1. Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983), p. 61. The debate about what whether the “gaze” is male is informed by Mary Ann Doane’s and E. Ann Kaplan’s theorizing of the female gaze. Kaplan’s essay—“Is the gaze male?” in Women and Film (New York: Methuen Press, 1983)—is interesting to me because she claims that feminist film critics “have (rightly) been wary of admitting the degree to which the pleasure [of looking] comes from identification with objectification” (p. 33). The problem of identificatory readings is beyond the scope of my study, but a crucial topic for the discussion of a specific female pleasure.
2. Myra Jehlen, “Archimedes and the Paradox of Literary Criticism,” in The Signs Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 71. See also Teresa de Lauretis’s Alice Doesn’t p. 7.
3. Wayne C. Booth, “Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism,” in Critical Inquiry 9, 1 (September 1982): 45–76. Although Booth takes sides against Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais in order to support his own feminist perspective, he ignores, I think, the potential in Bakhtin’s theory for revisioning the silenced voices of women in the dialogue/discourse of social power.
4. V. N. Vololinov, “Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art,” in Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, trans. I. R. Titunik ( New York: Academic Press, 1976 ), p. 115.
5. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986 ), p. 148.