Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity

The article enquires into the nature of group membership, on which the writing of the history of feminism rests. The author’s approach, largely sustained by psychoanalytic reading, construes feminist movements not as the inevitable expression of the socially constructed category of women, but as the means for achieving that identity. Group membership provides the illusion of wholeness only by appealing to fantasy. Within the history of Western feminist movements, two fantasies, prevalent from the late eighteenth century, operate to consolidate feminist identity: the fantasy of the female orator and the feminist maternal fantasy. The fantasies function as resources to be invoked and thereby resonate at various points in history. The aim of the article is not to deny the social fact of feminist movements, nor to question the existence of active political subjects. It is to suggest that psychoanalysis may elucidate the unconscious dimensions of these phenomena as well as the fact that they owe at least some of their existence to the operations of fantasies that can never fully satisfy the desire, or secure the representation, they seek to provide