SOURCE: Keating, AnaLouise. “Back to the Mother?: Paula Gunn Allen's Origin Myths.” In Women Reading Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde, pp. 93-117. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Keating analyzes Allen's distinctive use of North American origin myths and the metaphoric representations of the woman in her work.]

There is no arcane place for return.

Trinh Minh-ha

The meanings of the past create the significance of the present.

Paula Gunn Allen

Thus, “the feminine” wouldn't be the myths, etc. made by men; it would be that which “I, woman” invent, enact, and empower in “our” speech, our practice, our collective quest for a redefinition of the status of all women.

Rosi Braidotti

The “origin” of the tradition must be acknowledged, but acknowledgment does not sanction simple repetition: each new performer “signifies” upon that origin by transforming it, and by allowing for infinite transmutations.

Françoise Lionnet

The title to this [essay] reflects an ongoing debate in U.S. feminist movement: The political (in)effectiveness of “prepatriarchal” origin myths. Whereas some feminists see attempts to “recover” woman-centered creation stories as extremely misguided, others are firmly convinced that such attempts provide contemporary women with empowering models of identity formation. According to Mary Daly and Gloria Orenstein for example, accounts of a gynocentric prehistorical culture empower contemporary women in several interrelated ways. First, by positing a time before “patriarchy,” feminist origin stories suggest the contingent nature of female oppression, motivating women to challenge restrictive social systems; in the words of Daly, women are inspired to “transcend the trickery of dogmatic deception,” reject the “distorting mirror of Memory,” and “recognize the Radiance of [their] own Origins” (Pure Lust, 113; my emphasis). Second, by depicting “nonpatriarchal” egalitarian communities of women, these stories offer a new teleological perspective, or what Orenstein calls “the dream of a new feminist matristic Eden” (153). And third, by replacing the (male) “God” with the (female) “Goddess,” feminist revisionary myths provide women with positive images of their own “biophilic” power.¹

According to Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, and other poststructural theorists, however, feminists' use of subversive strategies that imply an “innocent and all-powerful Mother” and an “irrecoverable origin” in an imaginary, prehistorical past are far less effective than many revisionist mythmakers suggest.² They argue that mythic accounts of a maternal origin are exclusionary, divisive, and politically conservative, for they lead to simplistic identity politics—politics based on restrictive, ethnocentric notions of female identity that ignore the many differences among real-life women. Butler, for example, maintains that although feminist origin stories are employed to overthrow the dominant representational system, they generally replicate existing conditions:

The postulation of the “before” within feminist theory becomes politically problematic when it constrains the future to materialize an idealized notion of the past or when it supports, even inadvertently, the reification of a precultural sphere of the authentic feminine. This recourse to an original or genuine femininity is a nostalgic and parochial ideal that refuses the contemporary demand to formulate an account of gender as a complex cultural construction.

(Gender Trouble, 36)

In other words, feminists' attempts to recover or recreate ‘prepatriarchal’ forms of woman-centered communities inevitably rely on existing phallocentric definitions of Woman;³ they reject conventional gender categories only to establish other equally restrictive male/female binary oppositions. Moreover, Butler maintains that focusing on a time supposedly prior to or beyond present socioeconomic and political conditions inhibits feminist analysis and action in the present.⁴

For Teresa de Lauretis as well, there is no “going back to the innocence of ‘biology’” or to biologically based concepts of gender. As she explains in Technologies of Gender, because gender is produced by a wide range of discursive practices, including education, literature, cinema, television, and religion, it cannot be described as a “natural” attribute that all human beings are marked with at birth. Such descriptions reinforce normative, phallocratic definitions of “woman,” as well as the hierarchical male/female binary system. Thus she rejects what she sees as

some women's belief in a matriarchal past or a contemporary “matristic” realm presided over by the Goddess, a realm of female tradition, marginal and subterranean and yet all positive and good, peace-loving, ecologically correct, matrilineal, matrifocal, non-Indo-European, and so forth; in short, a world untouched by ideology, class and racial struggle, television—a world untroubled by the contradictory demands and oppressive rewards of gender as I and surely those women, too, have daily experienced.

(20-21)⁵

Like these poststructuralist thinkers, I'm extremely suspicious of feminist identity politics founded on exclusionary accounts of “woman's experience.” I, too, question the political effectiveness of rallying around normative, biologically based concepts of Woman, or mythic, monolithic images of “the Goddess.” All too often these attempts at establishing commonalities among women have the opposite effect, inadvertently reinstating conservative descriptions of “Womanhood” and binary gender systems that exclude the experiences of many women. But to assume that we can—or even should—toss out all origin myths, along with all references to “Woman” or the “feminine,” is too dismissive—not to mention highly unlikely. These categories have become so deeply ingrained in our personal and cultural meaning systems that we cannot simply reject them. Nor can we sort through the numerous images of women circulating in contemporary cultures and distinguish the truth from the lies. As Drucilla Cornell argues in Beyond Accommodation, “we can't just drop out of gender or sex roles” now that we recognize their oppressive, constructed nature (182); nor can we separate “Woman and women … from the fictions and metaphors in which she and they are presented, and through which we portray ourselves” (3).

As I see it, this debate over the (in)effectiveness of origin stories is part of a larger debate concerning the possibility of positing, from within the current representational system, new feminist—or perhaps even “feminine”—“beyonds”: Can we affirm the “feminine” yet arrive at definitions of “Woman” that are qualitatively different from existing descriptions? Perhaps more importantly, can we do so without erasing the many material and cultural differences between real-life women? On the one hand, terms like Woman and the “feminine” can be extremely divisive when they prevent us from recognizing that because gender intersects with historical, ethnic, sexual, and other axes of difference in complex ways, gender is an unstable category with multiple meanings.⁶ But on the other hand, to refuse all references to sexual difference, “the feminine,” and Woman risks reinstating the pseudo-universal human subject defined exclusively by masculinist standards. Moreover, to ignore or actively deny the “feminine” perpetuates the current sociosymbolic system; as Cornell suggests, “the repudiation of the feminine is part of the very ‘logic’ of a patriarchal order” (Beyond Accommodation, 5).

