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Word Made Flesh - Flesh Made Word
In the beginning was the Word... And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. (John 1: 1, 14)
The opening of the Gospel of John is a landmark on the path to mind-body dualism in the western tradition. Begun by the ancient Greeks, developed in the burgeoning Judeo-Christian world and reaching a high point with Enlightenment rationalism, the divisive structural logic which separates and determines the hierarchy between mind and body is the cornerstone of western epistemological systems. Mind-body dualism was mirrored by the systematic construction of other hierarchical binaries, such as self and other, subject and object and, of course, masculine and feminine. The privilege of the One has been maintained through both the intellectual marginalization and physical destruction of its Others throughout history. Ever since 'the word became flesh' we have been encouraged to mortify this flesh in order to seek the pure and objective knowledge of the mind. Since the 'masculine' was associated with the mind and the 'feminine' with the body, the 'mortification' of the flesh ensured the domination of the masculine subject at the very level of knowledge itself.
It is impossible for the marginal to articulate within the system as it stands since 'otherness' must be voiced through the logic of the 'same'. For women artists and feminist critics, 'others' operating in the discursive realms of cultural production, the task of dismantling such binary hierarchies of knowledge is thus imperative. This task has already begun, most particularly in and through explorations of 'the body' in recent feminist art, philosophy, and aesthetics. Reintroducing the body, that negated 'other' of the system, has opened spaces in which to analyse, challenge and, hopefully, transcend the structures which make the articulation of outsider identities and knowledges impossible.
It is important to recognise that the pairing of the 'word' and the 'flesh' is not merely coincidental. That opposition places flesh, body, woman and all forms of sensual knowledge ('aesthetics' in the widest sense) as subordinate to mind, man and forms of knowledge linked to rationality and, significantly, text. Traditionally, these binary structures gave rise to particular hierarchies in aesthetics. Within textual modes, philosophy and history, as 'objective', rational knowledges, were taken to be more pure and of greater status than drama and poetry with their appeal to 'subjective' emotion. [1] Additionally, these arguments have been used to place word and text over the more physical, sensual languages of the visual arts, still mistrusted as 'lower' forms of cultural expression. Text, and the knowledges appropriate to it, is understood as a privileged signifier over image, or the arts which use base matter or the body to construct meanings. This 'word' and 'flesh' distinction, as Barbara Stafford suggests, did damage to the visual:
In order for text-based theories, systems and methods to become autonomous referents, divorced from the sensory sphere above which they floated, the matter and manner of vision had to be demoted to intellectual nullity, to the realm of the merely showy or the fantastic. [2]
In the history of western art, strict rules concerning the body in representation, as well as the body of the artist and the work of art, were established in the academic system. At the pinnacle of this tradition, history painting placed the male artist as the interpreter of textual sources (the Bible, mythology, history) through the language of the ideal(ised) human form: the male nude. [3] This emphasised not the tactile, manual skill of the artist, but his higher, disembodied mental faculties, later honoured as his genius. [4] The works were then subject to 'disinterested' modes of criticism which explored them as good or bad translations of the original textual narratives. The fact of their embodiment as aesthetic objects was downplayed through techniques which regulated 'correct', mimetic forms of representation ('objective' rules for perspective and drawing) and hierarchies within the arts which, for example, stressed the 'feminine', sensual debasement of 'colourists' in opposition to the 'masculine', rational knowledge deployed by 'draughtsmen'. Hence, at least since the Renaissance, western fine art has been forced to assert its validity in relation to textual arts; clear hierarchies have been established between word and image and, by extended logic, theory and practice.
We thus come to a founding nexus of marginal terms which link the feminine, woman and the body with art practice and aesthetic knowledges. If word became flesh and thus denied women and the feminine a position from which to articulate, what might happen if flesh became word? When the body is reinstated as a critical focus for feminist art and philosophy, it forces into view the underlying erasure of 'woman' and the 'feminine' from the aesthetic and epistemological structures of western culture. [5] Exposing the gender-bias of the system is a critical first stage, but, as feminist scholars have argued at length elsewhere, it is not enough to enact a mere reversal or transgression of the boundaries; the boundaries themselves must be rethought and the gender-exclusive definitions of cultural categories such as 'art', 'philosophy' and 'aesthetics' must be redrawn.
