Sex, Work and Motherhood: The Impossible Triangle Author(s): E.

Ann Kaplan Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of Sex Research, Vol. 27, No. 3, Feminist Perspectives on Sexuality. Part 2 (Aug., 1990), pp. 409-425 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3812811 . Accessed: 15/02/2012 12:24
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Taylor & Francis, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Sex Research.

http://www.jstor.org

TheJournalof Sex Research Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 409-425 August, 1990

Sex, Work and Motherhood: The Impossible Triangle

E. ANN KAPLAN, Ph.D.
State University of New York, Stony Brook

This essay explores how current representations of sex, work and motherhood,in select recent films and women's science fiction, manifest and give meaning to contradictory discourses about women. Discourse analysis shows that what at first appear to be polarized discourses may be part of a larger societal need to control female sexuality, and reposition the nuclear family with woman safely within it. Ideological textual analysis may help feminists gauge how far their own discourses about abortion, female sexual adventurousness, mothering, reproductive technologies collude with, or challenge, dominant ones in relation to sex, work and motherhood. KEY WORDS: Female sexuality, work, motherhood; film; science fiction; reproductive technologies; ideology; discourse analysis. Introduction Many of us know women who, over the past 20 years or so, have struggled to combine sex, work and motherhood. Even when they are in heterosexual marriages, women have difficulties linking these three aspects of their lives. But those who are single or recently divorced mothers, who are poor or belong to minority groups, or who are gay parents, find even greater odds stacked against them. It has been clear that women's difficulties owe much to the lack of facilitating institutions for leading a life combining sex, work and motherhood: we still do not have adequate, available and inexpensive child care, and flexible and accommodating work schedules. Accounting for why modernist and postmodernist America still refuses to make easy for any women combining sex, work and motherhood lies beyond my scope here. Let me merely gesture to the enormous economic and technological changes that have taken place in
E. Ann Kaplan, Ph.D., is a professor of English and director of the Humanities Institute at The State University of New York, Stony Brook. She has written widely on feminist theory, film, and popular culture. Her most recent books include Rocking
Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture; and the edited volumes, Postmodernism and Its Discontents and Psychoanalysis and Cinema.

Her book on Motherhood and Representation is currently in press. Send requests for reprints to E. Ann Kaplan, Humanities Institute, SUNY, Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794-3394.
409

410

KAPLAN

the post-WorldWar II period, with their accompanying cultural shifts, that include first, increasing numbers of women in the work force; second, the 1960s/70s/80s women's movements; and third, new reproductive technologies impacting on women's lives. These cultural shifts have themselves produced various reactions from diverse quarters, resulting in the complex, contradictory discourses being discussed here. My interest is in how current representations of sex, work and motherhood in select dominant and sub-cultural forms manifest, and give meanings to, such contradictory discourses. Because dominant forms privilege white, middle-class women, and because I believe dominant discourses inevitably impact on minority ones, I have chosen to focus mainly on white, middle-class conflicts. Other research, however, also needs to be done. Cultural studies scholars have long theorized that popular representations provide some evidence for what preoccupies the American social imaginary in specific historical moments. Because commercial productions must command an audience sufficient for handsome profit, producers are clever at sensing the fantasies, fears and desires that preoccupy a majority of the people in a given period. Always hoping to be the first to provide desired images, producers keep their pulse on the moment, anticipating fashions before they catch on. Cultural studies research has always made a point of teasing out underlying forces setting media discourses in play.' Analysis of the hierarchicaldiscourses embeddedin texts allows a scholar to see which discourses are privileged, which excluded, and the power relations among discourses. From this analysis, it is possible to deduce what produces certain discourses, what culture needs them for, and whose specific needs they serve-this, despite the fact that commercial products present discourses as though they operate merely on the individual level (i.e., as though it were merely a matter of personal character, individual choice, or fate). It is true that dominant media are not monolithic (i.e., many different, contradictory discourses may be seen at work at the same time),2and the sheer enormity of the production increasingly guarantees gaps and spaces for some alternate

1For a good example of this kind of theory, see MacCabe (1974). 2See Stam (1988) for one argument about such contradictions.

