of it consists of immature,
less media-literate teenage girls. If soap operas operate as
repressive mechanisms for women, are they not doing the same
for these girls?

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Modleski’s statement about female anger might be read an

entirely different way. Perhaps soap operas should remind us
that women’s oppression and dissatisfaction and frustration and
pain are alive, requiring daily doses of soma television to
suppress them. And one might ask whether viewing contains
that anger, or prevents it ever being formulated. Are its (ideologi-
cal) practices of mystification, concealment and naturalisation so
effective that they deflect frustration and dissatisfaction into
self-criticism and personal insecurity, so that anger never forms?
There is a need, as Modleski’s arguments suggest, to re-
evaluate conservative critiques of soap opera which position the
largely female viewing audience as mindless puppets (though
Modleski is susceptible to this criticism herself at times). Such
work proceeds from the same ideological premises as much soap
opera. However, it must nevertheless be recognised that soap
opera has negative characteristics, many of which are concerned
with the representation, and so definition, of femininity and
masculinity in our society. These practices may be harmful
enough in the lives of adult women, but in the lives of young girls
about to make decisions about their appropriate future roles and
careers, they may be disastrous.
The best remedy, as the Girls and Television report suggests, is
to enhance the media literacy of girls (and boys) so that they
themselves have the critical tools to deconstruct television
narratives. They then have the option to accept or reject the
viewing position constructed for them, a position often premised
on an acceptance of sexist discourse. Adult women often achieve
this level of literacy as a result of long-term viewing and their
own experiential input; they are as adept at manipulating the
conventions of the genre as the writers themselves. But teenage
girls are not. As seen repeatedly in the research, they view these
texts as ‘realistic’ and use them in constructing their own reality.
Perhaps their fetishisation of the term suggests that already their
own experience is leading them to detect contradictions, pro-
blems with these narratives and their relation to the social
formation in which the viewing takes place. Often, however, the
disturbance felt by teenage viewers is a consequence of their lack
of familiarity with the genre conventions; in time all will be
naturalised. Obviously the time to intervene in this process most
usefully is at the stage when girls are making decisions about
their future, not after those decisions have been made and the
consequences are being lived through with the help of a
behaviour modifier-cum-tranquilliser known as soap opera.

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 Soap opera as gender training

Soap opera may be a feminine genre in that it is produced

within a patriarchal culture by largely male production teams for
consumption by a largely female audience. Its attractiveness for
this audience is excellent reason for its analysis by feminist
critics. However, it is not reason to find soap operas necessarily
good or valid in themselves. Their popularity with and use by
teenage girls must make feminist critics particularly wary of
adopting essentialist or liberal stances which position them to
celebrate these texts simply on the basis of their consumption by
women. The most useful-role for feminist critics is to lead the
way in the deconstruction of these texts, which give so much
pleasure to women—not in order to destroy that pleasure, but to
show women the assumptions, the ideology, on which it is based
and so to give them the option of participating (or not) as active,
interventionist viewers.

189
11 Gender, class and power: text,
process and production in
Strindberg’s Miss Julie

Susan Yell

Tre CHAPTER sets out to explore some of the rich semiotic

potential of a theatrical text as it unfolds in space and time,
and to examine some of the ways in which gender-related
paradigms are constructed and reconstructed in a particular text.
The text in question, Strindberg’s play Miss Julie, was staged as a
workshop project through the collaboration of the English
Department and the Theatre Studies Service Unit of the Univer-
sity of Sydney. All rehearsals and performances were fully
documented, using audio and video taping as well as still
photography. It must be stressed that this analysis is not con-
cerned with critical, biographical or translation issues relating to
the text as a literary work: it is an exploration of this particular
text as it was constructed in the Seymour Centre, Sydney, April
1986. As a semiotic, not a dramatic enterprise, this chapter claims
no expertise in performance studies. Performance studies are
still at a developmental stage, and very little work has yet been
done on the rehearsal process.
I want first to examine some general concepts and issues
presented by a multi-medial text, including methodological
approaches and problems, and then to analyse in detail the final
scene of the play, in order to suggest what meanings are being

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 Strindberg’s Miss Julie

made, and how. I will try to suggest how and why some meanings
come to be selected at the expense of others, and I will discuss
some of the implications these choices have.

Text and context

I am using the term ‘text’ in the general sense of ‘any coherent

complex of signs’ (Bakhtin, 1986:103), that is, a configuration of
semiotic acts, whereby certain meaning choices are made and
realised in and through one or more semiotic systems. The
rehearsals and performances of Miss Julie form a multi-medial
text which is both process and product. As a multi-medial text,
its meanings are constructed and encoded simultaneously at
many levels, through many semiotic systems, enabling multiple
possibilities for semiosis. The meanings encoded in different
semiotic systems can and do conflict, forcing the encoder/
decoder of the text to overcode meanings at a higher semiotic
level or to undercode (Eco, 1979: 133, 135): that is, to construct
new meanings using knowledge of existing codes (overcoding) or
hypothesising, guessing where no such codes exist (undercoding)
(Eco, 1970:136). It can be seen as a text in process, continually
constituting and reconstituting itself in a recursive fashion
through the rehearsal context; as a text in flux, not in the state of
fixity we have come to expect from the term ‘text’ as it is used of
written texts. The text can also be viewed as a product, in the
context of its ultimate public performance. (However, it is
difficult to pin down the ultimate performance as product. Not
only were there two performances, each unique, but for the
purposes of analysis I have taken as my ‘ultimate performance’ a
videotape of the production which was made before the two
public performances.) In spite of all these dimensions of possible
variation, the Miss Julie project’s textual coherence is maintained
through recurring patterns of meaning choices.
As a performance text, the Miss Julie text has a complex
relationship with its context. I am using ‘context’ in the Halli-
dayan sense of a situation type which is a semiotic construct
(Halliday, 1978:125). Halliday suggests that this semiotic con-
struct is structured in three ways: in terms of its field (the social
activity which generates the text), its tenor (the role relationships
of the participants) and its mode (the symbolic organisation,
which relates the text to the social action and the role structure).
As a fictional display text, the Miss Julie text is embedded in two

191]
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

contexts: the immediate fictional context constructed through

the text, and the wider context of the rehearsal/performance
situation. Both contexts constrain the meanings which can be
produced, and are in turn constructed through the textual
activity which defines them. As a further ‘complication’, dis-
cussions between the actors and director form a sort of parallel
text. This is a metasemiotic discourse on the encoding and
decoding of meanings within the play, through which the
speaking subjects enact some of their conscious and explicit as
well as unconscious and implicit orientations to meaning-
making in the Miss Julie text. The relation between text and
parallel text is therefore one of symbiotic intertextuality—a
mutual exchange of meanings—although obviously a partial and
unequal one, subject to many constraints.
I have been using metaphors such as ‘meaning is constructed’
and ‘the text is constituted’ in order to suggest that the meaning-
making practices of subjects construct certain meanings and
thereby the ‘world’ of particular texts. Rather than suggesting
that such meanings represent some sort of reality independent of
the text and transparently knowable, I am suggesting that the
text allows for the construction of its own ‘reality’ and indeed
contributes to the construction of social reality. Thus, gender,
class and power in the Miss Julie text are not represented as stable
entities but are constructed and reconstructed as shifting para-
digms in relation to each other.

Method

The framework for the analysis of this theatrical text is necess-

arily eclectic; a text which is constituted through so many
different semiotic media demands a variety of analytic
approaches. The basic framework is semiotic; it draws upon the
semiotic theory of Eco (1979), which encompasses both linguistic
and non-linguistic sign systems. Two crucial concepts in Eco’s
theory are that of ‘code’ (a rule or set of rules coupling signals
with meanings: Eco, 1979:36-38) and that of ‘sign production’
(‘the kind[s] of labor required in order to produce and interpret
signs, messages or texts’: Eco, 1979:152). This chapter examines
the construction and interplay of theatrical codes and the ways in
which the practices of speaking subjects, their ‘sign production’,
constrain the meanings which can be made.
In order to analyse the various systems through which the

192
 Strindberg’s Miss Julie

theatrical text is constituted, it was necessary first to select those

systems which seemed to me important or interesting, and then
to adopt methods of analysis appropriate to the systems con-
cerned. I have selected five of the non-linguistic systems for
anaylsis: the kinesic, proxemic, aural, vestimentary (costume)
and lighting systems. By kinesics, I mean the code of body
movements and gesture, what meanings individuals encode with
their bodies through motion and position. Proxemics refers to the
spatial arrangement of the stage and the objects on it, including
configurations of bodies. By the term aural sign system, I simply
mean non-linguistic ‘sound effects’ (when these occur). ‘Cos-
tume’ and ‘lighting’ are self-explanatory. I have drawn to some
extent upon Elam’s work on the semiotics of theatre and drama;
he isolates a number of codes which operate in theatrical texts,
including kinesic, proxemic and vestimentary codes (Elam,
1980:57). However, the description and analysis are my own,
consisting of descriptions of specific realisations within these
systems as they seem relevant. A fully developed method for
dealing with non-linguistic sign systems in rehearsal and
performance texts has yet to be established.
The analysis of the linguistic system uses the social semiotics
of Halliday (1978), which is able to suggest in very powerful ways
the nexus between text and context. The verbal text is analysed
using Halliday’s semantically based systemic-functional gram-
mar (1985), which provides a method for describing realisations
within the linguistic system (the lexicogrammar) in ways which
can then be related to the semantics and the context. The starting
point for the analysis of the verbal text is the lexicogrammar (the
choice of words and grammatical constructions), which in turn is
seen as encoding the meaning potential (what the speaker can
mean; the potential of the semantic system).
Halliday suggests that this encoding involves three functions:
the ideational function (meaning as content, corresponding to the
field), the interpersonal function (meaning as participation, corre-
sponding to the tenor), and the textual function (meaning as
texture, corresponding to the mode) (see Halliday, 1978:125). For
each of these three ‘metafunctions’, there are a number of
associated systems through which the lexicogrammatical realis-
ations are produced. For the purposes of my analysis, I will be fo-
cusing on those which seem to be most relevant and revealing.
With respect to the ideational function, I will be looking at the
lexical choices (which construct certain semantic paradigms) and
the transitivity choices (the types of processes—activities—and

193
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

the participant roles associated with them). Within the interper-

sonal function, I will focus on the mood, modality and polarity
choices. The system of mood encodes the speech roles taken by
speakers towards hearers; whether they are stating something,
asking a question, commanding or offering to perform an action.
Halliday makes a useful distinction between the exchange of
information (as in statements and questions), which he calls
propositions and the exchange of goods or services (as in offers
and commands), which he terms proposals (1985:68-71). The
modality system overlays the mood system, and is used to
express the speaker’s attitude to a proposition or proposal, such
as the probability or possibility of a proposition, and the inclina-
tion or obligation to perform a proposal.
I will not be focusing on the textual function, as the paradigms
of gender and power are constructed mainly through the field of
discourse (the ideational function) and the tenor of discourse (the
interpersonal function). The textual function realises the mode
of discourse (the dialogic conversational structure which consti-
tutes dramatic dialogue). Within the textual function, analysis of
the thematic system is often revealing of the concerns of the text,
since the theme is ‘the starting-point for the message’ in the
clause (Halliday, 1985:39). In the Miss Julie text the themes are
mostly the human participants within the text (the protagonists).
Other textual features include the use of deixis to construct the
text in space and time and to link the text to its context, and the
use of lexical cohesion and reference to establish the coherence
of the text.
Figure 8 shows a sample of a functional analysis of the
transitivity and mood systems in a short section of the text. (In
order to write this chapter I analysed the complete verbal text of
the final scene, but constraints of space preclude presenting the
full analysis here.) ;
An important semiotic system which I have not attempted to
analyse is the paralinguistic system, which is realised through
features such as stress and intonation, voice quality and so on.
An analysis of paralinguistic features would certainly reveal
interesting information about the construction of interpersonal
and textual meanings, but such an analysis is beyond the scope of
the chapter.
Analysis of a theatrical text presents an important method-
ological problem: how to document and segment a text which is a
continuum. While documentation and segmentation are necess-
ary steps in analysis, no method of documentation (whether

194
 Strindberg’s Miss Julie

audio tapes, video tapes or still photography) can fully convey all
aspects of the theatrical experience, and the segmentation of the
text into significant units is necessarily selective. Imposing
artifical boundaries must to some extent distort the processual
nature of the text. This is a problem which performance analysts
have yet to resolve satisfactorily.
However, for the purposes of my analysis I have segmented the
verbal text according to Halliday’s concept of the clause as the
unit of meaning. I have therefore divided the text into discourse
units consisting of main fjnite verb clauses, or minor clauses
(clauses which have no finite verb). These are numbered
consecutively. I have used the segmentation of the linguistic text
as a reference point for the segmentation of the non-linguistic
continuum, and have indicated the incidence or duration of
kinesic or proxemic features according to the discourse units
with which they co-occur. This sytem has obvious limitations, as
the proxemic and kinesic systems can and do operate in the
absence of any linguistic activity and are not necessarily hom-
ologous with the linguistic segmentation. However, in the case of
this scene (and in the play in general), the kinesic and proxemic
features were fairly closely tied to verbal utterances. This seems
to be because of the naturalistic acting and directing codes,
which take the verbal text as the basis for the construction of
meanings in other semiotic systems.

Analysis

With such a complex and semiotically rich text for analysis, it

was necessary to select a small part of it in order to look at what
was going on. In this chapter I will look at the final scene of the
play (Meyer, 1985:143-46). This scene was less well-rehearsed
than the rest of the play, a factor which may have helped to
highlight the effects of variations in the way the scene is played
at different stages of the rehearsal to performance process, since a
greater degree of fixity could be expected with increasing
rehearsal time.
Before looking at the final scene, I will briefly give its context
within the play. The action of the play takes place in a single
evening, and in a single room, the kitchen of a country house. It
concerns an aristocratic young woman, Miss Julie, and her
father’s servant, Jean. Miss Julie is an aristocrat who wishes to

195
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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

descend to the level of the common people, and Jean is a lackey

who wishes to rise in the world. Miss Julie is portrayed as
sexually frustrated and confused; she has just broken off with
her fiance and she has ‘her monthly coming on’ (Meyer,
1985:111). Jean is engaged to Christine, the cook, and is portrayed
as sexually potent. After some flirtatious verbal sparring, a
seduction takes place offstage. The couple come back on stage,
each realises their own dilemma and each struggles for the
fulfilment of their own desires and ambitions, either through or
in spite of the other. However, these desires and ambitions are
continually changing, as if Julie and Jean take up certain roles,
play them out and then cast them off as ultimately unsatisfying
or hollow. Finally, the pair decide to run away together, but the
cook, Christine, discovers the plan and prevents it from being
carried out. Thus, issues of gender and class can already be seen
to be intricately bound up in each character’s struggle for some
sort of solution. At this point the final scene takes place (see
Appendix C for the text of this). I will be looking specifically at
the exchanges numbered from 29 to 171, which I have divided
into two sections (29-72 and 73-171), punctuated by the ringing
of the bell, signalling the return of Miss Julie’s father, who has
been visiting relatives. The division is not an arbitrary one, as
rather different patterns of meaning take place before and after
the bell rings.
I will first discuss briefly some features within the non-
linguistic systems which do not vary greatly during this scene.
Then I will look in turn at the meaning potential of the two
sections (29-72 and 73-171), first as it is encoded in the
lexicogrammar (the linguistic system) and then in the non-
linguistic systems, and at the way in which these different
systems interact.
There are certain elements within the non-linguistic systems
which remain fairly constant, such as movable but non-dynamic
proxemic features of the set and visual elements such as lighting
and costume. In the final scene, a proxemic element which has
been encoded early in the play, and which is a feature of both re-
hearsals and performances, is the territoriality of the stage area.
The stage area consists of the interior of a kitchen, with a large
table at stage left, a pair of french doors at centre stage, and a
scullery table and large stove at stage right (see the stage plan in
Appendix C). The area at stage right is the centre of activity for
Christine, as cook, while Miss Julie keeps to centre stage and
stage left, as she is essentially displaced, a mistress in the

198
 Strindberg’s Miss Julie

servant’s world. During rehearsals, Jean and Miss Julie both

move towards each other at times and occasionally cross these
territorial boundaries, but this changes gradually during the
rehearsal to performance process. By the time the performance
takes place, Miss Julie’s movements are confined to centre stage
and stage left, while Jean remains predominantly in the kitchen
area (stage right). These proxemic features encode Jean’s dis-
tancing (both physically and emotionally) of himself from Julie,
his status as servant and the idea of difference between them
(meanings which are also encoded in the verbal text).
The lighting is a visual element which is encoded in the
context of performance, but not as a deliberate semiotic feature
during rehearsals. The lighting for the performance is subject to
the dramatic code of naturalism: it approximates ‘natural light’
falling through a doorway. The result is to light the centre of the
stage and to leave the sides less well lit. As Miss Julie tends to
keep closer to centre stage than Jean, she appears lighter. The
semiotic feature of costume enhances this effect. Jean is dressed
in a black suit while Miss Julie is wearing a long pale-blue dress,
which appears almost white. These visual features encode many
potential meanings—solidity versus frailty, evil versus inno-
cence, masculinity versus feminity—but can clearly be seen as
again encoding the idea of a difference between Jean and Julie.

The final scene from 29 to 72

In this section, as in the play as a whole, Jean and Miss Julie are
constructed both through their own and through each other’s
speech; as subjects they are constructed in and through lan-
guage.’ The field of discourse is constructed partly through the
transitivity patterns (the types of processes and the participants
associated with them). In their own speech, Jean and Miss Julie
construct themselves through the transitivity patterns as the
active participants—as actors, sensers, behavers and sayers. (Of
course, to talk of fictional personae as constructing themselves or
making choices in their discourse in this way is a fallacy: it is the
playwright Strindberg, via Meyer, the translator of the edition
used, who constructs them as constructing themselves. But to
avoid such a circumlocution I will talk of Jean and Julie as
subjects who construct themselves.)
Miss Julie also constructs her father as a ‘doer’ or active
participant. Both Jean and Miss Julie see themselves as separate

199
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

participants, as the grammatical reference shows; the exclusive

pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’ are used, not the inclusive pronoun ‘we’,
indicating separation between self and other. The relational
processes, whereby one entity is identified in relation to another
or assigned a value, are crucial in this part of the text. Jean uses
relational processes to introduce the paradigms of gender and
class, although in an oblique and indefinite way (IfIwas a lady of
noble birth... , 37; There’s a difference between us, 44). Miss Julie
takes up these relations and elaborates them, defining herself
with regard to them. Through her lexical choices, Miss Julie’s
discourse sets up a clear dichotomy between the intellect
(containing mostly positive or neutral terms. such as clever,
learned, thought and idea) and the emotions (which are mostly
negative: hated, revenged, despise, blame). Intellect is linked
explicitly to the gender paradigm of maleness, and emotions are
linked to that of femaleness (Miss Julie says I haven’t a thought I
didn’t get from my father, not an emotion I didn’t get from my
mother, 62). (See Appendix C for a diagrammatic representation
of these lexical sets and the way in which they interrelate and
conflict.) So while it is Jean, the male, who introduces the notion
of difference into the discourse, it is the female, Miss Julie, who
elaborates it, not as a difference between herself and Jean, but as
one embodied within herself. She is half woman and half man
(58); she has no unified subjectivity (Myself? I have no self, 60-61).
Even the rhetorical mode of her speech at this point, with its
dialogic series of questions posed and answered, embodies this
disunity.
During the rehearsal process, the elaboration of the ‘difference’
is taken up in the parallel text (a rehearsal discussion, involving
the director and the actor playing Jean), and is constituted as
‘feminine = emotional, romantic, honourable’ and ‘masculine =
scientific, practical, intelligent’. In the rehearsal discussion, Miss
Julie is aligned with the feminine (as it is constructed here) in a
far less problematic way than she is in the verbal dramatic text.
In the verbal text, Miss Julie’s speech suggests very strongly that
gender identity is socially constructed, as opposed to being
naturally intrinsic to the biological individual.? However, the
gender ambiguity constructed in Miss Julie’s speech is encoded
through the semiotics of costume more strongly in rehearsals
than in performance. During rehearsals, the actress’s dress and
hair encode a tomboyish element which reinforces the gender
ambiguity; her hair is cropped fairly short and she wears a long
skirt but with a loose T-shirt. While not a deliberate dramatic

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 Strindberg’s Miss Julie

encoding for performance, the actress’s choice of rehearsal

costume is still a realisation of her orientation to the meanings in
the dramatic text. In the performance, Miss Julie is constructed
as much more stereotypically and intrinsically feminine through
her costume, thus not reinforcing the verbal text’s problemati-
sing of gender. She wears a long pale-blue dress with a tight
bodice, and her hair is long and piled up with a bow. The
encoding of these meanings can be traced both to the rehearsal
discussions (which contribute to the construction of meanings in
the performance text) and to the director’s orientation towards
meanings and the codes he employs, which directly affect
costume codes (as well as other codes in the performance).
The tenor of discourse (the system of role relationships) in this
section is realised mainly through the mood, modality and
polarity systems (see above, Method). Halliday’s distinction
between propositions and proposals is a useful one here. In this
section, Jean’s and Julie’s discourses consist mostly of prop-
ositions (statements and questions). The speakers are construct-
ed as manipulating the situation through the exchange of
meanings rather than by attempts to get each other to act (as in
proposals). In contrast to Jean, who uses few modals (auxiliary
verbs expressing speaker’s attitude), Miss Julie’s speech is quite
highly modalised. Miss Julie uses modals of ability with negative
polarity to express her own (and her father’s) inability to act (I
want to do it—but I can’t. My father couldn’t do it, either...,
48-50). However, when questioning Jean, she uses positive
propositions of ability and inclination (Can you see any way out of
this. .., 32; What would you do in my place? 34). This pattern of
negative meanings constructed around herself and positive
meanings constructed around others such as Jean is pervasive;
others act and possess certain attributes, while she herself cannot
act and defines herself by what she is not (I can’t... , 49; I have
no self, 61; I haven’t a thought, 62). Her only positive modality is
that of obligation, which carries the implication of external
agency rather than self-will (I shall have to bear the blame, carry
the consequences, 71).
As well as discussing the meaning potential of the verbal text, I
want to focus on the non-linguistic systems, specifically the
kinesics and proxemics, which are brought into play through
performance. These systems play a crucial role in the construc-
tion of meanings. Early in the scene (34-40) Miss Julie asks Jean
What would you do in my place?. Jean replies: In your place? Wait,
now. If I was a lady—of noble birth—who’d fallen? I don’t know.