In this [essay] I want to suggest that transculturally contextualized metaphors of Woman and the “feminine” offer another alternative to these theoretical dilemmas. More specifically, I will argue that Allen's use of North American creatrix figures demonstrates the possibility of writing the “feminine” in open-ended, nonexclusionary ways. Rather than reject all references to “the Goddess,” Woman, and prepatriarchal social systems Allen uses the terms differently. She locates herself in the present yet goes ‘back’ to a diverse set of non-Eurocentric mythic origins, developing metaphoric representations of Woman that neither erase her own self-defined cultural specificities nor erect permanent barriers between disparate groups. Instead, her writings affirm what I will call “feminine” mestizaje: “feminine” in its re-metaphorized images of Woman; “mestizaje” in its fluid, transformational, transcultural forms. I borrow this latter term from Cuban literary and political movements where its usage indicates a profound challenge to existing racial categories. As Nancy Morejón explains, mestizaje transculturation defies static notions of cultural purity by emphasizing

the constant interaction, the transmutation between two or more cultural components with the unconscious goal of creating a third cultural entity … that is new and independent even though rooted in the preceding elements. Reciprocal influence is the determining factor here, for no single element superimposes itself on another; on the contrary, each one changes into the other so that both can be transformed into a third. Nothing seems immutable.⁷

Allen incorporates this ongoing cultural transmutation into her mythic metaphors of Woman. By drawing on the dialogic elements of verbal art, she utilizes metaphoric language's performative effects and invites her readers to live out the “feminine” in new ways. As she does so, she develops an interactive epistemological process—or … embodied mythic thinking—that challenges feminists' conventional notions of identity politics.

[Anzaldúa] and Lorde engage in similar transcultural affirmations of the “feminine.” They, too, simultaneously intervene in existing systems of racialized and gendered meaning and invent new definitions of the “feminine.” However, I have chosen to examine the poststructuralist debate concerning the (in)effectiveness of woman-centered origin myths and their implications for feminists' representational politics exclusively in the context of Allen's writings. I have several reasons. First, her origin myths play a pivotal role in her creative and theoretical works. Second, Allen uses her gynocentric mythic system to develop what could be interpreted as a highly irrational, entirely nonacademic epistemology. Third, her assertions concerning women's experience and the “feminine”—especially when read literally—are far more extreme than those made by Anzaldúa and Lorde. Yet it's the radical nature of Allen's assertions I find so intriguing. Why would a highly respected scholar of Native American literature support her claims with references to “spirit guides,” “the Grandmothers,” and other supernatural informants? How can an epistemological process based on what seem to be conservative notions of women's biological functions support feminists' political projects?

Interestingly, Allen's feminist writings have received less critical attention than Anzaldúa's and Lorde's. There is, I believe, an important parallel between this limited academic reception and the extremity of her claims. Rather than criticize what seem to be monolithic, essentializing views of spiritual forces and the “feminine” in American Indian traditions, theorists generally avoid commenting on these aspects of Allen's work. This avoidance is quite understandable. Consider, for example, the following assertions in The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions:

The Mother, the Grandmother, recognized from earliest times into the present among those peoples of the Americas who kept to the eldest traditions, is celebrated in social structures, architecture, law, custom, and the oral tradition. To her we owe our lives, and from her comes our ability to endure, regardless of the concerted assaults on our, on Her, being. … She is the Old Woman Spider who weaves us together in a fabric of interconnection. She is the Eldest God, the one who Remembers and Re-members.

(11)

Among the tribes, the occult power of women, inextricably bound to our hormonal life, is thought to be very great.

(47)

Women are by the nature of feminine “vibration” graced with certain inclinations that make them powerful and capable in certain ways.

(207)

It is the nature of woman's existence to be and to create background. This fact, viewed with unhappiness by many feminists, is of ultimate importance in a tribal context.

(243)

Coupled with her more recent references to “multitudinous Great Goddess(es)” in Grandmothers of the Light, it's difficult not to interpret these statements as indicating a concept of female identity rooted in biology and thus to conclude that the “feminine” Allen attempts to “recover” is an ahistorical, unchanging essence that supports conventional phallocratic definitions of Woman, as well as romanticized, nostalgic images of “Indians.”

According to Allen herself, however, recovering the “feminine” in American Indian traditions does not imply a retreat into a mythical prehistorical past. Nor is it an attempt to apply conventional masculinist notions of femininity to Native American women. It is, rather, a political act situated in the material present. In “Who Is Your Mother? The Red Roots of White Feminism” she emphasizes that her interest in recovering the “red roots” of Euro-American feminism is not motivated by “nostalgia.” As her title indicates, she argues that the principles guiding twentieth-century U.S. feminists have their source in Native traditions. However, because they have forgotten “their history on this continent,” feminists are unaware of the parallels between the forms of oppression experienced by contemporary women and those experienced by indigenous peoples and earlier European gynocentric cultures. Allen maintains that until mainstream and radical U.S. feminists recognize their efforts to establish egalitarian social structures represent the “continuance” of tribal gynocentric traditions, they restrict feminism to a gender-based movement and overlook important models for personal, political, economic, and cultural change (Sacred Hoop, 214).

Throughout “Who Is Your Mother?” Allen stresses that to alter current conditions, contemporary social actors must recognize their ties to the past. Origin stories play an important role in this process because they enable us to go ‘back’ to the ‘past’ to transform existing conditions. Thus she tells us

traditionals say we must remember our origins, our cultures, our histories, our mothers and grandmothers, for without that memory, which implies continuance rather than nostalgia, we are doomed to engulfment by a paradigm that is fundamentally inimical to the quality, autonomy, and self-empowerment essential for satisfying, high-quality life.

(Sacred Hoop, 214)

But what, exactly, is the difference between “continuance” and “nostalgia”? After all, both terms could be interpreted as the desire to recapture an earlier era. According to David Murray, for example, the two words are often used synonymously. As he explains in his discussion of contemporary writers' attempts to synthesize precolonial images of the past with present-day conditions, the “invocation of unity is a recurrent theme in American Indian writing.”⁸ He argues that although this holism could be politically motivated, generally it is not: “[I]n the existing body of American Indian writing, the idea of wholeness and unity are more usually an expression of a nostalgia without any political cutting edge—a nostalgia for a tribal unity, and for a simplicity which fits neatly into the patterns of literary Romanticism” (88).

Yet Allen's feminism, her theory of perpetual liminality, and her belief that time is nonlinear and human beings are “moving event[s] within a moving universe” make such interpretations untenable (Sacred Hoop, 149). In a dynamic, constantly changing world with no ‘beginning’ or ‘end,’ we cannot go back to an earlier point in time. Instead, we can use the so-called past to understand present conditions more fully and to direct future actions. For Allen, continuance implies the historical past's continuity, its constant presence and ongoing interaction with contemporary human life. Thus she distinguishes between the ritual-based “ceremonial time” found in Native American worldviews and the “chronological time” generally associated with history and daily life. As she explains in “The Ceremonial Motion of Indian Time: Long Ago, So Far,” whereas western culture's exclusive emphasis on chronological time divides history into discrete segments and separates time itself from “the internal workings of human and other beings,” Native American “ceremonial time” is achronological and mythic; events apparently located ‘outside’ the temporal present—whether or not we ‘actually’ experienced them—can have significant effects on our lives (Sacred Hoop, 149).

