Abstract

I propose that current literature by women of color in the U.S. and various strains of psychoanalytic, Marxist, and feminist theories imply that the concept of jouissance not only describes women's relations to ideology, but also simultaneously and paradoxically indicates a mediation of the elements of knowledge, action, experience and representation that comprise ideology. Close readings of literary and theoretical texts develop permutations of Karl Marx's concept of ideology from "not-know/do" to "not-know/experience," as well as multiple imaginaries of jouissance as an element of excess that can be experienced but cannot be represented. As analogous but distinct phenomena, ideology and jouissance inform and determine each other. I show how some Francophone existential, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories, and some Francophone and Anglophone subaltern theories, explore this claim of the relation of ideology and jouissance through three specific theoretical tropes: the female mystic as figured by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, Jacques Lacan in Seminaire XX: Encore, and Luce Irigaray in Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One; the colonized native posited by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks; and the female subaltern figured by Gayatri Spivak in "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Sandra Cisneros' novel The House on Mango Street, Achy Obejas' short story "We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?" and The Color Purple by Alice Walker illustrate complex strategies of representation by which female characters of color come to effect a jouissant knowledge of their ideological experience. Given my attention to textuality, my discussion also works to undo the textuality/materiality opposition imposed by critiques of either discourse's reliance on figuration, and show that the distinction is itself an ideological one that misreads the use of tropes and figuration in both literature and theory