Ellen Rooney

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What Can the Matter Be?Author(s): Ellen RooneySource: American Literary History, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Winter, 1996), pp. 745-758Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/490122.

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h a t C a n t h a t t e r B eEllen Rooney

Of course, the material existence of the ideology in an apparatusand its practices does not have the same modality as the materialexistence of a paving-stone or a rifle.

Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy

The problematic relationship of feminism and materialismhas a long history. But the recent resurgence of feminist interestin this unhappy couple is not a repetition of earlier battles overthe primary contradiction, class versus gender. On the contrary,feminism's reanimation of its materialist idioms has disclosed aproblem that Althusser's revision of the theory of ideology leftcunningly to one side. Arguing that ideology always exists in anapparatus, and its practice and that this existence is material(166), Althusser implicitly endorsed those feminisms that refusedto define sexual difference as mere ideology. But the questionof the modality of ideology's material existence has now resur-faced, heightened in the interval by the impact of poststructural-ism. Within feminism, the materiality of sexual difference is nowvividly at stake. This means not only that the material existenceof ideology as such is once again to be debated, but also that themeaning of materialism itself is in play in the arena of sexualdifference: the paving stone, too, is part of the inquiry.

Materialist FeminismsBy Donna LandryandGerald MacLeanBlackwell, 1993UnbearableWeight:Feminism, WesternCulture,and the BodyBy Susan BordoUniversityof CaliforniaPress, 1993Bodies That Matter Onthe Discursive Limits ofSexBy Judith ButlerRoutledge,1993

1The work of Susan Bordo, Judith Butler, and Donna

Landryand Gerald MacLean confirms that the poststructuralisttexts broadly known as French feminism have fundamentallyre-cast the idioms of feminist materialisms;any reading that seeksto comprehend them must take its departure from this criticalintervention. As long ago as 1981, in her essay French Femi-nism in an International Frame, Gayatri Spivak argued that thesex-analysis engendered by French feminism could not by it-self obliterate the problems of race and class or necessarily


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obvious what kind of materialism 'materialistfeminism' actuallyclaims as its own (749). The editors areunderstandablycautiousabout resolving these questions and so offer a provisional, ten-tative picture of what a 'materialist feminism' might look like inthe 1990s (749). It is rather unsettling, however, to realize justhow open the weave of feminist materialism actually is. WhileMoi and Radway privilege diversity (749) and the provi-sional RosemaryHennessy's MaterialistFeminismand the Poli-tics of Discourse argues that materialist feminism need notshrink from naming social totalities in order to address the com-plex ways in which subjectivities are differentiated (xiii). Hen-nessy rejects the tendency of the social logic of contingency,the antimatter of feminist materialism, to undermin[e]femi-nism's critique of patriarchy and to obscure the material rela-tion between the discursive(feminist critique)and the nondiscur-sive (women's lives) by its overemphasis on difference. WhereRadwayand Moi ironically see feminist materialists as united bytheir commitment to various historical analyses and an emanci-patory narrative (750), Hennessy works to recover eminism'sanalysis of social totality precisely because an emancipatorymovement requires normative grounds and closure (3). Speci-ficity and differenceappear both as the vehicles of feminist mate-rialism and as its antithesis. What can views that diverge sosharply possibly share?Reading feministmaterialisms is clearlynot simply a matter(sigh) of glossing inevitablelocal quarrelswithin the problematicby a casual (or even a strict) reference to the concept of familyresemblance.In this respect, however,the books under reviewdoattain a certain exemplary status: insofar as they define the taskof materialist feminism in different and even incompatible ways,together they expose its essential lack of essence. And yet it is nota category mistake to suggest that materialistfeminism resonatesacross their obvious differences.Each of these books attempts anundoing of the oppositions Spivak once troubled, and eachthus returns repeatedly to the category of difference and itsinscription-in history and on the body. No manifesto of prin-ciples or common strategydefines the materialist feminist at thefin de siecle; yet she always narrates an unavoidable encounter,an embrace or a refusal of the differenceof feminism in its post-structuralist form.The proposition that feminism ought to materialize itselfoften rests on the assumption that at some point in the past itwas dematerializedand so fell from a properlymaterialist orien-tation. This implicit history hardly need be literal. An explicitlymarxist reading might recollect the (unhappy) marriageof marx-

Theproposition thatfeminism ought tomaterializeitself oftenrests on the assumptionthat at somepoint inthepast it wasdematerializedand sofellfrom a properlymaterialistorientation.


