Herstories: new cartographies of the feminine and the ‘politics of location’

Abstract

The questioning of identity has always been a key issue in literature and, we might add, in the arts, as the whole. My aim in this paper is to reflect on the form this very questioning has assumed today, specifically when we concentrate on the poetics and the politics of representation of the female body, the inscription of new cartographies of the feminine and the demands of a true politics of location. Most feminist critics seem to agree that “the body” has become a key term in the discourses that define contemporary feminist thought and agenda: the body, not as a biological entity, but as a sign, a construction, a representation and a potential site of resistance.