Continuance has additional implications for indigenous North American peoples. Given the specific types of oppression they have experienced for the past five hundred years—which include (but are not limited to) genocide, forced assimilation, sterilization, removal, Christianization, and reeducation—continuance, survival, and recovery are almost synonymous. Allen maintains that Native Americans' attempts to reclaim their non-European cultural traditions have played a central role in their struggle to resist assimilation into mainstream U.S. culture. Throughout The Sacred Hoop she emphasizes the feminist dimensions of this project by associating both the decimation of Native peoples and the widespread erasure of Woman-based ritual traditions with a shift from gynocentric to phallocratic social structures. She explains in “How the West Was Really Won” that “[t]he genocide practiced against the tribes … aimed systematically at the dissolution of ritual traditions … and the degradation of the status of women as central to the spiritual and ritual life of the tribes” (195). According to Allen, this cultural/spiritual/biological genocide continues today, often (but not always) in less obvious forms, like the highly romanticized stereotype of the “vanishing Indian” (Sacred Hoop, 151). Continuance, then, entails far more than a nostalgic desire for “tribal unity.” Because she sees the ongoing systematic oppression of Native Americans as both gender- and culture-specific, she believes “[t]he central issue that confronts American Indian women throughout the hemisphere is survival, literal survival, both on a cultural and biological level” (Sacred Hoop, 189; her emphasis).

Allen's frequent references to the devastating effects of this ongoing material and ideological extermination make it difficult to dismiss either her origin myths or her desire to recover the “feminine” in American Indian traditions as an escapist retreat into an impossible, highly idealized past. It is, in fact, almost the reverse. Her emphasis on the sociopolitical and cultural implications of indigenous mythic systems attempts to reshape contemporary and future conceptions of American Indians, feminism, and U.S. culture. Indeed, Allen's feminized, Indianized “cosmogyny”⁹ represents several significant alterations in current systems of meaning. First, by describing preconquest North American cultures as gynocentric, Allen revises previous academic interpretations of Native traditions and attempts to enlist all U.S. feminists—whatever their cultural backgrounds—in Native Americans' ongoing political struggles. Second, by attributing forms of oppression experienced by contemporary women to the “same materialistic, antispiritual forces … presently engaged in wiping out the same gynarchical values, along with the peoples who adhere to them, in Latin America” and other countries (Sacred Hoop, 214), Allen expands existing conceptions of feminist movement and challenges self-identified feminists to develop cross-cultural, cross-gendered alliances with other oppressed peoples. As she asserts in an interview,

what I'm really attempting to do is affect feminist thinking. Because my white sisters—and they have influenced the Black and Asian and Chicano sisters—have given the impression that women have always been held down, have always been weak, and have always been persecuted by men, but I know that's not true. I come from a people that that is not true of.

(quoted in Ballinger and Swann, 10)

Third, by associating a diverse set of Native American mythic creatrixes with a cosmic “feminine” intelligence, Allen develops an epistemological system that draws on the oral tradition's dialogical nature to redefine Enlightenment-based descriptions of the intellect.

II

Is it only the question of unearthing that which the colonial experience buried and overlaid, bringing to light the hidden continuities it suppressed? Or is a quite different practice entailed—not the rediscovery but the PRODUCTION of identity. Not an identity grounded in the archaeology, but in the RE-TELLING of the past?

Stuart Hall

Allen's origin myths represent a significant departure from those described by earlier Native American literary scholars who relied on male-centered stories from Christianized Native informants.¹⁰ In The Woman Who Owned the Shadows Allen synthesizes and alters the Laguna Keres and Iroquois origin accounts to construct a gynocentric mythic story reflecting her own experiences in twentieth-century U.S. culture, as well as the experiences of her mixed-blood protagonist.¹¹ More specifically, she replaces earlier masculinist interpretations of Native American mythic systems with interpretations emphasizing the centrality of “feminine” creative powers. As Elizabeth Hanson asserts, “Allen redesigns her own creation myth and, in the process, … feminizes and personalizes the myth of Spider woman and her twin” (35).

Spider Woman and Allen's many other “personalized” mythic creatrixes represent an equally significant departure from the goddesses found in traditional Graeco-Roman mythology, for she associates them with a cosmic intelligence that manifests itself through language. She opens The Sacred Hoop by declaring: “In the beginning was thought, and her name was Woman” (11; my emphasis). Similarly, she begins The Woman Who Owned the Shadows with her version of the story of Old Spider Woman, whose “singing made all the worlds. The worlds of the spirits. The worlds of the people. The worlds of the creatures. The worlds of the gods” (1; my emphasis). And again in Grandmothers of the Light she attributes the creation of the entire cosmos—including nature, human beings, sociopolitical systems, literature, and the sciences—to Grandmother Spider or “Thinking Woman,” who

thought the earth, the sky, the galaxy, and all that is into being, and as she thinks, so we are. She sang the divine sisters Nau'ts'ity and Ic'sts'ity … into being out of her medicine pouch or bundle, and they in turn sang the firmament, the land, the seas, the people, the katsina, the gods, the plants, animals, minerals, language, writing, mathematics, architecture, the Pueblo social system, and every other thing you can imagine in this our world.

(28; my emphasis)

In these versions of Allen's woman-centered mythic stories, creation occurs through language and thought. These origin narratives have little in common with standard, phallocentric creation accounts that conflate “Woman” with “womb” and reduce the “feminine” to the highly sexualized yet passive bearer of (male) culture. Nor are they similar to those feminist origin myths that valorize women's previously denigrated maternal role by identifying goddess imagery and female power primarily with childbirth.¹² As a number of theorists have argued, feminist celebrations of motherhood can be problematic. Although they affirm traditionally devalued aspects of female identity, many revisionist accounts of mother goddesses or the maternal do not fully challenge the underlying, patriarchally defined gender roles. As Judith Butler points out, the reliance on existing systems of meaning inadvertently “engender, naturalize, and immobilize” binary gender relations and stereotypical notions of womanhood. She argues that by positing “the category of woman as a coherent and stable subject,” feminists' representational politics inevitably reify conservative, heterosexist constructions of a normative female identity (Gender Trouble, 5).¹³ It is this supposedly inevitable reification of exclusionary gender categories that leads her to question the political effectiveness of all revisionist accounts of Woman, “women's experience,” and the “feminine.”

