Randi Gressgård

The Veiled Muslim, the Anorexic and the Transsexual What Do They Have in Common?

The Muslim woman wearing the veil, the female anorexic and the from-male-to-female transsexual constitute three different figures that, despite their striking differences, have a common symbolic ground. By focusing on the similarity between the veiled woman and the other two figures, the article sheds a different light on the debate about the Muslim veil in western societies. It is argued that the western notion of woman is based on a structural ambivalence of transcendence and immanence. On the one hand, woman is expected to be liberated, in control and active in public life and in all ways just as free as the man, on the other she represents a deficiency compared to the man; it is expected of her that she takes up a complementary, subordinate position in relation to the man. The subordinate position, however, is seldom pronounced. Officially, the gender hierarchy is not a part of egalitarian societies, that is, the modern configuration that formally rejects a hierarchical worldview. Is this the reason why the three figures are regarded as pathological? Does their way of demonstrating extraordinary transcendence combined with extraordinary immanence make them monstrous? KEY WORDS body-spirit dualism ◆ gender construction ◆ hierarchy ◆ modern ambivalence ◆ the monstrous ◆ symbolic structures

The Muslim woman wearing the veil, the female anorexic and the frommale-to-female transsexual constitute three different figures that apparently do not have much in common. However, beneath the surface, on the structural level, a striking similarity is concealed. I approach the structural homology by asking what is special about these three figures. The purpose is to shed a different light on the debate about the Muslim veil.

Ever since France suggested a statutory prohibition against religious

symbols in schools, the debate about the Muslim veil has gained momentum in western countries. 1 What is it about this garment that gives rise to such ferocious debate and makes democratic states enact statutory prohibitions against it? THE TRADITIONAL SUBORDINATION OF WOMEN The veil is by many associated with a traditional subordination of women. Several Muslim women, however, and especially those having grown up in western societies, are of the opinion that the veil liberates them from the sexualized gaze of men [START_REF] Jacobsen | Tilhørighetens mange former. Unge Muslimer i Norge [The Many Forms of Belonging: Young Muslims in Norway[END_REF][START_REF] Roald | Women in Islam: The Western Experience[END_REF]. The argument is that the veil conceals the gender and sexual dimensions, and that they therefore gain respect as human beings. In this way, in stark contrast to the arguments of its opponents, the idea of human equality or equal dignity is attached to the veil.

Regardless of position in the debate, the arguments seem to presuppose a common symbolic ground: the idea of a division between human universality and human specificity. On the one hand, it is a matter of an abstract, universal human being, without any kinds of social particularities; on the other, it is a matter of concrete human beings, with particular qualities and attributes, formed by the society and culture of which they are a part. This structural ambivalence regarding the view on humankind can be found within different historical epochs within both western and eastern ways of thinking.

The mere idea of human abstractness and universality constitutes a typically non-modern figure of thought, attached to the notion of a hierarchical order. In accordance with Louis Dumont (1970: 239ff.), we may present the hierarchy as follows: First God creates Adam, the undifferentiated man, the prototype of 'mankind'. Thereupon he creates Eve from Adam's rib as the second sex. Thus Adam and Eve appear as prototypes of the two sexes. However, due to this operation, Adam has changed identity; from being undifferentiated, universally human, he has become a distinct human being -a male. On the other hand, a being has appeared -woman -who is both a member of the human species and different from the main representative of this species. Hence, on a first level, man and woman are identical, whereas on a second level, woman is the contrary of man and takes up a second, subordinate position.

The subject is universal in the sense of being identical to itself and anybody else; it is an eternal, undifferentiated, indeterminate, indistinct absolute -in accordance with a metaphysical ideal of purity or sacredness. The order of society and nature, on the other hand, is earthly, differentiated and distinct. As soon as Adam and Eve eat from the tree of life, the world of distinctions is an irrevocable fact. This conception of the fall of man from divine grace is an important mythical structure, informing not only religious narratives, but also western subjectivity in general and most of the political ideologies (grand narratives) of western culture.

According to the occidental thought traditions, influenced by the philosophy of classical antiquity and Christianity, the notion of the universal human being is inextricably linked to the notion of the human spirit, as it is by virtue of being spiritual, distinct from physical, bodily existence, that human beings may be imagined as members of the human species. It is, in other words, because of their spiritual capacity that human beings are distinguished from the rest of nature. This means that the category 'human being', based on the universal identity of the human subject, is considered within the framework of dualism, e.g. the distinction between matter and spirit, body and soul, distinctions typical of religion and philosophy in western cultures (Dumont, 1970: 263). A chain of subordination goes from God to the universal, immortal human spirit and onward from the spirit to the mortal body. And God, through the spirit, is -as the creation story indicates -linked to the gender of the subject (Irigaray, 2004: 178), associated more with the man than with the woman. Woman does not have the same privileged divine filiation as man, since she is thought of as more hampered by, and subordinated to, limitations associated with mortal, earthly life and nature in particular.

When universality constitutes the utopian horizon, any specificity will necessarily appear as a lack to be overcome, insofar as any particular qualities reveal the gap between the universal, undifferentiated subject and the autonomous, differentiated subject, or -more specificallybetween the particular cultural identity and a universal civic identity (Lyotard, 1992: 45). Gender, in particular, is seen as the subject's failure to achieve the full identity of (civilized) man (Salecl, cited in Donald, 1996: 186; see also [START_REF] Irigaray | Key Writings[END_REF], as woman is seen as subjected to the immanent, the physical, immediately discernible aspects of being a human animal (Clack, 2002: 7), which comprise those of the body, the natural, the bestial, the raw, the wild, etc. (see [START_REF] Butler | Gender Trouble[END_REF][START_REF] Grosz | Volatile Bodies[END_REF][START_REF] Lloyd | The Man of Reason: 'Male' and 'Female' in Western Philosophy[END_REF][START_REF] Ortner | Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture[END_REF].

Seen in this way, the distinction between spiritual universality and bodily distinctness constitutes an essential ambiguity or duality in the subject, raising the question of how the human subject can be universal (identical to itself and all others) and specific/autonomous (unique or different from all others) at the same time. As indicated earlier, modern ideologies seem to deal with the gap between universality and specificity/autonomy by incorporating the universal subject -the idea of the abstract man -into the autonomous male bourgeois subject (e.g. [START_REF] Braidotti | Patterns of Dissonance[END_REF][START_REF] Mosse | Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe[END_REF]. 2 In his capacity of transcending the basic physical facts of human existence, the autonomous, bourgeois man becomes a whole, universal human being, not via a religious, ascetic way of life, but via culture and intellectual life -in a civilizing process. 3 The body, being subjugated to the spirit, acquires a symbolic meaning through mirroring the spirit. This scheme may translate into the following motto: 'a sound mind in a sound body' (Juvenal's Satires 10.356), whereas an impure body -a body showing, for instance, traces of improper behaviour -is often considered to bear witness to a bad mind, or a mind that (temporarily) has lost control over the body (e.g. [START_REF] Norman | A Sound Family Makes a Sound State: Ideology and Upbringing in a German Village[END_REF]. The hierarchy has become reversed; the body has taken command of the mind.

Against this background, we may -in addition to modern subjectivity and ideologies -understand religiously motivated traditions of covering up the female body as well as a number of other practices, such as fasting and asceticism, related to the body. Often food is associated with desire, and hence fasting becomes an aspect of asceticism. According to Annemarie Schimmel (1997: 73), religions characterized by an ascetic strain operate with more or less negative images of women, because it is they who symbolize lust and desire. 4 It is a general notion -be it secular or religious -that women are more chaotic and blurred in comparison to men, and that they need strict boundaries and male control (Økland, 2002: 144).

THE HIERARCHICAL EGALITARIAN ORDER

As pointed out, the symbolic hierarchical structure is not reserved for other epochs and other cultures; it is also operative -although indirectly -within contemporary western, egalitarian societies, that is, within the modern configuration that formally rejects a hierarchical structure [START_REF] Dumont | Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective[END_REF]. Hierarchy is embedded in the very heart of the modern, egalitarian order, insofar as the idea that all human beings are equal is based on the image of the universal subject, the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human [START_REF] Agamben | Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life[END_REF][START_REF] Arendt | The Origins of Totalitarianism[END_REF], in the same way that Christianity, relating to the notion of the universal human spirit, above particular bodies, is based on the image of an almighty God hovering above particular human beings. In that sense, human equalityfollowing from the conception of all humans as identical when abstracted from the matter/body -presupposes hierarchy, with man being in cahoots with the universal human spirit against woman and the body. So, as long as equality bears on the spirit, in hierarchical opposition to the body, equality bears on a hierarchical, gendered configuration.

This scheme inevitably manifests itself in a structural ambivalence of the construction of woman. Simone de [START_REF] De Beauvoir | The Second Sex[END_REF], confirming this symbolic structure, describes the ambivalence as a contradiction between being human and being feminine. On the one hand, the woman is expected to be transcendent (human) on par with the man. This means that she is expected to be modern, liberated, in control, active in public life, and in all ways just as free as the man: a free subjectivity defining its individual projects. On the other hand, the woman represents a deficiency compared to the man, which associates her to immanence. As an Other it is expected of her that she is the object for the male subject: that she is sexually available, that she supports the existing state of affairs connected to family, kin and private relations; in short, that she possesses a generic function and takes up a complementary, subordinate position in relation to the man.

