Employing surprising juxtapositions, THE FEMINIST DIFFERENCE looks at fiction by black writers from a feminist/psychoanalytic perspective, at poetry, and at feminism and law. The author presents an unfailingly close reading of moments at which feminism seems to founder in its own contradictions--and moments that reemerge as sources of a revitalized critical awareness. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Feminist scholarship employs gender as a fundamental organizing category of human experience, holding two related premises: men and women have different perceptions or experiences in the same contexts, the male perspective having been dominant in fields of knowledge; and that gender is not a natural fact but a social construct, a subject to study in any humanistic discipline. This challenging collection of essays by prominent feminist literary critics offers a comprehensive introduction to modes of critical practice being used to trace the construction of gender in literature. The collection provides an invaluable overview of current femionist critical thinking. Its essays address a wide range of topics: the rerlevance of gender scholarship in the social sciences to literary criticism; the tradition of women's literature and its relation to the canon; the politics of language; French theories of the feminine; psychoanalysis and feminism; feminist criticism of writing by lesbians and black women; the relationship between female subjectivity, class, and sexuality; feminist readings of the canon.

An unprecedented analysis of an alarming schism in the wome's movement: the differences between black and white women's perspectives, attitudes and concerns. It presents an overview of women's status through history and discusses the vital issues where common differences occur; sexuality, men and marriage, mothers and daughters, media images, and the direction of the movement itself.

Ellen T. Armour shows how the writings of Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray can be used to uncover feminism's white presumptions so that race and gender can be thought of differently. In clear, concise terms she explores the possibilities and limitations for feminist theology of Derrida's conception of "woman" and Irigaray's "multiple woman," as well as Derrida's thinking on race and Irigaray's work on religion ..."

How feminism is used to attack immigration in Europe In recent years, opponents of 'political correctness' have surged to prominence from both left and right, shaping a discourse in which perpetrators are 'defiantly' imagined as Muslim refugees, i.e. outsiders/others, while victims are identified as 'our women'. This poisonous and regressive situation grounds Hark and Villa's theorisation of contemporary regimes of power as engaged primarily in the violent production of difference. In this moment, they argue, the logic of 'differentiate and rule' thoroughly permeates the social; our entire 'way of life' is premised on endless subtle hierarchical distinctions, which determine whole populations' attitudes, feelings and actions. How can learn to value difference, sabotaging all attempts to enlist difference in the service of domination? Hark and Villa make a compelling case for the urgent necessity for a detoxification of feminism as a matter of urgency; and for an ethical mode of living-with the world, that is, living with alterity.

Essays examine the impact of women's studies on scholarship in fields, includ American history, political science, economics, literary criticism, and psychology.

Griselda Pollock provides concrete historical analyses of key moments in the formation of modern culture to reveal the sexual politics at the heart of modernist art. Crucially, she not only explores a feminist re-reading of the works of canonical male Impressionist and Pre-Raphaelite artists including Edgar Degas and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but als

Calling for inclusion and dialogue, these essays by an international group of feminist scholars and activists stress the need to put into relation seemingly discrepant approaches to reality and to scholarship in order to build coalitions across the usual North/South and East/West divides. This diverse group of authors, who spent fourteen weeks working collaboratively, dispense with unity and seek instead to use dialogue and difference in their production of knowledge about effective political action. The dialogues materialized here among women's movements that have emerged within different contexts and cosmologies take feminisms' challenges to contemporary corporate globalization in new empirical and theoretical directions.

Winner of the Modern Language Association (MLA)’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize From Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, and Bessie Head, to Zanele Muholi, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Missy Elliott, Black women writers and artists across the African Diaspora have developed nuanced and complex creative forms. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan ventures into the unexplored spaces of black women’s queer creative theorizing to learn its languages and read the textures of its forms. Moving beyond fixed notions, Sullivan points to a space of queer imagination where black women invent new languages, spaces, and genres to speak the many names of difference. Black women’s literary cultures have long theorized the complexities surrounding nation and class, the indeterminacy of gender and race, and the multiple meanings of sexuality. Yet their ideas and work remain obscure in the face of indifference from Western scholarship. Innovative and timely, The Poetics of Difference illuminates understudied queer contours of black women’s writing.

Including contributions from an international list of renowned authors, this text seeks to address the controversial issue of difference in feminist philosophy, using approaches from both analytic and continental thinking.