What can be learned by the feminist critic and art historian from the models of the body currently circulating in women's art and feminist philosophy? Clearly, models which operate within binary paradigms cannot permit the articulation of new knowledges or challenge the dominant modes of power for feminism. This includes the binary relationship between theory and practice; the feminist 'theorist' as knowing subject parasitically colonising the 'body' of the artist, or substituting the work of art as the body/object, can only reinstate the dominance of the mind/body split. For feminist critics and art historians, modes of textual knowledge must be embodied and become coextensive with, rather than dominant over, the other sensate knowledges derived from visual and material practices. It is not merely sufficient to reverse the hierarchy between text and image, nor is it adequate to efface theory, even that based solely upon textual critique. Rather, the challenge is, as Beate Allert has suggested, to find multi-sensorial 'languages of visuality' which explore 'the textuality or sensuality of poetic images or of textual signs ... and other dynamic modes of expression.' [6]
The Flesh of the Word
There have been important convergences between theories of the body as developed in feminist philosophy and strategies of articulating in and through the body in feminist art since the 1970s. These body theories and practices range from concepts of representation through to models of embodied subjectivity. [7] However, a significant deadlock in the critical understanding of women's body art has been identified in recent work on the theme. For example, both Miwon Kwon's essay on Ana Mendieta and the revisionist survey of Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party by Amelia Jones have called for a more sophisticated discussion of so-called '1970s feminism' and feminist art which hitherto has been castigated misleadingly as 'essentialist'. [8] They have argued that it is reductive to pit 'poststructural feminism', with its concept of woman as a cultural construction, against an imagined 'essentialist feminist' past where 'woman-essence' was uncritically celebrated.
The problem inherent in the 'essentialist' versus 'constructivist' debate resides in the maintenance of simplistic binaries where essentialism is asserted as an untheorised emphasis upon pre-existent femaleness and the body while poststructural models of gender construction seem to be merely distanced theory with no room for the body as material. As Janet Wolff asserted however, there is no one 'correct' feminist aesthetic and such a false binary opposition is the very type of understanding which must be reconceived for feminists wishing to articulate new positions.[9] Moreover, it is a false dichotomy found in the critical 'reading' of these practices and a problem most insidious for the textual theorist.
Susan Kandel's essay 'Beneath the Green Veil: The Body in/of New Feminist Art' unwittingly shows that rethinking this oppositional paradigm is more difficult for the critic/theorist than for the artist/theorist. [10] In the piece, Kandel sensitively discusses Jana Sterbak's Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic (1987) as offering 'a dangerous theory of new feminist art, one that subscribes to the mystery of the visible, not the invisible world - this, over first (or even final) "truths".' [11] The power of the work lies its ability to refuse final limitation as either essential body or invisible culture; it created knowledges which transcended the binary opposition so deadly to the articulation of the feminine other. The work is theory and requires no translation of its meaning by the writing author.
Yet Kandel in the same essay asks 'What is a feminist object - in part or whole? How are we to theorize it? To theorize it without penetrating it?' [12] Kandel seeks a new mode of criticism and yet is caught by the very language in which she works. The question of a 'feminist object' reinstates the subject/object split. The 'we' who will theorise 'it' are the colonising 'knowers'. Where once the objectification of the body of the artist or the body in representation seemed to be the problem, it is now the work of art as a bounded, fixed object for our distanced theoretical consideration which threatens to provide a new orthodoxy. The limitations of defining a 'feminist text' have been explored by Elizabeth Grosz who posits an alternative formulation:
...no text can be classified once and for all as wholly feminist or wholly patriarchal ... These various contingencies dictate that at best a text is feminist or patriarchal only provisionally, only momentarily, only in some but not in all its possible readings, and in some but not all of its possible effects. [13]
Grosz suggests that the 'feminist' appellation resides neither in the object nor the subject who comes to 'read' it, but in the process which takes place between these. Hence the emphasis should shift to the processes and practices of making/thinking feminist art. On this model, a critic is neither a subject who 'reads' the inherent politics of an art object (meaning residing in the object) nor one who 'illustrates' their predetermined ideas with a range of chosen works (meaning residing in the subject). There are no perfect feminist objects nor ideal theories of representation. Rather, there are interactive processes whereby knower and knowledge are simultaneous and the 'feminist meaning' is in production.
