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Writing the Mystic Body: Sexuality and Textuality in the écriture-féminine of Saint Catherine of Genoa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Anna Antonopoulos
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Abstract

This paper looks to evolve a discourse about the body in medieval women's mystical experience via an understanding of the life and work of Saint Catherine of Genoa as écriture-féminine. Drawing upon Catherine's resolution of binarism through the articulation of sexuality and textuality, I argue that the female mystic's experience of the body as site of struggle helps move beyond analysis of a binary experience to a politics of speaking the body directly.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 6 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Feminism and the Body , Fall 1991 , pp. 185 - 207
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 by Hypatia, Inc.

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