The Death of the Author’s Gender

I’d like to use this post to explore some of Elizabeth Grosz’s theories regarding the relationship between author, text, and reader. In particular, I’m interested in the way Grosz uses Roland Barthes’ famous theory, the “death of the author,” and uses it in a context of gender and feminist politics.

According to Grosz, “The sex of the author has…no direct bearing on the political position of the text, just as other facts about the author’s private or professional life do not explain the text” (21). I think the first response for many when analyzing a feminist text is to do just the opposite. If an author is producing a feminist text, I think that most readers will take the author’s background into consideration when forming their analysis. Grosz must point out that the opposite should be true. If a text is to stand alone, as Barthes believes it does, demographic considerations such as the sex of the author must have no bearing, and are not productive for analytical purposes.

Since feminist texts are often perceived to be inherently political, how can Grosz’ four features concerning feminist texts (the sex of the author, the content of the text, the sex of the reader, and the style of the text) be acknowledged in an apolitical context? Is it really possible that the sex of the author has “no direct bearing” on the political position of the text? We can certainly use the sex of the author to analyze a text, claiming, for example, that the author chose to make her protagonist female because the author is female. Whether this is true or not, analysis such as this inevitably leads us to analyzing the author rather than the text.

So how can we acknowledge that a being known as “the author” produced a text, and that this being has certain demographic and personal characteristics and experiences, without opening the door to an analysis of these features? The interesting concept Grosz brings up, that of the authorial “signature” within the text, allows us to acknowledge what Barthes says we should not: the background of the author, without forcing us to inform our analysis using it. “There are ways in which the sexuality and corporeality of the subject leave their traces or marks on the texts produced, just as we in turn must recognize that the processes of textual production also leave their trace or residue on the body of the writer (and readers)” (21). In other words, texts include traces of the author’s “corporeality.” The way we make the traces of this signature useful is by following Grosz when she says, “I am interested in the way ways in which the author’s corporeality, an always sexually specific corporeality—not the author’s interiority, psyche, consciousness, concepts, or ideas, intrudes into or is productive of the text” (21). We must look for the way that the author’s corporeality, their material nature, is in the text. In essence, with the signature we are trying to see how the author embodies a text, with the author’s body being within the text, rather than how their body affected the text as a separate unit.