The subordinate position of women, however, is hardly ever pronounced, and when it is pointed out, it is often justified by reference to personal solutions or pure love, and it is represented as a result of free individual choice [START_REF] Haavind | Makt og kjaerlighet i ekteskapet' [Power and Love in Marriage[END_REF]. One example of women's structural ambivalence is found in Lizett U. [START_REF] Skottestad | Balansekunst: En analyse av hvordan en gruppe kvinner og kirurger redegjør for valg av brystforstørrelse[END_REF] study of women who have undergone plastic surgery to enlarge their breasts. The study shows that the women who have gone through cosmetic surgery of this kind account for their choice by referring to the wish for a visible female facade that does not decay. At the same time, they desire respect and dignity as human beings, something that conspicuously big implants exclude (because big implants make the gender stand out). All the women emphasize that the choice was entirely their own without pressure from husbands or fiancés.

Similar reflections are found among women of an immigrant background in western countries. Several studies show that these women, often expressing it as 'maintaining the best of two cultures', wish to achieve balance between liberation and subordination. A study by Annick Prieur (2002: 161ff.) shows that for young immigrant women in Norway their host country is to be preferred with respect to the public sphere, and the country of origin as to the private sphere. They appreciate individual freedom and egalitarian gender relations together with an appreciation of traditional family life, associated with the authority of their parents and other elders. (The consideration towards the family implies that the choice of spouses and the sexual morals of women cannot be a matter of individual and free personal choice.)

Both examples can be seen as a matter of ambivalence between transcendence and immanence, where transcendence is understood in terms of liberation, freedom, equality and being in control, while immanence means subordination, submission and constraint.

The point in question is what happens when freedom and control are not balanced by submission -when the ambivalence between transcendence and immanence is striking? What happens when some women use their freedom to choose submission instead, that is, when someone freely chooses lack of freedom? A first answer is that the choices are not accepted by the surrounding world. Questions are raised as to the validity of the freedom of choice, and the independence of the actors is disputed. Often it is assumed that they act under the influence of 'false consciousness', not knowing their own good, as it were [START_REF] Gressgård | Questions of Gender in a Multicultural Society[END_REF]. 5 A more substantial answer could be that the surrounding world reacts because the women's ambivalence appears threatening to the system of order when it becomes too visible. The ultimate ambivalence, consisting of complete freedom and control combined with complete submission, contributes to the demonstration of a gendered hierarchical structure of supremacy and subordination, and that creates unrest within a cultural logic founded on a rejection of a hierarchical worldview. Here we are on the track to the similarity between the Muslim woman wearing the veil, the female anorexic and the from-male-to-female transsexual.

THE VEILED WOMAN

The idea of the Muslim veil as suppressive of women is well established in western societies. According to Leila Ahmed (1992: 152), western opposition to veiled women may be traced back to colonial times. The discourse on Islam during colonial times indicated that the religion as such was suppressing women, and that the veil, along with the segregation of the sexes, contributed to a reinforcement of suppression. The veil was established as the strongest sign of the inferiority of Muslim countries. It symbolized both suppression of women and the backwardness of Muslim countries, in contrast to the civilized West. (This was the case in the colonial period despite the fact that the western countries, England among them, were deeply patriarchal and suppressive of women, and that Queen Victoria, on many occasions, wore a veil herself.)

Needless to say, this opposition between a liberating West and a suppressive East structures the recent debates about the veil. 6 (The opposition is operative despite the lack of a basis for claiming that the veil entails suppression, and that, on the other hand, western societies are just with respect to gender. The main object of the opposition seems to be the upholding of an egalitarian self-image.) However, what happens when Muslim women who are living in western democratic societies use feminist arguments, emphasize that wearing the veil is liberating, and insist on their freedom to choose? Given the well-established notion that the veil is suppressive, Muslim women's insistence that the veil is liberating, seems to create major confusion among the majority population. In order to understand the malaise that the veil arouses, we have to take as a starting point the western cultural tradition of thought as described earlier.

Here it appears that veiled women take the ambivalence of modern women to its utmost limits. In consonance with the western cultural ideal of transcendence of immanence towards the abstract human being and universal equality among humans, Muslim women use arguments of freedom, control and liberation to explain and legitimize the concealment of those parts of the body that are assumed to arouse the lust of men. As they see it, human equality and dignity is accentuated by the liberation from the sexual gaze of men (e.g. Roald, 2001: 288ff.). 7 Seen from a western cultural perspective, however, what happens in these cases is that transcendence towards a universal human being strikes back with full force. The reason is that during the process of desexualizing or disembodying themselves, the women -from a western point of view -accentuate those bodily attributes supposed to be hidden. As has been pointed out, in western societies the veil is considered an almost unambiguous symbol of women's subordination. At any rate, the veil is incompatible with the abstract, universal human being. So regardless of what the veil-wearing woman might herself think, she does not appear as transcendent, with the universal human subject having been incorporated into her specificity or autonomy. 8 Her gender attributes make transcendence and immanence go hand in hand; control and freedom are accompanied by submission. It must also be added that her cultural difference strengthens the distance to the universal human being, as one can hardly get further away from the modern bourgeois ideal of man (see [START_REF] Ahmed | Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of Modern Debate[END_REF]. Thus the deficiencies of the Muslim woman, when compared to the idea of human universality, become overly manifest. It is here that the malaise arises, because suddenly the veiled Muslim becomes a parody of the western woman. The decisive point is that the Muslim woman does not achieve a sufficient balance between liberation and submission the way most western women do, in order to keep the hierarchical structure adequately at bay. Instead, she lives it out completely, and lays bare the symbolic framework of the modern construction of women.

THE FASTING MEDIAEVAL WOMAN AND THE MODERN ANOREXIC

In her book Den guddommelige anoreksi (Divine Anorexia), Monica [START_REF] Wegling | Den guddommelige anoreksi[END_REF] compares modern female anorexics with fasting female Christian mystics of the Middle Ages. Her focus is on the structural homology between the fasting projects of the two epochs, where she argues that modern anorexia constitutes a variant of Christian asceticism of premodern times. 9 As structural continuity is also my concern, I primarily relate to her text.

Christian women of the Middle Ages fasted in order to get closer to God; it was a matter of becoming one with the Passion of Christ. According to Caroline W. Bynum (1987: 179), the female body was an image for a God who died to give birth to the world and bled to feed all souls. Motherliness was used as a characterization of the care and love that the soul received from God, and Jesus was looked upon as a life-giving mother, which explains why the bleeding wounds of Christ were associated with food; why Christ was perceived as a mother figure due to bleeding, feeding and nursing. More generally, it explains why it was possible to associate the wounds of Christ with the woman's body and woman with the Eucharist. The Eucharist served as a reminder of the suffering body of Christ, and gradually hunger became a preparation for the Lord's Supper, insofar as it expressed a hunger or longing for God, but also for the Passion of Christ. From a perspective such as this, food becomes more than a symbol, as food really turns into God. To eat God was the same as becoming the suffering body oneself; it was imitatio Christi (Wegling, 2002: 26). Uli Linke (1999: 137) claims that to eat God was becoming what the female symbolized: flesh, blood, nurture, suffering and regeneration.

For some female mystics, abstinence and the Eucharist constituted the essence of religious practice. Those who fasted gained honour and admiration by taking upon themselves the sins of humankind and doing penance. Also, they were considered particularly strong in the faith (Wegling, 2002: 22). Femininity, then, was both a means and an end, in that the worshipping women both chose as their starting point and became what woman symbolized, above all suffering. The divine was, in a sense, incorporated into the female body. At the same time, however, the fast constituted a suppression of the female body and its functions. Women who through fasting employed their female (bodily) qualities in order to serve God were said to bleed in a different way and to eject other kinds of bodily fluids. According to Linke (1999: 145), as part of their union with God, their behaviours were directed towards shutting off menstruation, excretion and other ordinary physical functions. Due to the fact that the body tied the spirit to the earth, and because eating strengthened this human connection to the earth, abstinence from food was regarded as the liberation of the spirit from the things of this world (Wegling, 2002: 52). In this sense, we may see it as a transcendence of immanence. However, because it happened to be femininity that was taken into the service of transcendence, and because the main goal was to affirm the Passion of Christ through an emphasis on his human/feminine sides (flesh, blood, nurture, suffering and regeneration), those who fasted fell back into immanence. For the mediaeval women, therefore, transcendence goes hand in hand with immanence, and both are taken to their utmost consequence. Wegling (2002: 176) finds the connection to female anorexics of today in the ascetic ideal of declining temptations, and in its connection to strength and control. She emphasizes that modern anorexia is not only a matter of the body, but also -as in the Middle Ages -a matter of purification, purity, conscience and control. Both the modern and the non-modern fasters have brought moderation out of proportion by wanting to raise themselves above the limitations imposed by the perishable body. At the same time, she points out, they are dependent on that very same body to succeed (Wegling, 2002: 56).

