Identities in Transition

In both her life and fiction, Unity Dow's consuming engagement resides in exploring issues of female entrapment and related notions of identity (or subjectivity) predicated on the idea of the embodied, sexualised and racialised “other”, an identity that conforms to the phallogocentric format of the patriarchal imaginary. In her personal struggles (as exemplified by the 1990 High Court Case with her Government over citizen laws) as well as in her fiction, in this case The Heavens May Fall, Dow adopts and constructs subject-positions (for herself, her fellow women and children) that are not only creative but also, and more to the point, that present the idea of identity as a matter of becoming, and characterised by nomadic, syncretised and hybridised cultural forms. Drawing on the 1990 court case and the above novel, this article explores the extent to which Dow's life and her fiction embody the kind of subjectivity that allows for multiple modes of belonging and celebrates borderlands of cultures. The article argues that Dow not only challenges the phallogocentrism (and related misplaced forms of modernity) but also relocates the idea of culture in multiple locations, routes and movements

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Modernity · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Subjectivity · The Imaginary · Computer Science · Gender Politics and Representation · Gender Studies · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology

• How the Global Informs the Local

  Justice Unity Dow•Health Care For Women International•2001

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• Imagined communities

  Benedict Anderson•Imagined communities•1991

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• Historical Colonialism in Contemporary Perspective

  Arif Dirlik•Public Culture•2002

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• Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

  Anthony Reid, Benedict Anderson•Pacific Affairs•1985

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