In this essay, I trace the development of Julia Kristeva's theory and practice of “the subject in procession trial” from her semiotic works of the 1960s to her psychoanalytic writings of the 1970s and 1980s. I read Kristeva's exploration of this “subject in procession trial” as contributing to a postmodern feminist ethics.

This article offers a critical reading of what Julia Kristeva calls ‘woman’s primary homosexuality’ and discusses homophobia in Kristeva’s work. If we are to draw conclusions on the merits and limitations of Kristeva’s theories of sexuality, homophobia needs to be assessed within the aesthetic and ethical contexts that typify Kristeva’s overall oeuvre. The article shows that we can apply Kristeva’s semiotic/symbolic model of signification to sexuality and argues for the construction of ‘primary homosexuality’ as the manifestation of resistance to authorized (...) sexual identity. The article also shows why the political demands to recognize lesbianism as a valid form of sexuality and especially as an intelligible lifestyle go against Kristeva’s understanding of what resistance entails. (shrink)

This essay situates Kristeva's theory of semiotics in the context of the controversial debate about the status of the maternal body in her work. I argue that, if we rethink the opposition between the semiotic and the symbolic as the relation between the trace and the sign, it becomes clear that the maternal semiotic is irreducible either to the prelinguistic plenitude or to the alternative symbolic position. The second part of the essay develops the connection between Kristeva's linguistic theory and (...) the alterity of the maternal body, articulated here as the in-fold of the other and the same. (shrink)