Terry Castle: The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (1995)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1700s, fantasy, gender, hallucination, masquerade, phantasmagoria, sexuality, travesty, uncanny
The work of leading scholar Terry Castle, called by the New York Times “always engaging…consistently fascinating,” has helped to revolutionize thinking about lesbian studies and eighteenth-century literature. Reenvisioning the era as peculiarly alive with complexity, in which gender, sexuality, and culture are in constant flux, she offers provocative new theories on culture and sexual identity.
This collection offers several of Castle’s liveliest essays on female identity from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. Throughout the book are woven themes which are constant in Castle’s work: fantasy, hallucination, travesty, transgression, and sexual ambiguity. Like the mythical thermometer of the title, which was purported to measure female lasciviousness, literature is filled with devices for quantifying elements of women’s nature and sexuality which are hard to define–or uncomfortable to confront. Looking at images that mask or mystify female nature, like the masquerade or ghosts, these essays offer a challenging look at a fascinating range of issues involved in the exploration of gender studies.
The inaugural volume in Oxford’s Ideologies of Desire, The Female Thermometer foreshadows the thought-provoking and forward-looking nature of the books that will make up the series. Its revisionist version of eighteenth-century life will intrigue all those concerned with cultural studies and issues of gender relations throughout history.
Publisher Oxford University Press, 1995
Ideologies of Desire series
ISBN 019508098X, 9780195080988
288 pages
Laurie Penny: Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · body, cannibalism, capitalism, feminism, sexuality, women
“A feminist dissection of women’s bodies as the fleshy fulcrum of capitalist cannibalism, whereby women are both consumers and consumed.
Modern culture is obsessed with controlling women’s bodies. Our societies are saturated with images of unreal, idealised female beauty whilst real female bodies and the women who inhabit them are alienated from their own personal and political potential. Under modern capitalism, women are both consumers and consumed: Meat Market offers strategies for resisting this gory cycle of consumption, exposing how the trade in female flesh extends into every part of women’s political selfhood. Touching on sexuality, prostitution, hunger, consumption, eating disorders, housework, transsexualism and the global trade in the signs and signifiers of femininity, Meat Market is a thin, bloody sliver of feminist dialectic, dissecting women’s bodies as the fleshy fulcrum of capitalist cannibalism.”
Publisher ZerO Books, an imprint of John Hunt Publishing, 2011
ISBN 1846945216, 9781846945212
79 pages
interview with the author, cont. (Maeve McKeown, New Left Project)
review (Abby O’Reilly, The Independent)
review (Zoe May Sullivan, The Oxonian Review)
author’s columns: The Guardian, New Statesman, The New Inquiry
Cary Wolfe: Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · animal, colonialism, philosophy, posthumanism, race, sexuality
In Animal Rites, Cary Wolfe examines contemporary notions of humanism and ethics by reconstructing a little known but crucial underground tradition of theorizing the animal from Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lyotard to Lévinas, Derrida, Žižek, Maturana, and Varela. Through detailed readings of how discourses of race, sexuality, colonialism, and animality interact in twentieth-century American culture, Wolfe explores what it means, in theory and critical practice, to take seriously “the question of the animal.”
With a Foreword by W.J.T. Mitchell
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2003
ISBN 0226905144, 9780226905143
237 pages