Reconstruction 7.4 (2007)
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Sacred Cyborgs and 21st Century Goddesses / Katharyn Privett
For you men who still do not know I will give one further clue. Look into yourself - look into your heart. Do you see who it is who lies there, in a sleep near to death, a sleep that has lasted for centuries, a sleep from which you can awaken her?
Daniel Cohen, Iphegenia: A Retelling
People put me into all different categories: I'm a material girl, a sex goddess, a mother, spiritual. But I love contradiction.
Madonna
<1> The late 20th and early 21st centuries shifted significantly from their Postmodern bearings in their search for new meaning, new ideologies, and new gods. One such shift resides in the contestation of the meaning of the feminine body and its corresponding gender, or more often, the lack thereof. Feminist theories of essentialism and constructivism, after years of battle over the delegation of the sexed flesh, were reinvigorated by Donna J. Haraway's riotous cyborg trope - evidence that the argument had finally left the security of the Ivory Tower and was now up for new, albeit alien, interpretations. [1] Outside of the academic boundaries of feminist theory, this shift in re-thinking the female frame aggressively emerged within the arenas of popular culture. In the early 21st century, the mass appeal of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code became a cultural phenomenon in its radical articulation of the sexual sacred female, sparking debate from the suburban housewife to the Vatican. Yet, pop music had already predicted the emergence of a national gender rebellion at the end of the 20th century; as it saturated the air waves and visually infiltrated mass culture through the venues of MTV and VH1, the politicized female body materialized as anything but unitary.
<2> America had become the voyeur of a commercialized gender performance that refused reinterpretation by hegemonic institutions and the effect had left a nation entranced. Cultural icons such as Madonna and Prince were paid to be national heretics, laughing in the face of normalized ideas of gender and daring religion and science to categorize them. Their legacy carved a space for lesser artists, such as Meredith Brooks and Natasha Benefield, who made their marks on late 20th and early 21st century with little more than a top ten recording. Yet, even in the brevity of their fame, Brooks' and Benefield's lyrical insistence of a fractuous feminine identity further disrupted and decoded gender as an altruistic ontology. As they danced across the frame of a television screen, these pop princesses called for women to sing along to a Post-Postmodernist mantra of democratized, autonomous sexuality that dared a nation to name them. They were, in effect, the commercialized goddess figure - and they were only the beginning.
<3> Perhaps the most recent indication of fracture in unilateral gender identity has appeared in the political arena and its insistence on intellectual brawn, regardless of sex. American concepts of femininity have notably shifted toward a more Athenian model, as the cultural expectations of political women now demand an inclusion of what has traditionally been considered masculine strength. The early 21st century has placed women into positions of political power, as a German Chancellor ( Angela Merkel), a Chilean President ( Michelle Bachelet), and a hotly contested female candidate for the American presidency, New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. [2] ABC launched "Commander in Chief" in the fall of 2005, a series that depicted actress Geena Davis as the first female president, "softening the ground" of the American mind for the 2008 presidential campaign. [3] In a Time article, columnist Joe Klein vacillates between praise for Clinton's tough demeanor and anxiety over her apparent lack of femininity, claiming her first to be "a judicious hawk on foreign policy," yet firmly negating her candidacy on the grounds that: "she isn't a particularly warm or eloquent speaker." [4] Klein subsequently admits that: "Any woman running for President will face a toughness conundrum: she will constantly have to prove her strength and be careful about showing her emotions," yet abruptly calls for a "credible feminine presidential style," an apparent conflict of terms. [5] What has been assumed to be feminine has, in the last ten or fifteen years, come under scrutiny and been redrafted in terms which include, rather than preclude, a masculine logos. The result is less androgynous than it is a radical hybridity - a goddess-like refusal of unilateral gender identity. Yet, the best evidence of this Post-Postmodern shift toward a bi-gendered femininity resides in the terrain of pop culture, as it often works to soften national ground for new and disruptive iconic figures.
<4> The pop culture of the 80s and 90s effectively produced those cultural icons that resisted totalarian concepts of gender identity on a public stage. Madonna, ironically named after a Christian Maternal Goddess, danced upon the holy ground of feminine concepts in drag, while Prince embraced a femininity that dared masculinist systems to name him. As the century drew to a close, Prince would rename himself after a symbol that refused pronunciation: a code created from a blasphemous fusion of traditional male/female symbols. This recodification of the self is emblematic of a 21st century shift in feminist thought, as well, marking the evolution of third-wave feminism and its insistence upon the individual. Kristen Rowe-Finkbeiner writes in The F Word of the changing face of feminism, defining it as third-wave or "modern" feminism and finds the markers of 21st century feminism to be autonomy, political inactivity, and a radical malleability of identity. [6] Rowe-Finkbeiner admits the difficulty in situating a stable locatedness for modern feminism as: "the general ethos of this generation rejects labels relating to the perceived exclusivity of identity politics and reveres the individual." [7] As such, third-wavers resist the gendered subject position, unlike their second-wave sisters, which has resulted in a political cleavage in feminism today. The clearest point of conflict within feminisms is: "that mainstream contemporary feminists, primarily led by second-wavers, has yet to catch up to the new ethos of the third wave, which doesn't shy away from combining 'traditional' and 'nontraditional' gender roles in ways that work best for each individual woman." [8] What this adds up to is a revolutionary way of thinking about identity, gender, and the body - the codification of all residing within the individual.
<5> It is the power to code, then, that differentiates third-wave feminists from their predecessors and fuels the growing field of cyborg theory in constructivist feminism. Donna J. Haraway's immensely influential work, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, works against organic theories of biology toward: "a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction." [9] Fundamental to her theory of the cyborg is autonomous codification, as Haraway argues for: "a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self [that] feminists must code." [10] Further, Haraway foresees the technology of writing to be the impetus of self-coding, arguing for a defensive politics "against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallocentrism." [11] Central to this argument is Haraway's resistance to a biological body that is tied to reproduction, gender, and heterosexual matrixes. Indeed, most constructivist positions are born in the margins of hegemonic systems of domination. Yet, cyborg theory dances upon the dreams of a union between the flesh and the mind, insisting upon the erasure of gender as the only salvation, and finds cyberspace to be the only ground stable enough to tread upon. It is a theory of resistance, and one in which Haraway utilizes the language of Christian mythology in her defense against an oppressive world, claiming: "But with the loss of innocent in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden." [12] Haraway links the un-cyborg, biological body with the sinful body, finding that:
A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end . . . Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. [13]
Working against any theory that begins with "original innocence," Haraway permanently links the biological female body to white/Christian/Western systems of domination. In calling for "a myth system" that could produce a "monstrous world without gender," Haraway misses other mythologies that included the body in autonomous, transgressive ways. [14] In her last statement, Haraway nods to the goddess myth, yet dismisses it in favor of a cyborg identity: "Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess." [15] Even though the boundaries between the two appear to be distinct for Haraway, the disparity between the goddess and the cyborg is not clearly marked in her manifesto. Rather, in her resistance to Christian productions of femininity, Haraway proclaims "my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg," a purposeful deviation from Western mythologies. [16] Yet, as original goddess and Earth Mother myths predate Christianity and patriarchy, they also offer a blasphemous reappropriation of the "myth of original unity," a radical departure from the juridicial schemas of gender, sex, and identity. [17] Further, Haraway describes her cyborg as: "committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence." [18] Ancient Goddess myths are anything but innocent: from Mesopotamia to Egypt, Nut to Ninlil, goddesses were shape-changers, warriors, mothers, magicians, prophetesses, loving, defiant, and above all, sexual. [19] The latter, perhaps, is the fundamental point of contention for Haraway, as her cyborg is thoroughly disengaged from sexual reproduction. To the extent that the cyborg is capable of refusing an essentialized maternal identity, he/she/it does represent a departure from the totalizing and often crippling effects of normative gender systems. Even so, Haraway's constructivist foreclosure on the gendered body comes dangerously close to re-essentializing the female form. As she insists that: "cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction," Haraway strips the liberated cyborg of what she names as: "reproductive politics [as the cyborg is] not of Woman born." [20] In an effort to resist maternal essentialism, Haraway creates a material corporeality that excludes the maternal as one possible element in a feminist constituency. While her manifesto argues for a "cyborg politics" that must "struggle . . . against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism," any myth that becomes dogmatic in resistance to that dogma has effectively turned upon itself. [21]
