Confronting Patriarchy: Psychoanalytic Theory in the Prose of Cristina Peri Rossi examines three works of the contemporary Uruguayan author who lives in exile as she dialogues with the psychoanalytic discourse endemic to patriarchal society. Peri Rossi's prose, structured like unconscious productions that give free expression to desire and passion as emanating from the forbidden recesses of the psyche, powerfully reveals the message as a treatment for an «ill» society. The language in the three works studied facilitates and reveals the male protagonist's interaction with the desired female object as a regression to a semiotic, pre-oedipal state in a type of «return of the repressed» of consuming desire that has been written out of mainstream patriarchy and that serves to challenge its rational, symbolic order. It is from this vantage point that the author attempts to re-write the conclusions obtained through Lacanian and patriarchal discourse so that woman can emerge as a subject in her own right.

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The Author: Mary Boufis Filou is a retired Jail Mental Health Clinic administrator credited with inaugurating an award-winning mental health and suicide prevention program in the county jails in Suffolk County, New York. She was awarded the Ph.D. in Hispanic languages and literature from Stony Brook University in December 2004, a course of study which she undertook to facilitate communication with Spanish-speaking inmates. She earned her B.A. in psychology from Barnard College, New York City, and an M.S.S. from the Smith College School for Social Work in Northampton, Massachusetts. She remains active in philanthropic causes having served as international president of the Daughters of Penelope, a women s group covering five countries that promotes literacy and philanthropy with particular emphasis on the empowerment of women.