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Yes. I do know. The stage directions in the written text say Miss
Julie ‘picks up the razor and makes a gesture’, saying This? (41).
Such a condensed verbal and kinesic semiotic act requires a great
deal of over- and undercoding on the part of both actors and
audience in order to make sense of what is going on. The
elliptical and deictic nature of the verbal act points us towards
other semiotic systems. Within the kinesic system, gesture, gaze
and the position of the razor are all crucial. The razor is a
particulary powerful sign. It is (in Eco’s terms) an ostension, a
showing of the class of objects it indicates, and it is also an index,
in that it points towards a meaning of which it is only a part (that
is, its meaning as an instrument of suicide, just as it functioned
earlier as an index of masculinity—we see Jean shaving with it).
The use of gesture—what is done with the razor—makes these
meanings more explicit. Gaze also functions in an important and
indicative way; who is looking at the razor, and when, indicates
the way in which we are to decode Jean’s elliptical Yes. I do know
(39-40).
In the first rehearsal run of this segment, Miss Julie has already
reached for the razor and has begun playing with it at 37-38, thus
ostending the idea of suicide before Jean’s lines I don’t know. Yes.
I do know. Jean’s gaze shows he has already seen her with the
razor before he says I don’t know. His gaze is not recorded by the
camera when he says Yes. I do know. This is followed by Miss
Julie putting the razor to her wrist as she says This?, thus making
the idea of suicide very explicit through the use of gesture.
However, the first run encodes an ambiguity over who was
thinking of the razor at what point, an ambiguity intensified by
the lacuna in the documentation—because of Jean’s position
outside the frame of the video we don’t see his gaze at the crucial
point.
In the second run, Jean clearly does not see Miss Julie pick up
the razor. At 38, he is at the front of the stage with his hands over
his face. The meaning encoded in this run is that it is Miss Julie
who thinks of committing suicide with no input from Jean. The
loss of lines 39-40 (Yes. I do know.), where Miss Julie comes in too
early with her line This?, results in an even.clearer construction
of Jean as innocent of suggesting the idea. The run is interrupted
at this point (41); the rehearsal discussion takes up the issue of
‘whose idea is it first?’ and explores ways of encoding Jean as sug-
gesting to Miss Julie that she commit suicide.
The third run then takes place, and this time the idea of Miss
Julie using the razor to commit suicide is clearly encoded as

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 Strindberg’s Miss Julie

Jean’s unspoken suggestion. This is done through gesture and

gaze; Jean paces in front of the table as if thinking, his eye falls on
the razor, he pauses and says Yes. I do know. Miss Julie follows
his gaze, reaches for the razor, places it against her wrist and says
This?. Jean steps back and then walks over to the scullery area
(stage right), a proxemic feature which puts a distance between
him and Miss Julie, encoding his disassociation with her and the
contemplated act.
The performance (that is, the one recorded on a split-screen
video tape, which I have taken as my ‘ultimate performance’)
does not retain the kinesic and proxemic features of the third
rehearsal run. Jean does not pace across the stage but remains in
the scullery area, and is bending over the table or has his face in
his hands when Miss Julie reaches for the razor, which she does
while Jean is still saying he doesn’t know what he’d do in her
place. Again, the crucial lines Yes. I do know. are omitted, again
probably because Miss Julie comes in too early with her line
This?. It is not until then that Jean looks up and sees her playing
with the razor, thus he is encoded again in this performance as an
innocent.
Gaze is therefore an extremely significant feature in the
encoding and decoding of meanings; it is indicative of whether
we are to see Jean or Miss Julie as suggesting the idea of suicide. It
therefore has a vital effect on the positioning of Jean, either as a
cold-blooded conniver or as someone acceding to someone else’s
impulsions. As we’ve seen, the razor as Jean’s idea is encoded
very clearly during the rehearsal process, but has reverted to
being Miss Julie’s idea in the performance. It is not clear whether
this was-a deliberate directing decision (the documentation of
rehearsal discussions doesn’t suggest this).

The final scene from 73 to 171

A sudden change in the discourse takes place with the ringing of

the bell (after 72). This aural sign is, like the razor, indexical. It
points to the return of Miss Julie’s father, with all the possible im-
plications we can over- and undercode from this. The most
striking change occurs in the tenor of discourse, in the mood and
modality choices that Miss Julie and Jean begin making. A wave-
like pattern of propositions (consisting of statements of inability
to act) followed by proposals (consisting of positive commands to
act) occurs alternately in Miss Julie’s and in Jean’s speech.

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Powerlessness is constituted both lexically and grammatically

through the combination of active processes in the transitivity
patterns and modals of inability (Miss Julie’s I can’t repent, can’t
run away, can’t stay, can’t live, can’t die!, 89-93). In a similar way,
Power/Action is constituted through the use of active processes
combined with positive imperatives (Miss Julie’s Do me this last
service, save my honour, save his name!, 97-99). However, these
commands have an ambiguity which I shall examine in more
detail later.
As in the earlier part of the scene, Jean and Miss Julie construct
themselves as active participants in their transitivity patterns.
But Miss Julie very early rejects the role of.senser (one who
thinks, feels or perceives). Having stated that she can’t feel
anything (88), she does not construct herself as carrying out any
further mental processes throughout the rest of the scene. By
contrast, Jean continues to take the role of senser in his own
discourse, but his mental processes are all intellectual rather
than emotional, thus aligning him with the rational masculine
paradigm set up earlier. Miss Julie also assigns Jean certain roles
and activity types through her own discourse. She constructs him
as acting, sensing, behaving and saying, roles which jean tries to
reject by expressing his inability to carry them out (I can’t). It is
also Miss Julie who sets up the relations of identification and
attribution in this scene, both with respect to Jean and to herself,
and also as a means of creating a desired ‘reality’ through
discourse. She also reintroduces the relation The last snall be
first, which was set up earlier by Christine in her sermon-like
speech (22). However, this general summary of the main mean-
ing-making practices in this scene can only convey a limited idea
of the scene’s dynamics, and tends to distort what is actually
happening along the syntagmatic axis, as the text unfolds. In the
following discussion, I'll follow this scene through in a more
linear fashion, looking at it as process. .
Miss Julie’s speech begins with propositions expressing her
powerlessness and inability to act, which then modulate to a
series of proposals—commands directed at Jean. To order is to
assume a powerful role, to attempt to force someone else to act in
a certain way. But the nature of the activity which Miss Julie
orders Jean to enact sets up a paradoxical flow of power. She is
ordering him to order her (Order me, and I’ll obey you like a dog,
95-96). Effectively, she is commanding him to be the powerful
one, and assigning herself the status of helplessness or power-
lessness (Help me!, 94; Save me!, 98; Will me!, 102). Such

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 Strindberg’s Miss Julie

paradoxical behaviour encodes the contradictory role relation-

ships between Jean and Miss Julie at this point. Miss Julie has in-
stitutionalised power over Jean by virtue of their respective class
statuses. Jean’s power over Miss Julie is fhat of a male over a fe-
male he has seduced—it seems that circumstances have given
him a contingent power. However, it is not as simple as that.
Jean’s power also arises from his freedom from the class value of
honour which constrains Miss Julie, a freedom which is just as
institutionalised, as indeed is his gender-related freedom from
blame in his share of the seduction.
In response to Miss Julie’s commands to take control of her,
Jean in turn expresses his inability to act and to assume such
power over her, an inability which he links to his institution-
alised servility (104-112).
Miss Julie’s response is again to command (Then pretend that
you are he and I am you, 113). At the same time, she realigns the
critical participants so that Jean becomes his lordship and she
becomes Jean. This effectively realigns the class status; Jean
becomes aristocratic and endowed with power, and Miss Julie
the powerless lackey. Miss Julie makes this even more explicit
when she says You acted so well just now, when you went down on
your knees—then you were an aristocrat (114-15). The proxemics
for this scene, as they are encoded during the rehearsal process,
make these constantly shifting paradigms of class and power
even more contradictory. Julie’s and Jean’s relative positions in
space encode this; during rehearsals Miss Julie begins by stand-
ing facing Jean, but later sits in the centre of the floor while Jean
stands. The paradox is thus heightened: Miss Julie is an aristo-
crat, yet down on the floor; commanding, yet giving up power;
while Jean is the lackey, but he stands; he’s obeying, yet
receiving power (see p. 206).
Miss Julie then introduces the metaphor of the hypnotist,
suggesting to Jean that he assume this role. However, she
effectively enacts this role herself, with a series of declarations
which effect a desired reality through her discourse (I am already
asleep... and so peaceful, 122-28). During the rehearsal process,
this meaning is gradually made more explicit through gaze and
eye contact. Miss Julie gazes steadily at Jean, forcing him to
maintain eye contact, as if hypnotising him. When Jean fulfils her
commands to act by handing her the razor and commanding her
to go... out to the barn—and— (130), she is again unable to act,
until Jean completes the realignment of the Last-First relation
which she commands of him (You are no longer among the first.

205
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 Strindberg’s Miss Julie

You are—among the last!, 139-40). This is a crucial paradigm for

Miss Julie, as it defines who shall be allowed to enter heaven. As
Christine formulates it, There shall the last (in a worldly sense) be
first (into heaven). At Miss Julie’s prompting, Jean realigns these
terms so that Miss Julie is no longer among the first (in a worldly
sense) but among the last, and if she’s among the last, she too can
enter heaven.
However, before Jean can finally command her, he traces (from
the ringing of the bell at 72-73) a chain of causality outside his
control, leading to his own and Miss Julie’s downfall. He does this
in a series of material processes whose agent (participant who
initiates or causes the action) is only partially and gradually
revealed. It proceeds from the metonymic a hand, to the non-
human something else, to the full human participant he (162-66).
Although the he is unnamed, it refers to his lordship, as the
ultimate authority and the presumed origin of the causal chain.’
The actual ringing of the bell is an aural semiotic which
functions both as an ostensive sign of his lordship taking up his
role as agent, and as a connotative sign of authority and
inevitability. Jean finally sees no alternative but to issue the
command to Miss Julie to go.
During this final scene, there has been considerable shifting in
the paradigms of gender, class and power. Through the construc-
tion of Jean as a subject, what was aligned as a masculine
attribute, the intellect, has become paralysed and has been
rejected as a means towards power; Jean says I don’t know (104), I
don’t understand (106), and commands Miss Julie, Don’t think,
don’t think! You take all my strength from me (151-53). At the
same time, the ‘feminine’ attribute of the emotions has been
paralysed, through Miss Julie; she says I can’t feel anything (88)
and at the same time cannot act in other ways. These explicitly
constructed gender paradigms are thus negated. They are then
replaced in a much less explicit way, through the different
meaning-making practices which Jean and Julie, as gendered
subjects, adopt in order to gain the power or will to act. Miss Julie
achieves some sort of resolution of her dilemma by a process of
analogy; she constructs analogic relations which realign partici-
pants and values in a way that permits Jean to command and her
to obey. Jean, however, constructs his resolution differently,
through a rational chain of cause and effect. Jean’s power to
command can be seen as ultimately hollow, as it is imposed on
him externally, while Miss Julie’s power is constituted by an act
of volition, a powerful reality-changing act, which she makes
Jean participate in. Thus, while on one level Miss Julie is a victim

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

of male power, on another she contributes in a more powerful

way than does Jean to her own end. This is, of course, a highly
metasemiotic reading, but one which can be made, and one
which is reinforced on other semiotic levels (such as the meaning
encoded through Miss Julie’s hypnotic gaze in the kinesics).

Conclusion

Finally (in terms of both the performance as ‘final’ product and

the conclusion of the play), the construction of Jean and Julie
seems to suggest a misogynist reading—one which sees the
woman as self-destructive. Her construction as being, on one
level, more powerful than Jean, tends to work against a construc-
tion of her as victim. In this reading, the blame or responsibility
thus falls to her more than to Jean, who is not responsible for his
own actions.
However, the written dramatic text does not construct this as a
fixed and necessary order: the balance of power is ambiguous
and fluctuates constantly as the text proceeds. The transform-
ation of the written text into a rehearsal/performance text in
turn opens up these paradigms further and allows for many
possible meanings to be made.
During the rehearsal-to-performance process, the rehearsal
context and the orientations towards meaning of the speaking
subjects (actors, director, theatre workers) are all constitutive of
the theatrical text. Meanings are selected and encoded through
certain semiotic systems, in ways which foreground some mean-
ings and de-emphasise others; this is often a deliberate and
explicit semiotic act which takes place in the context of rehearsal
discussions. The selection of some meanings and the omission (or
de-emphasis) of others necessarily has ideological implications;
but at the same time the complexity of the text allows for a
plurality of ideological readings. Foregrounding of certain mean-
ings can be achieved in a theatrical text either paradigmatically,
by encoding a meaning within more than one level or system, or
syntagmatically, by iterating it within the same system. Both
strategies may be used, for example, the notion of ‘difference’ in
the Miss Julie text is encoded paradigmatically by realisations
simultaneously in the verbal text and in the proxemics (44-47),
while the notion of Julie’s inability to act is foregrounded
syntagmatically by the repetition of ‘can’t’ in the verbal text
(89-93).

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 Strindberg’s Miss Julie

Foregrounding of meanings such as these is a strategy which

may invite different readings. For example, the foregrounding of
apparently misogynist meanings may be a strategy for inviting
criticism of, or for reasserting the authdérity of such meanings.
Alternatively, de-emphasising misogynist meanings may be a
strategy for naturalising misogyny, or for attenuating its author-
ity. Therefore, whether or not we read the Miss Julie text
primarily as a misogynist text depends partly on the extent to
which potentially misogynist meanings are foregrounded in its
construction in rehearsals and performance, and partly upon the
way in which we read such strategies (that is, upon our own
orientation to meaning).
One aspect of the Miss Julie performance text which could be
read as misogynist is the deliberate choice to encode the notion of
‘femininity’ through Miss Julie’s costume. This constitutes a
syntagmatic foregrounding which contributes to her construc-
tion as a gendered subject, and one which aligns her with the
negative meanings constructed and associated with femininity in
the verbal text. However, at the same time as these meanings are
being foregrounded, the text still defies closure; there are
conflicting meanings (such as the gender ambiguity encoded in
Miss julie’s speech) at this and other points in the text. The
construction of Miss Julie through her far less feminine costume
during rehearsals points to the multiple possibilities encoding
through different systems allows, and also highlights the impli-
cations of choosing to encode one meaning (‘femininity’) rather
than another (‘gender ambiguity’) through a semiotic system
such as costume. While such a strategy may invite a misogynist
reading at one level, the conflicts within such a complex text
work towards deconstructing it simultaneously at other levels.
The reading of such a complex text is constrained but not
ultimately defined by such foregrounding strategies (whatever
their ‘intention’).
In conclusion, the paradigms of gender, class and power do not
have fixed or static meanings, but dynamic meanings con-
structed through the interactions and interrelations of speaking
subjects (constructed dramatis personae, actors, director and us,
the audience). These meanings are set up initially through the
written text, which retains a certain authority and fixity (prob-
ably because of the acting and directing codes involved, which
seem to be oriented towards the primacy of the written text).
However, the interaction between the verbal text and other
semiotic systems which takes place during rehearsals and

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

performances allows these meanings to be elaborated, made

more explicit, shifted or even contradicted. These shifting and
conflicting meanings defy any single ‘reading’ of this text in
terms of its ‘message’.
This chapter has drawn on conceptual dichotomies such as
text/context and product/process; however, during the dis-
cussion of this complex text the boundaries of these dichotomies
have tended to blur and even dissolve at times. This seems to me
a necessary condition of the exploration of the systems and
practices (both of production and reception) of this particular
semiotic activity—the rehearsal /performance text.

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12 Scientific constructions,
cultural productions: scientific
narratives of sexual attraction

Gisela T. Kaplan and

Lesley J. Rogers

sk Is today a great deal of evidence which moves away

from the discrete polarisation into male and female cate-
gories which we have lived with for so long and which still
constrains our thinking on the subject. People are assigned to the
male and female sex according to the morphology of their
genitalia. On the basis of this division there is an assumed
biological underpinning which not only causes a host of second-
ary, physical differences between the sexes, but is assumed to
cause sex differences in behaviour as well. As the understanding
of the function of sex hormones and their effect on brain
development has grown, it is becoming increasingly clear that
the once-thought major biological differences between male and
female are no longer so clear-cut, and that biology has responded
to the cultural division placed upon the male and female sex
(Bleier 1984; Rogers 1981).
Equally doubtful, therefore, must be the commonly held
assumption that sexual attraction in heterosexual relationships
results entirely from sex characteristics of the opposite sex. As

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Hoult (1984) has pointed out, the biological model is inappro-

priate to an understanding of human sexuality, be it in terms of
sexual actions per se, sexual orientation or gender identities.
Sexual attraction has been channelled by most societies into a
consciousness limited by cultural and social practices, although
there are, of course, cultures which have placed less emphasis
and different emphases on individual sex characteristics (Ford
and Beach, 1951).
We suggest that the attraction of one person to another is
guided by a variety of stimuli which are little concerned with any
absolute male/female dichotomy. Overt gender signals may well
reflect as closely as possible biological sex; however, there are
covert signals and biological attributes which may either run
counter to acceptable notions of masculinity and femininity or
have nothing to do with either. We propose the thesis of an
attraction to a mix of male and female characteristics.
We have argued elsewhere (Kaplan and Rogers, 1984) that
sexual attraction is stronger to individuals who show a mix of
male and female physical characteristics and of masculine and
feminine behavioural traits. Most people have a mixture of male
and female characteristics, both physical and behavioural.
Recognition of this fact raises the question about what exactly we
mean by ‘male’ and ‘female’ characteristics, and indeed whether
the terms are at all useful or appropriate. In other words, a male
may respond to a female not only because some of her physical
and behavioural attributes are ‘feminine’ but because some of
them are distinctly ‘masculine’, and vice versa. Bem (1974) has
argued that behavioural masculinity and femininity should be
measured as separate behavioural dimensions, not as opposite
poles of a single continuum, as individuals may display beha-
viour which is both very masculine and very feminine. We wish
to draw attention to the fact that the same intermingling of male
and female characteristics may occur within an individual’s
physical features.
Our concept of the mix is thus not used as implying a levelling
out of, and taking away from, maleness and femaleness. It is
rather that both male and female attributes strongly assert
themselves side by side and are received as stimuli in this way.
Our concept is not to be confused with ‘androgyny’, commonly
used to indicate a fusion of maleness and femaleness into a
unified whole by way of minimising primary and secondary
sexual attributes of both sexes (see Fig. 1 as an illustration of
androgyny). The concept of androgyny certainly has its place,

Z\2
 Scientific narratives of sexual attraction

The Little Fisherman by Pierre Puvis de Chavennes (1824-98)

213
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

but, if accepted as the only reference to a mix, obscures the real

events precipitating and facilitating attraction of one individual
to another.
It has long been known by artists of Eastern and Western
cultures that the mix can be exploited very effectively in just
about any art form. We will give some examples of artistic
representation of the mix through the ages and in a number of
cultures in order to demonstrate our suggestion that the persist-
ent rendering of double gender messages is indeed related to the
attraction to the mix, and the artist’s awareness of such an
attraction.
The painting of Bacchus by Caravaggio (Fig. 2) illustrates our
definition of the sexual mix. The shoulder and arm muscles of
Bacchus, as well as the exposed part of the chest, are strong
displays of male characteristics. At the same time the gown
draped over the right part of his torso, the graceful way of holding
a goblet and especially the soft features of his face are indicative
of female characteristics. According to Greek mythology,
Bacchus (Dionysus) was the god of fertility and ecstasy and later
also of wine. Interestingly, he was always considered the op-
ponent and competitor of Apollo, the god of love. Bacchus was a
lover of men but women loved him with such frenzy that they ce-
lebrated orgies in his honour. This aspect of the Bacchus myth,
namely his extraordinary ability to sexually attract men and
women alike, must have inspired Caravaggio. Very cleverly, he
has worked into his painting an explanation of why Bacchus
could be thought of as so attractive by both sexes. In very early
representations Dionysus is depicted as a bearded man and in
later centuries as a young man wearing an animal skin, ac-
companied by a panther. Instead of these male images, Caravag-
gio chose to endow him with male and female attributes and to
let him rest on a pillow in this rather seductive pose, heightening
further his sensuality and sexual attractiveness. In this painting,
Caravaggio has rendered some of the complexities of human
attraction that have little to do with stereotyped female /male
models. The photograph of the singer ‘Boy George’, taken almost
400 years after Caravaggio’s Bacchus was painted has been
placed alongside the Bacchus in order to illustrate a rather
striking similarity in posture and transmission of the mix.
The form in which the open enjoyment of the mix has been
most often reified in non-Western and Western cultures alike is -
no doubt the theartrical arts. We are not suggesting that the open
enjoyment of the male/female mix is the only factor which has

214
 Scientific narratives of sexual attraction

Bacchus by Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio (1560-1609)

2195
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

The singer Boy George

led to theatre practices reflecting this interest. Complicated

factors of economy, power, in many cases the oppression of
women, and various other issues have contributed to the rise and
maintenance of certain forms of stage performances and person-
alities. We need to take note, however, that, despite enormous
differences of circumstances, of cultural context and time, there
is much evidence in Western and non-Western cultures of a
strong interest in plots and characters involving disguise across
biological sex.
The theatre, in its capacity to present visual images in the
context of action carried out in three-dimensional areas, has the
advantage that anything happening on its chosen platform is, by
definition, only an imitation of what it represents. The theatre is
the place in which conscious illusions are created. The actors, as
audiences know, are in real life not what they represent on stage.
The make-believe world of the theatre, used for entertainment,
for teaching and for political purposes, is also the place in which

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 Scientific narratives of sexual attraction

illusions to real life need not be rendered innocuous or carefully

masked as they must be, say, in a scholarly work, a treatise or a
report. It sets itself up as being removed from reality and
therefore often takes the liberty of saying and exposing what
might otherwise not be permissible. The non-verbal messages
and visual stimuli can also be such that they become acceptable
in the stage setting even if, in real life, they would be unaccepta-
ble or a threat. The enjoyment of the male/female mix falls
perhaps most readily into this latter category.
Breeches roles for women and transvestite roles for men began
to become part of the repertoire in Western culture once theatre
was permitted and freed from the church’s influence in the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Michelene Wandor
(1981:19) argues that transvestite theatre ‘has flourished at times
of changing attitudes to women in the theatre and to sexuality in
society—the Restoration, the Industrial Revolution, the suffrage
agitation and now, in the second half of the twentieth century. At
such times clearly there is a tension between the surface
appearance and how men and women are supposed to ‘be’ and
the changing reality.’ This explanation is an attractive one in a
sense of highlighting that theatre may well respond to social
changes by experimenting with extremes of such change, such as
role reversals would be. However, examples of cross-dressing are
not confined to the periods she specifies and are not less
numerous, or at least not less important, in other periods.
One of the best known examples of an early breeches role is
that of Viola, travelling as Cesario, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth
Night, written and performed in 1601, and based on an Italian
comedy of 1531 (Halliday, 1964). Viola has been separated from
her twin brother Sebastian during a shipwreck and is now in
search of him, dressed up as Cesario. She goes on shore in Illyria
and finds a job as page in the service of the Duke of Orsino who is
suffering from unrequited love for Olivia, a rich countess. As
Viola/Cesario takes on the role of go-between for the suitor,
Olivia falls in love with Viola/Cesario while Viola herself has
fallen in love with the duke. The audience is aware of Viola’s dis-
guise and can therefore relish the confusion in the relationships
of Cesario and Orsino, and Cesario and Olivia: Olivia pining for
the disguised Viola and the supposed Cesario blushing and
making eyes at Orsino. The problem of the difference between
appearance of clothes and physique is cleverly exploited by
Shakespeare, and verbalised on several occasions. Orsino, for
instance, is intrigued by Cesario and says:

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they shall yet belie thy happy years,

That say thou art a man: Diana’s lip
Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe
Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound;
And all is semblative a woman’s part. (I, iv, 32-36)
The reference to sexual characteristics and the slippery use of
metaphors to highlight the ambivalence of Viola/Cesario is
readily understandable and engenders laughter in the audience.
The question of reality and dream in relation to biological sex
and gender role is later well put by Viola:
She loves me, sure. If it be so, as ‘tis
Poor lady, she were better love a dream. (II, ii, 2-2)
The narrow confinement to socio-cultural roles has in fact not
disappeared in the play: Olivia is capable of loving Viola but can
do so only because she believes her to be a young, attractive
male. However, the audience has a much broader perspective
than the protagonists in the play, for it is aware of the crossing of
roles. In a sense, Olivia loves an illusion, the nonexistent Cesario,
but at the same time she loves this one particular and very much
present image of Viola in men’s clothes or of Cesario with
feminine features. Ironically, this is what the Duke had pre-
dicted, if not for features of sex alone, but also for age, when he
says to Viola:
... unfold the passion of my love;
Surprise her with discourse of my dear faith:
It shall become thee well to act my woes:
She will attend it better in thy youth
Than in a nuncio of more, grave aspects. (I, iv, 25-29)
This point is brought out later when Sebastian, Viola’s twin
brother, has been found and, luckily, is so much the image of
Viola that he keeps being mistaken for her, i.e. for Cesario. He
can replace Viola and now fulfil the role of Olivia’s lover once
Viola is discovered in her true sexual identity. Olivia can love
Sebastian precisely because he is so much like her, and while he
may well be second choice, he is the only choice Olivia has.
Shakespeare has used women in men’s roles quite often, for
instance Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Portia in The
Merchant of Venice, Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, or
Rosalind’s impersonation of Ganymede in As You Like It. It must

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also be remembered that women’s parts were generally still

taken by boys. Shakespeare’s heroines in disguise were thus boys
pretending to be women pretending to be men (Muir, 1970), a
double entendre in the play with gender that the male-to-female
disguise lacked at a time when all roles were filled by males.
Lesser known authors, and not just in England, used cross-
dressing as an effective tool in their comedies throughout the
seventeenth century. One such example occurs in Arabella,
written in 1642 by the Duke of Brunswick. By no means does it
reach the artistic standard of any of Shakespeare’s plays, but it
deals with cross-dressing in an interesting and complex way.
Here, a man having had to disguise himself as a woman and a
woman disguised as a man meet and fall in love. Finally, they are
exposed and get married. The patterns of sexual attraction are
quite complex, for the woman knows that she is a woman but be-
lieves the diguised man to be a woman, and vice versa: Lesbian,
homosexual and narcissistic elements as well as a continuous
exploitation of the attraction to the mix play into the plot,
observable by the audience and intermittently suspected by the
protagonists.
It seems that neither class differences nor the degree of social
change at the time of the performance of a play are necessarily
indices of the possible enjoyment of the mix or for the occurrence
of cross-dressing in the theatre. The plays by Shakespeare were
performed to a wide cross-section of the English (London) public,
including the poorer people, the well-to-do merchants and the
aristocracy (Salingar, 1970). The play by the Duke of Brunswick,
by contrast, was limited to an aristocratic audience. While
Elizabethan England showed signs of accelerated social mobility
and change, the German dukedoms and principalities of the
1650s, where there was also a theatrical interest in cross-
dressing, showed little change in social structures, although in
practice the Thirty Years War had undermined some of the moral
values held at the time (Kaplan, 1984).
If we do not confine ourselves to spoken stagecraft but include
ballet, opera and also film in the performing arts, the evidence of
cross-dressing and double-play with gender becomes even more
pronounced. Opera, with its combination of acting and singing,
was able to add auditory to the visual stimuli and thus take the
disguise, gender confusion and cross-dressing a step further. In
its beginnings, it did so by the introduction of castrati, singing at a
voice level of soprano and contralto. Moreover, castrati sang both
male and female roles. The castrati were very important figures

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in Western opera, right from its beginnings in 1607 when castrati

first appeared in Monteverdi’s Orfeo until around 1800 when
their use was prohibited for humanitarian reasons. In these two
centuries they often achieved prominence and they were in-
creasingly afforded great power (often political) and wealth. The
castrati are said to have been impressive figures on stage, tall and
broad-chested (Heriot, 1956:27), and.they were extremely popu-
lar in roles, even tragic ones, in which they portrayed female
characters. They were in such demand in the eighteenth century
that as many as 70 per cent of all male singers were estimated to
have been castrati, at a time when there was no dearth of female
singers (Heriot, 1956:31). Goethe (1749-1832), one of Germany’s
most eloquent poets at the time made special mention of these
castrati: ‘I reflected on the reason why these singers pleased me
so greatly, and I think I have found it. In these representations,
the concept of imitation and of art was invariably more strongly
felt, and through their able performance a sort of conscious
illusion was produced. Thus the double pleasure is given, in that
these persons are not women, but only represent women’ (cit. in
Heriot, 1956:26). When Silberberg made a film of Wagner’s opera
Parsifal recently, he was obviously playing with this tradition but
reversing the sex, a feat that could never be carried out in live
theatre: here Parsifal, once having reached adolescence, is
played by a woman but continues to be sung in a male voice.
Interestingly, Der Rosenkavalier by Strauss (1911) uses sex-role
disguise in much the same way that Shakespeare used it in his
plays. The part of Octavian is played by a soprano and Octavian
disguises himself as a woman in order to entrap and expose
another male character.
In ballet, the role of Franz in Delibes’ Coppelia was first danced
by a woman when performed in 1870. Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker
Suite contains a pantomime role’of the Old Woman who Lived in
a Shoe, to be danced by a male. Vladimir Yakovlav even wore a
moustache in this role with the overt intention of showing the
female-male mix (Warrack, 1973:258). Apart from these exam-
ples and the comedies which continued to use cross-dressing, the
melodrama made its appearance on European stages at the close
of the eighteenth century, at once including cross-dressing in its
repertoire. In the twentieth century, the medium of film has
continued to exploit, often in novel ways, the presentation of the
mix. The film historian Homer Dickens, in his book What a Drag,
has examined more than 200 cinematic treatments of cross-
dressing in films from the 1920s onwards. Today, plays and films

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continue to be written and produced incorporating cross-dress-

ing (Engel, 1985). Likewise, there are now a good number of
individual performers and entertainers whose success is linked
at or based on cross-dressing, like Boy George and Danny de la
ue.
We agree with Gabrielle Hyslop (1985) that cross-dressing was
still, as late as the nineteenth century, often used as a comic
device in the theatre that neither challenged nor undermined
conservative values and traditional mores but reassured and
reaffirmed them even if, within such a context, albeit limited, it
may have contained a rebellion against conformity. This is as
true for Shakespeare and the seventeenth-century playwrights as
for Pixerécourt, the deeply conservative popular French drama-
tist who ‘invented’ melodrama (Hyslop, 1985).
Eastern Cultures also have well-entrenched theatrical tra-
ditions and cultural practices of cross-dressing and of the
representation of the mix. Space does not permit us to delve into
elaborations on these, let alone on other cultures around the
globe, although examples are plentiful. We shall confine our-
selves here to two examples, the Chinese traditional opera and
the Japanese Kabuki theatre.
The main characters in the Kabuki Theatre are the female
onnogata played by highly trained male actors. Even in present-
day Japan these actors have a cult following. The Kabuki theatre
originally developed in Kyoto in the early seventeenth century
with an all-female cast. The word Kabuki denotes ‘to be unusual’
or ‘out of the ordinary’, with the connotation of sexual de-
bauchery and, indeed, most actresses were also prostitutes. An
injunction of 1629 would almost have ended the Kabuki theatre
had it not been saved as an art form by some determined males
who took over all the roles (Ernst, 1956), the female roles being
played by beautiful young boys. These boys were so revered and
admired that samurai fell in love with them and, after a public
brawl between two samurai, this form of Kabuki theatre was also
banned. The reopening of the theatre was granted on the
condition that the onnogata cut their hair, wore wigs on stage
and indicated to the audience by subtle hand movements that
they were in fact males. It is in this latter form that the Kabuki
theatre has survived to the present day.
As most Western observers of the Kabuki Theatre are unable to
read the subtle hand and body movements indicating the
maleness of the onnogata, the attraction of the male-female mix
escapes them. Of course, this is not so for Japanese audiences, for

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whom the onnogata are special favourites, spurred on noisily

with calls of enthusiasm, appreciation and support throughout
the performance. Such extrovert enthusiam has to be regarded as
significant in a society which tends to be otherwise very reserved
in public expression of emotions of any kind. Since all other
actors are equally well trained and experienced, it cannot be
argued that the onnogata performers please particularly critical
theatregoers. Here, obviously, it is important that these males
have learned to portray the female convincingly. Aesthetic
enjoyment aside, the admiration is likely to have a basis in the
male-female double message.
In Chinese opera, we also find female impersonators. Their
history within the Chinese opera, however, is considered to be
longer than that of the onnogata, and the reasons for their
appearance are likely to be different as well. Female imperson-
ators have appeared in Chinese opera performances since an-
cient times, very often because emperors intermittently forbade
stage appearances of males and females together (Mackerras,
1972:45) This was particularly so in the eighteenth century
(Alley, 1957). The practice of males playing the female, or tan,
roles has survived to the present day, although the restrictions
placed upon the sex of actors are no longer applied. Many
Western observers are unaware of this fact.
We do not know whether the actors of these female roles use or
used any subtle signals to indicate their maleness to the Chinese
audience or whether such special signals were in fact needed.
For several ancient theatre performances the novelty and in-
terest did not lie in the plot, which was already known (as for in-
stance, in ancient Greek theatre) but in the way the story was
told. We therefore tend to think that the audience, by whatever
means, had the knowledge of the disguise. The Chinese opera
has a stock of several stylised female roles: the young, the old, the
naive and the dissolute as well as the female warrior. There are
operas such as The Iron Bow in which we find the convoluted
situation of a male actor playing the female role of Chen Xiuying
who then, within the play, takes on the disguise of a man, goes to
battle, overwhelming a battalion of troops in order to avenge ‘her’
husband!
The Chinese custom of forbidding men and women to perform
together on stage also led to the formation of all-female acting
troops. In these, the women played the male parts, sheng, but
little is written about this reverse situation. However, there is a
report that one actress in the female Shuang-chi’ng Company

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A male performer of a female role in the Peking Opera

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An onnogata actor (Onoe Baiko, Vill) applying his makeup

 Scientific narratives of sexual attraction

played the parts of beardless young men and scholar-lovers and

in them she ‘strongly resembled a man’ (Mackerras, 1972:73).
While cross-gender disguise in Japan,and China seems to have
arisen, as it often did in Western countries, out of a need created
by social conventions and restrictions at various times, we argue
that its persistence beyond any of these restrictions up to the
present day has been possible because, among other things, it
generated an added attraction of its own, namely the attraction of
the double message of male and female. The double message,
which came about by default in its inception, was later kept alive
by design.
It must be noted that in both the Kabuki Theatre and the
Chinese Opera cross-gender disguise occurs in serious plots,
while cross-dressing, in Western cultures, is a stock-in-trade of
comedies, farces and melodramas. On Eastern stages, it has no
trace of ‘sending up’ the female role as one may find in some mo-
dern drag shows. A similar serious interest in cross-gender
disguise in the Western traditions has only occurred in the opera
of the seventeenth century and marginally up to today.
Clearly, the function of cross-dressing in any of the perform-
ance arts, past and present, may have been different each time
and we do not suggest minimising the complexity of this or
simplifying historical perspectives and social contexts. We have
also barely touched upon, and cannot here expand, on the fact
that male-to-female and female-to-male cross-dressing may have
signified very different things in terms of the interpretation of a
given piece of performance art. However, on one level of
psychological response, cross-dressing has undoubtedly an
appeal to the audience, precisely because of the double message
of the portrayal of the protagonists. It would be difficult to
conceive of its continuing popularity through the ages otherwise.
If there has been a significant change in cross-dressing in the
performing arts, it is that the use of the disguise has sometimes
moved from merely being a theatrical device to becoming the
very subject matter of the plot, as for instance in the film Tootsie
or in such plays as Torch Song Trilogy and now Eugenia Falleni.
The latter, written and performed first in 1986, is based on the
true story of an Italian woman who came to Australia as a
stowaway at the end of the nineteenth century, disguised as a
man. She lived as a man and married twice, murdering her first
wife after the discovery of her true sexual identity. Eugenia
Falleni was sentenced to death, but her sentence was converted
to life imprisonment and later she was released and died, after a

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few lonely years as a handyman, in Sydney in 1939. The story is

tragic on several levels (Croft and McCallum, 1986). To such
subject matter and to the treatment of cross-dressing, Homer
Dickens (Engel, 1985) suggests that drag ‘has gone from entertain-
ment to reality’. But what reality? The action is still happening on
the screen and on stage. The fascination and even titillation with
the mix can be indulged in from the safety of the anonymity of a
nameless audience and in the knowledge of the illusory and
transient nature of a performance. The pleasure is not derived
from a fusion of male and female attributes into one perfect form
(as in androgyny) but from the assertion of both side by side. The
intention of cross-dressing is ambivalence, cross-cutting categor-
ies that, in everyday life, are well-fixed and reified. On stage, for
shows and popular culture even in the most repressed cultures,
there is undeniable pleasure from the double entendre. In the
real world, an exaggeration of the mix, of which most of us have
some, might even be regarded as a threat or an abomination.
There is as yet comparatively little tolerance for a shift away
from rigidly defined gender roles in real life.
The challenge to the conventional restrictions of gender roles
is of a very recent date. Some defenders and makers of this
challenge are marked as outsiders, at least in our Western world,
namely transvestites and transsexuals for whom the question of
gender and sex with its contradictions and limitations is a matter
of high priority and a necessary consciousness. For Jan Morris, a
male-to-female transsexual, for instance, sex is a physical state
while gender represents ‘the inner consciousness—abstraction,
not anatomy’ (Morris, 1984). In a transvestite photographic
exhibition, one photographer (Allen, 1984) writes:

The primary emphasis of'this exhibition is on the

Transvestite, the man who yearns for femininity in his
search for wholeness. Drag offers a way of playing
with the illusion of femininity in consort with an
audience that always knows the score. For the
transsexual, it is the body’s maleness itself that
represents the ultimate illusion. If beauty is in the eye
of the behclder, whether the beholder is in the outside
world or a person looking into his or her mirror,
beauty remains for all of us an illusion. The same can be
said for masculinity and femininity. They are outward

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trappings that make a person appear to be male or

female.
And in the surgically advanced era in which we live,
anatomy itself becomes an illusion.
But the greatest illusion is that our sex determines
how we are supposed to conduct our lives.
When long-cherished notions relating to the supposed ‘natu-
ralness’ of behaviour according to biological sex are put into
question, doubts must arise about the ‘truths’ peddled about
biological sex and the whole societal framework constructed
around it. The experimentation with gender, with cross-dressing,
with role-reversals has now left the stage and become a social
issue, not for the sake of entertainment but for the sake of self-
assertion, (Glickman, 1985) not just for outsider or minority
groups but for any man or woman.
Evidence such as we have presented, which moves away from
the discrete polarisation into male and female characteristics,
points out that sexual attraction is indeed a much more complex
phenomenon than the simple male/female dichotomy suggests.
Recent scientific endeavours highlight the fact that the categor-
isations, for so long taken for granted, are not always meaningful,
especially when behavioural and physiological observations are
extrapolated from culturally existing forms which, in turn
obscure our understanding of the processes of sexual attraction.
Only recently have scientists come to realise that the male/
female dichotomy is not absolute. The scientific definition of
what is a male and what is a female has now become an issue,
facilitated by the development of techniques to genetically sex-
type individuals. It was consequently discovered that some
individuals are, for example, genetically male but female in
physical appearance (i.e. those with androgen insensitivity) and
that the cellular and hormonal factors once thought to be
distinctly different between the sexes are now known not to be so
clearly differentiated.
Our biology makes less distinction between the sexes than
does our social world. We know that biological factors contribute
to the determination of the physical characteristics of sex, the
construction of the genitalia and a number of other physical
traits. However, it is not a direct, invariant or unbroken chain of
causation from genotype (XX in the female or XY in the male) via
sex hormone levels to either the female or male phenotype
(physical type). Biology does not make a discrete choice between

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

one set of causal events which lead to a male phenotype or

another set of events which lead to a female phenotype. Variation
enters the system at all levels along the process of differentiation,
and this results in a broad range of morphological (structural),
physiological and behavioural characteristics in genetic ‘males’
and ‘females’. Indeed, as vom Saal (1983) has stated, it is the very
fact that sexual differentiation is affected by sex hormone levels
that guarantees marked variation in phenotype.
The differentiation of sexual behaviour is no longer considered
to be a unidimensional process (Olsen, 1983). Hormonal research
has shown that ‘masculinisation’ and ‘feminisation’ are indepen-
dent processes. ‘Male’-type and ‘female’-type behavioural
characteristics can exist within the one brain.
Despite these findings, research scientists are only just begin-
ning to see beyond the limits of channelled thinking, and it is not
surprising that thé tradition of psychomedical thinking is still
largely locked within its narrow confines. There are some
influential scientists in this area who still base their hypotheses
on a simplistic interpretation of research with animals and on
simplistic notions of human behaviour. Money and Ehrhardt
(1972) and Dorner (1983) for example, have claimed that, in
humans, sex differences in behaviour are caused by the action of
hormones in the developing brain, and that the choice is to be
either male or female. They have also claimed that abnormalities
in sex hormone levels during development cause homosexuality,
transvestism and, in the extreme case, transsexualism. These
three variations on behaviour are placed along a continuum of
increasing deviance caused by increasing hormonal imbalance,
despite the fact that there is no evidence for the latter and that
there is no continous behavioural variable which links the three
behaviours. Behavioural variation, such as cross-dressing, is
thus, in their view, a medical abnormality with a biological
‘cause’, to be confined, ‘cured’ and eliminated (Kaplan and
Rogers, 1985).
The inquiry into the true nature of sexual attraction (at the
perceptual end) has likewise been hampered by the male/female
dichotomy and by the associated assumption of genitalia-based
sexual identity. So far, most psychologists have considered
sexual attraction only as a matter to be extrapolated from sexual
practice (i.e. the response end) and thus have accepted, and
mistaken, social norms for biological reality.
Despite such repressive theories, and despite the fact that
many scientists have been tardy in recognising the lack of a
sexually absolute dichotomy—as recently exemplified by the

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BBC film The Fight to be Male—it is also known today that there
is no proven biological cause for sex differences in behaviour. In.
any known mammalian species, ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’ and
‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ are not opposite ends of a polarity.
This polarity has been a human construct, not one caused by
biology but a conceptualisation which has been stamped upon
biology. In other words, the male/female dichotomy is an
illusion, a societal construct.
We have argued elsewhere (Kaplan and Rogers, 1984) that the
separate dimensions of masculinity and femininity in one indi-
vidual in behavioural terms, as Bem (1974) had suggested, can be
extended to physical characteristics. As we showed, this makes
biological sense as well. Individuals may possess some physical
characteristics considered feminine and others masculine. The
combined physical characteristics, including secondary sex
characteristics, of males and females overlap significantly. Physi-
cal characteristics, moreover, in our social world, are linked to
the choice of clothing that the individual uses for the portrayal of
his/her identity. The form of dress can either exaggerate,
conceal, or be incongruous (in cultural terms) with male or
female physical characteristics (Kaplan and Rogers, 1984), as
judged on the basis of the individual’s particular makeup and the
contemporary cultural norms (Harre, 1981).
It seems to us that the artist has stepped in at the point of the
puzzling incongruity between social norms and actual beha-
viours and has intuitively formulated these irrationalities long
before science began to investigate questions of maleness and
femaleness or of sexual attraction systematically. The theatre
presents human frailty and human folly. In comedies, we can
laugh at the mistakes of the protagonists. In the case of mistaken
identities and socially disapproved attraction, the question is
whether we are laughing at the foolish error of mistaking the sex
of an actor or whether we are not also laughing with the actors
about the possibility that human attraction to a mix is happening
despite and beyond the narrow, conventional dictates of the day.
Art has asked for centuries what science has only recently begun
to investigate.
In 1975 Gagnon declared that the issue of what, in behavioural
terms, constitutes a man or a woman is an open question.
Meanwhile, his question has expanded to include the phenotype,
i.e. physical features as well, while the issue of sexual attraction
has largely been left unprobed. It is our contention that sexual
attraction is much more complex than traditional psychologists
and physiologists suggest.

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

traction is much more complex than traditional psychologists

and physiologists suggest.
Common sense should tell us that sexual attraction is not
dependent on our creation of stereotyped females and males. On
the contrary, had the human species not adapted to the reality of
some degree of the mix, sexual attraction could not occur in most
cases. However, sexual attraction is clearly not an area of
common sense, nor, for that matter, are the constructs for social
existence. We are convinced of the vast human capacity to
respond to stimuli. The question is to what extent the human
species has permitted itself to respond to these and in which
context. By definition, selective perception, carefully guided by
socialisation processes, neglects certain inputs. Artists and per-
formers have used this negation of the complexity involved in
the attraction to the mix to their advantage. Throughout history
and today, the transcendence of gender identification, the pur-
poseful confusion of expected elements of the male and female
types in the theatre, in fine arts and in dance has had large
followings, often by the same people who would, in real life,
totally refuse to admit their fascination, even titillation with such
a mix.

