What Does a Woman Want?: Reading and Sexual Difference

''What does a woman want?''--the question Freud famously formulated in a letter to Marie Bonaparte--is a quintessentially male question that arises from women''s resistance to their place in a patriarchal society. But what might it mean, asks Shoshana Felman, for a woman to reclaim this question as her own? Can this question engender, through the literary or the psychoanalytic work, a woman''s voice as its speaking subject? Felman explores these questions through close readings of autobiographical texts by Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and Adrienne Rich which attempt to redefine women as the subject of their own desire.

Shoshana Felman is Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Her many books include Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, Jacques Lacan and the Adventures of Insight Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, and Writing and Madnes.