material covered. This is a dilemma, as the editors have clearly sought to cover as wide a range as possible, but, just occasionally, they sacrifice depth for breadth.

The book engages with some of the big issues, organized in eight sections, starting with the question 'what is a body?' in Part 1. This is used to raise issues about the dualisms, such as mind/body, nature/culture, essentialism/constructivism and myriad others, that haunt all analyses of the body and embodiment. The next section includes several of the classic texts that form an important part of this book. Although the book's introduction promises extensive introductions to each of the eight parts that make up the Reader, I wondered if there has been enough explanation in these sections, since considerable assumptions are made about the reader's prior familiarity with the debates.

I particularly enjoyed the discussion of bodies and identity in Part 3, especially for its focus on the transgression of boundaries, including disciplinary boundaries, which is a most welcome feature of this book. Identity formation is located within the terrain of representation with some useful extracts from key texts, with Barbara Creed's and Judith Butler's work being really good examples.

No text on the body could fail to address the matter of 'normality' and Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco have made some interesting choices of extracts that address the debates and encompass recent developments in exploring monstrosity, which have particular resonance for the exploration of embodied discourses of gender, racialization and disability.

Scientific discourse pervades the book in a variety of guises. It is not confined to the section on health and disease, which is usefully followed by Part 6, on bodies and technology, which most appropriately starts with Donna Haraway. There could have been more on her understanding of technoscience and perhaps some more recent discussion of the developments in critical thinking on feminism and science arising out of Haraway's work. However, the extract chosen offers useful background material on cyborg thinking. Maybe a more up-to-date collection might have moved beyond cyborgs into new ways of thinking through technologies, but the background is important here. The discussion of consumer culture and the body, while featuring some key extracts, one of the best being from Marilyn Strathern, is curiously disembodied, an aspect which re-emerges at several points, perhaps inevitably since so much recent work has focused upon inscription and the discursive production of meaning about the body, often at the expense of analyses of difference. Part 7 has the largely objectified body of representational systems as its focus, although concern with racialization is especially valuable in this section, for example as introduced through Anne McClinock's work on commodity racism.

The Body is a really useful set of extracts mapping out the field of thinking about -and through -the body. It succeeds in both problematizing the field and providing interesting material for the reader who might be relatively new to this area of study. The authors also provide some well-explained suggestions for further reading. There are omissions, for example in covering psychosocial approaches and the psychic dimensions of embodiment and I would have liked to have seen some reference to body-focused theories of difference such as Luce Irigaray's, but editors have to make choices and overall Fraser and Greco have made very helpful ones. This is not an overtly feminist text or one located explicitly in the field of women's studies, unlike Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick's (1999) Feminist Theory and the Body, which I would think of as the nearest competitor, although Londa Schiebinger's (2000) edited collection, Feminism and the Body, which presents classic essays in feminist body studies also covers some work in this field.

However, it may be a tribute to the success of feminist interventions and feminist scholarship that The Body, while drawing extensively on feminist research does not have to so categorize itself. I hope so.

Carnal Thoughts is a very different book. Vivian Sobchack has written a most engaging series of essays that bring together a most diverse range of experiences, personal, embodied in -and through -all senses, cinematic, visual, narrative, mythological, textual and scholarly, all of which are marshalled to argue for the claim that we are material beings. People are not only located in texts and technologies, but in a body, in flesh that nonetheless has transcendent possibilities. She uses transcendency to encompass people's sense of beauty and of ethical valuesthat is of the sense of obligation to others. This range of illustrative material is deployed not only to expand upon and make meaningful Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, but also to develop a theory of the gendered body that foregrounds sense, senses, the visual and visible, which is conceptualized in her notion of interobjectivity. This book may look difficult but it is not. It is really accessible overall. Sobchack demonstrates really well the practicalities of the claim that body and consciousness are irreducible. We make sense of things and of ourselves through our bodies as well as through what is called consciousness. In this book, she expresses most passionately her argument that the things and other people in the world are bound to us in the body and we share a reality and materiality that really matters.

The essays in the book are divided into two parts, 'Sensible Scenes' and 'Responsible Visions', both of which have an embodied and, as one would expect with Sobchack and her previous work on cinema, a visual, representational component. In the first section, she focuses on some of the problems of embodiment, which she argues can only be resolved by incorporating all the senses and by bringing feeling into the analysis of experience, showing how carnal thoughts make sense of the subjective and the objective. This is illustrated in her essay 'What my Fingers Knew', where she discusses the cinesthetic subject of the sensate body in the film experience, citing the opening scene in Jane Campion's film The Piano in which the viewer (Sobchack) sees Ada's fingers as if they were her own -'"mine" as well as the image's' (p. 63). This sets the context of the experience that is also illustrated in another scene in which Baines, who is clearly sexually attracted to Ada, is watching her playing the piano. Baines touches Ada's skin through a hole in her stocking. Sobchack describes her own response as a spectator, as felt in her own body, but also in the bodies of Ada and Baines and even the film's 'body'. She thus situates subjectivity in the lived body.

In the second part of the book, she is more explicit about her polemical project to challenge theories of the body as text, which marginalize or obscure the pain and vulnerability of the body. She focuses most powerfully on the lived body, with the narrative of her own experience of cancer surgery, the loss of a limb and subsequently of having a prosthetic left leg, threading through the essays in the book. This personal experience is central to many of her essays in the second part of the book and is foundational in her essay 'A Leg to Stand On', which makes a particularly strong case for the interconnection between subjectivity and objectivity, although, in the best feminist tradition of eliding the personal and the political, she draws upon personal, embodied experience throughout the book.

Her reflections are often humorous, especially in the stories she tells about the instability of the images one has of oneself, made more manifest through the ageing process. In what seems to be a predominantly visual culture, she reflects on the prevalence of cosmetic surgery and the tension, not only between being seen and seeing ourselves but between seeing, being seen and feeling. This illustrates her claim, made most clearly in the context of cinematic representations, that we live in a visible rather than a visual culture. This is demonstrated by her retelling of a joke about a 75-year-old woman who is visited by God and told she has 35 years left to live. With this promised longevity in mind she decides to have extensive cosmetic surgery so that she can live looking good as well as for a long time. Sadly, on the day she leaves the clinic she is run over and killed. When she meets God at the pearly gates and asks why the promise of long life was not fulfilled, He says, 'I didn't recognize you ' (p. 38). Cosmetic surgery might mean that others do not recognize us, but Sobchack is keen to stress the greater fear that we might not recognize ourselves. She links stories of her own experience with other narratives and texts, such as films that substantiate what might otherwise appear ephemeral or too specific. Stories of all sorts are central to her approach. Sobchack defends her use of the everyday and of stories, for example using Paul Ricoeur's discussion of the narratives of ordinary lives. She uses the vibrancy of popular texts and the vitality of everyday stories to good effect in these essays. There is even a nice, circular, everyday (even though it features in a dream) story of getting lost told by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, which she retells in the essay 'Breadcrumbs in the Forest', to illustrate the relationship between 'getting lost' and 'going round in circles'. Scholarly stories and everyday stories about bodies in space and time elide throughout this book.

Merleau-Ponty's arguments are at one level obvious in that we are our bodies, yet at another, especially as developed within existential phenomenology, they are obtuse and difficult to grasp; to flesh out perhaps. This is Sobchack's project. She has some brilliant illustrations, which make existential phenomenology not only clearer but push forward an understanding of bodies that takes on the interrelationship between subjectivity and objectivity. Sobchack's stated aim is to redress the objectification of the body in so much recent work, which is illustrated in The Body. This approach might be seen as drawing upon a more philosophical approach to the illustration of argument and Carnal Thoughts is a diversely ranging interdisciplinary work. Using methods guided by existential phenomenology, Sobchack goes beyond seeing and understanding the body as a text or a machine and reinstates the corporeal that is the fleshy foundations of subjectivity. This is difficult to do, but I think she is successful because she incorporates such a wide range of illustrative material into her analysis. This not only makes the book a pleasure to read, as she makes very complex theoretical material accessible, but also, the personal narratives are what make it possible to demonstrate the aspects of embodiment, visible and visual, sensate and feeling, which she seeks to embrace.

Many of her examples have particular resonance, and I think that the personal narrative, for example in biographical details such as childhood experience as well as her experience of the prosthetic limb, often works better than the cinematic examples, although these are often more carefully worked through theoretically. This is a very ambitious book and at points the strengths of the illustrative material might also be a weakness, given the extent and eclectic nature of different narratives that are threaded through the book. There is a danger that the weight of personal experience might be troubling in its specificities. However, I think that Sobchack succeeds because she is explicit in stating the aims of her project and in the support which she draws upon in making her case. This book is a most enjoyable read and a useful counter to the overobjectification of the body as well as the overemphasis on constructivism and even disembodiedness that pervades so much of contemporary body talk.

