In this innovative book, a well-known feminist and sociologist-who is also the founding editor of Gender & Society-challenges our most basic assumptions about gender. Judith Lorber argues that gender is wholly a product of socialization, subject to human agency, organization, and interpretation, and that it is a social institution comparable to the economy, the family, and religion in its significance and consequences. Calling into question the inevitability and necessity of gender, she envisions a society structured for equality, where no gender, racial ethnic, or social class group is allowed to monopolize positions of power.

Paradoxes of gender

The essential introduction to the most important texts in post-colonial theory and criticism, this second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to include 121 extracts from key works in the field. Leading, as well as lesser known figures in the fields of writing, theory and criticism contribute to this inspiring body of work that includes sections on nationalism, hybridity, diaspora and globalization. The Reader's wide-ranging approach reflects the remarkable diversity of work in the discipline along with the vibrancy of anti-imperialist writing both within and without the metropolitan centres. Covering more debates, topics and critics than any comparable book in its field, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader is the ideal starting point for students and issues a potent challenge to the ways in which we think and write about literature and culture.

The Post-Colonial Studies Reader

(1987). A manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. Australian Feminist Studies: Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 1-42.

A manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s

The contemporary writer like Jean Rhys reveals the limitations of Western feminism in the way that the dissenting voice of the colonized woman is silenced through Christophine's 'expulsion' from Wide Sargasso Sea. The very relationship between sexual reproduction and social subject-production, the dynamic nineteenth-century topos of feminism-in-imperialism, remains problematic within the limits of Shelley's text and, paradoxically, constitutes its strength. Frankenstein is not a battleground of male and female individualism articulated in terms of sexual reproduction and social subject-production. A basically isolationist admiration for the literature of the female subject in Europe and Anglo-America establishes the high feminist norm. The battle for female individualism plays itself out within the larger theatre of the establishment of meritocratic individualism, indexed in the aesthetic field by the ideology of the creative imagination. In a reading such as mine, in contrast, the effort is to wrench oneself away from the mesmerizing focus of the 'subject-constitution' of the female individualist.

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Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism

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.

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Gender and Politeness

ONE OF MY LOVING QUIBBLES WITH CAROLYN, WITH WHOM I walked in the park every week for something like twentysix years, concerned her almost constant reference, from what seemed to me an early date, to her "old age." I know, of course, how she was ready for it, and wanted us to be so: the readiness in Hamlet and the ripeness in Lear were important to her. She had changed her reading, yes. For the last few years, on our weekly walks, she would talk-as enthusiastically as she always had about poetry-about science, scientists, and their lives. I would listen: what do I know about science? But her enthusiasm was continual, pressing, and, I hoped, catching. Only it wasn't. What I loved was her love of it all. Perhaps she wasn't writing, or at least lately she said she wasn't, but she was reading and talking about what she read. Science and philosophy held the greatest interest for her, these last times we walked.We had gone through a period of discussing mostly art. Some paintings she found endlessly mystifying, like Edouard Manet's painting Gare Saint-Lazare, with the little girl gazing out through the bars onto the tracks, her face turned away from us. What was the story? she would ask. We had half planned to do together a compilation of essays about radically different ways of reading art and its stories. She liked walking with me, she said, because my mind was so different from hers, my readings different, my attitudes different. You like the complex, she would say; I like the straightforward. But reading her straightforwardness was never an easy affair, as we have so recently learned, to our deepest sorrow. If her schedules did not change or the things she liked to look at in the parkthose tall buildings across the green or brown expanse, every dog she saw (my friend, she would say of me to whomever passed, only likes fuzzy-haired dogs), the ducks on the boat pond-her readings did. We often got on the topic of Henry James, whose Ambassadors she loved as much as I do The Golden Bowl. Perhaps not needless to say, The Wings of the

Forum: Responses to Carolyn G. Heilbrun's Guest Column

No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Vol. II: Sexchanges.

The Tongue of Power

This essay pursues women writers’ often fatal attraction to death. From Emily Dickinson to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, women poets have often imagined death as multiply and richly seductive. This essay outlines four general types of textual representation of suicide, naming these the “erotic,” “sacrificial,” “self-loathing,” and “mimetic” or “competitive.” These classifications necessarily also intertwine, thickening the seductive suicidal net. This paper moves from poetry’s persistent Charon, the “supple suitor,” to the current social struggle over assisted suicide, to which women are far more likely than men to fall victim. In the framework of the suicide plot this essay outlines, such a choice seems not much more than an accession to cultural proscriptions, which lurk beneath apparently rational choices. While choice has, for feminists, nearly invariably positive associations, revolutionary suicide may be nothing more than that old bug bear, the slippery slope. Against such a choice, this essay counsels readers to look at the work of disabled activists on the “Not Dead Yet” website and advises us to consider the sorrow so many suicides leave behind.

Sandra M. Gilbert

Papers

Forum: Responses to Carolyn G. Heilbrun's Guest Column

No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Vol. II: Sexchanges.

The Tongue of Power

The Supple Suitor: Death, Women, Feminism, and (Assisted or Unassisted) Suicide

Elegies upon the Dying