The modern anorexic may triumph at the expense of her surroundings' addiction to pleasure as long as she does not show any signs of weakness, that is, as long as she appears controlled and of strong character. But at the very moment strength disappears, she will -seen from her surroundings -move from being the incarnation of control to losing it. From being completely transcendent she has collapsed into immanence.

The modern anorexic's lack of status is explained by the fact that we live in a society where enchantment is lost and only logically convincing arguments are considered viable (Wegling, 2002: 177). Accordingly, the anorexic is neither understood nor tolerated. (This in contrast to hunger strikers, who have a worthy cause and rationale of what they do.) Anorexia-death is without meaning, because we have forgotten its origins (Wegling, 2002: 182).

As already shown, the mediaeval ascetic emphasized the earthly character of the body as a means to reach God. The body constituted a physical obstacle that had to be transcended in order to reach the spiritual world, but thus it also provided her with the necessary help to get where she wanted (Wegling, 2002: 184). Because the goals of the mediaeval woman lay beyond this world, she could die without this representing any contrast to control and transcendence. In contrast, the modern anorexic has lost in her attempt of transcendence long before death occurs. She is not applauded on her way to death, and the reason is that death -and the way to get there -is associated with loss of control and freedom.

In modern society, eternity is usually not assumed to be achieved through dying, but by living in certain ways. This is related to the fact that the undifferentiated, eternal dimension -the universal subject -is incorporated into the autonomous, bourgeois man -a specific ideal of manliness. As demonstrated earlier, transcendence is a matter of distancing oneself from what may be deficient in relation to this ideal, everything and everybody that mark gaps on the way to perfection. Among these are found the uncontrolled anorexic woman. Jorun Solheim's (1998) analysis of female anorexia draws in the same direction, although with a different focus (her focus is on the anorexic's relationship to her parents). Solheim claims that the anorexic's fanatical concern with purity, and the ruthless pursuit of perfection, points towards the anorexic girl's exaggerated identification with the image of the father. She wants to be perfect and pure, as opposed to deficient and impure, along the lines of the ideal male condition. In this, Solheim sees an obvious similarity to the women of the Middle Ages who fasted in order to get closer to eternity or divinity, in contrast to bodily femininity (Solheim, 1998: 114ff.). Within the emotional climate of the anorexic, femininity is a burden; it is heavy and earthly, while she wants to be free. Solheim states that the anorexic body symbolizes freedom from the burden of the bodily-determined fate of femininity (Solheim, 1998: 115). Solheim (1998: 116) also emphasizes another important aspect of modern anorexia: what may represent liberation to women, may, from a male point of view, represent a neutralization and undermining of the strength of women (symbolized by the mighty mother figure). Perceived this way, modern, female anorexia can be understood as an escape from a form of sexual dualism that incarnates femininity as body, flesh, food and mother (cf. the mediaeval image of woman), but which, in its denial of this image of woman, reproduces the same dualism along the opposite pole. It raises masculinity to become the ideal. Solheim concludes that in the last instance, on its most general and fundamental level, the anorexic message may be read as follows: you shall never be free and perfect, you may never be yourself in a woman's body. The more the woman tries to transcend, it seems, the more her attempts are bound to strike back into immanence. As the standard for evaluation is defined by a certain male ideal, the result is given: as 'different', one is judged in advance. Any attempt to live up to the ideal will end up in an accentuation of deficiency.

The fact that transcendence towards universality is incorporated into a specific entity that constitutes a particular ideal and defines a particular standard to live up to, makes it hard to catch sight of the underlying metaphysical notion of totality and hierarchy. Apparently society is based on egalitarianism, but nevertheless, underneath lies hidden a non-modern, hierarchical symbolic structure. We may conclude that the anorexic takes the consequences of living as a woman in such a society. The apprehension of this, however, implies that we recognize the non-modern configuration on which the hierarchical structure is based, and that is evidently more than society can bear.

THE TRANSSEXUAL

Concerning liberation, the transsexual who changes from being a man into becoming a woman goes in the opposite direction to the two other figures. The project of the transsexual is not liberating in the sense of transcending immanence, but in the sense of transgression -from one sex to the other. A common trait is that liberation is a matter of becoming complete as opposed to being divided between body and spirit. Only, in this case it is a matter of becoming one sex or one gender, and not of becoming a human being liberated from bodily attributes. However, as is the case with the Muslim and the anorexic, here also the hierarchical division between body and spirit imposes a fundamental symbolic structure. In the case of transsexuality the division becomes particularly visible, since the starting point is that the body is to such a small extent in harmony with the spirit, that it is necessary to carry out dramatic surgical intervention. Thus the transsexual not only demonstrates the hierarchical division between body and spirit, but also that the spirit is gendered, which means that a female spirit demands a female body, and correspondingly, a male spirit demands a male body. I refer to Tordis [START_REF] Borchgrevink | Kjaerlighetens Diktatur. Kjønn, arbeidsdeling og modernitet [The Dictatorship of Love: Sex, Division of Labour and Modernity[END_REF] book Kjaerlighetens Diktatur. Kjønn, arbeidsdeling og modernitet (The Dictatorship of Love: Sex, Division of Labour and Modernity) in order to illuminate what transsexuality can tell us about the modern configuration, or more precisely, about the relationship between liberation and submission.

Borchgrevink emphasizes that transsexuality is a matter of creating oneself as complete, to become self-identical, which implies that the body is adapted to the spirit. The body is a means for giving the 'head' what the 'head' legitimately demands, she maintains (Borchgrevink, 1987: 57). In this sense -of voluntarily altering one's body -transsexuality comprises a central aspect of freedom of choice, control, responsibility and intention. Borchgrevink (1987: 97) finds that transsexuals choose more radically than most people do.

But what do they choose? According to Borchgrevink, the transsexual 'person' ought to be so restlessly engaged in the definition of the sex he or she wishes to belong to, that the surroundings do not even notice that a change has occurred (Borchgrevink, 1987: 60). For this reason the transsexual is subjected to a psychiatric examination, before the operation, during which it is decided whether he or she is able to act convincingly as the 'new' gender, or whether he or she runs the risk of being disclosed. Borchgrevink (1987: 62) argues that doctors define their success by the extent to which the transsexual is able to adapt to common gender norms. With that, we touch upon perhaps the most central aspect of from-maleto-female transsexuality, because given the narrow needle's eye, the person in question has no other choice than to make femininity appear as convincing as possible, which means living up to a stereotypical gender role (see Greer, 1999: 65). Borchgrevink (1987: 82) points out that various studies show that transsexuals' elaboration of themselves as social persons is more in accordance with what 'culture expects' of men and women, than what goes for people at large.

There is little doubt that the qualities that are -or have to be -emphasized define the women in a subordinate position. Transsexual men identify themselves as women by being passive, care oriented, emotional and 'intuitive' (Borchgrevink, 1987: 83). Also, occupational preferences appear to be unambiguous: secretary, waitress, hairdresser, showbusiness and so on. (And they seem to have a strong wish for earning less than men.) Acceptance of and adaptation to the gender-divided labour market is actually a condition for being recommended for surgery; it is considered as 'high motivation'. However, the most highly prioritized 'occupational preference' is that of housewife (married, being provided for, at home) (Borchgrevink, 1987: 84-5). The clinics even offer education in living as the opposite sex, where it is taught how to make up, how to dress properly, how to walk and sit properly, and correct intercourse positions (Borchgrevink, 1987: 87). In this way, bordering on caricature, transsexuals are prepared for reproducing the symbolic pattern of gender roles.

Borchgrevink's material reveals that for the sex operated, freedom of choice and liberation goes hand in hand with submission and confinement. Like the Muslim and the anorexic, the transsexual makes a choice that contributes to marking the hierarchical inequality between masculinity and femininity. Just as explicitly as the others, if not more, the transsexual demonstrates that femininity is complementary to masculinity, and that femininity implies submission. The 'fact' that women are doomed to live in immanence is confirmed, and that is not only because of the body, but most of all because of the spirit. The hierarchy is both the source and the result of transsexuality.

We may say that, as with the two other figures, the transsexual uses freedom of choice to choose submission. There is, however, a significant difference here, because in this case we can attach choice and control directly to masculinity (before the operation) and submission directly to femininity (after the operation). Hence, the connection between masculinity and transcendence and femininity and immanence becomes exceptionally clear. The transsexual demonstrates an extraordinary transcendence combined with an extraordinary immanence.

THE MONSTROUS

In each way, the Muslim wearing the veil, the female anorexic and the from-man-to-woman transsexual demonstrate a structural ambivalence of transcendence and immanence attached to the notion of woman, within a hierarchical order. And with that, the three figures make visible the hierarchy on which the modern, egalitarian understanding of society is based, and thereby strike the society where it is most vulnerable.

We may say that their demonstrative character makes the three figures monstrous, if we look at Latin meaning of the word. Monster/monstrum is primarily an object of display, according to Rosi [START_REF] Braidotti | Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory[END_REF][START_REF] Braidotti | Signs of Wonder and Traces of Doubt: On Teratology and Embodied Differences[END_REF]. She points out that the monster de-monstrates God's will, and monstrum can be associated with moneo, which means to warn. Furthermore, the monster is always ambivalent in that it evokes both horror and fascination, and finally, the monster is associated with excess, lack and displacement in relation to something else, namely the normal human being. In that sense, the monster is in a liminal position, contributing to uphold the dominant view of subjectivity.