THE IMPOSSIBLE TRIANGLE

411

discourses. But unconscious cultural constraints still function to prevent expression of certain kinds of images.3 That the United States in the 1990s is in the midst of a cultural paradigm shift is generally agreed on: whether called "Postmodernism" or "New Age Consciousness," part of the shift involves the development of the contradictory discourses noted above, which the 1960s/70s liberation movements left in their wake. The excitement of these movements arose from the challenge they offered to the dominant establishment. A clear polarity between dominant and counterculture positions remained in the 60s, as the term "counter-culture" itself indicated. But American capitalism, in its incessant search for new markets, and its uncanny method of co-opting subversive discourses, has incorporated many of the 1960s/70s oppositional positions into dominant ones, blurring distinctions and boundaries. The sense of an "outside" distinct from an "inside" has produced increasing confusion between the "popular" and the "oppositional" text, between "dominant" and "marginal" cultures. While this has some benefits, sites of production still make a difference in what can be shown (for example, commercial TV presents soaps, but a wicked critique of soaps, like Joan Braverman's video Joan Does Dynasty, is reserved for alternative exhibition sites, like Paper Tiger TV, or museums). Therefore, I have chosen to explore contrasting texts from the "commercial/dominant"category (i.e., popular film, TV, newspapers, etc.), and those from a marginalized category, "women's science fiction." Arguably, the first domain articulates unconscious, patriarchal desire regarding sex, work and motherhood, while the second reflects the consciousness of women whose imaginations have both absorbed the lessons of the various feminisms, and been fascinated by new scientific/technological discoveries and projects. Representations in Commercial,Dominant Materials Changes in sex/family/work spheres are emerging culturally in tandem with changes on the technological/economic/industriallevel. Anxiety in relation to women and these spheres has, in part, to do with the fact that childbirth and child care are no longer an automatic,
3Feuer (1989) argues that interpretative communities may make new use of popular materials; they may defuse a program like Dynasty ideologically, and incorporate it into new imaginary constructs. But this does not mean that it is no longer important to explore the investments in positions that texts themselves stake out on an unconscious level.

412

KAPLAN

"natural," part of woman's life cycle: this centrally affects women's sex and work lives-women may not only be sexual before marriage, but need not have children at all; meanwhile, they can compete with men in the work sphere. That this change has preoccupied the recent cultural imaginary will be evident from a brief reminder of some 1970s films. Popular films of the 1970s showed American culture adjusting to women's new-found sexual freedom outside of marriage and the family. Fears hovered around the fact that if women can be sexual without having children, their sexuality is, in a sense, dangerously "unleashed." Richard Brooks' 1976 Lipstick showed the violent male desire such open sexuality (here in the body of the popular lipstick-model, played by Margo Hemingway) could provoke, although it interestingly went on to argue powerfully against allowing rapists to get away with it. The film was one of the first female "sexual revenge" films. Brooks' 1977 Looking for Mr. Goodbar, meanwhile, presented Diane Keaton positively as the new single, sexually adventurous woman. However, the film's ideology compelled it to demonstrate that she would come to a bad end. In the 1980s, unprecedented attention has been given to female sexuality in dominant media: it is important that the patriarchal imaginary has finally acknowledged that female sexuality is not, per se, dangerous. However, it is significant that films like Sex, Lies and Videotape or 912 Weeks do not necessarily offer a female perspective on female sexuality. They do open up the terrain of female desire, but arguably still within a patriarchal imaginary. While Sex, Lies demonstrates American culture's new acceptance of female sexuality as "normal," the film repeats old virgin/whore stereotypes, and has the male lover conquer the heroine's frigidity. [New perhaps is the attention to male sexual problems, and the exploration of male voyeurism as linked to impotence. But this lies beyond my specific focus here.] Meanwhile, 912 Weeks focuses explicitly on female desire and sexual pleasure, but there is a question as to how far it really moves beyond pornographic exploitation of women's complicity in male sexual sadism to genuine exploration of such a common dynamic. Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan or Donna Deitch's Desert Hearts perhaps come closer to suggesting the agency and activity that female sexuality might manifest without patriarchal constraints. Also significant is the fact that none of the above films combines treatment of female sexuality with attention to female work, let alone motherhood. However, some 1980s films do mix romance and working heroines, although in these cases the focus of the narrative is often

