Gender in the Mirror Cultural Imagery and Women's Agency

by Meyers, Diana Tietjens

• ISBN13: 9780195140408
• ISBN10: 0195140400
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-02-21
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

How do patriarchal representations of gender impact on women's lives? What about their effects on men's attitudes toward women? How can the deleterious effects of this hostile cultural environment be overcome? These are the principal questions Gender in the Mirror poses. Culturally prevalent imagery of feminine sexuality, beauty, and motherhood worms its way into women's subjectivity and agency. By providing authoritative language in which women describe themselves and project their lives into the future, this imagery constrains their self-determination. By reinforcing sexism in men, it undermines women's equality and jeopardizes feminist gains. Resisting these pernicious influences requires personal as well as cultural change. Women need to acquire self-reading and self-direction skills that enable them to articulate their needs in their own terms and to enact their own life stories. Gender in the Mirror defends a theory of self-determination that makes sense of women's capacity to find their own voices and rewrite their self-narratives. But feminist goals cannot be met unless patriarchal cultural contexts are reconfigured -- unless emancipatory gender imagery supplants patriarchal representations of womanhood. Gender in the Mirror proposes alternative imagery of feminine sexuality, beauty, and motherhood and advances an account of feminist discursive politics that takes on the challenge of neutralizing patriarchal imagery.

Table of Contents

Gender Identity and Women's Agency: Culture, Norms, and Internalized Oppression Revisited	3	(27)
Internalized Oppression, Identity, and Individuality
Subordination's Challenge to Autonomy Theory
Voice and Choice: A Feminist View of Autonomy
Patriarchal Cultures, Gender Normalization, and Women's Self-Determination
The Rush to Motherhood: Pronatalist Discourse and Women's Agency	30	(28)
Women's Testimony
The Scope of Autonomy: Can/Should Motherhood Decisions Be Autonomous? 3. Pronatalist Discourse---Matrigyno-idolatry
4. A la Recherche des Voix Perdues: Pronatalist Discourse and Discursive Insurgency
Gendered Models of Social Relations: How Moral and Political Culture Closes Minds and Hearts	58	(20)
Images of Social Relations: The Social Contract versus the Mother and Child
Imaginary Underpinnings of Mother-Child Relations
Refiguring Mother-Child Relations
The Inconclusiveness of Moral and Political Theorizing
The Family Romance: A Fin-de-Siecle Tragedy	78	(21)
The Controversy over Recovered Memory
Figurations of Sexuality and the Family: The Cultural Cache
Figuring One's Life
The Family Romance and Feminist Politics: Cultural Critique and Social Change
5. The Family Romance and Feminist Reclamation: Obstacles and Prospects
Lure and Allure: Mirrors, Fugitive Agency, and Exiled Sexuality	99	(49)
Narcissus and Narcissa: A Founding Tale and Its Repressed Double
Narcissus (a Translation): The Visual Culture of Feminine Narcissism
Narcissus Meets Oedipus (the Sequel): Psychoanalysis, Agency, and Heterosexism
Narcissa (a Pitch for an Adaptation): The Need for Feminist Reconstruction of Narcissistic Identity and Agency
Narcissa in Rehab (a Free Translation): Feminist Artists Revision the Woman at Her Mirror
Narcissa Unbound: Anticipating an Authentic Narcissism for Women
Mirroir, Memoire, Mirage: Appearance, Aging, and Women	148	(19)
Miss Lonelyhearts' Guide to Identifying with the Stranger in the Mirror
The Self, Representation, and Beauty: A Trio of Dubious Postulates
Facing up to Scary Heterogeneity: The Limits of Becoming and the Feminization of Death
Live Ordnance in the Cultural Field: Gender Imagery, Sexism, and the Fragility of Feminist Gains	167	(26)
Sexism According to Cognitive Psychology: Conceptualization and Inference
Sexism According to Psychoanalysis: Desire and Emotion
Overcoming Sexism?
Culture, Sexism, and Feminism
Notes	193	(20)
References	213	(12)
Name Index	225	(4)
Subject Index	229