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ism and feminism and propose a reconciliation, with compriseson both sides, of course. But a more general account (liberal orotherwise) need only longingly recall that once upon a time therewas a women's movement; it involved street demonstrations andreal consciousness-raising groups; it was not academic. Thisconjunction of the people, a particular form of politics (unlikecontemporary forms, which are apparently not politics at all),and a too familiar all-American anti-intellectualism can be fig-ured as materialist n the grossest sense: because the peopleare fundamentally pragmatic and realistic, their feminism wasoriented toward the real-and reality is material.This argument has particular salience in the universitybe-cause it aligns dematerialization with the academy, if not withbookishness in general. The argumentproceeds as if the feministaction and thought of people whose workplace is the universitywere a particularly invidious thing, the thing called academicfeminism, a kind of invader species that overruns the terrainand drives out good (nonacademic) feminism-not just withinthe university,but across the countryside and in the great cities,too. Academic feminism bears a particular burden, then, a re-sponsibility to reinstate what it has somehow squanderedor laidwaste, a duty to make feminism real again. Butler alludes to thisargument when she muses on her difficultyin keeping track ofthe subject of the body: I reflected that this wavering might bethe vocational difficulty of those trained in philosophy, alwaysat some distance from corporeal matters,who try in that disem-bodied way to demarcatebodily terrains:they invariablymiss thebody or, worse, write against it (ix). Hence the question (whichhas recently appeared in the form of a tiny poster on the doorto Brown University's Center for Modem Culture and Media):Whatabout the materialityof the body, Judy (Butler ix)?Materialization is thus a kind of return and so, at once, aturning awayfrom old temptations, from the prodigal, fromillicitpleasures and seductions. (The figure of the body has an oddlyprim part to play here; it is the body that takes its medicine,recalling us to sober matters.) In a philosophical vocabulary ora marxist idiom, the proper name of the seducer is idealism(common name, the hopeless idealist ). But idealism is a large,far-flungfamily,and in the more local languages of the humani-ties and social sciences, the tempters leading academic feminismastrayare called by the names poststructuralism,deconstruction,postmodernism. Materialism's task is to retrievereality from thelinguistic idealism of these late-twentieth-centuryaberrations.Of course, this is not the only scenario that materialism canunfold for the feminism it would discipline. An alternate plot


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suggests hatfeminismquafeminism a phrasewithonlya heu-ristic functionhere) s hopelesslydealist n its verynature,orat best in its contingentbutdeeplyengrainedhistorical enden-cies. Fromthis perspective, eminismwas invented n a purelybourgeoisand idealist idiomby and on behalfof womenprivi-legedon the basis of race,class,and sexuality;althoughit hasbeen schooledagainand againin the harsh truthsof materialreality-race, class, sexuality-again and again, feminismwilllapse into its idealizationsof race, class, and sexuality. t willspeakof woman,andshe will be onlyan idea.In both of these conversionnarratives,materialismprom-ises to rehabilitate feminism hatat present, or whatever ea-son, is immaterial,antimaterial,dematerializing,dealist. Andyet, while the texts clusteredhere underthe rubricof materialistfeminismsare not unified n their accountof what materialismsor how materialization appens,theydo sharea certainskepti-cism toward he traditional cenariosof feminism's eeducation.Each advancesthe discussionof what a feministmaterialismmightbebyretelling hestoryof feminism's istoricalrelation othese mattersand refiguringemininityas a materialdifference.

