Chōra/Chōros

Samuel R. Delany and the masculine semiotic inThrough the Valley of the Nest of Spiders(2012)

Bibliographic Data

ID3667904
AuthorsCameron Ellis (Trent University, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume26
Issue4
Pages446-461
Publication date2017-07-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Gender Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0958-9236 • E-ISSN: 1465-3869
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09589236.2015.1116982
OpenAlexW2310476978
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited33

Julia Kristeva’s idea of the semiotic chōra continues to haunt gender, literary, and political theory and practice. Reaching what some might consider its controversial climax in the early to middle 1990s – following its introduction in La revolution du langage poétique – the fate of the chōra was left mainly with Judith Butler’s deconstruction of Kristeva’s use of the term in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter. Respectively Butler argues: (a) ‘Kristeva restricts herself to an exclusively prohibitive conception of the paternal law, [and] is unable to account for the ways in which the paternal law generates certain desires in the form of natural drives’ and (b) ‘Kristeva insists upon [the] identification of the chora with the maternal body.’ The present article seeks to resurrect this debate with a critique of Kristeva’s as well as Butler’s position regarding the chōra; my argument is twofold: (i) Kristeva is guilty of being unable to account for the generative capacity of the paternal law and (ii) Kristeva’s use of the semiotic chōra does indeed resonate uncomfortably close to certain frequencies of essentialism in gender theory; however, both criticism can be overcome by adding chōros, the masculine form of chōra, to Kristeva’s theoretical lexicon. In order to sketch out the implications for gender, literary, and political theory and practice I turn to American author and critic Samuel R. Delany’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

Art · Criticism · Depiction · Epistemology · Essentialism · Literature · Politics · Semiotics · Sociology · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy · Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre · Thomas Hardy Literature Studies

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