Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (40 page)

to locate and describe the systemic racism and sexism of our culture, we found our accounts reduced to nothing more than talkshow topics, on a par with every other complaint and disorder of the moment. At the same time as this postmodern deconstruction was occurring, moreover, charges of leftwing totalitarianism were emerging from other quarters, fragmenting our efforts in more backwardyearning ways.

Both Flax and hooks, while eschewing essentialist notions of race and gender, are suspicious of any undermining of the authority of our experience just at that cultural moment when we might begin to "remember ourselves" and "to make ourselves subject" (Flax's and hooks's respective formulations). "There is a radical difference," hooks points out, "between a repudiation of the idea that there is a black 'essence' and recognition of the way black identity has been specifically constituted in the experience of exile and struggle."
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Similarly, Flax criticizes postmodern deconstructions of subjectivity and urges that feminists continue to seek ''location and participation" in the retelling and reconstruction of women's "differentiated yet collective experience." "What memories of history," she asks, "will our daughters have if we do not find ways to speak of and practice [the sense of 'we']?"
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At the same time, both Flax and hooks take very seriously what poststructuralist writers have called the "decentering" of the sub
ject—not,
however, as a methodological or theoretical dogma (according to which any articulation of identity, of the "we," is a totalizing fiction) but as part of the lived experience of acting, thinking, writing in fragmenting times. For neither of them is this decentering wholly positive (as it may be for those who spin it out abstractly, "in theory"); in human communities it has often meant homelessness, dislocation from history, a sense of political and intellectual vertigo and paralysis, and the replacement of lost human bonds by the individual search for stimulation and material gratification. Hooks's essays in
Yearning
(see especially "Postmodern Blackness," "The Politics of Radical Black Subjectivity," "Chitlin' Circuit," and "Homeplace") are especially instructive in their exploration of the consequences of postmodern fragmentation for African American identity and culture.

The decentering of the self is, however, also viewed by hooks as offering opportunities: for "new and varied forms of bonding"

among people, for artistic and intellectual engagement with popular culture, and for creating transformative subjectivities that express and exhibit the multiple aspects of identity, the different locations from which we see and think.
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She urges African American intellectuals and artists to embody in their work and presence all the complexity and variety of the cultural traditions that have shaped them. Only through such embodiment—by means of which elements of identity developed "at the margins" are brought to the "center"—can the hegemony of existing cultural styles of subjectivity be challenged. Her perfectly chosen example is a talk by Cornel West:

Though highly intellectual and theoretical in content, his manner of presentation was akin to a sermon mode popular in black communities, where such a style indicates depth and seriousness. In the context of white institutions, particularly universities, that mode of address is questionable precisely because it moves people. Style is equated in such a

setting with a lack of substance. West not only transformed social space, legitimating an aspect of black experience in a context which rarely recognizes the values of black culture, he was also able to include nonscholarly members of the audience. His style of presentation required of the audience a shift in paradigms; a marginal aspect of black cultural identity was centralized. To understand what was happening, individuals had to assume a different literary standpoint.
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Hooks's discussion was extremely meaningful to me. I once lost a prestigious job because (as I was informed later by one of the members of the committee) I "moved my body around so much" during my presentation. I know this was not the only time that my expressive style—part Jewish, part "feminine"—disqualified me as a serious philosopher; it was simply the one time that I was informed of it. Reconstructing subjectivity is risky, as hooks points out. When we give expression in academic settings to those aspects of our identity forged in marginality, we may be seen as ''spectacle. " Yet, as she argues (and I fully agree), this is a risk we must run, not only in the interests of our own "right to subjectivity" but also as the means by which culture is
transformed
and not simply reproduced with different players in the same game. Every time we
are
taken seriously it means that an entrenched paradigm has been

shaken; every time that I am taken seriously, for example, by those in my profession or by my students, it means that the deeply sedimented image of "the philosopher"—not simply as white and male, but as demonstrating his rigor through detachment, superiority, "cool" reason—has been upset.

Both hooks and Flax selfconsciously and deliberately inhabit a variety of locations—none of them taken on in the interests of textual play, all of them rooted in aspects of their own histories, professions, politics—in their books. They do not attempt to reconcile these locations, but simply allow them to speak in turn, each a different center of "authority." In this "polyphonic vocality" (as hooks describes it)
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these books are acutely postmodern. But because the insights that emerge are grounded in experience, the result is neither chaotic nor fanciful; rather, the security and elegance of theoretical unity are replaced by the different satisfaction of having sometimes incommensurable realities (that is, real life) described with precision, intelligence, and honesty.

For instance, as a therapist Flax is soberly aware of the terror that
literally
decentered selves endure, as well as of the limitations of postmodern "textual indeterminacy" as a principle for helping actual human beings; as a philosopher, however, she is appreciative of these notions for inviting "ambivalence, ambiguity and multiplicity" into our theorizing.
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Criticizing the poststructuralist discourse on "difference," hooks is stunningly on target concerning white theorists' continuing reading of black writers
only
for race issues (as representatives of the claims of "otherness") while they leave whiteness unproblematized, unexamined, constructed as no race at all. A shift of perspective, however, finds her hopeful that the ''contemporary engagement with issues of 'otherness and difference' . . . indicates that there is a growing body of work that can provide and promote critical dialogue and debate across boundaries of class, race and gender."
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This assessment is only contradictory in the abstract; in the context of academic communities, the concern for "difference"
has
functioned in a complex variety of ways, some stifling, some liberating. Throughout, hooks's
Yearning
exhibits a feeling for the complexity and multiplicity of cultural phenomenafrom poststructuralist theory, to relations between white and black feminists, to film representations of race

and gender, to the muchpublicized rape of a jogger in Central Park—that I have not found in any other contemporary work of criticism:

