Book Review, Barnett, Introduction to Feminist Jurisprudence

Abstract

Sasaki analyses the significance of silence in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, arguing that ‘silence is both a language of connection and a strategy of resistance’ (p. 135) and unsettling the white western assumption that speaking out is always a healthy option. This gave me some purchase on my discomfort with the idea, so fundamental to Gilligan and her colleagues’ work, that adolescent girls will lose their true selves if they do not speak their true feelings. Both Sally Kitch on African American women’s texts and Barbara Schapiro on Toni Morrison’s Beloved broaden the dominant psychological ways of understanding identity as constituted within dyadic and family influences by analysing identity in non-white heritages characterized by oppression and slavery. Drawing on the feminist psychoanalysis of Jessican Benjamin, Schapiro concludes: Beloved demonstrates, finally, the interconnection of social and intrapsychic reality. The novel plays out the deep psychic reverberations of living in a culture in which domination and objectification of the self have been institutionalized. If from the earliest years on, one’s fundamental need to be recognized and affirmed as a human subject is denied, that need can take on fantastic and destructive proportions in the inner world . . . can tyrannize one’s life even when one is freed from the external bonds of oppression. (p. 221)