Religion in French Feminist Thought should be essential reading for anyone who is concerned with the nature of religion and the contributions that women's writings on sexual difference in particular offer to this contemporary concern. This is also a highly significant text in drawing out and bringing together French thinking on religion, which can be constructive in redefining the central topics related to divinity. Love, life, birth, death, desire, sexual difference and human/divine oppositions come into their own as central topics for rethinking religion in this edited volume of essays. But these would be difficult and dense topics for the readers without the seriously impressive critical work on 'religion in French feminist thought' done by the contributors to this volume: Ellen T. Armour, Charlotte Berkowitz, Amy Hollywood, Luce Irigaray, Grace M. Jantzen, Morny Joy, Mary L. Keller, Dawne McCance, Kathleen O'Grady, Erika Ostrovsky, Judith L. Poxon, Martha J. Reineke, Sal Renshaw and Marie-Andree Roy each take up a new form of thinking on religion -rewriting divinity is one of their implicit goals.

Not only do these contributors meet the critical challenge of rendering accessible what has been described as 'French feminist' thought to both informed and uninformed readers, they confront the unstable dimension of religion in French psycholinguistic writings on divinity. The case for unearthing the productive side of psycholinguistic conceptions of topics related to divinity and the role of religion in human lived experiences is made persuasively in the course of this collection of essays. But this is despite the deep ambivalence on religion also apparent in the primary texts of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, Catherine Clement and Monique Wittig -on whom the volume focuses critically. The earlier published companion volume, French Feminists on Religion: A Reader (Routledge, 2002), also edited by Joy, O'Grady and Poxon, includes religiously significant excerpts from the writings of each of these women who write in French on religion.

Overall, the serious challenge confronted in the present volume of critical perspectives is addressed in various ways, some more polemical (e.g. Jantzen), others more textual-contextual (e.g. Joy), still others mainly exegetical with careful and clear exposition of concepts. Each is full of original ideas. Such a rich volume is not easy to cover adequately in a book review. The reviewer can only give a taste of the goods on offer and the material for digestion. In addition to focusing upon writings in French by women who each raise gendered questions about the nature of religion, the focus of any reviewer must be informed about the common ground

European Journal of Women's Studies 13(1)


The Social Construction of Space and Gender ABSTRACT Over the past 10 years two concepts of central significance in the social sciences have come up for rediscussion: 'space' and 'gender'. Today the two concepts are seen as relational, as a production process based on relation and demarcation. Gender and space alike are a provisional result of an -invariably temporal -process of attribution and arrangement that both forms and reproduces structures. This article takes a microsociological look at the construction of the local, seeking to trace the genderization of spaces. For this purpose, it discusses the organization of perceptions, in particular of glances and corresponding body technologies. Referring to the example of beach life, the article shows that the genderization of perception (including a culture of the glance) leads, in the sense of an embodiment of social order, to a practice of localization that reproduces the structural principles of society (including gender). In other words, gender may be seen as inscribed, via body practices, in the production of spaces.

KEY WORDS beach ◆ body ◆ gaze ◆ perception ◆ perspective ◆ placings ◆ space ◆ territories

In her film Office Killer, the New York artist Cindy Sherman depicts a woman who kills her adversaries and then carefully arranges the various parts of their bodies in her apartment. In an interview for the German Zeit-Magazin (see [START_REF] Sager | Der ganz normale Horror[END_REF], Sherman says that what interests her is not the actual killing but what the woman does with the bodies. Sherman's themes are the practice of arrangement, homogeneity and its destruction.

The idea of a homogeneous whole is ever present in modern societies, invariably serving to keep the alien, the other, the diverse at 'arm's length'. Exclusion of the heterogeneous from everyday practice and thought is reflected in the construction of the modern nation-state, of the homogeneous society, the unbroken identity, of closed corporeality, etc. It is also firmly anchored in our thinking on space. Although Henri Lefèbvre (1991), for example, pointed out very early in the discussion that the notion of a homogeneous space serves to legitimize domination of this one space, the image of the one space in which one God created the world remains deeply rooted in the consciousness of western societies.

In recent years, numerous studies in the fields of social geography and the sociology of space have problematized the limits and contradictions of an ideology of space constructed on these lines. Spaces are conceived today as processual, relationally ordered systems. Accordingly, investigating the topological dimensions of one or more cultures no longer means, as our everyday notions might suggest (Löw, 2001: 17ff.), observing the way structures are ordered in space but looking into how these structures form spaces. Doreen Massey (e.g. Massey, 1999: 28) points out that the term space is better suited than any other term to express the spheres of juxtaposition and coexistence. As the form of organization of the juxtaposed, spaces epitomize simultaneities. In this sense spaces are, first, an expression of the possibility of pluralities; second, they point to the possibility of overlapping and reciprocal relations; and third, and for this very reason, they are always open and indefinite with respect to future formations. This applies no less to national territorial spaces than it does to the microspaces of everyday life. It is no accident that it is Israeli geographers who point out that any notion involving the assumption that there can be only one space on any one piece of land can have fatal consequences as far as political power is concerned [START_REF] Yiftachel | Planning and Social Control: Exploring the "Dark Side[END_REF][START_REF] Fenster | The Global City and the Holy City: Narratives on Planning, Knowledge and Diversity[END_REF].

In attempting to come up with a new definition of the concept of space, the social sciences, seeking to emphasize the multitude of possible ways of placement -even in one single place -find that they are able to comprehend spaces as relational arrangements of living beings and social goods (see Löw, 2001). This underlines, on the one hand, the simultaneous practice of placing (groups of) humans and things and, on the other hand, the need to link together objects perceived/seen to form spaces. The synthesizing activity required here points towards the possible existence of highly diverse culture-, gender-or class-specific exclusion, and thus at the same time to the possibility of spatial relevance systems. The practice of placing, in turn, itself opens our eyes to hierarchic orderings and social structurings.

But if it is true that spaces are based on the fact that objects placed (in the sense as well of something that has grown, that flows, etc.) are set in relation to one another, then the constitution of space cannot be conceived without bodies. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1966: 35ff.) impressively demonstrates, what we perceive through our bodies are not only things but also 'interspaces between things'. What this means is that in perceiving through our bodies, we form syntheses in our everyday activities as a means of linking together a great multiplicity of objects to form spaces. In so doing, the body leads a noteworthy double existence. It is not only the medium of perception but is itself a placed object. As such it is staged, styled, genderized, permeated by ethnic constructions, thus becoming a highly precarious 'building-block' of spaces.

In this article, my main concern is to look more closely at the relation of mutual interdependence between spaces and bodies. I concentrate here on a significant aspect of modern corporeality and, as I hope to be able to demonstrate, of modern spatiality as well: genderization. I develop the thesis that the genderization of spaces is effected through the organization of perceptions, and in particular of gazes and the body techniques that go along with them. 1 In doing so, I look at a locally highly specific body practice, at 'topless' sunbathing on the beach. Although this is a practice that is highly culturespecific and restricted to special places, it nevertheless points to globally held images of gender and space as well as to more generalizable practices involved in the constitution of spaces.

ON THE BEACH

Over the last couple of centuries, beaches have come to symbolize nature in western societies. While one might seek in vain for a beach on the island state of Japan, finding for the most part only garbage dumps and concrete wastelands (with the exception of Europeanized Nagasaki), the West's associations were transformed from the notion of the cold sea and the hard beach to that of the seaside as a paradise [START_REF] Corbin | Meereslust. Das Abendland und die Entdeckung der Küste 1750-1840[END_REF]. A slow, barely discernible process involving altered body techniques, a new definition of public space (Hausen, 1976) and the 'discovery' of the sun gave rise to the image of an ideal place characterized by the concurrence of 'body, sea, sand, wind, sun, and emptiness' (Kaufmann, 1996: 38). It is hardly surprising, then, that Henri Lefèbvre (1991) dreams that on the beach the body might find the freedoms needed to break through policy which homogenizes space and, going a step further, dissects it into possessions. The beach therefore seems an ideal place to study the reciprocal constitution of body and space.

Jean-Claude Kaufmann (1996) looks into French beach life in an empirical study based on a series of guided interviews and participatory observation. The main focus of his study is the finely coordinated management of the way in which naked female breasts are displayed. 'The beach thinks it is a free place, but in fact the slightest gesture, the briefest glance is monitored' (Kaufmann, 1996: 172). Society's discovery of sunbathing brought with it a step-by-step process of baring the body. As far as women are concerned, this process is constantly recharged with erotic content, and even hair flowing loose after bathing or naked feet and ankles are sufficient cause for excitement.

