Fantasies of Femininity

Fantasies of Femininity PDF Author: Jane M. Ussher
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813524986
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Fantasies of Femininity, Jane Ussher focuses on unraveling the contradictory visions of feminine sexuality: the fact that representations of the definition of woman seethe with sexuality yet for centuries women have been condemned for exploring their own sexual desires. In her quest for the sources of feminine representation, Ussher interviewed dozens of women - as well as some men - and combed popular media - from Seventeen to Cosmopolitan and Dallas to Donahue - to identify what shapes women's symbolic images of sex and femininity. Ussher argues that women have effectively resisted and subverted these archetypal fantasies of femininity, and in the process of so doing, reframed the very boundaries of sex. In this way, she exposes as myth much of what we think we know about "woman" and about "sex."

Fantasies of Femininity

Fantasies of Femininity PDF Author: Jane M. Ussher
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813524986
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Fantasies of Femininity, Jane Ussher focuses on unraveling the contradictory visions of feminine sexuality: the fact that representations of the definition of woman seethe with sexuality yet for centuries women have been condemned for exploring their own sexual desires. In her quest for the sources of feminine representation, Ussher interviewed dozens of women - as well as some men - and combed popular media - from Seventeen to Cosmopolitan and Dallas to Donahue - to identify what shapes women's symbolic images of sex and femininity. Ussher argues that women have effectively resisted and subverted these archetypal fantasies of femininity, and in the process of so doing, reframed the very boundaries of sex. In this way, she exposes as myth much of what we think we know about "woman" and about "sex."

Feminist Fantasies

Feminist Fantasies PDF Author: Phyllis Schlafly
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book Here

Book Description
Essays written during the 1980s and 1990s argue that most women have no need or desire to work outside the home, and to do so damages the security of both the economy and family life.

The Feminine Mystique

The Feminine Mystique PDF Author: Betty Friedan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393322572
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 587

Get Book Here

Book Description
The book that changed the consciousness of a country—and the world. Landmark, groundbreaking, classic—these adjectives barely describe the earthshaking and long-lasting effects of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. This is the book that defined "the problem that has no name," that launched the Second Wave of the feminist movement, and has been awakening women and men with its insights into social relations, which still remain fresh, ever since. A national bestseller, with over 1 million copies sold.

Fictions of Femininity

Fictions of Femininity PDF Author: Edith Sarra
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804733786
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Get Book Here

Book Description
The history of Japanese memoir literature began over a thousand years ago, its greatest practitioners being women of the “middle ranks” whose literary talents won many of them positions as ladies-in-waiting at the Heian imperial court. As female writers they both inhabited and helped create a discursive world obsessed with the arts of concealment and self-display, the perils and possibilities—erotic, political, and literary—of real and metaphorical peepholes. As memoirists they were virtuosos in the exacting art of feminine self-representation. Fictions of Femininity explores the Heian memoirists’ creations of themselves in four texts: Kagero nikki (The Kagero Memoir, after 974), Makura no soshi (The Pillow Book, after 994), Sarashina nikki (The Sarashina Memoir, after 1058), and Sanuki no suke nikki (The Memoir of the Sanuki Assistant Handmaid, after 1108). Essays on the individual memoirs pursue a dual interest, asking how each text works as a rhetorical construct and how it reflects the author’s negotiations with Heian fictions about women and writing. Letting the memoirs themselves set the terms for exploring gender constructions, Fictions of Femininity addresses a spectrum of related issues. The reading of The Kagero Memoir probes two traditional avenues of feminine expression: the writing of waka and the discourse of Buddhist nunhood. Two essays on The Sarashina Memoir reveal a fine weave of literary, religious, and autoerotic fantasies, highlighting the intellectual gifts of a memoirist long misread as naive and girlish. The essay on The Memoir of the Sanuki Assistant Handmaid examines the use of spirit possession as metaphor for commemorative writing, tracing the balancing act its author performed in the midst of political intrigues at court. The relationship between the memoir and voyeurism takes center stage in the closing essay on The Pillow Book, which compares its author’s treatment of the thematics of “seeing and being seen” with that of her chief rival, Murasaki Shikibu, creator of The Tale of Genji. Taken together, the essays in this book underscore the diversity of the Heian memoirists’ responses to their roles as women and as writers in one of the most unusual epochs of Japanese history.

Colonial Fantasies

Colonial Fantasies PDF Author: Meyda Yegenoglu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521626583
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this 1998 book, Meyda Yegenoglu investigates the intersection between post-colonial and feminist criticism, focusing on the Western fascination with the veiled women of the Orient. She examines the veil as a site of fantasy and of nationalist ideologies and discourses of gender identity, analyzing travel literature, anthropological and literary texts to reveal the hegemonic, colonial identity of the desire to penetrate the veiled surface of 'otherness'. Representations of cultural difference and sexual difference are shown to be inextricably linked, and the figure of the Oriental woman to have functioned as the veiled interior of Western identity.

