The Ambivalence of Colonial Desire in Marguerite Duras's The Lover
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3945452 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Karen Ruddy (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2006 |
| Volume | 82 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 76-95 |
| Publication date | 2006-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Feminist Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400263 |
| OpenAlex | W1968103421 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 29 |
This paper analyses the notions of desire and metissage that circulate in The Lover, Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novel about an illicit and scandalous sexual relationship between an adolescent French girl and a wealthy Chinese man set in 1920s French colonial Siagon. Rather than celebrate The Lover as a tale of a young French girl's resistance to colonial sexual mores and regulations, this paper seeks to excavate how that resistance both affirms and challenges the racializing and racist dynamics of colonial society. In particular, I explore the intertwining discourses of colonial sexuality, gender, race, and Orientalism that both produced and constrained the specific forms of desire and subjectivities available to and taken up by European women in French Indochina, and that circumscribe the story that Duras is able to tell about the French girl's love affair in The Lover. I suggest that Duras's portrayal of the French girl as a sexually autonomous female subject - one whose erotic relations are not bound by the dictates of colonial patriarchy - is made possible only by the ambivalent structure of the girl's desire, by her simultaneous attraction to and repulsion of the racialized others of the French colonies
Ambivalence · Art · Colonialism · Girl · Human sexuality · Literature · Mores · Orientalism · Patriarchy · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Resistance (ecology) · Sociology · Subject (documents) · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
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Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power
Postmodern Revisionings of the Political
The Age of Light, Soap, and Water
Race and the Education of Desire
Colonial Desire
Anti-Oedipus
Displacing Whiteness
Interior Colonies
American Anatomies
Under Western Eyes
The Laugh of the Medusa
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
The Psychic Life of Power
Social Criticism without Philosophy
Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,11 |
| Citation span | 2008 - 2015 (8) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |