... Courtesans were also a tourist attraction. Merchant capitalism and the money economy worked a... more ... Courtesans were also a tourist attraction. Merchant capitalism and the money economy worked against static family arrangements in some cases (witness the anxiety of Alberti's treatise regarding the integrity of proximate Page 84. 72/Carla Freccero family business relations). ...
Does current scholarship shun or embrace what seems aleatory or “beside the point” in early moder... more Does current scholarship shun or embrace what seems aleatory or “beside the point” in early modern prose, especially those elements that could be said to convey affect, tone, emotion, desire? What does it do with lyric’s indeterminate rhetoricity? Through the figure of touch and the contingencies of the tangent, this paper explores textual instances in early modern Continental literature where reading poses problems of interpretation that cannot be resolved into determinate meaning and that raise the question of how to “read” what moderns call “desire,” especially queer desire, in early modern poetry and prose. François Rabelais’s inscription of woman as writing, the tortuous fashioning of the lyric “I” as it travels between Petrarch and Louise Labé, and the sparing narrative of Marguerite de Navarre bear fragmentary traces of what moderns might call a queer feminist archive, and yet none yield positive (or empirical) “knowledge” about gendered and sexual practices and subjectivities. Rather, they inscribe modalities of desire that challenge scholars of sexuality to attend to the excess and indeterminacy that eludes efforts to capture and “represent” objects of knowledge, whether “early” or “modern.”
... Cindy Patton, theorist and activist, chair of Boston's AIDS Action Committee... more ... Cindy Patton, theorist and activist, chair of Boston's AIDS Action Committee and former editor of Gay Community News, devotes an entire chapter of Sex and Germs to erotophobia, defining it as "the ... [MC]: Allhos [fellas]: Suck dick [MC]: Allniggas [ladies]: Eat pussy [repeat] [MC ...
Carla Freccero is chair of the Department of Literature at the University of California,Santa Cru... more Carla Freccero is chair of the Department of Literature at the University of California,Santa Cruz. Her books include Premodern Sexualities (1996), coedited with Louise Fradenburg, and Popular Culture: An Introduction (1999). She is working on a book about early modern French colonial encounters and has recently completed a book titled Prolepses:Queer/Early/Modern.
What I am presenting here is part of a book-length project on the politics of maternal sovereignt... more What I am presenting here is part of a book-length project on the politics of maternal sovereignty in early modern France. The focus is on the staging of feminine voices in The Heptameron and their delineation of a political conflict between maternal authority on the one hand and daughterly resistance on the other, in an attempt to understand something about how the nation-state "interpellates" the female sovereign subject in early modem France.' It is important, I think, not to suppose that a female self or the "woman's voice" that gets constituted in the past is a necessarily "feminist" or oppositional one, and it is in that spirit that I undertake the present work. I owe a great debt to the historicist impulse of literary biographers and literary historians who often gather the documents of a person's life and read between the documents and "the fiction" to write a story about that person "as though you were there." These scholars juxtapose the archives and the fiction and weave a narrative between them. They have always known that there is "fiction in the archives," to use Natalie Zemon Davis's term for the way fiction inhabits, if not constitutes, the texts of history. 2 The impulse of these historians and biographers, however, seems to have been a reconstructive one in that they sutured fic-1. Interpellation is a term used by Louis Althusser to describe how ideology constitutes the subject in a given social formation. In "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)," he offers these explanations: "1 say: the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology, but at the same time and immediately I add that the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of 'constituting' concrete individuals as subjects" (171); and: "ideology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way that it 'recruits' subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: 'Hey, you there!"' (174); see Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, trans.
... Talking Commodities: Woman in a Renaissance Text Carla Freccero ... In these senses he is not... more ... Talking Commodities: Woman in a Renaissance Text Carla Freccero ... In these senses he is not ideologically representative, either as a Florentine or as a member of the family business (Alberti did not become a merchant banker, nor did he marry and have children of his own). ...
Thus from the get-go, I thought about the feminist sex wars not as a participant, but as a histor... more Thus from the get-go, I thought about the feminist sex wars not as a participant, but as a historical and theoretical scholar, a feminist, and an activist. I remember that in the early eighties, when I was an assistant professor at Dartmouth College, I was an anti-porn feminist, and that ...
Abstract This response to Lee Edelman's" Against Survival" wonders why Hamlet is t... more Abstract This response to Lee Edelman's" Against Survival" wonders why Hamlet is taught in high school English classes and thinks about possible non-normative responses to the play, both suicidal and homicidal, suggested by the reading Edelman provides. In occupying ...
... Courtesans were also a tourist attraction. Merchant capitalism and the money economy worked a... more ... Courtesans were also a tourist attraction. Merchant capitalism and the money economy worked against static family arrangements in some cases (witness the anxiety of Alberti's treatise regarding the integrity of proximate Page 84. 72/Carla Freccero family business relations). ...
