European Journal of Women's Studies http://ejw.sagepub.com/ Identity in Transit : Nomads, Cyborgs and Women
Irene Gedalof European Journal of Women's Studies 2000 7: 337 DOI: 10.1177/135050680000700307 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ejw.sagepub.com/content/7/3/337

Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of:
WISE (The European Women's Studies Association)

Additional services and information for European Journal of Women's Studies can be found at: Email Alerts: http://ejw.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://ejw.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://ejw.sagepub.com/content/7/3/337.refs.html

Downloaded from ejw.sagepub.com by fati azz on September 2, 2010

Identity in Transit
Nomads, Cyborgs and Women
Irene Gedalof
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH LONDON

ABSTRACT

This article explores the problems and possibilities of different feminist theoretical models of identity for challenging women’s symbolic and strategic positioning in the discourses and conflicts that produce national, ethnic and racialized community identities. The discussion focuses on two of the most popular alternative models to emerge within white western feminism, the nomad and the cyborg, while also considering some other suggested paradigm shifts emerging from diasporic and postcolonial feminisms. It asks how successfully these feminist alternative models of the self and community identities deal with two key issues relating to women’s positioning in prevailing identity discourses – on the one hand, women’s relationship to questions of ‘place’, location and dislocation, and on the other, questions of female embodiment and the ways in which the specifically female body becomes both a symbolic and material target of conflict and contestation in processes of constituting community identities. cyborg x KEY WORDS