socially ordained order, rewarding Penelope and all that emulate her for loyalty and chastity.

Mythology does demonstrate deviance, but it always seems to be clear that the alternative described is exceptional even if valorous, and not to be tried at home. Athena, from her genesis, out of her omnipotent sire, Zeus, from whose head--or thigh, which seems closer to the mark, really--she sprang full-grown, is ready to do battle. Like Joan of Arc, she offers a legitimate alternative female role. But both Athena and the Maid of Orleans are regarded as special cases in contrast to Penelope's model-of-virtue norm. And in the case of Joan, she wears her hair suspiciously short.

Interestingly, the same contrasting pair of female role models appears in the classic Indian epic "The Mahabarata," in which the domesticated Sita is contrasted with the warrior-woman Sri Kandi. Significantly, few female patterns are suggested between these two extremes, and there is no doubt that Sita is the ideal, with Sri Kandi on hand to pick up the deviants and so keep them within socially accepted bounds. Too much of a tomboy, she is put on the battlefront where she can be useful, but you would not want her outside a highly disciplined environment lest her deviance necessitate change in the social structure.

This choice of myths is apposite to Randolph's exhaustive research in feminist theory. Her knowledge and reading of the issues are both passionate and deeply analytic. Randolph is not party to the cssentialist school of feminism that attempts to redress the gender imbalance by declaring all women goddesses. She sympathizes with the approach to feminism that regards the differences between male and female--and among women themselves--as a product of social conditioning, yet she also acknowledges and celebrates what is special to femaleness, vividly portraying female sexuality and its potency. This attitude is reflected in the ongoing conversations and mutual influencing of Randolph and Donna J. Haraway, the distinguished radical biologist with whom Randolph has collaborated. Finally, Randolph's feminism is linked with the global view's of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, for whom feminism denotes not simplv the analysis of the role of women and the commitment to deconstruct assumptions that keep women in their places, but also a study and examination to find the violence inherent in treatment of all oppressed groups and species: the poor everywhere as well as children, animals, and colonialized subjects.

Randolph, then, does not discard the notion of mythology as a means of conveying social norms, but she has some serious issues with the standard canon. Undaunted, she undertakes to forge new myths, ones that may draw from the canon but that also press forward to forge new images of women--and of human beings altogether.

For example in "La Mono Pnderosa [The Powerful Hand]," 1989 (fig. 10), Randolph takes the intention and format of the Mexican rctablo and reinvents it. The wish or hope--a prayer, in fact--she expresses here is to bring together people of difference without obliterating what makes each distinct. Adapting the traditional "Mono Poderosa" she transforms the hand into a naturalistic one, with a flower blooming from each fingertip. Each of the blossoms forms what looks like a tiny Buddhist lotus throne, within which a figure rests, each representatives of a different race or religion. They are self-contained; yet the fingers are like tributaries that converge in the hand. The new myth, in this case, is quite simple, however elusive: the possibility of peace.

This work, in simple terms, expresses Randolph's persistent optimism. Having followed the breakup of the Enlighten-ment tradition to its apogee in modernism, Randolph acknowledges the exhaustion of that train of thought. Yet she is not prepared to jettison the utopian ambition it embodied and is just quixotic enough to consider alternatives to the nihilism toward which postmodernism seems to lead us.

In a sense, all her work is an inquiry into what it is to be human, exploring boundaries both with technology and with other species. Among the sources for Randolph's new mythology are her honest assessments, from an informed political and ethical stance, of the post-modern condition. The utopian models and ideologies of modernism never