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

With this powerful and provocative book the authors of the classic The Madwoman in the Attic launch a landmark three-volume overview of modern literature in England and America, bringing feminist theory to bear on writings by men as well as women. In Volume One Gilbert and Gubar survey the social, literary, and linguistic conflicts between men and women that mark modernism, examining the work of writers from Alfred Lord Tennyson and Charlotte Bronte to Robert Lowell and May Sarton.

The war of the words

Because the myth of origins that Milton articulates in Paradise Lost summarizes a long misogynistic tradition, literary women from Mary Wollstonecraft to Virginia Woolf have recorded anxieties about his paradigmatic patriarchal poetry. To these readers, the principal story that Milton seems to tell is the story of woman's secondness, her otherness, and how that otherness leads to her demonic anger, her sin, her fall, and her exclusion from that garden of the gods which is also the garden of poetry. Parallels and doublings implicit in this story, moreover, link Eve, the archetypal woman, with the unholy trinity of Satan, Sin, and Death. For female readers sensitive to such implications, Milton may be what Harold Bloom defines as a “great Inhibitor.” From Wollstonecraft to Woolf, however, women writers have allayed anxieties aroused by this poet, whom Woolf called “the first of the masculinists,” by rereading, misreading, and reinterpreting Paradise Lost.

Sandra M. Gilbert

Papers

The war of the words

Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton's Bogey

"Rats' Alley": The Great War, Modernism, and the (Anti)Pastoral Elegy

What Do Feminist Critics Want? Or a Postcard from the Volcano.

No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2: Sexchanges