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Though Colette's novels have been thought sentimental and she herself has earned a certain notoriety as a decadent sensualist, Nicole Ward Jouve argues that we need to look closely at Colette's work again, and with the hindsight of feminist theory, to rediscover that inimitable talent for the inscription of sensual and familial pleasure.
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Acknowledged by many feminists as the single most important theoretical work of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) nevertheless occupies an anomalous place in the feminist 'canon'. Yet it has had an undeniable impact, not only on the development of critiques of sexual politics but on twentieth-century western thinking about the concept of 'woman' in general.This collection of six new essays by scholars from the disciplines of French, English literature, history, cultural criticism, feminist theory and philosophy makes a valuable contribution to the task of re-reading and reassessing this enormously influential text for a new generation of feminist readers, and also for cultural theorists, for whom the question of 'the feminine' is at the centre of key debates in philosophy and postmodernity.The contributors provide a significantly new rethinking of the place of The Second Sex in cultural history and of women and representation, the role of 'fictions' and the problem of ethical agency in the work of the leading intellectual woman of this age.
Is creation male, as the Bible seems to suggest? Does creativity always belong to the male element? Is there no female genesis? This exciting book argues against fashionable trends in contemporary feminisms that wish to abandon ′woman′ as a flawed and oppressive term, regarding masculinity and femininity as unwanted binaries that attempt to subvert gender as oppression. Instead the author argues for the need to revalue feminine origins, to make room for the feminine element in creation and explore the predicament of the female creator. Nicole Ward Jouve argues for a necessary relation to male and female, inside and outside, in the creative act and the formation of a creative sense of sel...
The rampaging female has become a new clich in Hollywood cinema, a sexy beauty stabbing and shooting her way to box-office success. Fatal Attraction, Thelma and Louise, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and Single White Female are a few of the recent mainstream films that have attracted huge audiences. Meanwhile, true accounts of a teenager shooting her lover's wife and a battered woman bludgeoning her husband to death get prime news media coverage-and are quickly made into TV movies. This pioneering collection of essays looks at our enduring fascination with women who murder. The authors explore how both fictional and real women are represented, as well as the way society responds to these wo...
Can fictions of desire determine real pleasures? Do texts regulate the performance of our sexual identities? In Sexuality and the Reading Encounter Emma Wilson offers a new account of the intimate relations between reading, identity, and identification. Interweaving theoretical debate with analysis of texts by Proust, Duras, Tournier, and Cixous, her study reveals the formative potential and transferential pleasures of the reading encounter. Drawing on an understanding of identity as performative, alienated and fictitious, this study argues that the fictions we read act as mirrors and decoys displaying seductive images of intelligible sexual identities. The texts chosen for discussion here draw attention to the strategies by which identity is constructed textually. They work thus to frame the reading encounter and to highlight its formative power. In analysis of these texts, this study works to cut across the axes of homosexuality and heterosexuality, offering an alternative focus on the interdependence of identity and fantasy.
James Joyce is located between, and constructed within, two worlds: the national and international, the political and cultural systems of colonialism and postcolonialism. Joyce's political project is to construct a postcolonial contra-modernity: to write the incommensurable differences of colonial, postcolonial, and gendered subjectivities, and, in doing so, to reorient the axis of power and knowledge. What Joyce dramatizes in his hybrid writing is the political and cultural remainder of imperial history or patriarchal canons: a remainder that resists assimilation into the totalizing narratives of modernity. Through this remainder - of both politics and the psyche - Joyce reveals how a minor...
The Reader's Guide to Women's Studies is a searching and analytical description of the most prominent and influential works written in the now universal field of women's studies. Some 200 scholars have contributed to the project which adopts a multi-layered approach allowing for comprehensive treatment of its subject matter. Entries range from very broad themes such as "Health: General Works" to entries on specific individuals or more focused topics such as "Doctors."
The most complete study of Blier's work to date, Harris traces the director's career from the early 1960s until the present. Outlines the forms, themes and style which dominate in Blier's work, and challenges the many labels that have been used to describe both the corpus of films and the man himself. Provides an original and controversial discussion of Blier's alleged 'misogyny', and invites the reader to understand the scatological and corporeal aspects of Blier's filmmaking in terms of long-established traditions of popular dramatic culture. Brings to light the comic mechanisms underpinning Blier's films and identifies strategies which navigate through one of the most entertaining and disconcerting bodies of work of recent years. The first book on Blier published in English.