Synopses & Reviews
This volume of recent
Signs articles offers a number of significant contributions to feminist debates on history and theory. It illustrates the uses of theories in recent feminist historical research and the often contentious arguments that surround them. The readings are organized into three sections. The first draws on the tradition of political economy, and discusses the importance of class relations for understanding historical events and social relationships and the expansion of concepts of political economy to include race. The second section, on "The Body," demonstrates how feminist scholars have increasingly worked to re-place the body, to move it from its traditionally less valued position in the hierarchal Enlightenment mind/body split to an approach that emphasizes the body as both material and discursive, both "real" and "representational." The final section, "Discourse," focuses on an examination of the productive power of language in both reflecting and shaping experience and in the contestation of social relations of power.
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Editors
Commodity Exchange and Subordination: Montagnais-Naskapi and Huron Women, 1600-1650
Karen Anderson
Women and the Rise of the Novel: A Feminist-Marxist Theory
Josephine Donovan
The Unproductive Housewife: Her Evolution in Nineteenth-Century Economic Thought
Nancy Folbre
Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in Kenya: "Burying Otieno" Revisited
April Gordon
Prostitution, Identity, and Class Consciousness in Nairobi during World War II
Luise White
From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor
Evelyn Nakano Glenn
Women's Voices in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse: A Step toward Deconstructing Science
Nancy M. Theriot
Foot-binding in Neo-Confucian China and the Appropriation of Female Labor
C. Fred Blake
Fearful Bodies into Disciplined Subjects: Pleasure, Romance, and the Family Drama of Colonial Reform in Mary Carpenter's Six Months in India
Antoinette Burton
Dancing Out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis's "Radha" of 1906
Jane Desmond
A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State
Nancy Fraser, Linda Gordon.
African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
Getting into Trouble: Dishonest Women, Modern Girls, and Women-Men in the Conceptual Language of Vida Policial, 1925-1927
Sueann Caulfield
The Trials of Alice Mitchell: Sensationalism, Sexology, and the Lesbian Subject in Turn-of-the-Century America
Lisa Duggan
Female Desire and the Discourse of Empire: Tacitus's Messalina
Sandra R. Joshel
Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience
Kathleen Canning
About the Contributors
Index