Date: Thu, 26 Oct 1995 11:21:44 -0400 (EDT)
From: Stella Gaon <sgaon-AT-oise.on.ca>
Subject: Re: identity issues/


	Diane,

	I'm not familiar with Frigga Haug's work, but I'm pretty sure that
Dorothy Smith won't be much help if you want to consider "the body as a
text which, when read critically/politically, produces difference."
Smith's concept is much more material than what (I think) you have in mind
here; she used to say "document" before she started to use the term
"text," and that should give you a clearer idea about what she means.
	In general, I have found that those feminists thinking through the
textual dimensions of bodies are working almost exclusively in the
continental tradition.  And, in particular, Julia Kristeva's "Women's
Time" was a crucial piece for my own thinking on these questions. 
("Women's Time" was first translated by Alice Jardine and Harry Blake in
_Signs_ vol. 7, no 1, Autumn 1981). Also, Judith Butler's _Bodies That
Matter_ (Routledge, 1993) is an important (and much more current)
intervention into the debate about the textuality of the body and the
political issues related to it. Butler - like Kristeva, Irigaray, and a
number of other french feminists - is also working (critically, that is)
with Derridean deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis. 
	I hope this helps you somewhat!

Stella Gaon Department of History and Philosophy, Ontario Institute for
Studies in Education/University of Toronto


Diane Celia Hodges wrote:

> in the meantime, I am writing about identity/politics,
> and am particularly interested in the discursive self,
> although, as I write below,
> I am struggling with how to do this in a way which
> doesn't stabilize or fix "women" as a category:

> I am borrowing Frigga Haug's (1986) use of memory-work 
> and Dorothy Smith's counter-sociology to construct a
> frame which enables a reading of multiplicity

> anyone familiar with Judith Butler's work on "queering"
> ontology?
> 



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