Gender in the Mirror Cultural Imagery & Women's Agency [Paperback]

Harmful, culturally prevalent imagery of feminine sexuality, beauty, and motherhood constrains women's self-determination.Gender in the Mirrorproposes alternative imagery of feminine sexuality, beauty, and motherhood and advances an account of feminist discursive politics that takes on the challenge of neutralizing patriarchal imagery.

1. Gender Identity and Women's Agency: Culture, Norms, and Internalized Oppression Revisited
2. The Rush to Motherhood: Pronatalist Discourse and Women's Agency
3. Gendered Models of Social Relations: How Moral and Political Culture Closes Minds and Hearts
4. The Family Romance: A Fin-de-Si?cle Tragedy
5. Lure and Allure: Mirrors, Fugitive Agency, and Exiled Sexuality
6.Miroir, Memoire, Mirage: Appearance, Aging, and Women
7. Live Ordnance in the Cultural Field: Gender Imagery, Sexism, and the Fragility of Feminist Gains
Notes
References
Name Index
Subject Index

Gender in the Mirroris a monograph in the theory of action or epistemology; as such it will be of most interest to scholars and students (of any gender) wanting to consider the ways in which feminist philosophy contributes to these fields and to the current literature on self-knowledge and on freedom of the will. --Hypathia

A superb interdisciplinary study that successfully integrates a lush prose, emphasizing metaphors of mirror and voice, with philosophical rigor --Choice

Gender in the Mirror is a brilliant, comprehensive, account of the many ways in which androcentric images of the feminine undermine women's self-esteem and block our capacity for self-definition. Meyers argues with some urgency that a culture so hostile to women's self-development must be radically transformed; more than this, she develops a theory of female agency that would allow each of us in her own way to create narratives of our past, our present, and more importantly, of our future. --SanlCÔ