B. Ruby Rich: Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (1998)

“If there was a moment during the sixties, seventies, or eighties that changed the history of the women’s film movement, B. Ruby Rich was there. Part journalistic chronicle, part memoir, Chick Flicks—with its definitive, the-way-it-was collection of essays—captures the birth and growth of feminist film.

For over three decades Rich has been one of the most important voices in feminist film criticism. Her presence at film festivals, her film reviews in the Village Voice, Elle, Out, and the Advocate, and her commentaries on the public radio program “The World” have secured her a place as a central figure in the history of what she deems “cinefeminism.” In the hope that a new generation of feminist film culture might be revitalized by reclaiming its own history, Rich introduces each essay with an autobiographical prologue that describes the intellectual, political, and personal moments from which the work arose. Travel, softball, sex, and voodoo all somehow fit into a book that includes classic Rich articles covering such topics as the antiporn movement, the films of Yvonne Rainer, a Julie Christie visit to Washington, and the historically evocative film Mädchen in Uniform.”

Publisher Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1998
ISBN 0822321211, 9780822321217
448 pages

Review (Linda Mizejewski, Women’s Review of Books, c1998)
Review (Susan Lord, Film Studies, c1999)
Review (Felicity Collins, 1999)

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See also Women and Film Project initiated in 2013 by Clarissa Jacob and Kate Wieteska.

Amy E. Wendling: Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation (2009)

“In Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation, Amy Wendling draws on lesser known archival materials, including Marx’s notebooks on women and patriarchy and technology to offer a new interpretation of Marx’s concept of alienation as it develops throughout his works. For Marx, technology exemplifies the interaction between human beings and nature. Marx’s description of this interaction is in transition throughout his works. An older, humanist and vitalist paradigm sets the human being against nature as a qualitatively different type of force. A newer, thermodynamic paradigm sets the human being and nature in continuity. Marx’s work occurs at the juncture of these paradigms and contains elements of each. This affects his deployment of the concept ‘labor’. Labor is demoted from its status as a meaningful human activity that confers political status and mastery of the natural world, and it becomes a mere nodal point where energy is transferred. Against this backdrop, Marx increasingly appealed not to meaningful labor but to the abolition of labor as the culmination of human freedom. He also shows how the labours of members of the working class, including women, are interpreted in the old and new paradigms.”

Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
ISBN 0230224407, 9780230224407
272 pages

Reviews: Chris Arthur (Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2010), Richard Cotter (LSE Review of Books, 2013), Tom Bunyard (Historical Materialism, 2014), McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar, 2015).

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Ivan Illich: Gender (1982)

“The break with the past, which has been described by others as the transition to a capitalist mode of production, I describe here as the transition from the aegis of gender to the regime of sex.” Ivan Illich insists that we survey attitudes to male and female in both industrial society and its antecedents in order to recover a lost ‘art of living’. He argues that only a truly radical scrutiny of scarcity, with special attention in this study to the sexes and society, past and present, can prevent an intensification of this grim predicament.

Publisher Marion Boyars, London, 1982
ISBN 9780714520902
192 pages

Reviews: Arlie Russell Hochschild (New York Times, 1983), Ninna Nyberg-Sørensen (Acta Sociologica, 1987).

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