Risking Difference

Jean Wyatt is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Occidental College and the author of Reconstructing Desire: The Role of the Unconscious in Women's Reading and Writing.

• Acknowledgments Introduction: I Want to Be You Part I. Totalizing Identifications 1. The Politics of Envy in Academic Feminist Communities and in Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride 2. I Want You To Be Me: Parent-Child Identification in D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow and Carolyn Kay Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman 3. Identification with the Trauma of Others: Slavery, Collective Trauma, and the Difficulties of Representation in Toni Morrison's Beloved Part II. Structures of Identification in the Visual Field 4. Race and Idealization in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby and in White Feminist Cross-Race Fantasies 5. Luring the Gaze: Desire and Interpellation in Sandra Cisneros's "Woman Hollering Creek," Anne Tyler's Saint Maybe, Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop, and Margaret Drabble's Jerusalem the Golden 6. Disidentification and Border Negotiations of Gender in Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek Part III. Heteropathic Identifications 7. Toward Cross-Race Dialogue: Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua, and the Psychoanalytic Politics of Community Appendix: The Challenge of Infant Research and Neurobiology to Traditional Models of Primary Identification Notes Works Cited Index