Feminist Readings of Antigone (SUNY series in Gender Theory)
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 143843278X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
New and classic essays on Antigone and feminist philosophy.
Feminist Readings of Antigone collects the most interesting and provocative feminist work on the figure of Antigone, in particular looking at how she can figure into contemporary debates on the role of women in society. Contributors focus on female subjectivity and sexuality, feminist ethics and politics, questions of race and gender, psychoanalytic theory, kinship, embodiment, and tensions between the private and the public. This collection seeks to explore and spark debate about why Antigone has become such an important figure for feminist thinkers of our time, what we can learn from her, whether a feminist politics turning to this ancient heroine can be progressive or is bound to idealize the past, and why Antigone keeps entering the stage in times of political crisis and struggle in all corners of the world. Fanny Söderbäck has gathered classic work in this field alongside newly written pieces by some of the most important voices in contemporary feminist philosophy. The volume includes essays by Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Tina Chanter, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva.
“These essays move beyond the critical aspect to consider the productive insights of Antigone for addressing contemporary political problems. Particularly remarkable because of its timeliness is the unity of the persistent themes of the political import of the relation of life to death, as well as of bare life to political life, and the state’s need to have access to the body in order for the law to have force.” — philoSOPHIA
Women's Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan
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focused on the work of Foucault, who primarily was concerned with male sexuality. No mention is made, for instance, of Sappho in Foucault’s work. Nor is an extended discussion of tragedy in its relation to sexual destiny to be found in the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides. Clearly, Sappho would have added a feminine perspective to Foucault’s history. Had he looked closer at tragedy, the outcome could well have been the same. Tragedies, as we know, were written by men, but were
inscribing the legacy of Antigone into a relatively current discussion about political discourses on race (the play is staged in apartheid South Africa), and by introducing race as another constitutive outside of politics she simultaneously renews and broadens a feminist discourse that has too long remained blind to its own others, to its own constitutive outside. Just as Antigone was buried alive for a crime that was not a crime, the black prisoners on Robben Island are excluded from their polis
humiliation, including physical abuse, to which Hodoshe has subjected Winston. We know that it enrages him, and yet he professes to prefer such treatment to the ridicule to which his cellmate subjects him. Such a profession is a measure of how unnerved Winston is by John’s sexual taunting. The terms in which Winston expresses his preference are indicative of his anxiety about his sexual identity. He would rather tolerate Hodoshe because the prison guard only wants to make Winston into a “boy,”
(49). The stage directions at the beginning of the play clearly recall Oedipus and the riddle of the Sphinx, as John and Winston are shackled together and forced to run to their cell “three-legged” (47), but they fail to run fast enough to avoid being beaten by Hodoshe, whose offstage presence is figured as the curse under which the Oedipal family labors. The beatings John and Winston sustain, which recall the routine beating slaves received in fifth century bce Athens, as much as they do the
human life. This participation in what is non-living turns out to be something like the condition of living itself. As in the reading supplied by Jacques Lacan, Heidegger also claims that “[Antigone] names being itself ” (118), and that this proximity to being involves a necessary estrangement from living beings even as it is the ground of their very emergence. Similarly, Heidegger understands the “unwritten law” to which Antigone refers as a relationship to being and to death: “Antigone assumes
