Feminism After Rancière: Women in J.M. Coetzee and Jeff Wall

Abstract

Gabriel Rockhill defines what Jacques Rancière calls a political subject as “an empty operator that produces cases of political dispute by challenging the established framework of identification and classification”. This essay challenges the tension between the “emptiness” of the political subject and the “framework of identification and classification” that this definition sets up by showing how “identity” operates in Rancière on the side of both the political subject and the established order. The essay focuses on the identity of “woman” and on Rancière’s discussion of the French revolutionary woman Olympe de Gouges as an example of a political subject: De Gouges is a political subject for Rancière not because she is an empty operator, but because she is a woman enacting the rights of men. The second half of the essay explores this insight by discussing the role of women in J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace and in Jeff Wall’s photographs Picture for Women and Mimic. I argue that the women in these artworks are political subjects in the sense in which Rancière understands this notion.