In a work with far-reaching implications, Chela Sandoval does no less than revise the genealogy of theory over the past thirty years, inserting what she terms "U.S. Third World feminism" into the narrative in a way that thoroughly alters our perspective on contemporary culture and subjectivity.What Sandoval has identified is a language, a rhetoric of resistance to postmodern cultural conditions. U.S liberation movements of the post-World War II era generated specific modes of oppositional consciousness. Out of these emerged a new activity of consciousness and language Sandoval calls the "methodology of the oppressed". This methodology -- born of the strains of the cultural and identity struggles that currently mark global exchange -- holds out the possibility of a new historical moment, a new citizen-subject, and a new form of alliance consciousness and politics. Utilizing semiotics and U.S. Third World feminist criticism, Sandoval demonstrates how this methodology mobilizes love as a category of critical analysis. Rendering this approach in all its specifics, Methodology of the Oppressed gives rise to an alternative mode of criticism opening new perspectives on a theoretical, literary, aesthetic, social movement, or psychic expression.

Methodology of the oppressed

This paper presents the theoretical foundation for a different type of place-centered or regional geography. The framework rests upon an integration of time-geography and the emerging theory of structuration. It also builds upon a conceptualization of place as a constantly becoming human product as well as a set of features visible upon the landscape. Place is seen as a process whereby the reproduction of social and cultural forms, the formation of biographies, and the transformation of nature ceaselessly become one another at the same time that time-space specific activities and power relations continuously become one another. It is further contended that the ways in which these phenomena are interwoven in the becoming of place or region are not subject to universal laws but vary with historical circumstances. Three empirical foci that suggest themselves from the framework are briefly discussed.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/2569284

Place as Historically Contingent Process: Structuration and the Time-Geography of Becoming Places

This article explores the ways that consumers use fashion discourse to inscribe their consumption behaviors in a complex ideological system of folk theories about the nature of self and society. Verbatim texts of 20 phenomenological interviews concerning consumers' perceptions and experiences of fashion are interpreted through a hermeneutic process with specific consideration given to gender issues. Whereas critics of consumer culture frequently argue that fashion discourses enshroud consumer perceptions in a common hegemonic outlook, our analysis suggests that this ideological system offers a myriad of countervailing interpretive standpoints that consumers combine, adapt, and juxtapose to fit the conditions of their everyday lives. By appropriating fashion discourse, consumers generate personalized fashion narratives and metaphoric and metonymic references that negotiate key existential tensions and that often express resistance to dominant fashion norms in their social milieu or consumer culture at large. A theoretical model is derived that portrays a dialogical relationship between consumers and this cultural system of countervailing fashion meanings. The implications of this model for future research on the meaning transfer process and the sociocognitive dimensions of consumer beliefs are discussed.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1086/209491.pdf

Speaking of Fashion: Consumers' Uses of Fashion Discourses and the Appropriation of Countervailing Cultural Meanings

Introduction Given the model of gender described in the last chapter, and given the model of linguistic politeness as described in chapters 2 and 3, it is difficult, if not impossible, simply to approach the relation between gender and politeness as a question of an investigation of the production, by individual men or women of a number of linguistic features which are assumed to be unequivocally polite or impolite. What I should like to do instead is to consider the complexity of the relationship between gender and politeness, so that the common-sense nature of gender and politeness and their relation to each other is troubled. Here, I aim to analyse the way that certain practices which are considered to be polite or impolite are, within particular communities of practice, stereotypically gendered. As I discussed in chapter 4, these stereotypes do not actually exist as such, but are hypothesised by particular speakers and hearers within communities of practices, on the basis of their representation by others, and are then negotiated with. It is this connection between gendering of practices and assessments of politeness and impoliteness which is of interest. These stereotypes of behaviour which are considered to be appropriate within particular contexts feed back into individual participants' assessments of what is appropriate in terms of their own behaviour. First, in this chapter, I analyse stereotypes of gender and politeness, and then move on to a discussion of the theoretical work on gender and politeness which I argue seems to replicate stereotypical views of women's politeness, rather than describing women's or men's actual linguistic performance or interpretative frameworks.

/pdf/gender-and-politeness-1hkbd3xeo9.pdf

Gender and Politeness

This article examines the main theoretical contributions of critical theory, poststructuralism and postmodernism. It is argued that these three theories offer related perspectives on the shortcomings of positivism as well as new ways to theorize and study contemporary societies. Empirical and conceptual applications of these perspectives in sociological research are discussed. Some of these applications include work in the sociology of deviance, gender, media and culture. Finally, implications of these three theoretical perspectives for the ways sociologists think about the boundaries and territoriality of their discipline are discussed.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2083337.pdf

Critical Theory, Poststructuralism, Postmodernism: Their Sociological Relevance

First published in 1977, this book presents a comprehensive and lucid guide through the labyrinths of semiology and structuralism — perhaps the most significant systems of study to have been developed in the twentieth century. The authors describe the early presuppositions of structuralism and semiology which claim to be a materialist theory of language based on Saussure’s notion of the sign. They show how these presuppositions have been challenged by work following Althusser’s development of the Marxist theory of ideology, and by Lacan’s re-reading of Freud. The book explains how the encounter of two disciplines — psychoanalysis and Marxism — on the ground of their common problem —language — has produced a new understanding of society and its subjects. It produces a critical re-examination of the traditional Marxist theory of ideology, together with the concepts of sign and identity of the subject.

Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject

Looks at how advertising takes advantage of female psychology and discusses the fitness boom, fashion, current beauty standards, family photographs, and the relationship between men and women.

Female Desires: How They Are Sought, Bought, and Packaged

Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations

What do Princess Diana, Margaret Thatcher, Madonna and Germaine Greer have in common? One would assume very little and yet, in recent years, they have all come to embody certain contemporary values and, in particular, ideas of how women can and should behave in public and private life. This book looks in detail at women who have reached the status of "icon" since the sexual revolution, examining what their images tell us about them, about women in public life, about women's access to power and influence and about their place in society.

Sacred Cows: Is Feminism Relevant To The New Millennium?

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Ffr.1982.12.pdf

Rosalind Coward

Papers

Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject

Female Desires: How They Are Sought, Bought, and Packaged

Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations

Sacred Cows: Is Feminism Relevant To The New Millennium?

Sexual Violence and Sexuality