1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910813022603321

Autore

Brooks Carellin

Titolo

Every inch a woman [[electronic resource] ] : phallic possession, femininity, and the text / / Carellin Brooks

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Vancouver, : UBC Press, c2006

ISBN

1-282-74087-3

9786612740879

0-7748-5358-1

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (224 p.)

Collana

Sexuality studies series, , 1706-9947

Disciplina

809/.93353

Soggetti

Gender identity in literature

Women in literature

Penis in literature

Femininity in literature

Masculinity in literature

Fetishism in literature

Literature, Modern - 20th century - History and criticism

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references: p. [194]-199 and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front Matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Preface -- Introduction -- In Freud's Case: Mothering the Phallus -- Literally Male: The Case Study -- The Body in the Text: All-Seeing 'I's -- Mysterious, Solitary Women: The Butch Cipher -- Girl Cock: The Literalized Phallus -- Avalanche of Dildos: The Transferable Phallus -- The Power of the (W)hole -- Notes -- References -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

What makes the textual image of a woman with a penis so compelling, malleable, and persistent? Although the figure of the phallic woman is in no sense unique to our age, Every Inch a Woman takes note of a proliferation of phallic feminine figures in disparate North American and European texts from the end of the nineteenth century onward. This multiplication, which continues today, admits of a corresponding multiplicity of motives. The phallic woman can be a ribald joke, a fantastical impossibility, a masculine usurper, an ultimately



unthreatening sexual style, an interrogation into the I of the author, or an examination of female culpability. Carellin Brooks takes up the textual figure of the phallic woman where Freud locates it, in the imagined mother that the little boy, in fantasy, credits with a penis of her own. It traces this phallic-woman motif backward to the sexological case study, and forward to newspaper accounts of testosterone-taking third-sexers. Brooks examines both high and low literature, pornography, postmodern theory, and writing that would seem to answer Lacan's injunction to move "beyond the phallus." Witty and engaging, Every Inch a Woman makes an innovative contribution to sexuality, gender, and women's studies, as well as psychoanalytic theory and criticism.