However, Allen's “feminine” mestizaje indicates the possibility of rewriting the “feminine” in nonexclusionary ways. Rather than replace one coherent and stable female subject with another, her re-metaphorized Woman destabilizes both male and female gender-inflected subject positions. For example, in her discussion of the Laguna Keres creatrix Allen complicates the conventional relationship between women, the “feminine,” and female gender roles. She refers to Thought Woman as “mother” and describes her power as “feminine” yet stipulates that this creatrix is “not limited to a female role in the total theology of the Keres people.” By associating Thought Woman's creative power with a cosmic intelligence rather than with biologically based definitions of creation, Allen can insist that her role is not gender specific: “Since she is the supreme Spirit, she is both Mother and Father to all people and to all creatures. She is the only creator of thought, and thought precedes creation” (Sacred Hoop, 15). Similarly, Allen asserts that in many tribal cultures the terms “Mother” and “Matron” reveal the great respect paid to all women yet maintains that the titles themselves are not gender specific. They apply to both women and men, for they represent “the highest office to which a man or woman could aspire” (Sacred Hoop, 28-29; my emphasis).¹⁴

This insistence on nonbiological, “feminine” creative powers provides an important exception to Butler's belief that references to “women” or “women's experience” inevitably reinforce heterosexist concepts of female identity. According to Butler, “the category of women achieve[s] stability and coherence … in the context of the heterosexual matrix” (Gender Trouble, 5). She maintains that in contemporary, western sociosymbolic systems, Woman is always defined in relation to Man; consequently, representations of women automatically imply heterosexually defined gender roles. However, by incorporating nonwestern elements into her revisionist mythmaking, Allen retains the category of “Woman” yet detaches it from the “heterosexual matrix” underlying western images of gender identities. And indeed, she often describes her mythic figures in distinctly nonheterosexual terms. In her discussion of Keres theology she emphasizes that

the creation does not take place through copulation. In the beginning existed Thought Woman and her dormant sisters, and Thought Woman thinks creation and sings her two sisters into life. … The sisters are not related by virtue of having parents in common; that is, they are not alive because anyone bore them.

(Sacred Hoop, 16)

Similarly, when she retells the Navajo creation story of Hard Beings Woman she points out that creation did not occur through male/female sexual intercourse but rather through the merger of two “feminine” elements—the “meeting of woman and water” (Sacred Hoop, 14). In Grandmothers of the Light Allen again distinguishes between heterosexual, biological reproduction and other forms of creativity by associating her creatrixes with thought. She asserts that because the Mayan creators—Xmucané and Xpiyacoc, who she calls “the Grandmothers”—represent “the original measurers of time, or day keepers,” their creative power goes beyond sexual reproduction to encompass a magical, nonbiological generative power (55). She maintains that scholars' references to heterosexually paired mythic figures as “(grand)mother” and “(grand)father” gods represent later patriarchal interpellations into earlier gynocentric texts. Thus she refers to both these Mayan creators (or “Grandmothers”) in female-gendered terms and parenthetically notes that in twentieth-century accounts Xpiyacoc is generally referred to as “Grandfather” (29). Although Allen does not explicitly lesbianize her creatrix figures, her repeated emphasis on their nonbiological creative powers undermines readers' heterosexist assumptions.

Allen further discredits conventional, phallocentric gender categories by repeatedly insisting that the “feminine” creative power she describes cannot be interpreted according to contemporary Euro-American descriptions of maternal functions. In “Grandmother of the Sun: Ritual Gynocracy in Native America,” she associates U.S. culture's sentimental notions of motherhood with the devaluation of contemporary women's socioeconomic status and asserts that gynocentric mythic traditions do not equate maternity and motherhood with biological functions.¹⁵ She distinguishes between fertility cults, biological birth, and “sacred or ritual birth” and carefully associates North American creatrix figures exclusively with the latter. Thus she challenges the commonly held assumption that Thought Woman, Hard Beings Woman, Corn Woman, and other mythic mothers represent indigenous peoples' inadequate understanding of human conception. According to Allen, such assumptions are ethnocentric and sexist: In addition to trivializing both “the tribes … and the power of woman,” they restrict “the power inherent in femininity” (Sacred Hoop, 14-15).

I want to emphasize that Allen does not disavow the importance of maternity itself. By positing a cosmic “feminine” intelligence her origin myths affirm the maternal—and, by extension, real-life women's experience—yet redefine it as “female ritual power” (Sacred Hoop, 27). In her discussion of Ixchel, the Yucatán Indian's “goddess of the moon, water, childbirth, weaving, and love,” Allen explains that “female ritual power” encompasses far more than biological birth, for it contains all types of physical and nonphysical transformations, including “the power to end life or to take life away” and “the power of disruption” (Sacred Hoop, 27). Rather than reducing Woman to the maternal function, then, Allen expands conventional definitions of maternity to incorporate all forms of creativity and change, as well as all aspects of human existence. She associates Thought Woman's “power of Original Thinking or Creation Thinking” with “the power of mothering” yet depicts “mothering” in terms that include, but go beyond, biological reproduction: “‘mothering’ … is not so much power to give birth, … but the power to make, to create, to transform” (Sacred Hoop, 29). One form this creative mothering can take can be found in “Grandmother,” Allen's poetic retelling of a Laguna Pueblo creation story about Grandmother Spider. In this short poem Allen alludes to biological birth yet reworks it to encompass other forms of creativity, such as weaving, storytelling, and writing. In the opening lines she describes creation in the following way: “Out of her own body she pushed / silver thread, light, air.” This grandmother creator weaves “the strands / of her body, her pain, her vision / into creation.”

By drawing connections between these mythic representations of Woman and historical Native women, Allen subtly underscores metaphoric language's performative effects, its influence on both psychic and material conditions. She maintains that this “feminine,” all-inclusive, transformational force had significant implications for preconquest indigenous women's social status. Because “the power to make life” was seen as “the source of all power,” women performed central functions in tribal ritual and political systems (Sacred Hoop, 27). According to Allen, “The blood of woman was in and of itself infused with the power of Supreme Mind, and so women were held in awe and respect” (Sacred Hoop, 28).

As these statements reveal, at times Allen seems to base her arguments concerning maternity and the “feminine” on women's reproductive capabilities. And in a sense, she does. However, by expanding conventional descriptions of reproduction to include imaginative and intellectual creativity, she downplays this biological aspect so significantly that she almost entirely discounts it. Consider the following description of “female ritual power”:

[T]he power to make life is the source and model for all ritual magic and … no other power can gainsay it. Nor is that power really biological at base; it is the power of ritual magic, that power of Thought, of Mind, that gives rise to biological organisms as it gives rise to social organizations, material culture, and transformations of all kinds—including hunting, war, healing, spirit communication, rain-making, and all the rest.

(Sacred Hoop, 28)

As in her equation of women's menstrual blood with “the power of Supreme Mind,” Allen redefines both “femininity” and the mind, creating an epistemological process that simultaneously “feminizes” the intellect and spiritualizes the body.

