ABSTRACT
Feminists routinely charge male authors with mediated appropriation of women's bodies through literary inscriptions that deny women authentic physical being by reducing the female body to trope. 1 Masculine representations of woman and her body, according to this view, instance the mirror effect, whereby "the question of the woman reflects only the man's own ontological doubts" (Doane 75).2 Ontology yields a troped topography, when, for example, the female body becomes figured as landFreud's "dark continent," mysterious and untamed, awaiting male discovery, mastery, and possession-what feminists are wont to call "colonialization."3 Problems of inscription are compounded by entrenched yet contradictory and ambiguous precedent. Long-standing philosophical traditions link women with metaphor and rhetoric (language), on the one hand, and simultaneously with the body and the physical, as opposed to the intellect, on the other.4 And while some feminists (such as Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett, Nina Auerbach, and Elaine Showalter) deplore the equation of woman with her physicality as regressive biologism, contemporary French feminists (including Luce Iragaray, Sarah Kofman, Michele Montrelay, and Helene Cixous) exalt the overwhelming "presence-to-itself" of the female body. Cixous, for instance, asserts, "More so than men[,] who are coaxed toward social success, toward sublimation, women are body" (343). In either feminist variant, the plaint that troping
"feminine" physicality-which precludes female subjectivitycharacterizes specifically male-authored texts implies that women writers who have not internalized their culture's ruling assumptions and authorial practices inscribe the female body differently. Indeed, such artists as Georgia O'Keefe and such writers as Rita Mae Brown, Erica Jong, and Monique Wittig programmatically endeavor to rescue women's self-as-body from male politico-aesthetic straitjacketing by pointedly subjectivized recastings of the female form.5 Yet, as Ann Rosalind Jones has demurred, although psychoanalytic models of sexuality admittedly bypass individual differences by universalizing "woman," they nonetheless acknowledge sexuality as culturally constructed. In ignoring the role of social arrangements and symbolic systems in its formation, Cixous, Irigaray, and other utopian proponents of "feminine writing" who proceed from these psychoanalytic models and thus generalize womanhood6 inevitably essentialize female sexuality. They thereby yoke women's creativity to procreativity (Cixous's "she writes in white ink"-that is, mother's milk), even when their own writings rely heavily on cerebral play and consciously respond to socioliterary realities'? Commentators on l' ecriture jeminine such as Arleen Dallery argue that American privileging of actual experience (which presupposes a simple referentiality) ignores the body's mediation by language, which is crucial to the French feminists' concept of radical alterity. That concept posits the feminine as sign, so that Cixous and Kristeva, for example, can credit such avant-garde writers as James Joyce and Jean Genet with producing feminine writing that undermines phallocratic discourse (Dallery 54-62). Yet that sign cannot be completely divorced from lived experience, hence is not arbitrary, so to examine it exclusively in terms of discourse means to isolate discourse from the concrete conditions that partly generate and shape it. To complicate the issue, some commentators deem feminist efforts to reclaim the female body through any means necessitating its display or representation extremely hazardous, on the grounds that associations attached to that body in contemporary culture overwhelmingly encourage
masculinist reappropriation (Wolff 121-22)-an oplmon that seems partly confIrmed by responses to Judy Chicago's vaginal "mistresspiece" in the Dinner Party Project.
