French Feminist Research Articles

‘Swollen with lightning like revolt, bursting anger (...) they dance wild dances’: Theatre as Transgressive Space in Quebec Women’s Writing in the 1970s

Catherine Scott’s paper travels beyond European spaces to lead to the scene of Quebec Women’s theatre of the 1970s. Looking in detail at Denise Boucher’s Les Fees ont soif (The Fairies are Thirsty) and at La Nef des sorcieres (A Clash of Symbols), written and produced by a collective, Scott highlights two of the first feminist plays which became of central importance for future theatrical activity in Quebec in the 1980s.. Many women playwriters regarded the established theatre as an institution, which ‘consolidated society’s misconceptions’ of women. Like other feminist writing of the 1970s in North America and Western Europe, these two plays posed questions about female identity by acting from a female-centred space. In making language and the patriarchal system of thought a centre of feminist intervention, Quebec women playwrights aimed at interrupting ‘the structure of accepted forms of communication’ and its ‘phallocentric order’. As other writings of the time, the texts were indebted to contemporary French feminist theories (e.g. Helene Cixous’s) which provided a framework for theorising questions of language, the body and female desire. Theatre in its physical specificity that incorporates the body, provided spaces to transgress social norms in a public way. Quebec women used theatre, Scott argues, as a ‘tool’ to analyse the ‘nature of representation’ in patriarchal discourse, and to make deformations physically visible – presenting bodies ‘tattooed with signs and symbols’. In Boucher’s play, for instance, the ‘Virgin Mary’ was represented as a statue, and so ‘Woman’ and the images of her collapsed on stage. The political impact of these attacks on the Catholic Church, the institution of marriage, the judiciary and, not least, the class character of Quebec society, perceptible in the politics of language, was mirrored by the sharp public reaction which Boucher’s Les Fees ont soif provoked. Cultural objections against the arrival of Montreal working class accents on stage were based on notions of ‘standard’. Religious objections led to a blasphemy trial which was expected to impose a ban. As a matter of irony, Scott demonstrates, the objections brought up in court in terms of ‘censorship’ and ‘freedom of expression’ revolved around ‘central themes’ of the play. It is interesting, however, that the plays staging body politics on a large scale and raising issues central to radical feminist politics, functioned institutionally, as Scott shows, within mainstream theatre. Whereas Quebec literature during and after the Quiet Revolution tried to create a ‘Quebec space’, concerned with constructing a national identity, Quebec theatre women abstained from seeking a place in this national movement. In times of backlash – as some would argue – Catherine Scott’s paper is a timely reminder of the social impact feminism as a political movement had - an impact which reached far beyond the academy and aimed at social change; at the same time the paper shows with hindsight what has been gained on the journey from the debates of the 1970s, when feminism became feminisms.

Hermance Lesguillon (1812-1882): the diversity of French feminism in the nineteenth century

HERMANCE LESGUILLON (1812–1882): THE DIVERSITY OF FRENCH FEMINISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Get access DAVID BARRY DAVID BARRY Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French History, Volume 13, Issue 4, December 1999, Pages 381–416, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/13.4.381 Published: 01 December 1999

The Use and Abuse of Simone de Beauvoir

For many years poststructuralist feminists have denounced Simone de Beauvoir as a `universal humanist' who denies sexual difference and inscribes woman in a masculine discourse. Returning to the original exchanges between de Beauvoir and the French feminists of difference, where this dismissive attitude began, it is seen that de Beauvoir circulates in their discourse as representative of a bygone eraan embodiment of all that has been surpassed. Their criticisms of de Beauvoir prove for the most part, glib and disingenuous and not grounded in a careful reading of The Second Sex. In this article the author defends de Beauvoir from their charges of universalism, phallocentrism and being a dupe of Sartre. Her particular form of universal humanism is not `indifferent to difference', but produces historically and socially nuanced insights. De Beauvoir does not valorize a Sartrean rational masculine subject as a model for feminist struggles, rather she theorizes an embodied, relational, situated subject. Furthermore, her theory of Otherness is able to accommodate the psychic register of subjectivity without psychologizing the socioeconomic or political world, a shortcoming of her French poststructuralist opponents.

