Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture - Janet Wolff - Paperback

Until recently, women have been noticeably absent from historical and sociological accounts of modernity. As a step toward remedying this situation, the essays gathered here challenge the continuing separation of sociological from textual analysis in cultural (and feminist) theory and inquiry. They address critically the question of women's writing, exploring the idea that women may begin to define their own lives and construct their own identities in a patriarchal culture through the very process of writing. They also present a cogent defense of a feminist cultural politics, including a politics of the body. Integrating material drawn from a variety of sources--feminist theory, cultural and literary analysis, sociology, and art history--Feminine Sentencesis an original discussion of women's relationship to modern and postmodern culture. Janet Wolff's book represents a major statement of her distinctive position, and will be of interest to everyone working in the areas of cultural and literary theory, women's studies, and sociology. FROM THE BOOK:"Women . . . are sentenced to containment and silence. . . . This collection is intended as a contribution to the overthrow of that 'sentence,' and to the process whereby women find ways to intervene in an excluding culture, and to articulate their own experience. Feminine sentences are those formulations and expressions, in a variety of cultural forms and media, of women's own voice." "The literature of modernity describes the experience of men. It is essentially a literature about transformations in the public world and its associated consciousness. . . . In so far as the experience of 'the modern' occurred mainly in the public sphere, it was primarily men's experience." "I want to argue that a feminist cultural politics of the bodyisa possibility. . . . There is every reason . . . to propose the body as a privileged site of political intervention, precisely because it is the site of repression and possession."Wolff, Janet is the author of 'Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture - Janet Wolff - Paperback' with ISBN 9780520074323 and ISBN 0520074327.