The topic of a female erotic is one place where these strands of body, practice and feminist knowledge can be seen to merge. Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain described the limits of text in relation to the phenomenological experience of physical suffering. [14] By analogy, it is arguable that the body in pleasure also exceeds the limits of words. The writing of the female erotic combines the modes of pain and pleasure, eros and thanatos, in ways which make the boundaries between the body and the mind, the visual and the verbal and even 'objective' and 'subjective' modes of knowing a nonsense. [15] Pain and pleasure are known through multiple levels of sensual cognition which are transgressive of the rational logic subordinating the body and its knowing to the mind. Thus to articulate pain or pleasure is to defy the conventions of the binary system through embodiment.
Audre Lorde, in 'Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power', argued that the erotic is a particularly female form of power, which permits difference to be explored and shared rather than obliterated as 'other'. [16] In relation to Lorde's erotic, M. Pilar Sanchez Calle referred to the 'will to connect' and associated it with a subject-to-subject interaction, rather than a subject-over-object domination. [17] The political power of the female erotic (not to be confused with the evacuated forms of commodified female sexuality so common in our culture) resides in the coexistence of difference. Thus, visual, tactile or bodily modes of knowing are not subordinated to seemingly disembodied, abstract mental processes in the female erotic; the multiple aesthetic knowledges coexist and interpellate the embodied subject.
It is precisely the potential to disrupt and reconfigure modes of knowledge and articulation which have made women's erotic writing an area of interest to feminist philosophers. Using a long passage from Mary Fallon's 1989 novel Working Hot to demonstrate her point, Elizabeth Grosz has suggestively argued that in women's erotic writing, where the ebbs and flows between writing, body, text and tactility are made multiple and left in constant process, there is seen a space in which to entertain a notion of 'becoming'. This 'becoming' reiterates the process of the subject rather than its final or fixed definition and also this 'becoming' refuses the subject/object split: the subject does not become a pre-identified object. Rather, the subject 'enters into relations' with a 'third term'. [18] The body is process.
In this conception of the female erotic, pleasure and desire can be positive, productive forces rather than the corollary of 'lack' and the knowledges particular to different aesthetic forms, such as poetry, painting and performance, can be maintained in conjunction with 'textual/theoretical' discourse to the benefit of both. The photographic work of Anna Maksymluk, based upon women's erotic writing, challenges the feminist critic to develop a fuller, aesthetic practice. If Maksymluk's work is approached with the intention of determining its 'feminist' content as an 'object' or as a mere illustration of theoretical text, the readings become highly reductive and even negative. If, however, the critic enters into a 'multi-sensorial' interaction with the work and the means with which the work uses its materiality to evoke the multiplicity of the female erotic as a mode of knowledge, productive and subversive spaces for feminine pleasure and power can be articulated.
Maksymluk's images are frankly seductive, representational and 'untheorised'. She displays nude female and male bodies in highly aestheticised photographs. These photographs would appear to have a traditional relationship to textual sources since they are paired with texts which are also displayed in the gallery and credited with author, title and date. Such features suggest Maksymluk's work both reenacts the domination of the visual by the textual and the objectification of the idealised nude, particularly the female nude. Approaching these 'objects' with preconceived notions of correct feminist texts/theories makes it impossible, therefore, to explore the pleasure and complexity of their forms, the ways in which they confound simplistic text/image relationships and Maksymluk's ability to enact the logic of the binary-breaking female erotic by articulating ideas through layered, coexistent strands of varied aesthetic languages.
The text/image relation, for example, is perpetually unstable in this work and the pieces suggest different experiential modes through which the female erotic must be understood. The images which Maksymluk pairs with the fragments of text are 'illustrative' but not contained by this logic. Objects described by the written passages sometimes appear in the images, such as the two female figures and images of wings in the photograph Nest which is paired with Christina Rossetti's passage from Goblin Market: 'like two pigeons in one nest...', yet there is no possible form of conventional narrative maintained in the works. The texts themselves, drawn from sources such as Adrienne Rich and Angela Carter, stress the fluidity of the sensual body and its inability to be completely captured in words. And if flesh and word are excessive in this work, flesh and image are no more simple.
These works are not merely representations of fetishized bodies or narrative action. They provide a space for aesthetic pleasure through their excess: luxurious colour and imagery printed onto highly textured and tactile water-colour paper evoke more than just a distanced, objective gaze onto the 'other'. The imaged bodies invite kinaesthesia and synaesthesia; the viewer relates bodily to the gestures and performances of the figures. The placement of the figures in tactile mise-en-scene (naked flesh against soft fabric or fruit) and indeed the scale of the works and their position within their frames, set up a particularly intimate relationship with the body of the viewer. Multiple spatial levels at work within the images (layers of fruit, flowers, bodies, drapery photographed through levels of glass) again implicate the spectator in a complex and mobile spatial interaction with the works and these objects suggest taste, touch and smell. Surface and depth are not clearly delineated and our own transparent sense of viewing is challenged. We become aware of our bodies in looking; we come to know these works in and through our own embodiment.
