Feminine Futures?: Gender Trouble in the Postcolonial ImagiNation

Abstract

There has been a notable turn towards the feminine in contemporary philosophical discourses, which appears as the seemingly logical consequence of the crisis of the rational subject of modernity: the so-called ‘death of man’ that, as Michel Foucault (2002: 373) comments, leaves a ‘void’ which opens up a space for new modes of thought, allowing for what he elsewhere (1980: 81) describes as ‘an insurrection of subjugated knowledges’. For example, for the so-called ‘holy trinity’ of French post-structuralism — Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze — the feminine comes to occupy a privileged position from which to destabilise the phallogocentric order, and accordingly becomes the vehicle for new and alternative visions of subjectivity, as evoked at the ending of Janice Galloway’s novel discussed in the previous chapter.1 This process connotes what Alice Jardine (1985: 25) terms ‘gynesis’; that is, she explains, ‘the transformation of woman and the feminine into verbs at the interior of those narratives that are today experiencing a crisis in legitimation’.KeywordsMale ProtagonistLost ObjectGender TroubleSectarian ViolenceDrag PerformanceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.