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The Body Deferred:

Reconsidering Feminist

Approaches to Embodiment

Diane Enns

Carleton University

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. . . . 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 ofany or all patterned arrangements

(Grosz, 1990:72).

Whileearlier feminists have cautiously circumvented any allusion to the

body to avoid both the pitfalls of sexual difference and accusations of

"biologism" or "essentialism", contemporary Anglo-American feminists are

frequent participants in what Terry Eagleton calls academic "body-talk"

(1993:7). Reasons for this shift are as varied and complex as the history of

Western ambivalence towards the body. But most significant is the advent of

post-structuralist critiques of the autonomous, rational, masculine subject,

and the concurrent feminist struggle to articulate women as subjects. The
voicing ofsuspicions against these critiques, particularly bywomen ofcolour
like bell hooks who claims they surface "at a historical moment when many
subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time,"

(1990:28) has generated a proliferation of ideas concerning embodied

subjectivity.

As Elizabeth Grosz suggests, feminists are now eager to "question the
terms in which the body has been previously theorized, as well as to question

feminist rejections ofnotions ofwomen's lived bodily specificities" ( 1 99 1 :2)

with a viewto dismantling the dualisms ofmind/body, self/other, and subject/

object, that continue to permit relations of domination. In this paper I



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problematize the claim Grosz makes that this retheorizing ofthe body moves

it away from an uncritical association with nature and otherness, and an

opposition to mind and self (1991:2). I argue that many of these new

articulations of an embodied subject continue to bump up against articula-

tions of the Body, and by association, the Referent, the Real, the Signified and

Nature. This Body is always one more layer beneath the culturally-inscribed

body, an inaccessible Ground or Beginning on which the spectre ofessential-

ism lingers, rendering our efforts to speak as subjects unattainable. In effect,

despite its promise to disassemble binary oppositions, much of the feminist

work on the body inadvertently assumes the very categories it wishes to

undermine.

Hence, wl\ile Grosz is right to enunciate an "active" and "productive"

notion ofbiology that acknowledges the contingencies in which our bodies are

embedded, she simultaneously refuses contingency by invoking the "white-

ness" of the writing surface that is our flesh. The tension inherent in tins

stunning blindness to the effects of white consciousness, one of which is to

obscure these effects, is characteristic of the contemporary discussion of

embodied subjectivity. I will focus on two responses to the problem of

bringing the body back into feminist concerns with identity and subjectivity

that I believe clearly highlight the difficulty Grosz displays in conceiving the

flesh as contingent rather than fixed and immutable.

Attempts to speak with/in a body that cannot be reduced to "sexual

indifference" or to an essentially-defined meaning ofwoman, are complicated

by an uneasy shift between a demand for a theory ofthe female subject, and

an adamant denunciation of such a demand as itself contributing to an

essentialist discourse. Those who hope to articulate a female embodied
subjectivity no longer exposed to the errors of exclusionary politics, are

attempting to revalue former notions of essentialism. Conscious of the

criticism by women of colour that white feminists' notions of subjectivity

often mirror the traditional masculine model ofthe self dominating the other,

feminists such as Rosi Braidotti attempt to situate subject positions in the

contingent spaces of our bodies. To this end she states:

I believe that the redefinition ofthe female feminist subject starts

with the revaluation of the bodily roots of subjectivity, rejecting

the traditional vision ofthe knowing subject as universal, neutral,

and consequently gender-free. This 'positional' or situated way of

seeing the subject states that the most important location or



situation is the rooting ofthe subject into the spatial frame of the

body. (1993:6-7)

Braidotti argues that the feminine needs to be re-connected to the "bodily

sexed reality of the female," permitting a revaluation of what remains the

condition of possibility for political activism-essentialism (1989:93). It

allows for a politics of location that rejects global statements about women

and in their place enables us "to be as aware as possible of where one is

speaking from" (Braidotti, 1993:8). With this in mind, Braidotti calls for a

recognition of "a bond ofcommonality among women," meaning "a consen-

sus that all women partake ofthe condition of 'the second sex "' which "seals

a pact among women... the foundation stone that allows for the feminist

position or standpoint to be articulated" (1993:8). Indeed, she goes so far as

to define woman as "an umbrella term" that brings together a variety of

different levels of subjectivity and different relationships to and notions of

time (1993:7).