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13‘ The privileging of
representation and the
marginalising of the
interpersonal: a metaphor (and
more) for contemporary gender
relations

Cate Poynton

Il est, selon nous, dangereux d’établir d’avance une

distinction entre des éléments grammaticaux d’un cété
et certains autres qu’on appelle extra-grammaticaux
de l’autre, entre un langage intellectuel et un langage
affectif. Les éléments dits extra-grammaticaux ou
affectifs peuvent en effet obéir aux régles grammaticales,
en partie peut-étre a des régles grammaticales qu’on
n’a pas encore réussi a dégager. (Hjelmslev, 1928:240,
cited from Stankiewicz, 1964:241)

Y STARTING point is a range of linguistic phenomena

Mt have not always been paid adequate attention
descriptively and/or theoretically, looked at from the
perspective of a systemic-functional model of language as social
semiotic. From this perspective, the phenomena in question are

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

identifiable as related in terms of structure and meaning, or

function in context, under the general label of the interpersonal.
They include: the organisation of conversation in terms of speech
or conversational roles, including the relation of congruence or
incongruence between speech function (speech act) choices,
such as statement or command, and the grammatical (mood)
choices which realise them; a range of aspects of lexical choice,
including terms of address, slang, swearing and attitudinal lexis;
and a range of ‘expressive’ phonological features, such as
lengthening, speech rate, voice quality, pitch range in intonation
contours and loudness or intensity, coding what has variously
been referred to as feeling, emotion, evaluation or affect.
Many of these features have, of course, been identified as
significant in the negotiation of social relations, especially in the
influential work of Brown and Levinson on politeness (1978); in
the literature on language and gender (see Thorne, Kramarae and
Henley, 1983 for an extensive annotated bibliography), and in the
now extensive literature on address, following in the footsteps of
the pioneering work of Roger Brown and his colleagues (Gilman
and Brown, 1958; Brown and Gilman, 1960: Brown and Ford,
1964. See Philipsen and Huspek, 1985 and Braun, Kohz and
Schubert, 1986 for recent bibliographies). While such features
have been recognised, however, and their social significance
acknowledged, this has frequently been on terms which either
ignore the place of this work within a theory of language, or else
simultaneously acknowledge its significance and marginalise it
by maintaining a rigorous boundary between the realms of
‘syntax’ and ‘pragmatics’, or ‘linguistics’ and ‘sociolinguistics’.
Other interpersonal features have been identified as primarily
personal, rather than interpersonal, under such labels as ‘expres-
sive’ or ‘emotive’. Central here are various ‘expressive’ aspects of
phonology (stress, intensity, lengthening, etc.), of morphology
(especially diminutive and augmentative affixation), and of lexis
(slang, personal names, attitudinal lexis). Such features have not
uncommonly been assigned a very marginal status indeed, if they
have not been totally excluded as properly ‘linguistic’. Concern-
ing names, for example, Hudson suggests that, as the main
markers of power and solidarity in English, they ‘might fairly be
described as peripheral to the system of English as a whole, in the
sense that proper names used as vocatives ... could be handled
in a separate section of the grammar with little or no conse-
quence for any other parts of it’ (Hudson, 1980:125). And Markey
makes a more far-reaching claim regarding their linguistic status,

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questioning whether names ought even to be regarded as

linguistic items since they ‘do not share the developmental
properties of ‘“normal’’ grammatical items... [and] are peri-
pheral to concerns which lie at the core of the theoretical
investigation of language’ (Markey, 1982:141). From a much more
sympathetic perspective, Edward Stankiewicz, in a paper which
describes a range of expressive phenomena in a number of
European languages, notes that what he calls ‘the emotive
function...and its peculiarities are still the least studied in
linguistic works, despite repeated attempts on the part of some
linguists to lift them from the limbo of grammatical appendices,
footnotes or lists of exceptions.’ (Stankiewicz, 1964:240). He sees
part of the cause of this neglect as a tendency ‘to confuse the in-
stinctive nature of “sound-gestures” with what can properly be
considered as the linguistic dimension of ‘“‘expressiveness”’ or of
the emotive function’ (p.239), i.e. a failure to distinguish adequa-
tely between ‘an “emotional’’ plane, which reveals itself in a
variety of articulated or non-articulated “forms” of a symptoma-
tic nature, that is through signals which are inextricably bound
to the situation which evokes them and which they evoke, and
the “emotive” plane, which is rendered through situationally
independent, arbitrary symbols.’ (p.240). He also suggests a
historical basis for contemporary attitudes, going back to the
‘neo-idealist’ response to nineteenth-century Neogrammarian-
ism: ‘The mistrust of the phenomenon called “emotive language”’
can also be explained by the exaggerated attention it received in
some linguistic quarters, which treated it as a panacea for all the
shortcomings of nineteenth-century linguistics.’ He goes on to
give the following account:

The stylistic approach to emotive or ‘expressive’

language received a notable impetus with the crisis of
the neogrammarian method ... The indictment of the
deterministic and naturalistic program of the Neo-
grammarians took a variety of directions in the work
of the so-called ‘neo-idealistic’ students of
language... All of them proclaimed the supremacy of
individual innovation, the importance of psychological
forces in the development of language, and the
primacy of emotion over the ‘intellectual’, mechanical
aspect of language and over the ‘blindness’ of the
phonetic law... The rejection of the neogrammarian

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method was accompanied by an interest in those areas

of grammar which seemed to ‘leak’; i.e., in individual
deviations from the norm, in substandard speech, in
poetic language, in stylistics. All these areas of language
were supposed to provide evidence for the superiority
of emotive and subjective language over cognitive and
objective language. Despite the undeniable merits of
these scholars in accumulating stylistic and occasionally
linguistic material pertaining to emotive language, the
theoretical premises and philosophical mystique of the
linguistic ‘expressionists’ must be considered wrong-
headed from a modern point of view. The neo-
idealists ... ignored or blurred the difference between
language and speech, code and message, or, in de
Saussure’s terms, ‘langue’ and ‘parole’, directing the
attention only to the latter.
The methodological impressionism of the neo-
idealistic school, together with a programmatic
insistence on the primacy and non-systematic
character of emotion in the functioning and history of
language, have actually stood in the way of
recognising emotive language as a legitimate area of
linguistic research. Its treatment as a kind of ‘contre-
grammaire’, and its identification with individual
deviations, were self-defeating for linguistics as a
science. The harmfulness of this approach was voiced
early by Hjelmslev: ‘Il est, selon nous, dangereux
d’établir d’avance une distinction entre des éléments
grammaticaux d’un coété et certains autres qu’on
appelle extra-grammaticaux de I’autre, entre un langage
intellectuel et un langage affectif. Les éléments dits
extra-grammaticaux ou affectifs peuvent en effet obéir
aux régles grammaticales, en partie peut-étre a des
régles grammaticales qu’on n’a pas encore réussi a
dégager’ ([Hjelmslev, 1928]:240).
To the opponents of the neogrammarian method,
‘stylistics’ seemed the road to the ‘life’ of language, to its
quivering essence, but, in effect, they did not abandon
the main tenets of the Neogrammarians: their
historicism which viewed language only in a state of
flux, their psychologism which recognized as ‘real’ only

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the speech of the individual, and the atomistic

approach to linguistic facts. The question of emotive
language was, in fact, posited not,with relation to
linguistic systems, but from the point of view of
contextual variation, of the possibilities of the
message. However, the expressive resources of the
message must be distinguished from the expressive
devices of the code, even if these do interact both
synchronically and diachronically. The confusion of
these two dimensions has not been avoided even by
some structural linguists, who are inclined to treat all
emotive phenomena as a problem of parole, rather
than of langue. (Stankiewicz, 1964:240-—42)
The contemporary marginalising of interpersonal features is
hardly surprising given the negative value assigned to the
emotions, the realm of feeling, in contemporary Western culture
and the primacy of the referential within linguistics itself. The
effects have been unfortunate, most significantly in imposing
arbitrary limits on notions of ‘language’ as a human phenomenon
and of ‘linguistics’ as the study of that phenomenon. An arbitrary
separation of the two faces of language—as code and as social
practice, as system and process—has been fostered, with serious
consequences for the adequacy of accounts of the code itself,
long the primary focus of attention within linguistics. If, as
Stankiewicz notes, the neo-idealists of the early twentieth
century ‘ignored or blurred the difference’ between langue and
parole by focusing too exclusively on parole, then much of later
twentieth-century linguistics has gone the other way, exaggerat-
ing the difference between them by valuing the cognitive at the
expense of the emotive.
In terms of ontogeny, it seems clear that expressive and
interactive meanings emerge earlier than cognitive meanings (in
the sense of the referential or representational). Infants develop
repertoires of signs for expressing interest, pleasure, displeasure
and a desire for interaction itself, as well as for getting people to
do things for them, well before they start using language more
referentially by learning ‘words’ as ‘labels’. The forms of these
signs, at this proto-language stage, are not yet those of the adult
language system that the child has yet to acquire, but they can be
shown to be both meaningful (i.e., functional in context) and
systematic (able to be mapped into sets of options organised
paradigmatically). They certainly form the basis for the range of

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

aspects of interpersonal meaning that the child later comes to be

able to code simultaneously with representational or experien-
tial meaning, by using the tri-stratal organisation of the adult
linguistic system to map the structures realising interpersonal
meaning onto the structures realising representational meaning,
thereby producing a single, multifunctional output. (See Halli-
day, 1975; Painter, 1984 for detailed accounts).

Assumptions underlying marginalisation of the

interpersonal

What, then, are the assumptions underpinning those models of

language which have marginalised interpersonal structures and
meanings? There are two interconnected aspects of such an
exploration, one looking more narrowly at attitudes and beliefs
focused specifically on language, the other looking more broadly
at ideological aspects of Western epistemology, in particular the
habit of dichotomising deconstructed so pungently by Derrida
(1976, 1978), with its concomitant privileging of one term and
dismissal of the other. The ideology of individualism is also
involved.
In terms of thinking about language, the central issues would
seem to be:

1 a too-exclusive focus on system at the expense of process

(deriving from uncritical reliance on dichotomies such as
langue/parole, competence/performance), one of the conse-
quences of this imbalance being
2 the ‘primacy attributed to réferential meaning in the western
positivist/empiricist tradition’ (Quinn and Holland, 1987:14);
3 constituency-based notions of linguistic structure which allow
no room for alternative kinds of structure;
4 assumptions about the unpredictability /lack of systematicity
of interpersonal features, deriving from privileging the cat-
egorical at the expense of the probabilistic.

Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole lies behind

both the contemporary focus on system, as well as the separation
of competence from performance and ultimately syntax from

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pragmatics. If one understands the langue/parole distinction as a

dichotomy, then the twentieth-century tendency has been to
choose to focus attention on one or other of the terms and, in
making that choice, implicitly to evaluate them in relation to one
another. If linguistics is defined as the study of langue then it is
hardly surprising that parole becomes ‘simply the evidence that
you use and then throw away’ (Halliday, 1987:603). Halliday,
with Firth, finds little use for such dichotomies as langue/parole
(and competence/performance) (Halliday, 1974). In a recent
interview with Paul Thibault, he makes it clear that he wishes to
value both terms, though the terms he prefers to use are not
langue/parole but the Hjelmslevian system and process, or
system and text:
M.A.K.H.:...I would see text as instantiation of the
system; the two must be mutually determining.
Hjelmslev says that you could, in principle, have a
system without process—a system without it generating
any text, but you couldn’t have the process without the
system; he presents it as a one-way determination.
I prefer to think of these as a single complex
phenomenon: the system only “‘exists’’ as a potential for
the process, and the process is the actualization of that
potential. Since this is a language potential, the
“process” takes the form of what we call text.
P.J.T.: The Saussurean discussion of this relation has
tended to disjoin system from text so that the ontological
status of the system is privileged. The systemic-
functional mode, as well as the earlier work of Firth and
Hjelmslev, has quite a different view of this relation.
The systemic-functional model is oriented to both
“meaning” and “text’’. Can you explain this relation?
M.A.K.H.: I’ve always felt that it was rather a
distraction in Saussure that he defined linguistics as the
study of la langue, with parole being simply the
evidence that you use and then throw away. I don’t see
it that way. Firth, of course, was at the other end of the
scale, in that for him the phenomenon was the text. He
wasn’t interested in the potential, but rather, as I think
I put it in one of my papers, in the generalized actual, so
that it was the typical texts that he was interested in.

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Firth tended to privilege the text as against the system.

I don’t want to privilege either. (Halliday, 1987:603,
emphases added).

If, on the other hand, one treats the relationship between pairs of
terms such as langue/parole as dialectic rather than dicho-
tomous, then one has to pay attention to both system and its
instantiation in particular contexts. Or one can look at the
relation from the other direction (starting with parole), attending
to actual instances of ‘languaging’ in the real world as both the
only guarantee of the existence of any system and also as
themselves affecting, and ultimately changing, the system. (And
note that ultimately one has to pluralise ‘system’, or be trapped
by one’s own reified terminology in a way that has a great deal
in common with nineteenth-century notions of ‘nation’ and
‘people’: a particular ‘language’, with its ‘system’, is just as much
a fiction as a nation is an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson,
1983)—both are dreams or fantasies of desired unity in the face of
actual diversity).
Chomsky’s reformulation of langue/parole as competence/
performance not only involves a similar dichotomous view of the
relation between system and process but also a strong emphasis
on the cognitive, which he is quite explicit about (see especially
chapter 1 of Chomsky, 1965). What isn’t always understood is
what has been lost by such an orientation, i.e. a concern not only
for the affective/expressive but also, ironically, for the very
social as against individual orientation to language that was one
of the values of Saussure’s Jangue/parole distinction. Langue
was what we all shared as speakers, where parole was the
individual use of that resource. What Chomsky does, with his
cognitive orientation, is to tie the notion of system to the
individual, albeit an individual who embodies the specifically
human cognitive capacities evolved by the species. What this
does, of course, is to sidestep the whole question of the social,
and to ensure, because of the hegemony of Chomskian linguistics
from the 1960s, that when linguists wanted to get back to the
social (as increasingly they have from the 1970s), that there is a
built-in hierarchy which gives priority to the cognitive and
individual over the interpersonal and social.
Foregrounding the cognitive has a long history in Western
ideas about language. Various commentators—almost invari-
ably, however, from within those traditions or approaches to
language with an interest in the social—have noted the preoccu-

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pation with the cognitive, referential, representational function

of language: language representing and hence controlling the
world. It is possible, however, to see the cognitive as constituting
the ‘central core’ of language, and yet still to make a strong case
for the inadequacy of a purely cognitivist orientation to language:
The linguist’s primary concern with the cognitive
elements of language is not surprising, because they
constitute its central core. Yet even though the
expressive elements are generally less apparent than the
cognitive units, it would be deceptive to think that the
former constitute a shapeless, subterranean stream
buried under the structure of language. Absence of
adequate descriptions is, as we know, not always
determined by inaccessibility of empirical data; it is
often the result of disinterest or of inadequacy of
prevailing theories. And so long as linguists do insist
on either/or solutions, or on a reductionism of all
elements of language to a single cognitive level, they
are bound to ignore those phenomena which do not fit
their constructs, or to force the facts into ready-made
schemes. (Stankiewicz, 1964:247)
Within the neo-Firthian tradition, Ellis notes ‘the excessively
referential conception of extra-linguistic components’, contrast-
ing this to Firth’s own emphasis on the importance of context
(Ellis, 1966:89-90 n. 6) and Halliday identifies the firm commit-
ment of linguists ‘in the psycho-philosophical tradition’ to
language as ‘an ideational system’ (Halliday, 1979:71).
Among those working within pragmatics, Levinson, having
referred to work on the ‘functions of speech’, notes the useful-
ness of this work in reminding us that ‘contrary to the preoccupa-
tions of many philosophers and a great many semanticists,
language is used to convey more than the propositional content of
what is said’ and several pages later is more explicit in acknow-
ledging ‘the philosophical and linguistic bias (no doubt reflected
in this book) towards what Buhler (1934) called the representa-
tional and Jakobson (1960) the referential function of language’
(Levinson, 1983:42,46).
Leech, in the earlier version of his work on the tact maxim
(1980), though interestingly not in the later version (1983), takes
up a related issue in seeing Austin’s How to Do Things with Words
as ‘a milestone because it offered to release linguistic philosophy
from the age-long tyranny of its preoccupation with the truth and

237
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

falsehood of propositions’ (Leech, 1980:79). But despite the very

clear acceptance in the earlier version of different but parallel
kinds of meanings, in the later version, in fact, he insists on a
hierarchy, privileging the representational as more centrally
linguistic (and seriously misrepresenting Halliday’s work in the
process).
Behind this widespread cognitively-oriented conception of
language, shared by linguist and lay person alike, would seem to
be two pairs of ideological dichotomies of profound importance
to Western epistemology: the dichotomy of ‘objective’ and
‘subjective’ and that of ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’. In both cases, the
first term is highly valued and the second devalued. Both of these
pairs of terms have had obvious significance as epistemological
preconditions for the development of the physical sciences in the
West, but have been invoked in other, social, areas of control,
particularly in relation to the subordination of women. (Lloyd,
1984; Poynton, 1985:18-19).
These linked notions, of the objective and the rational, have
undoubtedly served the interests of Western expansionist capita-
lism extremely well, by, on the one hand, assuming the value of
control (by force, by knowledge, by language itself) and, on the
other hand, by devaluing not only those uses of language directed
towards the social but those people who habitually use and value
the interpersonal, those who apparently talk ‘for talk’s sake’
rather than for ‘getting things done’. The dichotomy implied
between talk ‘for talk’s sake’ and talk for ‘getting things done’ is,
of course, a false one: talk is always a mode of ‘getting things
done’, a mode of action where what ‘gets done’ through the
ongoing conduct of everyday social relations is the produc-
tion/re-production of both social structure itself and individual
social subjects, socially situated. But in the ideological world of
conservative political values, where it is convenient to privilege
the individual at the expense of the social, that is a most
inconvenient insight.
The primary groups whose linguistic practices have been
systematically devalued by attitudes which assume the validity
of such a dichotomy, between talk ‘for talk’s sake’ and talk for
‘getting things done’, have been so-called ‘primitive’ peoples,
those in whose societies a central role of language lies in its
interactive role and its role in ritual and myth. Such attitudes
proved disastrous for the Aboriginal people of Australia after
European settlement, particularly when linked with the poli-
tically convenient nineteenth-century doctrine of terra nullius

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 The privileging of representation

which asserted that, because the Aborigines had not made their
mark on the land in ways that were recognisable to European
eyes as settlement and use, therefore, they had no claim to
ownership of the land. What struck European eyes most forcibly
was the poverty of Aboriginal material culture; what they were
unable to understand, even to conceive of, was the possibility
that ‘almost all of the human creative energy of a culture over
tens of thousands of years old had been invested in the develop-
ment of the society’s spiritual, intellectual, and social life’
(Sutton, 1988:ix). ‘
Within non-Aboriginal Australian society, and Western soci-
eties generally, it has been women and children whose selves
and whose language have been marginalised and devalued. In
the case of children, it is because however significant the
representational must come to be for them, if they are to be taken
seriously as adult human beings, it is not ‘one of the earliest
[functions of language] to come into prominence’ and ‘it does not
become a dominant function until a much later stage in the
development towards maturity’ (Halliday 1973:16). And this is
only the case if indeed, as Halliday goes on to note, in an oblique
reference to the hegemony of representational notions of lan-
guage, it ever does become the dominant function rather than the
dominant model of language for anyone. Women and women’s
language have been devalued because competence in interactive
genres, emphasising the interpersonal, is what they have been
expected to demonstrate. Men’s linguistic competence, on the
other hand, has been expected to be in language as performance,
as display, involving a significant focus on the representational,
whether in the form of story-telling or the presentation of ‘facts’.
And such linguistic behaviour does have a high value in our
culture. (Maltz and Borker, 1982; Poynton, 1985: 27-28).
A third reason for the marginalisation of the interpersonal is
the long-standing assumption shared by many who have had a
serious concern with language, particularly philosophers and
linguists influenced by philosophy, that there is only one kind of
linguistic structure: constituency structure. Hjelmslev, in the
quotation heading this chapter, makes clear the possibility that
‘affective elements’ in language could well be subject to kinds of
grammatical rules which have yet to be identified or described.
Halliday (1979) has made a significant contribution to such an
enterprise by distinguishing between three kinds of grammatical
structure, coding three kinds of distinguishable semantic func-
tion. He distinguishes between (i) constituency structure, realis-

241
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

ing experiential meanings (‘meaning in the reflective mode’, p.

59); (ii) prosodic structure, realising interpersonal meanings
(‘meaning in the active mode’, ibid); and (iii) culminative
structure, realising textual meanings (meaning enabling ‘the
other two kinds [of meaning to] take on relevance to some real
context’, p. 60).
Halliday makes the following comment concerning differences
in the attention paid to these different kinds of structure:

If we consider the major traditions in linguistic

thought, we find, not at all surprisingly perhaps, that
those in the psycho-philosophical tradition, who are
firmly committed to language as an ideational system,
have usually worked with constituency models of
structure: American structuralist and transformationalist
theories, for example. By contrast, linguists in the
socio-anthropological tradition, like Firth, who are
interested in speech functions and stress the
interpersonal aspect of language, have tended to
develop prosodic models. Those in the literary
tradition, concerned primarily with texture and text
structure, have developed models of a periodic kind:
the structure of the paragraph (topic sentences, etc.),
generic structures of various kinds, and of course the
whole theory of metrics. (Halliday, 1979:71-73).

He goes on to make explicit reference to the similar notions of

‘Pike’s (1959) important insight into language as particle, wave
and field’ and to note that :
Although Pike did not conceive of these in quite the
ame way, it seems very clear that this is what we have
ere:
constituent (experiential) structures are particulute
prosodic (interpersonal) A " field-like
periodic (textual) - ’’ wave-like
I will not elaborate on the periodic (textual) type of structure
here, since it is of no further relevance in this chapter, but will
give a brief, introductory characterisation of the prosodic type of
structure, characteristic of interpersonal meaning, in comparison
with the constituency structure of experiential meaning.

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 The privileging of representation

Consider a possible utterance, perhaps said on the telephone as

a prelude to terminating a conversation:

1. Someone is knocking on my door. °

The experiential content of this utterance consists of Actor

someone, Material Process is knocking, Circumstance: Location
on my door. (See Halliday, 1985: chapter 5 for a detailed account
of these categories). A representation of structure in constituency
terms, bracketing the struetural components as follows, seems
perfectly appropriate:

(Someone) ((is) (knocking)) ((on) ((my) (door)))

But what about the following possible utterance, perhaps pro-

duced by the anxious and deferential student who was knocking
on my door?

2. I was wondering if you could possibly spare me a few

minutes, could you please.

Here, the experiential content is not only less straightforward to

discern (for example what does one do about was wondering?),
but the whole utterance is suffused with a set of interrelated
features with the basic meaning of maybe, i.e. modality of
probability, the social function of which in a sentence like this is
to signal politeness or deference. The relevant features of the
clause are:

e modal auxiliary (could)

e modalised tag (could you)
e modal adjunct (possibly)
e ‘distant’ tense choice: present in past, was wondering. (Com-
pare other possible choices: the polite but less deferential
present, wonder, or the more distant and hence more deferen-
tial past in past, had been wondering (see Halliday, 1985:177-84
for this system of tense description)
e grammatical metaphor. I was wondering is not in fact the alpha
clause of a hypotactic clause complex, which is what it looks
like at first glance, but a metaphorical way of realising
modality, i.e. it means simply maybe. The tag, repeating the
mood element of what looked like the beta clause, makes it
clear that the subject of the whole clause is you not I (v.
Halliday, 1985: chapter 10).