<6> Haraway does point to an alternative to traditional concepts of the reproductive female body in her discussion of regeneration, a metaphysical substitution for biological reproduction. As Haraway calls for a resistance to "holistic politics [that] depend on metaphors of rebirth," she finds that cyborgs "have more to do with regeneration," enlikening the cyborg body to that of a salamander that can regrow a decapitated limb upon demand. Such a regrowth "can be monstrous, duplicated, potent," more viable than ever before. [22] Although Haraway exempts the myth of a goddess as a possible analogy for feminism, it is in her call for a regenerative creativity that cyborg and goddess theories converge. The Egyptian goddess Isis was capable of such regeneration, but even more intriguingly, was capable of gathering the severed limbs of her brother/lover Osiris and piecing him back to life. [23] Thus, the goddess represents a mythology of physical reconstruction, one that Haraway inevitably dismisses in the "spiral dance" that disrupts hegemonic semiotic systems of domination. [24]
<7> As a constructivist/poststructuralist feminist theory, cyborg theory is most often presented as being diametrically opposed to the fleshed body as integral to its premise. Such separability is not only unnecessary, but dangerous in its assumptions of a bias-free, unmarked identity. Michelle Chilcoat writes in "Brain Sex, Cyberpunk Cinema, Feminism, and the Dis/Location of Heterosexuality" of the current cleavage between science and feminism, finding the constructivist feminist resistance to the discussion of biology to be redundant. Arguing for a "malleability" in sexual sciences and politics, Chilcoat challenges the feminist/biological divide, contending that: "This positioning often requires feminism to abandon questions of biology and the material body altogether, for fear that any discussion of biology can only be reductionist." [25] There are good reasons for such a concern, as history has often proved, yet by abandoning the body, we leave it stable, knowable, and up-for-grabs for any ideological system that might have a dog in the fight. Finding that technology has opened the proverbial door to new discussions about the body, Chilcoat warns against the defensive abandonment of the biological body, arguing that:
Inspired by developments of the information age, feminist theory and feminist science have opened the door to this dislocation. But to fully realize its potential, the notion that the biological or material body is static and prior to the cultural constructions of gender must be relinquished . . . If the body is reconceived in terms of perpetual transformation, resistance and disruption are no longer antithetical to the norms that dictate social behaviors, but characteristic of the norms themselves: it becomes normal not to be normal. [26]
Therefore, the transformative biological body must exist in order for real resistance to occur. Haraway's use of the regenerative powers of the cyborg is one possible articulation of physical malleability, yet to dictate or limit that malleability as existing only in opposition to maternal or reproductive sites of identity disregards the autonomy of a transformative body. Chilcoat further points out that, while:
Cyberspace may indeed hold the promise of liberation, [it] is not about escaping from or to bodies . . . it is about putting the practice of imposing limits on the body into question, thereby rendering the will to locate and thus arrest knowledge a suspect, if not altogether undesirable practice. [27]
The suggestion that the body may be autonomous, but never maternal, negates the promise of liberation and regeneration that Haraway envisions as possible for the cyborg feminist.
<8> Charlotte Ross continues the interrogation of the utopian cyborg existence in "Creating the Ideal Posthuman Body?" positing that: "whether intentionally or unintentionally, cyborg narratives reveal the importance of the body in psychic development, and function in part as a warning against detaching ourselves too definitively from our own corporeality." [28] The notion of the cyborg body, while enticingly utopian in its positioning of an untethered, unnamable state of existence, runs further risk by de-marking the body in ways that deny race. For the black feminist, such a risk is non-negotiable, for if the body is (as Haraway suggests) that which the "feminist must code," then the unmarking of women of color constitutes a feminist homogenization in the name of liberation. Malini Johar Schueller, in her essay "Analogy and (White) Feminist Theory," resists Haraway's cyborg as a dangerous analogy, arguing that, while Haraway's attempt at inclusion is commendable, if it "entails a disregard for situatedness and locatedness, it avails itself of the universalizing and unmarked privileges of whiteness," the very thing that it purports to resist. [29] Schueller further argues against the "subsumption of race under gender/sexuality via analogy," finding that feminist theory is often (albeit unwittingly) guilty of "incorporation by analogy." [30] Although it is true that analogy runs the risk of assimilation by association, it is evident that the use of analogy and its signifiers is a consequential condition of analytic theory. It is the lens through which theory understands itself, and as such, runs a necessary risk as a tool of interpellation in feminist theory - which must, therefore, predate white, Western, male epistemologies of analogy.
<9> Schueller further cites Haraway's analogy of the vampire in Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium as yet another romanticized myth of a marginalized, unmarked existence, asking: "But where and how in the specific matrixes of racial and gendered/sexual oppression, can vampirism be a choice?" [31] What is more disturbing than a vampiric existence, perpetually victimized and victimizing, is its lack of a flesh and blood existence. Haraway's vampire, much like her cyborg, is not of woman born and has no truck with reproduction, but most insidiously, severs all bloodlines including that of race as: "Ties through blood . . . have been bloody enough. I believe that there will be no racial or sexual peace, no livable nature, until we learn to produce humanity through something more than kinship." [32] Haraway's exoticization of the unbiological body becomes a constructivist fetish in its urgency to usurp the flesh, a phenomenon that she denounces in detail in Modest_Witness:
Curiously, fetishes - themselves "substitutes," that is, tropes of a special kind - produce a particular "mistake"; fetishes obscure the constitutive tropic nature of themselves and of worlds. Fetishes literalize and so induce an elementary material and cognitive error. Fetishes make things seem clear and under control. [33]
Ironically, Haraway's use of the "tropes" of cyborg and vampire become "substitutes" for the female body in her attempt to "make things seem clear," thereby eclipsing and "obscuring" the body, in all of its shapes and colors, from feminist theory.
<10> Even so, Haraway's insistence on the technology of writing as an act of encoding is crucial to a feminist theory that would bridge the gap between essentialism and constructivism. Haraway argues that cyborgs are "seizing the tools to mark the world that has marked them as other," yet is this marking of the world not also a violent and oppressive act? [34] Instead, it might be useful to envision the cyborg as rewriting itself, erasing, marking, encoding an identity of its own rather than imposing a feminist solidarity upon the world. Haraway does point out that the cyborg "rewrites" herself and her body, yet does not interrogate the implications of "marking" a world in vindication for decades of oppression. [35] And so, in keeping with Haraway's definition of blasphemy "which has always seemed to require taking things very seriously," a feminist response to a rigid constructivist manifesto might be: "I'd rather be a goddess than a cyborg." [36]
<11> It seems to be the contention of cyborg feminism that the technology of writing and its ability to code necessarily begins outside of the fleshy body and further works as an extension into a cyberkynetic world outside of any organic, material reality. If this is true, then the constructivist impulse to abandon the body is more than phantasmatic: it assumes another plane of reality, altogether. The question remains, is an abandonment of the physical realm even possible for the cyborg feminist? Such a move disregards the body as a sight of real injury, leaving it open to aggressive invasions by any ideology that may claim it as uncontested (or uninhabited) territory. Virginia Woolf offered, in 1929, an alternate position for the writing body that contests the exteriorization of its technology, instead envisioning an embodiment of text and its products for the literary woman. By locating the technology of writing as an interior process, Woolf situated it as crucial to physical processes, as it would be: "death to hide . . . perishing and with it myself, my soul." [37] Further aligning the power to write with the power to live, Woolf suggests the writing heart to be metaphysically necessary, as its destruction would equal to "destroying the tree at its heart." [38] While Woolf incorporates the tool of writing (a certain technology, itself), Haraway extends the body toward technology in a quest for power outside of the organic flesh, asking: "Why should our bodies end at the skin?" [39] Rather than carving a space for anything sacred within the female frame, Haraway's argument cripples the autonomy of the body as useless outside of techno-exchange systems, as she argues that: "No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language." [40] What this interchange necessitates is an act of external coding upon the body in order to invest the sacred within the flesh; yet, does this act not invalidate the license of the individual to self-code? To what extent might the act of interfacing become a violent inscription of technology (itself driven by ideological codes) upon the unguarded female body? In retrospect, Woolf predicted the inherent jeopardy of bodily erasure, insisting upon the: "great part which must be played in that future so far as women are concerned by physical conditions." [41] Rather than voluntarily sacrificing the body to the technology of writing, Woolf claimed that "the book has somehow to be adapted to the body," re-visioning technology as metaphorically absorbed within the boundaries of a self-governed frame. [42] Legislating the body as the primary location and necessary space for the art of writing, Woolf creates spatial bodily boundaries capable of negotiation with external semiotic producers of identity rather than passive incorporation through the interface of technology. In doing so, Woolf's writing body forms a primitive template for the feminist cyborg, insisting upon the contours of the body as indispensable territory for the writing woman. After all, writing the body necessarily means retaining its privileges of ownership, however tenuous that ownership may be in a technological world.