THE IMPOSSIBLE TRIANGLE

413

neither sex nor work, per se; and certainly not any special tension there might be between the two for women. Mystic Pizza interestingly treats a group of working class women, but the thrust of the film is again not the working situation per se (this does figure more importantly than usual, however), but how the various women will resolve their love or other personal problems, and find happiness. Working Girl, meanwhile, is important and unusual in focussing on women in the work place. Its main theme is: what is it like to work for a female boss? And: what is a female boss like? Unfortunately, it answers both questions negatively, showing that the female boss is more ambitious, jealous, and manipulative than any male boss could be; and that working for such a boss is a nightmare! The narrative does construct Melanie Griffith as a potentially humane, empathic female boss, but the film ends as she undertakes her new role, leaving us to imagine what will happen. Significantly, this film absolutely excludes any reference to motherhood and children, as these roles might interact with, or problematize, female needs for satisfaction in work. Together, the films show, first, how patriarchy still desires to control even a no longer "dangerous" female sexuality; and second, a similar desire to keep female sexuality, work and motherhooddistinct, segregated spheres. If the patriarchal imaginary has to a degree accommodated woman's new-found sexual freedom in recent years, and has accepted woman's needs for work, new anxiety arises from the changed reality that childbirth and child care no longer signify either that woman need stay in the home, or that she be marriedand sexually monogamous. This fear has arguably produced some recent (differing) discourses about the threat of female sexuality to motherhood,which I will briefly illustrate by reference to three recent Hollywood films. The Good Mother (1988), Stella (1990), and Fatal Attraction (1988) exemplify in quite different ways contested discourses about female sexuality, motherhood and the family; together they show alterations in these discourses from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s. The Good Mother represents discursive struggles in a 1970s, "high modernist" framework.4In the film, the discourse of a heterosexual female desire released outside of marriage is in conflict with a sentimentalizing motherhood discourse (in which motherhood is viewed as in itself all that a woman needs). These in turn operate across other discourses,
4The term "high modernist" is meant to suggest late modernism-a modernismthat has almost exhausted itself, and that is to be differentiated from subsequent "postmodernism." The film is modernist in that it assumes that Anna's "truth" is achievable, theoretically, if only legal institutions were rational. For more on this, see Kaplan (1990).

414

KAPLAN

especially those of conservative legal institutions opposed to sexual openness, particularly outside of marriage and in conjunction with motherhood. The aspects of the film most pertinent here have to do with the staging of that 1970s moment of the oppressive, sexually unhappy marriage, followed by divorce and, for the heroine, Anna, singlemotherhood. Never sexually fulfilled in marriage, Anna puts all her energies into her relationship with her daughter, Molly. Although she works, her job is purely for income, of low status, and has no meaning for her in itself. But the film shows her sexual arousal by Leo, a playful artist, who eschews traditional bourgeois modes of life. There follow passionate sexual scenes, intercut with Anna's pleasure with Molly, and, increasingly with Leo, who is fatherlike with the child. But this discourse of free, open sexuality is contested when the husband, Brian, learns from Molly that Leo has allowed her to touch his penis. The film only allows us to hear about this in the course of a court case that follows, but we quickly see how it is Anna's situation as single mother that causes a problem in relation to her sexuality. Her sexuality is highlighted, made an object for investigation by the state, in a way that, within the traditional family, it is usually not. At least until recently (when concern about child-abuse has begun to alter things), sex within the family has been protected. But the single mother's sexuality is to be monitored. The film then introduces (and sympathizes with) liberatory discourses about single motherhood, female sexuality and child custody. But the discourses exist in complex relation to the renewed sentimentalizing motherhood discourse that I have isolated. The ending is reactionary, and the film once again fails to integrate career interests with sexuality and motherhood. Much the same may be said for the 1990 version of the old Stella Dallas story. Originally written in 1923, two film versions of Stella Dallas already exist (1926, 1937); even in those periods, the story was criticized for being "hoary."The revival of an essentially 19th-Century paradigm at this historical moment is itself significant (one cannot imagine the film being made in the 1970s or 80s). Once again, we have a single mother (this time, however, the child is born out of wedlock, by the heroine's choice); once again, nurturing ultimately replaces sexuality, although in Stella's case this happens far more quickly than for Anna. The upper-class Stephen Dallas' surprise interruption of a party Stella is having with her impossible working-class male and female friends in the baby's presence propels Stella into devoted