The monstrous can be seen as effects of, and constitutive of, certain discursive practices directed at re-establishing balance and recreating order by returning the monster figures to the fold. It happens by turning them into pathologies, which explains why the three figures, in respective ways, are turned into victims and thereby cut off from freedom of choice and control. In the first case it occurs through an 'us-them' discourse, where the veiled woman is ascribed the role as an Other in a cultural sense, while attention is diverted from the dominant cultural order. In the second case, it occurs through a 'healthy-sick' discourse, where the anorexic woman is given a diagnosis, while the surrounding society is given a clean bill of health. In the third case, we witness a 'normal-deviant' discourse, where the transsexual is constituted as deviant in a psychiatric sense, while the normality of the surrounding society is affirmed (see [START_REF] Sirnes | Alt som er fast, fordamper?" Normalitet og identitet i endring[END_REF][START_REF] Solvang | The Emergence of an Us and Them Discourse in Disability Theory[END_REF]. But despite all attempts to control the abnormal, it will not disappear, insofar as it is constituted by, and constitutive of, normality. As Braidotti (1996: 150) makes clear, the monster is always going to get us.

NOTES

I would like to thank Henrik Kjaerum for his careful work on the translation, and Cathrine Egeland, Yngve Lithman, Christine Jacobsen and the two referees for their valuable comments.

1.

The debate about the Muslim veil (hijab) started in France in 1989, when three girls were expelled from a school in Creil outside Paris, after refusing to unveil. But the debate is not confined to France. It takes place in many countries, and it has a long history, as is elaborated in the text.

2.

The gap is to be overcome by a civilizing process oriented towards universal subjectivity as the basis for an inclusive humanity. Thus modern ideologies, like the liberal and republican, are oriented towards a utopian goal that does not allow any autonomy (since the goal is indistinct or undifferentiated). This is only half the truth, however, because, as indicated, the ideal of universality does not require autonomy as such to be eliminated, as long as the autonomous citizen is the object of the civilizing process. Autonomy is both the starting point and the end; as starting point autonomy is uncivilized, as an end it is civilized (Gressgård, 2002). Only the civilized (male) autonomous subject can possess or display the attributes required of the equal human being, the mature citizen (see Arendt, 1973: 300-2;Dean, 1999: 134-5, 146), and as an ideal human being, he sets the standards for civilization. It is, in other words, the incorporation of the universal subject into the autonomous subject that makes it possible for a certain culture to represent humanity as a whole. Along these lines, [START_REF] Dumont | Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective[END_REF] notes that the German nation becomes the exemplary example of humanity, a perfect incorporation of a universal idea. His reference is the political philosopher Fichte, who adopts the current stereotypes of the excellence of the German character in order to state a hierarchy among peoples in the name of the very value of universalism (Dumont, 1996: 123). In Dumont's subsequent comparison of German and French ideology, he concludes that the Germans saw themselves as superior qua Germans, while the French consciously postulated only the superiority of the universalist culture, but identified with it so naively that they looked on themselves as the educators of mankind (Dumont, 1996: 131; see also [START_REF] Barthes | Mythologies[END_REF].

3.

It is particularly the Kantian philosophical tradition that is associated with 'secular' transcendence, where the human spiritual, intelligible world stands in contrast to the physical world's causal relations, and this opposition corresponds to the moral distinction between duty and inclination. Duty denotes freedom, and is achieved by controlling one's bodily impulses and preferences, with our actions being directed towards higher ideals and values. This is a modern, idealist concept of freedom. But the need for distancing oneself from the animal aspects of life can also be found in the philosophy of Plato, and later Augustin, where the life of the mind is prioritized over physical existence. This idea has influence the whole western way of thinking, including modern, existentialist thought, in which the human being is considered to have a desire to transcend features associated with nature. In de Beauvoir's (1952) philosophy, transcendence is linked to progression, and expresses (male) individual subjectivity. The male's vocation is to transcend towards the totality of the universe and the infinity of the future (Lyotard, 1992: 37). Immanence, on the other hand, is linked to maintenance and cyclical time, in the sense of sustaining life, and these (female) activities cannot express individuality [START_REF] De Beauvoir | The Second Sex[END_REF]. In Sartre's thought human beings have the ability to transcend physical placing; they have the freedom to shape their lives and thoughts (Clack, 2002: 6). This concept of freedom of choice is reflected in later sociology of reflexivity (i.e. Giddens, Beck). Classical liberalism (i.e. Hobbes, Locke, Hume) can also be seen as directed towards transcendence, in the sense of liberation from hindrances or constraints. To the extent that man is prevented from doing that he has a will to do, he is not free. This 'negative' concept of freedom is constitutive of most democratic political models in the West.

4.

Christian asceticism is often understood as if relinquishing oneself implies relinquishing the body for the benefit of the spirit. This, according to Halvor [START_REF] Moxnes | Mannens begjaer som moralsk problem. Foucault og Paulus om formingen av subjektet i antikken' [Male Desire as a Moral Problem: Foucault and Paul on the Formation of the Ancient Subject[END_REF], is a misunderstanding. The problem is not the body as such; asceticism is primarily directed against desire: 'It is desire that drives men to sexual activities that create bodily unions with prostitutes (1 Corinthians, 6), and thus connect them to the godless world. The alternative is not a disembodied existence, but to become "one with Christ in body"' (Moxnes, 2002: 64). Furthermore Moxnes argues that the sign of the bodily union with Christ is the Spirit thence becoming a bodily phenomenon: 'The spirit lives in man Corinthians 6.19) . . . This Paul contrasts to sin, "flesh", "evil nature", or "desire" (Rom. 8.12; Gal. 5.16-18), and these parties, so to speak, are in conflict forming the bodily and social life of mankind' (Moxnes, 2002: 65). I return to the relation between the human body and Christ later in the article, where the theme of female anorexics is discussed.

5.

For instance, Susan M. [START_REF] Okin | Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?[END_REF] points to a series of cultural practices and ideologies connected to gender that is directed towards controlling women and making them into slaves for men's interest and desires (here among, wearing the veil). Women who endorse such practices are presented as victims of some kind of false consciousness, not knowing their own good. Okin does not, however, base her argument on Marx's expressive materialist concept of freedom, in contrast to alienation, nor does she relate to the existentialist concept of freedom of choice, in contrast to bad faith. Her argument is predominantly liberal, directed against constrained choices. 6.

A main argument against the veil is that it suppresses women by being an expression of a patriarchal culture, in contrast to the egalitarian culture of the West. In many cases, the debates seem to be informed by the idea of the clash of civilizations (Huntington). 7.

This is, of course, only one way of understanding the Muslim veil. Nevertheless, it represents a widespread opinion among Muslims living in western societies [START_REF] Roald | Women in Islam: The Western Experience[END_REF]. 8.

Also, Muslim traditions provide the man with a prior right to transcendence of materialism towards eternity or divinity. As is the case with Christianity, the woman within most Islamic traditions is looked upon as incomplete in comparison to the man. An exception is found within Islamic mysticism, Sufism, where women may manifest the divine, although in some cases they are characterized as men encased in female bodies. It is just as likely, however, that due to her sex, the woman may personify evil [START_REF] Schimmel | My Soul is a Woman: The Feminine in Islam[END_REF]. A parallel is found in the mediaeval mysticism of Christianity. This I return to, when looking at female anorexics. 9.

See also among others [START_REF] Bell | Holy Anorexia[END_REF], [START_REF] Bell | The Voices of Gemma Galgani: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Saint[END_REF], [START_REF] Mazzoni | Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Mysticism, and Gender in European Culture[END_REF] and [START_REF] Vandereycken | From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls: The History of Self-Starvation[END_REF].

European Journal of Women's Studies 13(4)


UNIVERSITY OF WOLVERHAMPTON Victoria Thoms

Judith Butler

Reading Human Sex The Challenges of a Feminist Identity through Time and Space

Keywords:

This article charts the feminist perspectives that have come out of the author's thinking on the dance performance text Human Sex and how this has informed her own feminism. In doing so, the author argues that a feminist agenda is shifting and dynamic but also reliant upon prior readings and interpretations that provide the point of reference for a departure to other readings and perspectives. Using autobiographical material, the author highlights the importance of considering the personal histories of subject-hood that influence a feminist consciousness and how these are the condition of possibility for making other readings. To demonstrate the shifting character of identity over time, she engages in different readings of Human Sex through the work of feminist theorists Sara

Human Sex was the breakthrough piece for the French-Canadian choreographer Édouard Lock and his company La La La Human Steps. Choreographed in 1985, it garnered widespread attention for the company and marked La La La Human Steps' entrance into the international dance scene. Lock's choreographic and scenographic aesthetic was heralded as violent and oppositional and gave the company a reputation as radical dance revisionists. 1 Lock focused much of his choreographic attention on Louise Lecavalier, a dancer in his company. Lecavalier, whose appearance was muscularly androgynous and whose dancing was explosively risky, contributed to the revolutionary and cutting-edge feel of Human Sex at the time of its premiere. As the title of Lock's work suggests, the theme of this work was about the often unfulfilled character of sexual relationships between men and women.

