Writing about Desire: Cultural Contexts

I have given this entry the title as it appears at the top of the essay/article. However, the piece is titled "Writing on Desire: Cultural Contexts (1993)" on the page containing the abstract. I think this is similar to the article "Writing about Desire" published in The Glasgow Review (1993) but it's definitely not identical. This is the text of a

Keynote speech delivered at the Second International Symposium on Comparative Literature (1992); published in the Symposium Proceedings: Encounters in Language and Literature, ed. Hoda Gindi, Department of English Language and Ltierature, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University (1993), pp. 33-47.

Here's the abstract:

In this keynote address, Catherine Belsey re-examines the operations of desire across literature, ideology, and subjectivity—anchoring her critique in poststructuralist and psychoanalytic frameworks, particularly those informed by Lacanian thought. For Belsey, desire is not simply a private affect or biological impulse; rather, it is a culturally coded mechanism, structured by lack and inscribed within language. Her feminist intervention is clear: desire, far from being an apolitical interiority, is always already mediated by systems of power, discourse, and gendered meaning. Drawing from Lacan’s theory of the symbolic order, Belsey emphasizes that desire is never fully present or self-contained. It is haunted by absence and fundamentally split—an unstable force that literature can both mask and expose. In narratives of love, we see not only emotional entanglement but also ideological work: literature participates in the reproduction of heteronormative fantasies, yet it can also subvert them, laying bare the contradictions and fractures within dominant cultural scripts. Belsey argues that desire functions as a site of subject formation, a generative force through which individuals are constituted, reconstituted, and contested as subjects within culture. Through our longing—for recognition, for intimacy, for legibility—we are continually negotiating our place within (and against) social structures.
Foreword by Shereen Abouelnaga.

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One of my favourite Silhouette romances defines the protagonist's erotic dilemma in these terms: Her body wanted what he was doing. There was no question about that. But, a warning voice from within her scolded, did she? (Richards, 36). That question, however naively formulated, is surely intelligible to most twentieth-century readers. I am not convinced that it would have been intelligible to Ovid or to the anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, though they would both have acknowledged that desire might conflict with morality. I'm not even sure that the distinction the modern narrative makes between the body and identity ('Her body wanted what he was doing... But... Did she?') would have been intelligible to Plato, though he certainly perceived the possibility of a conflict in the soul between temperance and excess (The Phaedrus, 237, 246, 253-6). Cartesian dualism, locating identity in consciousness, reconstructs not just our theory but our experience of desire. (73)

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Fiction, then, constitutes the primary material for analysis. But which fiction? In view of the suspicion which now quite rightly attaches to the literary canon, its narrowness, its exclusions, I began, resolutely, with popular romance. It's easy to read; it's eminently familiar, even if you've never read one before; and it throws into relief all the problems of desire that Cartesian dualism both poses and offers to solve: mind and body apparently reconciled, in practice driven further apart in the cataclysmic rapture of true love. (76)