A01=Catherine M. Peebles
Author_Catherine M. Peebles
Category=JBFV
Category=JBSF11
Category=JMAF
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Product details
- ISBN 9781557533296
- Weight: 446g
- Dimensions: 157 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 01 Dec 2003
- Publisher: Purdue University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
The Psyche of Feminism argues that a feminist ethics, in order to be both feminist and ethical, needs to embrace psychoanalysis. After reviewing the relation between feminism and psychoanalysis and arguing for the centrality of psychoanalysis to feminist thought, the study offers an analysis of two attempts by George Sand to reimagine the sexual relationship (Letters to Marcie, Lelia), where the emphasis is on political injustice and the impossibility of women's desires. Moving from rights and desires to the question of pleasures, Peebles then takes up a relatively little-read work by Colette, The Pure and the Impure, in which the narrator suggests that pleasure and its corporeal language hold the key to any understanding of masculinity and femininity. We are then led to the risky question of ""neutrality"" put forward by Nathalie Sarraute ( You Don't Love Yourself ), whose work forces a psychoanalytic feminism to face the question: what if sexual difference itself is a ruse? Does the notion of a human neutrality condemn us either to a bygone humanism or to psychosis? The final chapter of the work synthesizes these analyses, and argues for a fundamental feminist rethinking of the ideal of equality, an ideal that figures significantly—and uneasily—in each of the works this book treats.
Catherine M. Peebles, University of New Hampshire, has written on French literature and film, psychoanalytic theory, and feminist theory. Currently she is working on a project tentatively entitled Anxiety, Equality, and the Will to Power.
