ABSTRACT
This chapter draws upon Elspeth Probyn’s searching and inspiring recent work, Sexing the Self. One of its strengths lies in making clear that a personal turn in cultural studies is not a license for a subjective, over personalized form of writing; it should, rather, incite a re-examination of critical vocabulary, a new approach to the issues underlying enquiry about the individual’s implication with the world of “others”. Probyn makes a penetrating analysis of ethnography’s self-criticisms, and the extent to which they are taken to their full conclusion; cf. Rabinow. Probyn’s investigation of the productiveness of the personal standpoint is barely thinkable except against the background of feminism’s consistent concern with the transformative effect of the “personal” on political and theoretical practice. For Probyn the link between the personal and the transpersonal is not just intellectual – her writing surely implies a political project that connects each individual’s searching for a voice to a mutually empowering collective practice.
