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ABSTRACT This article offers a new reading of Adrienne Rich's essay 'Notes toward a Politics of Location' (1984), one of the key documents in feminist discussions of 'locatedness'. Its focus is the spec#ic location of the body and it responds to Rich's exploration of the body, her body, as female, as white, as,ewish and as a body in a nation. Taking as its starting point Rich's concern with the relation between the pronouns T and eve the individual and the collective subjects, the article explores the significance of interconnectedness as a political and aesthetic impulse in Rich's work. Through considerations of femininity, race, the Holocaust and national identity, the article illustrates how Rich situates her body as personal and sentient, on the one hand, public and responsible, on the other. Though conscious of critical theory, the article's aim is to read Rich in relation to her own words and those of other writers, particularly George Steiner and Virginia Woolf.
The Problem of Pronouns
And so even ordinary pronouns become a political problem (Rich, 1987, p.24) [2]
Adrienne Rich has always maintained a cautious distance from critical theory. She states: 'Theory-the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees-theory can be a dew that rises from the earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn't smell of the earth, it isn't good for the earth' (pp. 213-214). Yet in her writing, especially her three volumes of essays (1979, 1987, 1995a), she has shown a keen awareness of critical issues and has produced at least three essays that have entered the feminist 'canon' and are constantly referred to in critical and theoretical arguments: 'When we dead awaken: writing as re-vision' (1971/1979)-particularly relevant to debates in feminist literary theory; 'Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence' (1980/1987) -particularly relevant to debates on sexuality; and the essay I want to consider in this article, 'Notes toward a politics of location' (1984/1987) which has proved to be a key document in feminist, post-modern and post-colonial discussions of 'locatedness'.
A sense of the located has emerged as a strategy for negotiating the many pitfalls in constructing individual and collective feminist subjects. The politics of location recognises find out-alongside the...