<12> As that technological world has advanced, there continues to be an aggressive movement towards retaining and reclaiming the primacy of the body. Integral to the battle over the mediated flesh is the incorporation of coding, which is (ironically) the first premise of Haraway's theory of the inorganic cyborg. As the cyborg belongs first and foremost to the culture of media, the most immediate response to recode her/him/it as an organic, yet autocratically-identified body is evidenced in popular music. Natasha Bedingfield's 2006 pop hit, "Unwritten," echoes Haraway's call to "actively rewrite the text of [the] body." [43] Bedingfield's lyrics suggest the act of self-coding as rebellion, claiming: "I am unwritten, can't read my mind, I'm undefined. I'm just beginning, the pen's in my hand, ending unplanned." [44] It is crucial to note Bedingfield's refusal to be culturally codified, as she disavows the subject position by alienating her identity from external identifications. Her lyrics insist upon a social insurgency, as she claims: "I break tradition, sometimes my tries, are outside the lines," locating a porous, malleably materiality that "breaks" external signifiers. Bedingfield's chorus incorporates the flesh as text, rendering the body as the location of its own epistemology:
Release your inhibitions / Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you / Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else / Can speak the words on your lips
Drench yourself in words unspoken / Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins / The rest is still unwritten.
The self, as Bedingfield points out, is the "rest," codified by words "unspoken," and necessarily, irreducibly, physical. Consequently, Haraway's claim that no space or body can be sacred delimits the power of words to code the physical self in political, sexual, racial, and even spiritual ways. If, as Haraway suggests: "Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves," then the next step for the cyborg is to reclaim her/his body, recast and recode it, as a host for the sacred. [45]
Sacred/Sacré Bodies
<13> If the marker of Postmodern women's fiction was the refusal of the feminine body, then the marker of a Post-Postmodern world is its urgent impulse to relocate the sacred within the feminine frame. Catherine Clement and Julia Kristeva argue for a revival of the sacred in feminist theory, asking: "What if the ancestral division between 'those who give life' (women) and 'those who give meaning' (men) were in the process of disappearing?" Their answer is a hopeful one, as they posit that: "It would be a radical upheaval, never before seen. Sufficient to herald a new era of the sacred." [46] Clement and Kristeva define the ambiguous term "sacred" to mean many things, as it is "sexual," a form of "sadomachism," but most clearly a question:
What if the sacred were the unconscious perception the human being has of its eroticism: always on the borderline between nature and culture, the animalistic and the verbal, the sensible and the nameable? What if the sacred were not the religious need for protection and omnipotence that institutions exploit but the jouissance of that cleavage - of that power/powerlessness - of that exquisite lapse? [47]
It is in this "permanent questioning" that the sacred holds its power. The alternate assumption has been, in essentialist feminist studies, that a permanent relationship exists between the sign and the signified - an assumption that has led many constructivists to abandon the body. Yet, in loosening the sacred from the body, Clement and Kristeva offer a theory that sacrifices the narcissistic impulse to reproduce feminine nature as flesh, thereby freeing the body for self-inscription. Constructivist theorists such as Monique Wittig and Donna J. Haraway, while offering revolutionary images of the unsignified body, radically unmark the body in ways that may, in effect, only reproduce the violence of regulatory systems of identification. [48]
<14> Judith Butler argues for the possibility that: "certain identifications and affiliations are made . . . precisely in order to institute a disidentification with a position that seems too saturated with injury or aggression, one that might, as a consequence, be occupiable only through the loss of viable identity altogether." [49] Such a loss is nonnegotiable for women of color, women who choose maternity, lesbians, transsexuals, or any identity that claims the body as its site of resistance and/or locus of power. Clement and Kristeva warn against the public marketing of the sacred as political freedom, finding that:
The sacred is, of course, experienced in private; it even seemed to us to be what gives meaning to the most intimate of singularities, at the intersection of the body and thought, biology and memory, life and meaning - among men and women . . . A 'private' sacred, therefore, since, as soon as it claims to become public, it totalizes and turns into totalitarian horror [is necessary as] it is in the sharing of it that the sacred unveils its risks as much as its vitality. [50]
Therefore, essentialism and constructivism are both incapable of harboring the sacred, for the former always assumes a permanent relationship with the maternal and the latter assumes (too often) a permanent fracture from the maternal. Both dismiss the sacred as either communal flesh or a dangerous myth, yet it is the nature of the sacred to be singular, private, orgiastic, and disruptive. Clement and Kristeva note the alternate linguistic meaning of the French term sacré to be: "also used as an expletive equivalent to 'damned,' 'blasted,' or 'bloody,'" and further note that the noun sacrément is "similarly ambivalent." [51] It is interesting to note the binary meaning of the holy word, as it is usually the case that what is sacred to one is often blasphemous to another. Changeable and private, it is the code that is most often mistaken for what is sacred or damned, and it is the coded body that provides serendipitous access to what is both.
<15> The body, therefore, need not be discarded in an effort to further a feminist politics within the 3rd millennium. The "unwritten" body becomes the "resistance to the Spectacle in which the religion of the Word culminates," a temple that can only be coded or decoded from its interior. [52] Natasha Bedingfield's body as text reverses the sacré for the sacred, insisting upon an untranslatable, private sacral flesh as she claims "I am unwritten," a declarative revolt against institutional semiotics of femininity. [53] Clement and Kristeva argue that the sacred "does not vanish with the appearance of religious codes . . . since its nature is to turn the order upside down," and further claim that "one of its functions is to cross over." [54] It follows that the body, sacrilegiously encoded in a private language, is crucial to a feminist ethos of autonomy that will "cross over" the fractures of essentialism and constructivism. As the vehicle for the crossing over those fissures of feminist theory, music and its encoded lyrical messages offered a viable and sustainable option for a Postmodern covert operation.
Sacrament in Song
<16> In investigating the place of a goddess in the realm of the sacred, Clement (in a letter to Kristeva) notes that "sacrilege befits a goddess" as historically they are created: "without the support of a clergy." [55] As the goddess trope reemerged in the late 20th Century, she took form most often on the airwaves, far from the silencing confines of religious sanctuaries. Clement and Kristeva note that: "Of all the arts, music is no doubt the closest to that elevation without words, before words, beyond words, the passion made voice, sound, rhythm, melody, and silence that the sacred communicates." [56] Not surprisingly, the act of recoding the sacred is most visible within the domain of pop music and outside of the logophobic discourse of academia. Clement and Kristeva nod to the pop diva, Madonna, as the epitome of "a caricature of the sacred," noting that: "the enormous cross on her punk chest in her early films, the role of Evita . . . the daughter baptized ' Lourdes'" all parody the sacred in sacré ways. [57] Yet, to dismiss Madonna's own coding of identity as "caricature" denies the possibility of a radical malleability of identity, the ability to reshape and recode oneself, which is the reflection of the sacred itself. [58] Such an identity refuses to align itself in traditional and interpretable terms, as Madonna has exhibited in her constant transformation.
