Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a "Postfeminist" Age

From Library Journal Feminist critic Modleski, author of four titles on women and media (e.g., The Women Who Knew Too Much , Routledge, 1987), here takes on the assumptions of her "postfeminist" contemporaries who, she argues, are unwittingly participating in a backlash against the very values they claim to promote. Using examples as diverse as Manuel Puig's novel Kiss of the Spider Woman ( LJ 5/15/79), the Disney movie Three Men and a Baby , and Ann Douglas's highly regarded historical study The Feminization of American Culture ( LJ 8/77), she shows how women continue to be degraded and devalued in both popular and academic representations. Her discussions of race, gender, pornography, Pee Wee Herman, war films, the function of the critic, and bestiality and pedophilia in popular culture are always provocative and often brilliant, although she relies too heavily on psychoanalytic ideas for some tastes. Highly recommended for film and women's studies collections.- Beverly Miller, Boise State Univ. Lib., Id.Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Publishers Weekly In the face of a self-proclaimed feminist criticism that leaps to embrace the often dubious pleasures of popular culture, Modleski calls for "a feminist rethinking of the articulations of popular culture and political criticism." The book offers such a rethinking, first in terms of theory, then as applied to several recent film trends. Much of Modleski's ( Loving with a Vengeance ) sardonic ire is leveled against ostensibly pro-feminist men; she finds male critics in support of feminism "most useful . . . where they analyze male power, male hegemony, with a concern for the effects of this power on the female subjectitals in text and with an awareness of how frequently male subjectivity works to appropriate 'femininity' while oppressing women." The volume is at its best when dissecting "profoundly regressive" films like Three Men and a Baby and "considering how various representations of masculinity that resist traditional patriarchal images and plots either contribute to or, on the contrary, undermine the feminist project." At other times, particularly in the last of the three theoretical essays, readers without a grounding in Lacan and Foucault will be utterly lost. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.