Gender in the Mirror Cultural Imagery and Women's Agency [Hardcover]

How do patriarchal representations of gender impact on women's lives? What about their effects on men's attitudes toward women? How can the deleterious effects of this hostile cultural environment be overcome? These are the principal questionsGender in the Mirrorposes.
Culturally prevalent imagery of feminine sexuality, beauty, and motherhood worms its way into women's subjectivity and agency. By providing authoritative language in which women describe themselves and project their lives into the future, this imagery constrains their self-determination. By reinforcing sexism in men, it undermines women's equality and jeopardizes feminist gains.
Resisting these pernicious influences requires personal as well as cultural change. Women need to acquire self-reading and self-direction skills that enable them to articulate their needs in their own terms and to enact their own life stories.Gender in the Mirrordefends a theory of self-determination that makes sense of women's capacity to find their own voices and rewrite their self-narratives. But feminist goals cannot be met unless patriarchal cultural contexts are reconfigured -- unless emancipatory gender imagery supplants patriarchal representations of womanhood.Genderin 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,lCÔ