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Added to these grammatical features, one should also include

as relevant to the interpersonal impact the lexical choice of spare
as predicator in the verbal group (implying that the speaker
recognises that this is an imposition and that the addressee isa
busy person), the politeness marker please, and the massively
incongruent relationship between the mood (tagged and moda-
lised declarative) and the speech function of command (i.e.
demand goods and services). A congruently realised command
uses the imperative mood. (See Halliday, 1985: chapter 4).
These features are spread throughout the clause, several
‘layers’ thick (because the scope of modal choices is the whole
clause not a single localised part of it), the reiteration of the
fundamental interpersonal meaning of modality functioning like
a prosody over the entire clause. The amount of repetition or
reiteration (indicative of the strength or amplitude of the pro-
sody) may not be precisely predictable from one relevant context
to another, but the actual linguistic choices implicated (the
systems ‘at risk’) certainly are.
Now consider a third example, involving the expression of
attitude (the use of ‘expressive’ or ‘emotive’ language):
3. //1+Jesus those/filthy /bastards/fucking/thrashed us//
Such a wording could have various phonological realisations.
The symbols used to mark intonation here indicate one such
possible realisation. As it is marked here there is only one point
of tonic prominence, on thrash, a wide tone 1 (falling), (marked
here as 1+), and no specific indication of what might be going on
in the pre-tonic (which could be low level—making a very
marked contrast with the high fall on thrash-, or rising). One
obvious alternative is for Jesus to constitute a single tone group,
with the tonic on the first syllable Je- and the vowel considerably
lengthened. (See Halliday, 1970 for details of the notation
employed here—but note that: // marks a tone group boundary;
/ marks a foot boundary.)
Again there is a cluster of relevant realisations which function
together to realise the strong attitude involved here:

e attitudinal lexis (filthy, bastards, thrash)

e swearwords (fucking as adjunct/ intensifier)
e thematised expletive (Jesus)
e exaggerated intonation contour
e other appropriate phonological features: intensity, rhythm,
vowel lengthening (especially on Jesus), possibly voice quality.

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 The privileging of representation

Again, the choices implicated (the systems ‘at risk’) are predict-
able: in the case of attitude, they will be primarily phonological
and lexical, in contrast with modality, which is realised gramma-
tically. These two examples are intended to provide an illustra-
tion of what is meant by referring to interpersonal structure as
prosodic. Suggestive analogies come from the fields of music and
painting: Halliday would seem to have had both in mind in
referring to interpersonal meaning as ‘strung throughout the
clause as a continuous motif or colouring’ (Halliday, 1979:66). He
goes on to say that ‘the rationale behind this mode of realization’
is that interpersonal meaning ‘is the speaker’s ongoing intrusion
into the speech situation’ and that ‘the essence of the meaning
potential of this part of the semantic system is that most of the op-
tions are associated with the act of meaning as a whole’ (my
emphases) (p.67).
Alongside the objections to interpersonal features as lacking in
structure, because they are not analysable in terms of con-
stituency, are assessments of them as unpredictable and hence
not properly linguistic, i.e. part of the linguistic system. Robin
Lakoff points out that ‘interpersonal behaviour is frequently
regarded as unpredictable and spontaneous. We do not feel that
we are following rules or even a preordained pattern in the way
we talk to others, move, respond emotionally, work, think’
(Lakoff, 1979:53).
Lakoff is one of an increasing number of linguists interested in
interpersonal phenomena, but the way she deals with this area is
to make an unnecessary distinction between the linguistic and
the stylistic, thereby contributing to perpetuating a view of the
interpersonal as ultimately non-linguistic because outside the
system, i.e. non-rule-governed. Lakoff certainly doesn’t want to
say that it is thereby uninteresting—on the contrary, she wants
‘to construct a predictive system of rules of style, to establish for
style something analogous to what linguists construct for lan-
guage in the form of a grammar’ (Lakoff, 1979:54). But making this
kind of dichotomy between ‘language’ and ‘style’ certainly
doesn’t help to legitimise the study of the interpersonal as far as
‘hard-core’ cognitivist, langue-focused linguists are concerned.
The kind of rules needed for such an enterprise as Lakoff’s,
however, are not categorical but, rather, probabilistic; it is this
which leads to the assessment of unpredictability. For many
linguists, however, only the categorical is linguistically interest-
ing, the probabilistic being dismissed as ‘merely statistical’
(Labov, 1972a:71). There is not only a clear bias in such views

245
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

towards the linguistic system as against process, but a very

different kind of conception of both the nature of the system
itself and the relation between system and process from that of
the systemic-functional model. (See Threadgold, 1988b for a
grammatical analysis which uses the systemic-functional proba-
bilistic approach to these questions.)
In this model, the system itself is modelled paradigmatically,
i.e. as sets of options arranged in networks of related and/or
dependent options. Each set of options, or system, is represented
with its own entry condition/s, and the individual terms or
features of each system have an inherent weighting or probab-
ility.

... the linguistic system as a system of paradigmatic

oppositions is a system of possibilities. Choosing a
particular feature in a system means what it does
because of the features that were not chosen but could
have been chosen. This is the qualitative aspect of the
system, the system of ‘either/or’ relations. But the system
is not only a system of possibilities, it is also a system
of probabilities ... The choice of a particular feature also
means what it does against the background of what
are more likely and less likely choices. What is said is
not only interpreted against a background of what
could have been said but was not; it is also interpreted
against the background of expectancies, against the
background of what was more likely and what was less
likely to be said. The grammar of a language is not
only the grammar of what is possible but also the
grammar of what is probable. (Nesbitt and Plum,
1988:8-9)
Instantiation in the text as process of such a paradigmatically
conceived linguistic system is necessarily probabilistic, because
it is context-dependent: this is as true for experiential structures
as for interpersonal and textual structures (see Nesbitt and Plum,
1988:10-11 for a summary account of the notion of probabilistic
realisation of context in language). Models of the system in
essentially syntagmatic terms, i.e. as structures and rules about
structures, and particularly context-independent models, give a
greater significance to the categorical and necessarily see the
probabilistic as indicating an inadequacy in the model itself.
At the same time as the presumed unpredictability of the

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interpersonal is what appropriately excludes it from considera-

tion as properly linguistic, it is precisely this which ensures that
the interpersonal (or, more accurately, the personal) is kept safe
from the control of ‘rules’, which have been seen as denying
autonomy and creativity. Lakoff (1979:53) does not accept that
the existence of implicit rules does deny autonomy and creat-
ivity, but in so stating her position she makes clear that these are
important values for her, as for many other linguists working in
the American tradition. Part of the context for seeing it as
necessary to assert the value of autonomy and creativity was
presumably a reaction to the behaviourism which Chomsky
(1959) criticised so trenchantly, but part of it is also an uncritical
acceptance of individualist ideology, a continuation of the
Romantic individualism of the nineteenth century, and its
particular early-twentieth-century manifestation within lin-
guistics, the neo-idealist emphasis on the personal referred to
above.
The ideology of individualism in Western society is strongly
committed to notions of creativity, autonomy and free will—
notions which have not, it seems, been seen as antithetical to the
attempt to see linguistic ‘competence’ as rule-governed but
which for long largely precluded investigation of linguistic
‘performance’, particularly those aspects of it concerned with
interpersonal meaning. But a cognitively-oriented notion of
linguistic creativity, certainly when Chomsky was first dealing
with this notion, seems to be little more than a combinatorial
potential:

Although it was well understood that linguistic

processes are in some sense ‘creative’, the technical
devices for expressing a system of recursive processes
were simply not available until much more recently. In
fact, a real understanding of how a language can (in
Humboldt’s words) ‘make infinite use of finite means’
has developed only within the last thirty years, in the
course of studies in the foundations of mathematics. Now
that these insights are readily available it is possible to
return to the problems that were raised, but not solved,
in traditional linguistic theory, and to attempt an
explicit formulation of the ‘creative’ processes of
language. There is, in short, no longer a technical
barrier to the full-scale study of generative grammars.
(Chomsky, 1965:8)

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

It is moreover, a combinatorial potential which is merely a

‘means for expressing indefinitely many thoughts and for react-
ing appropriately in an indefinite range of new situations’ (p.6),
i.e. which maintains a rigid separation between language as
expression and something else (‘thoughts’ in this case) which
it is expressing. Such a perspective on the content-expression
relation is quite antithetical to the views of Hjelmslev (1961) and
those working within the systemic-functional model (where
content and expression are both aspects of language itself, not
one ‘inside’ and the other ‘outside’ language). It is a view cogently
criticised in his paper on the ‘conduit metaphor’ (language seen
as ‘carrying’ something else) by Michael Reddy (1979).
This is not to say that the combinatorial potential of language is
not of the utmost significance, even for the very notion of ‘the in-
dividual’ that is seen as potentially threatened by any notion of
‘rules’ for social behaviour. People are, to a large extent, formed
as individuals by what they do, including most significantly what
they say, rather than simply ‘being’ who they are in some pure
metaphysical sense. ‘The individual’ can be seen as an artefact of
the particularity of the linguistic choices made by one person,
choices both identifying and constituting them as a particular
socio-historical entity. For those concerned about the apparent
‘determinism’ of such an account, with its apparent throwback to
behaviourist ways of thinking about language, the individual so
constructed is certainly unique: the combinatorial potential of
the inherent probabilistic weightings of the system combined
with the specificity of the linguistic demands made by the
individual’s personal history generates massive variability of
forms and meanings. Our experience of ourselves as singular and
unitary can then be seen as an artefact of the self-reflexive
capacity of language (see the quotation from Benveniste below).

Language, the individual and the social

I now want to look at the systemic-functional notion of the

interpersonal, incorporating as it does both the interactive and
the personal, the social and the individual. There are two prob-
lematic, and interrelated, issues that need to be discussed. The
first is the question of the relation between the individual and
the social; the second is the question of the affective, the realm
of feeling, emotion, passion, which seems irreducibly personal /
individual at first glance (and having little to do with any self-re-

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 The privileging of representation

specting notion of linguistic system), but which employs re-

sources from the linguistic system, resources which are
moreover structured in similar ways to the more overtly ‘social’,
i.e. interactive, resources.
I certainly take very seriously Halliday’s view that ‘the whole
question of the relationship between the individual and language
has to be seen as embedded in the social structure’ (Halliday,
1974:117). The linguistic system itself is inherently social—it is
jointly produced, a shared resource (there would not only be no
possibility, but no point, in a single human producing a language
in social isolation). So too is the process of instantiation in text a
social phenomenon, for all forms of text, however innovative, are
built on pre-existing types of text, which are socially learned not
only as types of text but as meaningful forms of social action
(Martin, 1985).
The fundamental grammatical unit, the clause, is likewise a
social act. Halliday makes the point that ‘an “‘act’’ of speaking is
something that might more appropriately be called an “interact”:
it is an exchange ...’ (Halliday, 1985:68), and the basis for that
exchange is the structural organisation of the clause from an
interpersonal perspective, by means of the system of mood:
... our traditional approach to grammar is not nearly
as one-sidedly oriented towards the ideational function
as sometimes seems to be assumed. For instance, the
whole of the mood system in grammar, the distinction
between indicative and imperative and, within
indicative, between declarative and interrogative—this
whole area of grammar has nothing whatever to do
with the ideational component. It is not referential at all;
it is purely interpersonal, concerned with the social-
interactional function of language. It is the speaker
taking on a certain role in the speech situation. This
has been built into our interpretation of grammar, and I
see no reason for departing from this and treating the
social meaning of language as some kind of optional
extra. (Halliday, 1974:97)
Mood options in the grammar make possible the organisation of
the clause in ways that are conventionally understood to consti-
tute propositions (information-oriented moves) or proposals (ac-
tion-oriented moves), which are then open to negotiation.
One can only interact with others as an ‘I’ to the ‘you’ of
other/s, however, and this has profound consequences. At the

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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

most literal level, ‘I’ signals the performer of a speech /conversa-

tion role (in fact, is constitutive of that performance), and is
simultaneously ‘this I’, on this particular occasion, but also ‘any
speaker’, from the viewpoint of the system rather than the text.
Ata more profound level, ‘I’ spoken as separate from ‘you’ seems
a necessary condition for the development of the capacity of a
speaker to posit themself as an individual, a self, a subject.
Benveniste elaborates this in the following terms:

It is in and through language that man [sic]

constitutes himself as a subject, because language alone
establishes the concept of ‘ego’ in reality, in its reality
which is that of the being.
The ‘subjectivity’ we are discussing here is the
capacity of the speaker to posit himself as ‘subject.’ It is
defined not by the feeling which everyone experiences
of being himself (this feeling, to the degree that it can be
taken note of, is only a reflection) but as the psychic
unity that transcends the totality of the actual
experiences it assembles and that makes the
permanence of the consciousness. Now we hold that that
‘subjectivity’, whether it is placed in phenomenology
or in psychology, is only the emergence in the being of a
fundamental property of language. ‘Ego’ is he who
says ‘ego’. That is where we see the foundation of
‘subjectivity’, which is determined by the linguistic
status of ‘person.’
Consciousness of self is only possible if it is
experienced by contrast. I use I only when I am
speaking to someone who will be a you in my address. It
is this condition of dialogue that is constitutive of
person, for it implies that reciprocally I becomes you in
the address of the one who in his turn designates
himself as I. Here we see a principle whose consequences
are to spread out in all directions. Language is
possible only because each speaker sets himself up as a
subject by referring to himself as I in his discourse.
Because of this, I posits another person, the one who,
being, as he is, completely exterior to ‘me,’ becomes my
echo to whom I say you and who says you to me. This
polarity of persons is the fundamental condition in
language, of which the process of communication, in
which we share, is only a mere pragmatic consequence.

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 The privileging of representation

It is a polarity, moreover, very peculiar in itself, as it

offers a type of opposition whose equivalent is
encountered nowhere else outside’of language. This
polarity does not mean either equality or symmetry:
‘ego’ always has a position of transcendence with
regard to you. Nevertheless, neither of the terms can be
conceived of without the other; they are
complementary, although according to an
‘interior/exterior’ opposition, and, at the same time,
they are reversible. If we seek a parallel to this, we will
not find it. The condition of man in language is
unique.
And so the old antinomies of ‘I’ and ‘the other,’ of
the individual and society, fall. It is a duality which it is
illegitimate and erroneous to reduce to a single
primordial term, whether this unique term be the ‘I’,
which must be established in the individual’s own
consciousness in order to become accessible to that of
the fellow human being, or whether it be, on the
contrary, society, which as a totality would preexist the
individual and from which the individual could only
be disengaged gradually, in proportion to his acquisition
of self-consciousness. It is in a dialectic reality that will
incorporate the two terms and define them by mutual
relationship that the linguistic basis of subjectivity is
discovered. (Benveniste, 1958—71:224-25)

The ‘I’ who speaks is always an historically specific ‘I’,

however, an ‘I’ who speaks with, at the very least, a gender, class,
racial/ethnic and generational specificity. All these aspects of
social identity are not simply given but are socially constructed
in a complex of (i) culturally learned forms of interaction, (ii)
structures of knowledge formed by the habitual forms of repre-
sentation available to and used by the individual speaker, and
(iii) structures of feeling about those structures of knowledge and
interaction. The ‘I’ who speaks has, furthermore, a unique
personal history, again with consequences for structures of
feeling, knowledge and interaction and the relationships
between them.
The expressive/emotive dimension of language is simultan-
eously social, in so far as it is part of the system, language as re-
source, but individual in so far as it is not only spoken by
individuals but also ‘speaks’ those individuals, i.e. it is part of the

25
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

means by which the particularity of individuals as historically

specific individual subjects is not only made manifest but also
socially constructed. What is particularly important about these
expressive /emotive features is that they constitute a key semi-
otic resource for both producing structures of feeling, exper-
ienced at the level of the individual, and also for attaching
feelings to the socially available forms of interaction and forms of
representation. The attachment of feeling to representation is of
particular importance for the circulation of ideologies, because it
involves a virtual physical attachment of people to beliefs and
values, thereby ensuring fierce commitment to those beliefs and
values and resistance to attempts to ‘take them away’ by means of
argument. The practice in contemporary polemical discourse of
bolstering the legitimacy of arguments in support of one’s own
point of view by calling them ‘rational’ and delegitimising those
of one’s opponents by referring to them as ‘emotional’ doesn’t
help to clarify the complicated issues involved here.

The representational and the social

Western culture has a long history of valuing ‘reason’ and the

‘rational’ to the detriment of the ‘emotional’, with those appren-
ticed to the various fields of legitimated knowledge being
conventionally required to suppress any evidence of ‘personal
feeling’ in the name of ‘objectivity’. What are regarded as
inappropriate displays of feeling or emotion have been rigorously
excluded from the highly prestigious forms of expository and
descriptive discourse, especially scientific and philosophical
discourse, i.e. those forms of speech and writing which are
concerned with ideas, theories, understanding the material and
social world we inhabit. This attempted exclusion of the af-
fective has meant in practice the exclusion of overtly attitudinal
lexis and of both the first-person pronoun I and instances and
narratives deriving from the personal experience of that I (‘the
anecdotal’), as distinct from the scientific persona of that I (which
in theory is indistinguishable from the scientific persona of any
other I). This is presumably why the first person plural we is
permissible: the text-producer is always presumed to speak not
on their own behalf but as a representative, ‘objective’ voice.
Note the discrepancy, however, between the legitimising of the
individual in conservative political discourse and the refusal to
grant it legitimacy in scientific discourse—politics can be seen to

202.
 The privileging of representation

be about ‘interests’ but the West clings to a notion of science as

about ‘truth’ rather than ‘interests’). Current work in semiotic,
feminist and critical theory (for example’Belsey, 1980) has made
abundantly plain that all producers of all texts are both them-
selves positioned (by their gender, class etc. affiliations, and by
the very discourses they are articulating) and also attempt to
position their listeners/readers as compliant, i.e. to regard that
positioning as entirely uncontentious and unproblematic with
respect to both the experiential content of the text and the
implicit social relationship between producer and receiver of
the text.
The systematic exclusion of the first-person singular pronoun,
attitudinal lexis and the anecdotal does anything but guarantee
that ‘scientific’ texts are suitably ‘objective’, however, since
these are only the most overt markers of ‘feeling’ and the
‘personal’. Even the most innocuous-seeming representations
need to be understood to be just that: representations, employing
a wealth of grammatical resources to obscure that fact (see
Threadgold, 1988c for an analysis of neo-classical aesthetics in
these terms). This is the territory of what Whorf (1956) called
cryptotypes and Halliday (1985) calls grammatical metaphor. The
effect of such grammatical patterns is to de-problematise the
representations involved, both in terms of the objective /subjec-
tive dichotomy (where ‘I can organise this data into three
categories’ becomes ‘There are three categories’) and in terms of
the disguising of ideology/evaluation (where ‘I think this is the
way things ought to be’ becomes ‘Our children’s futures depend
on the maintenance of the traditional values of honesty, integrity
and the freedom of the individual’, to give a rather crude
example).
The structural continuity of expressive/emotive features at
various linguistic levels is a crucial issue in building towards an
understanding of the individual-social nexus in all its ramifica-
tions. As long as the quintessential expressive /emotive features
were seen as phonological (and both outside the purview of
segmental approaches to phonology and, by definition, ‘meaning-
less’—i.e. non-referential), it was possible to maintain the fiction
that these were purely individually expressive (only really, of
course, by not asking the question of why these supposedly
‘individual’ manifestations were systematic within particular
languages, or by blurring the boundary between involuntary
‘noises’, such as snorts, and more systematic features). It was
even possible to be extraordinarily reluctant to admit that they

253
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

existed at all as elements of the linguistic system itself, as in the

case of phonaesthesia or sound-symbolism, that very theoreti-
cally inconvenient conjunction of phonological segments with
the referential. (Jakobson, 1978; Jakobson and Waugh, 1979;
Jespersen, 1922-33; Sapir, 1915-51, 1929-51; Wescott, 1976,
1980). Once you admit the essential continuity of the phonolo-
gical with the morphological (or with an intermediate morpho-
phonemic level), or with the lexical, then the way is open to
acknowledging the interconnection of the ‘expressive’ with the
representational. It is lexis that is the real key, looking both ways:
‘down’ to the personal by means of attitudinal/evaluative items,
‘up’ to the social in terms of the representational which is
simultaneously referential and ideological.
Phenomena like insult/abuse (Labov, 1972b; Leach, 1964;
Mitchell-Kernan, 1972; Murray, 1979, 1983; Winslow, 1969) and
slang (Wescott, 1976, 1980) are well understood within linguistics
to be social, not simply individual—even when ‘social’ is
interpreted to mean ‘anti-social’, acting in the interests of a
minority group rather than mainstream society. What does not
appear to be as well understood is that such affectively loaded
linguistic phenomena simultaneously function to code social
attitudes and values and to attach individuals to the social order
constituted by that set of attitudes and values.
It is important to identify the relation of language to feeling/
the emotions/the passions as a significant issue demanding
attention. One obvious future direction is to develop connections
between linguistics and psychoanalytic theory that go beyond
the kind of linguistic analysis of therapy sessions of Labov and
Fanshel (1977), however locally revealing these may be, or
which, from the psychoanalytical side, approach the linguistic
from too general a perspective, eschewing any serious considera-
tion of the nature and implications of empirical data (for example
Kristeva, 1980, 1984). The work of the group of people, mainly
based in Sydney, drawing on the systemic-functional model of
language in work they call simply social semiotics (for example
Kress, 1985, Kress and Threadgold, 1988, forthcoming; Lemke,
1988, forthcoming a, b; Thibault, 1986; Threadgold, 1986, 1988a,
b, c), has been notable for the multiple connections being made
with work in semiotic, critical, feminist and social theory.
Psychoanalytic theory needs to be added to this repertoire for
any serious exploration of the interconnections between lan-
guage, the individual and the social.
Future work will need to build towards an adequate under-

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 The privileging of representation

standing of this individual-social nexus by exploring precisely

the structural continuity of emotive/expressive features at
various linguistic levels and relating these findings to issues
being raised in psychoanalytic and other theoretical areas.
Meanwhile, what the denial of the linguistic legitimacy of the
interpersonal has consistently refused to see (probably a histori-
cally necessary refusal, if Western control over the external
world—with its dubious benefits as well as its undoubted
gains—was to be achieved as it has been) is that linguistic
representations of the world are not the kind of value-free
representations that many thought they were and ought to be,
that representations to a significant degree are simply that:
representations, constructions, indicative just as much of what
people think the world should be like as of how it actually is.