Samuel Richardson's Fictions of Gender

Samuel Richardson's Fictions of Gender PDF Author: Tassie Gwilliam
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804725225
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book Here

Book Description
In developing a new gender theory for analyzing Samuel Richardson's three major novels - Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison - the author argues that these novels of sexual threat expose, sometimes unwillingly, the extraordinary labor required to construct and maintain the eighteenth-century ideology of gender, that apparently natural dream of perfect symmetry between the sexes. The instability of that model is revealed notably in Richardson's fascination with cross-gender identification and other instances of transgressive desires. The author demonstrates that these violations of the supposedly unbreachable barriers between masculinity and femininity produce what is most moving and imaginative in Richardson's fiction and create an equally powerful repression in the form of punishment of transgressive characters and desires. She also illustrates, through a reading of recurrent fantasies about the composition of bodies - especially women's bodies - the complex interaction between those fantasies and the construction of masculinity and femininity. The genesis of Richardson's own writing is located in a dynamic, reciprocal idea of gender that allows him to see femininity from the inside while retaining the privileges of the masculine viewpoint; the relation between this origin and the novels themselves forms the basis for the discussions of the novels. Each of the three chapters in the book seeks to investigate particular turn of gender construction and a particular mode of the reiterative story of sexual differences. The first chapter, on Pamela, calls on eighteenth-century discourse about opposing ideologies of gender and sexuality to elucidate Richardson's project. The next chapter, on Clarissa, shifts to a more intricate analysis of fantasies about sex and gender, in particular the double reading of masculinity and femininity in the form of of masculinity reading itself through the feminine. The final chapter, on The History of Sir Charles Grandison, examines Richardson's attempt to solidify masculinity in the person of the "good man."

Gendering Orientalism

Gendering Orientalism PDF Author: Reina Lewis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136164758
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Get Book Here

Book Description
In contrast to most cultural histories of imperialism, which analyse Orientalist images of rather than by women, Gendering Orientalism focuses on the contributions of women themselves. Drawing on the little-known work of Henriette Browne, other `lost' women Orientlist artists and the literary works of George Eliot, Reina Lewis challenges masculinist assumptions relating to the stability and homogeneity of the Orientalist gaze. Gendering Orientalism argues that women did not have a straightforward access to an implicitly nale position of western superiority, Their relationship to the shifting terms of race, nation and gender produced positions from which women writers and artists could articulate alternative representations of racial difference. It is this different, and often less degrading, gaze on the Orientalized `Other' that is analysed in this book. By revealing the extent of women's involvement in the popular field of visual Orientalism and highlighting the presence of Orientalist themes in the work of Browne, Eliot and Charlotte Bronte, reina Lewis uncovers women's roles in imperial culture and discourse. Gendering Orientalism will appeal to students, lecturers and researchers in cultural studies, literature, art history, women's studies and anthropology.

Femininity and Domination

Femininity and Domination PDF Author: Sandra Lee Bartky
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136785337
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bartky draws on the experience of daily life to unmask the many disguises by which intimations of inferiority are visited upon women. She critiques both the male bias of current theory and the debilitating dominion held by notions of "proper femininity" over women and their bodies in patriarchal culture.

Femininity in Flight

Femininity in Flight PDF Author: Kathleen Barry
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822339465
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
'Femininity in Flight' considers flight attendants as cultural icons, looking at how attendants redeployed the 'glamourization' used to sell air travel to campaign for professional respect, higher wages, and women's rights.

Fashioning Postfeminism

Fashioning Postfeminism PDF Author: Simidele Dosekun
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252052099
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
Women in Lagos, Nigeria, practice a spectacularly feminine form of black beauty. From cascading hair extensions to immaculate makeup to high heels, their style permeates both day-to-day life and media representations of women not only in a swatch of Africa but across an increasingly globalized world. Simidele Dosekun's interviews and critical analysis consider the female subjectivities these women are performing and desiring. She finds that the women embody the postfeminist idea that their unapologetically immaculate beauty signals—but also constitutes—feminine power. As empowered global consumers and media citizens, the women deny any need to critique their culture or to take part in feminism's collective political struggle. Throughout, Dosekun unearths evocative details around the practical challenges to attaining their style, examines the gap between how others view these women and how they view themselves, and engages with ideas about postfeminist self-fashioning and subjectivity across cultures and class. Intellectually provocative and rich with theory, Fashioning Postfeminism reveals why women choose to live, embody, and even suffer for a fascinating performative culture.