Does current scholarship shun or embrace what seems aleatory or “beside the point” in early moder... more Does current scholarship shun or embrace what seems aleatory or “beside the point” in early modern prose, especially those elements that could be said to convey affect, tone, emotion, desire? What does it do with lyric’s indeterminate rhetoricity? Through the figure of touch and the contingencies of the tangent, this paper explores textual instances in early modern Continental literature where reading poses problems of interpretation that cannot be resolved into determinate meaning and that raise the question of how to “read” what moderns call “desire,” especially queer desire, in early modern poetry and prose. François Rabelais’s inscription of woman as writing, the tortuous fashioning of the lyric “I” as it travels between Petrarch and Louise Labé, and the sparing narrative of Marguerite de Navarre bear fragmentary traces of what moderns might call a queer feminist archive, and yet none yield positive (or empirical) “knowledge” about gendered and sexual practices and subjectivities. Rather, they inscribe modalities of desire that challenge scholars of sexuality to attend to the excess and indeterminacy that eludes efforts to capture and “represent” objects of knowledge, whether “early” or “modern.”
... Cindy Patton, theorist and activist, chair of Boston's AIDS Action Committee... more ... Cindy Patton, theorist and activist, chair of Boston's AIDS Action Committee and former editor of Gay Community News, devotes an entire chapter of Sex and Germs to erotophobia, defining it as "the ... [MC]: Allhos [fellas]: Suck dick [MC]: Allniggas [ladies]: Eat pussy [repeat] [MC ...
Carla Freccero is chair of the Department of Literature at the University of California,Santa Cru... more Carla Freccero is chair of the Department of Literature at the University of California,Santa Cruz. Her books include Premodern Sexualities (1996), coedited with Louise Fradenburg, and Popular Culture: An Introduction (1999). She is working on a book about early modern French colonial encounters and has recently completed a book titled Prolepses:Queer/Early/Modern.
What I am presenting here is part of a book-length project on the politics of maternal sovereignt... more What I am presenting here is part of a book-length project on the politics of maternal sovereignty in early modern France. The focus is on the staging of feminine voices in The Heptameron and their delineation of a political conflict between maternal authority on the one hand and daughterly resistance on the other, in an attempt to understand something about how the nation-state "interpellates" the female sovereign subject in early modem France.' It is important, I think, not to suppose that a female self or the "woman's voice" that gets constituted in the past is a necessarily "feminist" or oppositional one, and it is in that spirit that I undertake the present work. I owe a great debt to the historicist impulse of literary biographers and literary historians who often gather the documents of a person's life and read between the documents and "the fiction" to write a story about that person "as though you were there." These scholars juxtapose the archives and the fiction and weave a narrative between them. They have always known that there is "fiction in the archives," to use Natalie Zemon Davis's term for the way fiction inhabits, if not constitutes, the texts of history. 2 The impulse of these historians and biographers, however, seems to have been a reconstructive one in that they sutured fic-1. Interpellation is a term used by Louis Althusser to describe how ideology constitutes the subject in a given social formation. In "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)," he offers these explanations: "1 say: the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology, but at the same time and immediately I add that the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of 'constituting' concrete individuals as subjects" (171); and: "ideology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way that it 'recruits' subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: 'Hey, you there!"' (174); see Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, trans.
... Talking Commodities: Woman in a Renaissance Text Carla Freccero ... In these senses he is not... more ... Talking Commodities: Woman in a Renaissance Text Carla Freccero ... In these senses he is not ideologically representative, either as a Florentine or as a member of the family business (Alberti did not become a merchant banker, nor did he marry and have children of his own). ...
Thus from the get-go, I thought about the feminist sex wars not as a participant, but as a histor... more Thus from the get-go, I thought about the feminist sex wars not as a participant, but as a historical and theoretical scholar, a feminist, and an activist. I remember that in the early eighties, when I was an assistant professor at Dartmouth College, I was an anti-porn feminist, and that ...
Abstract This response to Lee Edelman's" Against Survival" wonders why Hamlet is t... more Abstract This response to Lee Edelman's" Against Survival" wonders why Hamlet is taught in high school English classes and thinks about possible non-normative responses to the play, both suicidal and homicidal, suggested by the reading Edelman provides. In occupying ...
... This book could not have been written without the research as-sistance of two graduate studen... more ... This book could not have been written without the research as-sistance of two graduate students in particular, Julie Cox and Maria Frangos. Maria especially has played a crucial role in shepherding this book into its final form. ...
... Texts such as Jewelle Gomez's Gilda Stories, Octavia Butler&#x27... more ... Texts such as Jewelle Gomez's Gilda Stories, Octavia Butler's Xeno-genesis trilogy, Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek, and William Gibson's Neuromancer, and films and videos such as Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied or Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning can be ...
Premodern Sexualitiesoffers rigorous new approaches to current problems in the historiography of ... more Premodern Sexualitiesoffers rigorous new approaches to current problems in the historiography of sexuality. From queer readings of early modern medical texts to transcribing and interrogating pre-modern documents of sexual transgression, the ...
... Father figures: Genealogy and narrative structure in Rabelais. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: ... more ... Father figures: Genealogy and narrative structure in Rabelais. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: ... SUBJECT(S): Fathers and sons in literature; Father figures in literature; Genealogy in literature; Narration (Rhetoric); Rabelais, François; Criticism and interpretation. ...
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