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The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity
From the publisher:
The meaning of hospitality in Western thought—from the Bible to Derrida
In The Hostess, Tracy McNulty asks, What are the implications for personhood of sharing a person—a wife or daughter—as an act of hospitality? Combining critical readings of the Bible and Pierre Klossowski's trilogy The Laws of Hospitality, the writings of Kant and Nietzsche, and the work of Freud and Lacan, she contends hospitality involves the boundary between the proper and the improper.
The Hostess is an outstanding piece of scholarship and a compelling read. Because her study is responsible to both historical tradition and contemporary theoretical concerns alike, Tracy McNulty confronts some of today's perplexing sociocultural problems: questions of borders, immigrants, 'guest' workers, hostility, commerce, and more. — Juliet Flower MacCannell, author of The Hysteric's Guide to the Future Female Subject