Deconstructive "Contortion" and Women's Historical Practice, by Mary F. Robertson
Poetics Today © 1986 Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0333-5372%281986%297%3A4%3C705%3AD%22AWHP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-C

Looks at Derrida's theory of Differance, and suggests rather than "absence of meaning" as his goal, that "contortion" might be a better concept, given what she calls the "self-evident fact" of women's distinctiveness and material differences.

p. 707 Realism of Derrida's formulation "captures what it means for women to resist the essentialist claims of a patriarchal system while also acknowledging the contingent nature of their existence -- the perpetual deferral of any hypostastizing principle that accounts for being-as-a-woman" representability is here made explicit.

p. 708 "Decoonstruction points towards gaps, silences and repressions in logocentric discourses but it is not itself a figure positing only gaps or silences as significant. It does not image the other as finally something silent and out of hearing; rather it brings into hearing the "other" to which logocentrism is deaf."

p 710. "Those who treat the deconstructive condition of meaning as, shall we say, "irrationality" rather than genuinely deconstructive "(non)-rationality" and treat the conditions of representability as a confirmation of unrepresentability forget the validity of Derrida's idea that, while the constitution of of meaning always secretly necessitates blurring cherished boundaries of difference, this process at the same time does not fully remove the boundary line and thus does not remove all representation from the field of action. [rather,] "paradoxical conditions of possibility of representation. -- interplay of presence and absence, not the loss of power to signify -- doubleness

p 712. "While the patriarchy's only leg to stand on is Difference [Robertson uses this in a pejorative capital-D sense], women's way of being and surviving is typically in the play of difference that undermines Difference. " [Warrior in two worlds, the double veil of Dubois? Slaves know masters but masters don't know slaves?]

p. 713 sets up contortion as a rejection of patriarchial "binary thinking." male essentialist/female essentialist/anti-essentialist but neither.

[I think what she's saying here is that women gain power from boundary-shifting between differences and no differences as being important. This is an important idea to think about, and one that perhaps Kolchin will speak to.]

[How would we distinguish this boundary-shifting from masking or posing?]

p 716 "Gossip is a cunning strategy of living with official categories that would strangle the system if gossip did not loosen the noose."


posted by Lloyd at 9:38 AM