D'cruz, Doreen 1950–

PERSONAL: Born December 28, 1950, in Johor Bahru, Malaysia; daughter of M. Antony (a hospital assistant) and Sara (a homemaker) D'Cruz; married John C. Ross (a university lecturer), January 24, 1998. Ethnicity: "Indian." Education: University of Singapore, B.A., B.A. (with honors), 1974; University of Michigan, M.A., Ph.D., 1980. Politics: New Zealand Labour Party. Religion: Roman Catholic.

ADDRESSES: Home—10 Belmont Pl., Palmerston North, New Zealand. Office—School of English and Media Studies, Massey University, Private Bag 11 222, Palmerston North, New Zealand. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer. Massey University, School of English and Media Studies, Palmerston North, New Zealand, senior lecturer. Speaker at conferences and colloquia.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with C.K. Lingam) Playworks: A Collection of Plays for Secondary Schools, Longman (Singapore), Volume 1, 1986, Volume 2, 1987.

Loving Subjects: Narratives of Female Desire, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor to reference books. Contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, including Renascence, Studies in the Novel, and New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies. Coeditor of ACLALS Bulletin: Commonwealth Drama, 1986; associate editor, The Year's Work in English Studies, 2002–.

SIDELIGHTS: Doreen D'Cruz told CA: "The most recent, and perhaps the biggest, project I have completed to date is my book Loving Subjects: Narratives of Female Desire. This is a book that studies selected twentieth-century novels in the light of French feminist theory, particularly that of Luce Irigaray. It sets out to interrogate the extent to which the selected literary works are able to subvert the structural obstacles to the representation of female subjectivity and desire. My study covers the fictional texts of writers such as Antonia White, Rosamond Lehmann, Toni Morrison, Radclyffe Hall, Isabel Miller, Jeanette Winterson, Anita Brookner, and Marilynne Robinson, before concluding with an analysis of Irigaray's lyrical composition Elemental Passions. No single strategy defines the attempts of these authors to represent female desire in their works. The narrative strategies are unique to each writer, as are the facets of patriarchal logic that each calls into question. Despite the specificity that defines each work, my discussion shows that the intervention of female desire refigures narrative form in subtle or spectacular ways, and also changes women's relationship to language, subjectivity, and genealogy.

"Antonia White's autobiographical works are shown to engage in a sustained attempt at displacing the incestuous foundations of heterosexual desire within patriarchy. Turning next to Lehmann's The Ballad and the Source, I argue that her deft use of narrative strategy leads to the retrieval of a tattered female genealogy despite the patriarchal claim upon history and its erasure of women's desire. In Morrison's Beloved, liquidity operates as both symbol and process to undermine the definite and solid configurations of patriarchal power. The force of this liquidity is aligned to maternal processes and brings in its wake the possible emergence of a female syntax. The quest for a feminine syntax also dominates the study of selected lesbian novels. At the heart of the quest for a feminine syntax is the rejection of a sexual economy based on a hierarchy of 'having' and 'lacking.' Works by Brookner, Robinson, and Irigaray are shown to disrupt this hierarchy. My book, it is hoped, goes some way toward showing how literary forms and language may contribute to the erosion of the linguistic sublimations practiced by patriarchy.

"Since the publication of this book I have continued to apply insights gained from its writing towards other research, in particular to a comparative study of the materialist and erotic-materialist dimensions in the novels of Rohinton Mistry and Arundhati Roy, which was published in the New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies in 2003. I have also been engaged in a completed but as-yet-unpublished article on the reconstruction of female desire in Jane Campion's early film Sweetie."