Sisters of the Earth: Identity and the Subject in Adult Learning

Martha Bell,
Department of Adult Education,
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Further correspondance: 10 Buick Cres., Palmerston North Aotearoa/New
Zealand.

Abstract
Research on theories of experience and on leadership for experiential learning
in the outdoors presumes an independent individual, as participant or leader,
who acquires and masters a body of knowledge outside of themselves.  Adult
women contest the discursive practice of decontextualizing their already taken
for granted autonomy by centring themselves as subjects of their own
experience on a week long canoe trip in Northern Ontario.  They find new
places in which to locate themselves through "discovering" their bodies and
the land as sources of their knowledge.  I explore my own location as leader,
constructed as super-bodied expert, possessing all knowledge.

Introduction
	For me, the core of the research process is almost a meditation, a
living with the complexity of a situation that is the focus of my interest,
much like the "living with the data" phase which substantiates qualitative
research methodology.  The work that I am presenting in this paper is the
prelude to such research, and the result of months of "sitting with" data
which are a prelude to a study.  I choose to report on this process as I think
it is an important constituent of what is learned through research.  What I
formulate as my initial research interest, and then what emerges as "the
question" to be answered, directs "the study" and "the knowledge" it produces
(Lather, 1988:576).  I am trying to work through a constant critical checking
so as to find more clearly what motivates my conceptualizations (Game,
1991:43).  I resist fixing my thinking at a single place or set of
conclusions, and welcome comments and dialogue from others about what I am
setting out here.
	This paper begins to document my current thinking about--my breathing
through in this meditation--the complex situation of how the learning on a
canoe trip can be thought about in a different way than experiential learning
in the outdoors is thought about now.  My aim is to release more of the
semiotics of it, the meaning-making processes embedded in such outdoor
experiences.  My starting point, or at least one of them, is taking the canoe
trip as a culturally inscribed form of social relations.  I depart here from
those who see wilderness expeditions as metaphors for the development of human
identity: a vehicle for learning by experience, a symbol of the eternal human
quest for self, a journey of personal growth and discovery (Beale, 1988;
James, 1981; Leenders & Henderson, 1991).  My focus is on the actual material
practices which constitute participants in outdoor experiences as subjects of
our own meaning-making, resisting an approach which sees us as agents
independent of a pre-existent knowledge and meaning.
	In this case, "us" is nine adult women on a six-day river expedition by
canoe in Northern Ontario, Canada.  The trip was planned and conducted
collaboratively, and deliberately, as a learning project, over a five month
period.  The agreed upon goal was to introduce the women involved to a
physically challenging and empowering experience, rather than to provide a
leisure-time holiday.  They wanted to be able to plan and conduct their own
wilderness trips in future.  Consistent with principles of adult education, we
began at their level of readiness and with their goals; they decided on the
information we needed to plan the trip and they each reported back to the
group when they had found resources (Edgington et al., 1987; Ewert, 1983). 
Seven of the eight women were over sixty years of age, and were not familiar
with wilderness canoeing, and the eighth, three years younger than her peers,
had participated in a recreational trip on an Arctic river a few years
previously.  At thirty-two years old, I brought extensive outdoor skills and

expedition experience, and was paid to "lead" the trip.  I knew many of the
women through their children.  It was not explicitly a feminist project (I
will return to this point later), although I talked with the women initially
about my feminist approach as an outdoor leader and feminist research
interests.  The data for my observations were gathered in my trip log, and in
field notes taken on and after the trip.  This was suggested by one of the
women.