Writing from Experience: The Place of the Personal in French Feminist Writing

Through a discussion of the work of Marie Cardinal and Annie Ernaux, this article aims to problematize the anglophone academic world's tendency to associate French feminisms predominantly with avant-garde or highly theoretical texts. The work of Ernaux and Cardinal is presented alongside a discussion of its reception by readers and critics in France, and by academics in English-speaking countries. The first part of the article identifies aspects of Ernaux's and Cardinal's works which cannot be encompassed within a critical framework based on the dichotomy between naïve realism on the one hand and the politically and linguistically radical text on the other. Ernaux's plain language, for instance, is clearly very unlike the linguistic experimentation of ‘feminine writing’; nonetheless the emphasis on social class in her writing constitutes a political intervention which is at least equally valid. The reception study in the second part of the article provides further evidence of the relevance to gender politics in France of Cardinal's The Words to Say It (1975) and texts published by Annie Ernaux in the 1980s and 1990s. The ambivalent response of critics seems to indicate the troubling nature of writing which combines the codes of realism and autobiography (or autobiographical fiction in Cardinal's case) with the depiction of taboo subjects such as menstruation, or a daughter's response to her mother's debilitating illness and death. The article also charts the widespread popularity of these texts in France, particularly with women readers, and gives some examples of the pleasures described in letters to the authors. In conclusion, we argue that the ambivalent space between popular and high culture occupied (albeit differently) by Ernaux and Cardinal may be particularly effective in terms of gender politics, and that even in the late 1990s, the personal may be as political as ever.

Introduction

Introduction George Rousseau (bio) I Although history will decide the matter, it is impossible not to endorse John Neubauer’s claim in the introduction to this volume’s predecessor that “Michel Foucault was both a historian and a maker of culture.” 1 He was both, of course, despite the caveats of all sorts of professional historians and learned groups whose ideology and politics differed from his. More Cassandra of culture than Goliath among historians, Foucault was also the lens from whose crystal the discourse of our generation has been shaped; predominantly in our concerns for gender and the body, but even more so in the ways in which sex continues to dominate our discourse and obsess us without liberating us. Foucault’s (almost millennial) predictions that we would become obsessed with sex have been entirely borne out; if not in the Starr report, then in the worldwide movements to repress sex in the workplace, legislate it in the social order, and eliminate it on the Internet. Yet nowhere are the antennae more directed against those groups who work for the repression of sex than in the West’s progressive universities—the very place where Foucault’s influence has been most acutely felt. Universities have become virtual sites for the monitoring [End Page 127] and policing of these attitudes, and they deserve much credit for taking on so onerous a task. In precisely this context it is difficult to think of any recent thinker who has had more influence within the contemporary academy, especially in our progressive North American universities. Other French thinkers have left their mark: Derrida has influenced the daily practice of humanists and social scientists, as have his brethren in Paris; and it would be gratuitous to try to prove that Kristeva and other French feminists have not been almost equally influential. But Foucault, more than these, virtually defined, and shaped, our generation’s sense of the mission of the humanities and social sciences, as confirmed by the number of references to him and books written in the crucible of his method—this despite the rhetorical gun held to his head by those seeking dramatic advantage in decrying him as a bandit, especially British historian Lawrence Stone’s claim about “Foucault’s crimes against humanity” and, more recently, Harold Bloom’s view of Foucault’s Satanic approach as the “disease of humanity.” Foucault, having abandoned the folly of the university’s self-proclaimed higher mission to inculcate national morality in the name of the state, taught us instead how language and discourse had been manipulated throughout history for the purposes of power and repression. And he demonstrated that primary authors were not exempt from these processes, no matter how aloof the form and content of their writing. In this sense Foucault’s fate, both during his lifetime and since his death in 1984, has resembled that of Nietzsche (in Neubauer’s words, “his adopted predecessor”). Both thinkers have been microscopically scrutinized and criticized by the practitioners of individual disciplines; yet the lasting significance of their work lies beyond disciplinary boundaries and the borders of “truth” for any given case study or range of problems. Both men ruthlessly challenged the main assumptions of Western culture; each imperiled age-old beliefs thought to have been invulnerable, even immutable. Foucault especially tapped into the body, and the forms in which its modes of expression could become a vehicle for the manipulation of power and the repression of selfhood. He intuited that the humanities, in our modern sense, are commentaries on the body. Little wonder then that his last, unfinished work—a symphony of books in progress—should have been his most ambitious: a history of sexuality from the Greeks to the present time. But not any history: it was a work dedicated to the same galaxy of language, discourse, ideology, power, and repression that enshrines the rest of his intellectual cosmology. For these reasons it is impossible to think of Foucault, the man and his work, apart from the crises of our time more [End Page 128] generally, especially the lingering sense on the eve of the millennium that the twentieth century has been among the most brutal of historical eras...

