She Changes by Intrigue: Irony, Femininity and Feminism (Genus 6) (Genus: Gender in Modern Culture)

261 Pages·2005·0.72 MB·English

by  Lydia Rainford

She Changes by Intrigue
GENUS:
Gender in Modern Culture
6
Russell West-Pavlov (Berlin)
Jennifer Yee (Oxford)
Frank Lay (Cologne)
Sabine Schülting (Berlin)
She Changes by Intrigue
Irony, Femininity and Feminism
Lydia Rainford
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005
Cover design: Pier Post
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 90-420-1607-8
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005
Printed in the Netherlands
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1
The “Impossible Dialectic”: Julia Kristeva 19

Chapter 2
The Anxiety of Irony: Søren Kierkegaard 53

Chapter 3
Unsustainable Change? The Traps of Ironic Femininity 83

Chapter 4
“Irony and Something Else”: Jacques Derrida 123

Chapter 5
Miming History: Sarah Kofman 177

Afterword
The Lesson of Irony, The Future of Feminism 233

Works Cited 237
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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, for appointing me
to the Joanna Randall MacIver Fellowship, and giving me the time
and space in which to finish this book. Many thanks are also due to
Robert Smith for his enthusiasm, patience and keen sense of irony in
supervising the original research; to Clare Connors, for sisterly
solidarity; and to my parents for their unfailing love and support.
Finally, by greatest debt is to Dominic, who has sustained me through
this project from beginning to end.
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Introduction

In spite of what the title of this book might imply, I do not intend to
formulate a feminist theory of wily femininity; at least, not without
introducing a number of disruptions and complications. I intend to
examine the association of a certain sort of “ironic” intrigue with the
figure of “femininity” in philosophy and theory, and investigate the
connections between this association and contemporary feminist
debates about gendered subjectivity and agency. But I also intend to
problematize the figure of “femininity”, questioning its hierarchical
and historical position in philosophical discourses, and how feminism
might relate to it. And I will be asking why irony should align itself
with “femininity” and feminism, and analyzing the different forms it
takes. In short, this is a book about writing, authorship, strategy and
agency: how “woman” and “femininity” have been figured, and how
feminists might re-write these figurations. It traces the mutual
relations and implications of irony, femininity and feminism.

In recent years, one of the most sustained debates within feminist
theory and philosophy has been over questions of subjectivity and
agency. The basic premise of feminism – that it is a discourse whose
aim is the freedom and autonomy of women – still holds, but the ways
in which “women” and “autonomy” are defined have become ever
more problematic. There has been an increasing anxiety about the
political possibility and desirability of (referring to) an autonomous
subjective category of “woman” because the ontological and
epistemological foundations through which this category commonly
gains significance are so embedded in patriarchal discourses. To
found an identity politics on the basis of “woman’s” sexual or
biological difference seems to veer uncomfortably close to historical
prescriptions of woman’s natural “essential” nature, and inferiority,
that feminism would seek to counter. Moreover, such a definition of