This essay is a critical review of two recent collections, Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, edited by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby and Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell. While the collections differ in their manner of addressing the critical sources that have inspired them-the former relying upon a single theorist, the latter attempting to move through some of the philosophical history that constitutes our present theoretical terrain-both attempt to think (...) through and thus revisualize some of the categories of difference which we have inherited. Though the best essays from these collections are celebrated for demonstrating how "feminism as critique" can work to move us toward a clearer and more inclusive feminist theory, questions are raised about what the inattention to race in these volumes suggests about our own role in the construction of power and knowledge, and the erasures that help to secure them both. (shrink)

An introduction to theories about language in attempts to understand and transform women's lives. This evolving body of work encompasses linguistics, anthropology, literary and cultural theory, psychoanalysis and postmodern philosophy.

A feminist study of language and its rules argues that men have shaped it in order to instill their own prejudices and viewpoints on society, and shows how male-slanted language affects all women's lives.

Contemporary feminist debates over the meanings of gender lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism. Perhaps trouble need not carry such a..

A text that focuses on feminist literary theory.

First published in 1983, Patriarchal Precedents is an excavation of the term patriarchy. Rosalind Coward shoes how the debates about patriarchy and matriarchy were crucial to social theories in the nineteenth century, discussing how the resolution of these debates resulted in our present ways of (mis)understanding the family, sexual relations and sexual characteristics. Rosalind Coward argues that the violent debates around patriarchy tell a salutary tale about how the term presupposed as much as it set out to explain. She demonstrates (...) how it was used in Marxism and psychoanalysis in ways which blocked any radical thinking about sexual relations, and how the arguments against the term patriarchy within anthropology still have to be taken seriously. She argues that in order to advance our understanding of how power is exercised in sexual relations, of the place which sexual relations have within society and the construction of sexual characteristics, a series of presuppositions about sexual relations must now be cleared away. This book will be of interest to students of gender studies, women's studies, sexuality, men' s studies, sociology and anthropology. (shrink)