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relation to the world. In the versions Fay Weldon produces of her self, mostly in interviews, there is feminism, there is punk, and there is the feminist-punk.
To call Fay Weldon a feminist is hardly a radical or an original thing to do. Everyone seems to do it, even though, as Micheline Wandor suggests, "I think it's not particularly useful to spend a long time deciding on whether or not she is or isn't a feminist writer" ( Bookshelf ). Scarcely an article goes by, however, without some discussion of Weldon's feminism and some attempt to pin it down. For instance, David Lodge says categorically that "there is no doubt that she is a feminist writer" (p. 26), while Nancy Walker talks of Weldon's articulation of a "tone of resignation" which seems "antithetical to the necessity for action urged by feminists" (p. 1). Despite this, however, Walker does still see an "overt feminism in much of Weldon's work" (p. 1). In The Guardian, Joanna Briscoe says that Weldon writes "deeply undreary feminist novels," while Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times complains of a dreary "didactic feminism" on Weldon's part. Weldon herself seems to take no responsibility for the "given" of her feminist identity when she says, "I'm not a feminist because I decided to be a feminist" (Briscoe). She would, rather, seem to resist the category.
Nevertheless, because Weldon's novels center around groups of women ( Female Friends, Down Among the Women ) and typically feminist issues, such as the social construction of beauty ( The Life and Loves of a She-Devil ), reproductive technology ( The Cloning of Joanna May ), and female sexuality and spirituality ( Puffball, Remember Me ), Weldon is assigned the label "feminist." Her work centers around the concerns of feminism, people argue, and so Weldon the writer (the "fictional personality") is perceived, by association, as a feminist. Weldon, I would argue, is, to some degree, as she is perceived. What seems important here is not whether Fay

 

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Weldon is or isn't a feminist, but that she is invariably identified with feminism. She can perhaps be called a feminist writer merely because, if nothing else, both she and her critics consistently raise the issue of, and call attention to, questions of feminist identity and ideology. She is, whether she wants to be or not, fixed in various positions, always within the constellation of feminism. No one, however, (as far as I know) has tried to fix her, and her persona, within the constellation of punk.
What may seem surprising is that this fixing can be done fairly easily. Unintentionally, one would assume, Weldon constructs herself as a literary figure after the fashion of the punk. She emerges with a punk persona in four significant ways: she reinvents her own identity, rejects the value of expertise, rejects the notion of an ideology, and, lastly, refuses her audience the respect they "deserve." It is this punkish fashioning, coupled with her identification with feminism, that makes Weldon, the writer, a feminist-punk.
Reinvention of the Self: "I AmUntil I'm Not"
The identity of Fay Weldon herself seems to be the stuff of fiction. Like Ruth Patchett in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Weldon's identity is constantly subject to revisionthe text of it, therefore, should be used as merely another fiction to inform her novels, not as a means to "master" them. Identity, postmodernly enough, becomes unfixed, unbound, a free signifier, signifying whatever it darn well likes. The antistatic self clings to nothing.
How very punkish. One only has to look at the names of most punks to know that one is in the presence of linguistic reinvention: Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene, Richard Hell, Sid Vicious, and, of course, Johnny Rotten. It is not so obvious that "Fay Weldon" is "one of them" until the Oxford Companion to English Literature reveals that Weldon was born "Franklin Birkinshaw." So much for Franklin.
So much too for biographical "facts." The history of punk is