2If materialistanalysiscan be said to includethe projectofreading to theletter anenormous if for whichI cannothereprovideadequateustification), ne materialistechnique orori-entingthesetextsis to read theirtitles,whichalignthemin rela-tion to two prominent dioms of feministmaterialism.2n thefirst,feministmaterialisms the call foran historicalaccountofthe materialcircumstanceshatconstructand delimit deologiesof masculinityand femininity:an analysisthat imbricates ace,sexuality,andespeciallyclasswithgender;an analysisof socio-economic determinations.This may be the most familiarof all(feminist)materialisms-historicalmaterialism.But in the fieldof feministanalysis,materialism lwayspotentially leaves o thesexed body, the material nscriptionof femininityand mascu-

linity on the flesh.In this discourseof the body,where essen-tialism nevitably asts its shadow,history may be left to lurkuncomfortablyn themargin;n such an instance,a feministma-terialismof the body can easily appearas the primeenemyofa reductiveor economistichistoricalanalysis.A reversals alsopossibleherewhen a vulgarly ssentializing eminism s theobject of an antitotalizing,historicalcritiquethat emphasizescontext,difference,and contingency.Hence,the primary arget


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of one mode of feminist materialism may be another feministmaterialist mode. The tension between these two projectsof ma-terialization has in some cases taken the form of an antinomy;even the most careful efforts to connect them are still markedbyragged stitches and loose ends. The three texts under review tes-tify to the difficultyof a seamless join.As the title Materialist Feminisms suggests, Landry andMacLean's is a large, inclusive project, a survey of a heteroge-neous field. Their immediate emphasis is on the historicizingstrand of feminist materialism,and they closely align, even some-times identify, materialism with marxism: This book outlinesthe recent history of debates between feminism and marxism inBritainand the United States. It then traces the consequences ofthose debates for other social movements (vii). The result is anambitious and wide-rangingtext, one that seeks to trace two ex-emplary histories of the marxist-feministconnection; to suggestthe critical range of a feminist materialist cultural critique,withexamples drawn from criticism of feminist detective fiction andrevisions of the history of the novel;and to guide readersthroughthe politics of contemporary theory, with introductory thoughhardly uncritical accounts of topics like essentialism, race, andpostcolonialism, and of theorists (not generally regarded asmarxists or feminists) like Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, andEdward Said. To achieve closure on this abundance is no easytask; Landry and MacLean attempt it by calling for a GreenCultural Criticism, a summa of the theoretical and politicalcommitments that survive their critical readings. The impact oftheir final synthesis is difficult to gauge. Given the enormous va-riety of topics, which sometimes seems to overwhelm the essay'spolemic, they are at times forced into schematic and generalizingreadings. For newcomers to Lacan and Derrida, these may betoo terse and sketchy;for readers with more experience of theirtexts, these passages are beside the point. The many examples ofcultural criticism are also asked to bear a weight too great fortheir brevity,and the very imperativeto be inclusive, to material-ize a plethora of critical strategies,occasionally seems to weakenthe polemic it is meant to bolster. If materialismvirtuallycoversthe critical field, do we need to resuscitate it? The pluralizing ofmaterialisms threatens to render them open to every appropri-ation.Whateverreadersmay make of its many details, LandryandMacLean's polemic is unambiguously on behalf of a new femi-nist materialism. Despite their apparently orthodox beginnings,they insist that materialistfeminisms are not simply marxist fem-inisms. The latter'scentering of class analysis is flatlyrefused: In


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addition to class contradictions and contradictions within gen-der ideology[,] . . . materialist eminism shouldrecognizeas mate-rial other contradictionsas well. These contradictions also havehistories, operate in ideologies, and are grounded in materialbases and effects.... [T]hey should be granted material weightin social and literary analysis calling itself materialist (229). Inthe place of a chastened feminism painfully relearning the in-sights of an intact historical materialism,we find the old hierar-chy of materialism and feminism reversed.This revision of whatwill count as materialist is telegraphed at the very outset, wheredeconstruction joins feminism and marxism as a strategy forcritiqueand resistance (vii). Landryand MacLean see all threeproblematics as prematurelydeclared dead. Rather than schoola fallen feminism in the higher values of materialism, they pro-pose that socialism be reinvented from within feminism andother new social movements, with significanthelp from Derridaand Michel Foucault and from feminists, from Michele Barrettto GayatriSpivak: We are proposing ... the articulation of dis-continuous movements, materialism and feminism, an articula-tion that takes the political claims of deconstruction seriously(13). The result is not a general theory of materialist feminismsbut a relocation of feminist materialism among a host of newmaterialisms-of race, of class, of sexuality, of species life. Thetask of historicizing this materialistmosaic is irreduciblycontin-gent. Materialism is not so much a ground or a foundation foranalysis as a method of reading, born of the refusal to totalizethe economic and raised up by a feminism that openly claimspoststructuralism's legacy, in particular the legacy of decon-struction.Landry and MacLean wrestle that legacy out of the armsof a French feminism they label FF Law :the French feministlimited company of Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray,and JuliaKristeva (54-55). Their rejection of a monolithic Frenchfemi-nist theory as an Anglo-American fiction that mystifies thediversityof Frenchfeminisms is not a rejectionof poststructural-ism as such (15). Rather, the law according to French femi-nism, which pointedly excludes the materialists Simone deBeauvoir, Christine Delpy, and Monique Wittig, is derided inpart, it seems, because it is monolithic, in part because it is afetish object subjectto a particularlyconcentratedform of com-modification : [W]hatgets packaged as French feminism sellsbecause, being French, it sounds like Theory, another commod-ity whose future seems remarkably academically secure (55).This puzzlingly dated objection runs counter to Landry andMacLean's earlier claims that commodification is inevitable,


