Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture - Softcover

Until recently, women have been noticeably absent from historical and sociological accounts of modernity. As a step toward remedying this situation, the essays gathered here challenge the continuing separation of sociological from textual analysis in cultural (and feminist) theory and inquiry. They address critically the question of women's writing, exploring the idea that women may begin to define their own lives and construct their own identities in a patriarchal culture through the very process of writing.They also present a cogent defense of a feminist cultural politics, including a politics of the body. Integrating material drawn from a variety of sources - feminist theory, cultural and literary analysis, sociology, and art history - "Feminine Sentences" is an original discussion of women's relationship to modern and postmodern culture. Janet Wolff's book represents a major statement of her distinctive position, and will be of interest to everyone working in the areas of cultural and literary theory, women's studies, and sociology."Women ...are sentenced to containment and silence...This collection is intended as a contribution to the overthrow of that 'sentence,' and to the process whereby women find ways to intervene in an excluding culture, and to articulate their own experience. Feminine sentences are those formulations and expressions, in a variety of cultural forms and media, of women's own voice." "The literature of modernity describes the experience of men. It is essentially a literature about transformations in the public world and its associated consciousness...In so far as the experience of 'the modern' occurred mainly in the public sphere, it was primarily men's experience." "I want to argue that a feminist cultural politics of the body is a possibility...There is every reason...to propose the body as a privileged site of political intervention, precisely because it is the site of repression and possession."

Janet Wolff was until recently Reader in the Sociology of Culture and Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Currently she is teaching and lecturing at various institutions in the United States. She is the author of The Social Production of Art, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, and (co-edited with John Seed)The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth-Century Middle Class.