I want to emphasize the innovative dimensions of Allen's “feminized” epistemology. By redefining the maternal as transformational thought, Allen unsettles the hierarchical, dichotomous worldview that equates “masculine” with transcendence, culture, and the mind, and “feminine” with immanence, nature, and the body.¹⁶ Significantly, she does not replace one dualism with another: As “the necessary precondition for material creation,” Allen's re-metaphorized Woman represents a dynamic, all-inclusive, intellectual, creative, maternal power that generates both “material and nonmaterial reality” (Sacred Hoop, 14-15; my emphasis). This “feminized” intelligence is both supernatural (Allen equates it with Old Spider Woman/Thought Woman) and natural (Thought Woman's intelligence encompasses human beings as well as the physical world: It “permeates the land—the mountains and clouds, the rains and lightning, the corn and deer” [Grandmothers, 34]). Unlike Athene, the Greek goddess of (patriarchal) wisdom whose divine intelligence entails the sacrifice of the mother,¹⁷ Allen's mythic Woman represents a maternalized embodied intelligence, or what Luce Irigaray might describe as “a spirituality of the body, the flesh” (“Universal as Mediation,” 135).¹⁸

III

One element of contemporary feminist reflection which I find particularly striking is the element of risk that these thinkers introduce into intellectual activity. Theirs is a more daring, risky form of intelligence; their approach to enunciation and to discursive practice is freer and more disrespectful than the established norms.

Rosi Braidotti

As her emphasis on the concrete, material dimensions of thought implies, Allen develops an epistemological system that avoids the Cartesian mind/body dualism. By establishing a reciprocal relationship between the intellectual, the physical, and the spiritual, she destabilizes classical western definitions of reason and rationality. Her embodied mythic thinking intervenes in western culture's “crisis of reason,” a crisis related to the absence of certainty and secure foundations in rationalist and empiricist theories of knowledge.¹⁹ According to a number of contemporary feminist philosophers, this crisis has its source in the hidden masculinist bias in all supposedly universal knowledge systems. As Elizabeth Grosz explains, because reason, rationality, and the mind have been symbolized as “masculine,”²⁰ this previously unacknowledged bias has led to “the historical privileging of the purely conceptual or mental over the corporeal” and the subsequent denial of the body. In western cultures the body has been traditionally associated with the “feminine,” and this disavowal has important implications for real-life women:

If the body is an unacknowledged or an inadequately acknowledged condition of knowledges, and if … [it] is always sexually specific, concretely “sexed,” this implies that the hegemony over knowledges that masculinity has thus far accomplished can be subverted, upset, or transformed through women's assertion of “a right to know,” independent of and autonomous from the methods and presumptions regulating the prevailing (patriarchal) forms of knowledge.

(“Bodies and Knowledges,” 187-88)

Allen's embodied mythic thinking, as well as her frequent references to Thought Woman and her use of North American creatrix figures to “feminize” American Indian traditions, can be read as her assertion of an independent and autonomous cognitive stance. Like Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and the other autonomy-feminists Grosz describes, Allen simultaneously critiques conventional western knowledge systems and develops new ways of thinking that require different intellectual standards. Her embodied mythic thinking exposes the phallocentric foundations of western culture's reliance on logical, rational thought and provides an alternative to analytical forms of thinking. As she explains in Grandmothers of the Light, she uses storytelling rather than logical proofs to unsettle contemporary readers' over-reliance on reason: “Many times the stories weave back and forth between the everyday and the supernatural without explanation, confusing the logical mind and compelling linear thought processes to chase their own tails, which of course is a major spiritual purpose behind the tradition's narrative form” (5).

But Allen's epistemic position departs more radically from Eurocentric masculinist conventions than the feminist epistemologies Grosz describes. Whereas autonomy-feminists generally support their alternate positions with arguments drawn from poststructuralist theory,²¹ Allen relies extensively on information acquired from her “inner self” and “the supernaturals.” She provides little “factual” scholarly evidence for her assertions. In the “Introduction” to The Sacred Hoop, for instance, she justifies her attempt to recover the “feminine” in American Indian traditions with the following highly unacademic statement:

Whatever I read about Indians I check out with my inner self. Most of what I have read—and some things I have said based on that reading—is upside-down and backward. But my inner self, the self who knows what is true about American Indians because it is one, always warns me when something deceptive is going on. … Sometimes that confirmation comes about in miraculous ways; that's when I know guidance from the nonphysicals and the supernaturals, and that the Grandmothers have taken pity on me in my dilemma.

(6-7; my emphasis)

She takes this open acknowledgment of supernatural guidance even further in Grandmothers of the Light and explains that she derived the information for her mythic stories “from a variety of ethnographic and literary sources, from the oral tradition, and from direct communication with my own spirit guides” (xiii; my emphasis).²²

Similarly, in “‘Border’ Studies” Allen replaces conventional epistemological methodologies and formalist theories of literary scholarship with her own highly idiosyncratic perspective on contemporary literary theory. This essay, published in the Modern Languages Association's Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, has little in common with the other, more conventional, scholarly essays collected in the anthology. Ostensibly a theoretical overview of literary production by contemporary self-identified U.S. women of color, “‘Border’ Studies” could be more accurately described as Allen's own inventive literary origin myth, her personalized account of what she calls the “creative void,” or the source of all original literary work (306). As in The Sacred Hoop and Grandmothers of the Light, Allen employs a variety of tactics that simultaneously critique and transform western academic literary conventions. She rejects margin/center discourse and all other oppositional theories as reactionary and maintains that many self-identified U.S. women of color writers, as well as other “disappearadas,” position themselves in the “Void”—“the still, dark center of the heart of the gynocosmos where nothing at all exists and whence, paradoxically, all must emerge” (306).

Does this reliance on spirit guides, supernatural informants, and the “dark grandmother of human wisdom” (“‘Border’ Studies,” 305) discredit Allen's “feminine” mestizaje and the embodied mythic thinking it implies? I think it depends on your perspective. Viewed from within the academy, her truth claims are highly suspect, if not outright laughable. Indeed, most academic scholars avoid commenting on the feminist epistemological dimensions of Allen's recent work. According to Elizabeth Hanson, one of the few literary critics who has not simply ignored Allen's gynocentric origin myths, this conflation of Native American cultures with the “feminine” lacks sufficient explanation or proof: “Allen's vision of tribal life as gynocratic in nature, rather than simply mystical or psychic, reveals a remarkable contention, one that Allen herself recognizes as supported by limited verifiable evidence” (15-16). Hanson also notes that Allen's interpretation of the “feminine” in The Sacred Hoop cannot be supported by factual, historical information. Furthermore, it contradicts her own earlier view of Native cultures, as well as the perspectives of well-respected, “gifted and sensitive historians” (16).