A woman's day on the beach in our time, he writes, begins with an inspection of the locality. Who is sitting nearby? What are they doing? Are there going to be problems when she bares her breasts? The choice must be made rapidly. Local inspections must be made to appear cursory so as not to confuse the gazing culture on the beach. Once a place has been chosen, the production of an individual space begins. 'Immediately following arrival on the beach this area is marked out by a number of objects: towels, bags, sunshade, games . . . as well as by ways of working the sand (smoothed, stamped flat, made into mounds . . .)' (Kaufmann, 1996: 123). People use symbolic and material boundaries to mark off their own space, creating a privacy zone -a practice carried out to perfection by the Germans and their culture of colonizing the beach by building large sandcastles on it (Linke, 1999). In these self-designated spaces, and very rarely outside them, women begin to remove their tops. They look surreptitiously around once more, assuring themselves that other women are also topless and that there is no man in the vicinity who appears to be staring.

Later on, in the interviews, they will not recall this inspection ritual. It is not until they are assured by their partners that each time they undress they survey their surroundings first, sometimes even commenting on them, that these practices become part of their consciousness. It is, then, only after inspection that the top can come off. This, however, is followed immediately by one more body-space precaution: most women not wearing a bikini top lie down flat on the ground. Generally, the only exceptions to this rule are young women with small breasts. Their firm, more or less immobile breasts are considered acceptable, and they are allowed to cross the narrow confines of space boundaries and to be gazed at more or less persistently even in motion. As a general rule, though, both the articulated moral code and the mode of behaviour exposed to view demand that on a beach naked breasts may only be presented in a state of motionlessness. Any deviation is registered. A female holiday-maker on the beach commented as follows on a woman observed surfing topless, 'She kept falling off the board, they wobbled all over the place, I mean, you know, it's just not a pretty sight' (Kaufmann, 1996: 128ff.). Any uncontrolled movement is seen as unseemly and ugly. By running, walking or jumping across the beach or swimming in the sea with her breasts swaying around, a woman revokes the social convention of rigidity and for this reason no longer enjoys the protection of seeming nonobservation. This is also true, though to a lesser degree, of individually created private spaces on the beach.

The crystal ball of one's own beach world is transparent. Gazes enter it, cross the boundaries, link the recumbent body with other objects. True, gazes can be attenuated by a defined and arranged space and its boundaries more successfully than they can in the 'public space' of a beach, which has not been individually demarcated; but in the end there is no avoiding being gazed at. A gaze into this private space may never be fixed or expressive (of either admiration or disapproval). Those who gaze this way are immediately disqualified as voyeurs. And yet everyone looks, men and women alike. After all, how else would they be able to give the interviewer such telling accounts of what they had observed in adjacent areas? 'This is why', Kaufmann observes, 'eyes must remain neutral and may never come to rest on naked breasts' (Kaufmann, 1996: 164).

On the beach people practise a specific 'art of seeing without seeing' (Kaufmann, 1996: 163), an art based on control over the stare and the more fluid gaze:

It is not forbidden to stare, but the stare must be fixed on a point which all observers would unequivocally accept as neutral. On the beach the most obvious neutral point is the horizon, the open sea, possibly a seagull or a boat. These sequences of motionlessness are needed to recover from the movement of gazing; but they also allow the gazer to secretly pick out hazy images in the corner of his/her eye. But the best catches are made in the course of a gradual visual scanning -the usual dodge used to conceal the fact that the gazer is in fact observing. (Kaufmann, 1996: 163; see also Goffman, 1982) Here, instead of staring, the gaze moves fleetingly along, sometime coming to rest on a neutral object, focusing on marginal phenomena. Both men and women gaze in this way, and yet this art of seeing without seeing is so embedded in our culture that we experience observing and being observed as something gender-specific. Women take notice of men's gazes -men talk about their gazes.

In his analysis, Kaufmann names various forms of the space-body relation. Women start out by using their bodies to (seemingly) intuitively sense spatial arrangements. In beach spaces (as often in everyday situations as well), we are under pressure to take our bearings swiftly, without making undue observations. The majority of the women interviewed on the beach state that they sense space-relevant decisions in their bodies (Kaufmann, 1996: e.g. 139). They appear to sense, and hence to know, whom they can sit down next to, when they can remove their top and how long they can remain in one position. The careful planning involved in these actions is experienced spontaneously, as a bodily process to which it is frequently impossible to gain verbal access, at least in the early stages of the interview situation.

In the next step observed, spaces are produced to mark off a secure intimate sphere. Our own bodies or the bodies of our reference group are safeguarded from others by the production of closed arrangements. Placings take the form of habitualized actions. Everyone knows these types of territorial demarcations: writing utensils and papers are spread out on working surfaces, books are placed on bedside tables, and jackets and bags find their way on to park benches. But placings of this kind have one disadvantage: they can be observed. The arrangement practice involved in constructing these 'territories of the self' (Goffman, 1982: 54ff.) is institutionalized and thus relatively easily accessible.

It is above all the gaze that palpably overcomes boundaries, extending one's own space into someone else's. If we assume that the constitution of spaces is based equally on a placing practice and a synthesizing act that links together placed objects to form a whole, then the example can be seen to demonstrate competition between productions of space. Can I successfully protect my own space from others' gazes? Are people (men) able to extend their own space into the territories of others? When we construct our own spaces, we can either ignore foreign objects or make use of them to mark the boundaries of this space. As Kaufmann shows in great detail, this process is socially monitored through gazing techniques. Bodies are protected by spaces; at the same time, however, these spatial boundaries invite conquest.

GAZE REGIMES AND PERCEPTIONS

When Jean-Claude Kaufmann reports on his observations and interview analyses, depicting men's gazes and women's bodily sense of the situation at hand, he can be sure that his readers will not be at a loss to understand him. It is less his perspective as a man that renders this line of difference accessible than the experiences of people on the beach, their attribution to self and the way they act within them.

In recent years, much research has been done in art and cultural sciences on the space-constituting dimension of the gaze and its genderspecific component. The point of departure of this modern logic of visualization is -as repeatedly emphasized by Lefèbvre -the discovery of central perspective in the early modern age. Based on mathematics and geometry, central perspective serves equally as a means to 'authentically' replicate reality and as a key to 'correct' seeing (Mathes, 2001: 95ff.; see also Jay, 1993;Kemp, 1990). The gaze that has gone through the school of central perspective is based on looking with one eye, unmoved or detached, while the world becomes its object (see Panofsky, 1991). Consequently, scholars see in the rise and swift naturalization of central perspective a modern form of the struggle for world domination (e.g. [START_REF] Crary | Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century[END_REF].

As Erwin Panofsky underlines, this view of the world goes hand in hand with an absolutist understanding of space. 'In order to guarantee a fully rational -that is, infinite, unchanging and homogeneous -space, this "central perspective" makes two tacit but essential assumptions: first, that we see with a single and immobile eye, and second, that the planar cross section of the visual pyramid can pass for an adequate reproduction of our optical image' (Panofsky, 1991: 28ff.). According to Panofsky, the 15th and 16th centuries scientifically underpinned the naive notion, which goes back to antiquity, of space as a container, the idea of homogeneous space, which even today is still firmly anchored in our consciousness. Central perspective makes it possible at the same time to construct and to naturalize rigid, immobile and homogeneous space. With central perspective established as 'correct' seeing, a 'discovery' that makes it possible for painters to present a replica patterned on this seeing as a realistic depiction, absolutist space 2 came to appear both scientifically correct and natural. The difference between scientific ideal and empirical practice, which was general knowledge in antiquity, is largely forgotten in this era (Sturm, 2000: 88ff.). The prerequisite for this gaze is a specific body technique that presupposes motionlessness. This is what Norman Bryson means when he speaks of the perspective view as the 'gaze' [START_REF] Bryson | Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze[END_REF]. The body of the gazer is reduced to a single point, one of his eyes. The field of vision, the corporeality of looking, vanishes, as he notes. What becomes established is a fluid gaze which, though it appears not to be staring, resolutely seeks to avoid losing sight of the focus of its observation.

GENDER ARRANGEMENTS

In her study on gender in the early modern age, Bettina Mathes stresses that 'it is in the gaze that gender is constituted' (Mathes, 2001: 105). Like other art and cultural scientists (see, for example, Hentschel, 2001;Mulvey, 1975;[START_REF] Williams | Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the 'Frenzy of the Visible[END_REF], she refers here to studies on film theory and picture interpretation. Like a scientifically detached viewing of paintings, the gaze directed at the big screen of Hollywood-style storybook cinema both produces and reproduces the cultural construction of gender difference. The picture based on perspective creates the impression of depth and thus of spatiality before the eyes of the beholder, a spatiality that is further reinforced by the moving pictures served up in the cinema. 'The commercial film aims, by employing inconspicuous cutting and camera techniques, to create the impression of a continuous, homogeneous picture space and to place the observer in a panoramic position' (Hentschel, 2001: 153).