Exceeding Hegel and Lacan: Different Fields of Pleasure within Foucault and Irigaray

Anglo-American embodiments of poststructuralist and French feminism often align themselves with the texts of either Michel Foucault or Luce Irigaray. lnterrogating this alleged distance between Foucault and Irigaray, I show how it reinscrihes the phallic field of concepts and categories within feminist discourses. Framing both Foucault and Irigaray as exceeding]acques Lacan's metamorphosis of G.W.F. Hegel's Concept, I suggest that engaging their styles might yield richer tools for articulating the differences within our different lives.

Exceeding Hegel and Lacan: Different Fields of Pleasure within Foucault and Irigaray

Anglo-American embodiments of poststructuralist and French feminism often align themselves with the texts of either Michel Foucault or Luce Irigaray. lnterrogating this alleged distance between Foucault and Irigaray, I show how it reinscrihes the phallic field of concepts and categories within feminist discourses. Framing both Foucault and Irigaray as exceeding]acques Lacan's metamorphosis of G.W.F. Hegel's Concept, I suggest that engaging their styles might yield richer tools for articulating the differences within our different lives.

The Double Voice of Metaphor: A. S. Byatt's "Morpho Eugenia"

Analogy is slippery tool. A. S. Byatt (100) The double voice of postmodern fiction presents challenge because it requires that we question the way we read and interpret not only postmodern literature but also literature as whole. [1] This doubleness is particularly noticeable in works that openly display their affiliation with generic conventions or older works, such as J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986), which rewrites Robinson Crusoe, Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor (1985), which is structured like detective story, or A. S. Byatt's Possession (1990), Lindsay Clarke's The Chymical Wedding (1989), John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), and Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover (1992), which all build on romance conventions. Such doubleness resembles allegory, insofar as allegory defines the moment when one text is read through the lens of another (Owens Pt. 1, 68). By thus allying themselves with previous texts in their genres and by fusing conventional and postmodern narrative strategies, these literary hybrids destabilize our interpretations of trad itional works, and, at least in the case of the postmodern romances, manage both to reread their tradition and revitalize its twentieth-century appearance. [2] Thus the multiple narrative voices, the open contradictions, and the consistent resistance to totalizing answers in postmodern romance like Possession can be seen as continuing the allegorical mode of the high romances of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as questioning the apparent uniformity of women's popular romances, and as restoring those complex and sophisticated qualities that formerly characterized the romance but seem to have disappeared from its twentieth-century manifestations. Even though Possession in its parodies of scholars influenced by French feminism and Lacanian psychoanalysis contains fair amount of critique of poststructuralist and postmodern attitudes, it signals its own postmodernity through devices like fluctuating narrative perspectives, paradox, ambiguity, and self-reflexivity. The short stories in Byatt's The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994) can also be categorized as postmodern fictions, especially through the inclusion of magic and fairy-tale structures in apparently realistic tales, and the disjunctive narrative style of Babel Tower (1996) is another example of Byatt's interest in postmodern literary techniques. Works like these, which openly display their postmodern links, need to be approached in way that can acknowledge the multiple meanings produced. Works that at least on the surface look like straightforward narratives might appear to be another matter. But are they? Consider the novella Morpho Eugenia in Byatt's Angels and Insects. In contrast t o Possession, Morpho Eugenia is firmly set in the past, and there is no visible twentieth-century perspective in the telling. The story is mainly told by omniscient narrator, and even though it is interspersed with fictional texts ostensibly written by the various characters in the novella, these do not represent different voices and shifting perspectives to the extent they do in Possession. Morpho Eugenia opens like women's historical romance and continues like novel about love, marriage, society's expectations, nineteenth-century hypocrisy, social injustices, Darwin, and religion. Because the stories in Angels and Insects are set in the 1860s and 1870s and deal with concerns, reviewers have described the diptych as resolutely mid-Victorian in tone and content (Hughes 49), and A. S. Byatt as a Victorianist Iris Murdoch (Butler). The postmodern connection is consequently overlooked. One reviewer, however, sees continuities between the novel and postmodernism when he refers to Byatt as postmodem Victorian who finds the grounds of her postmodernity in an earnest attempt to get back before the moderns and revive project that has never been allowed to come to completion (Levenson 41). …

Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Joan Wallach ScottEnglish Feminism, 1780-1980. Barbara Caine