259
Appendix A Extra illustrating
material for
chapter 5

1 Extract from A Talkyng of be Loue of God (translation)

But my sweet lover, enough were Your poverty and Your great disgrace
without other sufferings, but it never seemed enough to You fully to buy
my love altogether, as long as Your life lasts. Ah sweet Jesus, mercy!
What a high price You set on me, never was a valueless thing bought half
so dear. For Your whole life on earth was always spent in much toil for
me, unworthy wretch, and always more and more, so that before Your
death You exerted Yourself so much and worked so hard that You
sweated red blood: factus est sudor eius sicut guttae sanguinis in terram
decurrentes. For, as Saint Luke says in his holy gospel, You were in so
great labour that Your sweat ran like drops of blood down upon the
ground. But what tongue can tell, what heart can consider, for sorrow or
for pity, that cruel beating, that dragging about and abusing that You
disgracefully endured, when You were first laid hands on, when Judas
Iscariot treacherously brought hellhounds to seize and bring You to
their leaders; and how they bound You so harshly and so firmly that the
blood sprang out at Your finger-nails, as saints relate and as it is written
in books. And they bound You so fast and led You roughly forth,
piteously beating You on back and on shoulders and on either side. And
before the leaders buffeted You and mocked You and blindfolded Your
eyes, struck a blow and made You their fool and spat in Your face many a
time and often, and made it so disgusting, so pale and so livid with
beating and buffeting and spitting and spewing. Without any mercy they

256
 Appendix

maltreated You so. They grinned at You and wagged their heads and put
out their tongues and raved at You disgracefully and ridiculed You. How
afterwards before Pilate You were naked bound to a pillar and scourged
so cruelly that You could not turn at all, nor in any way avoid their pain-
ful lashes. There You were for my love with hard knotty scourges
flogged and beaten so painfully and so cruelly that Your fair complexion,
which was so bright and so fresh, was utterly defiled and soiled, Your
skin torn and rent to pieces. There flowed on each side a stream of water
and of red blood. You, Lord, endured all their pleasure with such a meek
mood. Then there was put on Your head a crown of sharp thorns so that
wherever there was a thorn the red blood streamed out. Then they also
beat down the crown on Your head and put it straight and pressed it and
made it sit fast so that the sharp thorns went into the brain, put a reed in
Your hand instead of a king’s sceptre, in scorn and in contempt, and bent
their knees for You and said: ‘Hail to You, King’ and spat straight in Your
face. And after all that villainy they would not stop there, but wickedly
and unjustly sentenced You to death.

Ah dear Lord, what shall I do now? Now can I no longer live for sorrow
and for grief, now that my dear love shall suffer death. Now I may mourn
vehemently, now I may weep bitterly, now I may sigh heavily and
lament constantly. Ah, now they lead Him away to Mount Calvary, to
the place of execution, to kill Him there. Ah my dear love! He carries the
cross on His bare shoulder for the love of me. His body is so tender. His
bones long and lean. Stooping He goes so that it is a piteous thing to see.
Ah my sweet love, the blows they deal You, the grief they cause You! On
either side they wickedly and violently push You on, crying horribly, to
Your death hastily. And You endured everything with love for me,
unworthy wretch. Lord, who are almighty, give me for Your mercy
remembrance of that villainy and make me feel in my heart how Your
wounds smart. Ah sweet Jesus, dear life, how many men follow You now
to gape at You in scorn. Your friends are sad and sorrowful at heart. Your
enemies follow mockingly and delight in their victory and decry You
basely in the sight of this whole world. Alas, now they have brought Him
there where they will kill Him. Now they cast Him down and lay Him on
the cross. Now they stretch His limbs, His sinews burst asunder, His
limbs break out of joint so that none of them can hold out. Alas, my dear
love, how can man, instead of feeling compassion, cause You all that
woe in return for so great favours, You who are so beautiful, so fair and
so noble. And You endured so meekly all that they chose to do. Ah Jesus,
now they drive the blunt large nails through Your fair hands and Your
goodly feet. Now Your skin bursts, Your sinews and Your bones. My
heart breaks in my breast in pity of Your complaints. Ah Jesus darling,
where is any weeping, where is a spring of tears to pour out on my
cheeks? May I never cease [to weep] either by day or by night, now that I
see Your fair limbs so piteously treated. The blood of Your wounds
springs so brightly and flows on Your white skin, so ruthful to see. Your

257
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

mother looks at it, that pure virgin. Her sorrow weighs more heavily on
You than Your own, as I think. Ah, now they set up the cross and set up
the rood-tree and Your body all covered with blood hangs on it. Ah
Jesus, now they put the cross in the socket. Your limbs leap out of joint,
Your bones part asunder, Your wounds are torn open because of being
gullied out so wide. Lord, that You were woe begone at that time! Ah my
dear love, when You had lost all Your blood, You became quite dried up
and began to be very thirsty. They offered You vinegar and gall to drink.
But when You tasted of it, You would take no more. Ah my sweet love,
in addition to Your other woe, they raved at You, when You hung on the
cross, so gentle and so meek, as if You were a meek lamb, when, to Your
shame, foully grinning, disgracefully shaking their heads in contempt
and in scorn, they said in reproach: ‘Lo, where He hangs who could save
other people and fails to save Himself.’ Alas Lord, our love is little worth
that cost You so dear. And yet we do not allow You to have it here but
follow our lusts in the devil’s company, as if he were better than You and
more worthy. Alas, alas, the pity of it, that I must see You, my love, so
cruelly tortured and that it is all my fault. Badly tortured and rent to
pieces, spat upon and shamefully dishonoured, to save us in the straits
we were in, that was Your only cause. Ah Jesus, sweet love, how can I
now live, now that I see You, dear life, the love of my heart, my darling,
my longing, my blessed Lord, my beloved, with arms white and fair,
stretched so tightly, without any mercy, naked on the cross, so that all
Your holy bones can be counted. There You hung piteously, so cold and
so bloody. All raw and stained is Your sweet body. Ah sweet Jesus, dear
love, now You die for me hanging on the rood-tree and let fall Your head,
that it is a pity to see. The white of Your eyes is turned upwards. Ah
Jesus, now the sun grows dark, now the earth trembles and the stones
burst. Now the temple splits asunder with sorrow for my love. Now the
dead rise up in witness of Your Godhead and walk in Jerusalem, as was
written before. Alas, no thing mourns, no thing feels grief for my dear
love, who suffered a painful and dishonourable death on the cross
without guilt of sin. Ah my dear love, my sorrow, my bliss, only love of
my life, who died such a cruel death for the life of this whole world, the
most painful and miserable that ever anybody suffered or might die in
for the love of men. Ah sweet Jesus, of Your grace, let me now die in
Your blissful arms from all the love of this world into the love of You, so
that only Your love be for ever all my delight. (Westra, 1950:47-53)

2 Extract from be Wohunge of Ure Lauerd

Ah! Jesu, sweet Jesu, thou that wast shamefully treated for love of me,
grant that the love of thee be all my delight. Sufficient were poverty and
shame, without other torments; but it seemed never to thee, my life’s
love, that thou mightest fully purchase my friendship whilst life lasted

258
 Appendix

thee. Ah! a dear bargain hadst thou in me; never was so unworthy a thing
bought so dearly. All thy life on earth was in affliction for my sake, ever
longer the more so. But before thy death so infinitely thou wast afflicted
and so sorely, that thou didst sweat red blood; for, as St. Luke saith in the
Gospel, thou wast in so great an affliction that the sweat, as drops of
blood, ran down to the earth. But what tongue may tell, what heart may
think, for sorrow and for ruth, of all the buffets and the grievous blows
that thou didst suffer in thy first capture, when that Judas Iscariot
brought the hell-bairns (children of hell) to take and to bring thee before
their princes; how they bound thee so cruelly fast that the blood was
wrung out at thy finger-nails (as saints believe), and led thee sorrowfully
bound, and struck harsh blows on thy back and shoulders, and before
the princes buffeted and beat thee; how afterwards before Pilate thou
wast bound naked and fast to the pillar, so that thou mightest nowhere
turn (wrench thyself) from the blows. There thou wast, for love of me,
with knotty whips beaten, so that thy lovely body might be torn and rent
asunder; and all thy blissful body streamed in one blood-stream.
Afterwards on thine head was set the crown of sharp thorns, so that with
every thorn the red blood poured out from thine holy head. Afterwards
also wast thou buffeted and struck on the head with the sceptre of reed,
that was previously in thine hand given thee in scorn. Ah! what shall I do
now? Now my heart may break, my eyes flow all with water. Ah! now is
my beloved doomed to die. Ah! now they lead him forth to mount
Calvary to the place of execution. Ah, lo! he bears his rood upon his bare
shoulders; and would that those blows had struck me with which they
battered and thrust thee quickly forward toward thy doom! Ah! beloved,
how they follow thee; thy friends sorrowfully with lamentation and
sorrow, and thy enemies mockingly in scorn and to bring trouble on
thee. Ah! now they have brought him thither. Ah! now they raise up the
rood, and set up the accursed tree. Ah! now they strip my beloved. Ah!
now they drive him up with whips and with scourges. Ah! how can I live
for grief, seeing my beloved upon the cross, and his limbs so drawn
asunder that I may tell each bone in his body. Ah! how do they now drive
the iron nails through thy fair hands into the hard rood, [and] through
thy gracious feet. Ah! now from those hands and feet so lovely, streams
the blood so ruefully. Ah! now they offer my beloved, that saith he
thirsts, eisel, sourest of all drinks, mixed with gall, that is the bitterest
thing (two bale-drinks in blood-letting, so sour and so bitter), but he
drank not ofit. Ah! now sweet Jesu, yet in addition to all thy woe they in-
crease it by shame and mockery, they laugh thee to scorn where thou
hangest on the rood. When thou, my lovely beloved, with outstretched
arms, hangedst on the rood, it was rueful to the righteous, but laughter to
the wicked. And thou, before whom all the world might dread and
tremble, wast a laughing-stock and a mockery to the wicked folk of this
world. Ah! that lovely body that hangest so sorrowfully, so bloody, and
so cold! Ah! how shall I now live, for my beloved dies now for me upon
the dear cross. He hangs down his head and his soul departs. But it seems

259
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

to them that he is not yet fully tormented, nor will they let the sorrowful
body rest in peace. They lead forth Longius with the broad sharp spear.
He pierces his side, cleaves the heart, and there comes flowing out of the
wide wound the blood that redeemed [us] and the water that washed the
world from guilt and from sin. Ah! sweet Jesu, thou openest for me thy
heart, that I may know (thee) truly and read therein true love-letters, for
there I may openly see how much thou lovedest me. With wrong should
I refuse thee my heart, since thou hast brought heart for heart. (Morris,
1886:280, 282)

3 ‘Quia Amore Langueo’ (Lambeth MS 853)

(1) (4)
Ina valey of bis restles mynde My fair spouse, & my loué bri3t,
Isou3te in mounteyne & in myde, Isaued hir fro betynge, & sche hab me bet;
Trustynge a trewe loue for to fynde. Iclopid hir in grace & heuenli li3t,
Vpon an hil ban y took hede; pis bloodi scherte sche hap on me sette,
A voice y herde—& neer y 3ede— For longynge of loue 3it wolde y not lett;
In huge dolour complaynynge bo, Sweté strokis axé bese; lo,
“Se, dere soule, how my sidis blede, I haue loued hir euere as y hir het,
Quia amore langueo.” Quia amore langueo.

(2) (5)
Vpon pis hil y fond a tree; I crowned hir wib blis, & sche me with born;
Vndir be tree a man sittynge, I ledde hir to chaumbir, & sche me to die;
From heed to foot woundid was he, I brou3te hir to worschipe, & sche me to scorn;
His herté blood y siz bledinge:— I dide her reuerence, & sche me vilonye.
A semeli man to ben a king, To loue bat loueb, is no maistrie;
A graciouse face to loken vnto;— Hir hate made neuere my loue hir foo,
laskide whi he had peynynge, Axé me no questioun whi,
He seide “quia amore langueo.” Quia amore langueo.

(3) (6)
lam true loue, bat fals was neuere; Loke vnto myn hondis, man!
Misistyr, mannis soule, y loued hir bus; bese gloues were 30ue me whan y hir sou3te;
Bi-cause we wolde in no wise disceuere, bei ben not white, but rede & wan,
Ilefte my kyngdom glorious Onbroudrid with blood my spouse hem brou3te.
I purueide for hir a paleis precious; bei wole not of, y loose hem nou3te,
Sche fleyth, y flolowe, y sou3te hir so, 1 wowe hir with hem where-euere sche go;
I suffride bis peyné piteuous Pese hondis for hir so freendli fou3te,
Quia amore langueo. Quia amore langueo.

260
 Appendix

(7) (11)
Merueille nou3te, man, bou3 y sitte stille; Fair loue, lete us go pleye!
Se, loue hab sched me wondir streite, Applis ben ripe in my gardayne,
Boclid my feet, as was hir wille, I schal bee clobe in a newe aray,
With scharp naile, lo, bou maiste waite. pi mete schal be mylk, hony & wiyn.
In my loue was neuere desaite, Fair loue, lete us go digne,
Alle myn humours y haue opened hir to, pi sustynaunce is in my crippe, lo!
Pere my bodi hab maad hir hertis baite, Tarie bcu not, my faire spouse myne,
Quia amore langueo. Quia amore langueo.

(8) (12)
In my side y haue made hir neste; Iff pou be foul, y schal bee make clene;
Loke in! how weet a wounde is heere, If pou be sijk, y schal bee hele;
pis is hir chaumbir, heere schal sche reste, If bou moorne ou3t, y schal bee meene;
bat sche & y may slepe in fere. Whi wolt pou not, faire loue, with me dele?
Heere may sche waische, if only filbe were, Foundist pou euere loue so leel?
Heere is sete for al hir woo; What woldist pou, spouse, bat y schulde do?
Come whanne sche wole, sche schal haue chere, I may not vnkyndeli pee appele,
Quia amore langueo. Quia amore langueo.

(9) (13)
I wole abide til sche be redy, What schal y do with my fair spouse,
I wole hir sue if sche seie nay; But a-bide hir of my gentilnes
If sche be richilees, y wole be gredi, Til pat sche loke out of hir house
And if sche be daungerus, y wole hir praie. Of fleischli affeccioun? loue myn sche is.
If she wepe, bat hide y ne may, Hir bed is maade, hir bolstir is blis,
Myn armes her hired to clippe hir me to; Hir chaumbir is chosen; is ber non moo.
Crie oonys; y come: now, soule, asay, Loke out on me at be wyndow of kyndenes,
Quia amore langueo. Quia amore langueo.

(10)
(14)
I sitte on pis hil, for to se fer,
I loke into be valey, my spouse to se; My loue is in hir chaumbir: holde zoure pees,
Now renneb sche a-wayward, 3it come sche me Make 3e no noise, but lete hir slepe:
neer, My babe, y wolde not were in disese,
For out of my sizte may sche not flee. I may not heere my dere child wepe.
Summe wayte hir prai to make hir to flee, With my pap y schal hir kepe.
I renne bifore, and fleme hir foo; Ne merueille 3e not poug3 y tende hir to;
Returne my spouse azen to me, pis hole in my side had neuere be so depe,
Quia amore langueo. But quia amore langueo.

261
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

(15) (16)

Longe bou for loue neuere so hi3, Wexe not wery, myn owné wiff!
My loue is more ban pin may be; What mede is it to lyue euere in coumfort?
pou wepist, pou gladist, y sitte pee bi, In tribulacioun y regne moore rijf
Sit woldist pou oonys, leef, loke vn-to me! Ofttymes ban in disport.
Schulde y alwey fedé bee In wele & in woo y am ay to supporte;
With children mete? nay, loue, not so! Myn owné wiff, go not me fro!
I wole preue pi loue wip aduersite, bi meede is markid whan pou art mort,
Quia amore langueo. Quia amore langueo.
(Furnivall, 1886: 180-88)

262
Appendix B French-English
passages from Zola’s
Une Page d'Amour
illustrating chapter 6

Passage 1

...ses cheveux chatains She slipped on a petticoat and

puissamment noués / les méches threw a shawl over her shoulders
de ses cheveux s’envolaient / The wind ... tossed about her
Elle passa une jupe...jeta un dishevelled hair ... her nut-
chdle sur ses épaules / le brown hair twisted into a knot /
médecin parut en veston, sans the doctor appeared in a short
cravate, elle l’entraina, elle ne coat and without a neck-cloth,
le laissa pas se vetir davantage / she dragged him away without
Le médecin avait boutonné son allowing him to finish dressing /
veston pour cacher son cou nu. The doctor had buttoned up his
Héléne était restée enveloppée coat to hide his bare neck, and
dans le chdle qu’elle avait jeté sur Héléne’s shoulders had been
ses €paules. Mais Jeanne en se enveloped till now in her
débattant, tira un coin du chale, shawl; but Jeanne in her
déboutonna le haut du veston / struggles had dragged away a
Elle rencontra le chale de sa corner of the shawl, and
mére, elle s’y cramponna... le unbuttoned the top of the coat /
chdle était complétement tombé she touched her mother’s
de ses épaules, découvrant la shawl and fiercely clung to it...
naissance de Ja gorge / son the shawl had quite slipped off
chignon dénoué laissait pendre her shoulders, displaying her
des méches folles jusqu’a ses throat and bosom. Her back-
reins ...ses bras nus / le hair had become undone, and
médecin... son veston ouvert... some wanton tresses swept
son col de chemise que Jeanne down to her hips... her arms
venait d’arracher / II avait free and uncovered / the

263
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

effleuré de la joue son épaule doctor... his unbuttoned coat...

nue ... son souffle rencontra le his shirt-collar that Jeanne’s
souffle d’Héléne / Le chdale clutch had torn away / He
avait encore glissé, la gorge se touched with his cheek her
découvrait, les bras restaient naked shoulder ... he could have
nus. Une grosse natte, couleur heard the throbbing from the
d’or bruni, coulait sur |’épaule mother’s breast ... his breath
et se perdait entre les seins. Et, mingled with Héléne’s. The
dans son jupon mal attaché, shawl had again slipped off, and
échevelée et en désordre, elle the arms and bosom were
gardait une majesté, une completely bare. A thick tress of
hauteur d’honnéteté et de hair waved over her shoulder,
pudeur qui la laissait chaste and was lost between her breasts.
sous ce regard d’homme, ou With everything on her person
montait un grand trouble / il disarranged, she stood in the
avait le cou nu / Héléne, d’une petticoat, that scarcely clung to
main lente remonta son chdle her, a model of queenliness,
et s’enveloppa, tandis que le chastity, and modesty, even
docteur boutonnait le col de beneath the gaze of this man
son veston (Zola, 1973:49-57). within whom were already
awakening confused sensations /
his neck was bare / Héléne
slowly wrapped her shoulders in
the shawl, while the doctor
hastened to button his coat at the
neck (Zola, 1895:9-19).

Passage 2

C’était comme si elles se It was as if they had stopped

fussent arrétées au seuil d’un on the threshold of a world that
monde dont elles avaient lay forever outspread before
l’éternel spectacle, en refusant them, and refused to enter it
d’y descendre. (Zola, 1973:102). (Zola, 1895:65).

Les deux fenétres de la The two windows of Héléne’s

chambre étaient grandes room were wide open. Down
ouvertes, et Paris, dans l’abime below, the vast plain for Paris
qui se creusait au pied de la stretched out, in the abyss that
maison, batie a pic sur la lay at the foot of the house,
hauteur, déroulait sa plaine perched right on the edge of the
immense (Zola, 1973:94) hill (Zola, 1895:56).

264
 Appendix

En haut, dans sa chambre, Upstairs in her room, in that

dans cette douceur cloitrée familiar atmosphere of cloistered
qu’elle retrouvait, Héléne se quiet, Héléne felt herself
sentit étouffer. La piéce stifled. She was amazed to find
l’étonnait, si calme, si bien the room so calm, so confined,
close, si endormie sous les so drowsy under its blue velvet
tentures de velours bleu, hangings, while she herself
tandis qu’elle y apportait le was panting and afire with
souffle court et ardent de turbulent emotion. Was this
l’éemotion qui l’agitait. Etait-ce sa really her room, this lonely,
chambre, ce coin mort de lifeless, airless place? Then,
solitude ot elle manquait d’air? violently, she threw open a
Alors, violemment, elle ouvrit window and leaned there to
une fenétre, elle s’accouda en look out at Paris (Zola, 1895:94).
face de Paris (Zola, 1973:154)

Paris ... était insondable et Paris ... was unsoundable

changeant comme un océan, and various as an ocean,
candide le matin et incendié le innocently bright in the
soir, prenant les joies et les morning and aflame at night,
tristesses des cieux qu'il assuming the joyous or
reflétait, Un coup de soleil lui melancholy mood of the skies it
faisait rouler des flots d’or, un reflected. A burst of sunshine
nuage |’assombrissait et soulevait would set it rippling with floods
en lui des tempétes. Toujours, of gold, a cloud would darken
il se renouvelait; c’étaient des it, awakening stormy turbulence.
calmes plats, couleur orange, It was constantly new; ina
des coups de vent qui d’une dead calm it would glow orange,
heure a l’autre plombaient under a sudden squall turn
l’étendue, des temps vifs et clairs leaden grey from end to end,
allumant une lueur a la créte bright clear weather would set
de chaque toiture, des averses the crest of every house-top
noyant le ciel et la terre, sparkling, while rainstorms
effafant l’horizon dans la débacle drowned heaven and earth and
d’un chaos. Héléne gottait la wiped out the horizon in
toutes les mélancolies et tous les chaotic disaster. For Heéléne it
espoirs du large; elle croyait held all the melancholy and all
méme en recevoir au visage le the hope of the open sea; she
souffle fort, la senteur amére; even fancied she felt the sharp
et il n’était pas jusqu’au breath and the tang of the sea
grondement continu de la ville against her face; and the very
qui ne lui apportait |’illusion de sound of the city, its low
la marée montante, battant continuous roar, brought her
contre les rochers d’une falaise the illusion of the rising tide
(Zola, 1973:95). beating against the rocks of a
cliff (Zola, 1895:47-48).

265
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Passage 3

... elle ne voulait pas montrer Laughingly, she declared she

ses jambes, et elle demanda une must not expose her legs, and
ficelle, avec laquelle elle noua asked for some cords to tie her
ses jupes au-dessus de ses skirts securely round her
chevilles / Pas un pli de ses ankles / Not a fold of her
jupes n’avait bougé / Une natte skirts was out of place, but a plait
de son chignon se dénouait / of hair had slipped down /
La natte dénouée battait sur son The loosened plait of hair rustled
cou / Malgré la ficelle qui les against her neck. Despite the
nouait, ses jupes flottaient et cord which bound them, her
découvraient la blancheur de skirt waved about, revealing
ses chevilles / Sa natte s’était the whiteness of the ankles /
échevelée; la ficelle devait se The tress of hair was flying in
reldcher, et ses jupons avaient disorder, the cord that confined
des bruits de drapeau / elle her skirts had given way
serra ses jupes autour de ses pieds somewhat, and they rustled in
(Zola, 1973:90-93). the wind like a flag /
She... drew her skirts round her
feet (Zola, 1895:51-54).

Passage 4

... le passage des Eaux, un . the Passage des Eaux, a

étrange escalier étranglé entre les strange looking steep lane like a
murs des jardins voisins, une stair-case, smothered between
ruelle escarpée qui descend sur garden-walls, leading down from
le quai des hauteurs de Passy. the heights of Passy to the
Au bas de cette pente. . .(Zola, quay. At the bottom of this
1973:73). descent... .(Zola, 1957:29).

