ABSTRACT
Readers of some recent works of feminist theory might be forgiven for feeling jet-lagged. The eye seems to be always overtaking some reference to the rapid theoretical crossovers and stopovers between the continents of Europe and North America, or (what perhaps comes down to the same thing) between two blocks called ‘French’ and ‘Anglo-American’ modes of analysis. Naomi Schor, for instance, in Breaking the Chain, wryly evokes ‘the trans-Atlantic shuttle Franco-American scholars are perpetually engaged in’.1 In a more literal flight, Jane Gallop’s Reading Lacan recounts the respective flights of Stuart Schneiderman from Buffalo and herself from Chicago to Paris to encounter the real Lacan.2 Alice Jardine, at the start of her book on Gynesis, refers to the double origin of her work:
The structure of the questions addressed is almost wholly shaped by recent French theory. But, at the same time, the questions themselves are those of an American feminist hoping to contribute to American feminist theory…. But of course, even an intervention, a gesture, runs certain risks, for in attempting this trans-position, I am neither ‘above it all’ nor somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic.3
