By Popular Demand

Although much of our attention these days is focused on le bébé, we have been getting some work done on our dissertations, too. Colin's been back to work since the first week after Jake was born, and I've been back to work since week six. Each afternoon I hand the baby over to Colin and head out to a café down the street with my laptop and type type type away. It's remarkable how much work you can get done when you don't have time to waste!

Funnily enough, although this blog has recorded Jake's babyhood rather than our lives as students abroad, my newfound role as a mother and interests as a scholar have certainly dovetailed. In the spirit of the original purpose of the blog, here's a short introduction to my dissertation topic:

“Mother Tongue: The Maternal Subject in the Works of Christine de Pizan” is a project that examines how, in her early works where she self-consciously constructs a female authorial persona, Christine grapples with maternity in order to elaborate an alternative discursive economy that both adequately portrays the embodied woman’s subjectivity and authorizes her own writing practice. In works such as Le Débat sur le Roman de la Rose (1402), Le Livre du chemin de longue estude (1402-03), La Mutacion de Fortune (1403), La Cité des dames (1405), Le Livre des Trois Vertus (1405) and Le Livre de l’advision Cristine (1405-06), the author represents various allegorical, historical, and mythological mothers, as well as women who possess a maternal morphology, such as lactating virgin saints; she also depicts her problematic relationship to her own mother, and portrays herself as mother of both her biological children and also of her texts.

Using Lacanian psychoanalysis as my methodological framework, I show how meaning is alternately conceived and transgressed on these bodies in Christine’s texts. I argue that in response to the misogynist literary, philosophical, and social context of her time, as exemplified by Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose, Christine posits a critical apparatus for the elaboration of female voice and speech, representing these as her ultimate desire and grounding them in the most marked sign of female specificity: the maternal body. I submit that, in the discursive economy elaborated by Christine de Pizan, strategies for self-empowerment and subversion of male dominance are figured as a maternal corporeal resistance, manifested through a plenitude that exists beyond the phallus and which stands as an alternative to androcentric models for subjectivity and signification.

So there you have it, although I don't know how much or how often I'll actually write about my dissertation here. I mean, really, who's cuter?

Jacques Lacan:



Jacob Blundell:



I mean, really, there's no contest.