Debating the Difference: Gender, Representation, Self-Representation

Rachel Jones

This collection represents a selection of papers from a conference held at the University of Dundee in September 2007, as well as from related workshops on issues of women, gender and (self-)representation. Together they reflect the multiple 'differences' which we were interested in exploring at these events. These differences are also reflected in the conference organising team, which involved members of the Scottish Word and Image Group (SWIG) as well as the Women, Culture and Society (WCS) postgraduate programme at Dundee. By working together, our aim was to generate an interdisciplinary dialogue assessing constructions of gender in both text and image.

The conference sought to create a forum for examining the inscription of gendered identities and sexed bodies in both visual and literary media. We were interested in the social and political power of gendered images as well as in the gendering of cultural production and the role of word and image in the creation of gendered counter-cultures. We invited contributions examining the ways in which both text and image can be deployed to subvert as well as to reinforce gendered norms. Our aim was to make a collaborative space in which to explore the representation of gender from a multitude of angles, examining depictions of women by men and men by women, and - given the historically patriarchal culture in which we find ourselves - paying close attention to the ways in which reductive representations of women have been challenged and transformed, as well as the ways women have come to represent themselves.

At the same time, we also sought to include a multitude of visual and literary media. We were not disappointed by the response: the final conference programme included papers on novels, poetry, film, drama, life writing, comics, photography, postcards, philosophy, Ultrasound, and CCTV. Many of the papers negotiated the inter-medial spaces between these forms, situating film alongside novels or photography alongside autobiographical writing, or examining modern art and/as fashion design. The theoretical reference points were equally diverse, ranging across cultural and literary theorists, philosophy, feminist and queer theory, anthropology, Marxist and (post-)structuralist criticism, criminology, and adaptation theory, amongst others. Together, the papers offered a critical investigation into femininity, masculinity and their inter-relations, paying particular attention to the representation of bodies (male, female, and transgendered). The transgressive poetry of early modern women authors was explored alongside works by contemporary female novelists, nineteenth-century women poets were examined alongside popular romance fiction and hip-hop.

The richness and diversity of the papers given indicates the multiplicity of intersecting differences the conference sought to address: for by 'debating the difference', we hoped not only to explore the construction of differences between female and male, women and men, feminine and masculine. We also wanted to examine what happens to those gendered differences as they are translated across different media, passing between word and image, the textual and the visual, the discursive and the figural. Thus one of the key aims of the conference was to investigate what happens at the intersection between sexual difference on the one hand, and the difference between word and image on the other.

If 'passing' and 'cross-dressing' have become key tropes in contemporary inscriptions of gender, 'Debating the Difference' sought to explore the transformations that occur when gendered discourse crosses over into image and visual representations seek to 'pass' as translations of textual constructs. Of course, the intersection of word and image is far from an arbitrary site for investigating questions of gender: on the contrary, both text and image have long been bound up with gendered forms, albeit in historically varying and often inconsistent ways. Nonetheless, within western culture at least, a few dominant patterns can be observed. These include the alignment of woman with the image as 'mere' appearance and of the word with a male creativity that finds its ultimate expression in the divine Word of a paternal God - a Word that brings the world itself into being.

Such alignments operate as an index both of the relative value of the two sexes within western thought and culture, and of the perceived power and significance of different media. Thus the culture wars between word and image that go back to the very roots of western thought are played out on a gendered stage. If for Plato, the artists and poets were both to be excluded from the ideal Republic, this does not reflect a democratic suspicion of both word and image equally. Rather, it is the alignment of art (of all kinds) with mere appearance that is the deciding factor - in contrast to the words of the (male) philosopher which purportedly reflect the truth and which have no need of a corporeal medium as they are written directly on the soul.

Given the work of feminist theorists and scholars, it is hardly a surprise to find that these living words reflect the truth of eternal Ideas that Plato parallels with the father as form-giving force, while the material receptacle for appearances is presented as a maternal medium. Indeed, from Plato to Film Noir, women have continued to be associated with the seductive power of appearances, particularly where those appearances are regarded with suspicion as superficial, distracting, and deceptive. At the same time, in the post-Platonic, Christianised west, the creative power of the word passed from God the Father to a more limited, mortal author who nonetheless remained paradigmatically male. The creative act of writing became intrinsically bound up with specifically male energies and sexuality, so much so that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar could begin their ground-breaking 1979 study The Madwoman in the Attic with the provocative question: 'Is the pen a metaphorical penis?' And as Christine Battersby has shown in her book Gender and Genius (1989), even when those energies are embodied by the feminised figure of Romantic genius, successfully harnessing the 'feminine' powers of imagination and intuition only serves to confirm a male creator's capacity for transcendence.

