"Lacking Members of Play": Sexual/Textual Politics in J. M. Coetzee's Foe

Abstract

In this essay I analyse J.M. Coetzee’s use of a woman narrator in his 1986 novel Foe and suggest that he ultimately stages a sabotage of his ability to “be the woman” to expose weaknesses in second wave feminist discourses current at the time of the novel’s publication. Through close reading of the novel, I identify a rhetoric of rape perpetrated by Susan which I use as a lens for analysing her role as a potential intermediary between the novel’s dominant and oppressed groups, represented by (De)Foe and Friday. In so doing, I explore the limitations of Coetzee's critique of the appropriation entailed in the process of storytelling and argue that he remains self-conscious of his (ab)use of an embodied woman's perspective. I find that the phallic insertion of a woman’s discourse into the writing of (literary) history is questioned in cases where that discourse is complicit with the trappings of a patriarchal-colonial ideology which further exploits various categories of otherness.