I first saw Human Sex performed in 1986 and I continue to be troubled by it, for three reasons. The first is the strong yet ambivalent identifications I have with the dancer Louise Lecavalier, who continued to figure prominently in Lock's work until her retirement in 2000. The second reason has to do with the troubling aspects of forgetting. The dynamics of forgetting are particularly poignant because during videotape viewing of Human Sex in 2000, a second female dancer, Carole Courtois, entered onto the televisual screen. I had completely forgotten her and this challenged my seemly lucid memory that Lecavalier was the only female performer in that long past dance performance. The third reason combines the dynamics of the first two to interrogate my own investment in Human Sex as a feminist text. How is it possible to find, over the course of several years and several contradictory readings, a feminist identification in this work; both acknowledging the contribution of dancer Lecavalier while at the same time understanding the dynamics of memory that exclude her colleague Courtois from being remembered. I do not propose to solve this problem. Rather, I suggest that having a text that one is haunted by is a useful barometer for understanding the multi-layered, complex and conflicting identification that negotiating a feminist consciousness might engender. To illustrate the dynamics of this disharmony I follow a trajectory of readings that I have made of Human Sex, beginning with an autobiographical revisiting of my first experiences viewing the performance live, to a reading of this experience through the lens of Judith [START_REF] Butler | Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory[END_REF] theory of gender performativity and finally return, full circle, to debate the memorial effects of the initial live performance. Here I engage with Peggy [START_REF] Phelan | Unmarked: The Politics of Performance[END_REF][START_REF] Phelan | Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories[END_REF] ontology of performance and its implication for feminist agendas. As a method to demonstrate how identity is never a finished or infallible project, I have inserted autobiographical accounts that contextualize the shifting locations and associations with these theorists and my understanding of the gendered effect of Human Sex. It is through these autobiographical moments that I suggest an understanding of identity as haunted.

My intention with this 'narrative' is not to arrive at a more enlightened feminist position or make a more 'correct' reading. Instead I suggest that these multiple readings illustrate the ongoing contingent character of a feminist identity and articulate a continuous development and commitment to feminism. I argue that readings are neither 'good' nor 'bad' but are made in relation to the person that we are at a particular point in time -a person whose processes of identification are immersed in the contexts of specific locations and specific human interactions. For example, while first encountered in a Canadian context, my continued theorizing about Human Sex is influenced by my placement within a European feminist and performance tradition. 2 Finally, I suggest that an effect of having made prior readings is that these readings never finally leave us. They haunt us, while at the same time providing the conditions of possibility to make other readings. It is this troubling that allows me to be faithful to the readings that have frequented my continued encounter with the performance text Human Sex and the theorizing this performance continues to engender. In this manner, I want my account to be read as a kind of hybrid text, both detective story and ghost story, as my transatlantic feminist subjectivity roams restlessly through Human Sex.

THE TROUBLE WITH LOUISE LECAVALIER

The time I first saw Human Sex performed, I was a full-time dance training student at a community college in Edmonton, the largest city in the province of Alberta, Canada. I was living in the downtown core of Edmonton after spending my teens in a semi-rural setting 20 km outside the city. While Alberta's economic base is largely agricultural, the discovery of oil about 60 years ago elevated its economic position in comparison to the rest of Canada. The city of Edmonton has a population of approximately 1 million people. Yet on the whole, Alberta is predominantly rural. These factors contributed to Edmonton's provincial and conservative atmosphere. Yet at the time, I felt I was living in an artistic and cosmopolitan bohemia. Indeed, the counter-culture feel of my lifestyle was enhanced by its contrast to the semi-rural setting I was brought up in. It was therefore a momentous event when companies touring from Montreal or Vancouver came to perform. These dance performances carried great significance for me because of what I perceived as their exoticism and sophistication. This was the case when La La La Human Steps, a French-Canadian company based in Montreal, stopped in Edmonton to perform for two nights only.

One of the company members, Louise Lecavalier was particularly inspiring and fascinating. Lecavalier was a mercurial and aggressive moving figure. This impression was compounded by a seemingly irreverent disregard for her own physical well-being, giving her a kind of macho bravado as she proceeded from one physically punishing movement to the next. Her signature move featured propelling her body into the air in a horizontal spin. The spin was repeated throughout the work, yet her descent was broken in several alternative ways, some appearing more dangerous and rash than others. For example, she launched her body into the arms of several dancers, or, more extremely, shot her body into a dancer who correspondingly fell to the floor as the force of her body hit theirs. At the most extreme, she launched into the air at full velocity, travelled a few feet in the horizontal spin and fell prone to the floor breaking her own fall. Choreographic action resumed from these feats immediately as if these astounding horizontal leaps were insignificant.

Lecavalier's representational impact was further influenced by an unconventional appearance for a dancer. Negotiating this bravado athleticism was Lecavalier's diminutive size that exhibited a defined musculature. She was petite and her body was 'boyish'. Even in contemporary dancerly body aesthetics that defines femininity as being thin and almost androgynous, Lecavalier stood out as gender-transitive. She had narrow hips and prepubescent breasts that typified the female ballerina-type, but the muscularity of her body was highlighted, casting more established representational conventions of signifying female dancers into confusion.

The confusion in reading Lecavalier's gender was further complicated by the sartorial and cosmetic choices that contributed to her stage persona. Markers of femininity such as her long, bleached blond and dread-locked hair served to define her as female. She was dressed in tight fitting elasticized trousers and a partially see-through bustier halter-top. While this dress did not immediately denote a manifest 'feminine' or 'masculine' impression, the 'femininity' of her dress was inferred by her difference to the male characters of the piece, who were depicted in more masculine suit-like attire. These masculine partners were most often represented in suits of various shades of black and Lecavalier was set apart by the intensity of her white shoulders, face and white blond hair. Yet signifiers of masculinity were also at play in Lecavalier's representation. She exhibited a blond moustache. The colour of this moustache suggested that it could be Lecavalier's own and not a cosmetic addition. The apparent 'realness' of the moustache continued the play around Lecavalier's gender identity. Additionally, a troubling of gender was suggested by the meeting of Lecavalier's 'clothing' and her 'body'. Here a female drag aesthetic came into play as the femininity signified by the bustier top she wore was parodied and stressed as artificial. Her muscular upper body was emphasized and she seemed not to have any 'breasts' for the top to hold up.

The confusion that surrounds Lecavalier's gender performance suggests instability in the category of gender. If gender is fixed and pregiven why would there be a need to have to negotiate Lecavalier's gender identity at all? This troubling of the category of gender has another effect; it gestures to the profoundly important structuring convention that gender has for determining a knowable identity and reality. Raising the debate about Lecavalier's gender is not only about the troubling of categories, but it also makes apparent the taken-for-granted relationship between appearance and reality. It questions the very assumption that seeing is believing. Lecavalier, as [START_REF] Butler | Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory[END_REF] in her essay 'Performative Acts and Gender Constitution' argues about transvestitism, 'can do more than simply express the distinction between sex and gender but challenges, at least implicitly, the distinction between appearance and reality that structures a good deal of popular thinking about gender identity' (Butler, 1988: 527). Here the lack of definitive masculine or feminine gender characteristics in Lecavalier's performance troubles our notions of a gendered 'real'. And in provoking a questioning of the gendered real, Lecavalier's representational effect might provoke a questioning of the character of the 'real' itself.

The possibility of Lecavalier's representation subverting gender norms made her an important representative of feminism for me. A gender transgressive figure was not confined to the constricting definitions of femaleness. At the time I began to engage with the work of Butler, I was an undergraduate doing a dance degree at a Canadian university. Coming to consciousness as a feminist in a dance setting involved seeing the inequitable relations of gendered power that circulate in this environment. While women overwhelmingly populate dance, women do not hold power in dance. As the manifesto-like provocation by Christy Adair, Valerie Briginshaw and Kay Lynn in the Dance Theatre Journal in 1989 suggests, 'a high percentage of women in dance is not a prerequisite for domination' (Adair et al., 1989: 28). As I became increasingly aware, more often than not it was men who received advancement and held positions of power in dance. 3 It is not within the bounds of the argument to theorize fully gender inequity in dance. I introduce it here as a means to show the dynamics that were influencing my burgeoning interest in feminism. With Butler's theory of performativity I was able to conceptualize the powerful role that sociality and history played in shaping gendered inequity. Lecavalier's performance highlighted the role acculturation played in determining a gender because she failed to fit into an easily recognizable gender identity or, in Butler's terminology, performance. If gender is a performance, and Lecavalier certainly demonstrated a different, potentially new type of gendered performance, then gender is not fixed or determined but open to new performances. Lecavalier was a figure of liberation because she opened the possibility of new types of gendered performances that challenged the bounds of female dancerly identity.