<17> Judith Butler argues that identification (what I have called self-coding) occurs outside of the symbolic law, insisting that "identifications belong to the imaginary; they are phantasmatic efforts of alignment, loyalty, ambiguous and cross-corporeal cohabitation; they unsettle the 'I,'" and as such are in a constant state of contest within normative culture. [59] Therefore, to interpret Madonna's identity performance as mimicry is to dismiss the legitimacy of a radically malleable self, reflected on the flesh, yet born of the sacred. Clement bases much of her analysis of Madonna's performative sacred on what she notes as "her stage name," missing the crucial significance of the pop diva's given name, Madonna Louise Ciccone. [60] As a Madonna since birth, and a disavowed Catholic, Madonna evokes a goddess stripped of her power, and in doing so, reinvests her own image in sacré signifiers - a move that suggests more than mere parody. Further, songs such as "Like a Virgin" (1984) and "Like a Prayer" (1989) purposefully rework, or reverse, the sacred for the sacré, made publicly clear when the Vatican condemned the latter as blasphemous for its intentional eroticism. Indeed, if the sacred is always the sacré, turned upside down and always moving in reverse, then Madonna's persona represents not simply an echo of the sacred as it exists externally within culture, but its constitutively internal malleability. [61] Madonna's performance heretically reverses traditional sacred tropes for sexual ones, and in doing so, invokes what Clement and Kristeva have named a "trait of the divine," that which "predates religion" in its deployment of the erotic. Madonna's lyrics often reinvest the erotic into the spiritual, as her song "Like a Prayer" exhibits:
When you call my name it's like a little prayer /I'm down on my knees,
I wanna take you there / In the midnight hour I can feel your power
Just like a prayer you know I'll take you there
I hear your voice, it's like an angel sighing / I have no choice, I hear your voice
Feels like flying / I close my eyes, oh god I think I'm falling
Out of the sky, I close my eyes / Heaven help me [62]
Calling to mind fallen angels, Madonna's lyrics infuse the sacred with sexual eroticism and reinvents worship as the physical act of felatio. Yet, even on her knees she is in power, as she promises "I'll take you there," a suggestion that reinvigorates female sexuality as an act of aggression, heretically disrupting the Christian sexual hierarchy of phallic domination. Clement and Kristeva note that, unlike the religious which must have organization, the sacred: "does exactly the opposite: it eclipses time and space. It passes in a boundlessness without rule or reservation, which is the trait of the divine." [63] Such a designation mediates the flesh, itself an organized surface, as the sacred, but rather posits the body as the vessel through which it passes. Clement and Kristeva note it as an act of private "revolt" against the "intersection of the body and thought," never existing as one or the other, yet giving both meaning. [64] Therefore, the function of the sacred is not to reestablish symbolic order, as it already precedes it, but rather to condemn it as natural law. Madonna's exhibition of the sacré therefore might reflect a sacred, divine upheaval of a religion that had once attempted to police her femininity, erase her sexuality, and name her unclean. In her blasphemous reversal of the sacred, Madonna deprivileged a Catholic mythology of the divine, and transformed into a diva. [65] Regardless of her stature as a highly commercialized, therefore tenuous, vehicle for feminist thought, Madonna's performance and mass appeal acted as a catalyst for gender rebellion in the mind of a nation. Such an impact, while markedly removed from a feminist ethos of difference and political motivation, cannot be ignored in its effect on cultural interpretations of gender; even as her work represents a mass commodification of feminism, Madonna's image continues to resonate as an emergent, defiant and sexual amalgam of female identity in the 20th century. Once marked by that image, despite the cost of its production, the American mind could not shake the memory of a torpedoed brassiere nor a diva in drag.
<18> Almost a decade later, a one hit wonder would become a suburban woman's mantra. In 1997, Meredith Brook's feminist pop manifesto "Bitch" hit the airways and MTV's top ten and proclaimed a multitude of identities to be harbored within the body of woman. Her lyrics both denounce abject correlations of angelic characteristics and announce the evasive goddess attributes within the female frame, claiming:
I tried to tell you but you look at me like maybe
I'm an angel underneath; innocent and sweet
Yesterday I cried; Must've been relieved to see the softer side
I can understand how you'd be so confused
I don't envy you; I'm a little bit of everything all rolled into one. [66]
Sympathetic to the masculinist desire for the angel, Brooks relieves that anxiety only temporarily before reaffirming a fragmented, yet whole, identity:
I'm a Bitch, I'm a Lover / I'm a child, I'm a Mother / I'm a sinner, I'm a saint
I do not feel ashamed / I'm your hell, I'm your dream / I'm nothing in between
You know you wouldn't want it any other way. [67]
Brooks's bitch is assuredly duplicitous, yet that is the condition of a goddess, "tender and murderous, without tears. Devotion guaranteed, fanaticism assured." [68] Sexed and maternal, sinful and sanctified, Brooks creates the Bitch Goddess of the late nineties as, rather than unwritten, externally uncodable in her ambiguous, amorphous frame. She is a lyrical cyborg, refusing interpretability by any source other than her autocratic designer. By situating the female frame as uncodable, Brooks claims both the sacred and the sacré; she is both "sinner" and "saint," enacting the reverse upon each other in a rhythmic, univocal synergy. Her chorus both disrupts and gathers the sacred and the sacré, most evident in her final rendition and revision of the chorus:
Offering the comfort of an angel "undercover," Brooks resituates the angel as only one version of a performance, unlike Madonna's visceral response to an angel's voice to which she has "no choice." Yet, both artists invest the image of an angel with a very physical eroticism: Madonna responds to an angel's sigh as passionate foreplay, while Brooks transforms into an angel "undercover," suggesting a divine consummation of her flesh under a bed sheet. It is also interesting to note the similarity between Brooks's imagery of a goddess performing felatio and Madonna's depiction of worshiping an angel "down on my knees." Yet, for Brooks, there is a corporeal expression of power in a goddess on her knees as the male passive recipient of the sexual act has been bled of his autonomy. As the locus of sexual power is effectively reversed in the act of felatio, Brooks's goddess is poised as sacré through her oral worship of the phallus and the blasphemous displacement of holy sacrament. Conversely, as the ultimate object of worship, the goddess on her knees accepts bodily sacrifice - an elemental necessity in the conjuring of the sacred.I'm a bitch, I'm a tease / I'm a goddess on my knees
When you hurt, when you suffer / I'm your angel undercover
I've been numb, I'm revived / Can't say I'm not alive
You know you wouldn't want it any other way. [69]
<19> Clement and Kristeva point out that: "these representations [of sacrifice] do not remain in their place of representation but plunge back into the flesh, which is not quite so sacrificed, after all, allowing it to resonate, in jouissance." [70] Therefore, both Madonna's and Brooks's representations of the act of felatio reincorporate the sacrifice back into the body through orgasmic expellation, and resonate there - recreating the act, often conceived as demeaning and submissive, as an aggressive and invasive act of the sacred. Clement and Kristeva note that: "The sadomasochism of the sacred connection (body/meaning) seems more obvious to a woman, more operative in a woman," yet never more fully realized than when on her knees. [71] Through the incorporation of both the sacred and sacré, Brooks's depiction of a kneeling goddess disrupts the religious code of sex, as it denies scriptural doctrine that insists upon the sexual act as exclusively ordained for reproduction. Further, the paradoxical nature of the sacred, always going in reverse, emerges as Brooks's lover offers himself up to a goddess for sacramental consumption, an act that both reverses holy communion and demands the physical sacrifice of the mortal, male subject. This scene creates a sense of feminine sexual domination, not unlike the ancient goddess cults that required the act of intercourse with her mortal consorts in order to achieve communion with the deity. Merlin Stone, in her work When God Was a Woman, explains this sexual ritual, pointing out that: "Women who resided in the sacred precincts of the Divine Ancestress took their lovers from among the men of the community, making love to those who came to the temple to pay honor to the Goddess." [72] Stone further points out that those sexual acts reflected the sacred sexuality of the feminine, and constituted male homage and reverence to "the patron deity of sexual love." [73] In her mythological origins, then, a goddess possessed a sexual materiality, was realized through male sexual sacrifice, and made contact with her world through the metaphysical experience of orgasm. As a Christian patriarchy reinvented the goddess as sexually frigid, her image retained only the reproductive mythos of maternal essence, thereby effectively castrating her capacity for erotic pleasure. Brooks's Bitch Goddess, however, enjoys a full recovery from an anesthetized feminine sexuality, claiming:
"I've been numb, I'm revived," and predicts the 21st century recovery of goddess mythology. [74]
One such site of recovery would be, however unsettling, within the stronghold of a Christian legend: the story of Mary Magdalene. Unwelcome in any other arena, the image of the goddess had once again found its way in the world of popular culture, and this time made fiction her consort.
