The Female Complaint

Author : Lauren Berlant
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822389169
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Female Complaint written by Lauren Berlant and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-17 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Female Complaint is part of Lauren Berlant’s groundbreaking “national sentimentality” project charting the emergence of the U.S. political sphere as an affective space of attachment and identification. In this book, Berlant chronicles the origins and conventions of the first mass-cultural “intimate public” in the United States, a “women’s culture” distinguished by a view that women inevitably have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate and revelatory. As Berlant explains, “women’s” books, films, and television shows enact a fantasy that a woman’s life is not just her own, but an experience understood by other women, no matter how dissimilar they are. The commodified genres of intimacy, such as “chick lit,” circulate among strangers, enabling insider self-help talk to flourish in an intimate public. Sentimentality and complaint are central to this commercial convention of critique; their relation to the political realm is ambivalent, as politics seems both to threaten sentimental values and to provide certain opportunities for their extension. Pairing literary criticism and historical analysis, Berlant explores the territory of this intimate public sphere through close readings of U.S. women’s literary works and their stage and film adaptations. Her interpretation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its literary descendants reaches from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, touching on Shirley Temple, James Baldwin, and The Bridges of Madison County along the way. Berlant illuminates different permutations of the women’s intimate public through her readings of Edna Ferber’s Show Boat; Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life; Olive Higgins Prouty’s feminist melodrama Now, Voyager; Dorothy Parker’s poetry, prose, and Academy Award–winning screenplay for A Star Is Born; the Fay Weldon novel and Roseanne Barr film The Life and Loves of a She-Devil; and the queer, avant-garde film Showboat 1988–The Remake. The Female Complaint is a major contribution from a leading Americanist.

Author : Sara Ahmed
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478022337
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Complaint! written by Sara Ahmed and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Complaint! Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens. To make complaints within institutions is to learn how they work and for whom they work: complaint as feminist pedagogy. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. To open these doors---to get complaints through, keep them going, or keep them alive---Ahmed emphasizes, requires forming new kinds of collectives. This book offers a systematic analysis of the methods used to stop complaints and a powerful and poetic meditation on what complaints can be used to do. Following a long lineage of Black feminist and feminist of color critiques of the university, Ahmed delivers a timely consideration of how institutional change becomes possible and why it is necessary.

Author : Andrea Long Chu
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1788737393
Total Pages : 113 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Females written by Andrea Long Chu and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of today’s most original thinkers on gender offers a provocative take on the current feminist movement, exploring “desire as the force shaping our identifies, the paradoxes of liberation politics, and her own gender transition” (Bookforum). “[Females] is always smart, sometimes sincere, and unpredictable about when it will pinch your arm or clutch its nails around your heart.” —Vice Everyone is female, and everyone hates it. Females is Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire. Drawing inspiration from a forgotten play by Valerie Solanas—the woman who wrote the SCUM Manifesto and shot Andy Warhol—Chu aims her searing wit and surgical intuition at targets ranging from performance art to psychoanalysis, incels to porn. She even has a few barbs reserved for feminists like herself. Each step of the way, she defends the indefensible claim that femaleness is less a biological state and more a fatal existential condition that afflicts the entire human race—men, women, and everyone else. Or maybe she’s just projecting. A thrilling new voice who has been credited with launching the “second wave” of trans studies, Chu shows readers how to write for your life, baring her innermost self with a morbid sense of humor and a mordant kind of hope.

Author : Lauren Gail Berlant
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822319245
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Queen of America Goes to Washington City written by Lauren Gail Berlant and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on literature, the law, and popular media--and "taking her (counter)cue from that celebrated sitcom of American life, 'The Reagan Years'" (Homi K. Bhabha)--Berlant presents a stunning and major statement about the nation and its citizens in an age of mass mediation. Her intriguing narratives and gallery of images will challenge readers to rethink what it means to be an American and seek salvation in its promise. 57 photos.

Author : Lauren Berlant
Publisher : Duke University Press Books
ISBN 13 : 9780822351115
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cruel Optimism written by Lauren Berlant and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present, Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s, as the social-democratic promise of the postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted. People have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life—with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy—despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives “add up to something.” Arguing that the historical present is perceived affectively before it is understood in any other way, Berlant traces affective and aesthetic responses to the dramas of adjustment that unfold amid talk of precarity, contingency, and crisis. She suggests that our stretched-out present is characterized by new modes of temporality, and she explains why trauma theory—with its focus on reactions to the exceptional event that shatters the ordinary—is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. Cruel Optimism is a remarkable affective history of the present.

Author : Rebecca Klatch
Publisher : Temple University Press
ISBN 13 : 1439906483
Total Pages : 259 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Women of the New Right written by Rebecca Klatch and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first coherent picture of who joins such movements as the New Right and how they think.

