Materialist feminisms / Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Landry, Donna.

Contributor:

MacLean, Gerald M., 1952-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Feminist literary criticism.

Marxist criticism.

Physical Description:

xiii, 270 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Blackwell, 1993.

Summary:

Materialist Feminisms investigates the crucial theoretical and political debates that have determined the course of British and American feminism over the last thirty years. As intellectual terrain has shifted during these decades from Marxism to cultural materialism and poststructuralist literary theory, questions of race and ethnicity, sexuality, postcoloniality, and green politics have converged and sometimes collided with the categories of gender and class on feminist agendas. By exploring some wide-ranging theoretical interests, the authors not only introduce major controversies within feminism, but analyze many of the most important texts and movements of contemporary cultural theory.

Offering not so much a unified history as an analysis of important moments within these debates, this book examines the work of such feminist theorists as Michele Barrett, Judith Butler, Rosalind Coward, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, the m/f collective, Tania Modleski, Jacqueline Rose, Gayle Rubin, Hortense Spillers, and Gayatri Spivak. It also provides helpful glosses on the work of Louis Althusser, Homi K. Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Marx and Engels, Edward Said, Raymond Williams, and the social ecologist Murray Bookchin. Materialist Feminisms includes new, exemplary readings of feminist detective, African-American, and postcolonial fiction, three kinds of textual commodity currently fetishized in the literary marketplace. What might the success of these kinds of writing signify about politics and desire in contemporary Anglo-American culture?

Demonstrating how the poststructuralist critique of essences and identities need not end in a complete paralysis of political action, as has sometimes been claimed, Materialist Feminisms argues that feminism, socialism, and deconstruction are not theoretical dead ends, but names for unfinished business.

Contents:

The Argument vii

Part I Beyond the Marxist

Feminist Encounter

1 Origins UK and US 19

2 Institutionalizing Feminism 42

3 Deconstruction and Beyond 60

Part II Feminism and Cultural Critique

4 Feminism and the History of the Novel 83

5 How PC Can a White Girl Be When Her Sisters of Color Can Represent Themselves? 95

6 History and Poststructuralism 125

Part III The Politics of Contemporary Theory

7 The Politics of Essence 145

8 Identity and Sexuality 153

9 The Theory "Race," Imperialist Fractures, and Postcolonial Subjects 183

10 Towards a Green Cultural Criticism 206.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN:

1557861846

1557861854

OCLC:

27266172