Nina Baym describes Pearl "as representing Hester's 'id'" (1976, 138); as such, she is the "id [...] ambiguously uttered", rather than singularly characterized, who speaks "the language of 1,000 tongues"; she traces a feminine writing in which there is "the wonder of being several" and the "pleasure from this gift of alterability" (Cixous 1991, 345).
As Stewart Motha argues in the context of Australian debates with respect to Indigenous land rights, sovereignty must not be understood as unitary or as "One," suggesting that present-day legal struggles over Indigenous claims to sovereignty highlight sovereignty's "supposition and alterability by law" as much as they do its resilience.
(67.) Led by veterans of the air war over Korea, Europe, and Japan, the Air Force had difficulty coping with "a dynamic age in which strategic problems arising from the deployment of any single generation of weaponry were transitory--to be supplanted by the next cycle of the arms race--the watchwords of the day were flexibility adaptability, and alterability." Ghamari-Tabrizi, "Unthinkable," 172-73.
It is characterized by her militant stance, her penetrating analysis of society, politics, and culture, and her fundamental belief in the alterability of prevailing power relationships.