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even for books like this one, and that poststructuralist theoryhas been left for dead.3 As they compose their own fiction ofAnglo-American readings of Francophone feminism since thelate 1970s, they are able to bracket French feminist appropria-tions of poststructuralism,even as they frequentlycite work byFrench intellectuals who are not feminists (14). This displace-ment of a certain French feminism launches their own feminist-materialist reading of poststructuralism.Derrida, in particular,emerges as a theorist whose emphasis on textual reading, areading of the text as text, can help us remain vigilant againstthe freezing into orthodoxy of the strategic, self-reflexivepoli-tics essential to a materialistfeministpractice.Guarding againstthe unconscious complicities that betray material interests re-quires a kind of deconstructive-materialistattention to textualmatters.The body as such is not a uniquely significant figure inLandryand MacLean's analysis.Race and gender emergeas ma-terialpositions, laden with ideology, but not markedby any pecu-liar materialityof the kind very much in evidence in the work offigures like Irigarayand Kristeva. By contrast, Bordo's Unbear-able Weight. Feminism, WesternCulture,and the Body invokesthe body eight times in the table of contents alone; the book'sthree main sections areentitled, Discourses and Conceptions ofthe Body, The Slender Body and Other Cultural Forms, andPostmodernBodies. Bodies proliferate,while materialist femi-nism receives a single mention: Thefeminist recoveryof femaleotherness from the margins of culture had both a materialistwing (Ruddick, Hartsock, Rich, and others) and a psychoana-lytic wing (Dinnerstein, Chodorow, Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray)(231). Without unpacking Bordo's gloss on these theorists, wecan note that Adrienne Rich and SarahRuddick'smaterialism isof a ratherdifferent order than anything even Landry and Mac-Lean'sgenerosity allows. This discrepancydoes not place Bordooutside the problematicof feministmaterialism,however.For thebulk of herbook, the body itself is the privilegedsite and signifierof materialistpractice, struggle, and intervention.Bordo assumes a largecanvas: Feminism, WesternCulture,and the Body is not a rubric easily reconciled with a logic ofhistorical contingency in which local differences and historicalspecificities are honored. She argues that if, whatever the spe-cific historical content of the [mind/body]duality, the bodyis thenegative term, and if woman is the body, then women are thatnegativity, whatever it may be: distraction from knowledge, se-duction away from God, capitulation to sexual desire, violenceor aggression, failure of will, even death (5). For Bordo, this


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is not an enormous if : since womanis the body,women arenegativity.We can read this passageas a fairly straightforwardexampleof thematerialbodyas thehomeof anessentialist ead-ing-not a reading hat is outside cultureperse but one that istransculturaln a totalizingway.A globalcultural act with nooutsideresidesin a curiouslynaturalized ulture,a culture,asBordoargues, hatcan be emptiedof whatever.. specifichis-toricalcontent t quitenecessarilyhas in order o reveala com-mon form.This transhistoricalmptyingout of certaincontradictoryspecificitiess infactanelementof theparticularmaterialistem-inism Bordodevelops.Sheclearlyalignsherusagewith marxismandhistory,againstnatureandrepresentation:When use thetermmaterial, do not meanit in the Aristotelian ense of brutematter,nordo I mean it in thesenseof'natural'or 'unmediated'(forourbodies arenecessarily ultural orms).... I meanwhatMarxand, later,Foucaulthadin mindin focusingon the 'directgrip'(as opposedto representationalnfluence) hat culturehason ourbodies,through he practicesandbodilyhabitsof every-day life (16).Themind/bodydualismthatis the startingpointforBordo's ritiques on this view a practicalmetaphysics 72),a mediatingprojectwitha globalreach.In someof thepowerfulreadings hat flow from thishypothesis, he tracestheoperationof this directgrip n the medicaldiscourseon eatingdisorders,in the publicmedia's nvestment n hungeras ideology (99),andin theideologyof fetalrights.Even the readerwho cherishesa deep historicalskepticismabout popularepidemicsof psy-chosocialorigin,especiallyas they pertain o (not to say target)

