The exchanged woman’s discontinuity is dissimulated to produce communal continuity

Evidence

My point is, of course, that through all of these heterogeneous examples of territoriality and the communal mode of power, the figure of the woman, moving from clan to clan and family to family as daughter/sister and wife/ mother, syntaxes patriarchal continuity even as she is herself drained of proper identity. In this particular area, the continuity of community or history, for subaltern and historian alike, is produced on (I intend the copulative metaphor—philosophically and sexually) the dissimulation of her discontinuity, on the repeated emptying of her meaning as instrument. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1847

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the critique in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ that the gendered subaltern subject position is foreclosed within the very categories used to name resistance — woman as sign of exchange rather than agent. — connects to: Women’s circulation as kin tokens underwrite communal continuity while emptied of identity
• DEFINE: Gives a concrete instance of what Spivak’s ‘strategic essentialism’ must contend with: even the ‘unity of community’ appealed to strategically is itself produced through woman’s emptying — so the strategic claim to community re-performs exclusion.