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power, allowing the subject of the body (for Wilton, the "self") to use the body to
communicate from below, interacting with the "social" who created the body in the first
place. The self, then, becomes not simply the subject, nor the material body, but rather "a
conversation between the body and the social, in which the ’matter’ of the conversation is
continually created and recreated in the dynamic, temporally located, interlocution" (p.
57).
Wilton enters this dynamic interchange on the body between materiality,
subjectivity, and textuality, again asking us to re-map the power relations imposed over
and onto the body with those that the body responds to culture with. Particular cultural
mores and understandings shape gender and identity; most importantly difference is
mapped onto the body from many avenues, in particular medical discourse. This is the
same medical discourse that for Bordo (1992), characterizes many physical ailments as a
symptomatology of femininity. She agues that "both nineteenth-century male physicians
and twentieth-century feminist critics have seen, in the symptoms of neurasthenia and
hysteria, an exaggeration of female stereotypes" (p. 16). Wilton and Bordo both address
here how cultural discourses map onto the body a set of expectations and norms.
The tendency may be to argue then that femininity is in fact essential, that one
cannot truly be "woman" without knowing menstruation, pregnancy, or other bodily
experiences only available to the biological "woman." Yet, this paradigm is complicated
by those who are biologically female yet have not been (or cannot become) pregnant, do
not menstruate, or possess a body with other disorders that prevent the physical markers
of gender. Thus, gender identity is further resolved to be constituted by a set of culturally
determined practices and engagements with the very culture that inscribes gender onto
Convention