line between sense and sensibility, an enlightenment rationale and an
emotional romanticism, and men and women, noting that it is there for
the crossing. Kristevaís analysis of feminine language makes a clear
connection between the irrational, emotional, sensuous and non-
sensical. Her strategy of resistance risks conforming to the stereotypes
of women being somehow more irrational, emotional and corporal
than men and it also places women outside of the social.
In Gender Trouble (1990) Judith Butler outlines the limits of
psychoanalytic perspectives and identifies problems with Kristevaís
notion of a semiotic dimension of language which is occasioned by
the primary maternal body that serves as a perpetual source of
subversion within the Symbolic realm of representational discourse.^30
She asks how far can the maternal body bear meanings prior to culture
when motherhood is often idealized by culture? Seen in this way,
Kristevaís model safeguards paternal and heterosexual structures of
culture. Butler questions Kristevaís use of Lacanís model of the
primary relationship with the maternal body asking whether this is a
knowable experience and a viable construct. Butler asks: ëIf the
semiotic promotes the possibility of the subversion, displacement, or
disruption of the paternal law, what meanings can these terms have if
the Symbolic always reasserts its hegemony?í^31 The semiotic experi-
ence cannot be maintained within linguistic law and its sustained
presence within culture leads to psychosis and the breakdown of
cultural life. Therefore, Butler asks how far Kristevaís construction of
the semiotic can be useful as an emancipatory ideal and this is an issue
that can be considered in relation to the work of the women poets.
Kristeva describes avant-garde feminists who look for a fluid
subjectivity away from delimited versions of identity.^32 However, the
representation of fluid identities remains a construction of sorts by
which the feminine is situated and defined. Thinking female identity
in terms of the semiotic, Kristeva paradoxically locates it within a
foundation of the anti-foundational or a structure of deconstruction.
Butler challenges the foundationalist philosophy into which she
views Kristevaís analysis slipping but she does not entirely dismiss
30 Butler, Gender Trouble, p.80.
31 Ibid., p.80.
32 Kristeva, ëWomenís Timeí, p.208.