Unsettled Subjects

by Lurie, Susan

• ISBN13: 9780822319993
• ISBN10: 0822319993
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-10-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

During the 1980s much of the work of feminist theory aimed to fully account for issues of class, race, and sexuality that previously had been overlooked. Susan Lurie argues that this work tended to privilege questions of race and class at the expense of gender, and frequently, if inadvertently, left patriarchal power unquestioned. Developing a feminist model that keeps multiple political forces in view, Lurie returns to three literary feminists from earlier parts of the century: Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Elizabeth Bishop. As Lurie argues, each of these women shows that both resistance to male domination and alliances between different oppositional politics rely on recognizing how power regulates a subjectrs"s multiple beliefs. In her analysis, Lurie traces each authorrs"s strategies for revealing and challenging the ways that patriarchal gender ideology profits from what is always plural and contested female subjectivity. Only such an inquiry, Lurie demonstrates, can explain the impasses that have steered poststructuralist feminism away from gender as a category of analysis and can point toward the models necessary for a more complete feminist critique of patriarchal power.

Author Biography

Susan Lurie is Associate Professor of English at Rice University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction	p. 1
Poststructuralist Feminist Subjects	p. 13
Antiracist Rhetorics and the Female Subject: The Trials of Zora Neale Hurston	p. 44
Women's Development and "Composite" Subjectivity: Feminism and Social Evolution in Ellen Glasgow	p. 78
"Caught in a Skein of Voices": Feminism and Colonialism in Elizabeth Bishop	p. 119
Epilogue: Toward a Poststructuralist Feminist Counterhegemony	p. 155
Notes	p. 161
Works Cited	p. 177
Index	p. 187
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