identity, particularly in colonized and post-colonial culture, which
does not take account of the diversity of Irish womenís writing and of
womenís writing cross-culturally.í^10 Exploring how far this assess-
ment of Bolandís is both fitting and mis-fitting, the relationship
between gender, nation and time can be problematized further.
Herstory
Referring to Bolandís poems, it is necessary to ask whether, as she
criticizes the myths of History, she reinstates the power of History as
myth rather than subverting it. Judith Butler has persuasively
criticized Kristevaís ëWomenís Timeí (1979) and noticed the dif-
ficulties inherent in establishing a herstory. In her essay ëThe Body
Politics of Julia Kristevaí (1991), Butler outlines how Kristevaís
theorization of womenís time and a semiotic dimension of language or
womenís space
appears to depend upon the stability and reproduction of precisely the paternal
law that she sought to displace. Although she effectively exposes the limits of
Lacanís efforts to universalize the paternal law in language, she nevertheless
concedes that the semiotic is invariably subordinate to the symbolic, that it
assumes its specificity within the terms of a hierarchy which is immune to
challenge. If the semiotic promotes the possibility of subversion, displacement,
or disruption of the paternal law, what meanings can those have if the symbolic
always reasserts hegemony?^11Butler also notes how the idea of the female body that Kristeva seeks
to express is itself a construct produced by the law that it is supposed
to undermine. In view of this, it is necessary to ask how far Bolandís
inscription of the female body in her poems offers any real agency.
For Kristeva, womenís time is imagined as a ëspace-time of
infinite expansioní, where monumental and linear versions of History
10 Meaney, p.137.
11 Judith Butler, ëThe Body Politics of Julia Kristevaí, Revaluing French
Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, ed., Nancy Fraser & S. Barkley,
(Indiana: University Press, 1991), p.163.