Immasculate

A larger number of plays than novels seem not to immasculate the female reader in the precise way Fetterley articulates. After having made my choices, I realized that the male-written plays analyzed in this book are all written by heterosexual-identified playwrights […]

His seminal readings of eighteenth-century all-male environments such as prisons and boys' schools have tended to "immasculate" the asylum, the clinic, and the confessional as well. Related is the question of whether this de fact androcentrism derives from something subversively queer or discouragingly traditional (i.e., misogynist) in Foucault or[…]

.The concept of 'reading as a woman' (Culler 1982) permits entry into women-centred text that, unlike male-centred mainstream works, does not immasculate women.

By definition, she [a female reader] cannot resist this danger as herself, as a woman, because as a creature of the flesh she is the danger, but only by renouncing her nature as a woman, remaining a virgin, and identifying herself with male spirit. Such a woman, according to Saint Jerome, is virile in her virtue, as good as a man. If the Power of Women topos in "Ad Virgines" addresses women at all, it appeals to their potential to identify with men and as men, to "immasculate” themselves, in Judith Fetterley's term.