1st Edition

Lacan and Critical Feminism Subjectivity, Sexuation, and Discourse

By Rahna McKey Carusi Copyright 2021
    188 Pages 11 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    188 Pages 11 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This book takes a critical feminist approach to Lacan’s fundamental concepts, merging discourse and sexuation theories in a novel way for both psychoanalysis and feminism, and exploring the possibility of a feminist subject within a non-masculine logic.

    In Lacan and Critical Feminism, Carusi merges Lacan’s theories of discourse and sexuation, not only from a gender/sexuality angle, but also from a literary, feminist, and women’s studies framework. By drawing examples from literature, film, art, and socio-political movements to focus on discourse and sexuation, the text examines how tropes impact the subject’s positionality within any discourse mode. The book also uses women’s collective experience and action to illustrate ways that women have repositioned dominant narratives discursively.

    This text represents essential reading for researchers interested in the relationship between Lacan and feminist theory.

    Preface

    Acknowledgments

    1: Introduction

    2: A (re)turn to Lacan

    QUILTING POINT: A literary discussion on metaphor and metonymy

    3: The troped body

    4: The materiality of the letter

    QUILTING POINT: I AM A MAN and the essence of Woman

    5: Woman as metonymy: or, I am not your manqué l’être

    QUILTING POINT: The masculine symptom in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

    6: Jouissance and ethical extimacy

    7: Myth, truth, and non-phallic sexuation

    QUILTING POINT: Tapping into excess, or the feminist trilogies

    8: The dethroning of the father

    Works cited

    Index

    Biography

    Rahna McKey Carusi, educational developer in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Digital Innovation at Massey University, New Zealand.