3.0 out of 5 stars
Wordy, but some interesting ideas, January 26, 2012
This review is from: Material Girls: Making Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory (Paperback)
I've included some quotes from each section in order to give you a feel for the book. The book is very wordy and the author often lets others speak for her throughout the book. Its interesting, but wasn't the best book I've read on feminist studies.
In the introduction the book claims that "The goal, rather, is threefold: to critically introduce readers to the main concepts and theoretical frameworks of feminist cultural criticism; to place these concepts and frameworks in the historical context that produced them; and, finally, to present a model of feminist cultural criticism that at once intertextual, multidisciplinary, and deeply invested in the demystification of patriarchal images and the construction of feminist ones." (25)
The first chapter (From Images of Women to Woman as Image) looks at the stereotypes involved in the image of what is woman.
"...most stereotypes are not neutral; they are deeply embedded in structures of oppression and domination and become prescriptions for behavior and modes of social control." (43)
"...that the entire cultural notion of "woman" is itself constructed in and through images rather than somehow "residing" in the images themselves-"woman" is constructed as "a set of meanings which then enter cultural and economic circulation on their own account."" (48)
The second chapter ( Visual Pressures) looks at the voyeuristic and fetishism of women's image.
"...claimed that the objectification of women was not an "added on" attraction, but rather endemic to the very structure of image making." (53)
"The fragmentation of the female body into parts that should "improved" or "worked on" often results in women having self-hating relationships with their bodies." (56)
"...male dominance means that not only do men as a gender have the institutional...power to control the actual production of culture and cultural images..., but they also have the ideological power to control the form and content of the images themselves." (66)
The third chapter (Positioning Women) looks at the narrative in which women are placed.
"..masculine agent often has the same knowledge that we, the audience, do; it is from his point of view, and rarely the woman's, that the story is oriented." (71)
"Feminist film critics argue that it is precisely this narrative inconsistency that we should seek out-to elaborate and make visible the cracks in the supposedly air-tight case that is male-dominated imagery." (75)
"It is not surprising that genres associated both with a female audience and with "feminine" subject matters...should be found unworthy of critical attention by male cultural critics.."(79-80)
In the fourth chapter (You Looking at Me?) the author looks more closely at the female spectator.
"Because the analyst's desire was somehow to construct a knowledge of the 'other'- or more precisely the other's knowledge- a resort to anthropological or sociological methodologies seemed inevitable." (98-99)
"We [women] resist, reinterpret, willfully read against the grain, and reinscribe dominant meanings with our own subversive interpretations." (111)
In the fifth chapter (Post-feminism and Popular Culture) the author looks at the backlash against the feminist movement.
"In addition, this backlash is more clearly antifeminist: it responds directly to the women's movement and often pits one woman against the other (Fatal Attraction, Working Girl, The Hand the Rocks the Cradle)." (139)
In the sixth chapter (Material Girls) is the concluding chapter of the book.
"For if the image so often mystifies and degrades us, out criticism of that same image should not-must not- participate in further mystification." (150)
"..up until now, cultural critics have been content to read a text; the point, however, is to write a new one." (152)
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7 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
This book does not live up to its title of "Making Sense", April 24, 2000
This review is from: Material Girls: Making Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory (Paperback)
Walters becomes very wordy in her second chapter and continues throught the entire book this way. She has several interesting chapters in which she gives critical interpretations of popular films and television shows, however, they fail to make up for the dullness of the entire book. She is overly critical of previous methods of feminist criticism, while at the same time almost cocky about her own superior viewpoint. In the end, she never actually has a viewpoint of her own, except that someone else should pick up the ball and develop a new feminist methodology. Her wordiness seemed to be nothing more than a cover for a lack of original thought. This book is definately not for the new student of feminism or for the skeptic. There are many other enlightening books on the subject. Unfortunately this is not one of them and it would be terrible for the book to turn off any more people to the subject as it did myself.
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