Adult Learning in the Outdoors
	One context for my writing about this expedition, called "the French
River trip," is current writing about women's outdoor adventures.  A feminist
critique of American adventure programmes providing expedition experiences
identifies widely accepted myths about the outdoors in that country which are
shown to hinder women's participation as a gender group in adventure
experiences (Warren, 1985).  The myths pivot on a reification of rugged
individualism and notions of equality of accessibility, opportunity,
achievement and fulfillment thought to be particularly unfettered in the
wilderness.  However, Warren points out the dilemma that women face in dealing
with this individual who is not them (the universal/male individual for whom
these programmes are run) in what becomes very close to a model highlighting
deficit as difference.  She calls on wilderness programmes to address the
distortion of women's reality hidden in commitments to liberal democratic
notions of equality, and to be responsive to the need for social change in and
through outdoor learning.  However, according to mainstream theories of
outdoor leadership, the characteristics of liberal individualism are precisely
what are endorsed in outdoor leadership practices.
	An examination of theories of experience shows that learning from
experience is conceptualized as occurring through detached, rational processes
of reflection, representation and transference on the part of individuals,
outside the lived reality of the experience, but within "the learning cycle"
(Dewey, 1938; Joplin, 1981; Kolb, 1984).  The literature on theories of
leadership for experiential learning in the outdoors emphasises the behaviour
of the leader in these processes of experience and of reflection.  Such
theories presume a self-directed individual who acquires and masters a body of
knowledge outside of themselves (Cockrell, 1991; Jordan, 1989; Priest, 1988). 
American research emphasizes generic, natural abilities (task, function, and
conceptual skills) and traits (maturity, for instance) which can be developed
in order to ensure predictable behaviour (Cain, 1991; Ewert, 1988; Phipps,
1991; Priest & Baillie, 1987; Swiderski, 1987).  Kohn (1991), in the United
States, and Kiewa (1991), in Australia, both articulate a specifically
humanistic belief in the leader as facilitator, whose responsibility is in
"carefully managing" the "evolutionary" process of learner-centred learning
and growth for a group.  With emphasis on the rational and the inevitable,
humanism is directed at discovering "personal power."  Power, in this sense,
is neutral and irreducible.  Its use depends on "one's effectiveness" as a
leader, as an individual outside the process.  Although "empowerment," writes
Kiewa, "is a process that implies personal growth and self-responsibility"
(1991:9) on the part of the learner.  Similarly, Jordan writes about
leadership specifically for women endorsing a holistic approach called
transformational leadership, which "allows humanism to be an integral aspect
of the definition of leadership" instead of "a more feminist orientation"
(Jordan, 1992:62).  This work is based on psychological role theory and gender
socialization theory, approaches presuming the existence of an individual with
intrinsic "worth" and "potential," upon whom gender expectations are
inconveniently imposed.
	A closer look at the language of another example reveals how the key
terms are presented.  A recent Canadian proposal for androgynous behaviour as
a theoretical breakthrough in outdoor leadership begins:
Outdoor adventure experiences are intended to develop the whole
person in terms of physical, social, emotional and intellectual
growth.  In order for individuals to reach their fullest
potential, however, they must experience a wide range of human

behaviour, emotion, skill and choice. (Friedrich and Priest,
1992:10)
Evident in the use of the terms "the whole person," "growth," "fullest
potential," "experience" is the assumption that these are self-evident and
autonomous terms.  The sweeping generality of the statements constructs a tone
of external authority, while the passive voice relieves the two authors of
such responsibility.  There is no specificity as to whom, evidently deficient,
is to be developed into "the whole person" nor by whom.  The intention,
development and reaching are considered natural and inevitable progress
towards coherence.  The prescription in the statement and encoded in cause-
effect logic in the language leaves me, as the reader, with the impression
that this is natural, good and beyond question.  This is 'the way things are'
in outdoor adventure learning.
	Women-only wilderness trips have also been treated generally, written
about in attempts to identify common aspects of what women experience and need
in the outdoors (Henderson & Bialeschki, 1987; Miranda, 1985; Miranda &
Yerkes, 1982; Mitten, 1986, 1985).  One account of an all-women's tripping
programme in the United States focuses on the empowerment women feel when a
"feminine reality" is endorsed:
Women agree that friendships with other women are important and
that having time in an all-women's space is nurturing and
essential for many in maintaining a solid sense of self....This
vulnerability brings with it both the joy and pain of intimacy,
and is central to women's bonding process....Women commonly bond
with nature....their attitudes towards women and towards
themselves change...Women often go past self- and society-imposed
ideas of what is possible, both as individuals and as women.  This
results in higher self-esteem and more self-reliance enabling
women to return home more actively involved as responsible
community members, family members or relationship partners.
(Mitten, 1986:2-5)
	To many women, and perhaps even the women on the French River trip,
Mitten's account above might seem to be an accurate description of what we
seek and experience with other women in the outdoors.  I have felt this, too. 
However, I have also begun to see this perspective as substituting one set of
conditions for certain predicted and regulated outcomes for another, while
still framed in the language of the dominant assumptions of individuality and
inevitability on which the perspective rests.  It reifies wilderness
expeditions as the means to a discovery of the essence of woman's real
identity, while attempting to counter the universalist accounts of wilderness
trips that hide their relevance to explanations of masculinity, but in fact
reproduces without contesting patriarchal structures of gender and
phallocentric discourse (Grosz, 1988).
	My interest in examining a particular women's canoe trip, in which I
participated, is to understand how the experiences of identity formation that
we have as women in the outdoors are deeply discursive, constituted by and
through the "naturalized" and sexualized relations between self and other,
subject and object, male and female.  In my own experience, these are
relations of pain.

