God Between Their Lips

Klappentext

Connecting the cultural domains of religion, sex, and work, this book encompasses aspects of feminist theory, post-structuralist materialisms, Victorian thought, and two prominent 19th-century women's novels (Charlotte Bronte's "Villette and George Eliot's "Middlemarch)--to understand desire between women as a form of "spiritual materialism."

Zusammenfassung

This book explores desire between women as a form of "spiritual materialism" in writings by Luce Irigaray, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. To begin with the study's underlying paradox, "spiritual materialism": the author wishes to understand why the act of grasping materialitiesa sob in the body or the body itselfhas so often required a spiritual discourse; why materialism, as a way of naming matter-on-its-own-terms, and material relations that still lie submerged, hidden from view, evoke the shadowy forms we call "spiritual."

Inhalt
Abbreviations; Introduction; Part I: 1. Bodies and God: post-structuralist feminists return to the fold of spiritual materialism; 2. Divine loss: Irigaray's erotics of a feminine fracture; 3. Lacking/labor; Part II: 4. Recollecting Charlotte Bront'; 5. Working for God autoerotically: approaching the bridegroom without a(r)rival in Bront''s Villette; 6. Recognizing George Eliot; 7. At home with desire: the domestication of St. Theresa in Eliot's Middlemarch; Postlude; Notes; Index.