Maksymluk therefore evokes the female erotic, rather than translates or illustrates her textual sources. The multiple form of bodily knowing which Maksymluk initiates uses the aesthetic as knowledge in precisely the manner described above as empowering for feminism. But, to engage with it, the critic must acknowledge the materials and spaces of her own thinking and writing and find ways to enrich the physical experience of coming into contact with the work through text. So, for example, it is not sufficient to enact a 'reading' of Maksymluk's three-part Desire (1997) and to write its 'meaning' into an academic code of textual theory. To indicate the levels through which Desire might be explored is not to stand outside the work and determine its final meaning. Rather, knowledge of the histories of image-making can be brought to the work as part of a multiple aesthetic exchange. Thus, I can expand upon the references in the text paired with Desire ('Oppenheim's Cup and Saucer' by Carol Ann Duffy) and discuss the reference to Meret Oppenheim's Fur Breakfast (1936). I can parallel the reception of Oppenheim's work in some circles as a form of lesbian erotica with the visual, tactile and oral sensations evoked in the poem and argue that these 'synaesthesic' codes are further resonant with surrealist object-making. I can express my own desire as a feminist critic for these techniques to produce specifically female forms of pleasure and I can describe my pleasure in Maksymluk's photographic play with fluidity and tactility, yet I cannot translate the sensate experience of the works into mere words.
My text, therefore, does not contain the work, it enacts a lateral engagement with its pleasures. To make feminist criticism a coextensive practice with other processes of knowing expands the definition of art and the aesthetic in ways which make them viable as genuine reconfigurations of articulated subjectivity. It is here that the feminist critic can learn most from the burgeoning debates about visuality as well as the implications of the conceptualisation of the body by philosophers since locating body practices has been a powerful strategy through which to overcome the essentialism/constructivism binary.
Body Theories - Body Practices
Philosophers and social theorists as diverse as Grosz, Judith Butler and Teresa de Lauretis have been working to dismantle the problematic opposition between 'social construction' and 'essentialism' in understanding 'woman', 'the feminine' and 'gender' as conceptual categories. To cite Butler from Bodies That Matter:
...what ensues is an exasperated debate which many of us have tired of hearing: Either (1) constructivism is reduced to a position of linguistic monism, whereby linguistic construction is understood to be generative and deterministic. Critics making that presumption can be heard to say. "If everything is discourse, what about the body?" or (2) when construction is figuratively reduced to a verbal action which appears to presuppose a subject, critics working within such a presumption can be heard to say, "If gender is constructed, then who is doing the constructing?" [19]
Again, the deadlock of a binary system makes the space for female articulation impossible and the oppositional logic of the positions seems to insist upon an orthodoxy. You must declare yourself on one side or the other - or must you?
The 'corporeality of theory' as described by Grosz and Donna Haraway, could lead to new configurations of knowledge outside these dominant, reductive binary models. As Grosz argued in 'Bodies and Knowledges', the corporeality of thought challenges the basis of a mind-body dualism in favour of a model which understands knowledges as practices. [20] Significantly, it is the concept of practice/process which emerges time and again when formulations of embodied subjectivity and corporeal theory are explored.
For example, Julia Martin argued that in order to think beyond mind-body dualism, we must move from a 'union' of mind and body to the concept of 'body practices'. [21] Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, in their work on the grotesque and monstrous as formulations of alterity have both moved toward process-based paradigms. In Haraway's essay 'The Promises of Monsters' she argued persuasively for 'articulation' rather than 'representation' since to 'represent' always remains locked in the subject/object space whereas to 'articulate' can suggest the possibility of new discursive configurations of identity. [22] Braidotti's work on 'monsters' is also instructive in this light. [23] Braidotti has long been researching the 'monster' as that 'other' object rendered inarticulate in order to reinforce the stable centring of the norm. In a fascinating conclusion to her most recent work on the subject, Braidotti moves away from the 'object' to 'process': '...I would like to propose a redefinition: the monster is a process without a stable object. It makes knowledge happen by circulating, sometimes as the most irrational non-object.' [my italics] [24]
Thinking through the body need not produce different bodies to objectify or to 'monster', but instead break that logic. It is here that Judith Butler too has offered practices and processes in order to challenge the stalemate of construction/essentialism:
...I would propose... a return to the notion of matter, not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity and surface we call matter. [Butler's italics] [25]
To reinstate fixed, bounded selves and others, subjects and objects with static and impermeable borders, is a self-defeating move. The concept of the body as process permits feminism to maintain its most powerful tools - its flexibility and diversity. Finding modes of production, rather than objects of study or fixed positions on new truths implicates feminist aesthetic criticism decisively.