Identity and the Material Conditions of Subjectivity
	The inscription of experiences with privileged meanings through cultural
systems is the writing of them in a text, the reading and representation of
which are the practices of discourse.  My assumption here, following Game, is
that "culture or the social is written, that there is no extra-discursive real
outside cultural systems" (Game, 1991:4).  I don't view canoe trips or outdoor
pursuits, then, as abstract 'objects' of my analysis, but as culturally and
historically constituted responses of people to their social situations (Hall,
1983:24).
	The texts in outdoor learning experiences are taken to be the activity
and the concepts required for the doing of it.  Paddling a canoe and knowing
the appropriate rescue skills on a river would be texts functioning on a canoe

trip.  The canoe trip itself is a text, and the "reading" of it is
"facilitated" by the group leader as part of reflection on the experience. 
The discourse of psychology organizes this textual reading and others around a
principle of what is essentially human, functional and "natural."  As such,
the text is framed within liberal humanism as a fixed and coherent
representation of meaning, able to be known when expressed through language. 
Texts are active in linking local contexts to culture, or the process of the
collective interpretation of meaning (Cheyne, 1991:34).
	Texts are cultural forms that do not exist until produced.  They exist
at the intersection between the individual and the social, as the meaning that
is inscribed from social activity, the ordinary and discursive relations
between individuals.  They are then "active constituents of social relations
and social courses of action," given that they must be read in order to be
interpreted (Smith, 1984:70).  Texts are situated in social relations, just as
social relations constitute texts.  Thus a canoe trip has its existence in the
inscription of its meaning from within an actual situation.  Its existence
cannot be separated from the historical context and social formation of its
origins.
	In the dominant practices of humanistic psychology, texts are viewed as
abstracted units of objectification.  A text is detached from an historical
moment and "from the lived processes of its transitory construction made and
remade at each moment of its course" (Smith, 1984:72).  This transcends the
limitation of that time of origin so as to allow "repeated uses on a number of
occasions on which it is treated as the same" (Smith, 1984:72).  'Reality' can
be proven and known with certainty and without bias once it can be replicated
in sameness.  This end is the goal of theorizing in experiential learning in
the outdoors: to find the sameness, the common 'truths' about the ways in
which outdoor experiences happen, groups function, individuals grow,
independent of the systematic interrelationships that constitute each of these
in cultural forms.  If sameness can be replicated, control can be exerted to
privilege the status quo and prevent real change.
	People go on canoe trips and other adventure expeditions to experience
themselves and the world more fully.  In nature, the coherence that we project
onto the natural elements becomes an explanation for reality.  Life in the
wilderness is supposed to be simpler, essential, more real.  The humanistic
paradigm of adventure-based learning, with its facilitation of self-discovery
through personal feedback, periods of reflection and group discussions led by
a detached facilitator, sees the process of self-definition as 'finding
oneself.'  This is built on the 'discovery' in scientific discourse which
underlies modernism; certain behaviours will lead to discoveries of facts.  We
will discover who we really are away from what we have created.
	Norwood finds in her work on "women in landscapes of adventure" that
each woman "is deeply involved in self-definition throughout her adventure,"
and that "motivating each adventure is a need to invent oneself in new ways"
(Norwood, 1988:158).  Lewis and Simon suggest that the reading of a text
constitutes a way of inventing one's identity.  This "reading" is "a form of
social practice that can be examined for the work it does in organizing
subjectivity"  (Lewis and Simon, 1986:463).
	How subjectivity is organized as a social process is the focus of an
ongoing critique of experiential education.  Subjectivity is a submission to
structures of power which create subjects as whole persons (complete and
perfected) and whole peoples (homogenous in unity and equal as individuals)
(Game, 1991:44).  The same principle underlying liberal democracy governs "the
group" in outdoor learning experiences.  All members are meant to participate
as individuals, contributing equally in the development of group identity. 
Identity and subjectivity are systematically mediated by conceptual and
material practices that divide subjects from each other and from themselves,
despite that rhetoric of wholeness and community.  However, as sites of
subjugation, they are open to contestation.  They are also sites for
negotiation and new possibilities.
	Canoe trips and the learning on them, though talked about in the liberal
humanistic paradigm of empowerment and discovery, do offer women ways to