It is difficult to seejust how a definition ofwoman as "an umbrella term"

leads us to a politics of location, where the particularities of women's lives

are not glossed over. It appears that Braidotti's revaluation of essentialism

has not overcome the central problematic for feminists concerned with this

paradox. To circumvent it, Braidotti advocates "an epistemological and a

political distinction between 'woman' and 'feminist'" (1993:8); that is,

between real women, speaking from a multitude of different locations, and

feminist women, who must unite for political reasons. Yet a third term is

introduced, "Woman," the historical representation of the feminine, 1 a

"culturally dominant model for female identity" (Braidotti, 1 993 : 8) that must

be recognized as distinct from the reality of women's lives in order for

feminists to elaborate a political subjectivity. Braidotti concludes that "[t]he

myth ofWoman is now a vacant lot where different women can play with their
subjectivity" (1993:9).

What happens to the body in the kind of separations that allow women

to play with what kind of Woman they want to be, and at the same time (or
maybe only sometimes) decide to be feminists for political reasons? It turns

out that Braidotti's notion of the body is as fraught with distinctions as her

elaboration ofWoman. When shegets down tothetask ofdescribingjust what

a "bodily sexed reality" is, we read that:

The 'body' in question is the threshold of subjectivity: as such it

is neither the sum ofits organs—a fixed biological essence—nor the



Alternate Routes, Volume12, 1995

result of social conditioning... The 'body' is rather to bethought

of as the point of intersection, as the interface between the

biological and the social... (1989:97)

In other words, this body that Braidotti puts in quotation marks, marking it

apart from what we know to be real, is not a collection of organs, tissue, and

skin—that remains another layer beneath this 'body.' Just what kind of body

is this, and how many kinds are there? In arguing that "there is a fundamental

qualitative distinction to be made between anatomy and sexuality as such,"

(1989:97) Braidotti distances herselffrom the flesh-and-blood body that she

argues so eloquently for incorporating into a theory of subjectivity.

Braidotti provides one example among many ever more sophisticated

attempts by feminists to separate the flesh from metaphorical, symbolic,

discursive, ortheoretical bodies, in an attemptto givewomen apolitical voice.

The body is stuck in the middle ofthese attempts, either uncritically assumed

in its undesirable "natural" state and ignored, or re-dressed and propped up

to pose in its new position as the indicator of particularity and locale for the

female subject

A second response to the problematic of essentialist discourses of the

Iffo body rejects altogether the notion of feminine subjectivity for being in itself

an essentialistproject. Judith Butlerprovides an excellent exampleofonewho

is critical ofthe perceived political need to construct a ground for identity, that

is, a notion of woman as subject, since it is this ground that invariably
excludes other identity positions.

Butler's opponents are those who claim that "politics requires a stable

subject" to be effective (Butler, 1993:4). On the contrary, she insists, weneed

to deconstruct the notion ofthe subject, not to negate it, but "to ask after the

process of its construction and the political meaning and consequentially of

taking the subject as a requirement or presupposition oftheory" ( 1 993 :4). To

demonstrate such a consequence, Butler asks how she is personally posi-

tioned as a theorizing subject: "how is it that a position becomes a positionf?]"

For is it "one that I devise, publish, and defend, that belongs to me as a kind

of academic property? Or is there a grammar of the subject that merely

encourages us to position me as the proprietor of those theories?" ( 1 993:9).
In other words, while Butler explicitly states that she does not "shirk" from

using the pronoun "I, "she is adamant that this "I" is not theoriginator ofthese

positions, but is constituted by them, for "[n]o subject is its own point of

departure" (1903:9)



Similarly, Butler states that she does not shirk from using the term

women, admittingwe have to "speak as and for women" for political reasons.