<i>Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man</i>. Joan Wallach Scott<i>English Feminism, 1780-1980</i>. Barbara Caine

Irigaray's Cave: Feminist Theory and the Politics of French Classicism

Although there are countless feminist readings of Plato and readings of Platoas(a)feminist, the French feminist theorist Luce Irigaray's extended—nearly 200 page!—reading of the cave passage from Book 7 of Plato'sRepublicmay still come as something of a surprise to the classicist. In the recently published bookFeminist Interpretations of Plato, however, there is an essay by Irigaray on Plato'sSymposiumincluded as just another example of this now established genre. Just any other?—well not quite… As in its sister volumeFeminist Interpretations of Aristotle, the editors have decided that unlike any other article in the collection, Irigaray's contribution needs some further exegesis for the classical scholar. An essay on Irigaray reading Plato appears in tandem to her own article. Just like in the Aristotle volume, this essay presents itself as a guide to the perplexed, explaining to the ancient philosopher schooled in a more traditional idiom of Anglo-Saxon academic research some of the context for Irigaray's seemingly inappropriate style. Freeland writes of Irigaray's Aristotle piece: ‘Irigaray's essay will be astonishing to the Aristotle scholar who reads it unaware of Irigaray's earlier writings’; in fact, she continues, ‘…it may seem unclear whether one is reading Aristotle scholarship, a primitive biology text or an erotic novel ….Reading her then,’ she concludes, ‘is far different from reading the usual commentators on thePhysics. Clearly, style is paramount to Irigaray's method of reading.’

Parité as a mobilizing myth in the French feminist movement

This article will examine the arguments for and against the introduction of the gender parity in the French political system. I will argue that whilst the idea of parity introduces a new, gender-conscious equality into political ideology, it is hard to avoid a more dangerous differentialism.

Wanting Word of Woman, Subversive Speech of Simile: Ecriture féminine and the Erotics of Rhetoric

