A feminist take on the rhizome renames it rootstock, for questions of place and space are crucial if we insist on embodied and ethical commitments to justice. The rhizome works flatly through lines rather than static point, but rootstock might dare ask Deleuze's "useless questions," for that reaching is part of an identity. Longing. This longing, too, is a tangled line. Indeed, we might say that a feminist rhizomatic or rootstock most resembles Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic subject, a vision of subjectivity that embraces simultaneity and multiple, sometimes contradictory layers of identity. In Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, she writes:

 

The nomadic subject I am proposing is a figuration that emphasizes the need for action both at the level of identity, of subjectivity, and of differences among women. These different requirements correspond to different moments, that is to say, different locations in space, that is to say, different practices. This multiplicity is contained in a multilayered temporal sequence, whereby discontinuities and even contradictions can find a place.

In order to sustain this process, a feminist must start from the recognition of herself as not-one; as a subject that is split time and time again, over multiple axes of differentiation. Paying attention to these multiple axes calls for suitably diversified forms of practice. . . .

[T]ransformation can only be achieved through de-essentialized embodiment or strategically re-essentialized embodiment: by working through the multilayered structures of one's embodied self. (171)

 

 

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