Popularizing the Sacred Feminine: Uncoding the Goddess
<20> The recovery of the sacred in 21st century literature was not exclusively motivated by nonwestern, pre-Christian mythology. Rather, in Dan Brown's controversial novel, The Da Vinci Code, the sacred feminine is revealed to be harbored within the conspiratorial legends of Christianity, itself. [75] As popular fiction, The Da Vinci Code represents less of an academic point of excavation in feminist theory than a remarkable site of cultural intervention in the argument over the sacred female flesh. Brown's compilation of goddess legends, religious histories, and the manipulative coding of the sacred feminine is evidence of a resurgent move to reclaim the feminine as a powerful myth, albeit in the form of print fiction. His protagonist, symbologist Robert Landon, is author of a new book entitled Symbols of the Lost Sacred Feminine, a perhaps coincidental, yet compelling, nod to current conversations in feminist theory. Positing the Holy Grail (or chalice) to be the body of a woman, Brown weaves a tale of the sacred feminine accessible only through the matrix of codes. Ironically enough, the symbologist is incapable of breaking those codes without the aid of a female cryptographer, Sophie Neveu. Brown feminizes his male heroes through his depiction of them as "heretics," noting the original meaning of the Latin word haereticus to mean "choice" and aligns the choice to revere Mary Magdalene as the sacred vessel with the heretical devotion of the Priori of Sion. [76] Situating the Sangreal documents as "tracing the symbology of the sacred feminine - tracing her iconography through history," Brown inserts an argument for the necessary utility of myth, arguing that:
Every religion describes God through metaphor, allegory, and exaggeration, from the early Egyptians through modern Sunday school. Metaphors are a way to help our minds process the improcessible. The problems arise when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors. [77]
Despite his closure on the validity of metaphorical representation, Brown's positioning of metaphor asserts its irrefutable power and situates metaphor as the lens through which humanity understands its own meaning and spirituality. Robert Landon vehemently argues for the primacy of metaphor, claiming: "Religious allegory has become a part of the fabric of reality," a supposition that lays claim to Clement and Kristeva's warning of a public, institutional sacred and its murderous potential. What has been murdered here in this work of pulp fiction is a fictionalized holy femininity, a production of patriarchal institutions that denies its own mythical foundation. Brown predicts a resurgence of the divine feminine, musing upon its rise in the early 21st century as: "Her story is being told in art, music, and books. More so every day. The pendulum is swinging. We are starting to sense the dangers of our history . . . and of our destructive paths. We are beginning to sense the need to restore the sacred feminine." [78] And, keeping with Clement and Kristeva's call for a private sacred feminine and a permanent questioning of its boundaries, Brown denotes the Divine Mary Magdalene as fleshly, yet amorphous, claiming that: "The beauty of the Grail lies in her ethereal nature." [79] Disaligning the sacred from the myths of religion, Brown's work articulates the ungovernability of the divine feminine outside of the institutionalized discourse of Christian doctrine. The Da Vinci Code's marked delineation between the realm of the sacred and the religious is crucial to Clement and Kristeva's understanding of the divine, as they argue that "the sacred predates the religious," and thereby "authorizes the lapse, the disappearance of the Subject," surpassing the laws and organizational impulses of the physical realm. [80] Yet, as Clement and Kristeva suggest, the sacred passes through physical vessels, often experienced through the act of sexual ecstasy. Brown's assertion of the sacred feminine is grounded by the assumption of Mary Magdalene's sexual nature, resituating the erotic, female body as the ordained vessel of divinity, a move that recalls the sacred sexual rites of Goddess cults. As pulp fiction, The Da Vinci Code relegitimizes the erotic as sacred, rather than sacré, and thematizes the feminine as historically misinterpreted. Brown's legitimized heir to Christ and the Magdalene, Sophie Neveu, exists as both the codebreaker and the code, as her name becomes the "keystone" that leads to the Holy Grail: Sophie, or Sofia, "literally means wisdom in Greek." [81] By incorporating a logos of wisdom into the discourse of the feminine, Brown recalls the Goddess Athena, and her mythological sister goddesses, as the victims of a politically-motivated transmogrification of Christian symbology. In his conclusion, Brown positions his protagonist on his knees to the "outcast one," reverent, and: "For a moment, he thought he heard a woman's voice . . . the wisdom of the ages . . . whispering up from the chasms of the earth." [82] It is here, in his redeployment of the sacred as ultimately female, that Brown recovers a voice that had been reduced to the sound of a whisper by a phallocentric suppression of feminine sexuality.
<21> More than any other theme, Brown's use of ancient Hebrew and Greek encoding systems mark the access road to the sacred feminine. The Da Vinci Code requires, however, that the breaking of code be enacted by both the feminine and the masculine, the symbologist and the cryptologist, and argues for the synergy of the male/female alliance represented in the ancient symbols of the chalice and the blade. This critical alignment thus threatens interpretive schemas of feminine subordination, a disruption that Kristeva notes in Powers of Horror in her discussion of defilement and taboo. Finding that: "biblical impurity is permeated with the tradition of defilement; in that sense, it points to but does not signify an autonomous force that can be threatening for divine agency." [83] Dan Brown resituates the defiled prostitute, Mary Magdalene, as already divine, working against biblical symbology of feminine sexual filth. [84] By doing so, he enacts a signification that interprets feminine sexuality as sacred, rather than sacré, presenting Mary Magdalene's womb as the carrier of God's seed. Reversing the Christian/patriarchal logos of an innocent maternal body for that of a sexual vessel, Brown pollutes what Kristeva names "the biblical test," that which: "performs the tremendous forcing that consists in subordinating maternal power (whether historical or phantasmatic, natural or reproductive) to symbolic order as pure logical order regulating social performance, as divine Law attended to in the Temple." [85] Yet, Dan Brown's novel explodes that "symbolic order" through its questioning of it as a material reality. As Sir Leigh Teabing reveals the image of Mary Magdalene in Leonardo Da Vinci's The Last Supper, the fleshly embodiment of the Holy Grail, he notes that: "Everyone misses it . . . Our preconceived notions of this scene are so powerful that our mind blocks out the incongruity and overrides our eyes." [86] Positing what Clement and Kristeva deem "divine Law" as often subconsciously absorbed through the phenomenon of "scotoma," Brown's protagonist, Robert Langdon, further notes that: "The brain does it sometimes with powerful symbols." [87] It is a crucial moment in this fictitious account of a suppressed sacred feminine, for to purport the power of symbols to create a malicious corporeality is to assume its vulnerability to an insurgent reversal. Such a move recalls Haraway's cyborg as a vehicle of self-coding, the power to reinterpret and re-relegate oppressive symbols regardless of the interface. Yet, it is also indicative of a 21st century resurrection of Goddess symbology, the visceral reversal of a nation's scotomatic logos of femininity. Resurrected by popular culture, the goddess trope has ultimately found its way into the rigorous, and often antagonistic, conversations of the academy.
