The Subversive Psyche: Contemporary Women's Narrative from Argentina and UruguayThrough detailed and theoretically sophisticated discussions of texts by six key writers - Luisa Valenzuela, Marta Traba, Sylvia Molloy, and Reina Roffe (Argentina), and Cristina Peri Rossi and Armonia Somers (Uruguay) - Geofrey Kantaris shows how their writing of the 1980s, including their own critical and theoretical work, engages with, and often challenges, Western theories of the construction of gender and its relation to identity politics (notably psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and feminism). By situating their work within the political turmoil of the period - the brutal military dictatorships and the necessity of political or cultural exile - Kantaris is able to show how these texts signal a shift of cultural perspective in the Southern Cone, in which gender is no longer ignored in the construction of national and political narratives. |
Common terms and phrases
aesthetic Alí Argentina Armonía Somers attempt becomes binary body breve cárcel Brujo castration context Cristina Peri Cristina Peri Rossi critical cultural Dasein death Derrida desire dialectical difference discourse displacement dissemination egg-whites elefantes emerge emphasis essay Evita exile experience father female feminine feminism feminist fetish fiction Freud gender Heidegger hymen imaginary inscribed Irigaray Jacques Lacan jouissance Lacan language Latin America Luisa Valenzuela male mandrake Mariana Marta Traba masculine means metaphor metonymic military mirror mode Molloy mother narrative narrator novel object Pasiphaë paternal paternal Law patriarchal Peri Rossi phallic phallus political possible postmodernism precisely Psyche psychoanalysis radical reading reference reification represent resistance Roffé rompiente rupture scene Sembrando Flores sexual identity Ship of Fools signifier silence social Somers's space stereotype story structure subversive suggests Sylvia Molloy symbolic textual theory tion torture Uruguay Uruguayan violence Walter Benjamin woman women women's writing words