Julie Kelso

Andrea Dworkin on the Biblical Foundations of Violence Against Women

In this chapter, Julie Kelso takes an in-depth look at the late Andrea Dworkin’s “notorious” book, Intercourse (1987), considering Dworkin’s controversial claim that women’s secondary status can be attributed to the socially constructed designation of the female body as lacking physical integrity during (hetero)sexual intercourse. Within patriarchal culture, women are recognized as having a body that can be penetrated, occupied, and denied privacy during the act of intercourse; this, asserts Dworkin, is central to women’s subordinate status. Kelso guides readers through Dworkin’s materialist analysis of intercourse as an institutional practice, considering the various discourses (literary, philosophical, religious, legal) that she claims have given intercourse its political meaning. She then frames Dworkin’s discussions of the role of biblical texts (particularly the sodomy laws in Leviticus and the story of Adam and Eve in Gen. 2:4b−4:1) within the framework of Intercourse as a whole, considering her evaluation of their foundational role in legitimizing the potentially devastating violence of intercourse for women in male-supremacist societies.

Irigaray’s Madonna

In this essay, I argue that Luce Irigaray’s recent, seemingly esoteric readings of the Madonna, actually provide us with a constructive, perhaps even politically progressive, interpretive mode for engaging with the religious texts and figures of our tradition as women. As such, I argue that through her own specific interpretive practice Irigaray provides us with a new image of Mary, and this new Madonna figures the very interrelational interpretive practice that Irigaray believes essential when it comes to our engagements with the (religious) texts of our tradition. Irigaray’s Madonna is an ethical listener, interpreter and exchanger of ‘sacred’ discourse and it is this aspect of Mary that warrants our allegiance. To imitate Mary is to practice reading, listening, and interpreting in the feminine, practices that can aid us in our ‘becoming spiritual’, which in Irigarayan terms is another way of saying ‘becoming woman’.

Review of Fiona Black, The Artifice of Love: Grotesque Bodies and the Song of Songs. London and New York: T&T Clarke/Continuum, 2009.

Julie Kelso reviews Fiona Black, The Artifice of Love: Grotesque Bodies and the Song of Songs . London and New York: T&T Clarke/Continuum, 2009.