As mortal gods, male authors retained the power to create (or at least, recreate) the world: to 'make it new', as Erza Pound succinctly put it. As Gilbert and Gubar note, one of their chief creations was Woman, fashioned according to a male imagination that positioned her by turn as idealised object of desire, necessary complement and counterpart, or monstrously threatening excess. If not exactly made in his image, woman has repeatedly been figured as 'other' to a male subject, projection and reflection of his fears and desires. Yet thankfully - and in ways that realise the worst fears and perhaps the secret longing of a phallocentric order - women have refused to be contained by such reductive images, powerful though they are. Slipping between the lines of the words and images that seek to define them, women writers and artists have found ways of speaking otherwise and seeing themselves differently, of contesting patriarchal traditions and attesting instead to their own creative powers.

As many of the papers at the conference demonstrated, it is this space for creative slippage which makes the intersection of gender with both word and image so productive. The fraught yet fertile passage between one set of literary or visual figures and another - as well as between word and image - harbours multiple possibilities for transformation and transgression.

Papers and Themes

1 Re-Presenting Heroines: Gender Between Word and Image

The contestation of gender in the spaces between the verbal and the visual is foregrounded in the first group of papers presented here. In 'Failing the Feminine: Photographed Words in Lincoln Clarkes' Heroines', Nancy Pedri examines the way socio-cultural norms of femininity are both invoked and problematised by a series of images by the Canadian photographer. Pedri's paper sets the stage for many of the discussions that follow, as she begins with a succinct introduction to the notion of gender as a cultural construct: as both "product and process", gender reflects and reinforces the practices and social technologies that work together to produce a reality "predicated on the fixed opposition between male and female bodies." (Pedri, p.1) It is this normative 'reality' which Clarkes' photographs make us question. Pedri pays particular attention to the role played by the words which appear in these images. While they may at first appear to be merely 'background noise' in fact, she argues, they not only play a key role in shaping the photographs' overall meaning, but work to make these images a powerfully over-determined site of gender re-inscription and contestation. Pedri concludes that Clarkes presents us with a failure to perform the feminine coupled with an unsettling erasure of personal identity, and that this coupling foregrounds and problematises the regulative norms of femininity as well as the expectations of the viewer.

These regulative norms are put into play in the second paper, by Julia Round. In '"Can I call you Mommy?" Myths of the feminine and superheroic in Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Black Orchid', Round explores the potential of the comic book's combination of text and graphics for transforming gender norms. As Pedri suggests, gender is here again affirmed as both produced, insofar as it is a normative construct that can be re-inscribed and subverted, and productive, insofar as the process of gendering has a capacity to re-inscribe and subvert other cultural norms. Thus, Round shows how, by re-inscribing the superhero in the feminine, the Black Orchid series simultaneously transforms gender and genre. Not only does Black Orchid present us with a distinctively feminised 'superhero' - or better, superheroine - but in so doing, it offers an alternative model of power and identity which resolves some of the tensions of the traditional masculine model.

If Pedri shows that gender transformations can begin with troubling destabilisations of the feminine, Round shows how new values can be generated by transgressively crossing the norms of femininity with the genre rules of the superhero. Where the femininity of Clarkes' 'Heroines' is contaminated and undone by heroin, Black Orchid re-envisions the heroine as an unconventional and hybrid sisterhood.

The third paper in this section returns us to a more familiar sisterhood: the British, and in particular, Scottish, suffragettes of the early 20th century who were real life heroines for many, feared and vilified by others. Norman Watson draws on a unique collection of suffrage memorabilia to demonstrate the crucial intersection of words with images in the struggles of these women. In particular, he draws attention to a medium which has thus far been neglected in studies of the suffrage movement: the picture postcard. One of the delights of this paper is the extraordinary set of images with which it is accompanied. Though hardly known today, Watson shows how such picture postcards were widely circulated at the time and played a key role in shaping public perceptions of the movement, supplementing written and oral debates and dramatising acts of protest. While the postcards often allowed the anti-suffragists to reinforce negative and often cruel caricatures, they also provided an invaluable documentation of key events and allowed the suffragettes to counter damaging misrepresentations of their cause and establish a powerful counter-imagery.