It could be tempting to label Allen's inability or refusal to provide sufficient “factual” evidence, coupled with her references to supernatural informants, as New Ageish or “neo-Romantic”²³ and to dismiss her epistemological perspective entirely. But I want to suggest another possibility, one based on the limitations of contemporary academic discourse. In a Eurocentric patriarchal culture such as our own, an elite group of people defines what counts as scholarship and thus establishes the rules and definitions for knowledge claims, validation standards, and truth effects. But as Patricia Hill Collins explains, positivism and other conventional epistemological methods are inadequate for exploring the “subjugated knowledges” of black women and other subordinate groups, whose experiences and self-conceptions do not conform to the prevailing standards. Collins found her own academic “training as a social scientist inadequate to the task of studying the subjugated knowledge of a Black women's standpoint.” Thus she relied on personal experience, the experiences of other black women, and “alternate sites” of knowledge production, like poetry, music, “daily conversations, and everyday behavior”²⁴ (202). Similarly, Allen's academic training as a literary scholar is inadequate to her undertaking. If, as Allen asserts, the decimation of Native peoples parallels the systematic erasure of gynocentric ritual and oral traditions,²⁵ how—relying on conventional positivist methodologies—could anyone examine the “feminine” in American Indian traditions? To borrow Luce Irigaray's term, both the “feminine” and the American Indian traditions Allen tries to recover are in a state of déréliction, or abandonment; they lack representation in the dominant cultural symbolic. There are no existing words or conceptual frameworks to convey the “feminized” Native traditions and beliefs Allen explores.

Allen does not provide readers with an authentic, gendered, ethnic-specific standpoint. Her epistemology is performative, not descriptive; and the effect is transcultural transformation. By writing her “feminine” mestizaje, she stages a fluid, transcultural self/worldview that she invites her readers—whatever their cultural backgrounds—to adopt. Instead of recovering a precolonial mythological system erased by patriarchal structures, Allen invents an ethical, artificial mythology—ethical, because her new Indianized metaphors of Woman provide imaginary alternatives to contemporary western definitions of the “feminine”; and artificial, because the “feminine” she affirms does not—yet—exist.

Thus Allen's inventive mythmaking embodies what Drucilla Cornell calls “ethical feminism,” or what I would describe as an aspect of differential consciousness that employs performative speech acts to disrupt the prevailing phallocentric sociosymbolic order. Significantly, Cornell's ethical feminist does not attempt to replace contemporary definitions of the “feminine” with alternate definitions that more accurately reflect the truth of women's experience. Instead, her feminist speaks from “the utopian or redemptive perspective of the not yet” by using allegory and myth to imaginatively reconstruct the “feminine” (Transformations, 59). Thus, ethical feminism occurs in the subjunctive, in a liminal space between past, present, and future definitions. Or as Cornell explains, ethical feminism

explicitly recognizes the “should be” in representations of the feminine. It emphasizes the role of the imagination, not description, in creating solidarity between women. Correspondingly, ethical feminism rests its claim for the intelligibility and coherence of “herstory” not on what women “are,” but on the remembrance of the “not yet” which is recollected in both allegory and myth.

(Transformations, 59)

In other words, ethical feminism reclaims and rereads already existing stories and myths of the “feminine” but interprets them in new ways.

At this point I want to adopt Cornell's ethical feminism and apply my own “redemptive perspective” to a reading of Allen's origin myths. Despite Allen's apparent comments to the contrary, I believe that her discussions of Thought Woman, Corn Woman, the Grandmothers, and other Native American creatrixes “should be” read performatively, as potentially transformational metaphors. In particular—and, quite possibly, contra Allen herself—I am suggesting that these mythic figures do not represent accurate descriptions of an authentic womanhood; nor do they indicate the recovery of an essential “feminine” nature. Such literal interpretations are far too limiting; they lead to restrictive definitions of the “feminine” and confine women's experiences to a predetermined set of characteristics. More importantly, if we read Allen's metaphoric language descriptively, we deny its performative effects and overlook the visionary, ethical dimensions of her work.

As Allen validates her claims with references to Thought Woman and other mythic figures, she draws on metaphoric language's performative effects to alter her readers' self/worldviews. In the revisionist myths she enacts, representation and creation become blurred. As Cornell explains, metaphoric language, “reality,” and perception are inextricably related in complex ways:

“Being” cannot be separated from “seeing,” but it cannot be reduced to it either. We do not see what “is,” directly. We see through the world presented in language. … [T]his world is never just presented as static, because the very language which allows us to “see” also allows us to see differently, because of the performative power of the metaphors that constitute reality. To reinterpret is to see differently.

(Beyond Accommodation, 131)

Because language structures our perceptions of reality, new words and new concepts can provide us with new points of view, different perspectives enabling us to reinterpret existing social systems and forms of identity.

Allen's origin myths play a significant role in this reinterpretive process. Rather than entirely rejecting all references to Woman and the “feminine,” as some poststructuralists suggest, Allen keeps the terms but redefines them without reinstating normative gender categories.²⁶ Just as her embodied mythic thinking destabilizes classical definitions of reason and rationality, her Indianized metaphors of Woman disrupt existing categories of identity and provide new alternatives. By associating her creatrix figures with a cosmic, divine, “feminine” intelligence, she intervenes in current systems of meaning and opens up possibilities for living out the “feminine” in new ways.

Paradoxically, then, Allen's “feminine” can be found neither within nor without the prevailing sociosymbolic structure. Yet it oscillates between the two. As Cornell argues in her discussion of Hélène Cixous's and Luce Irigaray's revisionist mythmaking, the “feminist reconstruction of myth” relies on a performative contradiction: Because the “feminine” system has been defined only in relation to the “masculine,” the “feminine” qua “feminine” does not (yet) exist; consequently, the “feminine” Cixous, Irigaray, and other contemporary feminist writers—Allen, Anzaldúa, and Lorde among them—affirm “cannot be reduced or identified with the lives of actual women, nor adequately represented as the elsewhere to masculine discourse” (Beyond Accommodation, 150). But if this ethical affirmation of the “feminine” is neither fully inside nor entirely outside current meaning systems, how might we enact it?

IV

Interviewer: “Given your background and your culture and the way in which you straddle cultures or have incorporated a number of cultures, what makes an Indian?”

Allen: “I believe that it's a turn of mind.”

Like Allen's theory of perpetual liminality, her ethical affirmation of the “feminine” indicates an ongoing creative process that occurs at the interface of inside and outside; as such, it involves the recovery of the “feminine” as an imaginative universal. According to Cornell, this recovery

feeds the power of the feminine imagination and helps to avoid the depletion of the feminine imaginary in the name of the masculine symbolic. This use of the feminine as an imaginative universal does not, and should not, pretend to simply tell the “truth” of woman as she was, or is. This is why our mythology is self-consciously an artificial mythology; Woman is “discovered” as an ethical standard. And as she is “discovered,” her meaning is also created.²⁷

(Beyond Accommodation, 178)

As Cornell's oscillation between creation and discovery indicates, this use of the “feminine” draws on the rhetoric of authenticity yet goes beyond existing definitions to emphasize the artificial, inventive nature of these mythologies.

