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Critical Madness, Enunciative Excess: The Figure of the Madwoman in Postmodern Feminist Texts

University of California, Irvine

This article provides a comparison of the politics of representation through the performance of hysteria and madness in Luce Irigaray's collection of essays, This Sex Which Is Not One, and Kathy Acker's novel, Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream. Through close readings of Irigaray's and Acker's texts, the article explores how these critical, feminist projects question the mechanisms and effects of a dominant tradition in which they participate at the same time. These readings argue against a widespread feminist position which claims that the use of "the madwoman" restricts feminist theory either to silence or to a powerless, delirious, speaking position. Rather, this article shows that the figure does not exclusively symbolize the restrictions of feminist theory through dominant discourses but that it aids postmodern authors such as Irigaray and Acker in the creation of an excessive politics of enunciation, which destabilizes and reconfigures the conditions of representation.

Key Words: feminism • sexual difference • gender • madness • madwoman • postmodern writing • Luce Irigaray • Kathy Acker

Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, Vol. 3, No. 3, 308-329 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/1532708603254434


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