An analysis of costumes in American movies from a feminist film theory perspective. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Spivak engages general questions of theory; ongoing critical debates with political philosophers such as Habermas and Althusser, with psychoanalysts such as Kristeva, and with legal theorists such as Dworkin.

Feminist social theory and female body experience are the twin themes of Iris Marion Young's twelve outstanding essays written over the past decade and brought together here. Her contributions to social theory raise critical questions about women and citizenship, the relations of capitalism and women's oppression, and the differences between a feminist theory that emphasizes women's difference and one that assumes a gender-neutral humanity. Loosely following a phenomenological method of description, Young's essays on female embodiment discuss female movement, pregnancy, clothing, (...) and the breasted body. In an introduction that situates her work in the context of shifts in feminist theory and politics over the past decade, Young emphasizes the rootedness of her theorizing in a dedicated and seasoned political activism. (shrink)

Documentary and feminist film studies have long been separate or parallel universes that need to converse or collide. The essays in this volume, written by prominent scholars and filmmakers, demonstrate the challenges that feminist perspectives pose for documentary theory, history, and practice. They also show how fuller attention to documentary enriches and complicates feminist theory, especially regarding the relationship between gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, class and nation. Feminism and Documentary begins with a substantial historical introduction that highlights several (...) of the specific areas that contributors address: debates over realism, the relationship between filmmaker and subject, historical thinking about documentary and thinking about the historical documentary, biography and autobiography, and the use of psychoanalysis. Other essays, most of which appear here for the first time, range from broad overviews to close analyses of particular films and videos and from discussions of well-known works such as Roger and Me and Don't Look Back to lesser known texts that might revise the canon. The collection includes an extensive filmography and videography with useful distribution information and a bibliography of work in this neglected area of scholarship. Lucid, sophisticated, and eye-opening, this book will galvanize documentary studies and demonstrate the need for women's and cultural studies to grapple with visual media. (shrink)

This volume brings together fifteen outstanding literary theorists and philosophers to examine ways to make the unsayable--that which has been excluded by what is sayable--tangible.

The Eight Technologies of Otherness is a bold and provocative re-thinking of identities, politics, philosophy, ethics, and cultural practices. In this groundbreaking text, old essentialism and binary divides collapse under the weight of a new and impatient necessity. Consider Sue Golding's Eight Technologies: curiosity, noise, cruelty, appetite, skin, nomadism, contamination, and dwelling. But why only eight technologies? And why these eight, in particular? Included in the answer are thirty-three artists, philosophers, filmmakers, writers, photographers, political militants, and pulp-theory practitioners whose work (...) has contributed to the re-thinking of so-called 'otherness' and its various, raw technologies; to which this book bears witness, throws out a few clues. Plays with. (shrink)