Traditionally, spaces are imagined as women('s bodies). In 1865, for example, the anthropologist Karl Schmidt wrote, 'The man appears as time incarnate, the incarnate process of becoming; woman as space, as being. Activity and passivity, mind and body, brain and heart, head and belly, individual and species, positive and negative pole: man and woman' (Schmidt, 1865: 420). To depict man and woman as opposites and yet still reliant on one another, Schmidt opts for a dichotomous arrangement. On the one hand, we have the male: time, activity, mind/brain/head, and on the other we have the female: space and body/heart/belly. The male is body by virtue of his head alone. He is conceived as moving and active and thus as an expression of time. The female, on the other hand, symbolizes space. Like space, she is seen as passive and corporeal. It is this that gives rise to a cultural association between spaces viewed and female bodies, a process that finds its modern-day manifestation in the election of national beauty queens as representatives of national spaces [START_REF] Banet-Weiser | The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity[END_REF]. As literary criticism has frequently noted, this overlapping of space fantasies and female bodies (see Kublitz-Kramer, 1995;[START_REF] Weigel | Topographien der Geschlechter[END_REF] ties the perspectiveminded voyeuristic gaze, which dissects without being seen, into a genderized and genderizing context. In the absolutist notion of space, the open picture space is experienced as something like the promise of a tendered and open female body and at the same time described as the womb with its promise of security [START_REF] Colomina | Die gespaltene Wand: häuslicher Voyeurismus[END_REF] and its promise of lust (Hentschel, 2001;[START_REF] Weigel | Topographien der Geschlechter[END_REF]. Against the background of a dualgender, heterosexual matrix, two potentially contrary positions become manifest: that of the male gaze and that of the female as the object gazed upon.

These positions are not necessarily bound to the placings effected by men and women: 'It is precisely because the voyeuristic gaze is a construction that it can, potentially, be appropriated by any subject. That is to say that the voyeuristic gaze is open to women as well as to men, but also that it can cause men to find themselves in a "female" position' (Mathes, 2001: 107). The fact that a woman can adopt the male-connotated voyeuristic gaze or, conversely, that a man can submit to being viewed in this way hinges on the culturally usual practices of doing gender -the production of gender in actions. If we can trust Erving Goffman's depiction of US society, it is not possible to embarrass a 'young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports' (Goffman, 1975: 158). It is considered scientific common sense (see Bourdieu, 1982: 307ff.;List, 1993;Longhurst, 1995;[START_REF] Sarasin | Reizbare Maschinen. Eine Geschichte des Körpers 1765-1914[END_REF] that only a middle-class, male, white, urban body is inconspicuous. Jewish men, for example, are considered soft, flowing, impotent in National Socialist ideology. As Susan [START_REF] Bordo | Reading the Male Body[END_REF] points out, these stereotypes can still be found today in the image of the 'nice Jewish boy'. It seems that only the normed body is free of the inscriptions of class, gender or ethnicity. This freedom to be inconspicuous allows this body to gaze at the others, the conspicuous, the abnormal, who, embarrassed by the outward signs of their body (e.g. breasts in motion), seek to hide from these gazes.

It is in a culturally specific and hierarchic structure consisting of milieu, class, gender and ethnicity that gazes are bestowed and received. Heterosexual men gaze at women, women at the handicapped, heterosexual men at gay men, women at other women, etc. It is easy to imagine black or gay men employing the practices described by Kaufmann: an inspection of their surroundings as a means of protecting themselves from gazes. It is, however, the specific dynamic described by Kaufmann as the 'three bodies' of women that currently serves to shape gender in western society. This dynamic is based on the male-coded cultural position of the gazer and the female-connotated position of the observed. According to Kaufmann, women are in a permanent state of flux between the banal, the beautiful and the erotic body. 'If the one is in evidence, the others will never be far away' (Kaufmann, 1996: 223). The modern banalization of nakedness, he notes, creates the kind of normality that sustains the exchange between men and women on the beach. Beauty, he goes on, enters into competition with this banality: it dispels again and again the impression of banality, dragging the naked body out of its invisibility. When beauty appears, he writes, men react by showing desire, and the erotic body flashes. However, as soon as the erotic threatens to entail disorder, Kaufmann notes, the body is again banalized.

With his concept of beauty, Kaufmann describes the conspicuousness of the female body, a marker system for women that opens up or closes various options by constructing a highly differentiated field of ascriptions of beauty and ugliness. This marker system involves notions and practices of eroticism and sexualization. These are, however, linked with strategies geared to securing power and domination that give rise to 'beauty' as an aesthetic dimension in the first place and cannot, as Kaufmann suggests, be derived straight from beauty. As Michel Foucault showed in exemplary fashion, the constraining, almost compulsive gaze men cast at female bodies is always bound up in a complex of power and knowledge. The behaviour of women on the beach is a prime example of the fact that sexualization is an expression not merely of men's desire but also of their position of power. Or, to use the jargon of systems theory, the asymmetry that stabilizes the gender difference is generated by the fact that 'women are simply more perceptible, are always the object of a gaze that cannot be switched off' (Nassehi, 2003: 101).

Today, men's bodies are frequently proffered for view in women's magazines. Women today describe, evaluate, and analyse men's bodies in ways they never did before (see Mathes and Löw, 2002). Women discuss the looks of their male colleagues, friends and neighbours. All this can be interpreted as gender convergence and as a kind of practice with the male-connotated gaze. And yet the practices appear to differ. We seldom observe, in public spaces in particular, that women's glances at male bodies evoke in these men the abashed covering-up/hiding/looking-theother-way responses that reproduce power relations; indeed, for women 'the gaze' opens rituals of flirting in which the balance of power always remains open. Since, as Kaufmann's study shows, social knowledge and expectations are based on the assumption that men gaze and women are gazed at, and since it is always more difficult to attain a position of greater power than it is to fall into a position of less power, women's gazes at men rarely achieve the same results as men's gazes at women. However, women -and this is a point largely overlooked by Kaufmann -are not only the objects of gazing, indeed they actively use their placing practices to produce gender arrangements. Perception is not only a process of individual activity but also, as Georg Breidenstein explains, an anticipatory act. 'Participants gear their own positioning, their representations and activities, to the way in which they anticipate that others will perceive them -and . . . to the anticipated boundaries of other people's perception' (Breidenstein, 2004: 91).

In perceiving and placing, we create spaces. We produce spaces by drawing symbolic and/or material boundaries in the expectation that others will recognize them through a synthesizing cognitive act. People perceive the placing practices of others and at the same time orient their own placings to what they have perceived (see Featherstone, 1993: 176). What imparts dynamics to this process is the fact that while we place in anticipation of perceptions, we are not able to compel these perceptions. When boundaries are crossed by gazes, by touches, by invasion, by language, etc., or when different spaces do not coexist in harmony, it is social power and domination that take over.

On closer examination, the act of perceiving-while-linking can be shown to be pervaded by gender. In mixed-gender, heterosexual contexts at least (and these constitute the majority of social contexts) perception falls into two positionings: the male-coded gaze and the female-coded intuitive sense for placings. Regardless of the fact that women also look and men also respond by hearing, smelling or touching, what is perceived is filtered, and as Kaufmann, quoting from his interviews, notes, this is then experienced, in the women's case, as a bodily sensing and, in the men's case, as a gazing (and hence as a detached, scientific, controlled practice -which can therefore not be said to be part of perception). Furthermore, we anticipate our mutual actions and orient our own actions accordingly. These cultural constructions are not only illusions, they are bound up with a practice of space production that is based on a hierarchic field of gaze cultures. The sense of vision has become the reigning sense. The sense of touch provides a good example of this. Even though when we touch another person we are both involved in the process, laying a hand on another body is conceived as a one-sided tactile contact. The eye turns this into a monoperspective act (Mathes, 2003). As a rule, people rely more on what they see than on what they taste, feel, smell. Consequently, the process of linking objects together to form spaces is based primarily on gazing.