Intcncxts, Vol. 3, No. 1,1999 Wanting Word of Woman, Subversive Speech of Simile: Ecriture feminine and the Erotics of Rhetoric Shirley Sharon-Zisser T E L A V I V U N I V E R S I T Y The relationship between language and femininity, and in particular between language and the female body, is akey concern that features prominently, if sometimes differently, in the French femimst theories of Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Michele Montrelay. This concern, how¬ ever, does not originate with those French feminist theorists or their con¬ temporaries; nor is it peculiar to female thinkers on language. Rather, the relationship between language, femininity and the female body has preoc¬ cupied (male) thinkers from the very beginnings of amost pervasive tradi¬ tion of reflection upon language in the West: that of rhetoric.As this article shows by means of comparing the notions of asubversive feminine lan¬ guageproposedbyCixousandIrigaray(anddifferently,byMontrelay) withnotionsoflinguisticform(mostprominentlythecategoriesof“fig¬ ure”andof“simile,”inparticularthecatachreticsimile)inthewntingsof Aristotleandofearlymodernmalerhetoricians,therudimentsofCixous notion of ecriture feminine^ Irigaray’s notion of le parler femme and Montrelay’snotionofparoledefemmecanbefoundintheverycanonof rhetoric that these French feminist theorists explicitly set out to defy. The notions of feminine writing set forth by Cixous and Irigaray, as well as, differently, by Montrelay, serve in this article as points of departure for an analysis of the discourse of rhetoric that, while produced within apa¬ triarchal culture and sometimes overtly hostile to women in its articidations and preferences, also betrays an irresistible attraction to the feminine and the maternal. The article shows that the feminine and maternal are in¬ scribedintorhetoricalcategoriessuchasfigure,simileandcatachresisthat are shunned, demeaned or abjected^ by the rhetoricians, but that as abjected categories do not cease to challenge and fascinate the system that produces and abjects them (Kristeva, Powers of Horror 2, 4). During the many centuries when these abjected feminized rhetorical categories were being produced and re-produced within patriarchal socie¬ ties, by male rhetoricians, and as part of amale linguistic imaginary largely predicated on “sameness” and the singularity of the “father” as the center of signifying systems,^ they were conceptually and practically unavailable to women as forms that could confer subject status upon them. During those manycenturiesof“speakingsameness”(Irigaray,ThisSex20S),thespace 3 3 3 4 I N T E R T E X T S made available to women in theories of language was largely that of struc¬ tures such as the division between first and second person pronouns in syn¬ tax that, as Irigaray argues in “When Our Lips Speak Together,” “divid[e] too sharply” between an implicitly male subject and an implicitly female object, thus foreclosing the possibility of inter-subjective amatory ex¬ change {This Sex2\^). One of the important contributions of the feminist theories of language of Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous and Michele Montrelayhasbeentoopenup ,conceptuallyaswellaspractically,linguisticspaces wherefemalesubjectivityandfemaledesirecanbearticulated.Asthisarti¬ cle shows, another important contribution of those feminist theories of language is that they make it possible not only to “invent alanguage” in whichwomen’sdesireandpleasurecouldbearticulatedandthatwouldbe different from that outlined in the male tradition of rhetoric (Irigaray, This Sexr214), but also to rediscover vrithin ±at tradition those forgotten forms inwhichwomen’sdesireandpleasureareinscribedbutwhichthecondi¬ tionsofsocialandconceptualhistoryhadmadeitimpossibleforwomento appropriate. What the reading of the male rhetorical tradition in the light of the requirements that Irigaray, Cixous and Montrelay posit for alan¬ guageofafemalesubjectofdesireandpleasureoffersisnotapossibilityof reconfiguring the male linguistic imaginary but of casting light upon those sitesofthisimaginarywheresuchdesireandpleasurearealreadyinscribed andwhichhadalwaysbeenitssitesofnostalgicfascination.Itistowardsthe rediscoveryofthosesitesoffemininedesireandpleasurewithinrhetoricby means of the theories of Irigaray, Cixous and Montrelay rather than to¬ wards acritique of those theorists’ understanding of the gendering of rhetoricortheirpossiblecomplicityinitsseeminglyunivocalphallocentrismthatthisarticleseekstopointtheway . Montrelay’sUombreetlenomidentifiesfemininityasthesiteofaninfi¬ nite,archaicjouissance(53-55),^oftheOne-ness(53)ofprimalfusion (44).4Thisidentificationgivesrisetoanimportantquestion:ifthecate¬ goryofthe“feminine”isidentifiedasthatof3ljouissancewhichisOne,infi¬ nite and archaic, is it not also, therefore, located in what Montrelay de¬ scribes as the “unexplorable” zone of Shadow [Ombre] (66).> If the “feminine”issituatedwithintheunexplorableShadow,doesitnotalsore¬ sisttheanalysisthatproceedsfi-omtheseparatingscissionsoftheName [Now]—that is, of language—that dissect the archaic One into discrete signifiersandformsofsignification ?Ifthefeminine,likethediscourseofmys¬ ticismwhichIrigarayidentifiesasoneofitseffects,isalliedwithpsychicfor¬ mations “where consciousness is no longer master” (Irigaray, Speculum 191) does it not then inevitably “elude ...linguistic classification” (Montrelay 29) and become “the ruin of representation” (66)? For Lacan, firom whose theory of language the conceptions of lan¬ guage of Irigaray, Cixous and Montrelay derive but also differ, this ques¬ tion would be arhetorical one. In Lacanian terms...

Gender and Language in Chaucer by Catherine S. Cox (review)