surface new knowledges of themselves as constrained and regulated, Other to
the totalising Same, to see new possibilities of autonomy and contradiction
outside the coherent wholeness of individualisation.  "The double moment of
totalisation and individualisation" governs the status of the subject, writes
Game (1991:44).  "The subject is an effect of systems working through the body
unconsciously" (Game, 1991:39).  Foucault asserts that instead of discovering
who we are, 'finding ourselves,' we need to refuse ourselves as made by these
systems (Game, 1991:44).  'Empowering' experiences for women are those that
allow them to know what the practices of power feel like in their bodies, the
site through which power operates, rather than disavow material experience as
the cost of rational remembering of 'what really happened.'  In this way women
are not taken as the object of the analysis, but the practices of power are
analysed from the experiences of women.  As a feminist "in(ter)vention of
knowledge," women refuse the patriarchal structures which place them as
objects, excluded from the distanced subject of phallocentric discourse, and
place themselves as subjects of knowledges, those through whom knowledge is
constituted (Grosz, 1988:97).

"My Canada Includes the French River!"
	The exclusionary practices of phallocentric discourse are constituted
through language and the semiotics of it.  The thought that the French River
trip might be "a woman's trip," or, more remote still, a consciousness-raising
project, was a dangerous one.  As the trip was dreamed up and inspired by this
group of eight women, I took it on their terms.  During one of our initial
meetings over potluck vegetarian dinner, they were curious about my university
studies.  "Don't you want to interview us?" they asked.  But they laughed at
the idea of feminist intentions: "I wouldn't even know what feminism was!" one
woman offered.  She inhaled on her cigar.  This was definitely a women's canoe
trip, the original suggestion to do a trip of married couples quickly
discarded, but it would not be explicitly named as such.  As the trip was to
take place over a long weekend in July known as Canada Day, this year
celebrating Canada's one hundred and twenty-five years of (imperialist)
confederacy, the group took up the national slogan for unity: "My Canada
includes Queb‚c!" and adapted it.  Our canoe trip was put on the long list of
anniversary projects and the women were proud of their nationalist spirit.
	This is just one example of how exclusion can produce a strong desire to
be included (McMahon, 1991:26).  This was not a struggle around equal
inclusion in the social for these women, as women.  In refusing gender as the
explicit token of membership to the group, these women were highlighting its
power, but in a way that revealed more of their subject formation, their
subject positioning, than at first I thought.  An important space opened for
me in learning about the choices these women had made for themselves.  I came
to see the structural regulation of other equally powerful systems in their
lives.
	Each woman was a strong, dynamic, capable, and independent mother and
wife in/from heterosexual relationships.  These were women whom, it appeared,
could have whatever they desired.  They had the self-motivation to meet other
women whom they did not know (though of the same race, class, ethnicity and
sexual orientation), plan and organize their own holiday, take time off paid
and 'volunteer' work for it, and pay for it with their own income.  They made
choices, decisions, plans and negotiations in a rational and autonomous way
and never questioned their ability to do so.  They did not know what they
would encounter; they did know that they would learn new things; they were
confident that they were physically capable; and they wanted to experience a
unique challenge--indeed uniqueness was a hallmark in their lives.  They were
leaders in their own lives (conducting cultural tours around the world for the
art gallery, chairing Boards of Trustees, and piloting non-profit community
projects), and took the skills of leadership, definition and control for
granted as easily as they planned ski trips to Norway.  Such autonomy was
decontextualized, not related to their own feelings and experiences; the
personal was political in that in public it was repressed.  These women were
happy with each other and I enjoyed being able to be part of their process.

