In these spirited and powerfully written essays, a new generation of intellectuals makes its mark, challenging conservatives and liberals alike to chart a new course for a responsible politics in contemporary society. A new intellectual movement on the left emerges here. No longer trapped by the old polarizing antagonism between Marxism and feminism, these authors demonstrate as never before the need for an awaremess of gender as it affects every aspect of our society. At the same time, these paradigmatic essays map out a new terrain for feminist thinking, one that fully recognizes the complex workings of gender and leaves oppositional feminism far behind.
In the keynote essay, Ambivalence as Alibi, Rosemary Hennessy challenges the most basic assumptions of postmodern sophistication to forge a compelling sytheseis of political, economic, and artistic theory. Betty Joseph, Jennifer Brody, and Poonam Pillai break through the shibboleths of Western liberal tolerance to describe gender inequalities that are intrinsically inter-cultural. Eileen Cleere demonstrates that novels are an important source for understanding how people interpret the economic conditions in which they live, linking social history and literary criticism in a provocative new way. Bridget Elliott uncovers the unusual social and artistic imagination of Marie Laurencin, an artist who was both working-class and avant-garde, and who makes us rethink basic assumptions of artistic form in the visual representation of women. Laura Lyons, analyzing the no-wash protest among IRA prisoners, discovers a new kind of political protest that draws on performance art and the discourse of the body for its political symbolism. And Joseph Litvak, in a highly suggestive critical reading, makes us wonder if the New Historicism may possibly owe its greatest debt to the charming young men of Jane Austen's fictitious world.

go to the Genders website ]

Sexual confessions on television talk shows. Gender and medical discourse in colonial India. River Phoenix in "My Own Private Idaho," White women in a German colony. Henry James' thwarted love. What do these seemingly diverse subjects have in common?

All address, in different ways, social and cultural attempts to contain eroticism by delineating the perimeters of genders. They scrutinize the political investments in the construction of gender in such disparate locations as contemporary Hollywood, Renaissance England, colonial India and Africa, and in modern and contemporary homosexual discourse communities and in Freud's sessions with Dora.

But whether the gendering of the subject follows the dictates of conservative politics or the radical agenda of a marginalized interest, the essays reveal the erotic overflow--the flood--that cannot be contained within any one gender identity. In examining how the erotic escapes containment, this work discloses problems inherent in the intersections of gender and desire.>[ go to the Genders website ]

In these spirited and powerfully written essays, a new generation of intellectuals makes its mark, challenging conservatives and liberals alike to chart a new course for a responsible politics in contemporary society. A new intellectual movement on the left emerges here. No longer trapped by the old polarizing antagonism between Marxism and feminism, these authors demonstrate as never before the need for an awaremess of gender as it affects every aspect of our society. At the same time, these paradigmatic essays map out a new terrain for feminist thinking, one that fully recognizes the complex workings of gender and leaves oppositional feminism far behind.
In the keynote essay, Ambivalence as Alibi, Rosemary Hennessy challenges the most basic assumptions of postmodern sophistication to forge a compelling sytheseis of political, economic, and artistic theory. Betty Joseph, Jennifer Brody, and Poonam Pillai break through the shibboleths of Western liberal tolerance to describe gender inequalities that are intrinsically inter-cultural. Eileen Cleere demonstrates that novels are an important source for understanding how people interpret the economic conditions in which they live, linking social history and literary criticism in a provocative new way. Bridget Elliott uncovers the unusual social and artistic imagination of Marie Laurencin, an artist who was both working-class and avant-garde, and who makes us rethink basic assumptions of artistic form in the visual representation of women. Laura Lyons, analyzing the no-wash protest among IRA prisoners, discovers a new kind of political protest that draws on performance art and the discourse of the body for its political symbolism. And Joseph Litvak, in a highly suggestive critical reading, makes us wonder if the New Historicism may possibly owe its greatest debt to the charming young men of Jane Austen's fictitious world.

go to the Genders website ]

"Forming and Reforming Identity" exposes the historical sites of identity formation and seeks to define the mechanisms of modern-day gender ideologies. Illuminating the power of the family and state in shaping gender identities, the book also examines the constitution of these identities. Each chapter reveals the complexities and contradictions that inevitably accompany the formation of any new category of identity, whether they are deliberately restrictive or intended as a reformation of the old.

