How can we read these texts without revisiting our own lives? Our long
forgotten past, each of us reconstructs it with multiple interpretations,
reinvents it and continually rewrites it over the course of time. And when
some aspect of the unexplored confronts us in the mirror where the
self is reflected plural, physical, phantasmic, social, political, the image
trembles with surprise and sometimes with fright.

Suzanne Lamy, Quand je lis, je m'invente

The text is neither discrete nor self-contained, but is constructed in the
discourses that articulate it, in an interactive context of reader and text.
Every text is a pre-text. The author, as reader, is rewriting precursor
texts: the reader, as author, rewrites the author's text, investing it with
meaning in the context of her own life and experience.

Barbara Godard, "Becoming My Hero, Becoming Myself:
Notes Towards a Feminist Theory of Reading"

Feminist critics of literature and film produced by men have
obliged us to confront many of the blatant as well as more subtle
ways in which women readers and film viewers have been lured into
identifying against themselves. ¹ Theorizing on the need to resist this
uncomfortable phenomenon, Teresa de Lauretis and others have
encouraged us to examine how, as with writing, strategies of reading
can also become forms of cultural resistance in which a woman
reader's power is established in direct proportion to her ability to
undercut, outmaneuver, and contradict the sexual politics engen-
dered in a conventionally male-oriented text or film. ² On the other
hand and in addition to its focus on the difference of women's
writing, "gynocritics" as proposed by Showalter and others, has
frequently stressed the rereading, reviewing, and reassessment of
women's texts with respect to the already established literary canon. ³
The importance of this activity for feminist critics and, more gener-

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