Butler's 'materialization' and her most recent work on the inextricable logic of the 'speech act', the articulation which is never wholly mind nor body and cannot be conceived within the binary split, implicates her in a conception of the phenomenological subject. The mode Butler suggests posits matter and the cognition of that matter as necessarily simultaneous. Such an evocation of the phenomenological subject is relevant to feminist critical aesthetics through its call to multiple, sensate knowing. Thus, we come full circle through the body to the eradication of the theory/practice impasse. Words, whether spoken or read are not 'objective' or disembodied, they are understood as material in themselves, articulated in performative acts or processes. By analogy, the aesthetic experience of the artwork is a performative act; its 'knowledge' and the 'knower' are inseparable. Even when 'word became flesh' a 'speech act', a performative gesture, took place. The mind-body separation was itself an act of construction and never a reflection of pre-existent 'truth'. By necessity, the recognition of this dismantles binary oppositions and acknowledges the knowing in matter and the materiality of theory itself.
Deferring the Art Object
In a process-based model of feminist art where multi-sensorial interchanges between different but not effaced modes of knowing are explored, neither the 'object' nor the disembodied truth of the textual discourse contains the 'meaning' of the work. The space of interest is the 'in-between', precisely the space being explored by the artist/theorist sa Andersson in her praxis. Andersson sets no limits to her explorations; she produces a range of aesthetic installations, writes in a combination of 'poetry' and 'academic' prose and uses text/image/body interchangeably as modes and processes which drive her work. Andersson's work interests me because she thinks and articulates in multiple aesthetic forms and these are derived, at least at an early stage, from the body. Arguably, Andersson's work is seductive, it is pleasurable and aesthetically appealing. It acts upon the phenomenological subject who is body and discourse. Engaging from the perspective of the feminist historian/critic with Andersson's work is thus to participate in the in-between space she opens; this work challenges the critic to find new modes of practice commensurate with Andersson's own. You cannot 'explain' the work, but you can add perspectives to it from the position of another, coexistent but not dominant, knowledge system.
Between 1995 and 1997, Andersson produced small, highly tactile objects which formed part of a number of installations in the period. These individual objects are various; a tiny powder puff with a nipple-like handle, sewn 'glove-fingers', a small box with butterflies' wings attached, glass 'ears' dusted with talcum powder, unusual in Andersson's oeuvre for being named: Ear Bath. The objects themselves are mutable and unfixed. They are 'body' and not, desirable and grotesque, visual, tactile and even scented. They are 'art', but they are also only the materials through which Andersson has configured and reconfigured various spaces in order to engage the spectator at the level of the in-between.
For example, in different installations, the talcum powder, butterflies' wings and glove-fingers have appeared in different constellations. Sometimes the powder was on the floor, scenting the room, leaving traces from (now absent) spectators' bodies and suggesting multiply sensuous encounters with materials. At other times, it was contained in dishes or glass cases, indicating precious sensuality, repressed yet visible. The sensuality of knowledge was implied through the spectator's conjunction with the material: you knew the powder had a scent, but you did not actually smell it. Or, you saw the butterflies' wings and intuited the fragility of their presence, the tactility of the powder on their surface. The 'fingers' could be both phallic and labial, emphasising their indeterminacy and the in-betweenness of performed gender. All the objects suggest meticulous care in making, a form of both intense introspective pleasure and pain.