CONCLUSION

My thesis is that the genderization of spaces is effected through the organization of perceptions, in particular of glances and the body techniques corresponding to them. This finds expression both in the predominance of the visual -and the implicit masculinization of a sense posited as the primary one -over other perceptions as well as in a hierarchically genderizing gaze regime that regulates the process in which objects are synthesized to form spaces and institutionalizes transgressions of boundaries. The genderization of perception (including the culture of the gaze) leads, in the sense of a somatization of social order, to a choice of place and a placing practice that reproduces structural principles of society (including gender). In other words, gender may be seen as inscribed, via body practices, in the production of spaces.

What this implies is that even though beach spaces may differ in the structure of their conditions of production from those of a parliament or of a private apartment, and even though spaces may differ from one country to another, power relations ensure that spaces remain bound within a permanent context of reference and relation. Power relations form a central component of the constitution of spaces. This is seen not only in the fact that places may be privileged or neglected but also in the reproduction of national and global structurings. Spaces must thus be seen as orderings/arrangements that are inherently dynamic but also contested.

There is much to indicate that institutionalized spatial orderings/ arrangements in turn affect bodies and thus also contribute to their genderization. Renate [START_REF] Ruhne | Raum Macht Geschlecht. Zur Soziologie eines Wirkungsgefüges am Beispiel von (Un)Sicherheiten im öffentlichen Raum[END_REF] has already demonstrated how the construction of public space influences the production of the insecure woman or the self-assured man. More research has been done on this reciprocal effect in the process of ethnicization. Andreas [START_REF] Eckert | Unordnung" in den Städten. Stadtplanung, Urbanisierung und koloniale Politik in Afrika[END_REF], for example, describes how colonial territorial policy in Africa served to ethnicize bodies. By isolating themselves from the native population and dividing the black majority population up into ethnically defined groups that in turn were assigned to 'tribal districts', the white colonial rulers created urban ethnic identities that remain in place to this day (see, for India, Randeria, 2004).

Space and gender traditionally share the same fate in that, in the context of occidental philosophy, both are conceived as material substances and accordingly naturalized and posited as immutable. Any research that sets out to analyse the relation between space and gender is faced with a strategic and practical challenge: not to posit the one dimension (space or gender) as the secure, quasi-naturalized basis from which the other social phenomenon can be nailed down conceptually as a relational one. Instead, it is essential to view both constructions in their processuality and relationality. For the sake of consistency, it must be argued that the city cannot be assumed to be an entity on whose stage men and women enact themselves as the correct gender. Nor is it possible for studies on the production of space to operate with men and women, boys and girls, as unquestioned entities. Indeed, space and gender must be grasped as 'an effective, reciprocally constructing and constructed structure' (Ruhne, 2003: 139). The body provides a key to understanding their reciprocal constitutional dynamic. Lefèbvre's suggestion that the body be understood as the staging ground of resistance to a capitalist order of space appears unconvincing here. It is the disillusioning recognition of the 'consonance between the constitution of being and the forms of cognition' (Bourdieu, 1997: 159) that destroys any hope of recapturing a precapitalist body experience. Body and fantasies are both cultural products: change results much more frequently from day-to-day shifts, from new knowledge won from contradictions, from ambivalent body socialization, or from frictions between spatial practice and representation. However, only when resistance embraces not only spatial practice but also its representations is change possible. Naked breasts, to get back to the beach, may have altered beach life, but they have had very little impact on gender or space arrangements.

To start out with, it is an act of emancipation for a woman to bare her breasts. At the beginning of the second women's movement in the 1970s, many women discarded their bras. Following the example of the novel Egalia's Daughters, they no longer see why breasts should never wobble in public, while men's primary sex organs are not forced into the penis holders suggested by the (female) author Gerd Brantenberg. Why, it is often asked, are men allowed to show their nipples in public while women are not. It is not long after this that women embark on topless sunbathing and swimming.

However, it is precisely this exposure of their bodies that, as Kaufmann shows, now drives women into passivity. Lying flat on the ground, they become the objects of the male gaze. The price paid for the naked bosom in our cultural context is the body's immobility. Without the stabilizing effect of a bra the entire body is brought into a state of rigidity. Women lie flat on their backs -a position long considered the suitable one for women during sexual intercourse -and their breasts take on the form otherwise suggested when they are wearing a bikini top. The body becomes what space no longer wishes to be: rigid and immobile. According to Marcel Mauss (1978), body techniques are historically and culturally specific modes of use of the body and thus of body behaviour/activity as well. In an intercultural comparison, Mauss uses swimming, walking, or running as examples to show that there is nothing in bodily movement that is 'natural'. On the contrary, there are culturally determined techniques that so permeate the body as nearly to elude reflection.

2.

Following Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, I distinguish between 'absolutist concepts of space' in the sense of container-space notions, and relativist concepts that derive space in relational terms. The approach used here, however, is a relational one that focuses analytically on both the object and the relation (see von Weizsäcker, 1986: 256ff.;Löw, 2001: 24ff.).

(

  Translated from German by Paul Knowlton)

European Journal of Women's Studies 13(2)

Identität. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Engl. edn: Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, New York: Aronson, 1974.) Goffman, Erving (1982) Das Individuum im öffentlichen Austausch. Mikrostudien zur öffentlichen Ordnung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. (Engl. edn: Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order, New York: Harper and Row, 1972.) Hausen, Karin (1976) 'Die Polarisierung der "Geschlechtscharaktere". Eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerbs-und Familienleben', pp. 363-93 in Werner Conze (ed.) Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europas. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Hentschel, Linda (2001) 'Die Ordnung von Raum und Geschlecht in der visuellen Kultur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts', pp. 150-65 in Marlis Krüger and Bärbel Wallisch-Prinz (eds) Erkenntnisprojekt Feminismus. Bremen: Donat. Jay, Martin (1993) Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kaufmann, Jean-Claude (1996) Frauenkörper-Männerblicke. Konstanz: UVK. (Orig. pub. 1995.) Kemp, Martin (1990) The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kublitz-Kramer, Maria (1995) Frauen auf Straßen. Topographien des Begehrens in Erzähltexten von Gegenwartsautorinnen. Munich: Fink. Lefèbvre, Henri (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. (Orig. pub. 1974.) Linke, Uli (1999) German Bodies: Race and Representation after Hitler. New York: Routledge. List, Elisabeth (1993) Die Präsenz des Anderen. Theorie und Geschlechterpolitik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Longhurst, Robyn (1995) 'The Body and Geography', Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 2(1): 97-106. Löw, Martina (2001) Raumsoziologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Massey, Doreen (1999) Power-Geometries and the Politics of Space-Time. Hettner-Lecture 1998. Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg Press. Mathes, Bettina (2001) Verhandlungen mit Faust. Geschlechterverhältnisse in der Kultur der Frühen Neuzeit. Königstein: Ulrike Helmer Verlag. Mathes, Bettina (2003) 'As Long as a Swan's Neck?: The Significance of the "Enlarged" Clitoris for Early Modern Anatomy', pp. 101-24 in Elizabeth D. Harvey (ed.) Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mathes, Bettina and Martina Löw (2002) 'Blaues Wunder: Viagra und Männlichkeit', Freitag. Die Ost-West-Wochenzeitung 16 (August): 17. Mauss, Marcel (1978) 'Die Techniken des Körpers', pp. 197-220 in Soziologie und Anthropologie, Bd. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (Orig. pub. 1935.) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1966) Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. (Orig. pub. 1945; Engl. edn: Phenomenology of Perception, London and New York: Routledge, 2002.) Mulvey, Laura (1975) 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Screen 16(3): 6-18. Nassehi, Armin (2003) 'Geschlecht im System. Die Ontologisierung des Körpers und die Asymmetrie der Geschlechter', pp. 80-104 in Ursula Pasero and Christine Weinbach (eds) Frauen, Männer, Gender Trouble. Systemtheoretische Essays. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Panofsky, Erwin (1991) Perspective as Symbolic Form. New York: Zone Books. Randeria, Shalini (2004) 'Kastensolidarität als Modus zivilgesellschaftlicher Bindungen? Gemeinschaftliche Selbstorganisation und Rechtspluralismus


Alice Ludvig

Differences Between Women? Intersecting Voices in a Female Narrative

Keywords:

The 'intersectionality' approach in feminist theory postulates that differences between women, such as age, ethnicity, class, nationality, sexuality, etc. do intersect. However, intersectionality starts to get blurred when examined concretely because the list of differences is always endless. There is frequently silence about concrete questions such as: who defines when, where and which of these differences are rendered important in particular conceptions, and which are not? This article examines how categories of difference and identity interplay and intersect by analysing a narrative life-interview with a female migrant to Vienna. It aims to make visible some of her specific identifications and differentiations and how these are located in time and space, by focusing on her self-presentation and the categories of difference such as gender, class and ethnicity that she introduces. Through this the article aims to contribute to discussions of the dynamism of subjectivities and power relations.

