Thinking Through the Body

Gender and Culture Series

by Jane Gallop

From one of our most outspoken feminist critics, this collection explores various ways in which the body can be rethought of as a site of knowledge rather than as a medium to move beyond or dominate. Moving between a theoretical and confessional stance, Gallop explores Sade's relation to mothers both in his novels and his life; Barthe's The Pleasure of the Text; Freud's work, read not as a psychological text but as a literary endeavor and from a woman's point of view; and Luce Irigarary's famous This Sex Which Is Not One.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Bodies, Womens

180 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1988

About the author

Jane Gallop is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin -- Milwaukee, where she has taught since 1990. Before that, she was Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Humanities at Rice University, where she founded the Women's Studies program. At the beginning of her career, she taught in the French Department at Miami University in Ohio (she earned a PhD in French Literature in 1976). She is the author of nine books, and nearly a hundred articles. She has written on a wide range of topics: psychoanalysis, especially the work of Jacques Lacan; French feminism; psychoanalysis and feminism; the Marquis de Sade; feminist literary criticism; pedagogy; sexual harassment; photography; queer theory; close reading. While the topics vary, her writing can be understood as the consistent application of a close reading method to theoretical texts. She has been teaching this close reading of theory to her students for the past 40 years.

Reviews

[Andrea Hickman Walker · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a very odd book. The cover is mentioned in the preface (or introduction, or whatever it was called), which required me to go back and actually look at it, until I found the baby's face. I do think it's an odd choice for a cover, but as the book is nominally about motherhood and mothers, it is appropriate. I am very ambivalent about this book. There was no compulsion to read it. I don't particularly agree with the vast majority of Freudian psychoanalysis and I must admit I found it rather bizarre to apply it to the works of the Marquis de Sade (none of which I have read). There really is only so much I can take of the "phallic mother" and the "castrated mother" and all oedipal nonsense.

Unless you're particularly interested in de Sade or Freud, I wouldn't recommend this.

[James]

More accurately, 'skimmed'. That is indeed Gallop's vagina on the cover.

[Isla McKetta · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too much thinking, not enough body. I expected (and hoped for) a book that would shock my system and push me farther into feminist thinking. Instead I found a dull academic diatribe that I didn't even choose to finish.