women,enrichthe therapy ndustry,and empowermembersofthe so-calledhelpingprofessions,will find manyresonantpas-sages describingthe reluctanceof physiciansto think abouteatingand the body in feministtermsand the relentlessness fthe publicdiscourses(in advertising,popularmusic,film) thatcondemnwomen'spleasure n food.I readBordo'sbook and theobituaryof thegymnastChristyHenrich,deadof self-starvationat 22, on the same day.The historical force of the pages thatdocument the normalizationof feminizedpathologiesof thebody trumpsall of Bordo's heoreticalargumentson the formalunityof Western ulture's racticalmetaphysics,houghwith-out quitesettlingall the theoreticalssuesherpolemicraises.In sharp contrast to Landryand MacLean,but whollywithin a recognizablymaterialistdiom, Bordo'smaterialism fthe bodyseeks to inspire eministresistance o a profoundlyde-bilitatingpostmodernism.Sheargues or feminism s systemiccritique, positioningher own analysis againstproponentsof


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the absolute heterogeneity of culture and the facile and ab-stract celebrationof'heterogeneity,' 'difference,' and]'subversivereading' (29-30). Bordo repeatedly acknowledges the contin-gency of historical contexts: Given the differences that race,class, gender, ethnicity, and so forth make to the determina-tion of meaning, 'reading'bodies becomes an extremely complexbusiness. But her version of feminist systematicityrequirescon-tingency's almost immediate reevacuation: However, I do notagree with those who claim that images must always be read for'difference.' . . [T]o focus only on multiple interpretationsis tomiss important effects of the everydaydeployment of mass cul-tural representationsof masculinity, femininity,beauty, and suc-cess (24). Difference is thus firmly situated as a holiday affair,while the everyday work of representation (here apparentlystanding in for both images and the directgrip of more mate-rial practice) can be understood without simultaneously engag-ing the complications of race, class, ethnicity, reading itself. Thebody is the site of this material grip insofar as it anchors thenormalizing effects of systemic power; this is its singular,mate-rial difference.If her initial references to critics who always read for dif-ference or focus only on multiple interpretationsseem at firstto be nothing if not abstract,Bordo soon clarifies.Howeverweakthe old feminism was in accounting for multiplicity, the plea-sure of decoratingthe body, or women's agency, it did pro-vide a critiquecapable of rousing women to collective action :[O]n the sexualization and objectification of the female bodycontemporary feminism (with some notable exceptions) is strik-ingly muted. Some forms of postmodern eminism ... are worsethan muted, . . . distressinglyat one with the culture in celebrat-ing the creative agency of individuals and denying systemic pat-tern (31; emphasis added). This is a liberal narrative of femi-nism's fall from materialism. Bordo theorizes feminism as amaterialismwith its own body logic (analogous to but in no sensederived from marxism, nor particularlyalert to its critique), andshe dismisses the possibility that postmodern feminism proposesany systemic analysis. Postmodern feminism spawns genderskepticism, the epistemological fantasy of becomingmultiplic-ity, and the retreatfrom female otherness (216, 228, 229), allidealisms, all abetting patriarchy.Fantasizingjouissanceand het-eroglossia, it is in effect a refusal of the body and thus has nopurchasewhatsoever on materialityitself: If the body is a meta-phor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the fini-tude of human perception and knowledge, then the postmodern


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bodyis no bodyatall (229).Postmodernism etrays eminism'smaterialistbody politics-the ladyvanishes.

