accountable outside the sphere o f w om en’s studies for the
consequences o f our theoretical propositions would, o f
course, be a stark abridgment o f the academic license we have
w orked so hard to create for ourselves. Simple-minded
feminists, o f course, object to a nuanced approach to rape but
we can only presume that their response to the abduction o f
Persephone would have been to picket Hell. T o understand a
w om an’s life requires that we affirm the hidden or obscure
dimensions o f pleasure, often in pain, and choice, often under
duress. One must develop an eye for secret signs— the clothes
that are more than clothes or decoration in the contemporary
dialogue, for instance, or the rebellion hidden behind apparent
conform ity. There is no victim. There is perhaps an insufficiency o f signs, an obdurate appearance o f conformity that sim ply masks the deeper level on which choice occurs. A real
woman cannot be understood in terms either o f suffering or
constriction (lack o f freedom). Her artifice, for instance, may
appear to signal fear, as if the hidden dynamic is her
recognition that she will be punished if she does not conform.
But ask her. She uses the words o f agency: I want to. Artifice,
in fact, is the flag that signals pride in her nation, the nation o f
wom en, a chosen nationalism, a chosen role, a chosen
femaleness, a chosen relationship to sexuality, or sexualities,
per se; and the final configuration— the w ay she appears— is
rooted neither in biological givens nor in a social reality o f
oppression; she freely picks her signs creating a sexual-
political discourse in which she is an active agent o f her own
meaning. I do not feel— and I speak personally here— that we
need dignify, or, more to the point, treat respectfully on any
level those self-proclaimed rebels who in fact wallow in male
domination, pointing it out at every turn, as if we should turn
our attention to the very men they despise— and what?
types that use this overblown rhetoric are entitled to valorization. They are certainly not women in the same sense we
are— free-willed women making free choices. If they present
themselves as animals in cages, I am prepared to treat them as
such. We are not, as they say, middle-class, protecting the
status quo. It is not, as they maintain, middle-class to
appreciate the middle way, the normal, the ordinary, while
espousing a theoretically radical politics, left-wing and solidly
socialist. It is not middle-class to engage in intellectual
discourse that is not premised on the urgency o f destroying
western civilization, though certainly we critique it, nor is it
middle-class to have a job. It is not repugnance that tur^s me
away from these marginal types, these loud, chanting,
marching creatures who do not— and here I jest— footnote
their picket signs, these really rather inarticulate creatures who
fall o ff the edge o f the civilized world into a chaotic politics o f
