All maids practice hop-scotch.
"Identities are not just defined, but, in the Neoist's case, made problematic."
Karen Eliot wrote "Orientation for the Use of a Context and the Context for the Use of an Orientation" in 1987, published it in the pro-plagiarist, Neoist magazine SMILE, and went a long way toward providing a context and an orientation for the name that is: Karen Eliot. The reader is referred to that article, incorporated here, for a complete explanation of the name.
In brief, she writes, "Karen Eliot is a name that refers to an individual human being who can be anyone." That is, it is a name that any artist or writer (or anybody else, though it is hard to imagine a non-artistic or non-critical context for such an activity) can inhabit. It does not name, as names usually do, any one particular body and the history that body has come to assume. Rather, the name is dissapated across many bodies, it resides nowhere, in a place between bodies, above bodies.
Karen Eliot writes that, "The purpose of ... people using the same name is ... to practically examine western philosophical notions of identity, individuality, originality, value and truth." This name provides a critique of the notion of personal identity which provides an orientation for many western assumptions about life: desire, economics, and ethics are all profoundly dependent upon the continuity of the individual. The critique that is Karen Eliot, then, is a call to attention that these western assumptions are profoundly inappropriate today, in our current historical situation. Karen Eliot would not herself say that we should throw away our notions of selfhood, but only question them.
That is what it means, after all, to adopt a name that one's body does not always bear.
That is who Karen Eliot is.