Abstract

Poststructuralist theorists have deconstructed "identity," "essence," "self," and "experience" at precisely the same historical moment that women, Afro-Americans, homosexuals, and other non-hegemonic groups have begun to lay claim politically to such notions. In the field of American literature and criticism, as well as in current feminist poststructuralist theory, this paradox has produced a structuring tension between essentialists on the one hand and anti-essentialists on the other. This project acknowledges and re-emphasizes the damaging and reactionary effects of essentialism on both dominant and subordinate groups, but it also discloses possible political or strategic uses of essentialism in the hands of women and minority writers themselves. Concurrently, the thesis investigates the contradictory uses to which anti-essentialism has been put in recent poststructuralist theory and criticism; through an analysis of the relation between poststructuralist theory and three current movements in literary criticism , I seek both to endorse poststructuralism's usefulness in reading texts by women and minority writers and yet to reveal, at the same time, poststructuralism's complicity with the very notions it works so persistently to displace