A brief theoretical justification for the inclusion of personal contexts for research in the body of this dissertation

Adrienne Rich writes that we should claim the politics of our locations, the contexts we bring to all the work we do, our various identities that blur and overlap. To neglect to do this, according to Rich, is to leave out half of the story, to pretend an argumentative position doesn't have a perspective, a context, and subjective human prejudices and biases behind it. For Rich the struggle against "lofty and priviledged abstraction" does two primary things: 1) it keeps the focus on the particular, the material, to "reconnect our thinking and speaking with the body of this particular living human individual, a woman" (213), and 2) it helps guard against the tendency to universalize ethnocentric positions, to say "all women" (219). Feminist theory since the time of Rich's 1984 article has moved beyond standpoints and even the universalizations of identity politics. Identities are seen now as more fluid, socially constructed, less confining and essentialist. However some still find value in feminist standpoint theory in the construction of ethos, which will emerge as a key concept in this dissertation. Susan Jarratt and Nedra Reynolds write,

Despite our reservations about some forms of standpoint theory, we find that collectively, the ideas of place, position, and standpoint in feminist theory offer us a way of reconceiving ethos as an ethical political tool--as a way of claiming and taking responsibility for our positions in the world, for the ways we see, for the places from which we speak. (Jarratt and Reynolds 52)

The problem of ethical-political action in postmodern thought is also addressed by Judith Butler in "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," framed specifically in terms of blurring identities and gender categories. Butler would have us remember that "Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original" (313), but while she makes a compelling argument for understanding the mimetic social construction of gender and other identities, she does not completely set to rest the ethical-political problem with erasing categories of identity. With gay and lesbian identities and standpoints in particular subject to political erasure by compulsory heterosexuality, those who would dissolve identities in queer theory run the very real risk of becoming complicit in their own oppression, an issue Butler touches on, but does not fully address, even in her more recent work (see "Gender Trouble" and "Critically Queer").

Meanwhile the work of Donna Haraway seeks to develop a guerrilla- like "cyborg consciousness", a loosely defined hybrid of animal and machine, a hit-and-run ironic turn in the microcircuit, appropriating the tools of technology for subversive ends. For Haraway cyborgs are invisible and ubiquitous, "illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchial capitalism, not to mention state socialism" (153), without loyalties or origins, "committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity, it is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence" (151). Haraway dissolves identities even as she mythologies the multiplicities of the cyborg. According to Haraway identities, insofar as they are totalizing, are oppressive, and cyborg consciousness represents a form of subversive liberation from them. In a later essay, she clarifies a working use for identities within oppositional consciousness and overlapping locations,

"Feminist embodiment, then, is not about fixed location in a reified body, female or otherwise, but about nodes in fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility for difference in material-semiotic fields of meaning. . . Feminism loves another science and technology, the sciences and politics of interpretation, translation, stuttering, and the partly understood. Above all, rational knowledge does not pretend to disengagement, to be from everywhere and so nowhere" (Coyote 23)

While Haroway's postmodern feminist deconstructions of identity seem far from Rich's radical feminist desire to avoid the distances theory abstracts from lived experience by claiming identites, we can see in both a resistance to universals, to master narratives, ethnocentric assumptions, through the particularizing of positions, whether localized and multiple, or unfixable "nodes in fields."

Moving still farther from Rich and identity politics, current queer theory and politics has taken as its primary mantra the desire to "fuck with all the categories," dispensing with identities altogether, or rather, to constantly "queer" everything. "To queer" has become the new verb for the undermining of essentialist identities. In a more recent article Butler writes, "The political deconstruction of 'queer' ought not to paralyze the use of such terms, but, ideally, to extend its range, to make us consider at what expense and for what purposes the terms are used, and through what relations of power such categories have been wrought" ("Critically Queer" 15).

But what does this movement away from socially-contingent identities get us? What does it get me? As we will see in this dissertation, the public relations positioning of Renaissance Pictures, the people who create the show "Xena: Warrior Princess," is strongly affected by the language of the queer movement, perhaps even appropriating it toward some dubious ends. As I see it, there are a number of ways that the queer "fucking with the categories" can backfire and become potentially exploitive of queers, personally and politically, but I'll save that discussion for another thread in this dissertation.

Which leaves me to own up to my personal narratives, my need to tell the stories behind the arguments, the stories that influenced the evolution of my thought, the identities I carry with me like so much white, middle class baggage, because even as I learn to fuck with the categories, a part of me is outraged at the effect of erasing identities. Part of me sees the move as a form of conscious denial of identifications that cannot be discarded so easily without deceiving oneself with a ruse, a pretense, like pretending to hide an elephant under a rug. It is in this context, then, that I tell my personal story as part of this dissertation