Grosz - Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism

We wish to acknowledge the support of our institutions which provided the resources and funds to render possible such a collaboration between two hemispheres and covering many countries and much territory in between. Our thanks to the Dpartement de sociologie, at the Universit de Montral, Qubec and to the Critical Theory program at Monash University, Victoria. We also thank Valerie Hazel for her wonderful job of indexing and Katarina Soukup for the dreary job of standardizing the references of the texts. Elizabeth Grosz would like to thank the staff of Critical Theory and the Philosophy Department, Monash University, and especially Gail Ward, whose clarity and firm common sense have been an ongoing inspiration. Elspeth Probyn gratefully acknowledges funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and from FCAR-Subvention aux Nouveaux Chercheurs (Qubec) which provided a course release, and thanks Professor Val Hartouni and the Womens Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego, for inviting her as a visiting professor during the winter of 1994, thus providing a warmer climate in which to consider the questions raised by this book.

Sue Best teaches in the Department of Art History, University of Western Sydney, Nepean.

Nicole Brossard is a poet, novelist and essay writer. More than thirty titles of her work are internationally renowned for the originality of their feminist intervention and include such books as Mauve Desert, The Aerial Letter and Picture Theory .

Dianne Chisholm is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alberta. She is author of H.D.s Freudian Poetics: Psychoanalysis in Translation (Cornell University Press, 1992) and consultant editor to Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary (Blackwell, 1992), edited by Elizabeth Wright. She is currently at work on three book projects: Queer Avant-Gardes, Pornopoeia: The Last/Lost Art of Modernism and Violent Femmes: Violence in Contemporary Writing by Canadian Women .

Barbara Creed lectures in Cinema Studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne. She has published widely in the areas of film, feminist theory and cultural studies. Her most recent book is The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1993).

Angela Y. Davis is a Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her articles and essays have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, both scholarly and popular. She is the author of five books, including Angela Davis: An Autobiography, Women, Race, and Class and the forthcoming Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday: Black Womens Music and Social Consciousness . She is currently conducting research on incarcerated women and alternatives to imprisonment, which will be the subject of her next book.

Mary Fallon is currently writing a two-act play Angels Bellowing on motherhood, faster motherhood and interracial relations in Australia, and Con/struction Site , an opera for eight women performers about the construction of female subjectivity, sexuality and language. Her novel-in-progress The Staff of Life (about that which sustains us) is in progress and sustains her.

Anna Gibbs teaches creative writing and textual theory at the University of Western Sydney, Nepean. Her most recent theoretical work has been on writing and death, and on Gertrude Stein as a ghost-writer. She also publishes fiction, and is currently writing for collaborative projects with visual artists.

Sue Golding is a writer and director of avant-garde work. She is also a Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy at Greenwich University, London. Her fiction and non-fiction work centres on radical democratic theory, sexualities/techne, and nomadic curiosities. Her first book ( Gramscis Democratic Theory , 1992) is being followed by a new work which steps into the virtual realities of a Nietzschean/ Wittgensteinian/Foucauldian blend to explore, as it is entitled, The Cunning of Democracy (forthcoming from Verso).

Elizabeth Grosz is the Director of the Institute of Critical and Cultural Studies at Monash University, Australia. Her most recent book is Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Indiana University Press).

Melissa Jane Hardie is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies and English at the University of Wollongong. She wrote her Ph.D. on Djuna Barnes and Modernism. Her recent work for a book about camp and femininity includes studies of Dolly Parton, country music and the novels of Jacqueline Susann.

Lisa Moore is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently completing a manuscript entitled Dangerous Intimacies , which examines the representation of love between women in the eighteenth-century English novel. Her articles on feminist theory and early modern constructions of gender and sexuality have appeared in Textual Practice, Diacritics and Feminist Studies .

Chantal Nadeau is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University. Until recently, she was Visiting Scholar in the Department of English, University of Pittsburgh, pursuing her research on the representations of lesbians in cinema and the politicization of the sexual other in the social. She has published and given talks and lectures on womens cinema, popular culture, feminist epistemology and lesbian and gay representations in the context of national identities. She is currently working on lesbian sexual practices and the regulation of subversion in Canada.

Elspeth Probyn is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Universit de Montral. Her work includes Sexing the Self. Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1993), By Choice. Feminism, Desire and Subjectification (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 1996) and Outside Belonging(s), The Singularities of Sex (forthcoming).

Sabina Sawhney teaches English at Daemen College and has published articles on feminism and post-colonial literature. She is currently working on The Other Colonialists: Imperial Margins of Victorian Literature , which deals with the impact of colonialism on the narrative structure of nineteenth-century British novels.

Catherine Waldby has worked in various areas of feminist research since 1984. She has published in a number of journals and anthologies on questions of sexuality, biomedical representations of HIV/AIDS and feminist and social theory. She is currently completing a Ph.D. thesis on AIDS and the idea of the body politic in the Womens Studies programme at Murdoch University.

Elspeth Probyn

When we are sitting on the bank of a river, the flowing of water, the gliding of a boat or the flight of a bird, the uninterrupted murmur of our deep life, are for us three different things or a single one, at will.

(Henri Bergson; cited in Deleuze 1991: 80)

It is the winter of 1994 when all of the east of North America froze and here I am in San Diego with strains of T.S. Eliot going through my brain: A cold coming we had of it. The very dead of winter (1963: 109). The very dead of winter and Im up on the roof with the harbour in front of me and the airport to the side. Still not totally sure where I am, I sit on the roof and watch the planes slope by. They angle by the two weird trees on the close horizon, then from mere specks they emerge in all their awesome materiality over me; bellies swaggering, lights flashing, they descend and are gone. This happens over and over and over again; the frisson of slight excitement each time smoothed away. From where I am, all is descending, arriving, returning. The only hints of leaving are the invisible roars from the space-off.