1. My use of the word feminine reflects the cluster of attributes that have constituted its current cultural construction in the literature. I have no intention of identifying essential characteristics of a feminine nature. If such characteristics exist, I could not distinguish them from what is culturally inscribed. None of this is to imply that there are not temperamental attributes influenced by so-called hard wiring. Whatever these may be, however, they must exist in a range of degrees across genders, reflecting, e.g., the range of hormonal distributions. For my agonistic definition of male/female see "The Scarlet Aitch" in this volume. [BACK]

2. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990). Parts of this essay are in conversation with Gender Trouble, which Butler asserts has been significantly superseded by her subsequent work, e.g., Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), but I've seen no real revision of the particular arguments in Gender Trouble that I'm addressing here. [BACK]

3. Dominique Fourcade has said this at many public occasions and in print. See, e.g., an interview in the literary journal Java, no. 17 (summer/fall 1998): 64–65. [BACK]

4. In Playing and Reality D.W. Winnicott makes this important distinction between imagination as playful "work," i.e., negotiating a reality principle, and fantasy, i.e., daydreaming without consequences. [BACK]

5. This movement from a picture theory of language to a use theory draws on and parallels Wittgenstein's move from the Positivist ambitions of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the Philosophical Investigations' use theory, where language is seen as an activity inextricably intertwined with forms of life. [BACK]

6. See Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Methuen, 1985), 42–49, for an interesting discussion of the "deep realist bias of Anglo-American feminist criticism. An insistence on authenticity and truthful reproduction of the ‘real world’ as the highest literary values." [BACK]

7. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), for a wide-ranging analysis and critique of philosophical consequences of "mirror" theories of knowledge. [BACK]

8. For an important discussion of the way in which the feminist desire for epistemological grounding leads to the rejection of postmodern theory see Jane Flax, "The End of Innocence," in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 445–63. [BACK]

9. See Foucault's discussion in Discipline and Punish (135–69) of the preoccupation with "details" and "little things" that is part of the discipline of "docile bodies." [BACK]

10. I wholly agree with Judith Butler's emphasis on the performative as enactment rather than expression but not its slide into performance—which is, I think, a back slide into an old female trap. [BACK]

11. I owe this idea to Jerome McGann, who, in correspondence, wrote of truth as "troth." [BACK]

12. In fact I want to argue that the most original and vital writing being done by women in this country today has come from a very different sort of literary tradition, one that has to do not with mirroring but with inventive poethical enactments. By the term poethics I refer to a practice of theory and literature that, following Wittgenstein, takes the primary force of language to be the way in which its uses are enactments, rather than portrayals, of forms of life. For discussions of this kind of poetic tradition see, e.g., Marjorie Perloff's Poetics of Indeterminacy, Poetic License, and Radical Artifice; Linda Reinfeld's Language Poetry; Charles Bernstein's Content's Dream and A Poetics; and Peter Quartermain's Disjunctive Poetics. [BACK]

13. All of the leading lights in the received feminist canon have received prizes, awards, tenured professorships, endowed chairs from the literary and academic establishments. They are clearly not seen as fundamentally threatening to business as usual in the masculinized academy. [BACK]

14. I want to distinguish between "patriarchal"—which denotes masculinist authority in the hands of male persons, and which I take to be the closest male equivalent to "feminist"—and "masculine," which denotes traits found in women as well as men. [BACK]

15. See Freud's 1909 paper "Family Romances," which, although one of his briefest essays, securely seals the fate of his progeny to reenact their thralldom to his authority. My reason for conflating Freud and Lacan in a perplexity for women is that the authority of the "law of the father" is already fully established by Freud; Lacan has merely to append the phallic-symbolic with its linguistic permutations. [BACK]

16. This has been noticed as the only space left, in Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, for a feminine not yet under the law of the father to exist. Hence the premie nature of those modes generically identified with the feminine by the psychoanalytic French feminists—pre-Oedipal, precultural, prelinguistic, presymbolic, i.e., generally pre(mature?)—in the semiotic of "jouissance," unable to intermingle with cultural logics or to articulate itself linguistically. It is at this point that one must question the whole psychoanalytic structure, i.e., look outside it, no? Perhaps we must move forward into the "unintelligible" that is pushing at the developmental edge of what can be articulated rather than moving regressively into the prelinguistic, which can—by definition—never be articulated. [BACK]

17. See Peter Gay's revealing discussion of Freud's literary ambitions—with respect to Goethe and Schnitzler—in Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), esp. 51–55. [BACK]

18. That Freud was indeed both intellectually and morally courageous, as well as aesthetically and intellectually vital and brilliant, is reason for admiration but not necessarily persuasion. [BACK]

19. The multiple field of psychoanalysis has yielded other models that are enormously useful. D.W. Winnicott's is only one example. But mainstream feminism depends heavily on generic versions of Freudian-Lacanian theory. [BACK]

20. Kierkegaard, iconic ironist himself, (ironically?) makes the point that irony is necessary to productive critique but is not itself a move to a new form or stage of development. [BACK]

21. For an analysis of ancient Greek constructions of the feminine, and their movement from metaphor to metonymy, see Page duBois, Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Janet Wolff writes interestingly of modernist and postmodernist constructions of the feminine in her Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). [BACK]

22. Italics here and in the two subsequent quotations are mine. [BACK]

23. My guess is that there were many women who ventured to write in experimentally creative feminine forms but that they were quickly silenced by the authoritative voices (parents, teachers, husbands …) around them: "This is incoherent and confused!" It certainly still happens today. [BACK]

24. This is a radical shift in the gendered demographics of experimental poetry that directly reflects societywide shifts in gendered demographics following WW II—medical and civil rights developments that made it possible for women to take control of their reproductive processes. [BACK]

25. In a more recent anthology of experimental poetry, Dennis Barone and Peter Ganick's The Art of Practice, twenty-three of the forty-five poets included

26. In post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory jouissance is the literal "je ne sais quois" experience of pre-Oedipal sensual pleasures. It is thought to be lost to direct articulation since its source is presymbolic and prelinguistic. It is also widely identified with the feminine, although Kristeva stresses that it has been experienced by, and is therefore available to, both men and women. [BACK]

27. This fact is lost to most linguistic scientists, which may be the reason why French psychoanalytic theories of language, with their reliance on Saussure, consign language to a rationalist symbolic realm. [BACK]

28. Tardos's text engages with a representative four (English, French, German, Hungarian) of the multiplicity of languages that articulate our globe, creating a web structure of cross-linguistic, intercultural "unintelligibility" that acts as a field of generous and suggestive semantic play. [BACK]