INTRODUCTION

The African American feminist writer Audre Lorde stated at the anniversary conference of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in New York in 1979:

In the middle of the 1970s, the political critique by US-Black feminists of white feminist theory began to make itself heard; its main critique was of the marginalization of Black and Third World women in mainstream feminist theory where the category of race and the phenomenon of racism were not reflected. Hence, feminist theory had focused strongly on gender difference (man vs woman) therefore relying implicitly on homogenized womanhood and ignoring differences between women.

Since at least the mid-1980s, the focus of gender studies in political theory has moved away from gender as a dichotomous category (see [START_REF] Squires | Gender in Political Theory[END_REF]. Simply put, the binary opposition, man vs woman, is no longer the only point of interest. Research turned from the dichotomy of gender to the reconsideration of differences and inequalities between women. This framework has been labelled the 'diversity approach' in feminist theory. 1 The normative frame of the diversity approach posits a dynamic plurality among women on the grounds that no group is homogeneous, as there are many differences between its individual members. Accordingly, the ascriptions of markers of difference/identity such as gender, colour, 2 ethnicity, social status, sexuality, nationality, religion, age and so on do intersect. It was the US jurist Kimberlé Crenshaw who coined the term 'intersectionality' for the phenomenon of the merging and mingling of multiple markers of difference [START_REF] Crenshaw | Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics[END_REF] or 'intersections' (see [START_REF] Higginbotham | African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race[END_REF][START_REF] King | Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology[END_REF][START_REF] Moore | Divided We Stand": Sex, Gender and Sexual Difference[END_REF]Schein and Strasser, 1997). Most elaborations implicitly recommend an inclusive approach to analyses of minority groups: the inclusion of differences in the analysis of power struggles and inequalities for minority groups.

The strengths of this approach are clearly that it reflects on 'otherness' and strives to avoid essentialized, fixed and homogenized assumptions of identities. It moves away from 'genderism', that is a fixation on the sex-gender dichotomy in feminist theorizing and analysis that marginalizes the effects of other differences on women.

The weaknesses of intersectionality become more obvious when trying to apply it to empirical analysis: its implications for empirical analysis are, on the one hand, a seemingly insurmountable complexity and, on the other, a fixed notion of differences. This is because the list of differences is endless or even seemingly indefinite. It is impossible to take into account all the differences that are significant at any given moment. Subjectively, it is often not possible for a woman to decide whether she has been discriminated against just because of her gender or for another reason such as a foreign accent. This is precisely the problem of intersectionality: the axes of differences cannot be isolated and desegregated. In this way, differences like gender, colour and class do not add but multiply: a Black woman is not oppressed 'twice' but many times [START_REF] King | Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology[END_REF].

But what follows epistemologically, then, is that the 'and so on' becomes the Achilles heel of intersectional approaches, as the list of differences is infinite (Butler, 1990: 143; see also Klinger, 1995: 813). Butler suggests that:

Theories of feminist identity that elaborate predicates of colour, sexuality, ethnicity, class and able-bodiedness invariably close with an embarrassed 'etc.' at the end of the list. Through this horizontal trajectory of adjectives, these positions strive to encompass a situated subject, but invariably fail to be complete. This failure, however, is instructive: what political impetus is to be derived from such exasperated 'etc.' that so often occurs at the end of such lines? (Butler, 1990: 143) The endlessness of differences seems to be a weak point in intersectional theory. The approach starts to get blurred with questions that are often avoided in published work: Who defines when, where, which and why particular differences are given recognition while others are not? (See also [START_REF] Klinger | Über neuere Tendenzen in der Theorie der Geschlechterdifferenz[END_REF] This article aims to provide insights into these questions. Still, the question of how to approach this remains open. Leslie [START_REF] Mccall | The Complexity of Intersectionality[END_REF] has recently discussed questions of how to study the complexity of intersectionality and proposes three approaches:

First, a 'categorical approach' affirms categories and has the potential to study the relationships between categories in quantitative research. It is useful for instance to model wage indicators and income differences between (fixed) groups [START_REF] Mccall | The Complexity of Intersectionality[END_REF](McCall, : 1790)). The categorical approach resolves our problem of indefinite complexity: it determines in advance the point where the long list will end, which requires the empirical use of preselected categories. This approach is not relevant to the aims of this article and will not be discussed further.

Second, McCall elaborates on what she calls the 'anti-categorical' approach [START_REF] Mccall | The Complexity of Intersectionality[END_REF](McCall, : 1779)). This is the postmodern critique of categorization per se, or as she points out, an 'anti-categorical critique of categorization' [START_REF] Mccall | The Complexity of Intersectionality[END_REF](McCall, : 1779)). In simple terms, after postmodern deconstructionism, gender becomes the product of certain discourses and hence the category of gender becomes obsolete. The same holds true for the category of 'race' and so on. The results in each case demonstrate the artificiality of social categories (and subsequently their intersections), as has been shown in historical science with the method of genealogy, in the study of literature by way of deconstruction and in anthropology with new ethnography.

The anti-categorical approach also leads away from my research interests, since I want both to examine intersectionality in relation to empirical material and acknowledge its groundings in social reality. This seems like a balancing act, because on the one hand I affirm categories while on the other hand I still want to be free to call them into question.

It seems to me that Black feminists' 3 critiques come very close to this: first, despite rejecting the validity of categorizations, Black feminists acknowledge that it is impossible to avoid using categories strategically for political purposes. Second, despite rejecting the validity of categorizations, feminists of colour do not reject the social reality that is manifest in their everyday lives. For example, despite sex and gender being the product of certain discourses, they have 'real' consequences for our existence in everyday life (Geschlecht als Existenzweise, [START_REF] Maihofer | Geschlecht als Existenzweise: Macht, Moral, Recht und Geschlechterdifferenz[END_REF]. Likewise, despite our understandings of the concept of 'race' as a manmade classification and in no way a biological 'truth', the phenomenon of racism is still alive and produced in everyday interactions.

According to McCall, methodologically 'personal narratives' and 'single group-studies' can be used to study the intersections of some single dimensions of multiple categories in selected social positions [START_REF] Mccall | The Complexity of Intersectionality[END_REF](McCall, : 1781)). McCall calls this third approach an 'intra-categorical approach': it does not intend to address the complexity of a full range of dimensions in a full range of categories. 'Narrative' in this approach can be literary, historical, discursive or autobiographical [START_REF] Mccall | The Complexity of Intersectionality[END_REF](McCall, : 1781)). This is why I chose a single self-presentation to look at differences and their intersections within individuals as well as in the relations with others, including myself, which the single person position presents. [START_REF] Wortham | Narratives in Action. A Strategy for Research and Analysis[END_REF] has shown how autobiographical narratives position the narrator in an ongoing dialogue with other speakers. In the following sections, I first elaborate my approach and then apply it to one female selfpositioning in a concrete example.

LINKING NARRATIVE WITH IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE

Simply put, the question I raise here is: How do categories of difference and identity intersect in a narrative? Some authors distinguish between a story and a narrative, the former denoting the 'story' told by the individuals and the latter meaning the means of enquiry (Roberts, 2002: 177). For my purposes here, I use narrative, narration and story interchangeably to denote the spoken and later transcribed text of a person's freely narrated associations.

In his examination of a narrative, Wortham (2001: 76ff.) uses as an example of a single person's narrative a half-guided open interview that results in a dialogue between interviewer and interviewee. Wortham's main focus is the understanding of how the narrator positions her storytelling self with respect to two types of presented self (an active, assertive one and a passive, vulnerable one) and with respect to the interviewer. I am focusing here less on empowerment in self-representations than on the constructions of categories of difference and identity in the narrative events presented by one person. By categories of difference I mean categories of distinction like sex, class, gender, nationality, race, ethnicity and age.

From the point of view of the individual subject, it is through narration that the axes of identity and subjectivity become explicit: when we acknowledge that subjectivity is the way people make sense of their relation to the world, it becomes the modality of identity. How a person perceives or conceives an event (and speaks about it) would therefore vary according to how she is culturally constructed, what she identifies herself with and/or differentiates herself from.

In this respect, the concepts of 'identity' and 'difference' are mutually constitutive. This is primarily because, in its structure, difference is based on binary oppositions like nature/culture, male/female, black/white, raw/cooked and so on (e.g. the structuralists de [START_REF] Saussure | [END_REF] and [START_REF] Lévi-Strauss | Le Triangle Culinaire[END_REF]). The interesting point here is that the dichotomies are not 'neutral'; they have been the means of fixing meaning in ways that secure power relations and inequalities in and of themselves (see [START_REF] Derrida | On Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak[END_REF]. In other words, the binary oppositions of difference construct classification systems through which meanings are produced. In this respect, identities are constructed the moment that people appeal to differences within such classification systems. On the one hand, difference can be used to create positive insider perceptions and representations of the self (identity) while, on the other hand, difference may be used to construct a negative view from the 'outside'. This encompasses the stigmatizing of people and groups on grounds of difference, the resultant phenomena being xenophobia, sexism, racism and so on.

