ABSTRACT
Theorizing the 'first person strategic' As will be evident from the preceding chapters, I regard what I have designated 'the strategic use of the personal pronoun' to be one of the key rhetorical innovations in contemporary feminist writing. As was noted in the Preface to this section (see note 3), the term itself derives from the work of Elspeth Probyn who, following Raymond Williams, launched her own campaign for the use of a first-person pronoun that was not necessarily autobiographical in inflection in Sexing the Self (1993). In her struggle to re-formulate, and re-validate, the role of both 'experience' and the 'speaking I' in cultural theorizing she argues powerfully for a reconsideration of both as enunciative strategies as opposed to self-referential modes of expression/confession. The real reason why we still needlhave been unable to discard these categories is quite simply that they provide us with 'a place from which to speak' that is lacking in all other rhetorical formations. Accepting Lawrence Grossberg's conclusions on the solipsistic limitations of a good deal of reflexive theorizing (Probyn 1993: 27) she nevertheless argues that:
Theorized within a theory of articulation, the experiential may be pried from its commonsensical location in 'be1ongingness'. It then becomes possible to distance the autobiographical from a representational logic. Instead of representing a 'truth', a 'unity' or a 'belongingness', a critical use of the self may come to emphasize the 'historical conditions' involved in its speaking.
