Gendered Agents

by Mariniello, Silvestra; Bove, Paul A.; Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (CON); Spillers, Hortense (CON)

• ISBN13: 9780822321965
• ISBN10: 0822321963
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-07-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

Gendered Agents, edited by Silvestra Mariniello andPaul A. Boveacute;, presents essays by influential feminist theorists who challenge traditional Western epistemology and suggest new directions for feminism. By examining both literary and historical discourses, such critics as Gayatri Spivak, Hortense Spillers, and Lauren Berlant assess questions of sexuality, ethics, race, psychoanalysis, subjectivity, and identity. Gathered from various issues of the journalboundary 2, the essays inGendered Agentsseek to transform the model of Western academic knowledge by restructuring its priorities and values. In the introduction, Mariniello urges feminists to begin anew but take as their starting place the achievements of feminism and feminist theory: an understanding of language that considers the implications of silence, the motivation to decompartmentalize experience, and the acknowledgement that everything is political.Challenging both a canonical organization of knowledge and the persistently self-referential "ghettoization" of feminism, contributors subsequently tackle subjects as diverse as pre-Marxist France, the American fetus, black intellectuals, queer nationality, and the art of literary interpretation.Contributors. Lauren Berlant, Karen Brennan, Margaret Cohen, Nancy Fraser, Elizabeth Freeman, Carol Jacobs, Silvestra Mariniello, Larysa Mykyta, Laura Rice, Ivy Schweitzer, Doris Sommer, Hortense J. Spillers, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Judith Wilt

Table of Contents

Introduction

Transgressing Representation: Women's Ways Against Institutional Knowledge

Responsibility

The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date

The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories for Feminist Politics

Veiled Threats: Malek Alloula's Colonial Harem

Undoing Discursive Constructions: Alternative Rhetorical Strategies

Maternal Discourse and the Romance of Self-Possession in Kate Chopin's The Awakening

America, "Fat," the Fetus

Queer Nationality

"The Most Suffering Class": Gender, Class, and Consciousness in Pre-Marxist France

Brava! And Farewell to Greatheart

The Politics of Allegory: A New Understanding of Agency

Allegory and Dialectics: A Match Made in Romance

Blanchot's Au moment voulu: Woman as the Eternally Recurring Figure of Writing

Wuthering Heights: At the Threshold of Interpretation

The Geography of Enunciation: Hysterical Pastiche in Kathy Acker's Fiction

Index

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