I want to underscore the open-ended possibilities in this use of the “feminine” as an imaginative universal. Because the “discovery” of Woman as an ethical standard occurs within mythic metaphors, it defies literal, monologic interpretation, making possible a proliferation of meanings. Revisionist mythmaking plays an important role in this “discovery,” for mythic images are open to multiple interpretations. As Cornell points out: “It is the potential variability of myth that allows us to work within myth, and the significance it offers, so as to reimagine our world and by so doing, to begin to dream of a new one” (Beyond Accommodation, 178).

Although Allen herself does not describe her gynocentric mythologies as artificial, they function analogously to the artificial mythologies Cornell describes. The rhetoric of discovery and authenticity Allen employs can be read as tactical maneuvers to bring about individual and collective transformation. When readers enter into Allen's origin narratives, they “discover” new definitions of the “feminine.” By phrasing her new definitions in the language of discovery, she authorizes her words.

Significantly, Allen's use of the “feminine” as an imaginative universal serves an additional, related purpose, as well. By Indianizing her “feminine” mestizaje, she opens up a space for the construction of transcultural feminist social actors. If, as I suggested in the previous chapter, each subject is composed of multiple parts and located at the intersection of diverse—sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting—discourses, no identity is or ever can be stable and fixed. As Chantal Mouffe states, there is always “a certain degree of openness and ambiguity in the way the different subject-positions are articulated” (35). It's this potential openness to redefinition that makes personal and cultural change possible. To bring about radical social change, however, these subject positions cannot just be combined differently; they must be transformed:

If the task of radical democracy is indeed to deepen the democratic revolution and to link together diverse democratic struggles, such a task requires the creation of new subject-positions that would allow the common articulation, for example, of antiracism, antisexism, and anticapitalism. These struggles do not spontaneously converge, and in order to establish democratic equivalences, a new “common sense” is necessary, which would transform the identity of different groups so that the demands of each group could be articulated with those of others according to the principle of democratic equivalence.

(43)

In other words, in today's postmodern world political unities do not automatically arise; they must be consciously developed through a process of articulation.²⁸ Like the cultural translation Homi Bhabha describes, the creation of new political subjectivities occurs in an ambivalent, heterogeneous space that problematizes conventional assumptions concerning unitary identities based on shared histories or cultural traditions. Political subjects, priorities, and plans of action do not ‘naturally exist; they must be constructed “through a process of translation and transference of meaning” (“Commitment,” 119). Contemporary socialist democratic politics and policies must be invented, not discovered, “because there is no given community or body of the people, whose inherent, radical historicity emits the right signs” (119; his emphasis). We—no matter who ‘we’ are—do not automatically unite on the basis of shared ‘natural’ traits. Instead, shared identities must be created. Bhabha underscores the inventive nature of contemporary politics in an interview with Jonathan Rutherford, where he rejects the commonly held belief that politics entails mobilizing already existing social subjects:

The concept of a people is not “given,” as an essential, class-determined, unitary, homogeneous part of society prior to a politics; “the people” are there as a process of political articulation and political negotiation across a whole range of contradictory social sites. “The people” always exist as a multiple form of identification, waiting to be created and constructed.

(“The Third Space,” 220)

Allen's “feminine” mestizaje indicates one form this construction of “the people” can take. Because her “discovery” of Woman as an ethical standard occurs within metaphor, on an imaginary level, it potentially destabilizes readers' ego-ideal identifications, the master signifiers or symbols that shape our self-conceptions in pivotal ways. When we identify the “feminine” in ourselves with the “feminine” in Thought Woman, Hard Beings Woman, and Allen's other mythic figures, we experience a “metaphoric transference.”²⁹ That is, we encounter a slippage within our current definitions of Woman and the “feminine” as we recognize a gap between what “is” and what “should be.” It's this slippage between competing definitions that enables readers to act out the “feminine” differently. More specifically, because Woman and the “feminine” function as master signifiers in identity formation, this recognition produces a shift in our self-perceptions.³⁰ As Mark Bracher explains, “what happens to our sense of being or identity is determined to a large degree by what happens to those signifiers that represent us” (25).³¹ By Indianizing the master signifiers that represent “us” women, Allen Indianizes her readers as well.

Allen's use of nonwestern North American “tribal” creatrix figures does not indicate a nostalgic desire to return to a prehistorical, utopian “Indian” community of women. By going back to previously erased indigenous conventions, she rewrites the past and invents new definitions. As Trinh Minh-ha asserts, “[T]he return to a denied heritage allows one to start again with different re-departures, different pauses, different arrivals” (Moon, 14). Allen's “returns” are performative, not descriptive. As she writes her “feminine” mestizaje, she engages in a to-and-fro movement that takes up yet disrupts conventional interpretations of Woman, “American Indians,” women, and the “feminine.” These disruptive oscillations enable readers to go beyond conventional feminist identity politics and open up new thresholds, textual and psychic locations, where transcultural identifications—mestizaje connections—can be made.

Notes

1. The term “biophilic” is Daly's.

2. The phrase “innocent and all-powerful Mother” is Haraway's (“Manifesto,” 218), and the reference to an “irrecoverable origin” is Butler's (Gender Trouble, 78).

3. Throughout this chapter I will capitalize “Woman” when indicating the term's metaphoric character, including both the oppressive and the potentially liberating aspects of the term. Also, in this chapter I will put “feminine” in scare quotes to emphasize the provisional, speculative, and potentially transformative dimensions of Allen's use of the term.

4. According to Butler, “If … it is a life of the body beyond the law or a recovery of the body before the law which then emerges as the normative goal of feminist theory, such a norm effectively takes the focus of feminist theory away from the concrete terms of contemporary cultural struggle” (Gender Trouble, 42).

5. Donna Haraway makes a similar point in “Manifesto for Cyborgs” when she claims that in today's fragmented, postmodern world, “[i]t's not just that ‘god’ is dead; so is the ‘goddess’” (81). She maintains that references to gods, goddesses, or other “transcendental authorizations” lead to restrictive political agendas based on totalizing and imperialistic identity politics that prevent feminists from constructing effective coalitions in the sociopolitical, historical present. According to Haraway, “There is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women.” Indeed, “There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual, scientific discourses and other practices” (72). Thus she challenges feminists to reject all such naturalized identities and develop temporary strategic alliances based on situational choices.

