Thinking Through the Body

Jane Gallop offers a wide range of intriguing reflections on sexuality and culture in this collection of feminist essays written during the last decade. Like works by Roland Barthes and Adrienne Kich, two critics she admires, 'Thinking Through the Body' is a unique blend of theory and autobiography. With her characteristic wit and eye for detail, Gallop makes unexpected, provocative discoveries in her innovative readings of the Marquis de Sade, Freud, and Barthes. Other essays focus on feminist thinkers including sex researcher Shere Hite, Lacanian analyst Eugenie Lemoine-Luccioni, and French philosophers Luce Irigaray and Annie Leclerc. The articles are all newly revised and include commentary on the psychological and institutional environments in which they were written. Gallop shares with Barthes and Rich an interest in challenging the mind-body split. It is this separation, the author writes, which “makes the mother into an inhuman monster by dividing the human realm of culture, history, and politics from the realm of love and the body where the mother carries, bears, and tends her children? This book bespeaks Gallop’s objection to the division between the public and the private —the “accomplice” of the mind-body split— which “keeps our lives out of our knowledge.” Jane Gallop is Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Humanities at Rice University, where she heads the Women’s Studies program. She commutes to Rice from Milwaukee, where she lives with her boyfriend and their son. She is the author of Reading Lacan, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis, and Intersections: A Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski.