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This lively and controversial collection of essays sets out to theorize and practice a ‘materialist-feminist’ criticism of literature and culture. Such a criticism is based on the view that the material conditions in which men and women live are central to an understanding of culture and society. It emphasises the relation of gender to other categories of analysis, such as class and race, and considers the connection between ideology and cultural practice, and the ways in which all relations of power change with changing social and economic conditions. By presenting a wide range of work by major feminist scholars, this anthology in effect defines as well as illustrates the materialist-feminist tendency in current literary criticism. The essays in the first part of the book examine race, ideology, and the literary canon and explore the ways in which other critical discourse, such as those of deconstruction and French feminism, might be useful to a feminist and materialist criticism. The second part of the book contains examples of such criticism in practice, with studies of individual works, writers and ideas. An introduction by the editors situates the collected essays in relation both to one another and to a shared materialist/feminist project. Feminist Criticism and Social Change demonstrates the important contribution of materialist-feminist criticism to our understanding of literature and society, and fulfils a crucial need among those concerned with gender and its relation to criticism.
Feminist criticism has come a long way in the last twenty years. Its development has been rapid, its snowball progress picking up elements of structuralism, deconstruction and psychoanalytic criticism; just as rapidly it has been shedding its own early theories and methodologies. Now it is a critical orthodoxy with its own established canonical texts. Now is the time, then, to begin to question that orthodoxy. In Problems for Feminist Criticism five women critics seek to do that, in a spirit of enquiry whose central point of focus is the literature for which feminist critics have offered a re-reading. By reference to a wide range of writers, from Milton to the contemporary poet, with a strong emphasis on the nineteenth-century novel, the contributors ask what we may be losing from literature by adopting the feminist orthodoxy. Each chapter provides a survey of feminist critical approaches to its subject and highlights the inherent problems. The book frees the way forward for critics who have found much that is stimulating and revealing in feminist approaches to literature, but who find its proscriptiveness potentially reductive. It shows how literature may have the flexibility to absorb and benefit from new critical approaches, whilst still retaining its own life, never quite to be contained in criticism’s theories and methodologies.
Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse confronts the impasses in materialist feminist work on rethinking ‘woman’ as a discursively constructed subject. The book looks at the problem of examining critically the social dimensions on which theories of discourse are premised: how such theories understand ‘materiality’; the relation between ‘women’s experience’ and feminist politics, and that between history and discourse. Rosemary Hennessy considers the work of Kristeva, Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe, and argues for a materialist feminist re-articulation of discourse as ideology. Concerns over identity and difference are incorporated into a rewriting of materialist feminism's analysis of women's oppression across capitalist and patriarchal structures. In adapting postmodernist theories in this way, Hennessy develops a project of social change, where feminism, while maintaining its specificity, is necessarily aligned with other emancipatory movements.
The ‘minority’ feminist viewpoints have often been submerged in the interests of maintaining a mainstream, universal model of feminism. This anthology takes into account the various differences among women while looking at the important areas of feminist struggle. While sisterhood is indeed global, it certainly does not mean that all women are required to submerge their specific differences and assimilate to a universal model. Consequently, the collection includes essays by leaders in the field of post-structuralist enquiry as well as by those immersed in the new spirituality, and the social consequences of recent biological research. Other essays reflect the political struggles which continue to be waged with different strategies by socialist and radical feminists, and the self-searching analyses undertaken by feminists uneasy about their inclusion within educational institutions and the radical new interpretations of sexuality within the cultural domain. The collection begins with a critique of white mainstream feminism emanating from Aboriginal women in Australia. The implications of the critique indicate that there is a pervasive racism within the feminist movement.
For over a decade, feminist studies have occupied an extraordinary position in the United States. On the one hand, they have contributed to the development of a strong ‘identity’ politics; on the other, they have been part of the post-structuralist critique of the unified subject – its experience, truth and presence – and of the massive challenge to Western metaphysics and humanism. Along with race and ethnic studies, feminist enquiry has moved beyond the fiction of a unitary feminism to address the differences within the study of difference. The essays in this volume all address feminism’s relationships to theory and politics at the level of the criticism and production of knowledge. Readers and students of politics, history, literature, philosophy, sociology and the sciences – anyone with a stake in theory and politics – will benefit from this powerful book.
Nine essays that Felski (English, U. of Virginia) has revised from publication elsewhere grapple with whether people live in the same time, whether it is possible to talk about men's time and women's or Western and non-Western time, how to explain that individuals and groups may perceive time very differently and yet seem to inhabit the same time in crucial respects, and what the stakes are in either affirming or denying the contemporaneity and coevalness of others. c. Book News Inc.
Felski presents a critical account of current American and European feminist literary theory, and analyzes contemporary fiction by women to show that no theorist can identify a specifically "female" or "feminine" kind of writing without reference to what gender means at a given historical moment. She argues that the idea of a feminist aesthetic is a non-issue needlessly pursued by feminists. She calls for a consideration of the social and cultural context in which these texts were produced and received, and demonstrates her method of an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of literature which can integrate literary and social theory. ISBN 0-674-06894-7: $25.00; ISBN 0-674-06895-5 (pbk.): $9.95.
An updated, reader-friendly guide to feminist theory and therapy! Feminist Theories and Feminist Psychotherapies: Origins, Themes, and Diversity, Second Edition examines major feminist theoretical perspectives and links them to practical applications of feminist therapy. This book focuses on the evolution of feminist therapy and how histor
The Oppositional Imagination draws together elements from Marxism, analytical philosophy, post-structuralism, and post-colonial criticism to analyse the elusive interplay of culture and power. It focuses its attention on cultural domination, opposition and evasion in the realm of sex and gender. Joan Cocks reflects on questions crucial to both political theorists and feminists: the relationship between political theory and practical life; the possibility of bringing together a philosophical and a literary language to comprehend and evoke concrete experience; and the reconciliation of radical political commitment with an appreciation of shades of grey in the social world. She explores the variety of ways in which power and eroticism intersect; the liberating and tyrannical impulses of marginal cultures; and the place of the loyalist, the eccentric, the critic, the traitor, and the rebel in the sexual struggle. The Oppositional Imagination reaffirms the centrality of political theory and feminist practice while at the same time challenging certain of their key principles in thought-provoking ways.
These original essays are planned to provide a coherent basis for an understanding of women's social and historical situation. This achieved by outlining the foundation of a systematic approach to an analysis of women's relationship to modes of production and reproduction within a materialist framework. The essays, each with a brief editorial introduction, deal with issues and perspectives brought increasingly to the fore in recent years, not only in the women's movement but in the social sciences generally. The articles are wide-ranging, covering such issues as patriarchy, paid and unpaid labour and the state. The centrality of two of the major themes - the family and the labour process - suggests that an understanding of women's situation is necessarily based on an analysis of the structures of production and reproduction. The authors' aim in producing Feminism and Materialism is to confront systematically theoretical issues current in the developing area of women's studies, while recognising that this must constitute a critique of existing theoretical frameworks. The book will be of interest to teachers and students in the social sciences and in women's studies, as well as to all those who wish to develop an understanding of what a materialist approach to feminism might be.