94ARTHURIANA she has identified earlier, rather she is concerned to investigate the lexicon ofseveral unattributed texts to establish their probability of having been written by Andrea. While establishing a canon based on an author's usage is a valuable and traditional occupation, it does not quite fulfill the promises implied in the title. Once it is clear what the author actually means, however, her study of the 'language of chivalry' in the works ofAndrea da Barberino is an impressive and careful study of the author's works. Her use ofthe Guerrino as a test ofauthenticity is a bit problematic, however, since she acknowledges that authorities do not universally attribute this work to Andrea. Through her examinarion of the undisputed works attribured to Andrea, the six books of / Reali di Francia, the Aspramente, the Storie Nerbonese, La Storia de Aiolfo del Barbicene, La Storia de Ugone d'Avernia, and Guerrino il Meschino, she argues that Andrea should also be credited with La Prima Spagna, La Seconda Spagna (also known as the Ansuigi), and Le Storie de Rinaldo da Monte Albano; to even the balance, she concludes with arguments that he did not write // Libro di Rambaldo (predictably, perhaps, because the quality is inferior). Her arguments seem persuasive. La Prima and Seconda Spagna fill in the missing bits in the Charlemagne cycle begun in the Reali de Francia and picked up in the Storie Nerbonese. Her careful examination ofthe language of the texts is minute and includes an examination of figures as well. A particularly charming example is her use ofelephant similes to draw a relationship between the Guerrino and the Rinaldo. Allaire provides a scrupulous examination ofthe language ofthe texts that may be attributed to Andrea da Barberino. Her book is not easy reading (and does not discuss the larger issues of ethos and language that she raises in her first chapter and title), but is a valuable prolegomena to a critical edition of Andrea's works, especially of those unedited works she now claims for him. This consequent giant step seems to be the project Allaire has in mind and the current book reads like the introduction to a pending edition. Considering the scope ofsuch a project, it would be unrealistic to suggest she also embark on a translation ofAndrea into English. Now that she has established his corpus and demonstrated his importance to an English-speaking audience, she might now want to make him accessible. Ifshe herselfdoes not wish to take on this Herculean task, she has done the groundwork for a succeeding generation of scholars and Ph.D. candidates. DON HOFFMAN Northeastern Illinois University Catherine s. cox. Gender andLanguage in Chaucer. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997. Pp. 240. isbn: 0-8130-1519-7. $49.95. I recently listened to a colleague give a paper on Robert Frost at a departmental colloquium and was astonished at her intimate psychologizing of his intentions. It was a well-done ptesentation, certainly eloquent and well-reasoned—if one could accept her premises that, unfortunately, remained underexamined and unproblematized throughout her talk. I was amused that I, the lone medievalist among a host of REVIEWS95 Americanists, had the strongest reaction against the idea of author function and autonomy on display over the cheese and crackers. Like many medievalists traditionally trained but committed to contemporary litetary theory, I am perhaps more sensitive, if not actually neurotic, about how theory is or is not deployed by my peers. The afternoon demonstrated for me once again that all critical theories are equal, but some are more equal than others. First, poststructuralist theories have made it impossible to write about texts without writing about method and the problems of method; second, the recent turn to history (as we like to describe it) has made it impossible to write about texts without taking into consideration the history of criticism itself. Such developments have dictated a short shelf-life for certain kinds of approaches to texts. These are the thoughts that came to mind as I read GenderandLanguage in Chaucer, for Catherine Cox's readings of the Chaucerian oeuvre, finely calibrated as they are, represent a strain ofpoststructuralist French feminism which, while it may no longer require explanation...

Fashioning the Female Subject: The Intertextual Networking of Dickinson, Moore, and Rich

In Fashioning the Female Subject, Sabine Sielke addresses the often nebulous concept of female subjectivity through a critical analysis of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and Adrienne Rich, each of whom has uniquely fashioned and transformed the female subject over the last 150 years. Applying the feminist theories of Kristeva, Irigaray, and Cixous, Sielke articulately develops a notion of female subjectivity as an intertextual network, a network whose three historically distinct levels illustrate a clear evolution in the poetic designs of such subjectivity.Acknowledging the semantics of the female body as the most contested battleground of female subject constitution, Sielke shows how a historical female subject emerges from Moore's and Rich's strategies of poetic mimicry and camouflage, and culminates in Rich's strategy of continuous re-vision. Like Dickinson, Rich creates subjects-in-process, which, when projected as processes in history, are capably transformed from a sense of fluent subjectivity into an ethically responsible identity practice. Rich's poetics close a significant gap in French feminist theory, Sielke claims, by reconstructing the female subject as an agent of her own history.Fashioning the Female Subject is a rereading of American women's poetry, a partial revisioning of French feminist theory, and a reassessment of Adrienne Rich as a central figure in American feminist theory. Offering a revisionary sense of literary history, Sielke's book offers a new model of literary affiliation to readers of poetry, scholars of literary history, feminist critics, and literary theorists alike.Sabine Sielke is Assistant Professor of American Literature, John F. Kennedy-Institut, Freie Universitat Berlin.

