SOURCE: Herbold, Sarah. “Well-Placed Reflections: (Post)modern Woman as Symptom of (Post)modern Man.” Signs 21, no. 1 (autumn 1995): 83-115.

In the following essay, Herbold examines Žižek's theory of “woman-as-the-postmodern” from the perspective of feminist cultural theory. Herbold compares the representations of gender and subjectivity in Žižek's essay “Rossellini: Woman as Symptom of Man” with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions.

Zanetto, lascia le donne, e studia la matematica. (Johnny, leave women alone and go study mathematics.)

(Zulietta [in Rousseau (1782) 1959, 322])

Whatever they may signify (and this is precisely the question: whether, how, and to whom they signify anything), the terms woman and the feminine figure prominently in contemporary Anglo-American and French poststructuralist theories of literature and culture.¹ This concern with woman and the feminine is implicitly linked to ideas of change and liberation: to a desire to be freed from traditional gender roles and representations in the case of feminist thinkers...