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Ethics/Reading/Sex: Toward a New Historical Reading Practice?
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Ethics/Reading/Sex: Toward a New Historical Reading Practice?

Debjani Bhattacharyya
NWSA journal, v 29(3), pp 193-197
01 Dec 2017

Abstract

Archives & records Books Eroticism Ethics Exegesis & hermeneutics Feminism Foucault, Michel Hearing Heidegger, Martin (1889-1976) History Huffer, Lynne Law LGBTQ literature Literary characters Literature Motion pictures Narratives Ontology Otherness Philosophers Politics Reading Sexuality Silence State formation Stops Subaltern identities
[...]I elaborate on Huffer's ethics of sex as a practice of reading, and, second, I show how such a practice is one of spatializing her ethical concerns to uncover a fissured ground upon which queer-feminist politics and a certain practice of history both come alive. Throughout the book, she practices this apocryphal reading of law, literary texts, films, biblical narratives, the queer literature on Irigaray, and the feminist readings of Foucault. If Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" stops by showing the impossibility of hearing the subaltern by marking the itineraries of silence in the historical archive, Huffer rethinks this ethical failure by reading the absence as a structuring otherness that produces the archive, the texts, the Law—in short, the various sites of reading that animate the pages of Are the Lips a Grave? Debjani Bhattacharyya Debjani Bhattacharyya is an assistant professor of history at Drexel University, and her research focuses on the interaction between law, environment, and state formation in South Asia.

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