Quilligan 2005

Quilligan, Maureen. Incest and Agency in Elizabeth's England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

"We have been taught by feminist scholarship that women are constrained by family structures; we have taken this as a foundatinoal principles of arguments for the liberation of women, at least in part because we have so poorly understood the activities women havea ctually undertaken within kinship structures in traditional societies. If, however, we understand that traditional family and kinship structures may be radically dfiferent from our own, we may see how family rank could work to empower highly placed women rather than to limit them. In the sixteenth century the family dynasty became far more pivotal in political arrangements in absolutist Europe than it had been throughout the cloistered Middle Ages, a development that would make the Renaissance aristocratic family a potential site of real agency for women." (1)

Lear's Cordelia refuses to express incestuous love; her "predicament offers us with admirable clarity the cultural paradigm in Renaissance society within which any attempt to claim female agency had to work": silence (3)

"association of appropriate female silence with a woman's perfect and passive willingness to be exchanged (4-5)

Milton's Sin (5-6)

"the fundamental source of authority denied the obedient woman is language that leads to action" (6)

Levi-Strauss: exchange of women between men to cement social bonds; woman becomes a sign (even as she manipulates signs) (10-11)

Gayle Rubin's critique: what's at stake in the exchange of women is female agency, active female desire

three ways to halt the traffic in women

• incest
• voluntary celibacy (e.g. becoming a nun)
• lesbian desire

feminist thinkers try to get outside the bind of language by positing a feminine writing (Irigaray, Kristeva)

• yet, "if such poststructuralist female writing is destined to happen only in the future, how does scholarship evaluate the writing that women have already done centuries earlier?" (16)

"What does it mean to dquate female subjectivity with incest? Is there anything we can learn from leaving open this radical theoretical possibility?" (22)

Annette Weiner, revisiting Malinowski, Mauss, Levi-Strauss

"Weiner's critique helps us see that placing some real value on the objects which women circulate among themselves within a family over generations allows us to calibrate an increase in that family's prestige: when the inalienable possessions do not have to be traded out but may circulate among women in the family, the family stnds to gain over time an ever-incresing degree of prestige, and expansion of property." (25) -- cloth especially important

"female agency empowers and is empowered by an endogamous assertion of family prestige" (27)

"neither early mdoern men nor early modern women trascend their moments; both are very different from us and it is easier to recognize these differences, and so to see what we may have imposed on male texts when we juxtapose them with texts by women" (27)