Global Obscenities: Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Lure of Cyberfantasy - Softcover

Eisenstein, Zillah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814722067 ISBN 13: 9780814722060

Publisher: NYU Press, 1998

Synopsis

The New York Times devotes the cover of its magazine to America's declining interest in politics and its obsession with money, finance, and the markets. Bill Gates builds a $50 million mansion while food pantries and homeless shelters overflow with the desperate. The explosive expansion of media and cyber conglomerates creates dreamworlds while the ecology of our actual world is jeopardized. Public space and public democracy withers, as is evidenced by the fact that the closest facsimile of a town square is the local Barnes and Noble.
New geographies of power are defined by sex scandals, plant closings, cyberporn, sweatshop labor, information webs, and stock market schizophrenia. Global capitalism and its cyberrelations use this chaos to construct modern forms of sexual and racial exploitation.
Into this world steps Zillah Eisenstein, with a book of profound despair and yet also great hope, informed by her trademark sharp analysis and her unrelenting passion for a more humane world. Exposing the purported democratic effect of new media for the global mirage it is, Eisenstein shows how transnational capital and its patriarchal obsessions threaten us all, while at the same time creating possibilities for a new democratic society.

About this title

About the Author

A noted feminist writer, Zillah Eisenstein is Professor of Politics at Ithaca College. She is the author of The Female Body and the Law, which won the Victoria Schuck Book Prize for the best book on women and politics, and, more recently, The Color of Gender: Reimaging Democracy and Hatreds: Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in the 21st Century.

Reviews

A noted feminist and professor of politics at Ithaca College, Eisenstein (The Female Body and the Law) here combines concern for Third World women and girls with political statistics designed to jar First World readers out of what she sees as deplorable apathy. Striving to investigate global capitalism, patriarchy, new media and feminism's place in a technologically focused society, Eisenstein also explores sex scandals, Princess Diana memorabilia, Marxism, dysfunctional families, state parks, Chernobyl and cyber-anonymity. Her insight and carefully directed rage surrounding topics such as sweatshops and telecommunications law is obscured by diatribes about Gennifer Flowers and Pizza Hut. After these lengthy harangues, she switches from accuser to hopeful dreamer, outlining possibilities for worldwide gender and economic equality and cyber equity, citing advances such as the rise of the "grrrl movement" and electronic spaces for women such as FemiNet Korea. Although her passion is admirable and her research impeccable, Eisenstein's ambitious, all-inclusive method and penchant for rant tend to drown the messages she is trying to convey, and prevent deep analysis. She proves adept at delineating the political and economic issues surrounding cyberspace, but will have a tough time here with the unconverted.

Copyright 1998 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814722067
• ISBN 13: 9780814722060
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 214