Resisting Bodies: The Negotiation of Female Agency in Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Resisting Bodies: The Negotiation of Female Agency in Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction Judith Kegan Gardiner Helga Druxes. Resisting Bodies: The Negotiation of Female Agency in Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1996. 230 pp. In this study of four women writers, Druxes throws many critical and theoretical balls into the air. Some moves make striking patterns, some are hard to follow, and a few ideas fall, undeveloped, by the wayside. The title highlights “Bodies,” resistance, gender, “Agency,” and “Fiction”; the introduction adds the economic terms “Transaction” and “Exchange”; and the conclusion features “Alterity,” while much of the argument focuses on the relationship between women and cities. The theoretical apparatus is equally diverse. To analyze the relationships between female bodies and urban space, Druxes draws upon cultural anthropology, poststructuralist Marxism, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and French feminist philosophy, as well as upon literary criticism and literary history from ancient Greek drama to medieval and Renaissance texts. Druxes discusses novels by the colonial modernists Jean Rhys and Marguerite Duras, who hail from the British Caribbean and French Indochina respectively, and by the contemporary metropolitan writers Margaret Drabble and Monika Maron, who situate their characters in a decaying London and a totalitarian East Berlin, so that their female protagonists trace a chronological trajectory from the 1920s to the 1990s that is also a political progress. Druxes claims that in these novels, “the city as the epitome of the commodity marketplace becomes the catalyst for critical self-consciousness” and that the four authors demonstrate a “progression from female protagonists as mute exchange objects to vocal agents in the exchange.” In the novels written after the advent of second-wave feminism, a gendered “agency leads to female coalition building that enables a shared systemic critique” of modern market society, which enables “collective acts of civil disobedience against undemocratic social practice.” Thus, the novels trace “a movement from isolated acts of rebellion” in Rhys’s fiction “toward an activist collective agency for social innovation and democratization” in Maron’s. Druxes focuses on two of Jean Rhys’s interwar novels and on her autobiography. She claims that Rhys’s autobiographical heroines are compelled to a repetition that provides some mastery over the trauma [End Page 486] of enforced female passivity in a predatory, male-dominated metropolis, while their hysterical bodies enact a “violent critique of colonialist practices.” Druxes’s anthropological analysis of the zombie figure in Vodoun belief persuasively confutes other critics’ optimism about Rhys’s disempowered, zombie-like protagonists’ chances for resurrection. Druxes’s perceptive discussion of Duras focuses on one book, Un Barrage contre le Pacifique [The Seawall ] , and on the difference between gift-giving and capitalist exchange. From this anthropological perspective, Duras’s autobiographical protagonist, the young daughter of a poor white colonial family, realizes her value and attains a measure of agency through both rejecting and accepting gifts from rich suitors without consenting to barter her body at the same time. “By the end of the novel, the vicious circle of (female) commodification has been interrupted” and replaced by a forward-moving narrative like the cinema, and “the city as backdrop becomes a catalyst for personal change.” The chapters on Drabble and Maron treat more novels—six by Drabble and five by Maron—and chart development not just from author to author but within the authors’ works. The Drabble chapter is the most contradictory in the volume. In Druxes’s overall scheme, Drabble is penultimate in a progression toward self-conscious agency on the part of women writers’ urban female protagonists. The Drabble characters are more multiple and diverse than those by Rhys or Duras, and they sustain themselves through female friendships, as the earlier characters could not. On the other hand, Druxes is more critical of Drabble’s liberalism than she is of Duras’s political radicalism. For her, Drabble is bound by her class perspective so that her bourgeois characters retreat from the cosmopolitan challenge of “liminoid urban spaces” into suburban enclaves. She says that “Drabble fails” her readers by demonizing mothers, and that her class bias “eerily reproduces a colonialist mentality.” Druxes further dissipates her analysis of Drabble by sketchily comparing her as a...

Fifty years on: The impact of Simone de beauvoir's le deuxieme sexe on contemporary French feminist theory

Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième Sexe (first published by Gallimard, 1949) is widely recognised as the first major analysis of women's oppression in the history of contemporary French feminist thought. The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between Le Deuxième Sexe and subsequent developments in feminist theory, within the context of feminism as a political movement. The first part examines the relationship between Beauvoir and materialist feminist theory, as represented in the political essays of Monique Wittig. Secondly, it reassesses the apparent opposition between Beauvoir's ‘egalitarian’ and Irigaray's ‘difference’ feminism. The article concludes by suggesting the possibility of cooperation between these two camps, with a view to reestablishing the links between feminism as theory and as political praxis.

Felicia GORDON, Maire CROSS, Early French Feminisms, 1830-1940. A Passion for Liberty, Cheltenham, UK, Brookfield, US, Edward Elgar, 1996, 287 p.

Early French Feminisms est un reader, type de publication encore peu developpe en France, destine principalement a un public etudiant. Y figurent des textes (par larges extraits ou dans leur integralite) de Flora Tristan (1803-1844), Jeanne Deroin (1805-1852), Pauline Roland (1805-1892), Madeleine Pelletier (1874-1939) et Helene Brion (1882-1962), assortis de longues introductions, de copieuses notes infrapaginales et d'une belle bibliographie. Cette anthologie a ete concue par deux hi...