Thus this section begins with images from the early twenty-first century which, as Pedri argues, mobilise the genre of portraiture in ways that produce a disturbing erasure of female individuality; it ends, by contrast, with images from the beginning of the last century in which women appropriated the traditional role of the portrait for themselves and constructed a public identity through which their leaders were presented as serious, sensitive and intelligent individuals. The next section begins with a paper which expands the frame for thinking about questions of gender and identity by further calling into question the supposed 'naturalness' of gender binaries via the notion of drag.

2 Gender Crossings: Performance and Translation

In her paper 'Theatrical Representation: Gender Performativity, Fluidity and Nomadic Subjectivity', Marissia Fragkou takes up the influential account of gender developed by Judith Butler, whose work also informs Pedri's analysis. As both contributors show, Butler's theory of the constitution of gender identity through performative acts both thoroughly displaces the notion that gender is 'natural' and emphasises the possibilities for both 'failed' and parodic reinscriptions that destabilise the heterosexual norm. In her classic text, Gender Trouble (1990), Butler pays particular attention to drag insofar as the latter is able to expose supposedly natural gender norms as the non-natural result of repeated 'performances'. While Butler herself remains suspicious of the subversive potential of drag in a theatrical context, Marissia Fragkou seeks to reclaim the possibilities offered by theatrical performance for both de-naturalising gender norms and re-imagining gendered identities. Fragkou draws on two plays by Phyllis Nagy to show how the performance of drag can reveal femininity as a simulation without original. Nonetheless, Fragkou is sensitive to the possible limits of critical gender parody as a mode of political intervention. Combining Butler with insights drawn from Rosi Braidotti, she argues that Nagy's plays foreground the importance of rethinking political agency for a "nomadic" subject who acts not in isolation, but by forging community through relations with others.

The intersection of performance and the political provides the backdrop for the next paper, 'A Touching Text: Dundee, Tehran and The Winter's Tale' by Marion Wynne-Davies. The inclusion of this paper is particularly appropriate as Professor Wynne-Davies was a founding member of the WCS programme at Dundee, and nicely brings the collection back to a specifically Dundonian context with her examination of the Dundee Repertory Theatre's 2003 staging of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Wynne-Davies shows how this context was integral to Dominic Hill's production, not only in its comic exuberance but also in its foregrounding of strong female characters in ways that resonate with Dundee's historical reputation as a 'women's town'. Wynne-Davies goes on to examine the ways in which the play's staging had to be reworked when it was performed in Tehran in January 2003, noting that it was the gender implications of the changes that most concerned the director and cast. Together, the alterations made as a result of censorship and the cast's response to these changes led to a reinterpretation of the play foregrounding the separation of the sexes and the repression and containment of female agency.

Wynne-Davies' paper concerns an act of cultural translation that was on this occasion hugely over-determined by the impending war on Iraq. Nonetheless, just as Fragkou's analysis reaches beyond the stage to make us re-think the role of community in the transformation of gender relations, Wynne-Davies offers us a case study with a much wider lesson, showing us how gender does not operate in isolation, but is bound up within complex and transnational webs of political, cultural and ideological differences. If gender is to play its part in the forging of new communities, it is complexities such as these which will need to be traversed and encompassed.

The final paper of this section reinforces this insight from a historical perspective by showing how texts by early modern women writers also need to be read in the context of social, political and religious complexities. Indeed, June Waudby shows how two such writers succeeded in negotiating these complexities to generate work displaying both originality and a high degree of rhetorical craft. In 'Anne Locke, Mary Sidney and the "hungry dogge"', Waudby shows how, in their renderings of the Psalms, each of these women took up a different relation to the dominant norms of early modern femininity: Locke largely avoided presenting herself in terms of conventional models of female propriety, yet showed disciplined restraint in her chosen poetic form; by contrast, Sidney appears to conform to a more typical image of female modesty in terms of authorial self-presentation, while simultaneously displaying extraordinary formal virtuosity in her work. This virtuosity takes us back to the intersection of word and image - or as Waudby suggests, the sympathy between ear and eye - as the Sidney Psalter ingeniously deploys visual form to reinforce its devotional and literary content.

Waudby argues convincingly that if we only value the works of Locke and Sidney because they show that early modern women's writing did exist, despite the obvious social and ideological constraints, then we ourselves homogenise both the works and their authors in ways that repeat those same constraining assumptions. Instead, we need to attend to the very different ways in which such writers negotiated both the constraints and the possibilities of their specific situations, in which gender is a key factor, but not the only one. Waudby's paper thus not only contributes to the recovery of important female voices from the past, but offers us a model for approaching the work of female authors generally, in ways that allow us to do justice to the originality and inventiveness of individual - and very different - women.