266
Appendix C __Strindberg’s
Miss Julie: supporting
material for chapter 11

Verbal text of final scene (Meyer, 1985: 143-146)

CHRISTINE ‘Are you coming with me to the church now? 2You need a
good sermon after what you’ve done.
JEAN °No, I'm not going to church today. ‘You can go by yourself, and
confess what you’ve been up to.
CHRISTINE °Yes, I will, and ‘Ill come home with my sins forgiven, and
yours too. ’The blessed Saviour suffered and died on the cross for all our
sins, °and if we turn to Him with a loyal and humble heart He’l] take all
our sins upon Him.
JEAN “Including the groceries?
MISS JULIE ‘Do you believe that, Christine?
CHRISTINE ‘With all my heart, as surely as I stand here. ‘I learned it asa
child, Miss Julie, ‘and I’ve believed it ever since. And where the sin is
exceeding great, there His mercy shall overflow.
MISS JULIE ‘Oh, if only I had your faith! *°Oh, if—!
CHRISTINE *’’Ah, but you can’t have that except by God’s special grace,
8and that isn’t granted to everyone—
MISS JULIE '*Who has it, then?
CHRISTINE 7°That’s God’s great secret, Miss Julie. **And the Lord’s no
respector of persons. There shall the last be first—
MISS JULIE *Then He has respect for the last?
CHRISTINE (CONTINUES) 7And it is easier for a camel to pass through the
eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
2That’s how it is, Miss Julie.° Well, I’ll be going—*and as I pass the sta-
ble I’ll tell the groom not to let any of the horses be taken out before his
lordship comes home, just in case. “Goodbye. (SHE GOES).

267
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

}EAN 2°Damned bitch! *’And all for a greenfinch!

MISS JULIE (DULLY) °'Never mind the greenfinch. **Can you see any way
out of this, any end to it?
JEAN (THINKS) *’No.
MISS JULIE °*What would you do in my place?
JEAN “In your place? Wait, now. “If I was a lady—of noble birth—
who’d fallen—? **I don’t know. *’Yes. “I do know.
MISS JULIE (PICKS UP THE RAZOR AND MAKES A GESTURE) *VT ia?

JEAN “Yes. “But I wouldn’t do it, mind. “There’s a difference between

us.
MISS JULIE *°Because you’re a man and I’m a woman? **What difference
does that make?
JEAN *’The difference—between a man and a woman.
MISS JULIE (HOLDING THE RAZOR) “I want to do it—**but I can’t. °°My father
couldn’t do it, either, the time he should have.
JEAN *'No, he was right. °*He had to be revenged first.

MISSJULIE °’And now my mother will be revenged again, through me.

JEAN “Have you never loved your father, Miss Julie?
MISS JULIE °°Yes—enormously—*but I’ve hated him too. *’I must have
done so without realizing it. *But it was he who brought me up to
despise my own sex, made me half woman and half man. **Who is to
blame for what has happened—my father, my mother, myself? Myself?
| have no self. I haven’t a thought I didn’t get from my father, not an
emotion I didn’t get from my mother—*and this last idea—that all
people are equal—I got that from him, my fiancé whom I called a
wretched little fool because of it. “How can the blame be mine, then?
**Put it all on to Jesus, as Christine did—no, I’m too proud to do that,
and too clever—thanks to my learned father. *And that about a rich
person not being able to get into heaven, that’s a lie, and Christine has
money in the savings bank so she won’t get there either. ®°Whose fault is
it all? What does it matter to us whose fault it is? "I shall have to bear
the blame, carry the consequences—
JEAN Yes, but—
THERE ARE TWO SHARP RINGS ON THE BELL. MISS JULIE JUMPS UP. JEAN CHANGES HIS
COAT.

JEAN “His lordship’s home! Good God, do you suppose Christine—?

(GOES TO THE SPEAKING TUBE, KNOCKS ON IT, AND LISTENS.)
MISS JULIE 7°Has he been to his desk?

268
 Appendix

JEAN “It’s Jean, milord. (HE LISTENS. THE AUDIENCE CANNOT HEAR WHAT IS SAID
TO HIM) 7’Yes, milord. (HE LISTENS). “Yes, milord. “Immediately. (HE
LISTENS) *°At once, milord. (LIsTENS)*'Very good, my lord. *In half an hour.
MISS JULIE (DESPERATELY FRIGHTENED) °*What does he say? **For God’s sake,
what does he say?
JEAN *®He wants his boots and his coffee in half an hour.
MISS JULIE °°In half an hour, then—! *’Oh, I’m so tired! ®I can’t feel
anything, “I can’t repent, can’t run away, “can’t stay, %can’t live—
**can’t die. “Help me! °Order“me, “and I’ll obey you like a dog. °’Do me
this last service, “save my honour, *’save his name! ?° You know what I
ought to will myself to do, ‘but I can’t. *Will me to, Jean, “order me!
JEAN ‘IT don’t know—'*now I can’t either—'*I don’t understand—
‘it’s just as though this coat made me—'™ can’t order you—’”"and now,
since his lordship spoke to me—"""l can’t explain it properly, but—""oh,
it’s this damned lackey that sits on my back—'”I think if his lordship
came down now and ordered me to cut my throat, I’d do it on the spot.
MISSJULIE ‘'°Then pretend that you are he, and! am you. ‘You acted so
well just now, when you went down on your knees—'**then you were an
aristocrat—''°or—haven’t you ever been to the theatre and seen a
hypnotist? (JEAN Nops) ''’He says to his subject: ‘Take the broom’, '’and
he takes it, "He says: ‘Sweep!’ ’and he sweeps—
JEAN ‘But the subject has to be asleep.
MISS JULIE (INANECSTASY) ‘I am already asleep—’™the whole room is like
smoke around me—"™ and you look like an iron stove—which resembles
aman dressed in black, with a tall hat—’”and your eyes shine like coals,
when the fire is dying—’*°and your face is a white smear, like ash—(THE
SUN’S RAYS HAVE NOW REACHED THE FLOOR AND ARE SHINING ON JEAN) It’s so
warm and good—! (SHE RUBS HER HANDS AS THOUGH WARMING THEM BEFORE A
FIRE) ‘And so bright—and so peaceful—!
JEAN (TAKES THE RAZOR AND PLACES IT IN HER HAND)'”? Here’s the broom. '°°Go
now—while it’s light—out to the barn—and—(HE WHISPERS IN HER EAR)
MISS JULIE(AWAKE) 1°!Thank you. '**Now I am going to rest. '**But just tell
me this—those who are first—they too can receive grace? '*Say it to
me—even if you don’t believe it.
JEAN ?™Those who are first? '°No, I can’t! '*’But, wait—Miss Julie—
138ow I see it! 1?°You are no longer among the first. *° You are—among
the last!
MISS JULIE ‘'That’s true. 1 am among the last of all. °I am the last.
1449h! But now I can’t go! °Tell me once more—"’say I must go!
JEAN ‘8No, now I can’t either. '*°I can’t!
MISSJUNE 1°°And the first shall be last.

269
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

JEAN '°'Don’t think, ’*don’t think! °*You take all my strength from me,
549u make me a coward. '°What? ’*I thought the bell moved! '*’No.
18Shall we stuff paper in it? '*’To be so afraid of a bell! Yes, but it isn’t
only a bell—"*'there’s someone sitting behind it—’*’a hand sets it in
motion—'”and something else sets the hand in motion—™ you've only
got to close your ears, close your ears! Yes, but now he’s ringing
louder! '*He’ll ring till someone answers—'”and then it’ll be too late.
The police will come—and then—!
TWO LOUD RINGS ON THE BELL

JEAN (CRINGES, THEN STRAIGHTENS HIMSELF UP) ‘It’s horrible. ‘”°But it’s the
only possible ending. '’’Go!
MISS JULIE WALKS FIRMLY OUT THROUGH THE DOOR

270
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pnosd (00}) ({)
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paaoy (0) el ayy ure] +} ({W)
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(aera:Jo ise] Tey
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(mou) 05 (0 | \s1y ay) SuoWwe 1aBUO] OU ere NOZ (0
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yney (aur) q 490b13 BATaIaI UPD 00} Ady) ‘JSIY a1e OYM asoy
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pesuanel (() juedad },ue9o (sop e fl See (auyswyyD Aq uayods surayt [eotxe] JO jas ad1e'T)
[aaj },ue9
aa- pain au djay (asunoosiq [D9I[qIq) UOIsITaY
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Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Floor plan of the set and seating layout for the English Department's Theatres Studies
Project Miss Julie 1986. At the Downstairs Space Seymour Centre, seating capacity as
shown=88.
(Plan courtesy of Theatre Studies Service Unit, University of Sydney)

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272
Endnotes

] Introduction

Terry Threadgold

1 The verb ‘elide from’ is used here to indicate the conscious and
deliberate exclusion, in all discussion, of the private from the public
world.

2 Foucault and Irigaray

Rosi Braidotti

The reference is to one of J. Derrida’s books, La Carte Postale, literally

‘post-card’.
My analysis of the intersection between feminism and modernity is
in disagreement with the ‘post-modern’ diagnosis, as in Jardine
(1985).
University of Chicago Press, 1983.
The Use of Pleasure New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.
For an account of recent Italian feminism see Braidotti (1986).
Both titles were translated by Cornell University Press in 1985.
NO On
OB this particular point I disagree with the reading of Irigaray
proposed by E. Gross in ‘Irigaray and Sexual Difference’ Australian
Feminist Studies 2, 1986.

4 Inscriptions and body-maps

Elizabeth Grosz

With special thanks to the Humanities Research Centre at the Austra-

lian National University, and to the feminists gathered there for the
theme of ‘Feminism and the Humanities’. Without the generous support

213
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

of the centre and various individuals, this paper could not have been
written. I would like to acknowledge the invaluable help of Susan
Sheridan, Virginia Blain and Meaghan Morris.
1 Franz Kafka’s short story, ‘The Penal Settlement’, describes an
‘exquisite’ punishment machine that will serve as an emblem of the
concerns of this chapter: the socio-material, representational inscrip-
tion of bodies. Kafka’s machine is an ingenious device made of three
parts: first, a ‘Bed’, onto which the prisoner is tied; second, the
‘Designer’, which determines what messages will be inscribed; and,
third, ‘the Harrow’. It executes the sentence on the prisoner’s body,
using a moving layer of needles to print the Designer’s message:
As soon as the man is strapped down, the bed is set in motion. It
quivers in minute, very rapid vibrations... You will have seen
similar apparatus in hospitals; but in our Bed, the movements all
correspond very exactly to the movements of the Harrow... Our
sentence does not sound severe. Whatever commandment the
condemned man has disobeyed is written on his body: ‘Honour thy
superiors’... (although he doesn’t know the sentence) he'll learn it
corporeally, on his person... An ignorant onlooker would see no
difference between one punishment and another. The Harrow
appears to do its work with uniform regularity...the actual
progress of the sentence can be watched, [for] the Harrow is made of
glass... When the Harrow... finishes its first draft of the inscrip-
tion on the back, the layer of cotton wool (on the Bed) begins to roll
and slowly turns the body over, to give the Harrow fresh space for
writing. Meanwhile the raw part that has been written on lies on the
cotton wool, which is especially prepared to staunch the bleeding
and so makes all ready for a new deepening of the script... So it
keeps on writing deeper and deeper for the whole 12 hours... But
how quiet he grows at just about the 6th hour! Enlightenment comes
to the most dull-witted. It begins around the eyes. From there, it
grows, it radiates. A moment that might tempt one to get under the
Harrow with him. Nothing more happens after that, the man only
begins to understand the inscriptions... You have seen how diffi-
cult it is to decipher the script with one’s eyes; but our man
deciphers it with his wounds. To be sure, that is a hard task; he
needs 6 hours to accomplish it. By that time, the Harrow has pierced
him quite through and casts him into the grave...Then the
judgement has been fulfilled and we bury him. (Kafka, ‘The Penal
Settlement’, Metamorphosis and other Short Stories)
Three elements of Kafka’s description and relevant to my chapter.
He links punishment to the operations of knowledges. Penal
punishment requires a certain epistemic backup for knowledges are
both the preconditions of power’s concrete operations, and are also
amenable to revision and transformation by information gathered

274
 Endnotes

from the processes of supervision, observation and inscription of the

prisoner’s suffering body. Second, Kafka explicitly describes the
machine as a discursive or writing instrument. Like the stylus, pen
or typewriter, this writing-machine is an instrument of material
inscription producing propositions, texts and discourses: the surface
to be inscribed in this case is human flesh and skin rather than the
blank page of the book, and the consequence of this inscriptive
procedure is not only a text, but a particular type of human subject.
Third, messages or inscriptions are etched on the body’s surface,
without the prisoner knowing the crime with which he is charged,
or the punishment he is to be apportioned. These punitive practices
create an ‘enlightenment’, a consciousness or psychic effect solely
by materially marking the prisoner’s body. Kafka allows us to focus
on relations between bodies, textuality, and consciousness (or
mind).

5 The discursive construction of Christ’s body

Jennifer Ash
1 The development of eucharistic doctrine and theology in the history
of the Christian faith is extremely complex: An excellent discussion
of the situation in the medieval period is given in Macy 1984.
2 See the texts presented in the appendix.
3 See Breuer and Freud, 1893-95; Freud 1905, 1912. Hysteria as a
‘feminine’ phenomenon has recently been the focus of feminist
theorising—especially psychoanalytic theorising; see Irigaray, 1985a,
1985b; Cixous and Clement, 1986; also the excellent collection of
articles in Bernheimer and Kahane, 1985.
4 For the discussion which follows see Lacan, 1977, but especially
Irigaray, 1985a, 1985b; see also Threadgold, 1988a which provides an
overview and analysis of much recent work being done on woman’s
relation to language. Doane, 1981:30ff gives a neat summary of the
situation in terms of psychoanalytic theorising.
5 See Lacan, 1982. Like hysteria, anorexia has become an issue of
concern for feminism. I found the analysis and discussion of anorexia
in Celemajor, 1986, 1987 particularly useful and satisfying, and have
incorporated arguments presented there in the material which fol-
lows. See also Bordo, 1988 and Probyn, 1988.
6 Women’s religious experience—whether orthodox or heterodox—in
the late medieval period has become the subject of much energetic
research in the last few years. Consequently an exhaustive biblio-
graphy is not really possible, or sensible, given the scope of this
chapter. However, I would like to make a few suggestions for those in-
terested: Baker, 1978, Beckwith, 1986; Bell, 1985; Bolton, 1976, 1978;
Goodich, 1981; Bynum, 1982, 1984, 1987; Erickson, 1976; Kieckhefer,

Py he
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

1984; McDonnell, 1969; McLaughlin, 1974, 1979; McNamara and

Wemple, 1977; Nichols and Shank, 1984; Petroff, 1977, 1986; Schulen-
burg, 1978, 1984; Stargardt 1985. ae
7 A phrase borrowed from Michele Montrelay (‘Inquiry into Feminini-
ty’ Semiotexte 4, 7, 1981, pp.228-35, special issue: Polysexuality).
8 This is the title of a Middle English mystical text. For the argument
presented here see Lacan, 1982.
9 Inedia. The word is used in Bynum (1987) to mean the condition of not
eating.

6 The feminine as a semiotic construct: Zola’s

Une Page d'Amour
Maryse Rochecouste
i This chapter is adapted from ch. 3 of my book (Rochecouste, 1988).
iD By ‘bovarysme’ I mean the neurotic malady caused by unrealisable
romantic ideals and yearnings, as experienced by Madame Bovary.
3 Or ‘falling’ sickness—which gives free rein to catamorphic pos-
tures.
I have discussed this symbolism in an earlier study (Rochecouste,
1979:22, 35).
I am extending to textual indices Keir Elam’s (1980:76) concept:
‘Related indices of speaker-gesturer intention include what can be
named attitudinal markers, indicative not of the act intended but of
the attitude adopted (towards the world, the addressee, the proposi-
tional content of the utterance) in speaking. Head nods, finger wags,
eyebrow movements, and so on, come close in function, in
determined communicative situations, to the linguistic modalities
usually expressed by means of ‘modal operators’ such as ‘want’,
‘must’, ‘can’, ‘may’, ‘impossible’, indicating the speaker’s proposi-
tional attitudes.’ '
See appendix B, passage 1 for the parallel French-English texts.
Schor (1976:189) rightly identifies the mysterious ‘unknown’ which
needles Héléne’s curiosity as to her libido.
Zola (1971:95) actually uses the word ‘initiation’.
Despite the fact that she has experienced marriage, motherhood
and widowhood, she is still not sexually awakened.
See Figure 5, adapted from Pavis’ model (1976:51), and the parallel
French-English texts in appendix B, passage 2.
isl See appendix B, passage 3.
te An interesting parallel is to be found in Jeanne’s clockwork doll, the
iconic portrayal of Héléne; like the heroine, its broken-down
mechanism causes it to somersault backwards, but thanks to
Rambaud’s patient mending, it walks and talks again—mechanical-
ly. In the course of her childish games, Jeanne even ‘feeds’ it the

276
 Endnotes

symbolic apple, fruit of the Fall—a clear symbolic representation of

Heléne eating from the Tree of Knowledge. This reification process
is also extended to Jeanne’s other doll, her ‘rag doll’, which can also
be seen as portraying Héléne, especially when it is described as
follows, at the very moment of her first rendezvous with Henri: ‘the
pink limbs, stuffed with sawdust, had become ds loose and ungainly
as old clothes’ (Zola 1973:281, my translation).
13 See appendix B, passage 4.
14 See O’Toole (1982:159) in which the ‘erotic elements in land-
scape... the...integration of natural scene and character... the
male quality of the... townscape ... matched by the predominant-
ly female anatomy of the country scene’ are discussed. Borie’s
(1971:214) instructive comments about the Seine are also helpful in
deciphering the hidden meaning behind Zola’s sexualisation of the
urban landscape.
The thematic recurrence and catamorphic significance of the
vestmental code when Helene returns to the apartment is to be
noted. The reversed procedure, that is, the ritual of undressing and
dressing follows, doubled by the symbolic washing of the hands.

7 The films of Marguerite Duras

Michelle Royer
1 Shoshana Felman ‘Woman and madness: a critical phallacy’, p.4 as
cited by Rosalind Jones (1985) in Making a Difference p.97
2 Luce Irigaray, interview with ‘Liberation’ 21 March 1979, as cited by
Rosi Braidotti in Refractory Girl 23, March 1982, p.11.

9 Homosexualities

Michael Hurley
The author wishes to thank Liz Jacka and Leigh Raymond for comments
on earlier drafts of this chapter.
a Pers. comm.
2 I might add here that in relation to men, ‘Wilde’ and the twentieth
century, I am modifying Sedgwick’s more general argument that
‘homosexual panic’ is used to construct a (male) heterosexuality in
which male homosocial desire is routed through women (Sedgwick
1985:114-17). i
The reference is to Yeats’ poem ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion .

27%
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

11 Strindberg’s Miss Julie

Susan Yell
1 See, for example, Bal (1984) for a discussion of the construction of
subjectivity through language.
2 Lemke (1988:11) argues for the social construction of the gendered
individual, pointing to anomalies between ‘biological sex’ and ‘social
gender’.
3 Iam grateful to Dr Rosemary Huisman for a discussion in which she
drew my attention to these features.

278
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296
Index

aboriginal, 240 Benjamin, W., 57

actantial, 108-10, 112 Bennett, T., 157, 159
Adams, P., 34 Benveniste, E., 250-1
Addleshaw, P., 143 binarism, 1, 4—5, 7, 11, 19, 28-30,
Allen, Grant, 141-53 passim 133-4, 139, 199-200, 204-6,
Alley, R., 222 210; binary constructions, 34;
anamorphic, 108, 109, 118, 119 binary oppositions, 4, 19;
Anderson, B., 238 dichotomy, 1, 5; male/female
androgyny, 212-14, 226 dichotomy, 72, 211-12, 227-9;
anorexia, 94-6 see also dichotomy
Aristotle, 58, 89-90 biology, 4, 8, 23, 25-7, 66, 71-4,
ATCO weed 200, 211, 216, 226-8 passim; as
Ash, J.'31, 33 cultural construction, 31
attitude, 201, 244 passim, 254; see Birch, D., and M.O’Toole, 20
also emotion birth, 26
auditory stimuli, 219 Blachford, G., 164
aural semiotic, 193, 207 Bleier, R., 211
Austin, J.L., 239 body, 3-4, 13-16, 23, 62, 65
auto-reproduction, 27 passim, 70 passim, 75-90, 193;
biological body, 31; body
Bachelard, G., 121 politic, 26-7; Christ’s body, 28,
Bakhtin, M.M., 191 31, 75; corporeal inscription (as
ballet, 219-20 construction), 24; genitalia,
Barker, F., 25 211-12; male body, 19;
Barthes, R., 107, 131, 179 psychical body, 31; sex-
BBC, ‘The Fight to be Male’, 229 hormone levels, 228-30;
Beane, W.C. and W.G. Doty, 113 Foucault on, 39-40
Beckwith, S., 91 Booth, M., 162
Bell, R., 94 Borie, J., 124, 126
Belsey, C., 253 Borresen, K.E., 89
Bem, S.L, 212, 229 Braidotti, R., 9, 17, 24

277
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Braun, F., A. Kohz and K. product/process,

Schubert, 232 langue /parole
breeches roles, see cross-dressing compliant, 14, 26
Britton, A., 162 congruence, 232
Brooke-Rose, C., 12, 18 connotation, 107, 207
Brown R. and M. Ford, 232 consciousness, 4-5, 24, 30, 33
Brown, R. and A. Gilman, 232 construction of meaning, 1-3, 4,
Brown, R. and S. Levinson, 232 7, 10=11618) 22; 95,0140;;155;
Brown, R. and G. Whitlock, 165 190-2 passim, 199-20, 204,
Brubaker, R., 49 208-9, 226-9 passim
Bugge, J., 91 context, 6, 25; as semiotic
Buhler, K., 239 construct, 191-2;
Bullough, V.L., 90 contextualised, 17, 28
Bynum, C.W., 87, 89, 92, 94, 97 Cory, V., 145
co-textual, 23
Gaine, Bae Coward, R., 7, 10, 20
Cameron, L., 144 Croft, J. and J. McCallum, 226
camp, 162, 163, 164, 166; see also Cross(e), V., 145, 147, 148, 153
homosexual cross-dressing, 148, 150, 164,
Campioni, M. and E. Gross, 15, 18 217-21 passim, 225; breeches
canon, 8, 158, 166 roles, 217; transvestite roles,
capitalism, 49-52; capitalist, 3, PANTS
16-18, 30 cryptotypes, 253; see also
castrati, 219; castration, 31 grammatical metaphor
catamorphic, 106, 109, 118 cultural analysis, 20, 22
passim culture, 8, 10, 31
Celemajer, D., 97 Cunningham, G., 142
childbirth, 31 Curthoys, A., 15-18, 20, 25
childcare, 16, 27
chinese opera, 222-5 Daly, M., 43
Chomsky, N., 238, 247 Daniels, K., 140
civil society, 29 De Certeau, M., 62
Cixous: Hi; 34, 9251128) 131 decode, see encode
class, 4, 30, 183, 190, 198, 200, deconstruction, 5, 7-8, 10, 17-18,
205-8, 209, 219, 253 20, 225-129; 138090 395177420S9
clause, as social act, 249; see also degendering and socialisation, 30
text deixis/deictic, 194, 202
Clement, C., 92 Deleuze, G., 42, 63
code, 192, 195, 201, 209, 234-5; denotation, 107
aural, kinesic, lighting, Derrida, J., 9, 37, 42, 236
proxemic, vestmental, 193; desire, 14, 33, 47, 50, 57, 82, 86,
theatrical, 193; see also system 138-9; erotic, Lesbian,
cognitive, 233-5, 240-1, 247 masculine, 151; sexualised,
colonial, colonised, 132 155; see also male
commonsense knowledge, 4-5, 14 determinism, 248
competence/performance, 236, deviance, 164, 226-8 passim
247; see also system/process, dialectic, 238

