Gender and Culture Series – serie

Do we need bodies for sex? Is gender in the head or in the body? In Second Skins Jay Prosser reveals the powerful drive that leads men and women literally to shed their skins and--in flesh and head--to cross the boundary of sex. Telling their story is not merely an act that comes after the fact, it's a force of its own that makes it impossible to forget that stories of identity inhabit autobiographical bodies. In this stunning first extensive study of transsexual autobiography, Jay Prosser examines the exchanges between body and narrative that constitute the phenomenon of transsexuality. Showing how transsexuality's somatic transitions are spurred and enabled by the formal transitions of narrative, Prosser uncovers a narrative tradition for transsexual bodies. Sex change is a plot--and thus appropriately transsexuals make for adept and absorbing authors. In reading the transssexual plot through transsexuals' own recounting, Prosser not only gives us a new and more accurate rendition of transsexuality.His book suggests transsexuality, with its extraordinary conjunctions of body and narrative, as an identity story that transitions across the body/language divide that currently stalls poststucturalist thought. The form and approach of Second Skins works to cross other important and parallel divides. In addition to analyzing transsexual textual accounts, the book includes some 30 photographic portraits of transsexuals--poignant attempts by transsexuals to present themselves unmediated to the world except by the camera. And the author does not shy from exposure himself. Interjecting the personal into his theoretical discussion and close textual work throughout the book, Prosser reads and writes his own body, his purpose in that stylistic crossing to stake out transsexuality--and hence this very book--as his own body's narrative.

From one of our most outspoken feminist critics, this collection explores various ways in which the body can be rethought of as a site of knowledge rather than as a medium to move beyond or dominate. Moving between a theoretical and confessional stance, Gallop explores Sade's relation to mothers both in his novels and his life; Barthe's The Pleasure of the Text; Freud's work, read not as a psychological text but as a literary endeavor and from a woman's point of view; and Luce Irigarary's famous This Sex Which Is Not One.

-- Elaine Marks, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Fifteen of the most important and influential women fiction writers, critics, and theorists writing in France today are interviewed in Shifting Scenes. Although their writing and attitudes differ in many ways, their work is perceived in the U.S. to constitute "French Feminism," and has a marked impact on American feminist theory. Alice Jardine and Anne Menke interviewed Chantal Chawaf, Helene Cixous, Catherine Clement, Francoise Collin, Marguerite Duras, Claudine Herrmann, Jeanne Hyvrard, Luce Irigaray, Sarah Kofman, Julia Kristeva, Eugenie Lemoine-Luccioni, Marcelle Marini, Michele Montrelay, Christiane Rochefort, and Monique Wittig. The women were asked what it means to be a woman writer in France today and how each views her relations to her country's institutions, and the place of women writers in the canon. the answers are lively, unexpectedly argumentative, and diverse. What these highly accomplished women have to say about contemporary society, politics, literature, feminism, and their own work, will surprise, inform, and challenge.

Fifteen of the most important and influential women fiction writers, critics, and theorists writing in France today are interviewed in Shifting Scenes. Although their writing and attitudes differ in many ways, their work is perceived in the U.S. to constitute "French Feminism," and has a marked impact on American feminist theory. Alice Jardine and Anne Menke interviewed Chantal Chawaf, Helene Cixous, Catherine Clement, Francoise Collin, Marguerite Duras, Claudine Herrmann, Jeanne Hyvrard, Luce Irigaray, Sarah Kofman, Julia Kristeva, Eugenie Lemoine-Luccioni, Marcelle Marini, Michele Montrelay, Christiane Rochefort, and Monique Wittig. The women were asked what it means to be a woman writer in France today and how each views her relations to her country's institutions, and the place of women writers in the canon. the answers are lively, unexpectedly argumentative, and diverse. What these highly accomplished women have to say about contemporary society, politics, literature, feminism, and their own work, will surprise, inform, and challenge.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun's groundbreaking essay "The Character of Hamlet's Mother" was published in 1957 at a time when few critics thought seriously about women's issues in literature. In the years since, Heilbrun has emerged as a feminist leader through her commitment to women's writing and feminist literary critique. Now in a new paperback edition with a new preface by the author, this collection explores feminism in literary studies during the last three decades. By questioning the gender arrangements of society, Heilbrun has helped to transform them. Taken together, these graceful essays demonstrate the consistency and clarity of Heilbrun's vision and her deep respect for the lives of women who write.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun's groundbreaking essay "The Character of Hamlet's Mother" was published in 1957 at a time when few critics thought seriously about women's issues in literature. In the years since, Heilbrun has emerged as a feminist leader through her commitment to women's writing and feminist literary critique. Now in a new paperback edition with a new preface by the author, this collection explores feminism in literary studies during the last three decades. By questioning the gender arrangements of society, Heilbrun has helped to transform them. Taken together, these graceful essays demonstrate the consistency and clarity of Heilbrun's vision and her deep respect for the lives of women who write.