Yet as I continued to think about the gender effects that Lecavalier produced, I became troubled by the apparent popularity of La La La Human Steps and the normative responses to Lecavalier's performance. Lecavalier's representation questioned gender norms, but widespread acceptance of La La La Human Steps' work on an international scale indicated that the gendered message of the work was still prescriptive of accepted modes of gendered being. Their success suggested that the persona that Lecavalier presented was also quite acceptable, employing already embedded notions about gender and reality. An established notion about gender and reality to consider is that the 'reality' of the stage can normalize the gender-transitive figure. As Butler points out in her work on drag performance noted earlier in this article, 'the sight of a transvestite onstage can compel pleasure and applause while the sight of the same transvestite on the seat next to us on the bus can compel fear, rage, even violence' (Butler, 1988: 527). The stage, with its suspension of reality, allows for the fantastical to be a source of pleasure and entertainment rather than fear and anxiety. The site of Lecavalier's gender transgression is far more pleasurable given its theatrical context. How Lecavalier's performance might read is also influenced by normative elements in the movement she performs. The movement that Lecavalier performs attests to an incredibly strong physique, suggesting a far more masculine appearance and bodily ability. Yet the force she uses to perform these feats suggests weightlessness and lack of direction, undermining the appearance of strength and bodily command. Ann Cooper [START_REF] Albright | Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance[END_REF] picks up this representational contradiction in her theorizing of Lecavalier. She argues that Lecavalier presents an ambivalent figure in relation to gender norms, both querying gender norms because of the appearance of her strength and muscularity, while reinforcing gender standards through movement dynamics used in her performance. Albright turns to the now famous essay 'Throwing Like a Girl' by Iris Marion [START_REF] Young | Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory[END_REF] to theorize Lecavalier's representational effects. In order to understand how movement itself is gendered, Young takes up the gender stereotype of a girl's inability to throw a baseball with force and accuracy. Young theorizes a physical gendered identity as the outcome of physically learned movement patterns that detach the limb's activity from the rest of the body. In other words, gendered subjectivity is enforced through the learned physicality of the body where women and girls learn not to take up space, or use the entire force of their bodies to effect. They learn not to project their physical intentions on to the world.

In relation to Young's theorizing, Albright suggests that Lecavalier's muscular appearance initially indicates an overcoming of this physically gendered feminine state because of the physically powerful movements these muscles produce, allowing Lecavalier the ability to launch herself forcefully into space. Yet, as Albright explains, the movements that are offered up by Lecavalier increasingly reinforce the gendered physicality associated with 'throwing like a girl'. As Albright aptly puts it, Lecavalier 'lets go of spatial intention in her movement, her dancing can take on a brutal, almost masochistic quality . . . she seems to be just throwing her body up in the air, not particularly caring where it lands' (Albright, 1997: 49). Here, while Lecavalier's appearance as physically strong and forceful gives the impression of a gender-transitive character, it is the force dynamics in her movement that reassimilate and return her transgression to normative understandings of female physicality.

Moreover, choreographer Édouard Lock chooses Lecavalier's body as the primary representational agent of this violent and transgressive aesthetic. It is Lecavalier who performs over and over again the horizontal turning mid-air leap. It is this move that immediately identifies both Lecavalier and the company. As Scottish dance critic Christopher Bowen notes, La La La Human Steps is 'a Quebecois company renowned for the gravity-defying horizontal pirouettes of its star dancer Louise Lecavalier' [START_REF] Bowen | Dance Choice[END_REF]. Yet this incessantly recurring move, the signature mark of Lock's company, does not seem to be recognized in terms of the violence it does to the body of Lecavalier. The inability to read the violence done to Lecavalier's body in Lock's aesthetic reminds me of Sara Ahmed's (1998) comment about the implications of postmodern aesthetics. In the context of Peter Greenaway's film Baby of Macon (1993) and various readings of this film, Ahmed highlights the problematic link between the postmodern aesthetic of transgression and its foreclosure of responsibility to the representational means it uses to communicate this aesthetic. Ahmed theorizes that the violence done to the female character in the form of a brutal rape is made invisible in critically affirmative readings of this film because the rape is decontextualized and 'read' instead as a postmodern aesthetic of transgression. The invisibility of the rape as rape forecloses any analysis of its potential for reinforcing dominant cultural ideologies, such as violence against women. As Ahmed warns, 'the non-seeing of the violence becomes constitutive of postmodernism . . . violence is not seen precisely because of the way in which postmodernism is seen through the assumption of transgression' (Ahmed, 1998: 189). Using Ahmed's example, the focus of transgression, allows the violence in Lock's choreography itself to lose materiality. It becomes a ghost not seen by the viewer. The violence inflicted upon the body of Lecavalier is both symbolically and literally erased. Thus transgression becomes the conduit to this aesthetic and serves to erase how the aesthetic is constituted through and by a violence acted upon women, upon the body of Lecavalier.

Another concern was raised for me when I returned to review the entirety of Human Sex on video. In the winter of 2000, I received a video tape of Human Sex from a friend in Edmonton. The video was of a 1990 copyrighted performance of Human Sex filmed during a live performance. It was an otherworldly experience for me because I had not seen this material in its entirety since the initial live performance. Instead of viewing the performance with a context of transgression amid 600 other spectators, I had recently moved to the northwest of England to begin doctoral study and was sitting alone. I was surprised to find that there were crucial elements that I had not remembered. This performance was violent. Gender differences and inequalities appeared to be reinforced rather than questioned. The work now seemed dated and nihilistic. The viewing left me feeling empty in the face of my memory of the initial viewing, which I remembered as having been all but these things. Even more important was the appearance of another female performer, Carole Courtois, who not only featured in at least half of the video, but who had also toured and rehearsed with the company in Lock's initial development of the piece. I had forgotten her. She was gone from my memory of Human Sex.

MEMORY, PERFORMANCE AND CAROLE COURTOIS

After viewing the video of Human Sex, I was troubled by the failure of my memory and concerned by what I feel was my failure to witness correctly. My 'discovery' has thrown up some questions about the problems of witnessing performance and the role of memory. It is this 'discovery' that motivates the second major reading of the feminist implications of Human Sex in this article and it does this through a discussion of the effects of forgetting within the dynamics of performance. What I am concerned to discuss, introduced earlier through Ahmed's work, is the dynamics of 'non-seeing', particularly in regard to its relationship with memory. These dynamics, I suggest, lie in understanding the way that Lecavalier is produced as a signifying force. I use recent theorizing both on the role of memory in performance and a discussion of figure fetishism. In bringing these two areas together I want to think about why it was that I failed to remember the dancer Carole Courtois. This failure to remember might be specific to me, yet people I have questioned who saw Human Sex in La La La's 1985-6 tour also failed to remember her. While Human Sex is now a relatively obscure piece of dance performance, I suggest there is a pressing need to consider how and why certain performances memorialize some things rather than others. How is it that Lecavalier continues to be remembered and others forgotten? In other words, what bodies are actively forgotten in order that hers might be 'materialized' in memory?

Certainly, a concern about memory and what is remembered is particular to performance as a method of meaning dissemination. Theatrical events have become understood as both singular and fleeting because there is no sufficient likeness that can be generated to represent the experience coherently. While the very same performance may be given the next evening, this performance is a new and distinct experience to the one the night before. While the script or choreography may be the same, the way in which the performers engage with it will change, as will the composition of the audience that comes to see it. If re-experiencing a performance is impossible in the same way as seeing a film over again is, discussing how and what is remembered and the value of this remembering takes on a certain importance. Indeed, recent work in performance theorizing has discussed how to understand the way in which performance has been characterized and the meaning this has generated. Some of this theorizing has negotiated the role of memory and forgetting in positing the significance of performance.

Peggy [START_REF] Phelan | Unmarked: The Politics of Performance[END_REF] opened up debate on the role of memory in relation to performance. Phelan's project explored the often unexamined psychical effects of performance and how performance structures identity. She argued that identity could not be assumed to be a finished project culminating in a whole sense of self. Rather, identity was continually reworked in its negotiation between the self and an other. Phelan argued for an understanding of identity as a loss rather than a completion: selfknowing and self-understanding are always negotiated in relation to an other. As Phelan poignantly explained:

Identity is perceptible only through a relation to an other -which is to say, it is a form of both resisting and claiming the other, declaring the boundary where the self diverges from and merges with the other. In this declaration of identity and identification, there is always loss, the loss of not-being the other and yet remaining dependent on that other for self-seeing, self-being. (Phelan, 1993: 13) For Phelan, theatrical performance demonstrates the role of identity as loss most effectively and intensely. Phelan suggests that performance disrupts normalized conventions of identity, precisely because the other, in this case the performance, disappears. Performance challenges the viewer's processes of self-knowing because performance fails to generate a copy by which the viewer's identity can continually said to be assured. Phelan's project is rooted in a political agenda of changing contemporary identity power relations that she sees as restrictive. This motivates her to theorize the transformational potential of identity loss in the nonreproducibility of the performance. The one off status of the theatrical performance disrupts normalized conventions of identity and reproduction, precisely because it makes loss more apparent. Here, the standard forms of identification take place in the way performance can be said to disappear, fade into memory and thus resist and even question standard understandings of reproduction. Considering Phelan's theorizing of performance in relation to my ongoing engagement with the performance text Human Sex brings up some concerns. Courtois's presence on the video tape and her absence from my memory of the live work suggests that some memories endure more than others. What are the implications of this forgetting in the context of Phelan's assertion that theatrical performance should be valorized because it resists reproduction? In order to illustrate the means by which performance troubles the self-being of the subject, Phelan suggests that the status of performance is ontologically non-reproductive. In this she means that performance's 'being' is unstable and resists reproduction because of the rapid rate at which its 'presence' fades. The nonreproducibility of performance, she suggests, is linked to the way in which performance cannot save anything; it does not leave anything behind to denote that it was present. Because of this non-reproductive status, performances disappear and fade into memory. Yet in relation to Human Sex, after the event of the live viewing, I was left with a memory. This memory's significance has sustained my interest for a number of years and as such is a form of reproduction. It is a form of reproduction that I suggest is continually reworked and renegotiated yet what if it was a memory that also perpetuated the forgetting of Courtois?

