Showing papers in "Feminist Studies in 1981"

Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of "L'Ecriture Feminine"

Abstract: each other's positions at top volume (Monique Wittig to Hle'ne Cixous: "Ceci est un scandale!"). But in the realm of theory, the French share a deep critique of the modes through which the West has claimed to discern evidence-or reality-and a suspicion concerning efforts to change the position of women that fail to address the forces in the body, in the unconscious, in the basic structures of culture that are invisible to the empirical eye. Briefly, French feminists in general believe that Western thought has been based on a systematic repression of women's experience. Thus their assertion of a bedrock female nature makes sense as a point from which to deconstruct langauge, philosophy, psychoanalysis, the social practices, and direction of patriarchal culture as we live in and resist it.

Gender and dichotomy

Abstract: The social conditions and consequences of the radical use of logical dichotomy are generally neglected by logicians and sociologists alike. Logicians, no doubt, can safely ignore them, but social theorists do so at their own risk. This paper examines some ways in which logical dichotomy and radical gender distinctions are associated, some consequences of conceiving of gender distinctions as formally dichotomous, and some reasons why it is in the interest of certain social groups to understand gender distinctions in that way. The point of departure will be an examination of Emile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. This book serves as a model of how one may begin to understand relations between intellectual concepts and social distinctions. It also serves as a cautionary tale, for Durkheim's uncritical use of dichotomy can be shown to create certain problems, among them

"Woman is perfect": H. D.'s debate with Freud.

Abstract: In a rare and uncharacteristic burst of anger, the poet H.D. wrote to Bryher, the woman with whom she lived on and off from 1919 to 1950, that she would not have her analysis with Sigmund Freud "spoiled" by the publication of her poem "The Master" (written 1934-35) in her friend Robert Herring's Life and Letters Today.1 Both Bryher and Herring were insistent that she print "The Master." But in 1935 H.D. refused to release the poem.2 In publishing "The Master" here for the first time, we would like to explore some of the implications of this important, unknown work in H.D.'s poetic career, especially as the poem stands in relation to the magisterial figure of Freud, so central to issues about women, sexuality, and culture. In her refusal to publish the poem, H.D. was not particularly concerned with preserving the privacy of her analysis with Freud, which had occurred in 1933 (March through May) and 1934 (October through November). For she would, in any case, later write and publish a number of pieces about her experience in psychoanalysis. Tribute to Freud, written in 1942 and published in 1956, is the best known and most public account. The character Theseus in H.D.'s book-length poem Helen in Egypt, a nurturant wise man who helps Helen understand her memories and her fragmented selves, is also explicitly based on Freud.3 In contrast to these accounts of Freud, "The Master" reveals a dimension of H.D.'s analysis which Tribute to Freud only suggests with the subtlest nuance and most oblique reference. Tribute to Freud is an autobiographical essay both generically and stylistically interesting for the allusive and attenuated pleasures of its personal, political, and spiritual reflections. Far from narcissistic, the work explores family, sexuality, and culture using H.D.'s avid and responsive memories as a probe. In this memoir, H.D. does not simply meditate on what Freud told her,