Rape does not have to happen. The fact that it does--and in the United States a rape is reported every six minutes--indicates that we live in a rape-prone culture where rape or the threat of rape functions as a tool for enforcing sexual difference and hierarchy. Rape and Representation explores how cultural forms construct and reenforce social attitudes and behaviors that perpetuate sexual violence. The essays proceed from the observation that literature not only reflects but also contributes to what a society believes about itself. Fourteen essays by authors in the fields of English, American and African-American, German, African, Brazilian, Classical, and French literatures and film present a wide range of texts from different historical periods and cultures. Contributors demythologize patriarchal representation in literature and art in order to show how it makes rape seem natural and inevitable. Contributors include: the editors, John J. Winkler, Patricia Klindiest Joplin, Susan Winnett, Ellen Rooney, Coppelia Kahn, Eileen Julien, Marta Peixoto, Kathryn Gravdal, Carla Freccero, Nellie V. McKay, Nancy A. Jones, and Froma I. Zeitlin.Their work raises pressing--and often difficult--questions for feminist criticism.

Rape does not have to happen. The fact that it does--and in the United States a rape is reported every six minutes--indicates that we live in a rape-prone culture where rape or the threat of rape functions as a tool for enforcing sexual difference and hierarchy. Rape and Representation explores how cultural forms construct and reenforce social attitudes and behaviors that perpetuate sexual violence. The essays proceed from the observation that literature not only reflects but also contributes to what a society believes about itself. Fourteen essays by authors in the fields of English, American and African-American, German, African, Brazilian, Classical, and French literatures and film present a wide range of texts from different historical periods and cultures. Contributors demythologize patriarchal representation in literature and art in order to show how it makes rape seem natural and inevitable. Contributors include: the editors, John J. Winkler, Patricia Klindiest Joplin, Susan Winnett, Ellen Rooney, Coppelia Kahn, Eileen Julien, Marta Peixoto, Kathryn Gravdal, Carla Freccero, Nellie V. McKay, Nancy A. Jones, and Froma I. Zeitlin.Their work raises pressing--and often difficult--questions for feminist criticism.

In essays on literary images of lesbianism from Defoe and Diderot to Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes, on the homosexual reputation of Marie Antoinette, on the lesbian writings of Anne Lister, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Janet Flanner, and on Henry James's The Bostonians, Castle shows how a lesbian presence can be identified in the literature, history, and culture of the past three centuries.

Engaging with Irigaray is the first collection of essays that attempts to go beyond the question of essentialism in order to provide a full critical assessment of Irigaray's contribution to a number of fields, notably philosophy. By reconsidering Irigaray's writings in the field of European thought and politics in which she positions herself, the authors of these essays--among them Judith Butler, Elizabeth Weed, and Rosi Braidotti--shed new light on the relationship of Irigaray to many of the philosophers she has "romanced," from Aristotle to Deleuze. This collection of essays will be invaluable to readers interested both in continental feminism and the intellectual engagement of an international group of scholars grappling with the issues of gender difference, sexuality, and women's politics between women and with men.