Several thinkers have engaged with Phelan's work on memory. 4 Philip [START_REF] Auslander | Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture[END_REF] work on liveness considers Phelan's critique in terms of the dynamics of the juridical. Citing several law cases in which the recounting of memory becomes a privileged site of knowledge production, Auslander demonstrates that memory does indeed have importance and does not avoid regulation. He argues that the status of memory is not acknowledged enough in Phelan's work. As he writes, 'inasmuch as memory is brought into the legal discourse as both a policed site and a mechanism of regulation, Phelan's proposition that memory eludes regulation and control, . . . seems true only of materials stored in memory and never retrieved from it' (Auslander, 1999: 154; emphasis in original). Auslander highlights, in contrast to Phelan, that memory does not elude reproduction. Rather, memory has effects on the interpretation of an event. Moreover, the particulars that are remembered are accorded status precisely because they are and can be remembered. What is remembered and what is forgotten have consequences for the importance granted a memory. I suggest that to value the ontological difference of performance as a present that dematerializes or disappears is almost to condone a kind of amnesia of the past and the future. If performance is to be valued because its representational means dematerializes and disappears, this valuation problematically allows for the disappearance of Courtois. It was only in viewing the video tape of Human Sex that I can re-encounter her and remember her.

The moment of the performance is unrecoverable but memories of that performance continue. How is it possible to consider the effects of that memory over time? I suggest that the performance, while unrecoverable, cannot be cut off from the conditions that make certain memories possible. While I agree with Phelan's point that that performance prescribes representational situations that cannot be reproduced in the same way as other forms of representation, there needs to be a consideration of the means that allow certain things to be remembered and others to be forgotten. Moreover, the status attached to the circumstances that are remembered and the circumstances that can be allowed to be forgotten also needs consideration. Sara [START_REF] Ahmed | Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality[END_REF] work on the figure of 'the stranger' provides an important point of departure for addressing the concerns about memory. While not framed from a specific engagement with the effects of memorializing performance, Ahmed's theorizing on figure fetishism provides a possible understanding of the dynamics involved in the process of remembering and forgetting. Ahmed demonstrates the means by which fetishization is used to establish western, national identities. What is significant for me in Ahmed's argument is her analysis of how 'the stranger' works as a figure and the implication of this association. For instance, Ahmed's working of Marx's commodity fetishism suggests that a process of fetishization works dually to displace social relations of labour onto an object and to convert fantasy into figure form. Ahmed suggests that the combination of displacement and fantasizing erases the social relations of labour. These invested effects provide a 'cutting off' of figures from the social and material relations of their existence, and the consequent perception that such figures have a 'life of their own' (Ahmed, 2000: 5). This investment in the figure as denoting a life 'cut off' from social production, Ahmed concludes, also cuts the proposed figure off from the histories that determine how it is valued and its labour threshold.

In relation to Human Sex, the possible effects of figure fetishism can also be thought to work in shaping what is remembered and what is forgotten. Lecavalier's body and persona is overdetermined by her appearance as strangely gender-transgressive. This overdetermination produces a situation where the meanings associated with her become separated from the material and social dynamics of the performance itself. Here 'Lecavalier', the figure, signifies in excess and externally of the performance. 'She' becomes cut off from the performance. 'She' becomes the performance itself. The process which separates her from the performance also sets her 'figure' on its own, a path that, as Ahmed notes, leads 'her' figure to a semiotic life of her own. The separation of performance contexts and figure depicted produces a disconnection and disassociation from the materiality of the performance.

It is how the fetishized figure itself becomes the performance that then can also be connected to what can be remembered about the performance. The strength of the overdetermination of Lecavalier's body as gendertransitive works to delimit the performance so that the primary memorial process focuses on her as a figure of transgression, eclipsing the memorialization of other characteristics of the performance. The fetish figure comes to stand in for what is and can be remembered of the performance. In this dynamic, the other female dancer, Carole Courtois, is placed beyond the reach of memory. Surprisingly, Lecavalier and Courtois share similar visual characteristics. Courtois is also petite and like Lecavalier departs from standard ideas about dancerly femininity, by appearing extremely muscular, especially in the upper body. In this respect, Courtois could also be interpreted as ambiguously placed in relations to normative gender characteristics. Yet she is shorter that Lecavalier and she wears more typically feminine make-up than Lecavalier, highlighted by overstated red lips. Courtois is curvier than Lecavalier and the 'feminine' attire she is wearing is not as ironic as Lecavalier's in that she fills out her costume more. Additionally, Courtois is a far less luminous figure as she has dark hair. Informing all this is the fact she does not perform the same kinds of movements that Lecavalier is asked to do. Courtois's characteristics, in comparison to Lecavalier's, may allow her performance to fade and in this forgetting, one performance becomes more important than another.

In arguing for an oppositional visual politics that incites because it actively fails to appear, Phelan notes that 'active disappearance usually requires at least some recognition of what and who is not there to be effective' (Phelan, 1993: 19). What remains is trying to understand the many nameless female dancers populating dance institutions who disappear from the memory because there is a failure to recognize a 'what' and a 'who'. How can Courtois ever be marked if part of her significance is that her representation fades from memory? In this way, what Phelan seems to leave out in her consideration of the disappearance of performance is a further acknowledgement of the 'histories of determination' (Ahmed, 2000: 5) that influence the remembering (and forgetting) of certain gendered performances. The histories of gendered meaning that impinge upon any interpretation make the performance never quite there, never quite as maniacally charged as Phelan suggests. The performance is always somewhere else in the past of other remembered performances. Accordingly, performance is a circulation of representations of representations that are informed by the histories of determination that affect what can be understood as a representation and what cannot, what can be remembered and what cannot. Live performance, while potentially disruptive in its ephemerality, is partially dependent on the histories of determination that structure the possibilities of its representational form and its memorialization.

In considering what might be done about remembering forgotten others, I am not trying to argue for the importance of such technologies as video documentation. Indeed, like Phelan and others, 5 I am deeply suspicious of the cultural force that seeks to fix the 'ontological being' of the performance too strongly within verbal or visual frameworks of understanding. I am also not suggesting that video and the live performance are similar representations of Human Sex. Indeed, they are diverging media for the dissemination of danced representations. Their means of representation have different effects. What I am advocating is that we assess more carefully the implications of various representational forms of performance. We need to understand more carefully what such representations allow and do not allow so as to understand the interrelated effects they produce for larger systems of value and status. The way in which performance is involved in the larger questions of status and value that circulated in social and cultural formations is, for me, clearly and pressingly the 'political' of performance.

CONCLUSION

In using autobiography I have been concerned about the way it imposes a narrative teleology. My progression through various readings of Human Sex might read like a progressive narrative to an ever more enlightened and refined understanding of Human Sex. I am critical of this possibility and have used autobiography rather as a means to show the cumulative and discontinuous effects of subjectivity. Human Sex continues to trouble me. I continue to identify with Louise Lecavalier's strength and energy while simultaneously recognizing how a mythology around her gender transgressiveness takes on a life of its own. 6 Making a choice is impossible. Identity is unfinished: we do not arrive. It is a process of comparing oneself to others, including one's other previous readings and their investments. I make this evident in the way my readings of Human Sex have changed over time.

In closing, I suggest that my conversations with Human Sex open the possibility of a ghostly encounter with identity and memory. This is an encounter that does not presume the integrity of the subject through its affirmation of a definitive reading position or definitive process of memorialization. Rather, it suggests that reading positions are ever only partial and open to rearticulation and transformation. Therefore, my story of Human Sex is a story that is not yet finished. Indeed, it is a story that may have no 'end'. NOTES 1.

A review in Ballett International of La La La's performance at the Holland Festival in 1985 commented: 'Édouard Lock's production Human Sex marks something completely new in the theatre-dance of today. . . . The punk dance from Montreal is the expression of a very sincere new dance generation' (Vanschaik, 1985: 28). Similarly, Jochen Schmidt reporting from the Vienna Dance Festival in 1986, also in Ballett International, commented: 'Edouard Lock's choreography Human Sex . . . stages a coarse, brutal but extraordinarily powerful punkrock-dance. . . . Not everyone likes this type of dance. But I was highly impressed and not only because it is completely unparalleled' (Schmidt, 1986: 34). Alastair Macaulay, reporting on Montreal's International Festival of New Dance in 1985 in Dance Theatre Journal, writes of Edouard Lock's choreography for Human Sex: 'Lock is reputed to be an original, not markedly influenced by anyone in the modern-dance world' (Macaulay, 1985: 27).

2.

La La La Human Steps is not a European dance company. Yet the company have toured extensively through Europe since very early in their history.

