Body Politics and the Fictional Double.

Debra Walker King, ed. Body Politics and the Fictional Double. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000. 214 pp. $39.95 cloth/$18.95 paper.

The strength of many books is also their weakness--and so it is with Debra Walker King's eclectic collection of essays, assembled in order "to demonstrate how the boundaries of difference and the limits of universality converge upon women's bodies." The "ultimate goal" of the collection, King states, "is to suggest, through [the book's] structure and dialogues, the need for women's cross-cultural and cross-racial alliance building." Regrettably, the structure King has chosen for this collection--primarily that of juxtaposition, with an introduction and afterword serving as bookends--does not work particularly well to further the dialogue among the essayists. While the book has merit, the essays simply do not engage each other in a conversation capable of sustaining a coherent and compelling argument, and this flaw, while not fatal, weakens the book's effectiveness as a tool for social change. If critique is not based on truth claims, it must rely on the force of a better argument, which means that, if a conve rsation is to result in the desired conversion, intellectual coherence is essential to the persuasive process. When a series of essays originates in a multitude of disciplines and personal experiences, as this one does, the editor's primary responsibility is to help the voices speak intelligibly with one another. Recognizing that ideology both hides itself in and naturalizes itself as "common sense," King has chosen astutely to attack the "truths" of common sense on many fronts simultaneously. In this war of ideas, juxtaposition as a far-reaching (if not necessarily all-encompassing) tool of defamiliarization can be a remarkably effective weapon for an editor to employ. But juxtaposition only works if all the essays in such a collection have ways of engaging one another in the common task not just of describing but of changing the world.

If Body Politics and the Fictional Double fails in its structure, it does not fail in its individual essays, some of which are refreshingly personal (reminiscent of both Virginia Woolf and, more recently, Jane Tompkins in her breakthrough 1987 essay "Me and My Shadow"), some of which are formal and represent both the best and the worst of specialized academic writing (i.e., the accessible and the impenetrable, respectively), some of which fall somewhere in between these two extremes (and are apparently meant to help link the others together), and, finally, one of which is a interview with two performance artists.

As her opening move, the editor reprints Gloria Wade-Gayles's 1996 personal-is-most-definitely-political essay "Who Says an Older Woman Can't/Shouldn't Dance?", which begins with the deceptively mild observation that, "when you are fifty and over, people seem to feel the need to tell you how well you are physically wearing/weathering your age." in her inspiring, delightful dance for/of words, Wade-Gayles joyfully dares to rethink ideology and its critique by claiming of her cherished maternal identity that "I chafe at the very idea that anyone would attribute this joy to patriarchy, to sexism, to restrictions on my life." Less successful is Sue V. Rosser's contribution that, while relying far too much on self-quotation, nonetheless reminds us of the epistemological connection between liberal feminism and the scientific method, both of which are tied to positivism and therefore "share a belief in the possibility of obtaining knowledge that is both objective and value-free." Ironically, Maude Hines's essay on " Body Language" is marred by the author's over-reliance on other voices to make her argument, and Maureen Turim's jargon-filled essay on music videos resists the efforts of even a sympathetic reader. On the other hand, King herself offers an important modification of Helene Cixous's concept of l'ecriture feminine by describing how late-twentieth-century black women novelists have (re)discovered the ability to write not in white but in red ink, and in so doing have helped make visible the longstanding, horrific pain suffered by black women's bodies. In "Myths and Monsters: The Female Body as the Site for Political Agendas," S. Yumiko Hulvey finds that contemporary Japanese women "challenge patriarchal norms," much as Mary Daly might advise, by appropriating patriarchal myths. In a stunningly original (but unfortunately repetitious) essay, the arguments of which characterize the strengths of this collection, Stephanie A. Smith rips open the cultural packaging of Marilyn Monroe to remind us that "common sense aid s in the endurance of ideological 'truths' that discourage the production of new knowledge, and retard anything like radical or even significant political alteration."

At the heart of the book, both intellectually and physically (to invoke the same mind-body split that the collection itself works to overcome), lie a pair of essays that focus on performance art as social critique: Caroline Vercoe's "Agency and Ambivalence: A Reading of Works by Coco Fusco" and Rosemary Weatherston's "Performing Bodies, Performing Culture: An Interview with Coco Fusco and Nao Bustamante." In a series of performance pieces from the 1990s, Fusco collaborated with Guillermo Gomez-Pena to present themselves "as indigenous Amerindians from an island in the Gulf of Mexico that had somehow not been discovered by European voyagers." Wrapping themselves in the anthropological trappings of ideology by providing their unwitting shopping-mall audiences with "authentic" artifacts and papers that "documented" their "primitive" society, these artists, in effect, juxtaposed the "primitive" with the modem "in a manner designed to entice viewer interaction" (as this anthology hopes to engage its readers). One unexpected result of their using an abundance of paraphernalia, which included Gomez-Pena's speaking in a "foreign language" that was composed of nonsense syllables, was the fact that many viewers missed the satire altogether. As we learn in the Weatherston interview, even the left can misunderstand performance art when Fusco and Bustamante treat ironically what multiculturalists insist be treated seriously. Although this book, too, risks misunderstanding, with its editorial weaknesses, I think that the political point of this heterogeneous collection of unusual essays will not be missed by its audience.