Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism - Softcover

Janice Doane; Devon Hodges

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0416015417 ISBN 13: 9780416015416

Publisher: Methuen, Inc., 1987

Synopsis

The authors' aim in this book is to show how poststructuralist theory can empower feminists by providing them with a way to analyze the strategies of representation. Interpretive strategies informed by poststructuralist theory have made it possible for them to conceptualize and discuss a frightening antifeminist impulse; they call it "nostalgic." Nostalgia, as defined by the authors, is a retreat to the past in the face of what a number of writers - most of them male - perceive to be the degeneracy of American culture brought about by the rise of feminist authority. Without reading male writers, the authors could not have gauged the resistance to feminism. And they would not have known how feminist arguments about women's "difference" have been appropriated by antifeminist writers. Their work has thus led them to enter the current debate among feminists about the articulation of sexual difference: they question recent efforts in feminist writing to establish a unitary identity for "woman," "woman's sphere," or "woman's writing." At every turn, however, their work has been enriched, they note, by the very feminist authority that has so provoked nostalgic writers. [From the Preface]

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

In this collection of a dozen essays written over the last decade, Doane ( The Desire to Desire ) demonstrates a heavily Freudian bent in plumbing the nexus of "knowledge and sexuality and their impact on feminism," particularly in terms of film theory. At the heart of the book is the idea that the cinema is "a machine for the generation of desire," for exploring and exploiting sexual difference. This thesis comes into play most tellingly when she engages specific films, including Gilda , Pandora's Box and La Signora di tutti . There Doane's insights into the ways in which women's bodies become a cinematic battleground are startling and illuminating. Likewise, her lengthy essays on psychoanalysis and racial difference and on the relationship between Freudian concept of sublimation and aesthetics (both written for this volume) are lucid and provocative, challenging the assumption that both race and aesthetics lie outside the purview of psychoanalysis. Unfortunately, Doane's dry-as-dust academic prose and general humorlessness detract from the book's appeal to non-specialists; the theoretical essays at the front of the volume are a particularly hard slog. Photos.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Methuen, Inc.
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0416015417
• ISBN 13: 9780416015416
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 169