Sororophobia: Differences Among Women in Literature and Culture

ISBN-13: 9780195073874 / Angielski / Twarda / 1992 / 224 str.

Helena Michie

Opis

This book looks at how differences among women have been textually represented at a variety of historical moments and in a variety of cultural contexts, including Victorian mainstream fiction, African-American mulatto novels, late twentieth-century lesbian communities, and contemporary country music. Sororophobia designates the complex and shifting relations between women's attempts to identify with other women and their often simultaneous desire to establish and retain difference. Michie argues for the centrality to feminism of a paradigm that moves beyond celebrations of identity and sisterhood to a more nuanced notion of women's relations with other women which may include such uncomfortable concepts as envy, jealousy, and competition as well as more institutionalized ideas of difference such as race and class. Chapters on literature are interspersed by "inter-chapters" on the choreography of sameness and difference among women in popular culture.

Recenzje

`...she has collected some wonderfully apt examples of the trope of sisterhood from several melodramatic stage versions of Jane Eyre, and her brief essays on the mother-daughter country music duo known as the Judds and on the Olympic figure-skating competition are spirited and shrewd. ... Michie has a keen eye for rhetorical slippages, ... and she can juxtapose bits of heterogeneous evidence to telling effect, ... offers a salutary corrective to the wishful inclusiveness of some feminist theorising.' Ruth Bernard Yeazell, The London Review of Books

O autorze

OUP author of The Flesh Made Word