Prophetic Reading: Sisterhood and Psychoanalysis in H.D.’s HERmione

This article offers a comparative reading of H.D.’s 1927 kunstlerroman à clef, HERmione, and Freud’s Dora alongside an intertextual close reading of its dense web of literary allusions in order to argue that it offers a sustained critique of Freudian psychoanalysis and an alternative origin story for the condition of hysteria. Drawing on the notion of prophecy as it is thematised in the novel, the article demonstrates H.D.’s prefiguring of Juliet Mitchell’s recent reconfiguration of hysteria as a response to, replacement by, or failure of identification with a sibling

Heidegger and Gender: An Uncanny Retrieval of Hegel's Antigone

In order to tackle the question of Martin Heidegger and gender I approach his philosophy through the general problematic of art, with specific reference to Sophocles’ Antigone. I read Heidegger against the backdrop of G.W.F. Hegel, arguing that Heidegger’s understanding of the uncanny sublimates Hegel’s rigorously sexualized, representationalist account of Antigone’s and Creon’s mutually exclusive ethical stances. I suggest that feminist responses to Hegel’s reading of Antigone stand in need of complication, because they remain attached to an understanding of sexual difference that is still too metaphysical

The picture of abjection: film, fetish and the nature of difference

The Picture of Abjection is an analysis of independent, contemporary, international film. Appropriating Kristeva's analysis of abjection, which she developed in the context of psychoanalytic theory to designate that which a subject rejects as a site of impurity, the book takes up the abject in order to illuminate various intersections of discrimination. The focus is on how race, gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity and nationality intersect with one another in ways that involve abjection. The argument is informed by a variety of disciplines, including film theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy and gender theory. The aim of the book is to enhance understanding of how film can both engage in and ameliorate the ways forms of discrimination play off one anothe