THE IMPOSSIBLE TRIANGLE

415

mothering (as if to prove to Stephen how much she loves the child). Thus, even the tensions between sex and mothering that The Good Mother reveals are not explored by Stella. What is new in the film is Stella's decision to have the child out of wedlock: after discovering the pregnancy, she tellingly notes that since it is 1969, she has several choices: to have an abortion, to have the child and give it up, or to have and keep the child, alone. She notes that all three are "terrible," and not really choices at all. New also is Stella's pride, and her determination to go it alone, not accepting money from Stephen, even though he wants to share in, and know, the child. Again, the child becomes Stella's whole reason for being, and any work that she does is merely to put bread on the table. But she is a feisty mother, warding off (or trying to) unsavory males chasing her daughter, and she is capable of deep love, anger, and laughter. But, as in the earlier versions, Stella's renunciation of the child to the upper class world where she can have most opportunities, and her consigning of herself to the margins, oblivion (emblematized in the final wedding scene), is seen as a positive sacrifice, eliciting as always, tears in the audience. Finally, this version significantly adds a strong father-daughter bonding not evident in earlier ones. In this way, the film subscribes to the prevailing sentimentality about fathers and daughters, which coexists uncannily with increasing evidence of father-daughterincest on the level of historical reality. Fatal Attraction, meanwhile, embodies in a much more postmodern way than either The Good Mother or Stella a violent polarizing of 1970s feminist liberatory sexual discourses and renewed, pro-("yuppie")family discourse. While The Good Mother looks back to, and stages, struggles in a mid 1970s mode; and while Stella perhaps augurs for a return to earliermothering discourses in this era of AIDS, Fatal Attraction is very much a late 1980s film. That the confrontation between the discourses of released female sexuality and of the nuclear family had to be so violent suggests the enormous psychic (unconscious) tension in contemporaryculture as a result of all the challenges to dominant 1960s sexual discourses that feminists made. Briefly, Glen Close is shown at the start of the film as an independent career woman (with whom the female spectator is invited to identify), who objects to being made a sex object, but who, in turn, has intense sexual desire and drive. She basically seduces the marriedman and father (played by Michael Douglas), and we are treated to scenes of intense, lustful love-making. When Douglas tries to end the affair (his

416

KAPLAN

wife and child have now returned),Glen Close points out the remaining double standard, in which his having an affair is a simple thing, she an object to be used and thrown away. Yet things are not so simple for her, since she is all alone, and needs him. The female spectator may continue identifying with the heroine this far, only to have the identification sickeningly wrenched away as Glen Close, unable to hold on to Douglas, turns into a monster of horrorfilm proportions before our eyes. We are invited now to identify with both the besieged husband and abused wife and, finally, with the wretchedly tortured child. Glen Close, the repressed underside of the nuclear family, now becomes intolerable:like the ghastly mutations of science fiction and horror genres, she must be eliminated at all costs as the representative of all that threatens the biological nuclear family. Like those mutations, she keeps returning in ever more vile forms, with ever more monstrous purposes, until, finally, husband and wife manage to eradicate her. The wife has to take on the murderous aspects of Glen Close in order to achieve her demise (revealing, perhaps, the violence embedded even within the family), but the sanctity of the nuclear family is, just about, retrieved as the battered trio regroup and reconstitute their little community. The film must be read on at least two levels, that of the depiction of gender/sex discourses, and that of underlying psychoanalytic processes. The possibility for the Glen Close character rests, first, on the new conceptions about female sexuality that the early Women's Liberation Movement produced: one of the main issues in the first phase of the Movement was challenging the limitation of female sexuality to that safely confined within patriarchal norms. Female sexuality was brought out of the closet and discussed: topics such as vaginal versus clitoral orgasms, lesbian versus heterosexual sexuality, female sexual fantasies and their implications were extensively debated in popular materials as well as in feminist scholarship. On the level of individual discourse (and the dailiness of historical subjects), these developments resulted in freeing women from the confines of oppressive, often sexually unhappy marriages, liberating women to seek sexual satisfaction in whatever modes (lesbian, heterosexual, "kinky," "vanilla")they chose. It is significant (forunderstanding the reaction to these developments in dominant representations) that the women's movement early on ignored the mother per se, while devoting attention to problems of day care, control of childbirth and reformulating child-rearing. The fact that much early feminist work was geared at freeing women from the necessities of mothering [and challenged dominant codes by refusing to hypostasize the (patriarchal)

THE IMPOSSIBLE TRIANGLE

417

mother-function] partly produces (by reaction) the pro-family discourse in a film like Fatal Attraction. Fatal Attraction, then, insists on restoring the nuclear family, and in subordinating the discourse of the independent/sexual woman to that of the wife/mother. The family is seen to be the only safe location of female sexuality, in a return to a discourse uncomfortably like that of the 19th century. Female sexuality outside of marriageis envisaged as wild, excessive, ultimately destructive. That the excision of this nonmarital female sexuality has to be so violent attests to the enormity of the perceived threat to the family, reading the film now on its surface level. But the more dramatic recent focus on the fetus as subject shows a new displacement of woman's threat to patriarchy that still remains in the cultural imaginary, perhaps just because of the advances gained through the late 1960s and 1970s women's movements. Anxiety about women's new freedoms is displaced onto the fetus, who in turn displaces the woman altogether. When central, the fetus renders unimportant woman's work, sex, and mother subjectivities; her body (assumed to be in the home, in heterosexual marriage)is now to be in the service of the fetus. This positioning is underlined by the fact that fetal imagery usually represents the fetus as an entity in its own right, unattached to the woman, or at least rendering her irrelevant to what is going on in the womb. A few examples from popular materials (newspapers, television, film) will make the point. To begin with, it is important to note that it was the militant antiabortionists' campaign that plastered culture with numerous new images of the fetus. It was sensational pictures of what happens to the fetus during gestation that drew renewed interest in, and sympathy for, the fetus. These images, particularly the ones featured in Life Magazine (April 30, 1965, pp. 62-69) made the spectator identify with the fetus as subject; they were used by anti-abortionists to initiate an idea that has now become commonplace, viz, that the fetus is what is most important. Meanwhile, a recent New York Times article (Gina Kolata, 1989, April 18) on fetal survival showed an enlarged image of the fetus, the umbilical cord moving out of frame. The cord was hanging in space, and the mother's body not imaged (nor even the womb!). Similar articles on fetal surgery showed the surgeon's implements entering the womb as if the womb were located in space, floating unattached to anything. Discussion of the surgery mentioned nothing about discomfort to the women in whose body this was taking place. But, significantly, the woman is assumed to be at her fetus' behest. Another New

418

KAPLAN

York Times article (1988, July 28) about in vitro fertilization imaged the sperm binding to an egg in the woman's body, but again the blownup image floated in space, and the title said nothing about the woman. Popular narratives also focus newly on the "unborn,"make the fetus of central concern, and marginalize the woman. A recent Buck James television episode pitted a daughter against her (negatively coded) mother over the question of whether or not the daughter should abort her illegitimate conception, despite the fetus' having been damaged in a sporting accident. Focus on the fetus may indicate a renewed desire to write the woman out of the story (except as once more an unquestioned patriarchalfunction), or to marginalize and negate her subjectivity. This new discourse, apparently contradictory to that of a nostalgic return to a sentimentalized mother-childrelationship, in fact colludes neatly with it. Instead of an intense mother-childrelationship being idealized and hypostatized, we have obsession with conception and gestation-with fetal life within the woman. But the discourses are linked in both indicating, at least in dominant forms, a return to obsession with the biological child. The differences are important, however: the sentimental mother discourse speaks from the position of the mother's absorption in nurturing: however oppressively, it situates the mother as a subject, as in The Good Mother. The reproductive discourse, on the contrary, marginalizes the woman again (i.e., it is only interested in the woman as the being that initiated the fetal discourse-by desiring to create a fetus); it also redefines subjectivity, in making into a subject what is not yet human. The woman is marginalized, made into a non-subject, or, as in a recent book by Elizabeth Kane (1988) about her surrogacy experiences, happily marginalizes herself. Meanwhile, culture positions the not-yet-born, paradoxically, as subject, raising anew issues of what constitutes subjectivity.
Representations of Sexuality and Motherhood in Select Women's Science Fiction

The ways in which sexuality and biological female sexuality are inter-twined in the dominant reproductive-technologies discourse makes it a very complicated topic for feminists. Feminist perspectives on the new technologies are currently being developed from a variety of positions, but I will here look briefly at relevant representations in the sub-cultural women's science fiction mode from the late 1960s to the present. It is clear that feminists' first interest in reproductive technologies in the 1960s focused on their bodies. Issues of all three areas under

THE IMPOSSIBLE TRIANGLE

419

discussion-sex, work and motherhood-were subsumed under the over-riding need for women to control their bodies in order to have choice about these three aspects of their lives. Emphasis was on women freeing themselves from a culturally imposed-and not necessarily desired-reproductive role that still prevailed at the time (Firestone, 1972). It also meant freeing themselves at the same time for sexual choice, including lesbian relations. Utopian fantasies about reproductive alternatives appearedin some women's sci-fi novels, such as Naomi Mitchisons' Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1968), Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1985), or Joanna Russ' The Female Man (1975). All three novels, in different ways, sought [as did Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Herland (1915)]to replace usual reproductive modes with alternatives that would make possible a utopian, egalitarian world, in which women were no longer oppressed by their biological and nurturing functions. Unlike Perkins Gilman, who simply avoided the issue of female desire altogether, some of this fiction stresses freedom of sexual choice, as well as multiple and varied sexual partners, as important parts of the utopian frame. Most novels assume that women work alongside men, on an equal basis, if men are included (as was not the case in Herland). In the 1960s, then, before abortion became readily available, some women's discourse centered on removing women from being inscribed within bodies not within their control. It was assumed that once such freedom from male domination were achieved, issues regarding sex, work and motherhood could be suitably resolved, and that women would be able to choose for themselves how to order their lives and priorities. In the 1980s, however, such unconflicted fantasies about the liberating possibilities of open sexuality and of reproductive technologies are problematic for several reasons. On the broadest level, there is the backlash against feminism that began in the late 1970s with the challenge to abortion rights [the Hyde Amendment and the refusal of Medicaid money for abortions] and continued with the right wing attacks on sex in general. Women remain vulnerable to high levels of male violence and to sexual harassment in the work place. If the AIDS crisis has only had a minimal effect on feminists' sexual behavior, it has had the psychological, imaginary effect on reinforcing links between sex and danger. Meanwhile, the way that new scientific discoveries about fetal development have been taken up by anti-abortion groups, as noted above, has inevitably had an impact on feminist positions (Petchesky, 1987). Images in women's science fiction have altered in accord with these

420

KAPLAN

important social and scientific changes. Two main sci-fi paradigms may be distinguished: first, novels replacing 1960s utopias with dystopias; and second, novels which radically shift the focus. Writing is now informed by an altogether new position that could be called "postmodern" in the sense of an acceptance of new cultural tendencies-working with, rather than against, new technological possibilities. A brief look at two novels [Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986) and Octavia Butler's Dawn (1987)],each representing one of the paradigms, will make the point clear. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale offers an example of the first kind of dystopia. The 1960's feminist utopia, in which women control and use reproductive technologies to free themselves of an oppressive patriarchy, now gives way to a dystopia produced by events (in this case the disasters of environmental depletion and release of radiation) outside women's control. Writing in the context of extreme proliferation of nuclear weapons and of projected life-threatening (and infertility producing) chemicals, women writers imagine postmodern worlds where the issue of the nuclear family is no longer the central one. The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopic fantasy of a totalitarian North America, now called the Republic of Gilead, in which a group of rightwing religious fundamentalists are in control. Most women are infertile, due to excessive use of chemicals and radiation released from an earthquake on the San Andreas fault. Those women, like the heroine Offred, who remain fertile, are made property of the State for the purpose of reproducing the Commander'sline. Many of the babies born are "unbabies," and there are also "unwomen," i.e., all the infertile women. Since the military takeover, women have been denied access to their money and property, which were given over to their husbands. Reduced once again to mere bodies (more thoroughly than in prior decades), women are refused literacy and education, their value limited to reproduction. In an ironically negative sense, the novel shows sex, work and motherhood as combined in a socially acceptable manner: Offred's "work" is to have sex with the Commanderfor the purposes of reproduction. The situation is a caricature of that which dominated Western culture since the first Industrial Revolution, only now the "work" of marital sex and motherhood is made "official" instead of being repressed. As often in the oppressive 19th-century marriage, woman's only pleasure is in an illicit passionate affair (such as Offred's with Nick).

THE IMPOSSIBLE TRIANGLE

421

Atwood's novel is, however, complex: running throughout the novel is a nostalgic discourse that suggests how close women were prior to the take-over to achieving their aim of linking sex, work and motherhood comfortably. Offredconstantly remembers the period prior to the take-over, when she, Luke and their daughter lived happily together. Offred was then an intellectual, combining mothering and career successfully; and it seems that she and Luke loved one another deeply. The child was well-adjusted and smart. Aunt Lydia, the right-wing moral majority instructor, whose task it is to re-educate Offred and other women, constantly refers negatively to the same period, blaming the women who chose not to have children, or who participated in reproductive medical practices now outlawed (such as looking into the womb with machines to see the condition and gender of the fetus). In this novel, right-wing thinking abhors new reproductive technologies, while it seems that from Offred's point of view, women were on the verge of having what they wanted when the take-over happened. Perhaps Atwood wants to indicate that, if only we take care of the environment, refuse the right-wing positions of power, and use new technologies with due respect and care, a world like the one in her novel can be avoided. Octavia Butler's Dawn provides an example of fiction speaking from an altogether other position vis-a-vis new technologies-a position perhaps first articulated by Donna Haraway in 1985, and rearticulated in a more complete form recently (Haraway, 1989). The novel is concerned with the problem of xenogensis between an earth woman, Lilith, and a species, the Oankali, from another planet. A postapocalyptic tale, Dawn traces the events after a nuclear destruction of the earth. The Oankali land on earth and take several earth beings up to their planet to mate with, so as to produce a new species, neither human nor Oankali, which will be returned to reproduceon earth. The Oankali need such gene renewal to survive, but they also want to remove the genetic flaw that lead humans into nuclear war. The novel ends with Lilith pregnant, but the product remains unknown. In a sequel to Dawn, Butler again demonstrates how reproductive technologies will, when carried to a science-fiction extreme, not only save humankind from destruction but free women and men from the stifling notions of difference recent feminism has exposed. According to Donna Haraway, "Butler's fiction is predicated on the natural status of adoption and the unnatural violence of kin. Butler explores the interdigitations of human, machine, non-human animal or alien, and their mutants, especially in relation to the intimacies of bodily exchange and mental communications" (Haraway, 1989, p. 294). And

422

KAPLAN

Susan Squier (forthcoming) notes that Butler imagines a situation where genetic, birth and social parents may be the same people or they may be different people. In this sense, Butler opens up the creative possibilities of new reproductive 21st-century concepts of the human body as the only valorized one. Butler's postmodern fiction takes us so far into the future that problems of combining sex, work and motherhood subjectivities no longer apply. She envisions a world, like that of Baudrillard (1983), where the Faustian, Oedipal scenario has been replaced by "the ecstacy of communication" (p. 1). For now, American culture still has to deal with the Oedipal configurations that are ultimately responsible for making it difficult for contemporary women to combine sex, work and motherhood. But new reproductive technologies open up possibilities of worlds like those in Butler's fiction, and for that reason warrant our interest and analysis.
Conclusion

In the popular culture sphere, it is clear that discourses attempt to recoup the status quo that the 1960s shattered in relation to female sexuality. Recent images, uncannily like those in the 1950s, have insisted first that the only good female sexuality is that within marriage, and second, that woman's sexuality is dangerous if freely released. The sentimentalizing motherhood discourse has also returned, but the new focus on the fetus perhaps even more than this discourse, marginalizes and oppresses the mother. A postmodern form of an old patriarchal fear of the mother, this new discourse shifts the locus of concern away from the subjectivity of historical mothers, and their struggles to link sex, work and motherhood, to constructing a new subject, the fetus (that can only paradoxically be called a subject). In feminist circles, the overall change has been from discourses about women in the late 1960s and the 1970s that excluded or marginalized the mother, while focusing on female sexuality, to, in the 1980s, including motherhood discourses alongside continuing (if differently focused) attention to sexuality. The feminist discourses dealt with here address recent reproductive technological advances, and imagine how they might harm or benefit women. The early feminist focus on sexuality took precedence over motherhood for good reason: we abhorred the pregnant body because the child stood in for the phallus-the child seemed to be for the father we no longer aimed to please. But we were also still angry daughters who believed that the mother had allied herself with the father and denied us access to sexual (and other) pleasures. Nevertheless, we ironically re-appropriatedthe

THE IMPOSSIBLE TRIANGLE

423

mother through concepts of sisterhood, female bonding or explicit lesbianism. Understanding this, a first group of feminist scholars gave new and due attention to the mother,5largely using a psychoanalytic and sociological approach. In the wake of the recent reproductive technologies, a second group of feminist scholars has again turned to motherhood to analyze the new situation produced through scientific and social changes.6 Interestingly (and disturbingly in some ways), far less theorizing has been done by feminists about the work sphere, specifically, as it figures in women's psychic lives. Much important work has been done by feminist economists, sociologists, psychologists and historians on the empirical, materialist level. But humanities feminists have largely focused on issues of sexuality, motherhood, and the domestic sphere, as if agreeing that this terrain is still the central one for women. This is clearly something that requires more analysis. Whereas feminisms and popular culture had clearly polarized positions on female sexuality and motherhoodin the 1960s and 1970s, such a clear polarity no longer pertains in relation to either discourse. On the one hand, medical discoveries made possible new reproductive technologies which may benefit women, offering, as they do, alternate ways to deal with pregnancy, fertility and infertility. On the other hand, new discoveries were made about fetal development, possibilities for fetal surgery, and the use that fetal tissue might be in curing some diseases. The perception of the public about these discoveries has been heavily influenced by Right-To-Life propaganda, whose dramatic visual techniques impact on feminists and others alike, and enter into popular entertainment materials, as we have seen. Feminists (like Atwood and Butler) whose imaginations are inspired by recent developments to look to the future take diverse positions in regard to these developments; meanwhile, historical women of varied political persuasions begin to make use of reproductive technologies
5I am thinking of the well-known books by Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1981); Jane Lazarre, The MotherKnot (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985).
6Cf. new books by Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Barbara Katz Rothman, Recreating Motherhood:

Ideology and Technology in a Patriarchal Society (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1989); E. A. Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The USA Maternal

Melodrama,1830 to the Present (Londonand New York:Routledge, 1990, in press); and

J. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Pyschoanalysis, Feminism and the Problems of Domi-

nation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).

