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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature

Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature

Sempruch, Justyna

Paperback

Series: Comparative Cultural Studies

Literary CriticismMetaphysical GeneralWomen's Studies

ISBN10: 1557534918
ISBN13: 9781557534910
Publisher: Purdue Univ Pr
Published: Mar 1 2008
Pages: 198
Weight: 0.75
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
In her book Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature, Justyna Sempruch analyses contemporary representations of the witch as a locus for the cultural negotiation of genders. Sempruch revisits some of the most prominent traits in past and current perceptions in feminist scholarship of exclusion and difference. She examines a selection of 20th century US-American, Canadian, and European narratives to reveal the continued political relevance of metaphors sustained in the archetype of the witch widely thought to belong to pop-cultural or folkloristic formulations of the past. Through a critical re-reading of the feminist texts engaging with these metaphors, Sempruch develops a new concept of the witch, one that challenges traditional gender-biased theories linking it either to a malevolent hag on the margins of culture or to unrestrained feminine sexual desire. Sempruch turns, instead, to the causes for radical feminist critique of feminine sexuality as a fabrication of logocentric thinking and shows that the problematic conversion of the hag into a superwoman can be interpreted today as a therapeutic performance translating fixed identity into a site of continuous negotiation of the subject in process. Tracing the development of feminist constructs of the witch from 1970s radical texts to the present, Sempruch explores the early psychoanalytical writings of Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray and feminist reformulations of identity by Butler and Braidotti together with fictional texts from different political and cultural contexts.

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