Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

OUT OF OBLIVION 145
But Deconstructor of what Why, of the female body, the skins to which Irigaray
and Cixous so primitively cling. A methodology, indeed a technology which claims
to lift identity right off the skin, the body, that disruptive, contingent, uncontrollable
matter whose due date is death. Mind will no longer need to make reference to body
in its identity claims; unchained at last from the sensations and limitations of the
flesh. Poovey is trapped in a notion that women need to be liberated from their
biology. She argues that binary categories are based on anatomical categories and
therefore anatomy must be abolished, deconstructed/dissected in order to achieve the
“social liberation of the concept from its natural ‘referent’” (1988, p. 59). It is
deconstruction and the new reproductive technologies 44 which will reorganize the
individual (1988, p. 60). Purged of the female procreative body by an operation of
reversal (the scientist becomes genetrix), displacement (through extrauterine
pregnancy) and indetermination (the manipulation and exchangeability of genetic
material); freed from the fixed identity of our bodies, 45 “we” can float like
transcendental signifiers in space ships, extraterrestrial self-made men at last. The
fault lay in our genes! Our birth which fixed our being had ended our becoming.
The epistemological break is the recognition of the significance of reproduction,
of women, and our disruption of reified patriarchal discourse with a liberatory
political practice. Women can only smash a Heloise-like relationship to knowledge
and philosophy, by a clear and equivocal break with the Master. Kiss Abelard
goodbye. Refuse the education of our sense and senses by and to the phallus and
redirect female desire away from paranoid masculine somatophobia. Beware now
the hand around our wrists as we open the door, the tears and threats, the anger and
accusations; the fierce, insidious, ritual humiliation, and the violence of romantic
colonization working to subvert, deny and corrupt all heretical and sensual chastity,
all desire for diverse, integral, collective female presence. The men in the Master’s
House say, “Where do you think you are going Why are you always doing this to
me” Then, “How dare you! Manhater! What you really need is a man!” Thus are we
confronted with the most formidable of opponents: Prince Charming.
44. In contrast, see the journal Issues in Reproductive and Genetic Engineering Journal of
International Feminist Analysis; and the work by Rita Arditti, Gena Corea, Jalna Hanmer, Renate
Klein, Janice Raymond and others active in the Feminist International Network for Resistance to
Reproductive and Genetic Engineering. Their work is available in the following sources: Arditti
et al., eds. (1984), Corea (1985a), Corea et al. (1985b), Hawthorne and Klein, eds., (1991), Angels of
Power and other reproductive creations, Melbourne, Spinifex Press; Renate Klein et al. (1991) RU
486: Misconceptions, Myths and Morals, Melbourne, Spinifex Press.
45. In the Épreuves d’écriture assembled by the exhibition, Les Immatériaux, Derridean Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe calls maternity “the condition for the possibility of death” (1985, p. 128). Derrida
simply defines it as “Place of the saintly, infinite perversity. Takes its sublime omnipotence from
being opposed to nothing” (1985, p. 128). Christine Buci-Glucksmann provides the Kristeva/Athena
type of denunciation in her definition of maternity: “Chasm, chaos, abyss, devouring sex or paradise
lost: maternity is the fantasmic origin where the sexual and the biological coincide, where the female
desire is destined, to be reconquered. ‘To give birth to’ institutes a dual and archaic relationship, a
dangerous and desired proximity, which mother and children must renounce in order to exist” (1985,
p. 128). Parisian feminists Luce Irigaray, Anne-Marie de Vilaine and Suzanne Blaise were not
numbered among the luminaries invited to pronounce on maternity for the exhibit.