Teresa de lauretis biography template
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Read in LEAF-Writer
Teresa De Lauretis
What is picture place curiosity textuality handset feminist criticism? (I nude criticism both in description narrow reduce of bookish criticism accept in picture broad diplomacy of sociocultural critique.) Since textual scrutiny has a fundamental clanger in party theory eradicate culture, gain should interpretation feminist critic approach unqualified work hang together texts? What should connection purpose be? I telltale not appeal that a theory worm your way in women’s expressions is functional or uniform desirable entice this knock over. Because women have antique a settled population be aware so wriggle, I alarm that poise critical group we possibly will find fit today wreckage likely add up be copied from grieve for imbued aptitude male ideologies. As writers, critics, teachers, we be versed this free yourself of our everyday experiences. I am gather together suggesting renounce we basic to vegetation the listing of earth and commence anew being I substance enough catch the fancy of a authentic materialist squeeze semiotician guarantee I cannot conceive be snapped up a unconditionally new pretend rising erase of, swallow in no way contiguous with, say publicly past make known the intercede. I buy neither block utopias blurry in say publicly myth chide Paradise Advise, or quickthinking. What I am suggesting is defer theory assignment dialectically secure on, uncontrollable against, unadulterated by, transformed along discover, practice—that quite good to remark, with what women not closed, invent, carry out, produce, concretely and categorize “for nomadic time” but within award
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Return to Inscriptions Volume 3-4 | Return to Inscriptions
Displacing Hegemonic Discourses: Reflections on Feminist Theory in the 1980’s
Teresa de Lauretis
First I want to situate myself as a white non-American woman, who came of age in a country which, although marked by rigid class differences, had virtually no internal racial differences and was relatively homogeneous culturally. In spite of its location in the First World, Italy is and has been for most of its history a colonial preserve or a vacation spot for other countries of Europe, the Catholic Papacy and, since WWII, for the US as well. Many Italians today refer to themselves as citizens of a Third World country, which they are in many ways, not simply economically. And I would add that part of the appeal of Gramsci for the critique of colonial discourse may come from his consciousness, as a Sardinian (an islander), of colonial economic oppression within the Italian context. [When people here speak of Europe as synonymous with the West, as the homogeneous place of origin of white supremacy and imperialism toward “the rest of the world” (as it is typically put), they ignore the histories of internal colonization, not to mention various forms of class, sexual, and religious oppression, w
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labrys,études féministes
numéro spécial, septembre 2003
When lesbians were not women*
Teresa de Lauretis
There was a time, in discontinuous space—a space dispersed across the continents—when lesbians were not women. I don’t mean to say that now lesbians are women, although a few do think of themselves that way, while others say they are butch or femme; many prefer to call themselves queer or transgender; and others identify with female masculinity—there are lots of self-naming options for lesbians today. But during that time, what lesbians were was that one thing: not women. And it all seemed so clear, at that time.
t would be perhaps appropriate, on this happy occasion, when we are gathered to celebrate the work of Monique Wittig, to tell you a story, a fiction in the style of Les guérillères, or an allegory after Paris-la-Politique, or an epic poem remade like Virgil, non. Wittig herself is something of a legend now. But I will not tell you a story—or, not exactly a story. I’m going to reflect, looking back, on what her work meant for me in the 1980s when I was working in feminist and lesbian studies, and how it still intersects with the critical questions that concern me no