To fully understand the multiple meanings of [the Central Park rape], it must be approached from an analytical standpoint that considers the impact of sexism and racism. Beginning there enables many of us to empathize with both the victim and the victimizers. If one reads
The Demon Lover
and thinks about this crime, one can see it as part of a continuum of male violence against women, of rape and terror as weapons of male domination—yet another horrific and brutal expression of patriarchal socialization. And if one

considers this case by combining a feminist analysis of race and masculinity, one sees that since male power within patriarchy is relative, men from poorer groups and men of color are not able to reap the material and social rewards for their participation in patriarchy. In fact they often suffer from blindly and passively acting out a myth of masculinity that is lifethreatening. Sexist thinking blinds them to this reality. They become victims of the patriarchy. No one can truly believe that the young black males involved in the Central Park incident were not engaged in a suicidal ritual enactment of a dangerous masculinity that will ultimately threaten their lives, their well being.

If one reads again Michael Dyson's piece "The Plight of Black Men" . . . it is easy to understand why young black males are despairing and nihilistic. And it is rather naive to think that if they do not value their own lives, they will value the lives of others. Is it really so difficult for folks to see the connection between the constant pornographic glorification of male violence against women that is represented, enacted and condoned daily in the culture and in the Central Park crime? Does racism create and maintain this blindspot or does it allow black people and particularly black men to become the scapegoats, embodying society's evils?
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I have quoted this section at some length because as I write about hooks's appreciation of multiplicity I am aware of how empty that word—reverentially intoned over and over in contemporary writing—now sounds. Despite the constant lip service paid to multiplicity, we have few models of thinkers who are genuine "'world' travellers" (as Maria Lugones calls them).
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Many people
theorize
about multiplicity, and deconstructionist readings
seek
it from texts—often guided by
jouissance
alone rather than a hunger for understanding. But becoming a worldtravelling thinker cannot, in my opinion, be accomplished by sightseeing, textual or cultural.

Nor does it require extensive coverage of "foreign" territory. As Lugones describes it, it has fundamentally to do with the desire and ability to explore reality "wearing the other's shoes." This means recognizing, wherever one goes, that the other's perspective
is
fully realized, not a bit of exotic "difference" to be incorporated within one's own world. The worldtravelling thinker thus must be prepared, not only to "appreciate" the foreign, but also to recognize and nurture those places where worlds meet. And the world travelling thinker will always be ready to abandon familiar territory when human understanding and communication seem to require it. It is in these senses that
Yearning,
in its complex and expanding understandings of race and gender politics, is beyond dualism not merely theoretically but also in intellectual practice, and so models the best of postmodern multiplicity for us.

Flax and hooks, with their concerns about knowledge, voice, and intellectual and political perspective, do not devote much discussion to the body as a carrier of culture, postmodern or otherwise. But there are many who do see the body—both as a living cultural form and as a subject of scholarly theorizing—as a significant register of the fact that we are living in fragmented times. Our cultural attitudes toward the body are full of dissonances, expressive of the contradictions of our society. On the one hand, sex has become deadly; on the other hand, it continues to be advertised as the preeminent source of ecstasy, power, and selffulfillment. Both on MTV and on daytime soaps, sobering messages about AIDS are broadcast back toback with video images of mindless abandon; the abandon which by definition precludes attentiveness to such "practical" considerations as condoms—is depicted as the essence and proof of erotic charge. At one extreme, our culture seems newly recaptivated by biological determinism. Although the Human Genome Project has had its critics, excitement over progress it has made in interpreting the entirety of the human genetic blueprint has been rekindled in 1992. Even as I write this, a friend has just come into the room, showing me a full page in the
New York Times
entitled "Blueprint for a Human" and illustrated both with a photo of a newborn and with the latest, most complete chromosomal maps devised by the project. Daily, newspaper articles appear declaring genetic and chemical bases for physical and psychological disorders of all sorts,

including many—such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia—for which the evidence for cultural origins seems overwhelming. At the other extreme, it is being just as unequivocally declared that "Bodies are not born. They are in fact made by culture."
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For many scholars, this commitment to cultural constructionism has gone far beyond notions that the biological body never
presents
itself to us in innocent or "natural" form but is always historically and politically "inscribed" and shaped (a position I adhere to), to the much more radical position that the very notion of the biological body is itself a fiction. Popular culture has its own versions of this thesis, as we alter our bodies without regard for biological consequences, recklessly making them over through yoyo dieting and plastic surgery and eagerly embracing any technology that challenges our various biological clocks. Arguably, we are more in touch with our bodies than ever before. But at the same time, they have become alienated products, texts of our own creative making, from which we maintain a strange and ironic detachment.

Turning back to more scholarly contexts, arguably (as I suggest in the introduction to this volume) a major paradigm shift has occurred over the past hundred years. Formerly, the body was dominantly conceptualized as a fixed, unitary, primarily physiological reality. Today, more and more scholars have come to regard the body as a historical, plural, culturally mediated form. To the degree that such a shift has occurred, feminism (as I have argued) has contributed much to it, to the corollary development of a "political" understanding of the body, and to a new suspicion of the category of "nature" and its accompanying ideologies concerning women's "species role." To feminism's recognition of the body as a cultural form and "site" of "disciplinary power'' poststructuralist thought has contributed two additional elements. First, in its more Foucauldian manifestations, poststructuralism has encouraged recognition of the fact that prevailing configurations of power, no matter how dominant, are never seamless but are always spawning new forms of subjectivity, new contexts for resistance to and transformation of existing relations. Second, in its more Derridean manifestations, poststructuralism has encouraged us to recognize that the body is not only materially acculturated (for example, as it conforms to social norms and habitual practices of "femininity" and "masculinity"),
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but also mediated by language: by metaphors (for