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Following the publication of Simone de Beauvoir's influential book, The Second Sex, (1949), many feminist critics in Europe and North America have discussed the problems facing women artists and critics of working within phallocentric and phallo-symbolic culture and language. Simone de Beauvoir was the first to demonstrate how male-dominated culture has used symbolic language in order to exclude, repress, and objectify women. Language is one of the key mechanisms employed in phallocentric culture to define and construct reality and gender identity according to male experience and desire. Feminist critics writing since the 1950s,. have been examining the ways in which women might find or develop a language through which they can express their own experience of reality, gender identity, sexual desire and pleasure. Many contemporary women writers and film-makers have appropriated the representations of female desire and sexuality that pervade male-dominated western culture, deconstructing and subverting them in order to create innovative and challenging representations of their own. They refer to, and draw upon, the traditional imagery and conventions of classic Hollywood cinema, using such references to serve their own ends and create their own meanings. They have also radically deconstructed and reappropriated stereotypical pornographic images, exploring the possibility of creating a female-oriented, woman-centred, non-misogynous erotica. Women working in the fields of literature and film are attempting to explore and develop alternative representations of female desire and gender identities, experimenting with new vocabularies of representation in order to explore women's perceptions of their multiple identities and their experience of themselves as desiring subjects. They have taken some of the most negative representations of women constructed by phallocentric culture, and reappropriated them in order to create innovative, alternative forms of representation and a radical critique of the social construction of "femininity" and gender identity.

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Seigneur Dildoe, as this dissertation will contend, was a fixture in Restoration literature and culture (1660-1700). But what was his provenance, by what means did he travel, and why did he come? This dissertation provides a literary history of the fascinating and highly irreverent dildo satire tradition, tracing the dildo satire’s long and winding progress from antiquity to Restoration England, where the tradition reached its early modern zenith. Adding breadth, context, and texture to existing treatments of the trope’s political and sexual potency, this dissertation investigates the dildo satire’s roots in both Greek comedy (Aristophanes, Herodas) and Latin invective (Martial, Juvenal), its influential association in early modern Italy with Catholicism and monastic life (Aretino), and its introduction in early modern England (Nashe), where it cropped up in the works of a surprising number of literary giants (Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Marvell). In Restoration England, we find in the satiric dildos of Butler, Rochester, and the contextually rich “Seigneur Dildoe” articulations of a dildo gone viral: the mock-heroic Seigneur deployed as a politically central motif symptomatic of its society’s acute patriarchal fissures. Throughout I argue that the dildo satire’s longevity is due not to a uniformity of purpose or signification (misogynist, anti-Catholic, emasculating, or otherwise), but to its innate versatility and ambiguity as a fugitive sexual and political figure. I also argue that what does in fact unite the satiric dildo’s variety of contingent ends, against what has been assumed in the scholarship, is its status as a markedly anti-Phallic figure. / Graduate / 2018-01-09 / 0401 / 0733 / missmenno.sf@gmail.com