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Mourning and Metonymy: Bearing Witness Between Women and Generations
- Hypatia
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 19, Number 4, Fall 2004
- pp. 142-166
- Article
- Additional Information
Drucilla Cornell's Legacies of Dignity: Between Women and Generations proposes a feminist ethics of self-representation that asks what exclusions are necessary to autobiography's constructions of identity. Focusing on the ways in which alterity, particularly linked with figures of the mother, are silenced, it advances a mourning that is transformational. I question Cornell's use of a Kantian concept of dignity and suggest that Irigaray's engagement with Levinas offers another way of conceptualizing the problematic.