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Gendered Agents, edited by Silvestra Mariniello andPaul A. BovÉ, 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 journal boundary 2, the essays in Gendered Agents seek 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
List of contents
Introduction / Silvestra Mariniello 1
1. Transgressing Representation: Women's Ways Against Institutional Knowledge
Responsibility / Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 19
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date / Hortense J. Spillers 67
The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories for Feminist Politics / Nancy Fraser 123
Veiled Threats: Malek Alloula's
Colonial Harem / Laura Rice 144
2. Undoing Discursive Constructions: Alternative Rhetorical Strategies
Maternal Discourse and the Romance of Self-Possession in Kate Chopin's
The Awakening / Ivy Schweitzer 161
America, "Fat," the Fetus / Lauren Berlant 192
Queer Nationality / Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman 245
"The Most Suffering Class": Gender, Class, and Consciousness in Pre-Marxist France / Margaret Cohen 279
Brava! And Farewell to Greatheart / Judith Wilt 306
3. The Politics of Allegory: A New Understanding of Agency
Allegory and Dialectics: A Match Made in Romance / Doris Sommer 325
Blanchot's
Au moment voulu: Woman as the Eternally Recurring Figure of Writing / Larysa Mykyta 349
Wuthering Heights: At the Threshold of Interpretation / Carol Jacobs 371
The Geography of Enunciation: Hysterical Pastiche in Kathy Acker's Fiction / Karen Brennan 396
Index 423
About the author
Silvestra Mariniello is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Montreal.
Paul A. BovÉ is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and Editor of boundary 2.