They were also structured by social relations of class and race in a way that
silenced gender.  They had money, which gave them confidence, autonomy and
freedom, the products of entitlement.  Again, there was no public
acknowledgement of this privilege.  At least at first.
	I did notice a tension.  And as we began to meet and see into each
other's lives more and more, we became aware of the different ways that women
had organized their lives in response to the incongruities of their class and
gender training.  One member of the trip, one of the first women architects to
graduate and practise from the local university, had bought a house of her own
to live separately from her husband, but joined him in one of their country
homes on the weekends.  Two women lived alone, had been divorced solo moms for
over ten years and both worked full-time.  Both were considering going back to
their maiden names, and so we took delight in honouring their new/old/own
names.  One didn't live with her lover so that she could stay away from his
overuse of alcohol.  Different women had problems with ill or neurotic
children and some with ill or neurotic parents, most with overbearing, self-
preoccupied or abusive husbands.  One woman was going through a nasty divorce
battle.  One woman was in recovery from treatment for a terminal illness. 
These aspects of their lives were never discussed openly.  Canoes are tandem
boats, though, and so as different women paired for the day in their canoes
they learned more about the ways each other was living and coping.  The
enormous pain that each carried was acknowledged toward the end of the trip. 
(I don't see this as the same "joy and pain of intimacy" of which Mitten
writes above.)  The tension and the awareness were as much a part of the
social training as the pain.
	The trip name reflected an engagement with Canadian party politics and
the flag-waving, bumper-sticker support campaign for the incumbent
conservative government.  It echoed the "rah rah" of the Blue Jays baseball
fans at the Skydome, for whom some of the women were passionate supporters. 
To me it sounded possessive and territorial when applied to a river that had
been the major route for opening up the "penetration" of the Canadian west by
the fur trade; a river named for the "courageous" French men, les voyageurs,
who had crashed and rolled down, and up, its rapids and steep granitey gorges;
a river along which there is today "Indian Reserve" land, tiny parcels left
for the Dokis and the Pickerel bands after the rest of the land on the river's
banks, left to them by the trading companies, was ceded to the Crown in a
treaty in 1850.  The trip name included our adventure with the other national
projects.  Our six days of fun had significance beyond the personal, in a way
that couldn't be condemned as trivial or just something for "the gals."  
	Now I see that the name was also a way of taking space and status as
democratic citizens.  Part of the women's class training would have been like
my mother's: to take an active and "selfless" role in civic activities.  As
voters, even those women not heads of households could act independently and
in solidarity with their husbands if they chose.  Appropriation of ownership
is part of the democratic process of governance and homogeneity.  The name for
our trip was a refusal of what women are, as gendered objects subject to the
authority of the State and men, and an inscription of race and class
privilege.  It was perhaps more effective in inventing us as legitimate
travellers of that river than one which might have reclaimed women's feminine
connections to the earth, although later our feelings about being women
together on the river changed, and the women themselves gave me the title for
this paper See Anderson, L. (Ed.).  (1991).  Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and
Poetry about Nature.  New York: Vintage Books..  The inevitable joke at first was that we were "voyagettes," a
devalorised female parody of those early explorers.
	I speak of legitimacy as historically the French and British canoe trips
were part of a pattern of appropriation from the indigenous peoples, the Cree
and the Algonquin, and as a cultural form, a wilderness trip is still
inscribed with relations of domination.  The men who braved the wilds were
evading responsibility for what they were really constructing in the New

World, practices of violation and colonisation of the different, the Other. 
The spiritual quest for self-discovery (James, 1981) is an evasion of the
possibility that the self is tied, subjugated to the social, the hero's
journey into the wilderness a material practice that privileges the
individual, the individual who is male (Beale, 1988; James, 1988).  The French
River is socially and historically constituted as a place for men, men who
were not with women specifically because they were on the river.  "In
exploration...women were at best passengers" or food gatherers close to
settlements (James, 1988:15).  What happens when women enter the place in
which they are constituted as not existing?  They can become male, or they can
become the opposition to male, "pilgrim and suppliant, not...hunter and
conqueror" as one writer suggests (James, 1988:20).  This follows the
linguistic pattern of subject/object, canoeist/passenger, hunter/pilgrim,
active/passive.  I argue that it is precisely this binary opposition which
structures our language as a practice of phallocentric discourse which is
contested when women paddle canoes down a river with bodies living their
tension and desire.  Where is the reflection of the "brave" woman in society? 
Yet these women live their realities bravely every day.  What about the active
woman who is tired, too tired to care or to bond or to be suppliant?  But
first it is important to go back to language.
	Language can be seen as one of the discursive practices which privileges
the notion of individual autonomy and constitutes identity as objective, self-
evident and universal.  Concepts and terms are given validity by being what
they are not, or by being defined in terms of their direct opposites (Game,
1991:99).  The linear dichotomy establishes rigid systems which privilege
presence by virtue of absence.  One cannot stand without the other, and yet
the Other is repressed.  The One which stands represents the universal, the
generic in society, is the dominant term, the present, absenting any
alternative.  It evades the conditions of its own production (Grosz, 1991:97). 
The French voyageur on the river was present by virtue of his subject
positioning, his maleness, and which he would lose were women to be present. 
It became apparent that some of the women on the French River trip lived in
conditions of propping up the men to whom they were Other in their lives even
if they were not still living in the same house. 

