Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"The striking cover photograph—two identically dressed, nearly identical, crabby Victorian girls—aptly initiates Michie's project. She dissects two conceptions of woman: the traditional patriarchal view of women as Other, site of difference and disorder, and the feminist view of women as identical, distinguished more by their sisterhood than by their individual identities. Using feminist theory even as she interrogates it, Michie shows how these identities play themselves out in both literature and popular culture. In a time when culture depicts women either at each other's throats or joined in cheery, uncomplicated sisterhood, Michie's subtle and original probing of women's relations with each other is especially welcome." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Review
"In a time when culture depicts women either at each other's throats or joined in cheery, uncomplicated sisterhood, Michie's subtle and original probing of women's relations with each other is especially welcome."--Virginia Quarterly Review
"Twenty years ago 'sisterhood' was synonymous with feminism. Shortly thereafter the term dropped out of usage, as feminists began to take stock of the contradictions behind the ideality. Helena Michie is the first feminist theorist to fix her attention on the shadows lurking behind the sunny assertion of sisterhood. Strong, subtle, original, and careful, Sororophobia takes a shockingly honest look at relations between women as they appear in theory and culture. What she finds will affect feminist theory for years to come."--Jane Gallop, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
"Offers an important revisionist account of the role and value of "sisterhood" as an organizing rubric for feminist theory and politics....[Michie's] work has particular relevance for gay and lesbian studies, and especially for lesbian feminist theories of sisterhood, a lesbian continuum, and the history of female erotic friendship."--Lesbian and Gay Studies Newsletter
"With its painfully close examination of the divisions among women--whether of race, color, class, sexuality, or nationality--Sororophobia could not have been an easy book to write. Its success is a tribute to Michie's ability to write respectfully of women no matter what choices they make or how different they are from one another or from her....Michie's book will make troublesome but insightful reading. In these days of flamboyant performativity, its sincerity deserves respect."--American Literature
"Responding to a society both fascinated and repelled by diversity, Michie's major contribution to American studies lies in [her] ability to thread sameness and difference through...divergent aspects of literature, art, music, cinema, dance, and life. Furthermore, without demeaning or substantially weakening feminist critique, she brings it into a real world not explained in such a Pollyanna-esque fashion as the sisterhood mode."--Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 203-208) and index.