298
 Index

dialogue /dialogic, 194, 200 emotion, 200 passim, 207;

Diamond, I. and L. Quinby, 25, 32 emotive language, 234;
Dias-Diocaretz, M. and I. Zavala, expressive /emotive (language),
20 251, 253; evaluation /affect,
dichotomy, 236-8 passim; 232, 233; feeling/passion, 248;
objective /subjective, 240; language and emotion/feeling,
reason/emotion, 240; see also 254; see also attitude
binarism emotional, 26-7
Dickens, H., 220, 226 employment, 29
difference, 25, 37-8, 44 passim; as encode/decode, 191, 192, 193,
gendered, 70; sexual, 163; see 198)7201
also sexual English Studies, 155, 166, 170
discipline, 8 equality, 25, 26
discourse, 3-4, 7-8, 13, 17, 33, 39, Erosigeey 221
A3—4, 76, 91, 935.1075 127,170, erotogenic surfaces, 68-9 passim;
185; field of discourse, 200; intensity, sensitivity, orifices,
unit of discourse, 195; tenor of 68-9
discourse, 201, 203; discourse essentialism, 27
of feminism, 18, 28 ethics, 17, 37-8, 41, 46, 54-5, 64,
discursive, 1-3, 9-10, 17, 32; 67, 154-5, 168-9
apparatus, 66; frameworks, 24; everyday life, 19
practices, 40; systems, 18;
discursive construction, 155, fact, 3-4, 21
165; discursive organisation, fasting, see anorexia
161 Fawcett, M.G., 142, 153
disguise, 216-21 passim Felman, S., 129, 152
documentation, 190, 194-5, 202 female, 211-12; female/male,
Dorner, G., 228 200, 221-5
Dowling, L., 141 female desire/eroticism, 44-5,
drag, 220, 226; see also cross- 145; see also female pleasure
dressing female pleasure, 97, 99, 153
drama, 8 feminine/femininity, 1, 8-10,
Dreyfus, H.L. and P. Rabinow, 38 36-8, 43-5, 48, 54, 89-90, 97,
Du Plessis, R. B., 185 100, 106, 128-30, 135-6, 138-9,
Durand, G., 121 140-41, 143-4, 146-7, 148,
Duras, M., 9, 129-30, 136 151= 2715301839188; 1995201;
Dyer, R., 162 211-12, 229
feminine/masculine, 1, 23; see
Eagleton, T., 156, 157 also feminine /femininity
BCOmWi 2.3, 191, 192; 202 feminism, 7, 12, 22, 70, 71, 142;
economy, 4, 7 feminist, 3-4, 8, 15; critiques of
esctacy, 97-100 passim; see also science, 21; of equality, 26; of
anorexia, female pleasure, difference, 26; humourless
hysteria feminist, 12-13
Elam, K., 193 femme fatale, 146-7
Eliade, M., 120 femmeninism, 7-8, 12, 22
Ellis, J., 239 Fernando, L., 142

299
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

fiction, 3-4, 155; Australian, 158 grammatical, choices, 232;

passim grammatical metaphor, 243;
field (of discourse), 191 types of grammatical structure
film, 8-9, 21 (constituency, prosodic,
film theory,
131, 219, 220 culminative), 241-2
Habita, Wolke, PAS Greenfield, C., 156, 157, 158
Fiske, J., 107-8 Greimas, A.G., 12, 108
Ford, C.S. and F.A. Beech, 212 Gross/Grosz, E., 15, 16, 17, 19,
foregrounding, 208-10 20, 24, 30, 31
Foucault, M., 24-5, 32-3, 37, 38 Gross, E. and M. de Lepervanche,
passim, 46, 63, 64, 72, 160 Bid,
free love, 140-1, 143 Grosz, E. and Allen, J., eds, 25
Freud, S., 29, 31, 37, 55-6, 92
function/functional, 193-4; see hagiography, 76, 91, 94
also ideational, interpersonal, Hall, E.T., 108, 166
textual Halliday, F.E., 217
Halliday, M.A.K., 191, 193, 194,
Galen, 89 195; 201;.2369 237; 2389239;
Gallop, J., 93, 134 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 249, 253
Gatens, M., 21, 23, 27-8, 30-1, 33, Harre, R., 229
73, 141, 160 Heath, S., 130-1
gaze, 202-3, 205 Hegel, G.W.F., 57, 60
gender, 5-7, 10, 20-1, 34, 43, 70, Henriques et al, 20, 25, 32
Way die ahsy4 wey iltatoy, tele alse y Heriot, A., 220
166, 180-1, 192, 198, 200, heterosexuality 15, 30, 45-6, 57,
207-8; gendered subject, 209; 161, 165-6, 169, 211
gender ambiguity, 209; history, 15-16
confusion, 221-2; double-play Hjelmslev, L., 231, 248
with gender, 219-20; identity, Hobbes, T., 58
22srole, 218,.221—2; 253; Hollway, W., 7, 9, 32
ungendered, 4 homosexual, 42, 151, 154, 155,
gender paradigm, 128, 134, 200-1, 158, 159, 160, 162, 165, 169,
207; see also sex stereotyping : 2195228
gendered subject, see gender, homosociality, 160, 164, 165
gender paradigm Hoult, T.F., 212
generative grammars, 247-8 Hudson, R.R., 232
genitalia, see body humanist, 3, 8, 27
genotype/phenotype, 227 Hunter, I., 157, 158, 163
fegevonigsy, (0), Sh FAcy, ohil, wets), alzeey itso Hurley, M., 34
188; generic, 8, 14; interactive Hyslop, G., 221
genre, 241 hysteria, 68, 92-5; the hysteric,
gesture, 202-3, 221-2 97, 137; see also anorexia,
Gilbert, S.M. and S. Gubar, 21 ecstacy
Gilman, A. and R. Brown, 232
Goethe, J.W., 48, 220 ideational function, 193, 249
government, 4 identity, sexual, 155, 161, 167;
grammar; 17; functional, 193-4, Australian, 170
232 ideology, 4,14, 18, 64, 127, 182-5

300
 Index

passim, 208, 247, 253 Kingscote, A., 144

imaginary body, 24, 31 knowing subject, 36-8, 39; see
(im)morality, 54-5, 140; see also also subject
ethics, morality knowledge(s), 4, 10, 18, 33, 64, 74,
index /indexical, 6, 202, 203 164; master, 21; sexualised 17
individual, individualism, 30, Kramer, L., 167
183-5, 247, 248; individual/ Kress, G., 254
self/subject/“T’’, 249-51 Kress, G. and T. Threadgold, 9,
passim; individual/ social, 253 254
passim, 254-5 Z Kristeva, J., 9, 96, 132, 134-5, 254
inscription, 24 Kroker, A. and M. Kroker, 25
institution, 4-5, 7, 12, 14-15, 29,
34, 38, 63, 96, 156-7, 158-9, labour, 5, 21
205; of English Studies, 155, Labov W., 245, 254
166, 170; of literary (history), Labov, W. and D. Fanshel, 254
141-2; of literary criticism, Lacan, J., 33, 47, 93, 99, 131
166-7; of science, 38, 227-30 lack, 96, 132
passim; see also power Lagorio, V., 85
interdisciplinary, 8-9, 14 akoteeheiee245
interpersonal, 231, 242, 255; language, 4-7, 10-13; ordinary,
interpersonal function, 193, 11, 18; realist theories of, 20;
196-7, 201; interpersonal women’s/feminine, 9; as social
grammar, 17 semiotic, 231
intertextuality, 10, 17, 130, 192; langue/parole, 233-38 passim
intertext, 14, 23 dowLauretisn eno tlm aeons
inversion /invert, 165 32,30
investment, 33 Leach, E., 254
Irigaray, L., 9, 11-12, 20, 26, 38, Leech, G.N., 239, 240
42-6, 63, 92, 93, 99-105 passim, Lemay, H.R., 90
AS7y 139 Lemke, J., 254
lesbian, 151, 159, 160, 164, 165,
Jakobson, R., 239, 254 219
Jakobson, R. and L. Waugh, 254 Levine, D.N., 49
Jameson, F., 180 Levinson, S., 239
Jesperson, O., 254 lexical, 94, 200; lexical cohesion,
Jolley, E., 158 194; lexical choice, 244
Julian of Norwich, 81 lexico-grammar, 193, 198
lexis, attitudinal, 232; see also
attitude, emotion
kabuki, 221-2 libidinal, 32; libidinal economy,
Kafka, F., 63 7; libidinal intensity,
Kamuf, P., 7, 10 68;libidinal zones 68-9; see also
Kani 52 erotogenic
Kaplan, G.T. and L. Rogers, 31 J
biteveatcy a\yy (Ste), Lee}, 771k
Keller, E. Fox, 20, 22 linguistics, 4-5, 8, 12
Kieckhefer, R., 92 literature, 8, 10, 21; literary
kinesics, 193, 195, 203, 208 history, 141-2; literary
King, N., 156 criticism, 166-7

301
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

Lloyd, G., 48, 60, 240 melodrama, 184, 221

Lonzi, C., 43 menstruation, 31
Lumsden, C.J. and E.O. Wilson, metafunction, 193
26 metalanguage, 4, 11-13, 17-19, 24
Lyotard, J-F., 36, 63 metaphor, 5, 24; see also
grammatical metaphor
Mackerras, C.P., 22 metasemiotic, 192, 208
McLaughlin, E.C., 85 Metz, C., 130
MacNeill, I., 170 Meyer, M., 195
male, 19, 211, 227; male desire, Millet, K., 17
165, see desire; male myth, 27 mind/body, 4, 18, 24
maleness, 212, 227-30 misogynist, 208-9
male/female, 27, 212 passim Mitchell—-Kernan, C., 254
malestream, 1, 4, 12 modality, 194, 201, 203, 245
Maltz D.N. and R.A. Borker, 241 mode (of discourse), 94
man, 27 Modleski, T., 171, 183-8
Marcuse, H., 51 Moi, T., 9, 11
Markey, T.L., 233 Money, T. and A. Ehrlandt, 228
marriage, 29, 138, 142, 144, mood, 194, 196-7, 201, 203, 243,
147-8, 150, 219 249 passim
Marshall, J., 164 moral/morality, see ethics,
Martin, J.R., 249 (im)morality; character (of
Martinez, I., 165 novel), 168, 169; moral training,
Marx, K., 48 155, 166; moral subject, 156,
marxist, 3, 16 166; moral introspection, 168;
masculine/feminine, 1, 7-8, 19, judgement, 169
22-3 morphology (patriarchal), 24, 73,
masculine/masculinity, 155, 164; 232
masculine desire, 143, 147, 151: Morris, J., 226
masculine sexuality, 41, 141, Morris, M., 11, 12, 18, 20
146, 151, 152-3, 202 mother, 16
masculinity, 9, 10, 27, 43, 48, 53, Muir, K., 219
55, 56, 57, 60-1, 96, 99, 129, multifunctional, 236
130, 135, 139, 141), 148,150; multi-medial (text), 191
152,91593,1202,5204,205; 211-12. Muraro, L., 43
226-30 Murray, S., 254
master-slave, 29 mysticism, female, 90-1, 99-105
Masterman, L., 180 myth, 66
material, 6, 14; material
apparatus, 6 name, 14
maternity/maternal, 85-9, 144-5, narrative, 3, 66, 91, 108, 127,
iNex} 131-2, 134, 139, 146, 149, 153,
meaning, 3-5, 10; meaning- 179-80, 182-6, 188, 211
making, 2-4, 5;meaning- narrative closure, 161, 169, 185
process, 5 naturalism, 195
meaning potential, 193, 201, 245 nature, 25, 29, 31
medium, 6, 8, 14, 22 neogrammarian, 233-5 passim

302
 Index

Nesbitt, C. and G. Plum, 246 phallocratic order, 95

New Woman, 140-5, 148, 153 phallo-logocentric, 36-8, 42, 44,
Nietzsche, F., 36, 51, 57, 59, 63, 47; 128
66, 67-8 phenotype, 227; see also genotype
non-discursive, 24-5 Philipsen, G. and M. Huspek, 232
non-linguistic (systems), 192-3, philosophy, 4, 18
195, 198, 201 phonology, 232
photography, 6-7
objectification, 39 Pike, K., 242
objective observer, 3,19; ~- Plummer, K., 160
objective /subjective, 240, 252 politico-ethical, 27
oedipal complex, 55-6, 93 politics, 4, 252-3; political action,
Olsen, K.L., 228 13; political theory, 3
onnogata, 221-2 Poole, R., 27
opera, 219-20 pornography, 57; see also pain
oppression, 7, 15, 16 positioning (of subject), 3, 8, 9,
ostension, 202; ostensive sign, 14, 16, 18, 32
202, 207 positivist /empiricist (tradition),
other, 56-7, 66, 90, 92; otherness, 236
38 post-structuralist, 3-5, 8, 22, 25
overcoding, 191 power, 7, 12, 14, 30, 33, 38, 40,
51, 54, 57, 58, 59, 63, 64, 70-1,
pain, 65, 66-8, 81, 86, 87, 92, 150, 192, 204-8, 209, 216;
93-4; pornography/violence, 57 solidarity, 207, 232
Painter, C., 236 Poynton, C., 5, 9, 16, 17, 19, 20,
paradigm, 29, 92-3, 107-8, 111, 25, 34, 240, 241
135 123, 228671305139; 192, pragmatics, 232, 239
204, 207, 209; paradigmatically, primitive, 240
28, 208; see also gender probabilistic (grammar), 245
paralinguistic, 194 passim; (as against categorical),
Pateman, C., 2, 16, 20, 25, 27, 28, 248
29 process/product, 5, 20, 191, 204,
Pateman, C. and E. Gross, 4, 11, 208-10
20, 28 product, see process
patriarchy, 11; 16, 17/22, 37; proposition/proposal, 194, 201,
93-6, 107, 132, 138, 182, 186, 203, 249 passim
189; Pateman’s analysis of, 28; Propp, V., 108
and capitalism, 29 proxemics, 108, 113, 193, 195,
Peirce, C.S., 107 198, 201-3, 205
performance, 7, 190-2, 195, psychical, 32
198-9, 201, 203, 208-10 psychoanalysis, 5, 24, 25, 73, 93,
performing arts, 216, 219-26 95, 131; psychoanalytic, 3, 8, 32
pervert, 165 psychologists, 228
phallic, 95 psychomedical thinking, 228
phallocentric, 4, 7, 9, 11, 16, 25-6, public/private dichotomy, 53-5
41, 45, 73 74,; phallocentrism,
1, 34 Quinn, N. and D. Holland, 236

303
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

race, 132-3, 135, 139; metaphor also self-representation

for sexism, 146 role play, 173-4, 175-7
rational masculine paradigm, 204 Rolle, R., 82
rational subject, 38, 48, 49 Rose, J., 25
passim, 252; see also subject Rossi-Landi, F., 5, 7, 17
rationalisation, 49 Rousseau, J-J., 54
rationality, 43, 48 passim Rowland, R., 4, 25, 28
reading, 14, 21, 154, 155; camp, Ruehl, S., 165
166; compliant readings, 253; Rule, J., 165
gay, lesbian, male readings,
166; resistant readings, 156; vom Saal, F.S., 228
reading formations, 158, 161, sadomasochism, 57, 63; see also
165, 166, 167, 170; reading pornography
positions, 161, 165, 253; reading Salingar, L.J., 219
practices, 156, 164 Sand, Georges, 162, 166
eral, De Ae ale aly, alleys: Sapir, E., 254
realisation, 4, 193, 201; realised, 6 de Saussure, F., 107, 237
realism, 172-7, 177-9, 183, 188 scarry, Hy, 25
realist, 4, 20-1 Schaffer, K., 20
reality, 2, 4, 5, 6, 11, 192, 204, 216 Schor, N., 127
reason/emotion, 240; intellect/ Schulenberg, J.T., 96
emotion, 200; see also attitude, science, 3, 4, 8, 10, 19, 21, 39,
emotion, rational, interpersonal 227-30 passim; hard science, 4,
Reddy, M., 5, 248 17; social science, 4, 15, 17, 24;
referential, 4, 19, 235, 236, 239, scientific authority, 165;
254; referent, 6; refers, 5 discourse, 252; persona, 252;
register, 155 rationality, 59; ‘truth’, 253; see
rehearsal, 8, 190, 191, 195, 199, also rationality, reason
200, 202, 208-10 Sedgwick, E. Kosofsky, 160
reified, 5, 17, 214, 226 segmentation, 194-5
representation, 1, 3-7, 10, 19, 30, Seidel, G., 20
41, 43, 55, 56, 64, 70, 72, 93, self-representation, 174, 176
106; 113) 127;,135, 140-15 1144; semantics, 193
THOS 71 G2 2a 252a 2538 * semiosis, 2, 6
representational meaning, 236; semiotic, 2, 3, 18, 164; order, 18;
representation as story-telling, processes, 6; square, 12;
2Ajesas tacts1241: systems, 14, 18, 20, 190-5;
representation and the social, semiotician, 4, 6
252; representational and the semiotics, 2, 5, 12, 24, 75-6, 106,
expressive, 254-5; see also 134-5, 190-5, 207; semiotics of
emotion, interpersonal the body, 32
reproductive function, 27 SCX, 5397, 9-10 S211 02. 2 8asex
resistance, 14 (biological), 216, 227-8; sexed
Rich, A., 43 body, 24, 32
Rochecouste, M., 12, 119 sex/gender, 23-4, 26
Rogers, L.J., 31 sexist, 14, 180, 186
role models, 171, 176, 181-3; see sexual attraction, 228-30

304
 Index

sexual contract, 17, 27 structuralist, 8

sexual difference, 25, 30, 32, subject, 3, 37, 38-42, 42-6, 56, 63,
37-8, 43-5, 47, 70-1, 72-3, 64, 95; masculine/male, 26, 48;
200-1, 211-12, 227-8 knowing, 3, 19; rational, 16;
sexual domination, 9 speaking, 3, 5, 14, 22-3, 192,
sexual emancipation, 113; ‘free 209; male and female speaking
love’ 143-4, 148 subjects, 31; self-reflective
sexual identity, 162, 164, 165 subject, 34; subject of semiosis,
sexuality, 17, 29, 15, 169 34
sexually positioned, 14 ss subjectivity, 3, 7, 10, 18, 21-2, 24,
Sheridan, S., 21, 161 156; bodily and discursively
Showalter, E., 21 constructed, 31; female, 43-5;
sign) 2 0, 63; 64,570, 107, 1115 male, 19; see also subject
192-4, 202, 207 subversion, 129, 138; subversive
sign production, 192 strategy, 134
signification, 2, 6 suffrage, women’s, 143
signifying practice, 3, 5, 15; Suleiman, S., 24, 25, 34
process, 3, 5; network, 14; state, Summers, A., 109
27 Sutton, P., 241
singer, 219 symbolic (order), 93, 95, 135, 138
soap opera, 8, 171, 172, 177, 178, syntagm, 107-8, 204, 209
183-9 system, 5, 193, 234-5, 238-9,
social, 28; social difference, 25; 245-7, 248-9; as meaning
social norms, 228, 229; social potential, 193; as potential for
order, 254; social practice, 6; process, 237; as shared
social relations, structure, resource, 249; linguistic
subjects, 240, 248-9, 251; social system, 254; paralinguistic
system, 4; social theory, 254 system, 194; see also
social semiotics, 7, 20, 22, 24, 193; competence /performance,
see also language meaning potential, process,
socio-cultural roles, 218; product, langue/parole
practices, 33 systemic-functional (grammar),
sociolinguistics, 232 193, 231, 248
sociology, 15-16
Sontag, S., 162 Tagg, J., 4, 6, 20
speaker, 5 technologies, 28; of gender, 33;
speech roles, 232; speech social technology, 157
function (acts), 232 television, 8
Spender, D., 9 tenor (of discourse), 191, 193, 201,
Spinoza, B., 28 203
Stankiewicz, E., 231, 233, 234-5 text, 64, 191-5, 208-10 ; as social
Stead, C., 154, 160 action, 249; body as text, 64, 75
Steedman, C., 3 passim; textuality, 18; see also
stereotypes/sexual, 109, 111, clause, genre
181-2, 186, 229-30 textual function, 193-5
story, 3, 8, 23, 27 theatrical arts, 216-22
Strindberg, A., 190, 199 theatrical text, 190 passim

305
Feminine/Masculine and Representation

thematic system, 194 Waller, J., 154, 155

theory, 3=AO Ome Ora ae Wandor, M., 217
master-theory, 12 Warner, M., 20
Thibault, P.J., 237, 254 Warrack, J., 220
Thorne, B., C. Kramarae and N. Watney, S., 160
Henley, 232 Weber, M., 49 passim
Threadgold, T., 5, 9, 11, 20, 24, Weedon, C., 20, 21, 25
33 20a, 204 Weeks, J., 161, 162
transitivity , 193, 196, 199, 204 The Well of Loneliness, 165
translation, 13, 24 Westcott, R.W., 254
transubstantiation, 76-81 White, P., 158, 161
transvestite, 217, 226-7; Whitlock, G:, 165
transvestism, 228; see also Wilde, O., 148, 161, 162, 164, 165,
cross-dressing 166
transsexual, 226, 228 Williams, C., 179-80
truth; 3) 4) 6.21-)true.4: truth= Williamson, D., 168
effects, 5, 7, 15; of Winslow, D.J., 254
representation, 33; truth and women, 8, 9, 23, 27
falsehood (of propositions), women’s oppression, 44, 186-7,
239-40; see also reason, 216
rationality, science women’s studies, 22
The Twyborn Affair, 167, 169-70 Woolf, V., 62
Wotherspoon, G., 166
Ubersfeld, A., 108, 113 writing, 8, 13; masculine/
unconscious, 131, 192 feminine, 19, 21, 129-31;
undercoding, 190 writing practices, 170; writing
universal, 4, 19, 26 subject, 3

violence, see pain Yell, S., 34

virtue, 55 Yellow Book, 147
visual, 7, 198-9; visual stimuli,
212-17 passim Zola, E., 12, 106 passim

306
Feminine/Masculine and Representation provides a
much needed introduction to a number of challeng-
ing issues raised in debates within gender studies,
critical theory and cultural studies. In analysing
cultural processes using a range of different meth-
ods, the essays in this collection focus on gender/
sexuality, representation and cultural politics
across a variety of media.
Terry Threadgold, Associate Professor of English at the
University of Sydney, is the author of Feminist Poetics
(forthcoming). Anne Cranny-Francis teaches cultural
studies and critical theory at the University of Wollon-
gong and is the author of Feminist Fiction.

Cover illustration: Julie Brown-Rrap

Cover design: Clea Gazzard

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