Presumably, the concept of identity owes its attractiveness to its prominent position within one big debate in social theory, namely about the relationships between structure and agency [START_REF] Giddens | Capitalism and Modern Social Theory[END_REF][START_REF] Giddens | The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration[END_REF]. The major questions here are: To what extent are individuals externally shaped by classificatory systems that are assumed to be outside, prior to and independent of particular persons? And to what extent do individual actors shape and structure their world through their interactions? These two extremes are mutually exclusive: the more the individual's identity is shaped by structure, the less it can influence the structures, the more it has the ability to create and define its identity the more it might shape the structures themselves. For this latter viewpoint, the individual's ability to define their identity will depend on the resources it has, or as Bourdieu says, its social, cultural and economic capital [START_REF] Bourdieu | Entwurf einer Theorie der Praxis auf der ethnologischen Grundlage der kabylischen Gesellschaft[END_REF][START_REF] Bourdieu | Ökonomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital und soziales Kapital[END_REF]. In addition, Bourdieu has equipped the discussion on the relationship between structure and agency with the concept of 'habitus' (Bourdieu, 1976: 165), a means to link and combine both: individuals act within 'fields', and within these fields they can shape the structures and are mutually shaped by them. The ability to act is dependent on the resources available, which determine their status within the field and in relation to the other individuals.

From this perspective, my research focus is based on the classic tension between the more flexible way identity and subjectivity are perceived by individuals and the more static way that they are shaped by (political) structures. This brings us to my last assumption for my example (which is located in Austria): what can the self perceptions and positioning narrated in the interview tell us about the politico-social structures in Austria? Austria is still a self-declared non-immigration country with particular legal provisions and restrictions for its third country, non-EU residents. It is important to emphasize the fact that difference (and its intersections) cannot be treated as abstracted from power relations (see [START_REF] Phoenix | Dealing with Difference: The Recursive and the New[END_REF]. The narration can, therefore, reveal how the individual concerned perceives legal restrictions as well as their everyday interactions. Perceptions can, therefore, be situated in the Austrian context. Succinctly, the research focuses on the following operational question for analysis: Which notions of belonging, identity and differentiation are articulated in the interview narrative that informs this article?

THE NARRATION

The interview reported here lasted nine-and-a-half hours and was conducted over several weeks in four sessions between February and May 2005 in Vienna. The interview partner is Dora, 4 a 29-year-old migrant from Bulgaria who has lived in Austria since spring 2001. Her academic level is high: Dora has a masters degree in political science and international relations from the Central European University in Sofia. She is legally resident in Austria because she has a student visa to be a full-time student at the University of Vienna, where she studies law. Since she does not hold an Austrian work permit, she is reduced to very low-paid, illegal and unskilled work and, in her own words, only studies to maintain her legal status through the student visa. 5 Before the first interview, we had never met and all she knew about me was that I am interested in lifestories.

The autobiographical method I employ is partly based on Rosenthal and Fischer-Rosenthal's (Fischer- Rosenthal andRosenthal, 1997a, 1997b;[START_REF] Rosenthal | Analyse narrativbiographischer Interviews[END_REF] method of free association -the main principles of which include: using open questions, avoiding 'why', 'where', 'who' and 'when' 6 questions and following the respondents' wording and phrasings. For the initial phase, which took two-and-a-half uninterrupted hours, I began the interview with the following single and very open statement: 'I am interested in your life-story. Please tell me everything that comes to your mind and that you would like to tell.

Everything that is important to you is important to me.' 7 Rosenthal and Fischer-Rosenthal use their autobiographical method to study family and life-stories. Their sociohistorical perspective distinguishes between experienced life ('life as lived') and life-history ('narrated life'/'life as told') because they try on the one hand to reconstruct what the narrator actually experienced during the sequences of their life and on the other, how they present their life in a present-day interview (Rosenthal and Fischer-Rosenthal, 2000: 459ff.).

My goal is more modest: I am focusing on the presentations of self through language ('narrated life'/'life as told') and the ways that categories of difference and identity are used in these. In other words, I am not interested in the biography as such, but in the current selfpositioning in a specific setting in time and place. I use the narrative autobiographical interview technique because it helps to generate a self-reflexive text of this kind.

Dora theoretically has a repertoire of possible stories, so any story presented is a selection. Moreover, she is engaged in a research interview, and regardless of the very open setting, necessarily relates to me as the interviewer. This could explain why, for instance, 90 percent of her stories are located in Bulgaria. First, it seems plausible that she wanted to explain Bulgaria to me as someone who has never been there. Half of her stories on Bulgaria are valued as 'positive' and deal with the landscape, family life and social activities. The other half can be regarded as 'negative', telling about the bad economic and political situation, corruption, criminality and poverty. Second, it seems plausible that Dora is likely to be homesick as she uses the few references to Vienna, where she has now been living for four years continuously, to explain her 'bad' economic situation in Vienna and her indecisiveness over whether to stay or to leave. She describes both options as 'negative', she does not wish to go back to Bulgaria (in her words her generation 'is lost' 8 ) but she also does not refer to Vienna as a viable option for her (she has no fulfilling occupation and is fed up with studying all the time, see note 5).

Clearly, I have interpreted Dora's account, and interpreters always foreground certain actions as most salient. When they study someone's whole life-history the process of interpretation demands that interpreters constantly modify their 'construal of elements' in order to construct a whole out of all the elements (see Wortham, 2001: 141). This is a very subjective process. However, I was not interested in a whole life-story, but in categories of 'difference' such as gender, ethnicity and so on in order to make their intersectionality transparent. Therefore, I have examined Dora's explicit or implicit, and unprompted, associations relevant to intersectionality.

THE ANALYSIS: CATEGORIES OF DIFFERENCE AND IDENTITY

In the first part of the analysis I ranked the narrated events in descending order according to time spent talking about the specific theme in order to get a sense of the 'importance' given to it. The long opening statement of two-and-a-half hours deals with the bad economic situation in Bulgaria and Dora's own problems. In the rest of the nine-and-a-half hours, the other themes link to members of Dora's family: here 80 percent of the narrated events deal with her brother who is six years her junior and lives in Amsterdam, and 20 percent with her mother's sporting activities. 9 All narrated events refer directly or indirectly to Dora as a person. This way Dora's narration presents particular representations and interpretations of the world from her own perspective -in a specific place and moment (today's Vienna). Likewise, Dora presents a particular version of herself.

The following text outlines how Dora mentions and refers to differences using the example of a few (of my selected) categories of differences.

Gender

Gender is a category that one is not easily 'conscious' of because, as a normative category, it is rarely questioned. Dora does not explicitly mention gender, but does so implicitly in connection with 'distinction' from her brother. As mentioned, the major part of her stories deal with him. Dora is constructing her brother in her stories as 'different' to her, first and most importantly, because 'he is a boy' as, for example, in:

Because he is a boy, and the boys they cannot talk that much, and so, give detailed information.

Second, she contrasts her brother to herself in saying that he can deal better with the capitalist system, because he has lived most of his life after the changes in Bulgaria: 10 He was educated in the new times, exactly the reality, from an early age, in what his reality, what it really is about, the first phase of capitalism, and he is fairly different from me. (Translation from German original; my emphasis) However, the subsequent passages break from the positive descriptions of her brother, as Dora criticizes him for being interested 'only in money' and constantly thinking about how to 'make money':

In contrast to her brother, Dora likes to stay at home and read books, she is 'correct and punctual' and when she works she is reliable. She speaks about one time when she did all her brother's literature homework, and another time when he destroyed her skiing equipment that she had lent him. Then she juxtaposes herself as 'opposite' to him:

Whatever he does, he exaggerates a bit, it is like this with people, the opposite from me. Me, for instance, I am always so . . . always so correct, always punctual, when I work on a project or something that I start with, and always when there are other people involved in the whole story, I tend to always be correct with all the people, and I do not destroy it because of little mistakes. And he is the opposite, he thinks, oh if there is a problem I will resolve it afterwards. I will think afterwards, his device is, there is a proverb . . . 'Don't trouble the trouble until the trouble troubles you' (laughs). (My emphasis)

As her account unfolds, Dora gradually dismantles the positive picture of her brother, culminating in a sequence where she speaks about his defeat, referring to his 'childish enthusiasm':

My brother wrote an email last week and my mother has forwarded it to me, it was crazy. He lives in Amsterdam and he is as well rather confused about what he should do, because he is studying, but he wanted to go back to Bulgaria to earn money, I do not know, with investments from Holland, to open a Real Estate Bureau in Bulgaria and sell villages, whole villages to foreigners, and, yes, for people from Holland it is probably good to buy a house in the mountains, because they do not have any mountains there. But all this, all this was just something, some childish enthusiasm, and after two weeks he went back to the Netherlands again.