In the more recent installations, Habitation (1997) and Incident (a site-specific piece, 1997), Andersson engaged again with these objects, but changed the process through which they intervened in the space by photographing or making slide shows of them. Habitation queried interior and exterior and any sense of 'home'. Incident suggested the impossibility of fixing time and narrative sequence. In each case, Andersson used the modes most effective to articulate space and to materialise ideas and thus deferred the definition of the art object by making the activity of the subject-to-subject encounter the 'art'. To define the individual 'glove-fingers' or butterfly boxes as the objects in her practice, or to literally describe them, is to miss the more subtle levels through which the praxis comes into being. In this work, there are only processes and configurations operating like the speech acts and materialisation of the body discussed above. Writing to or of this work engages the critic in a praxis where the text is able to suggest different temporal and cognitive levels of experience. The text can slow or hasten the conceptual recognition; in reading contiguous passages, the viewer can linger or think laterally about the implications of the material.
The ability of this work to go beyond a theory/practice divide inspires the attempt to think the practice of feminist aesthetic theory so that it remains versatile and adaptable rather than solidifying into a new orthodoxy. It is through embodiment that the aesthetic can be empowered for feminist artists and critics, yet not any model of the body will do. To envisage the body as practice and process transcends the subject/object divide, but also requires feminist critics to challenge the dominance of theory over practice and enter into a dialogue with materials. The many modes of knowing, from textual to visual and sensual can be made coextensive and multiple. This does not reduce the significance of thinking/writing, it empowers it as a fuller practice.
Endnotes
1. John T. Kirby, 'Classical Greek Origins of Western Aesthetic Theory' in Beate Allert (ed), Languages of Visuality: Crossings between Science, Art, Politics and Literature, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1996, pp. 29-45. Not only does Kirby bring out the text/image domination, but the important fact that the spoken word dominated the written text too.
2. Barbara Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1996, p.45.
3. Griselda Pollock, 'Gleaning in History or Coming After/Behind the Reapers: The Feminine, The Stranger and The Matrix in the Work and Theory of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger' in Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, London, Routledge, 1996, pp.266-88, p. 270.
4. Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius, London, The Women's Press, 1989.
5. Luce Irigaray, This Sex which is not One, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, trans. C. Porter, 1985, p.78.
6. Allert, op.cit., p.1.
7. Rosemary Betterton, An Intimate Distance: Women, Art and the Body, London, Routledge, 1996, p.7.
8. Miwon Kwon, 'Bloody Valentines: Afterimages by Ana Mendieta' in Catherine de Zegher (ed), Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art In, Of and From the Feminine, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1996, pp. 165-71 and Amelia Jones, 'The "Sexual Politics" of The Dinner Party: A Critical Context' in Jones (ed), Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party in Feminist Art History, LA, University of California Press, 1996, pp. 82-118.
9. Janet Wolff, 'The Artist, The Critic and the Academic: Feminism's Problematic Relationship with "Theory"' in Katy Deepwell (ed), New Feminist Art Criticism, Manchester, Manchester University Press, pp.14-19, p.16.
10. Susan Kandel, 'Beneath The Green Veil: The Body In/Of New Feminist Art' in Jones, op.cit., pp. 184-200.
11. ibid., p. 198.
12. ibid., p. 190.
13. Elizabeth Grosz, in Space, Time and Perversion, London, Routledge, 1996, pp. 23-4.
14. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985.
15. E. Douka-Kabitoglou and Litsa Trayiannoudi, 'The Erotic in Women's Poetry' in Gramma, vol.4, Aristotle University of Thessalonika, 1996, pp. 27-40.
16. Audre Lorde, 'Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power' in Sister Outsider, California, The Crossing Press, 1984, pp.53-59, p.53, 56.
17. M. Pilar Snchez Calle, The Maternal, The Lesbian and The Political: Explorations of the Erotic in Audre Lorde's Poetry' in Gramma, op.cit., pp. 107-118, pp. 108, 112.
18. Grosz, op.cit., p. 184.
19. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex', London, Routledge, 1993, p. 6.
20. Grosz, op.cit., p. 37.
21. Julia Martin, 'On Healing Self/Nature' in Nina Lykke and Rosi Braidotti (eds), Between Monsters, Godesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace, London and NJ, Zed Books, 1996, pp.103-119, p. 110.
22. Donna Haraway, 'The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others' in Lawrence Grossberg, et.at. (eds), Cultural Studies, London, Routledge, 1994, pp.295-337.
23. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York, Columbia University Press, 1994 and 'Signs of Wonder and Traces of Doubt: On Teratology and Embodied Differences' in Lykke and Braidotti, op.cit., pp135-152.
24. Braidotti, 'Signs of Wonder', op.cit., p. 150
25. Butler, op.cit., p. 9.
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