Author : Louise A. Tilly
Publisher : Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN 13 : 1610445341
Total Pages : 689 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Women, Politics and Change written by Louise A. Tilly and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 1990-06-21 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women, Politics, and Change, a compendium of twenty-three original essays by social historians, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists, examines the political history of American women over the past one hundred years. Taking a broad view of politics, the contributors address voluntarism and collective action, women's entry into party politics through suffrage and temperance groups, the role of nonpartisan organizations and pressure politics, and the politicization of gender. Each chapter provides a telling example of how American women have behaved politically throughout the twentieth century, both in the two great waves of feminist activism and in less highly mobilized periods. "The essays are unusually well integrated, not only through the introductory material but through a similarity of form and extensive cross-references among them....in raising central questions about the forms, bases, and issues of women's politics, as well as change and continuity over time, Tilly, Gurin, and the individual scholars included in this collection have provided us with a survey of the latest research and an agenda for the future." —Contemporary Sociology "This book is a necessary addition to the scholar's bookshelf, and the student's curriculum." —Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, professor of sociology, City University of New York Graduate Center

Author : Lauren Gail Berlant
Publisher : Dead Letter Office, BABEL Working Group
ISBN 13 : 9780615686875
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Desire/Love written by Lauren Gail Berlant and published by Dead Letter Office, BABEL Working Group. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory," writes Lauren Berlant. Yet the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy have been profoundly shaped by theories - especially psychoanalytic ones, which have helped to place sexuality and desire at the center of the modern story about what a person is and how her history should be read. At the same time, other modes of explanation have been offered by popular and mass culture. In these domains, sexual desire is not deemed the core story of life; it is mixed up with romance, a particular version of the story of love. In this small theoretical novella-cum-dictionary entry, Lauren Berlant engages love and desire in separate entries. In the first entry, Desire mainly describes the feeling one person has for something else: it is organized by psychoanalytic accounts of attachment, and tells briefly the history of their importance in critical theory and practice. The second entry, on Love, begins with an excursion into fantasy, moving away from the parent-child structure so central to psychoanalysis and looking instead at the centrality of context, environment, and history. The entry on Love describes some workings of romance across personal life and commodity culture, the place where subjects start to think about fantasy on behalf of their actual lives. Whether viewed psychoanalytically, institutionally, or ideologically, love is deemed always an outcome of fantasy. Without fantasy, there would be no love. Desire/Love takes us on a tour of all of the things that sentence might mean.

Author : Lauren Gail Berlant
Publisher : Critical Inquiry Book
ISBN 13 : 9780226384412
Total Pages : 455 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Intimacy written by Lauren Gail Berlant and published by Critical Inquiry Book. This book was released on 2000 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Last year's impeachment of President Bill Clinton demonstrated the paradox, but did not begin to explain it. How is it that "private matters" are analyzed endlessly in public forums on a daily basis? Why is it assumed that "getting a life" means having a private relationship? Intended to unravel some of the tangled relations that fall under the broad category of "intimacy," this provocative collection of sixteen essays articulates the ways in which intimate lives are connected with the institutions, ideologies, and desires that organize people's worlds. Locating its domain in the familiar spaces of friendship, love, sex, family, and feeling "at home," Intimacy also examines the estrangement, betrayal, loneliness, and even violence that may accompany the demise of relationships, both personal and political. These include intimacies among strangers, such as happens in times of national scandal or habits of everyday life. The contributors to this volume traverse many disciplines and cultures, tracking the processes by which intimate lives absorb and repel the dominant rhetoric, law, ethics, and ideologies of public spheres. Drawing on examples from contemporary culture, history, art, literature, and music, this book illuminates the ways in which intimacy has become linked with stories of citizenship, capitalism, aesthetic forms, and the writing of history. As it challenges conventional notions of private life, Intimacy is sure to spark controversy about its institutions as well. Some of these essays in this book were previously published in an award-winning issue of the journal "Critical Inquiry." Contributors include Lauren Berlant, Svetlana Boym, Steven Feld, Deborah R. Grayson, Michael Hanchard, Dagmar Herzog, Annamarie Jagose, Laura Kipnis, Laura Letinsky, Biddy Martin, Maureen McLane, Mary Poovey, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, Joel Snyder, Candace Vogler, Michael Warner, and others.

Author : Sarah C. E. Ross
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030429466
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Early Modern Women's Complaint written by Sarah C. E. Ross and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-23 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection examines early modern women’s contribution to the culturally central mode of complaint. Complaint has largely been understood as male-authored, yet, as this collection shows, early modern women used complaint across a surprising variety of forms from the early-Tudor period to the late-seventeenth century. They were some of the mode’s first writers, most influential patrons, and most innovative contributors. Together, these new essays illuminate early modern women’s participation in one of the most powerful rhetorical modes in the English Renaissance, one which gave voice to political, religious and erotic protest and loss across a diverse range of texts. This volume interrogates new texts (closet drama, song, manuscript-based religious and political lyrics), new authors (Dorothy Shirley, Scots satirical writers, Hester Pulter, Mary Rowlandson), and new versions of complaint (biblical, satirical, legal, and vernacular). Its essays pay specific attention to politics, form, and transmission from complaint’s first circulation up to recent digital representations of its texts. Bringing together an international group of experts in early modern women’s writing and in complaint literature more broadly, this collection explores women’s role in the formation of the mode and in doing so reconfigures our understanding of complaint in Renaissance culture and thought.