A concise glossary of feminist theory

Acknowledging the variety of contemporary feminist theories, this glossary includes entries on black, post-colonial, Italian and French feminisms, and draws on a range of fields including semiotics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism and deconstruction. The substantial entries on the key words of feminist discourse do not attempt to be definitive, but instead demonstrate the provisional and open-ended nature of the working concepts. The glossary contains cross-referenced entries on the most commonly-encountered terms.

Misogyny, Cultural Nihilism, and Oppositional Politics: Contemporary Chinese Experimental Fiction (review)

194 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 1998© 1998 by University ofHawai'i Press of Chinese nationalism, so Western concepts and power diplomacy could not prevent the KMT's failure on the mainland. The revolutionary reforms of the Chinese Nationalists did not take place until Chiang moved the seat ofhis government to Taiwan. It took two generations of Chiang's regime, or four decades, for the KMT to modernize their party and society. A large collection of Chiang's papers, long known as the mysterious "Dash'i Archives," have recently been released by die KMT government on Taiwan. These documents, which were not available during the preparation of this book, will be useful for any further discussion on the subject. Xiao-bing Li University of Central Oklahoma Xiao-bing Li is an assistantprofessor ofhistory specializing in Sino-American relations during the Cold War. Lu Tonglin. Misogyny, Cultural Nihilism, and Oppositional Politics: Contemporary Chinese Experimental Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. xi, 235 pp. Hardcover $39.50, isbn 0-8047-2463-6. Paperback $14.95, isbn 0-8047-2464-4. In this book Lu Tonglin unveils a literary project in which the hitherto seemingly subversive tendencies of twentieth-century writing no longer seem able to deploy the dissenting "minority discourse" that was once the mainstay of their "communist fathers." Instead, the majority have elected an "oppositional discourse against this already oppositional ideology," which, writes Lu, may lead to "a dangerous identification witii a conservative position previously occupied by the Confucian grandfathers." In the few phrases just quoted, the reader will have noticed that Lu Tonglin foregrounds, righdy, the dominant patriarchal nature of the lineage of modern Chinese writing. Indeed, these phrases encapsulate the tone ofwhat is an astute and scholarly book that addresses the serious and pervasive concerns about the representation ofwomen and femininity, and the increasing dominance of masculinism and misogyny in the Chinese writerly practice. She makes this compelling claim: "The misogynistic discourse common among contemporary Chinese experimental fiction writers results in part from a subversive intent against the failed women's emancipation movement promoted by May Fourth radicals and the Communist party" (p. 155). Reviews 195 She brings to her discussion a close knowledge ofmodern mainland history informed by personal experience and tempered by scholarly reflection. The texts in question are thus finely historicized and contextualized, and her readings and comments take us beyond the habitual clichés of China-watching area studies and modernized sinology. Indeed, Lu's work is that ofa scholar consistently reflecting on the relatedness ofthe historical reality to contemporary literary production. That recognition ofthe importance ofhistory and her reading of the twentieth century sets her apart from many ofher contemporaries. Similarly, her use of theory is judicious. Given Lu's attention to maintaining within her contextual frame the historical and social realities, it is not surprising that her book should be informed by Luce Irigaray, a French feminist and psychoanalytical theorist who is also, importantly, an activist who, despite her marginalized status within her own academic community, is determined to see feminism at work in society and not confined to bookshelves. In the six chapters of this book, Lu Tonglin provides impressive and well-argued , passionate readings ofa number ofimportant contemporary writers including the two writers whose books have provided such rich pickings for Fifth Generation cinematic exploitation, the novelists Mo Yan {Red Sorghum) and Su Tong {Raise High the Red Lantern). There is also a detailed and fascinating reading of woman writer Can Xue's work, which Lu reads as subversive ofthe patriarchal order. Thus, Lu provides provocative and unorthodox readings of some ofthe better- and lesser-known texts ofpost-Mao experimental fiction. In chapter 4, Lu has some poignant remarks to make on the work of Zhaxi Dawa, who is known for his stories representing the ideological and identity confusion ofpresent-day Tibet. However, his concern over one oppression fails to extend to a more enlightened discursive treatment ofwomen. Indeed, as Lu Tonglin notes, in a Chinese and global context in which "political, cultural and ideological values have become nonsensical," Zhaxi Dawa clings to sexual difference as a provider of meaning, "reducing women to objects and signs that support...

Only paradoxes to offer: french feminists and the rights of man

Only paradoxes to offer: french feminists and the rights of man