pomofemlitcrit vocab ?

[Lisa Rogers <eqwq.lrogers@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx (Doug Henwood)
I'm out of touch now, but this stuff used to be popular in feminist
lit crit, with a deconstructive bent. Logocentric = phallocentric =
hierarchy = faith in a transcendental signified. Against that,
decenter, deconstruct, write under erasure, enjoy the signifying
freeplay of endless displacements.
They still write that stuff?

Lisa:  I think some still are, but whenever I see stuff like that I
generally run in the other direction.

A little of it makes sense to me, but I still draw a line somewhere
before that extreme.  Probably the closest I've got to some of that
is Helene Cixous, Adrienne Rich and such.  I really enjoyed "This sex
which is not one" and "Compulsory Heterosexuality".  These are not
litcritters, though, I think.  They do make some use of language that
is far from conventional, but it made sense to me.  The stretch of
language is intended to stretch the thoughts, to express the
inadequacy of previous concepts/language.

Some of the lingo is partly a result of the same forces that create
specialist jargon in any field, some of it indicates specialized
meanings.  Some of it is reasonably translatable or has a point, such
as 'deconstruct'.  It means something like 'analyze', but it
emphasizes that the thing to be deconstructed was socially
constructed in the first place, so it is to be analyzed in this way.
One looks for it's origins, political implications and connections to
other ideas and social/material forces, rather than assume the
naturally obvious existence and properties of a given thing such as,
say, "masculinity," heterosexuality, capitalism or whatever.

Seems marxian to me.

But 'transcendental signified'?  I don't even want to know.

Lisa



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