Teresa de Lauretis

Feminist Studies/Critical Studies: Issues, Terms, and Contexts

“It is by now clear that a feminist renaissance is under way … a shift in perspective far more extraordinary and influential than the shift from theology to humanism of the European Renaissance.”1 Like feminism itself, these words of Adrienne Rich, written in 1973, bear reevaluation; not so much, perhaps, to discuss the validity of their assessment or the extensiveness of its claim as to examine the manner of the shift, to analyze, articulate, address the terms of this other perspective.

Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation

There is a sense in which lesbian identity could be assumed, spoken, and articulated conceptually as political through feminism-and, current debates to wit, against feminism; in particular through and against the feminist critique of the Western discourse on love and sexuality, and therefore, to begin with, the rereading of psychoanalysis as a theory of sexuality and sexual difference. If the first feminist emphasis on sexual difference as gender (womans difference from man) has rightly come under attack for obscuring the effects of other differences in womens psychosocial oppression, nevertheless that emphasis on sexual difference did open up a critical space-a conceptual, representational, and erotic space in which women could address themselves to women. And in the very act of assuming and speaking from the position of subject, a woman could concurrently recognize women as subjects and as objects of female desire.

The Cinematic Apparatus

In the first moments of the history of cinema, it is the technology which provides the immediate interest: what is promoted and sold is the experience of the machine, the apparatus. The Grand Cafe programme is headed with the announcement of ‘Le Cinematographe’ and continues with its description: ‘this apparatus, invented by MM. Auguste and Louis Lumiere, permits the recording, by series of photographs, of all the movements which have succeeded one another over a given period of time in front of the camera and the subsequent reproduction of these movements by the projection of their images, life size, on a screen before an entire audience’; only after that description is there mention of the titles of the films to be shown, the ‘sujets actuels’, relegated to the bottom of the programme sheet.1

The Stubborn Drive

Sexuality must not be described as a stubborn drive, by nature alien and of necessity disobedient to a power which exhausts itself trying to subdue it and often fails to control it entirely. It appears rather as an especially dense transfer point for relations of power: between men and women, young people and old people, parents and offspring, teachers and students, priests and laity, an administration and a population. -Michel Foucault, The History of SexualitySexuality must not be described as a stubborn drive, by nature alien and of necessity disobedient to a power which exhausts itself trying to subdue it and often fails to control it entirely. It appears rather as an especially dense transfer point for relations of power: between men and women, young people and old people, parents and offspring, teachers and students, priests and laity, an administration and a population. -Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality

Der Feminismus und seine Differenzen

Es wird berichtet, daß Audre Lorde 1989 auf einer Dichterlesung in Stanford ihr Publikum mit den Worten begrüßte: »Ich bin eine schwarze feministische lesbische Kriegerin-Poetin-Mutter, die ihre Arbeit macht.« Und dann fragte sie: »Wer seid Ihr, und wie macht Ihr Eure Arbeit?« Ich habe Audre Lorde nie kennengelernt, aber in meinem heutigen Vortrag, der ihr gewidmet ist, möchte ich auf ihre Frage antworten als Versuch, einen Dialog auf unterschiedlichen Wellenlängen aufzunehmen, der dazu beitragen soll, jenes »Haus der Differenzen« mitzubauen, das sie in ihrer Mythobiographie Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, 1982 [Zami. Ein Leben unter Frauen, Berlin, 1993] so überzeugend entworfen hat. Also lassen Sie mich nochmals beginnen, und lassen Sie mich sagen, daß ich eine weiße, feministische, lesbische Kriegerin-Theoretikerin-Mutter bin, die ihre Arbeit macht. Und meine Arbeit ist es, hier und jetzt zu Ihnen über Theorie zu sprechen und im übrigen an anderen Orten Theorie zu lehren und zu schreiben. Doch ich möchte Ihnen ganz aufrichtig gestehen, daß es mir lieber wäre, ich könnte Lyrik oder Science Fiction schreiben oder Filme machen. Aber ich kann es nicht. Ich weiß nicht, wie es geht, und würde ich es versuchen, wären die Ergebnisse wahrscheinlich kaum zufriedenstellend. Ich wünschte, ich könnte mich Dichterin statt Theoretikerin nennen, so wie Audre Lorde oder Adrienne Rieh es können. Ich bin aufgewachsen in einem Kulturkreis, in dem Dichtung immer noch ein viel größeres Ansehen genießt als Kritik, Theorie, Philosophie: Dante, nicht Thomas von Aquin, verkörpert den Gipfel der italienischen Kultur. Selbstverständlich waren sowohl Dante als auch von Aquin außerordentlich politische Autoren, wie auch Audre Lorde, aber es war Dantes Göttliche Komödie, diese Mythobiograpie eines Krieger-Poeten, an der sich die Einbildungskraft einer ganzen Kultur entzündete und die den Träumen und Alpträumen für kommende Jahrhunderte Form gab. Wie die Arbeit des Philosophen ist auch meine Arbeit nicht so weitreichend, ihr Leserkreis und ihr Einfluß auf die Welt sind viel begrenzter; welche Bedeutung das Wort »Theorie« auch haben mag (und es hat ganz unterschiedliche Bedeutungen, je nachdem wer gefragt wird), »Theorie« hat auf jeden Fall eine weitaus geringere Bedeutung als Dichtung, zumindest außerhalb der Universitäten und der geisteswissenschaftlichen Fachtagungen: Es gibt kei-

