ABSTRACT
In Barbara Kruger’s signature photomontage, a photographic image of a woman’s face with each eye covered by a solitary leaf is cut across the bias with the following text: “We won’t play nature to your culture.” Kruger’s image both visually and discursively deconstructs the hierarchical positioning that structures the nature/culture duality. As Craig Owens elaborates, this image presupposes “a binary logic of opposition and exclusion that divides the social body into two unequal halves, in order to subject one to the other” (Owens 1983:5) The order of subjection mediating Kruger’s graphic display is specifically gendered by the representation of a naturalized female figure which Kruger’s text equally graphically sets out to denaturalize. This denaturalization of the female figure enters into the deformation of Kruger’s text that appears in my title to this introduction, “we will not play body to your territory,” so
as to recall a prevalent trope currently mediating postcolonial discourses: the feminization of colonial territory. In its metaphorical expression this trope figures the Woman/Body as a landscape of natural desire, the shape of imperial expansion; metonymically, the Woman/Body, in its most fractured and reified form, is disassembled into a synecdochic machine reproducing an originary fantasy of the virginal site that entices imperial penetration and conquest. This figural investment in an unspecified and seemingly generic Woman/Body for First Nations’ women, whose bodies are, in reality, subjected to colonial domination, represents an important area of study for decolonialist and materialist feminist critical practices.
