Lacan and Critical Feminism

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.

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

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