This is the first comprehensive collection of feminist politics and writings by the most influential feminists of the twentieth century, with a full glossary of key terms, section introductions, and entries on individual writers. Contributors include Simone de Beauvoir, Catharine A. MacKinnon, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Betty Friedan, Gayle Rubin, Laura Mulvey, Elaine Showalter, and Julia Kristeva. Modern Feminisms covers key feminist ideas and perspectives on the family, sexuality, work, education, patriarchy, race, language, culture, and representation, and provides a persepective on the variety of modern feminisms that have emerged in the twentieth century.

Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most influential texts in gender studies, men's studies and gay studies," this book uncovers the homosocial desire between men, from Restoration comedies to Tennyson's Princess.

In many fields, the body is the topic generating exciting new research and interdisciplinary inquiry. Feminist theorists, in particular, have focused on the female body as the site where representations of difference and identity are inscribed. Drawn from a broad range of disciplines, Writing on the Body explores the tensions between women's lived bodily experiences and the cultural meanings inscribed on the female body. The volume includes classic and contemporary essays on rape, pornography, eroticism, anorexia, body building, menstruation, and maternity, and challenges racial, class and sexual categories. Complemented by the editors' introduction, Writing on the Body is a comprehensive sourcebook on the major theoretical positions and critical trends surrounding the female body.

-- Jane Gallop, author of Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment

-- Jane Gallop, author of Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment

Do we need bodies for sex? Is gender in the head or in the body? In Second Skins Jay Prosser reveals the powerful drive that leads men and women literally to shed their skins and--in flesh and head--to cross the boundary of sex. Telling their story is not merely an act that comes after the fact, it's a force of its own that makes it impossible to forget that stories of identity inhabit autobiographical bodies. In this stunning first extensive study of transsexual autobiography, Jay Prosser examines the exchanges between body and narrative that constitute the phenomenon of transsexuality. Showing how transsexuality's somatic transitions are spurred and enabled by the formal transitions of narrative, Prosser uncovers a narrative tradition for transsexual bodies. Sex change is a plot--and thus appropriately transsexuals make for adept and absorbing authors. In reading the transssexual plot through transsexuals' own recounting, Prosser not only gives us a new and more accurate rendition of transsexuality.His book suggests transsexuality, with its extraordinary conjunctions of body and narrative, as an identity story that transitions across the body/language divide that currently stalls poststucturalist thought. The form and approach of Second Skins works to cross other important and parallel divides. In addition to analyzing transsexual textual accounts, the book includes some 30 photographic portraits of transsexuals--poignant attempts by transsexuals to present themselves unmediated to the world except by the camera. And the author does not shy from exposure himself. Interjecting the personal into his theoretical discussion and close textual work throughout the book, Prosser reads and writes his own body, his purpose in that stylistic crossing to stake out transsexuality--and hence this very book--as his own body's narrative.

Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America explores the relationship between confessional poetry and constitutional privacy doctrine, both of which emerged at the end of the 1950s. While the public declarations of the Supreme Court and the private declamations of the lyric poet may seem unrelated, both express the upheavals in American notions of privacy that marked the Cold War era. Nelson situates the poetry and legal decisions as part of a far wider anxiety about privacy that erupted across the social, cultural, and political spectrum during this period. She explores the panic over the "death of privacy" aroused by broad changes in postwar culture: the growth of suburbia, the advent of television, the popularity of psychoanalysis, the arrival of computer databases, and the spectacles of confession associated with McCarthyism. Examining this interchange between poetry and law at its most intense moments of reflection in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, Deborah Nelson produces a rhetorical analysis of a privacy concept integral to postwar America's self-definition and to bedrock contradictions in Cold War ideology.Nelson argues that the desire to stabilize privacy in a constitutional right and the movement toward confession in postwar American poetry were not simply manifestations of the anxiety about privacy. Supreme Court justices and confessional poets such as Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, and Sylvia Plath were redefining the nature of privacy itself. Close reading of the poetry alongside the Supreme Court's shifting definitions of privacy in landmark decisions reveals a broader and deeper cultural metaphor at work.

Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America explores the relationship between confessional poetry and constitutional privacy doctrine, both of which emerged at the end of the 1950s. While the public declarations of the Supreme Court and the private declamations of the lyric poet may seem unrelated, both express the upheavals in American notions of privacy that marked the Cold War era. Nelson situates the poetry and legal decisions as part of a far wider anxiety about privacy that erupted across the social, cultural, and political spectrum during this period. She explores the panic over the "death of privacy" aroused by broad changes in postwar culture: the growth of suburbia, the advent of television, the popularity of psychoanalysis, the arrival of computer databases, and the spectacles of confession associated with McCarthyism. Examining this interchange between poetry and law at its most intense moments of reflection in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, Deborah Nelson produces a rhetorical analysis of a privacy concept integral to postwar America's self-definition and to bedrock contradictions in Cold War ideology.Nelson argues that the desire to stabilize privacy in a constitutional right and the movement toward confession in postwar American poetry were not simply manifestations of the anxiety about privacy. Supreme Court justices and confessional poets such as Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, and Sylvia Plath were redefining the nature of privacy itself. Close reading of the poetry alongside the Supreme Court's shifting definitions of privacy in landmark decisions reveals a broader and deeper cultural metaphor at work.

Unlike the literary traditions of the United States, England, and France, the first century of Hebrew literature was lacking in women novelists; women tended to write poetry, while prose fiction was mainly the domain of male writers. Since the 1980s, however, there has been a virtual explosion of commercially successful Hebrew fiction by women that includes many traditionally male genres, such as the historical novel, fictional autobiography, and the mystery novel. No Room of Their Own is a comparative analysis of recent Israeli fiction by women and some of its Western models, from Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir to Marilyn French and Marie Cardinal.Feldman shows the richness and subtleties of Israeli women's fiction as she explores the themes of gender and nation, as well as the (non)representation of the "New Hebrew Woman" in five authors-the "foremothers" of the contemporary boom in Israeli Women's fiction: Amalia Kahana-Carmon (Up on Montifer, With Her on Her Way Home), Shulamith Hareven (City of Many Days, Thirst, The Vocabulary of Peace), Netiva BenYehuda (The Palmach Trilogy), Ruth Almog (Women, The Story of a [Writer's] Block, Roots of Air), and Shulamit Lapid (Gei Oni).

Is feminism dead, as has been claimed by notable members of the media and the academy? Has feminist knowledge, with its proliferation of methodologies and fields, been purchased at the price of power? Are the conflicts among feminists evidence of self-destructive infighting or do they herald the emergence of innovative modes of inquiry? Given a feminism now ensconced within higher education as specialized or fractious scholarship, Susan Gubar's Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century demonstrates that an invigorated concentration on activism and artistry can accentuate not the clinical or disparaging meaning of "critical" but its sense of compelling urgency and irreverent vitality. As a pioneer of feminist studies-and the object of some of the more rancorous criticism lodged against early feminist scholars-Gubar stands in a unique position to comment on current dilemmas. Moving beyond defensiveness produced by generational rivalry, the impasse propagated by smug deployments of identity politics, and the obscurity of poststructuralist theory, she claims that the very controversies that undermine feminism's unity also prove its resilience.Gubar begins by considering the volatile impact of gender on recent redefinitions of race, sexuality, religion, and class proposed by four important groups in contemporary feminism: African-American performance and visual artists, lesbian creative writers, Jewish-American women, and newly institutionalized female academics. She then addresses major divisions-including the rifts between various area studies and women's studies, as well as strains between generations-that both threaten and invigorate feminist inquiry. Gubar's forays into art and activism, politics, and the profession provide a sometimes distressing, sometimes comical, sometimes optimistic view of feminism emerging from a time of contention into a lively period of pluralized perspectives and disciplines.

