Abstract
In the past women were able to resort to crisis heterotopias, places suitable for re-examining femininity as an object of desire and for fashioning new forms of subjectivity. Are there such places today, when women are generally considered to be emancipated and seem to have unrestricted access to all kinds of ‘places of their own’? This article explores the psychoanalytic and genealogical conditions necessary for fashioning new forms of subjectivity where women find themselves in a heterotopic place. It brings together the Foucauldian notion of the heterotopia – both as linguistic locus and material place – and the psychoanalytic notions of the traversal of the fantasy and the drive, emphasising the ways in which women produce new subjectivities via the exploration of their identity.
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Notes
For an English translation of this novel see Rhea Galanaki (2003) ‘Eleni or Nobody’, David Connolly (trsl), Northwest University Press. In this article all translations are mine.
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Maria Tamboukou for her support and advice at all stages of writing this article; the editors and anonymous reviewers of Subjectivity, Jonathan Socrates, Diana Yeh, Marianne Wells and Corinne Squire for their detailed comments and recommendations.
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Voela, A. Heterotopia revisited: Foucault and Lacan on feminine subjectivity. Subjectivity 4, 168–182 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2011.5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2011.5