ABSTRACT

One of the more provocative areas of debate in academic communities today is that in which possible directions for gender studies are being explored. Do the increasingly destabilized (deconstructed, devalued) tendencies which define much of contemporary critical thought leave room for a political agenda? Recently, the rigorous scrutiny of the normative functions of categorization has enabled a recognition of the ‘essential’ natures of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as social constructions whose constancy is untenable. Yet ‘women’, as occupants of gendered positions in this social matrix who continue to struggle against the prevailing impact of representation, might readily argue that this deconstruction of categories precludes the political investment which remains necessary to effect change. If deconstruction, for example, is to be used as a tool for the dismantling of categorical absolutes, can the re-construction of new and mobile relations of power still be a viable enterprise? Can the subject positions of women as marked by gender be effectively utilized without relapsing into ‘identity politics’? The recurrence of these types of questions indicates their exigency, and Sally Robinson has accepted the challenge of negotiating between the apparently apolitical stance often attributed to post-structuralist thought and the specific goals which remain immanent to gender-related studies. In her recent work Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction, Robinson, an assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan, suggests that it might be more productive to maintain the tension between these conflicting positions rather than to attempt their reconciliation. Although she resists the definitive closure of any single comprehensive answer, Robinson locates her argument for effectively utilizing the challenges of contemporary theory by positing the interactions between text and reader as an open process from which to interrogate the construction of gender positions in discursive structures. The project, as Robinson describes it, is the attempt ‘to trace how gendered subject effects are produced and articulated

through the contradictory processes of self-representation’ (p. 15). Using Gayatri Spivak’s formulation of ‘subject-effect’ as a textual construction that describes a process rather than an immanent consciousness, Robinson conceptualizes representation as the concomitant process which functions both as a product of, and a reaction to, ‘official narratives’; this process generates the contradictions between these narrative structures, both official and non-official, that provide the potential force for disruption of gender representation.