In the introduction to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir notes that "a man never begins by establishing himself as an individual of a certain sex: his being a man poses no problem." Nancy Bauer begins her book by asking: "Then what kind of a problem does being a woman pose?" Bauer's aim is to show that in answering this question The Second Sex dramatizes the extent to which being a woman poses a philosophical problem. This book is a call for philosophers as well as feminists to turn, or return to, The Second Sex. Bauer shows that Beauvoir's magnum opus, written a quarter-century before the development of contemporary feminist philosophy, constitutes a meditation on the relationship between women and philosophy that remains profoundly undervalued. She argues that the extraordinary effect The Second Sex has had on women's lives, then and now, can be traced to Beauvoir's discovery of a new way to philosophize-a way grounded in her identity as a woman. In offering a new interpretation of The Second Sex, Bauer shows how philosophy can be politically productive for women while remaining genuinely philosophical.

Exploring the status of feminism in this "postfeminist" age, this sophisticated meditation on feminist thinking over the past three decades moves away from the all too common dependence on French theorists and male thinkers and instead builds on a wide-ranging body of feminist theory written by women. These writings address the question "Where are we going?" as well as "Where have we come from?" As evidenced in the essays compiled here, the multiplicity of directions available to this new feminism ranges from poststructuralist academic theory through cultural activism to re-readings of law, literature, and representation. Contributors include Mieke Bal, Lauren Berlant, Rosi Braidotti, Elisabeth Bronfen, Judith Butler, Rey Chow, Drucilla Cornell, Ann Cvetkovich, Jane Gallop, Beatrice Hanssen, Claire Kahane, Ranjana Khanna, Biddy Martin, Juliet Mitchell, Anita Haya Patterson, and Valerie Smith. Feminist Consequences, representing the forefront of international feminist thought, marks a new and long-desired stage of feminist criticism where women are themselves making theory rather than reacting to male production.

Exploring the status of feminism in this "postfeminist" age, this sophisticated meditation on feminist thinking over the past three decades moves away from the all too common dependence on French theorists and male thinkers and instead builds on a wide-ranging body of feminist theory written by women. These writings address the question "Where are we going?" as well as "Where have we come from?" As evidenced in the essays compiled here, the multiplicity of directions available to this new feminism ranges from poststructuralist academic theory through cultural activism to re-readings of law, literature, and representation. Contributors include Mieke Bal, Lauren Berlant, Rosi Braidotti, Elisabeth Bronfen, Judith Butler, Rey Chow, Drucilla Cornell, Ann Cvetkovich, Jane Gallop, Beatrice Hanssen, Claire Kahane, Ranjana Khanna, Biddy Martin, Juliet Mitchell, Anita Haya Patterson, and Valerie Smith. Feminist Consequences, representing the forefront of international feminist thought, marks a new and long-desired stage of feminist criticism where women are themselves making theory rather than reacting to male production.

The Well of Loneliness-the Radclyffe Hall novel at times referred to as "the bible of lesbianism"-was released in Britain in 1928 and was immediately controversial. Pronounced obscene following a sensational trial, the book has become a cultural icon as well as a source of considerable debate, especially among feminists, lesbians, and transgendered persons. Palatable Poison gathers together classic essays on Radclyffe Hall's book-beginning with Havelock Ellis and early reviews-as well as pieces by such contemporary critics as Esther Newton, Judith Halberstam, Teresa de Lauretis, and Terry Castle. Providing an understanding of how views of the book have changed over time and covering such topics as race, the nation at war, and melancholy, the collection presents new and provocative ideas about the immense cultural impact of The Well of Loneliness and its unique place in the literature of sexual nonconformity. Palatable Poison gathers together classic essays on Radclyffe Hall's book-beginning with Havelock Ellis and early reviews-as well as new pieces by such contemporary critics as Esther Newton, Judith Halberstam, Teresa de Lauretis, and Terry Castle.Providing an understanding of how views of the book have changed over time and covering such topics as fetishism, inversion, and melancholy, the collection presents new and provocative ideas about the immense cultural impact of The Well of Loneliness and its unique place in the literature of sexual nonconformity.