3 Engendering Transgression: Women, Violence and Criminality

If Locke and Sidney defied regulative norms of feminine silence through their textual creations, the next section begins with an examination of female activities which challenged such norms in a far more direct and indeed violent manner. Paradoxically, as Felicity Donohoe shows, precisely because they posed a more overt and troubling challenge, these activities were even more firmly silenced, both at the time and in subsequent historiography. The activity in question is the ritual torture of enemy captives undertaken by native North American women and encountered by European colonists in the course of their expansionist programme of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In her paper, 'The Gender Map and Ritual Native Female Violence', Donohoe shows that the involvement of native North American women in ritual violence and torture was not only difficult for eighteenth-century colonists to understand, but that viewing such acts within a frame informed by European gender norms made it almost impossible to recognise the status and nature of these acts in their own terms. This blindspot can be compared to the ways in which the European colonists found it hard to recognise unfenced lands as already inhabited and erased the presence of indigenous peoples via the myth of terra nullius. Donohoe goes on to show how this blindspot is compounded by later historical analysis which has often continued to map the activities of North American Indian women in terms of a gendered framework drawn from a Western historical context. This frame, with its emphasis on the ideological power of the notion of 'separate spheres', tends to erase the ways in which Native American women played a full and crucial role in both the spiritual life of the tribe and its 'public' life in times of war.

In ways that resonate with Waudby's analysis, Donohoe points out that the tendency to parallel Native American female violence with contemporaneous acts of violence by white (colonist) women leads to an understanding of both as simply 'anomalous'. Such interpretations homogenise female actions on the basis of sex instead of accounting for the heterogeneous significance that violent acts might have for women whose lives were framed by different histories and very different socio-political contexts. By contrast, Donohoe argues for the need to attend to the significance of Native American women's role in ritual torture in its own terms, and provides the basis for such an analysis. Her approach is valuable both because it begins to make visible the very different 'gender map' that seems to have shaped the lives of indigenous North American peoples, and because this alternative mapping challenges some of the most deeply entrenched features of modern western gender norms and models of femininity.

The final paper of the collection shifts us back to the present day, with a discussion of the relevance of gender difference to the dominant discourses of criminology. In 'Visions and Visibility: Gender, Crime and Difference', Heather Morgan sets the scene via a survey of relevant literature in the field which suggests that gendered assumptions have made it more difficult for women to be seen as 'criminally deviant' than men. Nonetheless, some crimes - such as shoplifting - tend to be seen as more typically 'feminine' than others, a presumption that Morgan also calls into question. By drawing on original field work undertaken in the course of her doctoral research, Morgan is able to demonstrate how these presumptions inflect judgements about potential criminal activity and in particular the identification of possible suspects. Her project involved observing how the security operations of a department store were managed by a CCTV surveillance unit (which happened to be staffed by men) and a number of female store detectives. By paying close attention to how the security team made decisions about who to watch, Morgan reveals the tensions and contradictions that arise because of the ways in which gender inflects surveillance and intersects with other differences (particularly those of class).

In the course of her essay, Morgan notes the conflicting views that surround the impact of women's emancipation on their participation in criminal activities. This discussion takes us back to Watson's paper, which provides a historical dimension to the question of women's relation to crime and violence (both trangressive and socially sanctioned). As his analysis suggests, the suffragettes' carefully produced images of respectable femininity dissimulate both the extent to which some suffragist women were willing to mobilise more militant tactics themselves (such as window smashing), and the violence perpetrated against them by police and the criminal justice system (such as force feeding in jails). By taking us more fully through the uncomfortable terrain where gender, violence and criminality meet, the two papers in this final section show that despite the operation of powerful blindspots and norms, modern (and early modern) western conceptions of femininity remain unstable, contested and - thus - transformable.

Conclusion: the 'hungry dogge'

In the course of this collection we move between the imagination of a contemporary female playwright and the creations of her early modern fore-sisters, between the heroic interventions of the suffragettes and the re-imagining of superheroic powers in the feminine gender; we see how the fertile intersection of word and image can generate a critical transformation of gender, and how attentiveness to gender can transform established discourses and expectations; and we are shown how gender differences cross with differences of culture, class, time and place to reveal blindspots and produce alternative perspectives as well as possibilities for change. In the title of one of the papers, we even find a reference to a 'hungry dogge'. Waudby's 'dogge' is the greedy imagination, always hungry for more. We would thus like to conclude by thanking our contributors for feeding the imagination so generously and for whetting our appetite for more with their rich and thought-provoking papers.

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