Human Sex was performed at international dance festivals in both Holland and Austria in 1985 and 1986 respectively. La La La was regularly featured at London's Dance Umbrella Festival through the 1980s and into the early 1990s. Present European dance makers such as Belgian Wim Vandekeybos exhibit a strong aesthetic inheritance to the early work of Lock. For a description of Vandekeybos's work, see Mary [START_REF] Brennan | Eurocrash -The Bane of Physical Theatre?[END_REF].

3.

This type of gender inequity and its causes are also strongly highlighted by Christy Adair in her groundbreaking monograph Women and Dance [START_REF] Adair | Women and Dance: Sylphs and Sirens[END_REF]. Similarly, Elizabeth [START_REF] Dempster | Women Writing the Body: Let's Watch a Little How She Dances[END_REF] provides an important discussion about the linguistic mechanisms that produce gender inequity. 4.

See also [START_REF] Murray | Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video and Art[END_REF]. 5.

See for instance [START_REF] Harris | Staging Femininities: Performance and Performativity[END_REF] and [START_REF] Martin | Agency and History: The Demands of Dance Ethnography[END_REF]. 6.

Lecavalier as 'gender-transgressive' continues to circulate and make appearances in curious places. In Philip Green's 1998 monograph about Hollywood cinema, called Cracks in the Pedestal, he references Lecavalier's cameo in Kathyrn Bigelow's 1995 film Strange Days, linking this role as a sadistic muscular killer with a performance by La La La Human Steps in 1989. He details the final moments of this piece, which ended 'with the lead male dancer flinging himself into her [Lecavalier] arms, at which point she lifted him above her head and held him there like a weightlifter pressing weights' (Green, 1998: 400). What is striking for me in this description of Lecavalier is that it comes almost 10 years after seeing Lecavalier perform and in a book that is focusing on film. Here Lecavalier as the representative of a mythical type of gender transgression continues to circulate and, again to echo Ahmed's theorizing earlier, takes on a life of its own unconnected to the actual dance production.

European Journal of Women's Studies 13(4)

Thoms: Reading Human Sex


This book offers a useful summary, in the first chapter, of epistemic foundationalism. Many students of the subject, I am sure, will find this valuable. The book's overall stance and orientation is one with which I am sympathetic.

Hull sets out in the book to counter positivism and postmodernism, and to defend a form of realism. This is very much what I also set out to do in my book Enlightened Women (Routledge 1996), which I was sorry to see was not referred to in the text.

Hull provides a robust defence of the naturalness of the two-sex distinction, with some very useful scientific evidence in support of her position, against those, like Judith Butler, who seek to question the naturalness of this distinction and who argue that sex is a performative construct and that there may be more than one sex. Hull questions some of the statistical evidence that purports to show that the number of individuals who deviate from the norm of male and female is significant. In fact, she argues, the number of such individuals is very small indeed. She offers some useful material on the categorization of people into two sexes that will give food for thought to those who question the two-sex dichotomy. She argues that it is poor scientific practice to suggest, on the basis of statistically insignificant numbers, that there may be more than one sex. This is one point made in the book, and the sex distinction is referred to in a number of places throughout the book. But the book seeks to go much further than this. Where it sets out to go further, I would have appreciated some distinction being made between variants of postmodernism and positivism that would have made it easier to evaluate the positions defended.

For example, Hull claims that positivists and nominalists are setting out to counter epistemic foundationalism. She mentions, in this regard, two thinkers from the analytic philosophical perspective -Nelson Goodman and W.V.O. Quine. She also refers to two major thinkers from different traditions -namely Foucault and Judith Butler. She claims that there are similarities between the thought of these various people, similarities that are not usually drawn to the attention of potential readers. I think that this is a useful thing to have done. However, I was left wondering why these particular thinkers had been chosen and why many others who might have been considered had been left out. For example, there are

those in the analytic tradition who might be thought to be more obvious -or equally obvious -candidates for inclusion, who are not even mentioned -for example Kuhn, Sapir-Whorf or Feyerabend. There are also many more thinkers in the broadly continental tradition who might have been mentioned.

Then there is the further question: what particular form of postmodernism or nominalism is being questioned? One thesis that is frequently identified with Quine for example, is conceptual scheme relativism. But Quine's work is dismissed in four pages of Hull's book. Unfortunately, moreover, the language used about great thinkers is sometimes insulting. For example, Hull writes: 'Quine contends that even from within a single language, meaning can never be shared. Seemingly eager to gain an advantage in the race to meaninglessness, he dramatically concludes that there is no "meaning to be shared in the first place"' (p. 32). It is unfortunate that language like this is used about someone whose thought is highly original and very influential. There is also a huge literature on his work, very little of which is mentioned by Hull.

For Quine, the thesis of conceptual scheme relativism is thought to be a consequence of the claim that language determines the limits of our world. It is also important to point out -and Hull does not mention this -that conceptual scheme relativism has been used to serve a number of different ends, and these ends need to be carefully distinguished from one another. One is metaphysical anti-realism -the view that there is no one determinate way the world is or that there is no privileged language in terms of which we should describe it. But a different end is epistemological scepticism -the idea that, for all we know, the world might be radically different in general character from the way we ordinarily take it to be.

The points made by Hull throughout the book about ontological realism would cut no ice with a believer in epistemological scepticism. When Hull claims, for example: 'Realism characteristically posits the existence of a special class of entities, the sorts of things rejected by nominalism: causal mechanisms, structures, kinds and other "universals"' (p. 83), the epistemological sceptic could simply reply 'so what?' To be fair, Hull does claim that realists are not setting out to counter the foundationalist. She writes: 'If it countered that this solution misses the larger philosophical point of an absolute guarantee for our knowledge, realists are no longer troubled by this point' (p. 83). She makes the valid point that it is important to accept that no theory need be rejected simply because there is a small number of exceptions to the thesis. She also makes the important point, following Bhaskar, that experimentation would be impossible were it not for the structured nature of reality. However, it is difficult to see why Hull spends such a long time characterizing foundationalism if she is not interested in countering it in any way. She does not, for example, make many epistemic points -most of her characterization of realism is done in terms of ontology.

The position she outlines -largely a defence of Roy Bhaskar's transcendental realism -is indeed a different position from anti-realism. However, I think that a believer in anti-realism would need stronger arguments than the claims made here to be convinced. There is, furthermore, a whole literature offering some very detailed and sophisticated arguments against metaphysical and epistemic antirealism that is not referred to in Hull's book. There is, for example, Donald Davidson's very influential article 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme', which challenges the coherence of conceptual scheme relativism with some very nuanced arguments: he distinguishes, for example, total failure of translation and portal failure of translatability between two hypothetically incommensurable languages and offers some detailed arguments against each.

There is one final point I would like to make. Hull offers a defence, as I have said, of Bhaskar's transcendental realism. Although much of the empirical material Hull is referring to -from Foucault and Butler -on sexuality, madness and punishment, for example, is social, Hull does not refer to the realist theoretical literature on the social realm. Durkheim, for example, was adamant that social facts are real entities existing in the real social world, external to the individual and exerting a causal effect on him or her. He argued that when we perform our duties as a brother, a husband, a citizen, for example, we carry out commitments we have entered into and which are defined by law and custom. These things are intrinsically social and are different from individual acts. They are general throughout society; external to the individual and constraining. He believes, indeed, that individual actions derive from society. This could be argued to be a form of realism. Indeed, there are examples from Bhaskar himself that Hull could have referred to. But most of Hull's examples, in her sections of the book on realism, are taken from the natural sciences. This is especially unfortunate, given that some realists in the social sciences would like to challenge the assumption that there is a hierarchy of sciences, with physics at its root. Some would wish, and not in an anti-realist fashion, to assert the position of the social world as sui generis.

Overall, then there is much in this book that will be of interest to many different people. However, I doubt that it will convince those who are not already followers of critical realism.

Alison Assiter University of the West of England

NURTURING WHITE IDENTITIES DOI: 10.1177/1350506806068671 Bridget Byrne White Lives: The Interplay of 'Race ', Class and Gender in Everyday Life London: Routledge, 2006, 200 pp., ISBN 0-4153-4711-4 (hbk), 0-4153-4712-2 (pbk) Bridget Byrne's qualitative analysis of white London mothers' discourse represents a major step towards establishing whiteness as a serious paradigm in British sociology. Not only is this an empirical monograph problematizing the racialization of white identities, but one that does so by focusing on the experiences of mothers, thus beginning to fill another hole in the literature. Byrne's work addresses key themes raised in fieldwork in Britain, and highlights methodological issues pertinent to all researchers interviewing people about 'race'.

Byrne opens with an epistemological discussion outlining the background of studies of whiteness: 'the assumption often is that we (everyday white people in Britain who are not particularly racist) cannot be interesting as "race" has nothing to do with us' (p. 1). Indeed, her project involves analysing how the 'we' she refers to is constructed, a project requiring 'hearing and seeing "race" in contexts where it is not explicitly felt as present' (p. 2).

This elusive quality of whiteness generates particular methodological problems illuminated here. In an engrossing section on narrative methods, she demonstrates how telling life stories can enable some respondents, but prohibit others from making themselves subjects: building a story around turning points requires seeing one's life in a particularly coherent way in which the self is attributed a

European Journal of Women's Studies 13(4)