Recuperating pleasure: Toward a feminist aesthetic of reading

The aim of this thesis is to construct a feminist reading aesthetic, one which attempts to resolve the tensions within feminist theory between politics and aesthetics, and which creates a hybrid theory from the antithetical arguments of essentialism and postmodernism/poststructuralism. My aesthetic theory is what Gayatri Spivak would call 'strategically essentialist' in that it positively defines 'woman' (specifically, reading as a 'woman') in order to challenge and subvert the androcentric/patriarchal claim that 'woman' is merely what 'man' is not. This defiant and self-defined woman reader goes beyond the resistant or oppositional response to what I call 're-captivation'--a re-claiming of aesthetic pleasure by women readers who have been excluded and/or denied textual pleasure within androcentric models. Re-captivated reading is distinguished by its introspective and ethical characteristics. This is a reading aesthetic which is self-reflexive, the pleasure one experiences when'retelling' and analysing the text (and one's own reading of it). A re-captivated reader appreciates difference through the pleasure derived from moments of genuine intersubjective communication, combined with the pain of misrecognition and acknowledgement of one's own complicity in systems of oppression. Thus, re-captivation, as I have constructed it, is a complex reading aesthetic which is both motivated and constituted by my desire for textual pleasure and my commitment to feminist poststructural politics in a way that holds the tension between them.;A major focus of my dissertation is the development of a feminist reading aesthetic which is specifically anti-racist and anti-heterosexist and is particularly sensitive to the ethical complexities I face as a European-American women reading the texts of lesbians and women and men of colour. The thesis concludes with an analysis of my feminist readings of three contemporary, "marginalized" authors--Octavia E. Butler, Jeanette Winterson, and Oscar Hijuelos.