Wholeness

The belief that "one is a woman" is almost as absurd and obscurantist as the belief that "one is a man." ~ Julia Kristeva

"Persons communicate through language, but also through the flesh, blood, and rushing currents of feeling and energy by which they are also constituted. This womanly gesture, in which language may participate without becoming the ruling metaphor, neither masters, succumbs to, nor even excludes, its male audience. In this way, it avoids being a "master" narrative.

Postmodernists in general and feminist postmodernists in particular have opened up an enormous intellectual space in which to reconsider the relationship of self and knowledge. Feminists have integrated gender concerns into this space as well. But a subjective experience that moves from textuality to a different style of subjectivity altogether is not available in postmodern thought as currently constituted. Feminist appropriations of postmodernist structures have, by and large, conceived of themselves as opposed to essentialist feminist perspectives. For Buddhists, the possibility of subjectivity not anchored in language or oppositionality suggests a way in which the strength and agency associated with essentialist perspectives can be integrated with a full acknowledgment of the complexity of a woman's identity in the contemporary climate. Thus, I think it extremely worthwhile to recognize a dimension or category of subjectivity that is not bounded, constructed, or defined solely by language.

Contemporary women's lives, replete with incongruous elements of culture, race, religion, or worldview, can be a cause for celebration so long as one's entire possibility for coherence does not lie with a verbalized narrative coherence. The mastery of detail and nuance that this would require is impossible. But this impossibility need not stand in the way of subjective or personal coherency, for keen and focused attention inevitably reveals that multiplicity makes the only kind of whole that can be one."