The acts of shopping, of wearing an article of clothing, of receiving clothing as a gift, can be expressions of recognition and love between women, or between women and men, which should not be ignored, though they may fail to transcend the dominant phallic economy of desire.

Fashion, then, is neither inherently oppressive nor inherently liberating. It is "contradictory for women," and in that very contradiction lies the possibility of using it to push the boundaries of acceptable feminine sexuality.

Because these feminist essays are specifically concerned with the bodies of women, they avoid one of the major problems of this book and of any theoretical investigation of "the body." It seems to me that discussions of "the body" as an ungendered, neutral entity too easily slide into the assumption that it is male. For example, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker' s essay, "Theses on the Disappearing Body in the Hyper-Modern Condition," seeks to "emphasize the fact that the (natural) body in the post-modern condition has already disappeared." This statement assumes, with most contemporary feminist theory (including Kim Sawchuk above), that the body, like gender, is socially constructed rather than an unchangeable biological entity. Yet the authors devote one paragraph specifically to women's bodies, which they claim "have always been post modern because they have always been targets of power." (There is, of course, no specific reference to men's bodies.) If women's bodies must be discussed separately, then "the body" must be male in its abstract form. (If a body can be something other than male or female, as Monique Wittig argues in "The Straight Mind," the possibility is not explored here.) Despite their theoretical disclaimers of "naturalness," the Krokers have fallen back on the assumption that there is an unchangeable, or at least, abstractable, state of the body and that women's bodies are the occasional exception to this general condition. Many of the other essays work on the same assumption, and indeed, I think it is difficult to avoid for any theory which takes "the body" as its object of study. Post modern theorists would do well to note Adrienne Rich's words, quoted by Elspeth Probyn in "The Anorexic Body:" "To say 'the body' lifts me away from what has given me a primary perspective. To say 'my body' reduces the temptation to grandiose assertions."

Grandiose assertions, of course, are what post-modern theory does best. Perhaps because it insists on our contemporary isolation from history, writing such as this often insists disturbingly on the significance of current dilemmas. Not since the seventeenth-century millenarians have we heard such doom saying as the editors' assertion that what follows is body writing for the end of the world" or Baudrillard's notion of "the disappearance of history," in which "history can no longer surpass itself, it can no longer envisage its own finality, dream its own end." Because these claims seem inflated, even hysterical, I am tempted to dismiss them as insufficiently historical, mere navel-gazing. But a feminist writer not represented in Body Invaders, Christina Thurmer-Rohr, reminds us that "the patriarchal wish for omnipotence and total control has stepped out of the realm of mere fantasy, fiction and experiment into the realm of complete realiability."¹ What Thurmer-Rohr calls "the worldwide escalation of nuclear, chemical and biological means of annihilation" set our era apart definitively from the past. Nonetheless, seeing this difference clearly and facing the inevitable, daily anxiety it engenders can distract us from the political action that post-modern theory, with its recognition of the power of the media and the complex functioning of ideology, can also make possible. Fortunately, many of the essays in Body Invaders (most notably those by feminists) manifest a specific political agenda that is all the more effective because it is grounded in a sophisticated theoretical understanding of the dilemmas, temptations and possibilities of this era of late capitalism, high patriarchy, and nuclear terrorism - in sum, the post-modern condition.

¹Christina Thunner-Rohr, "From Deception to Un-Deception: On Complicity of Women," Trivia 12 (Spring 1988), p.63.