This essay’s semiotic and feminist approach proposes a re-reading of the
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Analysis of such a text (including intertextuality with Alexander Pope’s
The Rape of the Lock) with deleterious effects for a rape culture
reveals the interplay of satire with its poetics of rape, the misogynist biases
actuating the sexual violence of its rape rhetoric, and the necessity to re-inscribe
valuation of the feminine in such a text of terror vis-à-vis a
rape culture. This poetic satire possesses no ideological neutrality as its
androcentric nature (en)genders the (male) poet and Yhwh to
(circum)(in)scribe the ultimate fate of these women as rape victims after having
mocked them with sexist stereotypes. Nonresistance to this textual marginalization
of Woman as ‘other’ tacitly succumbs to this text’s
power to interpellate female readers as immasculated victims and male readers as
salacious voyeurs, thus coopting readers in the perpetual ethos of violence against
the feminine. The resistant act of re-reading such a textual act of violence,
however, empowers by unveiling it as an abuse of power and liberates by voicing
advocacy for the suffering silent demeaned, devalued, and dehumanized.
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