3Whatabout the materialityof the body,Judy? took itthat the addition of Judy was an effort to dislodgemefromthe more formal Judith nd to recallme to a bodily

life that couldnot be theorizedaway.Judith Butler,Bodies That Matter:On the DiscursiveLimits of SexEnterJudithButler.Bordo'scriticismof postmodern eminismas intoxicatedwith differenceor itsownsake 39)and relent-less in its desirefor historicalheterogeneity 234) is aimedat a rangeof feministtheorists, romNancy Fraserand LindaNicholsonto DonnaHaraway ndanonymousigureswhosecel-ebratorypostmodernismmightevenembrace exercise ompul-sions ... and'polysurgical ddictions' (295).Bordoalsooffersa critique of Butler's GenderTrouble:Feminismand the Subver-sionof Identity 1990),and herquestionsecho those ButlercitesasmotivatingBodiesThatMatter: Ifthebodyis treatedas puretext, subversive,destabilizing lementscan be emphasizedandfreedomand self-determinationelebrated; ut one is left won-dering, s therea bodyin this text? Bordo 38). Butlerspeaksdirectly o Bordo'sview that postmodern eminismbetrays herealityof the body,evenas she abandons he scenario n whichfeminismmustpainfullyacquirean adequatematerialism,f notfromhistorythen from the finitudeof the body itself.4 ndeed,rather han undertakea therapeuticproject o materializeemi-nism,Butler's adicalquestion s howandwhy'materiality' asbecomea signof irreducibility,hatis,how is it thatthematerial-ity of sex is understoodas that whichonly bearsculturalcon-structionsand,therefore, annot be a construction? 28)-Whymaterialism ow?BodiesThatMatter igures n its title the literalcomingto-getherof theproblematic f (historical)materialism ndthefig-ureof the body.It brilliantly econceivesas a singleproject hedoubleimperativeo historicize he specificmaterialconditionsof sexualand genderidentityand to accountfor the body,tofactorthebodyinto theideologicalanalysis hatfeministcritiqueendlesslyelaborates.Butlerturns the problematic f historyonthequestionof materialitytself.This twistdiscloses hat matter


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has a history (indeed, more than one) and that the history ofmatter is in part determined by the negotiation of sexual differ-ence (29). (A point Bordo also stresses.) Rather than simplyreaffirmthe materialityof femininity or sexual difference,Butlerinterrogatesthe persistent femininity of matter.The recourse tomatter and the materialityof sex (or the body) as terms to groundfeminist movement is bound up with the critical role sexualdifferencehas played in our conception or determination of ma-teriality itself. In her formulation of the problem of determina-tion as it plays itself out in the negotiations of sexual difference,Butler articulates the crux of the new feminist materialisms:tostraddle and undo the ideological/material opposition is to re-think the problem of determination, which is in part to rethinkthe problem of agency.Historical agency, the determination that structures theproduction and reproduction-as well as the disruption and ren-ovation-of the social totality, is the critical issue GenderTroublebequeathes to Bodies That Matter If gender is not an artificeto be taken on or taken off at will and, hence, not an effect ofchoice, how are we to understand the constitutive and com-pelling status of gender norms without falling into the trap ofcultural determinism? (x). The theory of gender performativitypresentedin Gender Troubleopens onto a figureof the subject asfree to choose her performances, to come as she likes in her ownconstruction. Butler glosses the renewal of the question of thebody as an effort to recall [her]to a bodily life that could notbe theorized away, to a body that would be determining ratherthan determined, constructing rather than constructed. She re-sponds to this call by both reaffirmingthe body and its contoursas fullymaterial and rethinkingthat materiality as the effectof power, as power'smost productiveeffect (2).Finally,Butler rewrites the problem of feminism'smaterial-ism as the problem of aprocess ofmaterialization that stabilizesover time to produce the effect of boundary,ixity, and surface wecall matter (9). This process constructs not only the body butalso the subjectas at once constrainedand active,caught up willynilly in the repetition of a signifying chain and yet thus endowedwith the power of resignification: Construction not only takesplace in time, but is itself a temporal process which operatesthrough the reiteration of norms; sex is both produced and de-stabilized in the course of this reiteration (10). In Butler'sargument, matter is displaced by materialization-process,repetition, sedimentation-and the binaries of specificity andsystematicity, difference and normative closure, give way to the