Gaudy Rose: Eco and Narcissism*

Whats in a name? asks Juliet, who is a woman and knows the tide, the ebb and flow, the pull of the real. Eco answers her question simply, yet implicating the whole of philosophy and the vicissitudes of Western epistemology: everything and nothing. Stat rosa pristina nomine. Nomina nuda tenemus. 1 But Juliets, of course, was a rhetorical question, and Ecos answer is not what she wants. We leave Juliet at the balcony unfulfilled, as she must be, and go on to scene two.

Gender symptoms, or, peeing like a man

A number of books and articles have been published on the relative merits of queer vs gay and lesbian, on the collisions and coalitions of queer, lesbian and feminist, on queering this and that; more has been written on the meaning of queer, its shifting semantic boundaries, its radical inclusiveness or assimilationist tactics (depending on the point of view), its role in the postmodern global markets commodification of sexuality. This paper, a contribution to social semiotics, does not contribute to the debate on queer, but continues the critical project of rethinking sexuality and gender.

Feminist genealogies: A personal itinerary

Abstract “Feminist Genealogies” is a glimpse at womens intellectual accomplishments from the 17th century to the present, seen from the perspective of a contemporary feminist critic. The question that runs through the lecture concerns womens desire for intellectual creation. The lecture outlines some of the conditions of knowledge that shape feminist thought today.

The Queerness of the Drive

ABSTRACTThe view of sexuality Freud first proposed in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality contains a discrepancy between the sexuality perverse and polymorphous described in the first two essays and the biologically directed, reproductive sexuality of the third essay. According to Jean Laplanche, the theorist of psychoanalysis who is Freud’s closest reader and translator, the discrepancy is due to two contradictory opinions Freud apparently held at different moments of his writing: one, that sexuality is exogenous, an effect of seduction by adults; two, that sexuality is endogenous, innate in the human biological organism. This article focuses on Laplanche’s elucidation of two aspects of sexuality present in each adult: an instinctual, hormonally based, and ultimately reproductive sexual impulse, which begins at puberty, and the drive-based sexual impulses first theorized by Freud as polymorphous-perverse infantile sexuality, which begin in infancy and continue to be active throughout the individu...ABSTRACT The view of sexuality Freud first proposed in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality contains a discrepancy between the sexuality perverse and polymorphous described in the first two essays and the biologically directed, reproductive sexuality of the third essay. According to Jean Laplanche, the theorist of psychoanalysis who is Freud’s closest reader and translator, the discrepancy is due to two contradictory opinions Freud apparently held at different moments of his writing: one, that sexuality is exogenous, an effect of seduction by adults; two, that sexuality is endogenous, innate in the human biological organism. This article focuses on Laplanche’s elucidation of two aspects of sexuality present in each adult: an instinctual, hormonally based, and ultimately reproductive sexual impulse, which begins at puberty, and the drive-based sexual impulses first theorized by Freud as polymorphous-perverse infantile sexuality, which begin in infancy and continue to be active throughout the individual’s life. Laplanche’s rereading of Freud leads to a more complex understanding of sexuality as always deviant, in one way or another and to a greater or lesser degree, from the established social norms. So-called sexual deviance, therefore, is not a problem within the sexual but an issue within the social field.

The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION PART ONE: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LESBIAN SEXUALITY 1. Freud, Sexuality, and Perversion 2. Female Homosexuality Revisited PART TWO: ORIGINAL FANTASIES, SCENARIOS OF DESIRE 3. Recasting the Primal Scene: Film and Lesbian Representation 4. The Seductions of Lesbianism: Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory and the Maternal Imaginary 5. The Lure of the Mannish Lesbian: The Fantasy of Castration and the Signification of Desire PART THREE: TOWARD A THEORY OF LESBIAN SEXUALITY 6. Perverse Desire 7. Sexual Structuring and Habit Changes Works Cited Films Cited General Index Index of Films Citied