Feminine/Masculine and Representation

"Feminine/Masculine and Representation" provides a much needed introduction to some challenging issues raised in debates within gender studies, critical theory and cultural studies. In analyzing cultural processes using a range of different methods, the essays in this collection focus on gender/sexuality, representation and cultural politics across a variety of media. This collection of essays makes an important contribution to debate on the role of representation in the social construction of the patriarchal gender order. It deals centrally with questions about sex and gender, subjectivity and signification. In her editor's introduction Terry Threadgold confronts the scepticism of those resistant to the challenge which poststructuralist semiotics ("that language stuff") poses to all branches of knowledge. She points out that these discourses about language, or semiosis, seem arcane only because they have not yet become part of everyday life, as have similar specialist discourses like economics, government, sociology, biology. Terry Threadgold, Associate Professor of English at the University of Sydney, is the author of "Feminist Poetics". Anne Cranny-Francis teaches cultural studies and critical theory at the University of Wollongong and is the author of "Feminist Fiction". This book is intended for students and researchers in gender studies, cultural studies and critical theory.