Description
Book SynopsisMaterialist Feminisms investigates the crucial theoretical and political debates that have determined the course of British and American feminism over the last thirty years. As intellectual terrain has shifted during these decades from Marxism to cultural materialism and poststructuralist literary theory, questions of race and ethnicity, sexuality, postcoloniality, and green politics have converged and sometimes collided with the categories within feminism, but analyze many of the most important texts and movements of contemporary cultural theory.
Offering not so much a unified history as an analysis of important moments within these debates, this book examines the work of such feminist theorists as MichUle Barrett, Judith Butler, Rosalind Coward, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, the m/f collective, Tania Modleski, Jacqueline Rose, Gayle Rubin, Hortense Spillers, and Gayatri Spivak. Materialist Feminisms includes new, exemplary readings of feminist detective, African-American, and postcolonial fiction, three kinds of textures commodity currently fetishized in the literary marketplace. What might the success of these kinds of writing signify about politics and desire in contemporary Anglo-American culture?
Demonstrating how the poststructuralis critique of essences and identities need not end in a complete paralysis of political action, as has sometimes been claimed, Materialist Feminisms argues that feminism, soicalism, and deconstruction are not theoretical dead ends, but names for unfinished business.
Table of ContentsThe Argument vii
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiv
Introduction 1
Part I Beyond the Marxist--Feminist Encounter
1 Origins UK and US 19
2 Institutionalizing Feminism 42
3 Deconstruction and Beyond 60
Part II Feminism and Cultural Critique
4 Feminism and the History of the Novel 83
5 How PC Can a White Girl Be When Her Sisters of Color Can Represent Themselves? 95
6 History and Poststructuralism 125
Part III The Politics of Contemporary Theory
7 The Politics of Essence 145
8 Identity and Sexuality 153
9 The Theory "Race," Imperialist Fractures, and Postcolonial Subjects 183
10 Towards a Green Cultural Criticism 206
Conclusion 229
Works Cited 231
Index of Names 248
Index of Subjects 253
