Sororophobia Differences among Women in Literature and Culture

by Michie, Helena

• ISBN13: 9780195073874
• ISBN10: 0195073878
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1992-05-28
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This book looks at how differences among women have been textually represented at a variety of historical moments and in a variety of cultural contexts, including Victorian mainstream fiction, African-American mulatto novels, late twentieth-century lesbian communities, and contemporary country music. Sororophobia designates the complex and shifting relations between women's attempts to identify with other women and their often simultaneous desire to establish and retain difference. Michie argues for the centrality to feminism of a paradigm that moves beyond celebrations of identity and sisterhood to a more nuanced notion of women's relations with other women which may include such uncomfortable concepts as envy, jealousy, and competition as well as more institutionalized ideas of difference such as race and class. Chapters on literature are interspersed by "inter-chapters" on the choreography of sameness and difference among women in popular culture.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 3
"There Is No Friend Like a Sister": Sisterhood as Sexual Difference	p. 15
Inter-Chapter: "That Stormy Sisterhood": Portrait of the Brontes	p. 51
"Another Woman in Your Shape": Sexual and Class Duplicity in Sensation Fiction	p. 58
Inter-Chapter: "Mama He's Crazy": The Judds	p. 89
Writing Lesbian Difference	p. 101
Inter-Chapter: Eliminating the Other Woman: The Excremental Fatal Attraction	p. 131
"And Now She Was Different": Sexuality and Differentiation Among Black Women in Quicksand, Passing, and Sula	p. 137
Inter-Chapter: Between Two Carmens: Olympic Ice-Skating and the Choreography of Otherness	p. 169
The Colleague and the Washerwoman: The Other Woman in Feminist Theory	p. 175
Inter-Chapter: Elizabeth and Helena	p. 199
Notes	p. 203
Credits	p. 209
Index	p. 211
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