Women's Rites: Reincarnating a Goddess
<22> Dan Brown's popular fiction represents an emergent "structure of feeling" in the 21st century, a phenomenon that Raymond Williams defines in Literature in Society as being "often apprehended as isolated and individual, a private feeling: it is often what is felt by members of society," but once felt and recognized, "is seen as a real structure which unites individuals who may not have been aware of each other." [88] Although the resurgent interest in the sacred feminine has appeared most often in the music and fiction of pop culture, there is evidence of an emerging discourse of the sacred within academic theology. Carol P. Christ's article "Whose History are We Writing?" foresees a formidable following for Goddess feminism, arguing that: "Though it has no institutional funding and little academic support, the feminist spirituality or Goddess movement has hundreds of thousands of adherents in North America, Great Britain, continental Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and elsewhere across the globe." [89] Further, Christ locates a critical lapse in feminist conversation, especially within the realm of religion and scholarship, noting that: "It thus becomes critical that we name the political circumstances within the academy, the churches, and the larger culture in which feminist work in religion is being codified and transmitted." [90] Christ's emphasis on the interruption of external coding is reminiscent of the late 20th and early 21st century insistence on the power to code, evidenced in Donna J. Haraway's myth of the cyborg, Natasha Bedingfield's Unwritten body, and Dan Brown's coded sacred feminine. Evidently, both the phenomenon of the sacred and the deployment of its codes are fundamental to the new face of feminism, as the relinquishment of the ability to code "simply transmits the (patriarchal) status quo" and leaves the feminine body open to oppressive signification. Therefore, the language of "Goddess feminism" is one that codes the sacred female body in strictly matriarchal terms. Specifically, Christ "reenvision[s] the standard theological topics of authority, history, divinity, humanity and nature from the standpoint of Goddess spirituality," claiming the emergence of a "profound metaphoric shift" from patriarchal to matriarchal thinking that disrupts and exceeds normative perceptions of the feminine as flesh. [91] If it is true that patriarchal institutions created a Maternal Goddess, thereby imprisoning woman through the trope of the reproductive body, those very institutions might be overthrown by reclaiming a matriarchy and its vision of the sexed, feminine flesh as sacred. [92]
<23> In her essay, "Feminist Theology as Post-traditional Thealogy," Christ asserts the significance of renaming the historically male Christian deity, for "to name the divine power as 'Goddess'" unsettles patriarchal hierarchies "in the way we understand all that the female body has come to symbolize: the flesh, the earth, finitude, interdependence, and death." [93] The crux of Christ's argument rests on the necessity to reclaim the feminine body within theology and spirituality studies, an alignment that is inherently assumed in Goddess religions. Christ criticizes "Orthodox theology's emphasis on immortality," linking that emphasis to "similar trends in the history of Western theology" and claiming it to be: "structurally connected to the denial of the body and therefore to the subordination of women." [94] Even so, Christ foresees a quantitative dismissal of Goddess feminism as it relates to spirituality, noting that while it promises "concepts of borderland, contact, and Hybridity [and] provides new tools for talking about the way cultures and groups influence and transform each other," there still "remains the stubborn resistance of entrenched interests, both religious and secular, which shape the contexts in which feminist research is produced." [95] Finding academic feminism to be heavily invested in the politics of the Ivory Tower, Christ argues for a "hermeneutics of suspicion" in reading feminist texts, and is puzzled by the "antipathy toward [the Goddess's] reemergence in Western cultures," and especially that of feminists. [96]
<24> Regardless of academic feminist resistance, Christ is not alone in her endeavor to promote Goddess feminism in the 21st century. Vrinda Dalmiya writes in "Loving Paradoxes: A Feminist Reclamation of the Goddess Kali" of an alternative reading of patriarchally-ordained goddesses, noting that: "it has often been argued that the formulation of female divinity is a ploy to keep real power away from real women in the real world." [97] In spite of her theory, or rather outside of it, Kali argues for a reexamination of the masculinist appropriation of Goddess myth, finding that:
[But] simply because an image has been (and can be) manipulated to serve the ends of patriarchy does not imply that it has no positive value or that it cannot be further manipulated to serve other ends. It is the possibility of such an alternative encashing of a spiritual phenomenon that is being suggested here. [98]
Ironically enough, such a critical inquiry into the history of an image was suggested in the late 19 th century by John Ruskin, as he labored over the possibility of misappropriated myth, claiming: "For the question is not at all what a mythological figure meant in its origin; but what it became in each subsequent mental development of the nation inheriting the thought." [99] The nation that would inherit that thought would be, inevitably, American. Through its music, fiction, and innumerable forms of media, goddess mythology has created a catachrestic rupture of institutionalized/normalized femininity - yet, its arrival on the academic stage has been decidedly more tentative.
<25> If pop culture predicts emergent structures of feeling, softening the ground for reappropriation in literature and theory, then feminism, in all of its forms, might be the next space of reentry for Goddess myth. Evidenced in the theories of cyborg feminism, as well as theology and religion, the malleable nature of the Goddess has already been introduced into the conversations of academia, albeit on tenuous and marginal ground. As the myth of the Goddess negates fatalistic and dualistic Christian ideologies, it may be useful within the field of feminism(s) that focus on West plus East, rather than West versus East, epistemologies of diversity, as well as work to heal the divide between constructivist theories of self-coding and essentialist premises of embodiment. If the emerging eco-feminist model requires the suturing of the female body to the materiality of the earth, the Goddess and her tenets of natural and supernatural preeminence might provide the basis for an ethos of connectivity and power in a Post-Postmodern world. Colleen Mack-Canty writes in "Third-Wave Feminism and the Need to Reweave the Nature/Culture Duality" of a certain urgency in eco-feminism to reclaim the body as a resource, noting it to be: "an especially important endeavor in these environmentally disturbing times." [100] Arguing for eco-feminism's use in the wake of a second-wave world, Mack-Canty notes its capacity to "broaden the explanatory power of feminist theory" in the struggles indicative of 21st century culture, such as: "globalism, multiculturalism, and environmentalism." [101] And it is here, in the call for feminists to reconnect to the earth, that eco-feminists are in tentative conversation with the theology of Goddess feminists.
<26> Arguing for a "feminist process paradigm," Carol P. Christ writes in She Who Changes: Re-imagining the Divine in the World against dualistic theisms, asking: "Is the source of the theological mistakes of classical theism a rejection of embodied life that begins with the rejection of the female body?" [102] If those rejections were articulated in terms of institutionalized maternity, the answer is clearly "yes." Aligning her feminist process paradigm to the concerns of eco-feminists, Christ offers that it: "can shed light on conflicts that have arisen in relation to attempts to reclaim the female body, the earth body, femaleness, and the feminine in feminist spirituality." [103] Christ foresees a remarkable movement in our culture toward the Goddess, pointing out that: "The popularity of images of the naked female body of the Goddess in feminist art and ritual is testimony to women's hunger for symbols that express the creative and sacred powers of the female body." [104] By positing a feminist paradigm that includes the premise of connectivity to the earth while also providing an access road to the sacred, Christ marries all of the terms prevalent in current feminist conversation: an encoded feminine, earthly materiality, and metaphysically-charged sacred. Arguing that, "in process philosophy, the importance of body, relationship, and connection to nature is affirmed," Christ further contends that:
While it was appropriate for ancient peoples to speak of earth as Goddess, it may be more appropriate for us to understand the world or the universe as the body of Goddess/God. A feminist process paradigm supports the feminist intuition that the earth body is sacred, while helping us to clarify our thinking and expand our vision. It also makes it clear that the desire to save the earth and its creatures is not misplaced romanticism. [105]
Although Christ's theory rests upon specifically theological ethics, her premise of recovery utilizes the themes of eco-feminism, specifically in the interrelatedness of the body to its environment. Disrupting Christian concepts of patriarchy and the dualistic treatment of the mind/body split, Christ argues for repair, and suggests its necessity for a 21st century world. Toward that end, Christ reinvigorates the use of myth for future feminisms, suggesting that: "Philosophical insight must be expressed in symbols that involve the body and community," and situates process philosophy as the lens through which we might "understand re-imagining symbols as a process of making new creative syntheses from the resources of the past." [106] The 21st century has already seen its models for Athena symbology, in the rise of political women, warrior women, and academic women who are fast becoming the keepers of wisdom.
