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Published online: 19 December 2022
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2022
In her deft explorations of what constitutes sexual difference, and of the anxiety provoked by women’s desire and jouissance, the central figure in Bethany Morris’s book is that of the dangerous, monstrous woman. Morris traces a number of iterations of this feminine monster throughout history: the Biblical figure of Eve, the female mystic or saint, the witch, the femme fatale in film, the melancholic pop star, the borderline, the mother who kills her child, and even the pregnant woman. What is dangerous about such female figures, what provokes anxiety and hatred, has to do with women’s desire and jouissance and the problematic of how to account for sexual difference. To take up the example of the pregnant woman, Morris’s arguments are clearly relevant to the June 24, 2022 Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. In this decision we can read a kind of criminalization of women’s desire. This criminalization even extends, in some states such as Texas, to those seen as aiding and abetting a woman’s desire (for example, through helping her travel to a state where abortion is legal).
The whole of Morris’s book is devoted to the interpretation of the role of the feminine in various sociohistorical contexts, from the Middle Ages to the era of the Enlightenment all the way to contemporary times marked by neoliberal capitalism. Morris primarily draws from the work of Jacques Lacan but also makes good use of the works of Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, as well as those of Bracha Ettinger. More important, however, than any one analysis Morris makes in her book, she teaches us a way to read and interpret the position of the feminine and the aporia of the sexual relationship within any given historical moment and symbolic context.
Lacan’s (1975/1998) concept of sexuation, or the non-rapport of the sexual relationship, features prominently in Morris’s ar