Jane Gallop
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Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Gallop has been associated with the dissemination of "French feminist" poststructuralist theory in the United States. Anglo-American feminists focused on women's experience and history and on "realistic" näytä lisää images of women in literature. French feminists theorists, on the other hand, explored feminine subjectivity and the use of "woman" in language, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Anglo-American feminists searched out literary foremothers; French feminists elaborated a utopian and modernist or avant-garde writing of the feminine body and desire. Anglo-American feminists called for women to make themselves "whole"; French feminists theorized a feminine subject who was inescapably split, gloriously multiple, uncontained by a unitary self. Gallop's second book, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1982), was published shortly after the first translated works of French feminists appeared. Hers was therefore one of the first American feminist overviews of French feminist deconstructive and psychoanalytic theory. As such, it had a significant impact on the way in which the French theorists were read, and it participated in what was becoming a division within the feminist community between those for or against "theory." All of Gallop's books, even her first, Intersections (1981), strategically engage French theory and questions of sexuality. Typically, Gallop demystifies texts by doing "symptomatic readings" of them, drawing on psychoanalytic and deconstructive methodologies to reveal a work's "perversities"---the contradictions, blind spots, and slips that arise from its rootedness in history and ideological conflicts. She seeks to expose these so as to betray the text's (or author's) interests. Her own work is frequently autobiographical, full of puns and other literary gestures that call into question its claims to knowledge---a process she terms "dephallicization." Gallop has published four books and has been the recipient of several fellowships, including a Guggenheim. (Bowker Author Biography) näytä vähemmän
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Yleistieto
- Syntymäaika
- 1952-05-04
- Sukupuoli
- female
- Kansalaisuus
- USA
- Syntymäpaikka
- Duluth, Minnesota, USA
- Koulutus
- Cornell University (BA|1972|Ph.D|1976)
- Ammatit
- professor
- Suhteet
- Blau, Dick (partner)
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- University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
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- #54,749
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- 3.2
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- 3
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- 41
Once she gets to the third and fourth chapters, however, which both deal with Lacan's famous Seminar XX: Encore, in which he outlines his theory of feminine sexuality, Gallop really hits her stride. Those two chapters alone make this book a classic, a sensitive reading of Lacan's theory (supplemented, in Ch.4, by a reading of Stephen Heath) that shows why Lacan is both an object of attraction and repulsion to feminist critics - and indeed, why this ambivalence is so central to the insights he provides.
Chapters 5 and 6 successfully repeat this pattern by putting Luce Irigaray into dialogue with Freud and Lacan, focusing in particular how she challenges notions of paternal authority, attempting to find a different way of writing and thinking that does not fall back into the same old patriarchal patterns. I found it fascinating how Gallop shows Irigaray asking "impertinent questions" to her "fatherly" precursors, while at the same time showing how Irigaray, as their "daughter," is unconsciously partially "seduced" by them.
The final three chapters show feminist critics in dialogue with each other: Irigaray and Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni (Ch.7), Irigaray and Julia Kristeva (Ch.8), and finally, Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous (Ch.9). Gallop shows how these thinkers struggle to implement a feminist discourse that goes beyond the traditions of phallic authority.
What I really loved about Gallop's book is its radical honesty: as a critic, Gallop is not afraid to be brutally candid about the shortcomings of her intellectual heroes nor, even more endearingly, to turn the spotlight of criticism on her own possible shortcomings and prejudices. "In all this talk of correct narrative position, staging one's own transference, risking one's identity, I begin to feel less and less sure of what might be the 'correct position' for me, of whether I, like Irigaray, am trying to regain self-mastery by the best ruse of all. [...] my avowed project [...] is to avoid getting locked into a specular opposition," she writes in Ch.7 (p.103). This openness, this vulnerability, this unvarnished willingness to question authority makes Gallop's book a true revelation: here, in its self-reflexive uncertainty, is a genuinely new mode of discourse, the realization of a promise that psychoanalysis has, until now, largely failed to keep.… (lisätietoja)