The Icon Critical Dictionary Of Feminism And Postfeminism

This book begins with a series of essays that trace the development of feminist thought and outline its influence on various aspects of contemporary culture, such as technology, religion, literature and film.

The last few decades have seen an explosion in the production of critical theories, with deconstructionists, poststructuralists, postmodernists, second-wave feminists, new historicists, cultural materialists, postcolonialists, black critics and queer theorists, among a host of others, all vying for our attention. The world around us can look very different on the critical theory applied to it. This vast range of interpretations can leave one feeling confused and frustrated. This book provides a route through the tangled jungle of competing theories.

Since the 1990s, when Reviving Ophelia became a best seller and “Girl Power” a familiar anthem, girls have assumed new visibility in the culture. Yet in asserting their new power, young women have redefined femininity in ways that have often mystified their mothers. They have also largely disavowed feminism, even though their new influence is a likely legacy of feminism’s Second Wave. At the same time, popular culture has persisted in idealizing, demonizing, or simply erasing mothers, rarely depicting them in strong and loving relationships with their daughters. Unruly Girls, Unrepentent Mothers, a companion to Kathleen Rowe Karlyn’s groundbreaking work, The Unruly Woman, studies the ways popular culture and current debates within and about feminism inform each other. Surveying a range of films and television shows that have defined girls in the postfeminist era—from Titanic and My So-Called Life to Scream and The Devil Wears Prada, and from Love and Basketball to Ugly Betty—Karlyn explores the ways class, race, and generational conflicts have shaped both Girl Culture and feminism’s Third Wave. Tying feminism’s internal conflicts to negative attitudes toward mothers in the social world, she asks whether today’s seemingly materialistic and apolitical girls, inspired by such real and fictional figures as the Spice Girls and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, have turned their backs on the feminism of their mothers or are redefining unruliness for a new age.

Approachable for general readers as well as for students in women's studies related courses at all levels, this invaluable guide follows the unique Companion format in combining over a dozen in-depth background chapters with more than 400 A-Z dictionary entries. The background chapters are written by major figures in the field of feminist studies, and include thorough coverage of the history of feminism, as well as extensive discussions of topics such as Postfeminism, Men in Feminism, Feminism and New Technologies and Feminism and Philosophy. The dictionary entries cover the major individuals and issues essential to an understanding both of feminism's roots and of the trends that are shaping its future. Readers will find entries on people such as Aphra Behn, Simone de Beauvoir, Princess Diana, Courtney Love and Robert Bly, and on subjects such as Afro-American feminism, cosmetic surgery, the 'new man', prostitution, reproductive technologies and 'slasher' films.

Jacques Lacan is known as 'the French Freud' and is the key figure of postmodern psychoanalysis.

Women Willing to Fight is a collection of essays that explores the presence of the fighting woman in contemporary Hollywood cinema. Drawn from a variety of genres, the authors examine the changing role, image and position of this figure in film over recent decades. The increasing dominance of this character and her repositioning as a protagonist reinvigorates discussion concerning the dynamics of film narrative and spectacle. Each contribution takes as its focus a central character from the Hollywood blockbuster era, examining in detail the motivations and implications of the fighting female. In doing so the collection raises significant questions about the place of the fighting woman in contemporary media and the relationships she forges on and off-screen. With a strong appreciation of the mixed messages inherent in images of fighting women, Women Willing to Fight seeks to draw attention to the embodied forms - physical, intellectual and emotional - through which female fighters are represented. The anthology places particular emphasis on the emergence of the physically empowered woman, a character for whom the body has become a weapon and a target. While early cinematic representations allowed women to voice their fury and frustration, today’s female fighters not only ‘speak up’ but ‘muscle up’. Putting aside the supernatural powers of many action heroines, this volume focuses on the kinds of fighting skills, abilities and desires that are engendered in characterisations of mortal women. To this end the volume implicitly addresses complex and cross-cultural notions of ‘extra-ordinary’ power. By examining the embodied arsenal that these characters possess and develop - through training, conditioning, and life experience - it considers the representation of motivation and metamorphoses into ‘the fighting woman’: how a woman fights holds implicit meaning and inevitably urges us to consider why and what she is fighting for.

Ladies who Lunge: Essays on Difficult Women dances through history with the unconventional woman. Witty and refreshing, the tone, texture and feeling of the words on the page are as unconventional as the plucky women who punctuate the prose. It is a tough, determined, moving, frank and funny review of difficult women: how they got there, how we can understand their actions, and how we can learn from them.