Jouissance, Cyborgs, and Companion Species: Feminist Experiment

Abstract

In the late seventies and early eighties (around 1981, in Jane Gallop's memorable formulation), utopia still seemed at hand. The energies of the defeated revolutionary political and counter cultural movements of the sixties seemed to have been channeled into feminism. For some feminist theorists and critics working in literary academia, the revolution of the word, that fabulous legacy of the twentieth-century avant-gardes, seemed to have become the revolution itself. Experimental writing—writing that disrupts conventional modes of signification and provides alternatives to them—was, for literature, the site of this revolution. Through the work of continental poststructuralists and psychoanalytic theorists, particularly Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, and Luce Irigaray, we (academic feminists, almost entirely Euro-American and white) assembled an arsenal of ideas and analyses that we thought would change the world, as sixties activism had failed to do.