Afterword

In the readings that make up The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France, I have engaged (some of) the strategies involved in reading-as-a-feminist. Since the late 1960s, this critical practice has shifted constantly, and at times, dramatically in relation to emerging contextual conditions and new textual approaches that the six essays in this book have, in part, incorporated and reworked. I say reading-as-a-feminist to foreclose questions about biology, often embedded in the notion of reading or writing “as a woman,” and to signal instead a set of constructed positions that as a speaking subject, I inscribe into the matter of my texts. As I suggested in the Introduction to this book in discussing the early-modern Querelle des femmes (et des hommes), I believe that reading-as-a-feminist involves deconstructing textual elements that presume or construct male predominance and make this norm appear to be both natural and universal, rather than historically and contextually bound, and it predicates as well signaling any aspects that “repeat with a difference” or “resignify.” This type of reading also upholds those texts, which I name pro-woman, that put into questions aspects of the norms, scripts, themes and semes that deny women’s capacities to be “fully human,” as this notion can be defined in an ongoing negotiation between the ideological moment in which the text is written, and the feminist reader’s own context. ¹ Pro-woman texts are bound to iterate elements of dominant normativity, since iteration is the sine qua non of readability (intelligibility). But they also effectuate a reverse or counter-discourse about these norms, which it is, then, the function of a feminist reading to highlight as the agency of the text and/or its subject of enunciation in a way that promotes the empowering aspirations of women and other others in a particular male dominant system of power-knowledge that is nonetheless always subject to dynamic shifts. As Chapter 6 concluded, however, this putting into question, in dialectical relation to dominant discourses, may involve an “overstanding” that, at one and the same time, does not eliminate doubt, but that also does not feign neutrality or impartiality, and that gives “pro-woman” the benefit of the doubt.