Ехо-фантазия: историята и конструирането на идентичността
Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity

Summary/Abstract: The paper is a challenge to give the term “fantasy echo” some substance by finding a use for a psychoanalytic term such as fantasy in understanding historically specific phenomena. The wonderfully complex resonance of fantasy echo is used to recall the existence of retrospective identifications, related to the collective identity of the “women-orator” and “mothers”. The fantasy of the woman-orator is noticeable in different narratives of French feminist history. Joan Scott discovers that this fantasy has played a significant role in the articulation of similar women’s identity in the life-stories of Olympe de Gouges, Jeanne Deroin, Madeleine Pelletier and some others. This similarity functions as a basis for the idea of continuity in feminist history. The maternal fantasy spreads the echo that motherhood is a basis for similarity and sisterhood between women of various racial religious and social groups. The fantasy of the woman as a mother again calls for a collective identity, which gains importance when biological and social differences between men and women come into question. In both examples fantasy-echo functions as a designation of a set of psychic operations by which certain categories of identity are made to elide historical differences and create apparent continuities.

• Details
• Contents