<27> It is not without some trepidation that this study presents the image of a goddess as a possible metaphor for feminist theory, for, as Christ warns us: "As we creatively re-imagine symbols, it is important to remember that symbols are not an end in themselves." [107] Rather, it is necessary that the Goddess be kept under constant watch and remain open to what Clement and Kristeva have called "a permanent questioning." [108] What has been historically manipulated as an instrument of oppression might now be further manipulated to exclude masculine bodies from a feminist ethics of empowerment. Haraway's trope of the fleshless cyborg risks that very same entrapment, for if "no objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves," then those bodies are defenseless against aggressive ideologies and politically-motivated agendas. The 21st century Goddess is not a cyborg, but has the tools of the interface: she is multidimensional, bi-gendered, sacred and blasphemous, yet utterly capable of rewriting the code of her own flesh. She is the Greek eiko (icon) of the feminist refusal to be a cyberkynetic image without substance. Yet we, as feminists, must remember that symbols are indeed not an end in themselves, but are only the tropes that allow us to "re-imagine" a feminist ethics of malleability, however disruptive to academic solidarity they may be. In the act of imagining ourselves, icons will inevitably emerge, and with them the critical discussions that necessitate the reexamination and reinvigoration of 3rd millennial feminist theory.
Notes
[1] Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1991). [^]
[2] Most recently, Nancy Pelosi was elected Speaker of the House, the first woman ever to hold the office - a position that puts her third in line for the American presidency. [^]
[3] As a preemptive military maneuver, U.S. airstrikes are used to "soften the ground" for battle. [^]
[4] Joe Klein, "Hilary in 2008? No Way!" Time ( May 8, 2005); available from http://www.time.com/time/columnist/klein/article/0,9565,10590000,00.html; accessed 15 May 2006. [^]
[5] Klein 1. [^]
[6] Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, The F Word: Feminism in Jeopardy (Emeryville: Seal P, 2004), 17. [^]
[7] Rowe-Finkbeiner 89. [^]
[8] Rowe-Finkbeiner 148. [^]
[9] Haraway, Simians 149. [^]
[10] Haraway, Simians 163. My emphasis. [^]
[11] Haraway, Simians 176. [^]
[12] Haraway, Simians 157. [^]
[13] Haraway, Simians 180. [^]
[14] Haraway, Simians 181. [^]
[15] Haraway, Simians 181. [^]
[16] Haraway, Simians 149. [^]
[17] Haraway, Simians 151. [^]
[18] Haraway, Simians 151. [^]
[19] An enormous body of work exists on the myths of ancient goddesses, intriguingly evident in larger numbers during the last two decades of the 20th century until today. [^]
[20] Haraway, Simians 176 and 177. [^]
[21] Haraway, Simians 176. [^]
[22] Haraway, Simians 181. [^]
[23] For more on Isis, see: H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, Vol. II (Pasadena: Theosophical UP, 1988). [^]
[24] Haraway, Simians 201. [^]
[25] Michelle Chilcoat, "Brain Sex, Cyberpunk Cinema, Feminism, and the Dis/Location of Heterosexuality," NWSA Journal, Vol. 16 No. 2 (Summer 2004), 168. [^]
[26] Chilcoat 169. [^]
[27] Chilcoat 170. [^]
[28] Charlotte Ross, "Creating the Ideal Posthuman Body?: Cyborg Sex and Gender in the Work of Buzzati, Vacca, and Ammaniti," ITALICA, Vol. 82, No. 2 (2005), 240. [^]
[29] Malini Johar Schueller, "Analogy and (White) Feminist Theory: Thinking Race and the Color of the Cyborg Body," Signs 31.1 (Autumn 2005), 81. [^]
[30] Schueller 65. [^]
[31] Schueller 88. [^]
[32] Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_Oncomouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), 265. [^]
[33] Haraway, Modest 136. Haraway's use of the word "fetish" is primarily focused on the dynamics of genetic and creation sciences. As her theories often overlap, I am investigating her use of the word as it would apply toward another area of her specialty, that of feminist theory. [^]
[34] Haraway, Simians 175. [^]
[35] Haraway, Simians 177. [^]
[36] Haraway, Simians 149. Although I am toying with either/or notions of goddess and cyborg, some theorists have written about the connection between the two. Jane O'Sullivan writes of the possibility of an "uneasy partnership" between the tropes of cyborg and goddess. O'Sullivan suggests that: "by adopting such a postmodern provisionality of identity, some of the attributes of a cyborg and a goddess need be neither antithetical, nor mutually exclusive." As a malleable creature, the cyborg has intrinsic value, a "disruptive power" akin to that of a mythical goddess. See: Jane O'Sullivan, "Cyborg or Goddess: Postmodernism and Its Others in John Fowles's Mantissa," College Literature 30.3 (Summer 2003), 110. [^]
[37] Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (London: Harcourt, Inc., 1981), 38. First published in 1929. [^]
[38] Woolf, A Room of One's Own 38. [^]
[39] Haraway, Simians 178. [^]
[40] Haraway, Simians 163. [^]
[41] Woolf, A Room of One's Own 78. [^]
[42] Woolf, A Room of One's Own 78. [^]
[43] Haraway, Simians 177. [^]
[44] Natasha Bedingfield, Unwritten (Bmg International, 2004). Her album was released in America by Sony in August, 2005, after achieving triple-platinum status in the UK. "Unwritten" made it to the top ten slot in pop music in America during the Spring of 2006. [^]
[45] Haraway, Simians 181. [^]
[46] Catherine Clement and Julia Kristeva, The Feminine and the Sacred, Trans. Jane Marie Todd (New York: Columbia UP, 1998), 14. In the same passage, Clement and Kristeva find that, in locating the sacred on a global scale, they are also uncovering the phenomenon as 'increasingly black.'" Although this racial delineation suggests an appropriation of African spirituality, it resists Western/White mythology in productive, and perhaps even radical, ways. [^]
[47] Clement and Kristeva 26 and 27. [^]
[48] See: Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon P, 1992). Forward by Louise Turcotte. [^]
[49] Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), 100. [^]
[50] Clement and Kristeva 178. My emphasis. Perhaps it is this paradoxical space of connection and cleavage that essentialists have attempted to claim, locating the moment of maternal labor as a reliable sacrament in accessing the sacred. Yet, it is not the nature of sacraments to provide reliable access to what is sacred, but rather to provide the possibility. [^]
[51] Clement and Kristeva 15. Footnote. For the purposes of this work, I will use the French term "sacré" in its explicative form. [^]
[52] Clement and Kristeva 27. [^]
[53] Note that this is an enactment unlike Madonna's performance of the sacré, standing as both interesting commentary on the reversibility of the sacred as well as a 21st century impulse to relocate a feminist spirituality. [^]
[54] Clement and Kristeva 30 and 126. [^]
[55] Clement and Kristeva 127 and 129. [^]
[56] Clement and Kristeva 136. [^]
[57] Clement and Kristeva 144. [^]
[58] The standard definition of malleability lends itself to exterior forces that can shape and transform matter. My use of the term is modified by its radical potential of identity to be formed by specifically interior forces. [^]
[59] Butler, Bodies That Matter 105. [^]
[60] Madonna picked the name "Veronica" as her confirmation name and chose Esther as her Kabbalistic/Hebrew name, after the heroine in the Hebrew scriptures. [^]
[61] Other late 20th century musicians disrupted hegemonic concepts of identity: the pop artist Prince, on June 7 th, 1993, legally changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol of androgyny in an effort to retain the rights to his own personal image and identity. Prince reverted to his birth name on December 31, 1999 - the date that his contract with Warnel-Chappell expired. [^]