6. Butler summarizes this view in Gender Trouble (3-6).

7. Nancy Morejón is quoted in Lionnet (15-16). As Lionnet notes, mestizaje is incompatible with conventional notions of a singular origin: “In this constant and balanced form of interaction, reciprocal relations prevent the ossification of culture and encourage systematic change and exchange. By responding to such mutations, language reinforces a phenomenon of creative instability in which no ‘pure’ or unitary origin can ever be posited” (16).

8. David Murray describes this commonly invoked holistic worldview: “Rather than seeing the world as made up of different realms of experience to which we apply different methods of understanding and evaluation (religious, scientific, and so on), there is a sense of a fundamental unity underlying the facets of experience, which is regularly characterized in traditional images of circles or living organisms” (88).

9. “Cosmogyny” is Allen's neologism. She explains that “[f]or my purposes, ‘cosmogyny’ is more accurate [than ‘cosmology’]. It connotes an ordered universe arranged in harmony with gynocratic principles” (Grandmothers, xiii-xiv).

10. For a discussion of how Christianized informants de-feminized Native myths, see Linda Danielson's “Storyteller: Grandmother Spider's Web.”

11. Renae Bredin discusses Allen's appropriation of Iroquois stories in “‘Becoming Minor.’”

12. For examples of feminist celebrations of motherhood, see Elinor Gadon's The Once and Future Goddess and Kathryn Rabuzzi's Motherself.

13. Drucilla Cornell points out that another potential danger in mythic images of Woman is the possibility that “[t]he counter-valorization of Woman associated with the re-metaphorization would risk the danger of essentialism and of claiming a special status of one vision of Woman” (Beyond Accommodation 167). To my mind, feminists' re-metaphorized Mother Goddesses often fall into these traps.

14. Allen later reiterates her point: “At Laguna, all entities, human or supernatural, who are functioning in a ritual manner at a high level are called Mother” (Sacred Hoop, 28).

15. In her discussion of Thought Woman, Allen again distinguishes between Thought Woman's creative power and biological reproduction by emphasizing that this creatrix figure's power is not “simply of biology, as modernists tendentiously believe. When Thought Woman brought to life the twin sisters, she did not give birth to them in the biological sense. She sang over the medicine bundles” (Sacred Hoop, 27).

16. As Margaret Whitford notes, in western philosophical traditions “reason, conceptualized as transcendence in practice came to mean transcendence of the feminine, because of the symbolism used” (“Luce Irigaray's Critique,” 111).

17. Athene represents a highly masculinized version of femininity. As Irigaray rather poetically remarks, “A woman—the other—will be asked to set the seal of necessity upon this/her burial. A woman, in truth: of divine reality. A divinity conceived in the head of the God of gods. Well born—without a mother” (Marine Lover, 94). Irigaray discusses Athene and other Greek goddesses in “Veiled Lips” (Marine Lover, 77-119).

18. I explore Irigaray's “spirituality of the body” in greater detail in Chapter 6.

19. Elizabeth Grosz provides a useful overview of western culture's “crisis of reason” in “Bodies and Knowledges.” This “crisis” began in its modern form with Descartes. Today, it manifests itself in a variety of ways in a diverse group of thinkers, including Heidegger, Habermas, Lyotard, Rorty, Jameson, Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze. According to Grosz, “This crisis has been variously described as a crisis of identity, of modernity, of capitalism, of morality, and even of science. It is a crisis of self-validation and methodological self-justification, formulated in different terms within different disciplines and periods; a crisis of reason's inability to rationally know itself; a crisis posed as reason's inability to come outside of itself, to enclose and know itself from the outside: the inadequation of the subject and its other” (189; her emphasis). For other contemporary feminist critiques of traditional masculinist epistemologies see Braidotti's Patterns of Dissonance; Gatens's “Towards a Feminist Philosophy of the Body”; Hodge's “Subject, Body and the Exclusion of Women from Philosophy”; Moi's “Patriarchal Thought and the Drive for Knowledge”; and Whitford's “Luce Irigaray's Critique of Rationality.”

20. It is important to note that this equation of rationality with the masculine occurs on a symbolic level; as Whitford asserts in “Luce Irigaray's Critique of Rationality,” “To describe rationality as male is not to restrict rationality to men” (124).

21. Luce Irigaray, for example, holds doctorates in both linguistics and philosophy. She frequently uses poststructural theory to expose the masculinist bias in conventional systems of knowledge. See, for instance, Speculum of the Other Woman.

22. For another remarkable example of Allen's unconventional research methods, see her assertion that she “was honored to have channeled information” about the Crystal Skull (Grandmothers, 195).

23. The term “neo-Romantic” is Bat-Ami Bar On's. See her brief discussion of “neo-Romantic subjectivity” in “Marginality and Epistemic Privilege.”

24. Muchas gracias a Debra Miller for reminding me about this chapter in Black Feminist Thought.

25. In several essays collected in The Sacred Hoop Allen associates tribal genocide with a shift from matricentric to phallocratic belief systems. See, for example, her assertion in “How the West Was Really Won”: “The genocide practiced against the [North American] tribes … aimed systematically at the dissolution of ritual traditions … and the degradation of the status of women as central to the spiritual and ritual life of the tribes” (195).

26. As Cornell points out, “We cannot escape the hold of the feminine on the unconscious, which is precisely why we work within myth to reinterpret and transform, rather than merely reject. Theoretically, identity may be deconstructed as pure form or structure, as de-sistance of mimesis; but gender identity is, practically, very much in place and enforced by the law” (Beyond Accommodation, 182; her italics).

27. Cornell further asserts that “[w]e re-collect the mythic figures of the past, but as we do so we reimagine them. It is the potential variability of myth that allows us to work within myth, and the significance it offers, so as to reimagine our world and by so doing, to begin to dream of a new one. In myth we do find Woman with a capital letter. These myths, as Lacan indicates, may be rooted in male fantasy, but they cannot, as he would sometimes suggest, be reduced to it” (Beyond Accommodation, 178).

28. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe describe this process of articulation in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.

29. I borrow the term “metaphoric transference” from Cornell: “The metaphors of Woman, in and through which she is performed, are enacted signifiers which, as such, act on us as genderized subjects. But this performance keeps us from ‘getting to the Other’ of the prediscursive ‘reality’ of gender or of sex. Metaphoric transference, in other words, recognizes the constitutive powers of metaphor, but only as metaphor” (Beyond Accommodation, 100).

30. As was already mentioned, Cornell explains that “metaphors of Woman, in and through which she is performed, are enacted signifiers which, as such, act on us as genderized subjects” (Beyond Accommodation, 100).

31. Both Bracher and Cornell maintain that alterations in the social system entail psychic change as well. Bracher, for example, insists that “any real social change must involve not just changes in laws and public policy but alterations in the ideals, desires, and jouissances of a significant number of individual subjects” (73). See also Ross Chambers's Room for Maneuver.