ABSTRACT
The matter of bodies has in the past been the Baby Jane of cultural theory. “Only very recently”, writes Elizabeth Grosz, “has the body been understood as more than an impediment to our humanity” (Grosz 1995:2). Certainly cultural theorists have for some time regarded the body with suspicion in the spirit of antiessentialist combat. This dismissal has been compounded through the discourses of both structuralism and psychoanalysis, where a linguistic account of subjectivity theorizes the repression of corporeality as an effect of language; in the Lacanian account, the body is as inaccessible as the real. Yet as the psychoanalytic account of subjecthood has been increasingly perceived as an account of dominant forms of identity, its failure to articulate marginal and diverse forms of subjectivity has indicated the limits to the explanatory and discursive powers of psychoanalysis. The reversal in the fortunes of the body has developed in league with a by now familiar problematization of the universalism of psychoanalysis. This critique has brought with it an insistence on differences of identity which extend beyond sexual difference as an anchor of identity, differences that fundamentally tie the psyche to the body in a dialogical relationship. Interest in the body has emerged also as a shared attempt in feminism, postcolonialism and queer theory to escape the gridlock of binary thought, to undo what has become shorthand for all socio-cultural difference, but which ironically erases the multiplicity of identities, the infamous opposition “subject/other”. What these discourses share, without erasing their individual genealogies, is the search for a way of framing the relations of social and historical intermixing, as well as the mechanisms of social reproduction. Feminism, postcolonialism and queer theory seek a way of understanding the contingent and fluid nature of identity, a contingency that characterizes not only the present pull on identity, but for many, has long characterized the decentred and displaced history of their subjecthood. Discourses of the body propose to reorientate a universal psychoanalysis by offering a threshold between models of the psyche and history, interfacing those troublingly rigid oppositions of mindbody, interior-exterior, subject-other, and experience-knowledge.
