Ludic Feminism, the Body, Performance, and Labor: Bringing "Materialism" Back into Feminist Cultural Studies

Abstract

metalanguage or a violent closure of meaning, we need to reunderstand theory as a historical critique of the politics of intelligibility. By this I mean theory is most effectively understood in resistance postmodernism not in an idealist (theory as metalanguage) but as an explanatory critique of the ways in which meanings are materially formed and social reality is constructed in relation to various strategies of power. This reunderstanding of theory enables us to acquire a historical knowledge of social totalities and the relations of power, profit, and labor rendering certain forms of daily practices legitimate (meaningful) and marking others as meaningless. Theory, in this sense, is a double operation: it is both the frame of intelligibility through which we organize and make sense of reality, and the critical inquiry into and contestation over these modes of meaning making. Practice is inscribed in theory as I am articulating it here. Thus theory is not simply a cognitivism but a historical site of social struggle over how we represent reality, that is, over how we construct reality and the ways to change it.7 Theory, in other words, is a political practice and not simply a metaphysical abstraction or discursive play. This means that even such a seemingly natural and nontheoretical practice as common sense (as Gramsci argues in Prison Notebooks) is a frame of intelligibility, a theory, but one that conceals its mode of knowing, representing it as the way things are. Theory, then, is not opposed to experience but is the necessary supplement of experience (to use Derrida's term in order to deconThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Tue, 27 Sep 2016 06:02:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms