Notes to Chapter 22 23 24 25 26 27 remains, however, is whether this synthesis requires and maintains the ontological distinction between body and mind of which it is composed and, by association, the hierarchy of mind over body and of masculine over feminine See Elizabeth V Spelman, “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views,” Feminist Studies, Vol 8, No 1, Spring 1982 Gayatri Spivak most pointedly elaborates this particular kind of binary explanation as a colonizing act of marginalization In a critique of the “self-presence of the cognizing supra-historical self,” which is characteristic of the epistemic imperialism of the philosophical cogito, she locates politics in the production of knowledge that creates and censors the margins that constitute, through exclusion, the contingent intelligibility of that subject’s given knowledge-regime: “I call ‘politics as such’ the prohibition of marginality that is implicit in the production of any explanation From that point of view, the choice of particular binary oppositions is no mere intellectual strategy It is, in each case, the condition of the possibility for centralization (with appropriate apologies) and, correspondingly, marginalization” (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Explanation and Culture: Marginalia,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics [New York: Routledge, 1987], p 113) See the argument against “ranking oppressions” in Cherríe Moraga, “La Güera,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings of Radical Women of Color, eds Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga (New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1982) For a fuller elaboration of the unrepresentability of women in phallogocentric discourse, see Luce Irigaray, “Any Theory of the ‘Subject’ Has Always Been Appropriated by the Masculine,” in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans Gillian C Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) Irigaray appears to revise this argument in her discussion of “the feminine gender” in Sexes et parentés (see chapter 2, n 10) Monique Wittig, “One is Not Born a Woman,” Feminist Issues, Vol 1, No 2, Winter 1981, p 53 Also in The Straight Mind and Other Essays, pp 9–20, see chapter 3, n 49 The notion of the “Symbolic” is discussed at some length in Section Two of this text It is to be understood as an ideal and universal set of 197