This stimulating collection is the first to take on the issue of form and what it means to the future of scholarly writing. A wide range of distinguished scholars from fields including law, literature, and anthropology shed light on the ways scholars can write for different publics and still adhere to the standards of quality scholarship.

This stimulating collection is the first to take on the issue of form and what it means to the future of scholarly writing. A wide range of distinguished scholars from fields including law, literature, and anthropology shed light on the ways scholars can write for different publics and still adhere to the standards of quality scholarship.

This volume of recent "Signs "articles offers a number of significant contributions to feminist debates on history and theory. It illustrates the uses of theories in recent feminist historical research and the often contentious arguments that surround them. The readings are organized into three sections. The first draws on the tradition of political economy, and discusses the importance of class relations for understanding historical events and social relationships and the expansion of concepts of political economy to include race. The second section, on "The Body," demonstrates how feminist scholars have increasingly worked to re-place the body, to move it from its traditionally less valued position in the hierarchal Enlightenment mind/body split to an approach that emphasizes the body as both material and discursive, both "real" and "representational." The final section, "Discourse," focuses on an examination of the productive power of language in both reflecting and shaping experience and in the contestation of social relations of power.

Introduction Barbara Laslett, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres. African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor Evelyn Nakano Glenn The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies Ann duCille Beyond White and Other: Relationality and Narratives of Race in Feminist Discourse Susan Stanford Friedman Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective Iris Marion Young Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory Gayle Greene Gender as a Personal and Cultural Construction Nancy J. Chodorow The Construction of Subjectivity and the Paradox of Resistance: Reintegrating Feminist Anthropology and Psychology Maureen A. Mahoney, Barbara Yngvesson. Purity, Impurity, and Separation Maria Lugones Differences and Identities: Feminism and the Albuquerque Lesbian Community Trisha Franzen Getting It Right Marilyn Frye When a Looker Becomes a Bitch: Lisa Olson, Sport, and the Heterosexual Matrix Lisa Disch, Mary Jo Kane. "The Teachers, They All Had Their Pets": Concepts of Gender, Knowledge, and Power Wendy Luttrell About the Contributors Index

That literature is a form of social action has been an implicit assumption of feminist literary criticism since its emergence in academia some twenty-five years ago. This assumption has served not only to heighten the awareness of gender construction and response in literature, but also to redefine the process and goals of literary criticism itself.
Three powerful interviews with writers of different nationalities (Audre Lorde, Simone de Beauvoir, and Carmen Naranjo) introduce topics echoed in the essays that follow: the interplay between women's writing and feminist theory, the politics of writing, and the roles of race, class, and sexual orientation in artistic production. These issues are engaged on a theoretical level by three essays that represent today's most prominent areas of concern for feminist literary criticism. The theoretical perspectives advanced in this anthology provide models for reading the traditional expressions of women worldwide including oratory and performance as well as literature in the more conventional sense.
Contributors include Jane Flax on "Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory," Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham on "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Paula Bennett on "Female Sexual Imagery and Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory," Leslie Rabine on "Social Gender and Symbolic Gender in the Writings of Maxine Hong Kingston," Joyce Zonana on "Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre," Jane Desmond on "Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis's 'Radha' of 1906," Terri Brint Joseph on "Poetry as a Strategy of Power: The Case of Riffian Berber Women," Chikwenye Ogunyemi on "The Contemporary Black Female Novelin English," and Sandra Zagarell on "Narrative of Community."
This collection is especially appropriate for scholars and students of feminist literary criticism, women's studies, English, and ethnic studies.
Essays were originally published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.