The Well of Loneliness-the Radclyffe Hall novel at times referred to as "the bible of lesbianism"-was released in Britain in 1928 and was immediately controversial. Pronounced obscene following a sensational trial, the book has become a cultural icon as well as a source of considerable debate, especially among feminists, lesbians, and transgendered persons. Palatable Poison gathers together classic essays on Radclyffe Hall's book-beginning with Havelock Ellis and early reviews-as well as pieces by such contemporary critics as Esther Newton, Judith Halberstam, Teresa de Lauretis, and Terry Castle. Providing an understanding of how views of the book have changed over time and covering such topics as race, the nation at war, and melancholy, the collection presents new and provocative ideas about the immense cultural impact of The Well of Loneliness and its unique place in the literature of sexual nonconformity. Palatable Poison gathers together classic essays on Radclyffe Hall's book-beginning with Havelock Ellis and early reviews-as well as new pieces by such contemporary critics as Esther Newton, Judith Halberstam, Teresa de Lauretis, and Terry Castle.Providing an understanding of how views of the book have changed over time and covering such topics as fetishism, inversion, and melancholy, the collection presents new and provocative ideas about the immense cultural impact of The Well of Loneliness and its unique place in the literature of sexual nonconformity.

In her latest work of personal criticism, Nancy K. Miller tells the story of how a girl who grew up in the 1950s and got lost in the 1960s became a feminist critic in the 1970s. As in her previous books, Miller interweaves pieces of her autobiography with the memoirs of contemporaries in order to explore the unexpected ways that the stories of other people's lives give meaning to our own. The evolution she chronicles was lived by a generation of literary girls who came of age in the midst of profound social change and, buoyed by the energy of second-wave feminism, became writers, academics, and activists. Miller's recollections form one woman's installment in a collective memoir that is still unfolding, an intimate page of a group portrait in process.

Academic superstars Andrew Ross, Edward Said, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Bad boy filmmakers Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, and Brian de Palma. What do these influential contemporary figures have in common? In Cool Men and the Second Sex, Susan Fraiman identifies them all with "cool masculinity" and boldly unpacks the gender politics of their work. According to Fraiman, "cool men" rebel against a mainstream defined as maternal. Bad boys resist the authority of women and banish mothers to the realm of the uncool. As a result, despite their hipness-or because of it-these men too often feel free to ignore the insights of feminist thinkers. Through subtle close readings, Fraiman shows that even Gates, champion of black women's writing, and even queer theorists bent on undoing gender binaries, at times end up devaluing women in favor of men and masculinity. A wide-ranging and fair-minded analysis, Cool Men acknowledges the invaluable contributions of its subjects while also deciphering the gender codes and baring the contradictions implicit in their work.Affirming the legacy of second-wave feminist scholars and drawing as well on the intersectional work of third-wavers, Cool Men helps to reinvent feminist critique for the twenty-first century.

Academic superstars Andrew Ross, Edward Said, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Bad boy filmmakers Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, and Brian de Palma. What do these influential contemporary figures have in common? In Cool Men and the Second Sex, Susan Fraiman identifies them all with "cool masculinity" and boldly unpacks the gender politics of their work. According to Fraiman, "cool men" rebel against a mainstream defined as maternal. Bad boys resist the authority of women and banish mothers to the realm of the uncool. As a result, despite their hipness-or because of it-these men too often feel free to ignore the insights of feminist thinkers. Through subtle close readings, Fraiman shows that even Gates, champion of black women's writing, and even queer theorists bent on undoing gender binaries, at times end up devaluing women in favor of men and masculinity. A wide-ranging and fair-minded analysis, Cool Men acknowledges the invaluable contributions of its subjects while also deciphering the gender codes and baring the contradictions implicit in their work.Affirming the legacy of second-wave feminist scholars and drawing as well on the intersectional work of third-wavers, Cool Men helps to reinvent feminist critique for the twenty-first century.