Queering place : the intersection of feminist body theory and Australian Aboriginal collaboration

My positioning in relation to feminist poststructuralism was always already a "queering" position in that, although taking on theories and practices of poststructural research, I questioned the overemphasis on language in the constitution of subjectivity (Probyn and Somerville 2004). In following the early theoretical work of feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (eg Grosz 1989, 1990, 1994), I experimented with putting the body at the center of knowledge construction. Grosz's trajectory of viewing philosophy from the point of view of the body interrogated Lacanian psychoanalysis, in particular the relationship of the body to language proposed to occur in the mirror stage of an infant's development. The mirror stage occurs when an infant first becomes aware of herself as a separate being from the mother and marks the stage of entry into the symbolic order, the world of language and symbol (Grosz 1990). For the French feminist philosophers, Kristeva (1980), Irigaray (1985), and Cixous (1999), Lacan's mirror stage offered fertile ground for reconceiving the relationship between bodies and language embedded in western thought (Grosz 1989). They variously developed new forms of theory, language, and writing in which the body was privileged over mind rather than the mind over body as in the usual hierarchical dominance of the mind/body binary. This strategy of inverting the binary structures of thought through the body is the first queering strategy I examine in this article in relation to place.