The volume moves, as gender construction does, across a field of different media: novels, plays, teleplays, films, official documents, political theory, and advertisements. Four sections--REMOLDING WOMAN; REBELLING MAN; HOMEMADE IDENTITIES; and FEMINISMS THAT MAKE (A) DIFFERENCE--address such subjects as the representation of American women in the 1950s; nationalism and respectable sexuality in India; women, Hollywood cinema, and World War II; compulsory heterophobia; and the televising of AIDS.
go to the Genders website ]

"Forming and Reforming Identity" exposes the historical sites of identity formation and seeks to define the mechanisms of modern-day gender ideologies. Illuminating the power of the family and state in shaping gender identities, the book also examines the constitution of these identities. Each chapter reveals the complexities and contradictions that inevitably accompany the formation of any new category of identity, whether they are deliberately restrictive or intended as a reformation of the old.

The volume moves, as gender construction does, across a field of different media: novels, plays, teleplays, films, official documents, political theory, and advertisements. Four sections--REMOLDING WOMAN; REBELLING MAN; HOMEMADE IDENTITIES; and FEMINISMS THAT MAKE (A) DIFFERENCE--address such subjects as the representation of American women in the 1950s; nationalism and respectable sexuality in India; women, Hollywood cinema, and World War II; compulsory heterophobia; and the televising of AIDS.
go to the Genders website ]

"The new Genders is even more useful and interesting than its older incarnation. It offers a fuller spread of the cultural study of gender from social practice to literary representation. Always the leading journal in its field, Genders is now more extensive and more concrete. This first new issue on Sexual Artifice will come to be a source for scholars in a wide range of fields."
--"Sander L. Gilman, The Goldwin Smith Professor of Humane Studies, Cornell University"

Sexual Artifice marks the evolution of Genders from a triannual journal to a biannual anthology. Henceforth, each volume will have a focus on a particular gender-related issue, offering original essays on the specific theme.

This volume proposes that there is something more to the social construction of gender than what social science has been able to describe. On the contested state of international politics, public imagery, and nationalist cinema, the artifice of sexuality wields an enormous power to influence the interpretation of our social selves and the world we live in. These essays collectively explore the art of constructing gender in symbolic media images; in poetry, photography, and montage; in dramatic identity politics; and, last but not least, in contemporary feminism itself.

With original essays on Virginia Woolf's Orlando; Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and the culture of romance; Valerie Solanis (the woman who shot Andy Warhol); male hysteria and the U.S. invasion of Panama; and representations of women in Northern Ireland, Sexual Artifice offers up some of the most thought-provoking and daring young scholarship in contemporary cultural and gender studies.

>[ go to the Genders website ]

Sexual confessions on television talk shows. Gender and medical discourse in colonial India. River Phoenix in "My Own Private Idaho." White women in a German colony. Henry James' thwarted love. What do these seemingly diverse subjects have in common?

All address, in different ways, social and cultural attempts to contain eroticism by delineating the perimeters of genders. They scrutinize the political investments in the construction of gender in such disparate locations as contemporary Hollywood, Renaissance England, colonial India and Africa, and in modern and contemporary homosexual discourse communities and in Freud's sessions with Dora.

But whether the gendering of the subject follows the dictates of conservative politics or the radical agenda of a marginalized interest, the essays reveal the erotic overflow--the flood--that cannot be contained within any one gender identity. In examining how the erotic escapes containment, this work discloses problems inherent in the intersections of gender and desire.

go to the Genders website ]