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                 In her 1979 essay Women’s Time , Julia Kristeva calls for a radical program of gender terrorism. Civilization is “bored to death” and the job of Feminism is to painfully shock society out of its stupor (Kristeva Women’s Time ,193). It must first and foremost emphasize the real fundamental difference between the sexes. To a large extent the goals of feminism were accomplished—women have at least nominal equality in the political, economic, and professional spheres. Only those goals to do with sexual difference—contraception, abortion, and sexual liberation for example—seem to be still on the table. Women are forced to endure, against their will, an all-out assault on difference and specificity, sacrificed on the altar of stability and conformity. Surely, some women rise within male-dominated hierarchies, but these are mere tokens. Real change must begin with symbolic violence. To this end, she points to women from ...

Decadent Beginnings, Symbolist Endings The Decadent movement was an artistic movement of art and literature from the late 1800s. Some place the beginning of the movement with the 1857 publication of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal , others as late as Anatole Baju’s magazine Le Décadent , first published in 1886. Decadent literature was the primary mode of French literature from the beginning of the belle epoque through about 1900, and the many schools of literature at the time, including Parnassism, Naturalism, 1 Symbolism, and Decadentism proper all fall under its purview. This decadent umbrella is primarily comprised of a group of themes which are themselves constitutive of much of what the Decadent movement represented. They include, in no particular order: Theophile Gautier’s Parnassian declaration “ l'art pour l'art” (art for art’s sake), the assertion that there are no deep or primordial truths, the preeminence of artifice over the natural, the modern city as a hive ...

  Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Sonnet XLI”  is a demystified picture of women’s sexuality detached from fantasies. In hushed tones just prior to a sexual encounter, the poem attends to the strength of a woman’s sexuality, regardless of her feelings towards her partner. Refusing to fall back to an acceptable justification, such as future love or procreation, Millay rejects an optimistic or reparative meaning to her drives. The sonnet reveals that, as women are undone to be the space of man's becoming through sex, a space is created for a heterosexual and female sinthom osexuality. Intoning to her unnamed lover, Millay expresses her desire to “bear [his] body’s weight upon [her] breast,” while apologizing for the “needs and notions of [her kind]” women (Millay 601).  The reader—and indeed, the lover—may be surprised to learn that the “needs and notions” of women apparently do not include any semblance of a need “for conversation when [they] meet again,” (ibid). Millay i...

“ The Society we know, our own culture, is based upon the exchange of women,” - Luce Irigaray          Crises have lost their novelty. Rising political unrest, looming disasters, and the culture wars are the background noise of modern life. Flame wars and discourse endlessly recycle the same handful of topics; debating the successes and failures of this or that struggle against oppression. Today's flavor of discourse is transgender rights. Tomorrow's is discourse will be about problematic Maoists, last week we covered queer assimilation and the week before that was hammering out a definition of "lesbian" which is already lost to the sands of time. Feminist theory, queer theory, and anti-capitalist strategy blend together. While each of these topics is often segregated into its own school of discourse, it has long-since been clear that capitalism and patriarchy are inextricably linked, and the ideological mechanisms of capitalist realism and het...