Confronting Patriarchy: Psychoanalytic Theory in the Prose of Cristina Peri Rossi examines
three works of the contemporary Uruguayan author who lives in exile as she dialogues with the
psychoanalytic discourse endemic to patriarchal society. Peri Rossi's prose structured like
unconscious productions that give free expression to desire and passion as emanating from the
forbidden recesses of the psyche powerfully reveals the message as a treatment for an «ill»
society. The language in the three works studied facilitates and reveals the male protagonist's
interaction with the desired female object as a regression to a semiotic pre-oedipal state in
a type of «return of the repressed» of consuming desire that has been written out of mainstream
patriarchy and that serves to challenge its rational symbolic order. It is from this vantage
point that the author attempts to re-write the conclusions obtained through Lacanian and
patriarchal discourse so that woman can emerge as a subjectin her own right.
