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

Introduction: The female imagination and the modernist aesthetic

Her "mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage," Matthew Arnold wrote of Charlotte Bronte in 1853.1 He was referring to Villette, but he might as well have been speaking ofJane Eyre, for his response to Bronte was typical of the outrage generated in some quarters by her first published novel.2 "Jane Eyre is throughout the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit," wrote Elizabeth Rigby in the Quarterly Review in 1848, and her "autobiography ... is preeminently an anti-Christian composition.... The tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority ... abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also writtenJane Eyre."3 Anne Mozley in 1853 recalled for the Christian Remembrancer that "Currer Bell" had

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3173210.pdf

Plain Jane's Progress

In the Preface to this second edition of her first book, Sandra M. Gilbert addresses the inevitable question: "How can you be a feminist and a Lawrentian?" The answer is intellectually satisfying and historically revealing as she traces an array of early twentieth-century women of letters, some of them proto-feminists, who revered Lawrence despite his countless statements that would today be condemned as "sexist."H.D. regarded him as one of her "initiators" whose words "flamed alive, blue serpents on the page." AnaisNin insisted that he "had a complete realization of the feelings of women."By focusing on Lawrence s own definition of a poem as an "act of attention," Gilbert demonstrates how he developed the mature style of "Birds, Beasts and Flowers, "his finest collection of poetry. She discusses this volume at length, examines many of his later poems in detail, including the hymns from "The Plumed Serpent, Pansies, Nettles, "and "More Pansies, "and ends with a close look at "Last Poems. "Her detailed examination provides a clearer image of Lawrence as an artist an artist whose poetry complements his novels and whose fiction enriches but does not outshine his poetry."

Acts of attention;: The poems of D. H. Lawrence

No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 3: Letters from the Front

The title of Sandra M. Gilbert's and Susan Gubar's long-awaited sequel to The Madwoman in the Attic carries powerful images of both the battlescarred terrain of twentieth-century literature, site of bitter war between creative men and women, and the more idealistic landscape of a female utopia, along the lines of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland. The War of the Words is the first volume in a projected trilogy, to include Sexchanges and Letters From the Front, which explores these two poles of women's experiences in the world of modem letters. Gilbert and Gubar present the first volume as "an overview of social, literary, and linguistic interactions between men and women from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present." An ambitious undertaking, certainly, and at times the scope of their task results in the co-authors being unable to elaborate on different propositions; nonetheless, their wide-ranging approach has much to recommend it, as they tantalize and provoke their readers with a radical revision of literary history, which claims that many of the features we associate with literary "modernism" have their roots in "an ongoing battle of the sexes that was set in motion by the late nineteenth century rise of feminism and the fall of Victorian concepts of 'femininity.'" Sex antagonism is a central topic in No Man's Land, and despite their profession of description over prescription, Gilbert's and Gubar's text itself becomes an antagonist in the sex war of the twentieth century by engaging with (male) literary history, as well as by exchanging a sexually monolithic canon for a dialogue between the sexes. The first two chapters relate "The Men's Case" and "The Women's Cause," describing how male anxiety in response to the developing feminist movement engenders misogynistic texts, which in turn produce a complex female response. In terms of male writers, Gilbert and Gubar trace a linear development of hostility to women's aspirations beginning with Tennyson's The Princess, continuing through writers like Eliot, Nathanael West and Henry Miller, on toTed Hughes today. However, despite the optimism of turn-of-the-century feminist polemicists like Christabel Pankhurst, women writers from Emily Dickinson to Sylvia Plath display unease with matching the directness of male antagonism, and they also have difficulty imaging women triumphing over men's brutality. Only with the second wave of feminism, particularly in the genres of science fiction, fantasy and lyric poetry, do Gilbert and Gubar see a revival of belief in the possibility of female triumph. The field of literary history is the most difficult for women to assail, as not only must they face the resistance of male writers safely entrenched in tradition, but they must also contend with what Gilbert and Gubar term the "female affiliation complex." That is, modem women writers have to resolve their relationship to their literary mothers and sisters as well as to their fathers and brothers. Gilbert and Gubar take Freud's family model in "Female Sexuality" as their paradigm for the experience of the woman writer. Although this gives them three paths for the female artist adoption of the father's tradition, claiming the mother's tradition, or a "frigid" rejection of both (and of aesthetic ambitions) the Freudian model proves problematic, as Gilbert an Gubar admit, for his analysis of female sexuality is itself determined in part by sex antagonism. Moreover, the Freudian paradigm is limiting, as the woman artist's interaction with literary forebears is more complicated than the model allows. Finally, by working from Freud, Gilbert and Gubar are at times placed in the position of claiming that women are guilty of their own silencing. In some cases this may be so, but the argument is more palatable when it also takes into consideration economic and social factors rather than just psychosexual ones. One of the more thought-provoking areas of sexual warfare that Gilbert and Gubar discuss is the battleground of language. Wisely, they avoid passing judgement on whether biology or anatomy actually determine linguistic power; instead, they focus on the interesting issue of how both male and female writers work with fantasies of linguistic primacy. Whereas the language play of Joyce, Pound and Eliot simultaneous1y devalues women's words as hysterical or incoherent and excludes women from the "civilized" father speech (Walter Ong's patrius sermo, cited p. 243), linguistic experimentation by Djuna Barnes, Woolf, Stein, and other women writers is aimed at achieving a true "mother tongue," achieving linguistic autonomy from the male tradition. Women's drive for linguistic freedom is further considered in terms of the importance of "naming" for such writers as H.D., Rebecca West and Isak Dinesen. What clearly matters here is not that men and women write differently out of different bodies, but that both

Sandra M. Gilbert

Papers

Introduction: The female imagination and the modernist aesthetic

Plain Jane's Progress

Acts of attention;: The poems of D. H. Lawrence

No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 3: Letters from the Front

No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1: The War of the Words