Gender in the Mirror: Cultural Imagery and Women's Agency

ISBN-13: 9780195140408 / Angielski / Twarda / 2002 / 248 str.

Diana T. Meyers

Opis

How do patriarchal representations of gender impact on women's lives? What about their effects on men's attitudes toward women? How can the deleterious effects of this hostile cultural environment be overcome? These are the principal questions Gender in the Mirror poses.
Culturally prevalent imagery of feminine sexuality, beauty, and motherhood worms its way into women's subjectivity and agency. By providing authoritative language in which women describe themselves and project their lives into the future, this imagery constrains their self-determination. By reinforcing sexism in men, it undermines women's equality and jeopardizes feminist gains.
Resisting these pernicious influences requires personal as well as cultural change. Women need to acquire self-reading and self-direction skills that enable them to articulate their needs in their own terms and to enact their own life stories. Gender in the Mirror defends a theory of self-determination that makes sense of women's capacity to find their own voices and rewrite their self-narratives. But feminist goals cannot be met unless patriarchal cultural contexts are reconfigured -- unless emancipatory gender imagery supplants patriarchal representations of womanhood. Gender in the Mirror proposes alternative imagery of feminine sexuality, beauty, and motherhood and advances an account of feminist discursive politics that takes on the challenge of neutralizing patriarchal imagery.

Recenzje

Gender in the Mirror is a brilliant, comprehensive, account of the many ways in which androcentric images of the feminine undermine women's self-esteem and block our capacity for self-definition. Meyers argues with some urgency that a culture so hostile to women's self-development must be radically transformed; more than this, she develops a theory of female agency that would allow each of us in her own way to create narratives of our past, our present, and more importantly, of our future.