The Indefinite Article: A Body. An Exploration of Relationship Between Language and Body

Abstract

This work explores and speaks experiences of embodied subjectivity/ies, using both the recorded talk of women and autobiographical material. As such it is a work in process, about process, a personal journey, and an intersubjective activity, one in which I consciously seek to include the reader. It is in conversation with two groups of women, and drawing on enabling aspects of feminist poststructuralist and postcolonialist theories, feminist readings of psychoanalytical and developmental theories, that I explore the terrain of relationship between language, body and subjectivity. I find the women's space of production to be located in the space between mothers and children, children and mothers and it is this which I make the focus of my analysis. I ask if we can speak the body differently, if there are ways of constructing alternative discourses to those which would discount, diminish, exclude corporeality's place in theories of experience, or which presume to set male bodies, masquerading as neutral, as a universal standard. And in exploring my own and other women's productions - of self, other, images, text and art, I consider a pivotal mediating role for the body in the spaces and dynamics of transformation.