In these sequences, Dora is constructing herself through difference, difference from her younger brother, who she narrates to be what she is not. He is a boy; this is why he can afford to be unreliable. She underlines this with stories of being dependent on money from the family in Bulgaria and how he frequently used to lose his flight tickets. Parallel to this narrative, Dora explains her own difficult and insecure situation (in Vienna and in Bulgaria likewise). In contrast to her brother, she maintains that she would never ask her family for money. She still feels attached to the 'older values' of Communism, contrasting it with her younger brother's ability to cope better with the new challenges. She underlines this with another story about his pretending to be from the EU country Malta to get a job in Holland. This is contrasted with Dora's explanations of never daring to do likewise because of fear of discovery. Once she has dismantled her initially positive presentation of her brother, she uses the same strategy to change all the formerly negative discussion of herself into positive moral signs focusing on her insistence on correctness, neatness, punctuality and reliability.

Class

In Dora's narratives, class is a significant point of reference discussed as having changed with the political changes in Bulgaria and her subsequent migration to Vienna. Dora comes, in her own words, from the 'intelligentsia' in Bulgaria. In her narrative she first uses this to demonstrate that she appreciates these values because she likes to study and learn. She contrasts these values to those of present Bulgaria in which they are no longer appreciated, having been replaced with a cruder obsession with financial success and high rates of corruption and organized crime. She distinguishes herself repeatedly from the tasteless 'new money' population in Bulgaria.

Ethnicity

Subsequently, Dora differentiates herself from others when she reports about the diminishing Bulgarian population:

We were 9.2 million people, 2 million are abroad and I do not know what it will be in 10 years. Then we will maybe only be 5 million or so. The problem is that all Bulgarians flee and that there are some that stay, and these increase in numbers. We have a small Turkish minority and the Gypsies, now we call them Roma, that is the political-official name in Bulgaria, and this is very horrible, because in 10 years there will maybe only be Gypsies and Turkish minorities living in Bulgaria, I do not know, it is like that, it is a demographic change, and it will not be easy to be an ethnic Bulgarian, because the majority is abroad, they have no children or do not want any children, because they do not know how to manage the future, if they are financially capable of having children and educating them afterwards and so on. (My emphasis)

Ethnicity is understood here as subjective feelings of belonging to specific collectives, defined foremost on common ethnic grounds (for an extensive overview on theories of ethnicity, see [START_REF] Heinz | Ethnizität und ethnische Identität. Eine Begriffsgeschichte[END_REF]. Dora counts herself in this passage as one of the 'ethnic Bulgarians', who are neither Gypsies nor members of the Turkish minority. She paints a picture of despair. She is afraid for the future, even the Gypsies are a threat, because of their high birth rates. This gets intensified by her presenting the Bulgarian population as having decreased to 7 million: actually Bulgaria today has 8 million inhabitants. It might be expected that Dora would talk about her own 'ethnic' situation in Austria as a foreigner, perhaps recounting some experiences with Austrian xenophobia, but she does not. Instead, she refers to her status as a Bulgarian migrant, giving examples of her poor economic situation because she is not a citizen and lacks a working permit.

CONCLUSIONS: INTERSECTIONALITY IN A FEMALE NARRATIVE

Dora relates to her gender identity by differentiating herself from her brother via several attributions that shift their meaning during the interview. Gendered identities, however, are not only determined by the relation between the sexes but also through its interrelationships with other categories of difference. In Dora's case nationality intersects with gender and class: as a female non-EU national living in Austria, forced to work illegally in low-paid jobs in the informal economy, Dora has nondominant status. In her narrative of events located in Bulgaria, class intersects with ethnicity when Dora narrates herself as having dominant status, which giving examples about 'the others' -the uneducated, the nouveau riche and the Roma and Sinti in Bulgaria -demonstrates.

Furthermore, despite her academic qualifications and belonging to the Bulgarian upper middle class, Dora's migrant status means that she is confronted with political and institutional barriers that constrain her actions: she cannot find legal employment and has to extend her studies in order to keep her residence permit. This demonstrates that global and local relations of power are at the heart of how gender works in relation to other categories of difference. Foucault has argued that there is no place outside power relations; all of us are interwoven in a net of power relations, though some may take part in more dominant discourses than others [START_REF] Foucault | Die Archäologie des Wissens[END_REF]. With Dora we get a picture of how, on the one hand, the actions of single actors are determined through their structural conditions. Her position is changing, first with Bulgaria's velvet revolution and second with her migration to Austria and her confrontation with Austrian immigration laws. On the other hand, through Dora's case the interpretations and negotiation of these structures by the individual become transparent. There are probably many other ways in which Dora could have presented her life -her account is locally situated in the specific interview situation. This implies of course that, in another interview with the same person, the events narrated may well be presented differently. Not only are social existence and understandings of the self perceived differently in each situation but the 'objective' basis of conditions (gender relations, class relations, racism and sexism) changes for the individual over time and in different interactions.

Finally, Dora's agentic strategies have to be analysed together with her perspective as (dis)placed and located in the specific difficulties of her migratory situation. Her autobiographical narratives are in tension between adaptation and rejection in that she says she does not feel at home either in Austria or in Bulgaria. Although research that links gender to other categories of difference decentres gender, it does not centre any other category. Instead, the intersections of gender with other categories of difference serve to constitute the specific quality of the gender identity in question in a specific time and place. Because they work together -and intersect -their relative prevalence shifts. NOTES I am very grateful to the anonymous referees as well as the editors for their careful and most helpful comments. I also thank Eline Peterson for her comments on an earlier version.

1. After the equality and the difference approach, which both focused on genderduality (see [START_REF] Kristeva | Women's Time[END_REF], the equality stream demanded equal treatment and equal rights for men and women, while the difference stream rejected the dominant masculine social order in the name of difference and demanded special protective rights for women (see [START_REF] Brooks | Postfeminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms[END_REF][START_REF] Squires | Gender in Political Theory[END_REF]. 2. In this text, the term Black is capitalized to represent it as a political selfdescription and to avoid reproductions of Black and 'colour' as objective categories since all classifications of humans according to skin-pigmentation are man-made and therefore socially constructed. 3. I refer here to the authors of this position. Not all Black feminists (or feminists of colour) hold this position, and vice versa not all authors of this position are Black feminists. 4. The name is a pseudonym.

5.

OK, I am, I am from Bulgaria and I am, I study in Vienna, unfortunately, because I have to make my status legal here, somehow. So the only possibility at the time is, to stay a student, and I am 29 years old, still a student, I mean, this is my third university here, and I have already studied at the American University in Bulgaria, first I studied for four years, and I got the Baccalaureate title, and then for two years, its name is the 'New University of Bulgaria', I got a Masters title in Political Science and International Relations and here [in Vienna] I study in addition law, the legal rules of International Relations at the Faculty of Law in Vienna.

6. Instead, the questions to keep the interview flowing should be very open; for instance 'Can you please tell me more about it?' Likewise, one should avoid prompting and taking up value positions such as: 'Oh, that must have been hard', or 'You must have been afraid'. It is advisable to encourage the narration by repeating what has already been said: 'You mentioned that you used to travel by bus from Bulgaria to Vienna, can you tell me more about that?' 7. Dora was sent the full text after transcription and did not want to make changes.

8.

It is always like that, our generation, the people that are around 30, we are somehow lost, now, in these circumstances in Eastern Europe, because it is very unstable. . . . There is this wave of young people that left for foreign countries in the 1990s, they come back here [to Bulgaria], they imagine that everything is better in Bulgaria, and they try to find a job during some months and to regulate their lives, but it is really hard now. (My emphasis) 9. Interestingly, no one else functions as a main character in the events told by Dora.

10.

Because he is from this new generation in Bulgaria, he spent most of his life already in -after the change, he was eight years old or so, when everything changed with the -, we had no revolution in that sense, it was, we have always called it 'the un-bloody revolution', velvet revolution or something like that.

It never was a pleasure to him to read books or to study at home and to engage in something, he was always on the streets with all the Bulgarian flags.European Journal of Women's Studies 13(3)

European Journal ofWomen's Studies 13(3)