Jane Austen in the Ghetto

Abstract

The feminist movement that produced an emphasis on 'women's writing' and feminist literary criticism has evolved alongside the current shift from Women's Studies to Gender Studies. Critical interventions such as queer theory and the historical advent of AIDS produced new alliances between Women's Studies and Gay Studies, while the globalization of both literature and feminism has emphasized new literary and political models. Considering what 'gender studies' has come to mean involves exploring its emphasis on the plurality of genders, cultures and literatures. Embodiment (rather than performance) places limits on utopian constructions while insisting on the material as well as discursive conditions in which genders are lived and produced. Literature's ways of knowing make possible the exploration of aspects of embodiment and its relation to writing. Focusing on ' the scene of undress'--scenes from the writings of Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jamaica Kincaid, Charlotte Delbo and Helena Maria Viramontes--brings to light aspects of embodiment (including anxiety and shame, privation and repair) associated with the display of the gendered body. These scenes are intended to be not so much prescriptive as suggestive of the ways in which issues involving gender and writing are intimately entangled when it comes to representation. The meanings of the body--whether washed or unwashed, sick or dying--include cultural policing and cultural continuity, the affirmation of personhood and the language of mourning. Attending closely to such moments can illuminate the kinds of engagement made possible by Gender Studies in a literary frame.