For "[s]urely, that is the way in which representational politics operates, and

in this country, [the United States] lobbying efforts are virtually impossible

without recourse to identity politics" (Butler, 1 993 : 1 5). Rather than shying

away from it, Butler argues we can release the term woman ' into a future of
multiple significations. . . emancipate it fromthe maternal or racialist ontologies

to which it has been restricted, and. . . give it play as a site where unanticipated

meanings might come to bear" (1993:16).

In order to facilitate this accommodation of both the destabilization of

the category and the recognition of its usefulness, Butler espouses a strategy

that is critical of the common feminist assumption of a radical distinction

between sex and gender. Originally, she asserts, this distinction was stressed

in order to free gender from the immutable natural-ness of sex, a pre-

discursive and pre-cultural given (1993:6-7). But the problem with this

distinction, according to Butler, is the assumption of sex as a natural

category.

If such a position is contested, Butler argues, then "perhaps this

construct called 'sex' is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed perhaps

it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction

between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all" (1990:7). In

Butler's view, sex cannot bethe surface on which gender, as a form ofcultural

inscription, imposes meaning. Rather, sex itself is a gendered category,

discursively constructed as a pre-discursive ground: "[t]his production ofsex

as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of

cultural construction designated by gender" (Butler, 1990:7).

Butler's denunciation ofthe subject is clearly caught up in what she sees

as a problematicpositioningofthe body. In her notion ofsex—bywhich I think

she means the body—as culturally constructed and therefore the same as

gender, Butler effectively collapses sex and gender into one free-floating

signifier and removes them both from the body. Where do we find a
reconceived notion of the body? Where do we find any body at all?

Oncethe distinction between the body and gender has been synthesized,

Butler outlines a strategy for "denaturalizing" sex. She proposes "a set of

parodic practices based in a performative theory of gender acts" that allow

a subversive "resignification and proliferation beyond the binary frame" of

the body, sex, gender, and sexuality ( 1 990 :x). Since parody is understood by

Butler to mean an imitation "that mocks the notion ofan original" ( 1 990: 138)

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gender parody reveals only that there is no original gender identity on which

gender "fashions" itself. What we think is an original is really a copy, a failed
"ideal that no one can embody" (Butler, 1 990: 139). She concludes from this

that gender is merely "a stylized repetition of acts," a performance, neither

real nor true, played out by cultural and political discursive regimes.2

Since she has already collapsed sex and gender into a single perform-

ance, we can only presume then that the body is also neither real nor true.
Hence Butler has succeeded in removing our flesh from any considerations

of identity, subjectivity, and voice. Sex and gender are merely effects of

discourse, despite Butler's lip-service to reconceiving the body "no longer as

a passive medium or instrument awaiting the enlivening capacity of a

distinctly immaterial will" (1990:8).

From these brief examples, and many others, 3 it is clear that feminist
discussions ofembodiment reveal a relentless rejection ofthe "literal," "real,"

"biological," "p re-discursive," or "referent." Indeed, the search for a way to
separate the flesh from speech, consciousness, and subjectivity, can be

thought of as seeking to position women's bodies somewhere else. As Vicki

Kirby argues:

ffo Although rethinking essentialism marks an avowed return to the

body, the reunion is always be-ing deferred. It is certainly not an

easy homecoming. Perhaps commerce with the body is considered

risky business because the border between the mind/body split...

just cannot be secured. (1992:6)

The problem facing feminist attempts to envision a re-embodied subject

arises out of the assumption of the very terms they are struggling to

destabilize: the notion of a fixed universal body that must be rejected as an

inaccessible pre-discursive reality. In effect, as Kirby claims, it is assumed

that "if the ground isn't solid then it isn't a ground—if it moves and changes,

then it must bejust the representation ofa ground" ( 1 992: 1 4). In other words,

the feminist anti-essentialist stance is ironically founded on an essentialist

notion of The Body, Nature, or Biology, that is absolute and immutable

(Kirby, 1992:14)

