Does gender have a poetics: What difference does gender make? How does it affect writing, reading, and the functions of text in society? The Poetics of Gender is a brilliant assembly of leading feminist critics whose collective effort presents the most up-to-date research on these important issues. The range of techniques and theories represented here are applied across a broad spectrum of texts and cultural forms, extending from women's writing of the Renaissance and the fiction of George Sand to the relation between quiltmaking and nineteenth-century literary forms, the pornography...

From one of our most outspoken feminist critics, this collection explores various ways in which the body can be rethought of as a site of knowledge rather than as a medium to move beyond or dominate. Moving between a theoretical and confessional stance, Gallop explores Sade's relation to mothers both in his novels and his life; Barthe's The Pleasure of the Text; Freud's work, read not as a psychological text but as a literary endeavor and from a woman's point of view; and Luce Irigarary's famous This Sex Which Is Not One.

What can reading for the gender of signature tell us about the act of reading as a poetics and politics? In Subject to Change Miller demonstrates the textual effects of female authorship in the production, reception, and circulation of women's writing. In the wake of Roland Barthes's famously Dead Author, Miller argues for the cultural vitality of feminist writing subjects.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun's groundbreaking essay "The Character of Hamlet's Mother" was published in 1957 at a time when few critics thought seriously about women's issues in literature. In the years since, Heilbrun has emerged as a feminist leader through her commitment to women's writing and feminist literary critique. Now in a new paperback edition with a new preface by the author, this collection explores feminism in literary studies during the last three decades. By questioning the gender arrangements of society, Heilbrun has helped to transform them. Taken together, these graceful essays...

'In Dora's Case contributes...to an understanding of feminism and psychoanalysis for it highlights many of the pertinent aspects of the case in their relationship to recent feminist psychoanalytic theories.'--Literature and Psychology

Engaging with Irigaray is the first collection of essays that attempts to go beyond the question of essentialism in order to provide a full critical assessment of Irigaray's contribution to a number of fields, notably philosophy. By reconsidering Irigaray's writings in the field of European thought and politics in which she positions herself, the authors of these essays--among them Judith Butler, Elizabeth Weed, and Rosi Braidotti--shed new light on the relationship of Irigaray to many of the philosophers she has "romanced," from Aristotle to Deleuze.

This collection of essays will...

This is the first comprehensive collection of feminist politics and writings by the most influential feminists of the twentieth century, with a full glossary of key terms, section introductions, and entries on individual writers. Contributors include Simone de Beauvoir, Catharine A. MacKinnon, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Betty Friedan, Gayle Rubin, Laura Mulvey, Elaine Showalter, and Julia Kristeva.

Modern Feminisms covers key feminist ideas and perspectives on the family, sexuality, work, education, patriarchy, race, language, culture, and representation, and provides a...

Now back in print, this feminist classic explores how women define themselves and their lives in terms of novels. Many of the greatest novels in English have women as their protagonists, and women have always been the novel's most faithful readers. Why is it that fiction and women relate so intimately?

Do we need bodies for sex? Is gender in the head or in the body? In Second Skins Jay Prosser reveals the powerful drive that leads men and women literally to shed their skins and--in flesh and head--to cross the boundary of sex. Telling their story is not merely an act that comes after the fact, it's a force of its own that makes it impossible to forget that stories of identity inhabit autobiographical bodies.

In this stunning first extensive study of transsexual autobiography, Jay Prosser examines the exchanges between body and narrative that constitute the phenomenon of...