Women's Bodies Matter
	When women act with their heads from a training in rationality, they
necessarily move out of their bodies, as these are absented in the binary
opposition (Brodkey & Fine, 1991).  Class and race training had constructed
the women on the French River trip, including myself, as independent,
rational, selfless subjects, making our own choices about our desires and
entitlements.  Gender training had also taught us to be selfless, albeit
connected, embodied, caring, passively allowing others who know to make
decisions for us.  On the river, we were in the position of thinking and
moving, rational and embodied, learning and doing, living the split in our
subjectivities.  For the model of discursive subject production that poses as
universal is
a form of discourse which totally erases the body, the emotional,
the symbolic, the multiplicities, the confusions--and in all ways
orders the chaos of our lived experiences so that we can no longer
feel their power, their immobilizing conflicts as we live them.
(Rockhill, 1987:13)
	On the French River, women paddled our canoes, carried our canoes and
packs, cooked and prepared our meals, set up and struck camp, navigated the
route.  Our 'discovery' was of our material selves, our bodies, in uncovering
them, seeing them work, feeling them work, feeling them wet, feeling them in
the wind, feeling the rock beneath us.  The body is a particular text through
which inscriptions of power are written and read, in plural and contradictory
ways.  For these women, uncovering our physical bodies surfaced a delight in
them, a noticing of what was beautiful,  what was feminine, what was strong. 
Swimming "skinny" mid-day, lying out on the salmon-coloured granite like a
lizard in the sun, carrying heavy loads, and paddling the rapids on their

knees, were ways in which women uncovered and sustained their embodied selves. 
I know of the impact on different women only by the comments they made on the
last morning: that as they had moved through the land and found their way,
they had also moved through their bodies making relationships with that land
and that body, not the sexualized body that was the territory of another.  In
our final circle, contrary to notions of women's intimacy as nurturing and
harmonious, we brought up the ruptures, the pain, the dislodging we felt.  We
asked not for emotional support, but for each other to notice the struggle,
acknowledge the complications, even betrayal of self, that we 'chose' to live
with at different intersecting locations of power.  I noticed that different
women I had seen on the trip who were expected to be strong in their lives had
taken time on the trip to balance, or to be cared for.  One woman responded
quietly, and with difficulty: she had a capable body and appeared strong but
she "wasn't allowed to be strong" in her partnership.  She was one of the most
competent art gallery tour guides.  Another woman told her: "I noticed you
laughing on this trip."
	But I am not seeking homogeneity and I am sure that I have left many
important parts out.  I leave my narrative re-telling here, struggling to make
sense of the stories, but knowing that the telling is the beginning.  In my
own experience, even on that trip, on others, my body is the most lonely place
for me, the site of constant betrayal of myself, and of conflicting desires
for constructions of meaning.  I talked to the women on the French River trip
about this, and the feelings of fullness and strength and love that I feel in
the wind and the rain and the river.  Over the course of the trip, they had
called on me for my knowledge, "the right way to do it," decisions about the
best option, and I had refused this centring as super-bodied expert,
possessing all knowledge.  I had pointed out that there were many alternatives
that would work or I had negotiated for input into decisions.  Some reactions
had ranged from confusion to resentment.  But in the end they realized that
sometimes there are no certain explanations, only new inventions.  Any knowing
is from a situated or embodied place, the particular location, which in turn
has its costs.
	Being in the outdoors gives women a chance to try to end the mind-body
split not in achieving coherence, but in noticing the tension and desire that
are part of the lived reality of being women.  The women on the French River
trip did know that they would be able to paddle the river, because we have
been trained to be strong and confident, but they also explored the learning
that we are constituted by discursive practices that separate us from our
bodies as agents and simultaneously embody us as receptacles.  What is real,
the text, is the situation in which we live the tensions as both object and
subject, and the French River was only context (Game, 1991:44).

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