Re-presenting Representation: Towards a Contemporary Feminist Mimesis
To feminists thinking double is nothing new. Feminist theorists, like Susan Lanser , Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have ushered in a feminist narratology which has resisted "models and methods [which] have been almost exclusively masculine in their sources and orientation, and whose ideology has been profoundly patriarchal." With a space carved out for feminist narratology one can now begin to posit a contemporary view of a feminist mimesis. A feminist mimesis, much like feminist narratology itself, sees women (and their narratives) as sites of differences. Multi-layered, like women's experiences, a contemporary feminist mimesis is not a sweeping representation of the "real world," but recognises its provisionality, just as each experience that a feminist mimesis seeks to represent is itself provisional and incomplete. Consequently, the crux of representing reality (or at least specific moments of experience from a feminist perspective) is not so much based on a postmodern preoccupation or reservation with regard to the limits of representation. A feminist mimesis, as borne out in specific hyperfictions, cognisant of the limits of representation, calls for a type of crossing. Recognising postmodernism's uneasy alliance with representation but highlighting continually becoming individual experiences, a feminist mimesis invites a complex and shifting relationship with representation and its limits. Becoming, in Braidotti's terms, is a "technique of strategic re-location in order to rescue what we [women] need of the past in order to trace paths of transformation of our lives here and now." It is thus less a matter of embracing a transformation than of bringing different points into play: "fluid boundaries, a practice of the intervals, of the interfaces, and the interstices." Like Hutcheon's, Butler's, and Irigaray's pioneering "notion[s] of positionality," although articulated in a very different way, Braidotti's concept of becoming and "as-if" is grounded in postmodern parody and subversive repetition. In Braidotti's terms, for "becoming" to remain useful to feminists one must stress its deliberate agency and the worth of lived experience. Feminist becoming, then, is a term to describe the complex process of women's diverse lived experience as women live it and as women structure it. Therefore "becoming," in feminist terms "can be politically empowering on the condition of being sustained by a critical consciousness that aims at engendering transformations and changes." A fundamental point is that each embodied female subject represents a complex network of identities and positions, and must be conceived of as a process in a constant state of dynamic "becoming," rather than a static entity.