[62] Madonna, Like a Prayer (Sire/London/Rhino, 1990). First released March, 1989. [^]
[63] Clement and Kristeva 30. [^]
[64] Clement and Kristeva 176 and 178. [^]
[65] In November of 2005, Madonna released her album, Confessions on a Dance Floor (Warner Bros.), which included "Isaac," a song which she claims is based on Yitzhak Sinwanit, a Yemeni singer. Since, the Jewish response overwhelmed the press with accusations of blasphemy, claiming that Madonna refers to the 16 th century mystic Isaac Luria. Using the names of catalysts for public ends and profit is against Jewish doctrine, and has created conflict between Madonna and Jewish mystics. Further evidence that Madonna has revisited her period of sacred parody and commentary was noted on her "Confessions" world tour. Rising from the stage bound to an electric, mirrored red cross and wreathed with a crown of thorns, Madonna sang "Live to Tell," inciting Catholic League President, Bill Donohue, to admonish the artist with the statement: "Knock off the Christ-bashing." It would appear that, in keeping with the surge towards a reclamation of a feminine sacred, Madonna has come out of her disco closet and reentered the 21st century as sacré as ever. For more, see: "Critics Rage at Madonna Imagery," CBS NEWS, 11 June 2006, http://www.cvsnews.com/stories/2006/05/22/entertainment/printable1640297.shtml. [^]
[66] Meredith Brooks, Bitch (Capitol Records, 1997). It is interesting to note that Bedingfield, Madonna, and Brooks all released their hit songs under albums of corresponding titles. [^]
[67] Brooks, Bitch. [^]
[68] Clement and Kristeva 84. [^]
[69] Brooks, Bitch. [^]
[70] Clement and Kristeva 15. [^]
[71] Clement and Kristeva 15. [^]
[72] Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman: The Landmark Exploration of the Ancient Worship of the Great Goddess and the Eventual Suppression of Women's Rites (Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1976), 154. [^]
[73] Stone 154. [^]
[74] Meredith Brooks notes her inspiration for the song as being motivated by a desire to reincorporate duplicitous meanings into the identity of woman, as she claims that: "I was hoping to change the meaning of that word [bitch] with the song . . . I was saying that I am all of these things that make up a woman and how that is perceived by people." See: Anne Taylor, "Meredith Brooks," Village Voice ( 16 August 1997). [^]
[75] While the The Da Vinci Code is popular, rather than literary, fiction, it put the term "sacred feminine" into a cultural conversation that has had worldwide impact. Brown's novel has been translated into 44 languages (over 60.5 million copies have been sold) and was released as a major motion picture in May, 2006 by Columbia Pictures., grossing 30 million dollars in the first night of wide release in America. The Catholic Church has noticed the impact. In an interview with CNN reporter Alessio Vinci, Father Joseph NiNoia, a Vatican official, was quoted as saying: "I'm mystified by the popularity of it." Many countries and principalities, including South Korea, areas in India, and Singapore, have either called for a ban of the movie or have already eliminated it from future releases. The outrage and controversy incited by Dan Brown's presentation of a sacred feminine equal to the sacredness of Christ is indicative of the novel's cultural collateral and the emergent interest in pre-Christian Goddess mythology. See: "Da Vinci Code Meets With Catcalls," CNN.com, 15 May 2006, http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/Movies/05/17/da.vinci/index.html. [^]
[76] Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code ( New York: Doubleday, Random House, Inc., 2003). [^]
[77] Brown 341-342. [^]
[78] Brown 444. Brown often uses Isis mythology to explain the misinterpretation or transmogrification of Mary, mother of Christ, as the originator of the sacred feminine. For an example, see page 232. [^]
[79] Brown 444. Also see: Riene Riesler, The Chalice and the Blade (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1988); and Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body--New Paths to Power and Love (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998). Dan Brown's novel was partially inspired and attributed to Holy Blood, Holy Grail, provoking the current debate and lawsuit in both America and England over rights of authorship. See: Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, Henry Lincoln, Holy Blood, Holy Grail (New York: Bantam DoubleDay Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1982). [^]
[80] Clement and Kristeva 30. [^]
[81] Brown 320-321. [^]
[82] Brown 454. My emphasis. [^]
[83] Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Trans. Leaon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982), 90. [^]
[84] The interpretation of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute is commonly attributed to Pope Gregory the Great. He was purported to have accidentally misread a passage in Luke. Yet, official or not, once claimed a prostitute, Mary Magdalene remained in the minds of history as such. It was a difficult image to retract, although the Church did attempt to do so in 1969. See: David Van Biema, "Mary Magdalene: Saint or Sinner?" Time Magazine ( 11 August, 2003); accessed online 19 May 2006, http://www.danbrown.com/media/morenews/time.html. [^]
[85] Kristeva, The Powers of Horror 91. [^]
[86] Brown 243. [^]
[87] Brown 243. [^]
[88] Raymond Williams, "Literature and Society," Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958), 37-38. [^]
[89] Carol P. Christ, "Whose History Are We Writing? Reading Feminist Texts with a Hermeneutic of Suspicion." Feminist Studies in Religion 20.2 (Fall 2004): 59(24). Also see: She Who Changes: Re-imagining the Divine in the World ( New York: Palgrave MacMillan,) 2003 . [^]
[90] Christ, "Whose History Are We Writing?" 60. My emphasis. [^]
[91] Christ, "Whose History Are We Writing?" 72. Also see Christ's full discussion in "Feminist Theology as Post-Traditional Theology," The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology, Susan Frank Parson, Ed. ( Cambridge: Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology, 2002), 81-94. [^]
[92] I see a distinction between the trope of the Maternal Goddess, a specifically essentialized and de-sexed trope, and the emerging Athenian goddess imagery of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. [^]
[93] Christ, "Feminist Theology" 81. [^]
[94] Christ, "Whose History Are We Writing?" 72. [^]
[95] Christ, "Whose History Are We Writing?" 82. [^]
[96] Christ, "Whose History Are We Writing?" 82. [^]
[97] Vrinda Dalmiya, "Loving Paradoxes: A Feminist Reclamation of the Goddess Kali," Hypatia Vol. 15, No.1 (Winter 2000), 128. For further study on the feminine within religious texts see: Laurel Lanner, Who Will Lament Her?: The Feminine and the Fantastic in the Book of Nahum(The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies) ( New York: T. & T. Clark Publishers, Ltd., 2006). [^]
[98] Dalmiya 128. [^]
[99] John Ruskin, The Ethics of the Dust (Philadelphia: Henry Altemus, 1894), 218. My emphasis. [^]
[100] Colleen Mack-Canty, "Third-Wave Feminism and the Need to Reweave the Nature/Culture Duality," NWSA Journal, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Fall 2004), 154. [^]
[101] Mach-Canty 156. [^]
[102] Carol P. Christ, She Who Changes: Re-imagining the Divine in the World ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 200. [^]
[103] Christ, She Who Changes 202. For further discussion on eco-feminism and feminist theology, see: Salli McFague, Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril ( Minneapolis: Fortress P, 2001). [^]
[104] Christ, She Who Changes 203. [^]
[105] Christ, She Who Changes 210. [^]
[106] Christ, She Who Changes 244. [^]
[107] Christ, She Who Changes 244. [^]
[108] Clement and Kristeva 178. [^]
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