We cannot continue to talk about a female embodied subject that is
rooted in the traditional notion of the body alienated from consciousness and

the world While there are several feminist intellectuals currently engaged in

such a critical project, most notably Grosz and Kirby, ' what I think is missing

in even the most eloquent and persuasive invitations to rethink the body, is a



sustained conceptualization of the body as flesh, as inseparable from

consciousness and actively interacting with the surrounding world. 5 Once we
accomplish this, it will no longer be necessary to speak of the body as though

it were some entity isolated from minds, others, and the world we share.
The urgency of such a project is evident in Grosz's assumption of the

"bedrock" that is the body; that while viewed as interacting with social

inscription and thereby accounting for all the contingencies and particulari-

ties of life, it is nevertheless conceived of as a "whiteness." Sidonie Smith is

right to remark that the discourse of embodied woman is comprised of the
subjectivities of those "angels in houses": the bourgeois women. As the

universal, male subject is formed through the discourses of identities such as

race, class and sexuality, "so those angels take shape through the discourses

of various kinds of contaminated women, those even more 'colorful' others

who are denied the possibility of escaping the drag of the body" (Smith,
1993:17).

Notes

1. See Teresa de Lauretis, Sexual Difference: A theory of socio-symbolw practice, (1990)

for a description of her differentiation between "Woman" as cultural imago, and women, /ft)
as real agents of change.

2. For example, the practice of drag, Butler suggests, "plays upon the distinction between

the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed," thereby exposing the

imitative and contingent structure of gender itself (1990:137).

3. Elsewhere I have included the work of Elspeth Probyn who makes distinctions between

a "natural" body and a "discursive" body (see "This Body Which Is Not One: Speaking an

Embodied Self," Hyparia 6:, no. 3, 1991).

See also feminist responses to Irigaray, whose discussions of female embodiment provoke

enormous ambivalence and anxiety in Anglo-American feminist writing: Maggie Berg

(1988), Diana Fuss (1989), Toril Moi (1985), Margaret Whitford (1989).

4. Tania Modleski and Moira Gatens should also be noted here. Modleski convincingly

argues against an "as if' position in her first chapter of Feminism Without Women (1991),
appropriately entitled "Post-mortem on Post-feminism," where she asks "could we... say

of anti-essentialist feminists that only those possessing vastly wider options than the

majority of women living in the world today can play at 'being if while theorizing

themselves into the belief that they are not it?" (1991:22).

Gatens points to the split between representation and reality, and the "impotence of our

political vocabulary" for articulating bodily difference ("Corporeal representation in/and



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the body politic,'' Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and

Spaces, North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991: 85).

5. I am thinking here of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as well as the novels of Toni

Morrison: two examples of writers who ignore the dualities of flesh and consciousness,

flesh and object, and flesh and word, and move on to an understanding of what it means to

be sentient beings

References

Braidotti, Rosi

1989 'The politics of ontological difference." Pp. 89-105 in Teresa Brennan

(ed), Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge

1993 "Embodiment, Sexual Difference, and the Nomadic Subject." Hypatia 8

(1):1-13.

Butler, Judith

1 990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion ofIdentity. New
York: Routledge

1992 "ContingentFoundations:FeminismandtheQuestionof"Postmodernism."

Pp. 3-2 1 in Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (eds.), Feminists Theorize the

Political. New York: Routledge

1993 Bodies That Matter: On the discursive limits of "sex". New York:
Routledge

Eagleton, Terry

1993 "It is not quite true that I have a body, and not quite true that I am one
either," London Review ofBooks 15 (10):7-8.

Grosz, Elizabeth

1990 "Inscriptions and body-maps: representations and the corporeal." Pp. 62-

74 in Terry Threadgold and Anne Cranny-Francis (eds), Feminine,

Masculine and Representation. Sydney: Allen & Unwin

1991 "Introduction." Hypatia 6 (3): 1-3.

hooks, bell

1 990 Yearning: race, gender and culturalpolitics. Toronto: Between the Lines

Kirby, Vicki

1992 "Addressing Essentialism Differently... Some Thoughts on the Corpo-

real." I niversityof'Waikato Women \s Studies Occasional Paper Series.

New Zealand: University of Waikato, 4: 1-23.

Smith, Sidonie

1 993 Subjectivity, Identity and the Body: Women 'sA utobiographical Practices

in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press