FIRE

All these cinders, he feels them burning his flesh. —Jacques Derrida, Cinders

In 1978, Ana Mendieta burned the title page of Mircea Eliade's Rites and Symbols of Initiation with a branding-iron formed in the shape of her own hand (pl. 7). The burn goes deep; the first five or six pages are reduced to feathery black ashes where the palm of the iron hand pressed down hard. The imprint of the fingers appears more slender, and its touch is less harsh, but it has scorched a few of the title's black letters. The cover of the book has been torn from the binding to reveal the vulnerable white leaves that are now warped and curled at the corners. The smoke from the fire has defiled the leaves; they appear dirty, battered, and fragile. It is hard to get through the density of meanings encoded in this gesture of branding. A brand is meant to claim ownership, to stigmatize, or to signify the Contents of a vessel. It disintegrates like words, burns and yet loses its hold like names. It is a self-effacing mark, Derrida's cinder.

I begin here with fire, with ashes, with words on the printed page, because in them I see Ana Mendieta's methodology, her performative practice of marking through disappearance. That dissolutive practice is absolutely central to the interpretation of her oeuvre. It is important both because it was employed in varying degrees by an entire generation of artists and because it relates directly to the themes with which Mendieta engaged. One of the four essentials, fire is as evanescent as speech, as elusive as certainty, as animate and unstable as identity. I see Mendieta's branding of Eliade's book as paradigmatic of her engagement with the contradictions of gender, ethnicity, and nationality; I want to finger the book's pages to see how she plays with fire.

Identity's politics is naming, a necessary practice inflamed by an underlying belief in innate qualities, by the presumption of authenticity or of essences that flicker and burn. The period of Ana Mendieta's active career coincides directly with the era of both divisive feminist arguments around the issue of essentialism and radical subaltern critiques of identity. These incendiary debates, whose flames were fanned throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s by the winds of Marxism, women's liberation, poststructuralism, deconstruction, postcoloniahsm, and psycho-analysis, have proved difficult to contain.

Even if we momentarily (and artificially) isolate the debate on essentialism and gender from other battles over the nature of identity, the issues become only slightly more manageable. One might State simplistically that, in the context of early second wave feminism, women artists like Judy Chicago, Harmony Hammond, Mary Beth Edelson, Hannah Wilke, and Buffie Johnson formed a collective political response to sexism through a celebration of and insistence on the innate qualities of femininity and the notion of a recognizable feminine aesthetic. Their efforts have been reinforced by such theorists as Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Silvia Bovenschen, and Tania Modleski. Poststructuralism and identity politics, on the other hand, have drawn attention to the differences among women and to the classist, racist, and homophobic tendencies that have remained hidden (although some would say hidden in plain view) within feminism. As a result, many women artists turned against the universalism of feminism's essentialist philosophy. One thinks of Laurie Andersons cyborg performances, Catherine Opie's photographs of lesbians costumed as men, or Mary Kelly's investigations into the psychoanalysis of gender construction. Their critiques of the essential category woman have been buttressed by the work of Toril Moi, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and Elizabeth Spelman.

The debate as I have sketched it here is, however, only a schematic for a much more intricate relation of discourses that only proliferate more questions. If gender is constructed, then how, and by whom? Is gender/sex determined by culture or chosen freely by the individual? Is gender the constructed half of the sex/gender binary; in which case, is sex really free of social inscription? Does the problem lie with the body and our conception of it or rather with the phallogocentric language and epistemology through which we are forced to see it? What is the real, concrete effect of either essentialism or antiessentialism as political practice? How do these issues play out in relation to identity categories beyond and in combination with gender? What historical and political influences have prompted the varying responses to the question of essentialism, and why is it being asked now?

It is well beyond the scope of this project to attempt a detailed and accurate summary of all the theoretical and artistic responses to these questions. My point is rather that feminists on all sides of the debate are burned by the contradictions mandated by the epistemology of identity, a fact made evident by at least two important books on the subject: Diana Fuss's Essentially Speaking (1989) and Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed's more recent anthology The Essential Difference (1994). These books testify to the insolubility of the essentialist/constructionist debate. They take up Simone de Beauvoir's question, "What is a woman?" while at the same time asking, along with Judith Butler, "What can be meant by 'identity'?" Like Butler, they wonder "what grounds the presumption that identities are self-identical, persisting through time as the same, unified and internally coherent?" But they are also suspicious of the political disengagement that can result from the strict application of Butler's deconstructive method. So they ask, to paraphrase Schor, to what extent does antiessentialism "secure feminism's place in male theory and recognition by it, notably the dominant male theory of the era, poststructuralism, which is most often to say, deconstruction?" To what extent is antiessentialism "the wages of academic legitimation?" The possibilities for a resolution, a laying to rest of the problem, are limited only to a concession that essence and antiessence are inextricable. Even Judith Butler concedes that it is impossible to do away with identity categories and the dangers of essence that they imply.

If we make room in our examination of identity for race, ethnicity, and nationality, the questions multiply exponentially. The radical examination of identity politics in the United States grew out of the civil rights movement, protests against the Vietnam War, and the advent of postcolonialism, each of which prompted a critique of dominant epistemologies of culture and identity. It was aided in the art world by the prolific (although often short-lived) formation of various ethnic, racial, and political groups throughout the 1960s and 1970s, such as the Art Workers Coalition, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, and El Movimiento Artistico Chicano. The Task Force on Discrimination against Women and Minority Artists, a group in which...