424

KAPLAN

because they serve a need. Collusion thus occurs between the medical establishment, geared to ever more sophisticated technologies and to controlling reproduction (and women) while benefitting themselves financially, and women needing the technologies in an era in which bearing the biological child has again become central. What seem like contradictory discourses (liberated female sexuality pitted against a sentimentalizing family discourse; the absence of real attention to women in the work place pitted against the need for female workers; sex, work and motherhood kept carefully segregated on the imaginary level, while women themselves try to cope) may actually be part of a larger economic need to reposition the nuclear family, whose centrality was challenged by various 1960s liberation movements. Different economic entities have realized that fulfilling 1960s/70s/80s demands for freedom of sexual choice, and for living arrangements alternate to the modern nuclear family, puts enormous financial strain on the state. This discourse, however, has to contend with a series of other (largely 1960s) discourses which have problematized the old nuclear family: the 1960s discourses, then, although hierarchically lower than the economic one, push themselves to the surface of popular culture as other forces insist on re-instating the family as the only viable institution. Other discourses that also link up with the broader economic one behind the renewed valuing of the family, and the controlling of female sexuality are those of female promiscuity (indeed, Fatal Attraction could be read as an attack on female adventurousness, labeled "promiscuity"), and of the virulent anti-abortion crusade. This latter discourse implicitly excoriates pre-marital female sexuality, which it hopes to recoup through sentimental emphasis on having the child, and on constructing the family. Meanwhile, reproductive technologies in turn emphasize the biological family, privileging this over adoption, and newly problematizing mother-child relations by making the fetus, not the mother, the central subject. I have here tried to suggest the need to examine both popular culture and sub-cultural feminist discourses carefully so as to tease out their governing ideologies. As the difference between these two kinds of cultural products disappears, so the need for ideological analysis increases. Only discourse analysis,7 which aims to locate hierarchical ideological positions, can help us understand whose interests certain discourses serve. Feminists need to know how far their own discourses collude with dominant ones from which they are no longer so easily dis-

THE IMPOSSIBLE TRIANGLE

425

tinguished. Above all, we need to understand more about the difficulties we all still have in linking sex, work and motherhood on the level of the imaginary.

References
J. (1983). The ecstasy of communication. In H. Foster (Ed.), The antiaesthetic: Essays in postmodern culture (pp. 126-134). Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press. J. FEUER, (1989). Reading Dynasty: Television and reception theory. South Atlantic Quarterly,88(2), 443-460. S. FIRESTONE, (1972). The dialectic of sex. New York: Bantam. M. FOUCAULT, (1972). The archaeology of knowledge (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). New York: Pantheon. M. FOUCAULT, (1978).The history of sexuality, VolumeI (R. Hurley, Trans.).New York: Pantheon. HARAWAY, D. (1985). A manifesto for cyborgs. Socialist Review, 80, 65-107. D. HARAWAY, (1989). The biopolitics of postmodern bodies: Determinations of self in immune system discourse. Differences, 1(1), 263-312. C. JOHNSTON, (1975). The work of Dorothy Arzner. London:The British Film Institute. KANE, E. (1988).Birth mother. New York: Random House. KAPLAN,E. A. (in press). Motherhood and representation in the USA maternal melodrama:1830 to the present. London and New York: Routledge. C. MACCABE, (1974).Realism and the cinema:Notes on some Brechtian theses. Screen, 15(2), 7-27. R. PETCHESKY, P. (1987). Fetal images: The power of visual culture in the politics of reproduction.Feminist Studies, 13(2), 263-292. SQUIRE,S. (forthcoming).Contemporaryliterary representations of reproductive technologies. R. STAM, (1988).Mikhail Bakhtin and left cultural critique. In E. A. Kaplan (Ed.),Postmodernism and its discontents: Theories and practices (pp. 116-145). London: Verso. SUTER,J. (1976). Feminine discourse in ChristopherStrong. CameraObscura,Nos. 3-4, 135-150.
BAUDRILLARD,

7"Discourseanalysis" usually refers to Foucault's interventions, particularly in his The Archeology of Knowledge (1972) and The History of Sexuality, Volume I (1978). Jacqueline Suter (1976) defines feminine discourse as "an ideological position from which a subject 'speaks' (acts/interacts)within the social order.Delineating parameters for what might constitute the feminine in cinematic representation may best be approached by examining how discourses present themselves in a given text." Or, cf. ClaireJohnston's definition: "I use 'discourse',"she says, "to refer to a particularlevel of 'speech' within a film attributable to a source (ormore precisely a 'subject'-not to be confused with a character in the film-and thus answers the question 'Who is speaking here?'). It derives from the manner in which the textual system of the film operates. Thus within a film there may be a variety of discourse, each having a different perspective on the action; though in classic Hollywood cinema, a male discourse is almost invariably dominant" (1975, p. 3).