This book is an annotated translation of one of the great Tibetan classics of Mahayana Buddhist thought, mKhas grub rje's sTong thun chen mo. The text is a detailed critical exposition of the theory and practice of emptiness as expounded in the three major schools of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy: the Yogacara, Svatantrika, and Prasangika. Used as a supplement to the scholastic debating manuals in some of the greatest monasteries of Tibet, the sTong thun chen mo is a veritable encyclopedia of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, dealing with such topics as hermeneutics, the theory of non-duality, the...

In Femicidal Fears, Helene Meyers examines contemporary femicidal plots--plots in which women are killed or fear for their lives--to argue that these female Gothic novels of death actually bring the nuances of feminist thought to life. Through her examination of works by Angela Carter, Muriel Spark, Edna O'Brien, Beryl Bainbridge, Joyce Carol Oates, and Margaret Atwood, as well as such infamous cases as the Montreal Massacre and the Yorkshire Ripper, Meyers contends that these femicidal plots restage and embody feminist debates flattened by such glib and automatic phrases as "essentialism"...

At once racially privileged and sexually marginalized, white women have been energetic in calling for solidarity among all women in opposing patriarchy, but have not been equally motivated to examine their own racial privilege. White Women in Racialized Spaces turns primarily to literature to illuminate the undeniable blind spots in white women's comprehension of their advantage. The contributors cover extensive historical ground, from early captivity narratives of white women in seventeenth-century America up to the present-day trials of Louise Woodward and Manjit Basuta, both British...

From Girl to Woman examines the coming-of-age narratives of a diverse group of American women writers, including Annie Dillard, Zora Neale Hurston, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Mary McCarthy, and explores the crucial role of such narratives in the development of American feminism. Women have long known that identity is complex and contradictory, but in the twentieth century their coming-of-age narratives finally voice this knowledge. Addressing a variety of themes--awakening sexuality, the body's metamorphosis in puberty, consciousness of difference from males, and the socialization into...

Focusing on women's writing of the last two centuries, Scenes of the Apple traces the intricate relationship between food and body image for women. Ranging over a variety of genres, including novels, culinary memoirs, and essays, the contributors explore works by a diverse group of writers, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Toni Morrison, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Jeanette Winterson, as well as such nonliterary documents as discussions of Queen Victoria's appetite and news coverage of suffragettes' hunger strikes. Moreover, in addressing works by Hispanic, African, African American, Jewish, and...

Feminist theorists have often argued that aesthetic surgeries and body makeovers dehumanize and disempower women patients, whose efforts at self-improvement lead to their objectification. Amending the Abject Body proposes that although objectification is an important element in this phenomenon, the explosive growth of "makeover culture" can be understood as a process of both abjection (ridding ourselves of the unwanted) and identification (joining the community of what Julia Kristeva calls "clean and proper bodies"). Drawing from the advertisement and advocacy of body makeovers on television,...

This book traces the intersection of radical feminism, composition, and print culture in order to address a curious gap in feminist composition studies: the manifesto-writing, collaborative-action-taking radical feminists of the 1960s and 1970s. Long before contemporary debates over essentialism, radical feminist groups questioned both what it was to be a woman and to perform womanhood, and a key part of that questioning took the form of very public, very contentious texts by such writers and groups as Shulamith Firestone, the Redstockings, and WITCH (the Women's International Terrorist...

In The Violent Woman, Hilary Neroni brings psychoanalytically informed film theory to bear on issues of femininity, violence, and narrative in contemporary American cinema. Examining such films as Thelma and Louise, Fargo, Natural Born Killers, and The Long Kiss Goodnight, Neroni explores why American audiences are so fascinated--even excited--by cinematic representations of violent women, and what these representations reveal about violence in our society and our cinema. Neroni argues that violent women characters disrupt cinematic narrative and challenge cultural ideals, suggesting how...

Through the Reading Glass explores the practices and protocols that surrounded women's reading in eighteenth-century France. Looking at texts as various as fairy tales, memoirs, historical romances, short stories, love letters, novels, and the pages of the new female periodical press, Suellen Diaconoff shows how a reading culture, one in which books, sex, and acts of reading were richly and evocatively intertwined, was constructed for and by women. Diaconoff proposes that the underlying discourse of virtue found in women's work was both an empowering strategy, intended to create new kinds of...

While Darwinian and Freudian theories of vision and sexuality have represented women as lacking visual agency, Daryl Ogden's The Language of the Eyes argues that "the gaze" is not merely a masculine phenomenon, and that women have powerfully desiring eyes as well. Ogden offers a comprehensive cultural history of female visuality in England by analyzing scientific writings, conduct books, illustrated periodicals, poetry, painting, and novels, and he makes important and hitherto unrecognized connections between literary history, cultural studies, and science studies. In so doing, Ogden...