Part of what I've done in this chapter is to argue that Judy Grahn's writing uses language in new ways to alter our possibilities for conceiving of the world. Her tools are part of a system of language that at present embodies detrimental social, cultural, and political relations; while recognizing language's complicity in oppression, she suggests that it can be used differently to provoke a rethinking and a reunderstanding of these social relations. For Grahn, as for other contemporary feminist and lesbian feminist poets, changing the language changes reality. In this appendix, I'd like to address some of the lesbian-feminist and poststructuralist theoretical work that underlies Grahn's political project.

Grahn in/as Context

Judy Grahn's work with language to transform our understanding accords with a broader context of feminist and lesbian feminist movements that seek to challenge social and cultural reality, to redefine power relations to accommodate and value women. Some lesbian feminist writers try to reach beyond the "fundamental oppressiveness" inherent in our patriarchally structured world: Mary Carruthers argues that writers such as Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, and Olga Broumas create poetry that

does not arise directly from nor concern itself primarily with a response to men. Its energy springs rather from the perception that women together and in themselves have a power which is transformative, but that in order to recover their power women need to move psychically and through metaphor to a place beyond the well-traveled routes of patriarchy and all its institutions, especially its linguistic and rhetorical ones (Carruthers 294).

By examining themselves in relation to men, many women trap themselves within a binaristic linguistic structure, ultimately perpetuating the potential for oppression. When man/woman or heterosexual/homosexual or rich/poor remain the only ways to describe people, the dominant culture retains powerful means for regulating reality and insuring power relations that are fundamentally the same. Within this system, marginalized people can only hope for what Elizabeth Meese calls a "reversal where relations of power are exchanged;" this exchange is only valuable for "the lesbian whose personal stake/investment rests in the domination of men, and not particularly in the liberation of 'women' and 'men"' (Meese 6). Meese implicitly aligns herself with Grahn and other lesbian feminist writers in her attempt to write beyond the dominant mode of discourse, to change the universal and not merely the personal. She locates her work in relation to that of, among others, Monique Wittig and Jacques Derrida; Derrida describes transformational language as being beyond grammar, as "a choreographic text with polysexual signatures," pluralized labels and meanings that expand linguistic categories beyond difference (understood both sexually and as "otherness" in general) to encompass a continuum of meaning (Meese 11/Derrida "Choreographies" 76). Derrida would argue, I think, that much of the language in literature and poetry throughout history has been "transformative"—he describes literature elsewhere as "an institution that tends to overflow the institution" ("This Strange" 36), implying that literature is by definition pluralizing. But here he seems to be concerned with the relationship between language and sexuality; as I've argued above, Grahn's vision is overtly polysexual (see the discussion of Ernesta's future at the end of the novel), and she implies that it is her language that makes this vision possible. Grahn is engaged, like Meese and Derrida, in pluralizing language, in disrupting its stability in order to open it up to unlimited possibilities for understanding. Derrida, again quoted by Meese, envisions the possibilities of nondiscriminating language in terms of sexuality:

. . . what if we were to approach here . . . the area of a relationship to the other where the code of sexual marks would no longer be discriminating? The relationship would not be a-sexual, far from it, but would be sexual otherwise: beyond the binary difference that governs the decorum of all codes, beyond the opposition feminine/masculine, beyond bi-sexuality as well, beyond homosexuality and heterosexuality which come to the same thing. (Derrida "Choreographies" 76/Meese 11)

Derrida's metaphor for this area of polysexual signatures is the "dance"; this is his "dream." Both of these metaphors become significant in Mundane's World; my discussion of Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues in the next chapter is also quite pertinent.

Grahn's linguistic work, like that of Meese, attempts to go beyond establishing an essentialized identity for lesbians within the current cultural framework. It seems to question that whole framework; any lesbian identity would then be constructed, rather than absolute.

Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope also link lesbian writing and poststructuralist theory , pointing out that both "problematize gender relations" and "question the 'naturalness' of gender relations" (Wolfe 1). They argue, though, that traditional notions of the self deconstructed by postmodernism never applied to lesbians; before lesbian theorists could participate in deconstructing notions of identity they had to posit an idea of the lesbian subject. To do this, "we have had to deconstruct the notion that women can be seen only in relation to men, and defined only in terms of male discourse, in order to create a position from which to speak and be heard" (Wolfe 3). Implicit in lesbian writing is a disruption of the dominant language and understanding. Beyond this, though, Wolfe and Penelope assert that it is essential to retain some sense of identity: the lesbian feminist writer's project becomes that of deconstructing dominant discourse while constructing an identity from which to base political action. They quote Diane Fuss as pointing to the possibility for a "more mature identity politics" (Wolfe 4)—the unstable and incoherent nature of identity does not mean that identity disappears. Judy Grahn accords with Wolfe and Penelope's vision by disrupting language, by asserting women's identity apart from men, and by positing the possibility of an infinity of constructed and coexisting identities in a single community's discourse. Her notion of identity and subjectivity , as I argue above, is decentered yet politically enabling. It is an engagement with a "more mature identity politics" in that it is a vision of how we can conceive of subjectivity and identity after (or rather in the midst of) the deconstructive movement.

But why do I place Grahn's work in these theoretical contexts? Why do I subject her to philosophical/critical/theoretical frameworks? Is it merely to argue that she is doing what Meese and Derrida and Wolfe and Penelope have already done? No—I would not argue that Grahn has borrowed her ideas from these theorists; only insofar as they have influenced or are representative of greater cultural/intellectual trends toward postmodernism. What I would rather argue is that Grahn tries to put into practice in her fiction a solution to the problem of subjectivity and understanding in this postmodern world. Grahn is perhaps responding to the conditions outlined by Meese and Derrida and Wolfe and Penelope; she offers some of the same solutions. But in the very way in which those solutions are proposed she is enacting and at the same time describing a transformation.