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operations of performativity, eiteration and resignification.Thisresignification arks heworkingsof an agency, s Butlerputs it, that is (a) not the same as voluntarism,and that (b)thoughimplicatedn theveryrelationsof power t seeks to rival,is not, as a consequence,reducible o those dominant forms(241).The apparentparadoxof the effort to straddleand undothe ideological/materialpposition s capturedhere in the inter-stices of the processof repetition.The very materialization fdominantideology permits, ndeed demands ts reiteration,tsincessantredetermination;gency s the impossibilityof perfectrepetition, he impossibilityof the repetitionof the same: Iri-garay's riticalmimeof Plato,the fiction of the lesbianphallus,and the rearticulation f kinshipin Paris is Burningmight beunderstoodas repetitionsof hegemonicforms of powerwhichfail to repeat loyally and, in that failure, open possibilitiesfor resignifying he terms of violation against their violatingaims (124).Butlerquietlyobserves hat to thinkthrough heindissolu-bilityof materiality ndsignifications no easymatter 30).Partof the unease so manyreaders eelin the face of her refusalsim-plyto embrace themateriality f thebody s doubtlessa conse-quence of her insistence that agency emerges only from suchforms of relation-of the body to history,of sex to politics,ofideologyto materiality, f differenceo theregulatorydeal. It isno more and no less than the unavoidableand unpredictableeffect of constitutiveacts of reiteration ndrepudiation, f con-touringand disavowal.Thisuncertainty,his elusiveand under-determinedmodality,rather hananytoo facile assertionof thesubversive ossibilitiesof choice, s thehaunting lementof Bod-ies That Matter.Materializations boththe instanceandthe effectof such aregulatedbut irregularprocess, determiningand determined,and so agencyand materialization re foreverboundto one an-other: The orceof repetitionn languagemaybe theparadoxi-cal conditionby whicha certainagency-not linked o a fictionof theego as masterof circumstance-is derived romthe impos-sibilityof choice (124). To straddleand undo the oppositionbetweenthe ideologicaland the material s thusfinallyto traceits productionandreproduction,ts unevendeterminations,ndto face the impossibility f eitherdraping deologyoverthepav-ing stonesor burying t beneaththem.Bodies ThatMatter hereslips beyondthe field of feministmaterialisms;n its reiterations,thequestionof themateriality f sex mutates nto thatof the sexof materiality.Womanno longerseemsonlyan idea.

Tostraddleand undo theoppositionbetween theideological and thematerial is thus inally totrace its productionandreproduction, ts unevendeterminations,and toface the impossibilityofeitherdraping deologyover thepaving stones orburyingit beneath them.


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758 WhatCan the Matter Be?

Notes1. Spivak'sessay,perhaps best remembered for its sharp critiqueof JuliaKris-teva's About Chinese Women,concludes with this understatement: [A]deliber-ate application of the doctrines of French High 'Feminism' to a different situa-tion of political specificity might backfire (164).2. Jane Gallop is one of the many poststructuralistfeminist readers to pursuethis argument; see Reading Lacan (1985).3. Landryand MacLean are also surelyaware that it is no longer true that onthe academic marketin the US today ... feminist theory in a job description isvery likely to mean French feminism (so-called) (54-55), though this was truein some places in the mid 1980s. Their hyperbole hints that French feminismmust be definitivelysidelined to clear the way for their alternativeappropriationof poststructuralism.4. Bordo uses the term postmodernism to refer to theoretical problematics,including those marking Butler'swork, that I would ordinarily termpoststruct-uralist. This is not the moment to examine this distinction, and I have essen-tially adopted her usage.

Works CitedAlthusser, Louis. Lenin and Philoso-phy and Other Essays. Trans. BenBrewster. 1971. New York: MonthlyReview, 1972.Hennessy, Rosemary.Materialist Fem-inism and the Politics of Discourse.New York:Routledge, 1993.

Moi, Toril, and Janice Radway. Edi-tors' Note. SAQ 93 (1994): 749-50.Spivak, GayatriChakravorty. FrenchFeminismin an International Frame.YaleFrenchStudies62 (1981): 154-84.

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